Moulin Rouge
Moulin Rouge is a cabaret in Paris, France. The original house, which burned down in 1915, was co-founded in 1889 by Charles Zidler and Joseph Oller, who owned the Paris Olympia. Close to Montmartre in the Paris district of Pigalle on Boulevard de Clichy in the 18th arrondissement, it is marked by the red windmill on its roof; the closest métro station is Blanche. Moulin Rouge is best known as the birthplace of the modern form of the can-can dance. Introduced as a seductive dance by the courtesans who operated from the site, the can-can dance revue evolved into a form of entertainment of its own and led to the introduction of cabarets across Europe. Today, the Moulin Rouge is a tourist attraction, offering musical dance entertainment for visitors from around the world; the club's decor still contains much of the romance of fin de siècle France. The Belle Époque was a period of peace and optimism marked by industrial progress, a rich cultural exuberance was about at the opening of the Moulin Rouge.
The Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900 are symbols of this period. The Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1889, epitomising the spirit of progress along with the culturally transgressive cabaret. Japonism, an artistic movement inspired by the Orient, with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as its most brilliant disciple, was at its height. Montmartre, which, at the heart of an vast and impersonal Paris, retained a bucolic village atmosphere. On 6 October 1889, the Moulin Rouge opened in the Jardin de Paris, at the foot of the Montmartre hill, its creator Joseph Oller and his Manager Charles Zidler were formidable businessmen who understood the public's tastes. The aim was to allow the rich to come and'slum it' in a fashionable district, Montmartre; the extravagant setting – the garden was adorned with a gigantic elephant – allowed people from all walks of life to mix. Workers, residents of the Place Blanche, the middle classes, elegant women, foreigners passing through Paris rubbed shoulders. Nicknamed "The First Palace of Women" by Oller and Zidler, the cabaret became a great success.
The ingredients for its success: A revolutionary architecture for the auditorium that allowed rapid changes of décor and where everyone could mix. The early years of the Moulin Rouge are marked by extravagant shows, inspired by the circus, attractions that are still famous such as Pétomane. Concert-dances are organised every day at 10pm. 1886–1910: Footit and Chocolat, a comic act of a white, authoritarian clown and a black, long-suffering Auguste, are popular and appear on the Moulin Rouge poster. 19 April 1890: 1st review, "Circassiens et Circassiennes". 26 October 1890: His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who on a private visit to Paris, booked a table to see this quadrille whose reputation had crossed the Channel. Recognising him, La Goulue, with her leg in the air and her head in her skirts, spontaneously called out "Hey, the champagne's on you!". 1891: La Goulue: Toulouse-Lautrec's first poster for the Moulin Rouge. 1893: The "Bal des Quat'z'Arts" caused a scandal with its procession of a nude Cleopatra surrounded by young naked women.
12 November 1897: The Moulin Rouge closed its doors for the first time for the funeral of its manager and cofounder, Charles Zidler. Yvette Guilbert paid him homage saying, "You have the knack of creating popular pleasure, in the finest sense of the word, of entertaining crowds with subtlety, according to the status of those to be entertained". 1900: visitors from around the world, attracted by the Universal Exhibition, flock to the "Moulin Rouch". This gave Paris a reputation as a city of decadent pleasure. In many other countries imitation "Moulin Rouges" and "Montmartres" sprang up. January 1903: the Moulin Rouge reopened after renovation and improvement work carried out by Édouard Niermans, the most "Parisian" architect of the Belle Époque. First aperitif concert, where the elite of the fashionable world met for dinner and a show in a setting more beautiful and comfortable than any that existed elsewhere; until the First World War, the Moulin Rouge became a real temple of operetta. Further successful shows follow: Voluptata, La Feuille de Vigne, le Rêve d'Egypte, Tais-toi tu m'affoles and many others, each with a more evocative title than the last.
