A further reason for the decline of Expressionism lies in the changing cultural climate of Germany. Most art historians date the end of the movement in painting around 1924. The style had been current for about a decade and a half and had gradually filtered into the popular arts and design. It became too familiar to retain its status as an avant-garde style, and artists turned in more vital directions.
Many artists moved away from the contorted emotionalism of Expressionism toward realism and coolheaded social criticism. Such traits were not specific enough to constitute a unified movement, but the trends were summed up as Neue Sachlichkeit. For example, the savage political caricatures of George Grosz and Otto Dix are considered central to New Objectivity. Their paintings and drawings are as stylized as those of the Expressionists, but Grosz’s and Dix’s attention to the social realities of contemporary Germany set them apart from that movement (5.26). Similarly, photography became increasingly important as an art form in Germany, particularly from 1927 to 1933. Such images ranged from Karl Blossfeldt’s beautiful, abstract close-
5.27, left The hero follows a prostitute and encounters an ominous sign in The Street.
5.28, right Tragedy of the Street uses lengthy low-height tracking shots through the murky street set as prostitutes solicit clients.
Ups of plants to John Heartfield’s bitingly satirical photomontages attacking the Nazis.
The avant-garde theater, too, became less concerned with the extreme emotions of the characters and more with the ironies of the social situation. Bertolt Brecht first came to prominence in the late 1920s and 1930s. His concept of the Verfremdungseffekt (commonly translated as the “alienation effect”) was the opposite of Expressionist technique; Brecht wanted spectators to avoid total emotional involvement with the characters and action so that they could think through the ideological implications of the subject matter. New Objectivity reached into literature as well, as exemplified by Alfred Doblin’s novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), filmed by leftist director Piel Jutzi in 1931.
In the cinema, New Objectivity took various forms. One trend usually linked to New Objectivity was the street film. In such films, characters from sheltered middle-class backgrounds are suddenly exposed to the environment of city streets, where they encounter representatives of various social ills, such as prostitutes, gamblers, black marketeers, and con men.
Street films came to prominence in 1923 with the success of Karl Grune’s The Street. It tells the simple story of a middle-aged man’s psychological crisis. From the safety of his apartment, he sees visions of the excitement and romance that may be awaiting him in the street. Slipping away from his wife, he explores the city, only to be lured by a prostitute into a den of cardsharps and falsely suspected of a murder (5.27). Eventually he returns home, but the ending leaves the sense that the denizens of the street lurk threateningly nearby.
The most celebrated German director of the mid-1920s, G. W. Pabst, rose to fame when he made the second major street film, The Joyless Street (see box). Another major example was Bruno Rahn’s Dirnentragodie (“Whore’s Tragedy,” aka Tragedy of the Street, 1928). In it the enduring Danish star Asta Nielsen plays an aging prostitute who takes in a rebellious young man who has run away from his middle-class home; she dreams of making a new life with him. He returns to his parents in the end, and she is arrested for murdering her pimp. The film used dark studio sets, a moving camera, and close framings to create the oppressive atmosphere of back streets and dingy apartments (5.28).
Rahn’s premature death and Pabst’s move into other subject matter contributed to the decline of the mainstream street film in the late 1920s. In general these films have been criticized for their failure to offer solutions to the social ills that they depict. Their gloomy images of the streets suggest that the middle class could find safety only by retreating from social reality.
A number of factors led to the decline of New Objectivity in the cinema. For one thing, the increasing domination of German politics by extreme right-wing forces in the late 1920s and early 1930s resulted in a wider split between conservative and liberal factions. Socialist and Communist groups made films during this era, and to some extent these provided an outlet for strong social criticism (see Chapter 14). Moreover, the coming of sound combined with greater control over the film industry by conservative forces to create an emphasis on light entertainment. The operetta genre became one of the most prominent types of sound filmmaking, and social realism became rare.
World History
