After the First World War, the effects of financial crisis could be felt in all corners of the newly formed Weimar Republic. The newly interconnected world economy was barely understood and yet it was increasingly made visible in the films of the time. The complexities of this system were reflected on screen to both the everyday spectator as well as a new class of financial workers who looked to popular depictions of speculation and crisis to make sense of their own place on the shifting ground of modern life. Finance and the World Economy in Weimar Cinema turns to the many underexamined depictions of finance capital that appear in the films of 1920s Germany. The representation of finance capital in these films is essential to our understanding of the culture of the Weimar Republic – particularly in the relation between finance and ideas of gender, nation and modernity. As visual records, these films reveal the stock exchange as a key space of modernity and coincide with the abstraction of finance as a vast labour of representation in its own right. In so doing, they introduce core visual tropes that have become essential to our understanding of finance and capitalism throughout the twentieth century.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1. The Stock Exchange as a Space of Modernity and Labour of Representation
- The Stock Exchange as a Space of Modernity
- Introduction
- The Official Spaces of Finance
- Where the Exchange Meets the City
- The Stock Exchange as a Labour of Representation
- The Image of the World Market
- ‘Productive’ vs. ‘Non-Productive’ Capital
- Gambling and the Financial Imaginary in Germany
- Price Production as Worldview
- 2. Dr. Mabuse and His Doubles
- Dr. Mabuse the Speculator
- Introduction
- The Figure of the Raffke and Schieber
- The Little Bank Tellers Go to the Movies
- Dr. Mabuse: Gambler or Speculator?
- Dr. Mabuse: Tyrant, Anti-Semitic Stereotype, or Weimar Anti-Hero?
- Dr. Mabuse and the Weimar Financial Imaginary
- ‘Money was the Key to Every Lock’
- Spectres of the Past: Gambling, Colonies, and National Boundaries
- Under the Sign of Mabuse: Speculation, Numerology, and the Financial World Picture
- State Power and the Defeat of Dr. Mabuse
- 3. Women and Finance Capital in Weimar Cinema
- The New Woman as Speculator
- Introduction
- Finance and Women’s Emancipation in Die Börsenkönigin
- Class and Gender in Die Börsenkönigin
- The Gendering of the Market in Financial Discourse
- Women as a Medium of Exchange
- Financial Agency in Die Austernprinzessin and Fräulein Raffke
- The Role of Finance and Speculation in Die freudlose Gasse
- Property and Prostitution in Die freudlose Gasse
- The Allegory of Economy in Die freudlose Gasse
- 4. Finance, Liquidity, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Weimar Cinema
- The Threat of Dissolution
- Introduction
- Mercurial Modernity: Women and Water in Berlin:
Die Sinfonie der Großstadt
- Destabilizing Flows and Male Identity
- Capitalism and Der letzte Mann
- Power, Vision, and Liquid Masculinity in L’Argent
- Reactionary Modernism and Finance Capital
- The Image of Northern German Industry in Hanseaten
- Hanseaten in the Context of Die Verrufenen
- Going Public vs. Private Capital
- 5. The Aggregate Image and the World Economy
- Macroeconomic Visions
- Introduction
- Representations of the Economy and the Critique of Capitalism: Soviet Montage
- Fictitious Capital and Brecht’s Fictions of Finance
- The Cross-Sectional Aesthetic
- Corporate Visions of the World in Melodie der Welt
- Epilogue
- Fungibility and Authenticity
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- List of Films
- Index
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1. Eric Schilling, ‘Der Welthandel’ (World Trade), Simplicissimus, April 20, 1921. Caption: ‘Warum kann der Kerl nicht mehr laufen? Wir haben ihm doch nur das deutsche Bein amputiert.’ (‘Why can’t this guy walk anymore? We’ve only amputated the Ger
- Figure 2. Norbert Jacques and his wife (Margerite Samuely) on a boat during a journey from Australia to Peru. Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, Ullstein Verlag, no. 39, September 25, 1921. Photographer unknown. Ullstein Bild.
- Figure 3. The Schramm ‘mini-film’ in Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922). Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung.
- Figure 4. Top: Arthur Johnson, Kladderadatsch, September 25, 1922. Caption: ‘Das Rätsel des Wiederaufbaues. Die Sphinx: “Wer löst das Rätsel dunklen Sinnes? Ist’s Odipus? Nein! Es ist Stinnes!”’ – Translation: ‘Who will solve the riddle of the crisis? Is
- Figure 5. The stock exchange scene in Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922). Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung.
- Figure 6. Stills from Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922) that show the closely related sets of numbers that run through the film. Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung.
- Figure 7. Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader, “Dadadegie,” in Der Dada, issue 1, June 1919. DADA III:18:1. Kunsthaus Zürich Library.
- Figure 8. Helene (Asta Nielsen) standing in the wings overlooking the exchange floor in Die Börsenkönigin (Edmund Edel, 1916). Edition Filmmuseum press photo.
- Figure 9. A spectral figure encroaches on the domestic space in Die freudlose Gasse (G. W. Pabst, 1925). Copyright: Filmmuseum München.
- Figure 10. Kladderadatsch, September 1923. Caption: ‘Die Valuta-Rire: Halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin’ – Translation: ‘The Valuta-Laugh: he was partly pulled and partly sank in.’
- Figure 11. Merkur, as depicted in: Adolf Hirémy Hirschl, Souls on the Banks of the Acheron, 1898. Oil on canvas. From the collection of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.
- Figure 12. The porter’s dream – a liquid moment from Der letzte Mann (1924). Photo: Friedrich-Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung.
- Figure 13. The representation of flows of capital in Gundermann’s antechamber in L’Argent (Marcel L’Herbier, 1929). Photo: Flicker Alley.
- Figure 14. Top: Hamelin loses his ability to focus his sight. Bottom: a point-of-view shot of his hand, which appears to dissolve with the breakdown of optical focus. L’Argent (Marcel L’Herbier, 1929). Photo: Flicker Alley.
- Figure 15. The stern Karl Twersten (left) and Theodor Bramberg, his Raffke-like rival (right) in Hanseaten (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1925). Photo: Deutsche Kinemathek.
- Figure 16. The Hamburg harbour and the launching of the Jngeborg in Hanseaten (Gerhard Lamprecht, 1925). Photo: Deutsche Kinemathek.
- Figure 17. Dissolves and liquefaction join these two images in Polizeibericht Überfall (Ernö Metzner, 1928).
- Figure 18. For example, this composition from the final issue of Der Querschnitt magazine. Clockwise from the top left, the captions translate as: ‘The spire of the London stock exchange’; ‘The stone on the Thames at Putney, where the yearly rowing race b
- Figure 19. Stills from K 13 513: Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheins, (fragment, Berthold Viertel, 1926). Photo: Filmarchiv Austria.
- Figure 20. The ‘Beggar’s Exchange’ in M (Fritz Lang, 1931). Photo: Praesens-Film.
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