The aftermath of the First World War

‘The war experience is an ultimate confirmation of the power of men to ascribe meaning and pattern to a world, even when that world seems to resist all patterning.’ This quotation from Eric John Leed's No man's land puts the main concern of the present study in a nutshell, that is, the problematic nature of ascribing meaning and form to an unprecedented historical experience, the experience of the First World War. It is the reflection of research into German films about the First World War that were made during the Weimar Republic. This study will focus on cinematic representations of the catastrophe that swept the world between 1914 to 1918 and which was to have profound consequences during the Weimar for post-war Europe and many of its overseas colonies. This study probes the role played by the most popular medium of the twenties in coming to terms with this war. How did the cinematic imagination deal with the war and how were these efforts received by critical viewers? In addition, the present study will explore both the possibilities and the limitations of representing the First World War in cinematic form.

There are several reasons for taking Germany and German war films as the starting point for this study. All countries involved in the war were heavily weighed down by its effects, but I would like to emphasize the differences between Germany and the other warring parties. The circumstances under which people in Germany had to come to terms with the war were not only different psychologically, but also in a broad social, political and cultural sense. After all, Germany not only lost the war, but with two million dead it also suffered a higher casualty rate than all the countries involved. Furthermore, the allies put most of the blame for the war on Germany by forcing it to accept the Versailles Peace Treaty. In the years after the war, this led to what Michael Salewski has called the ‘Weimarer Revisionssyndrom’, that is, the collective aim, supported by government policy, to get the so-called war guilt clause in the peace treaty revised. This war guilt clause and the resulting international pressure to pay huge reparations was considered to be humiliating and unjust by most Germans.