The first two texts that Walter Benjamin wrote on film were published in the journal Die literarische Welt in March 1927. Both articles, entitled ‘On the Present Situation of Russian Film’ and ‘Reply to Oscar A. H. Schmitz’, were written after Benjamin's stay in Moscow from 9 December 1926 to 1 February 1927 and focussed on Soviet cinema. These texts analysed the situation of cinema in the first years of the Soviet Union and started to address some primary concerns regarding the technological nature of this new art form alongside the politicization of aesthetics, anticipating many important themes of essays such as ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (1935–1939). The reception of Soviet film in the Weimar Republic provoked varied responses, from those on the left and the right, from journalists, intellectuals, and film theorists. The terms of aesthetics and politics were the subject of intense debate, especially after the release of Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, dir. Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925), which premiered in a censored version in Berlin on 29 April 1926 One of the first reviews of the film came from Siegfried Kracauer, who published a passionately positive critique of the film. Kracauer declared that Potemkin showed ‘something fundamentally different’, ‘a moment of revolution’, achieved by means purely cinematographic. He argued that Eisenstein might ‘be the first to have used cinematic means to represent a reality’, since the film shows something ‘genuine’, from which ‘true content emerges’.