3 January 1907: during the show le Rêve d'Egypte, Colette exchanged kisses that showed her links with the Duchess of Morny. Deemed to be scandalous, the show was banned. 29 July 1907: first appearance of Mistinguett on stage at the Moulin Rouge in the Revue de la Femme. Her talent was obvious; the following year she had a huge success with Max Dearly in la Valse chaloupée. Mistinguett had an undeniably quick wit, she wanted to build her own life
Otto Dix
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz, he is considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Otto Dix was born in Untermhaus, now a part of the city of Gera, Thuringia; the eldest son of Franz Dix, an iron foundry worker, Louise, a seamstress who had written poetry in her youth, he was exposed to art from an early age. The hours he spent in the studio of his cousin, Fritz Amann, a painter, were decisive in forming young Otto's ambition to be an artist. Between 1906 and 1910, he served an apprenticeship with painter Carl Senff, began painting his first landscapes. In 1910, he entered the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, now the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where Richard Guhr was among his teachers. At that time the school was not a school for the fine arts but rather an academy that concentrated on applied arts and crafts.
The majority of Dix’s early works concentrated on landscapes and portraits which were done in a stylized realism that shifted to expressionism. When the First World War erupted, Dix enthusiastically volunteered for the German Army, he was assigned to a field artillery regiment in Dresden. In the autumn of 1915 he was assigned as a non-commissioned officer of a machine-gun unit on the Western front and took part in the Battle of the Somme. In November 1917, his unit was transferred to the Eastern front until the end of hostilities with Russia, in February 1918 he was stationed in Flanders. Back on the western front, he fought in the German Spring Offensive, he reached the rank of vizefeldwebel. In August of that year he was wounded in the neck, shortly after he took pilot training lessons, he took part in a Fliegerabwehr-Kurs in Tongern, was promoted to Vizefeldwebel and after passing the medical tests transferred to Aviation Replacement Unit Schneidemühl in Posen. He was home for Christmas. Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, described a recurring nightmare in which he crawled through destroyed houses.
He represented his traumatic experiences in many subsequent works, including a portfolio of fifty etchings called Der Krieg, published in 1924. Subsequently, he referred again to the war in The War Triptych, painted from 1929-1932. At the end of 1918 Dix returned to Gera, but the next year he moved to Dresden, where he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, he became a founder of the Dresden Secession group in 1919, during a period when his work was passing through an expressionist phase. In 1920, he met George Grosz and, influenced by Dada, began incorporating collage elements into his works, some of which he exhibited in the first Dada Fair in Berlin, he participated in the German Expressionists exhibition in Darmstadt that year. In 1924, he joined the Berlin Secession, his 1923 painting The Trench, which depicted dismembered and decomposed bodies of soldiers after a battle, caused such a furore that the Wallraf-Richartz Museum hid the painting behind a curtain. In 1925 the then-mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, cancelled the purchase of the painting and forced the director of the museum to resign.
Dix was a contributor to the Neue Sachlichkeit exhibition in Mannheim in 1925, which featured works by George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Heinrich Maria Davringhausen, Karl Hubbuch, Rudolf Schlichter, Georg Scholz and many others. Dix's work, like that of Grosz—his friend and fellow veteran—was critical of contemporary German society and dwelled on the act of Lustmord, or sexualized murder, he drew attention to the bleaker side of life, unsparingly depicting prostitution, old age and death. In one of his few statements, published in 1927, Dix declared, "The object is primary and the form is shaped by the object."Among his most famous paintings are Sailor and Girl, used as the cover of Philip Roth's 1995 novel Sabbath's Theater, the triptych Metropolis, a scornful portrayal of depraved actions of Germany's Weimar Republic, where nonstop revelry was a way to deal with the wartime defeat and financial catastrophe, the startling Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden. His depictions of legless and disfigured veterans—a common sight on Berlin's streets in the 1920s—unveil the ugly side of war and illustrate their forgotten status within contemporary German society, a concept developed in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they regarded Dix as a degenerate artist and had him sacked from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy. He moved to Lake Constance in the southwest of Germany. Dix's paintings The Trench and War Cripples were exhibited in the state-sponsored Munich 1937 exhibition of degenerate art, Entartete Kunst. War Cripples was burned; the Trench was long thought to have been destroyed too, but there are indications the work survived until at least 1940. Its whereabouts are unknown, it may have been looted during the confusion at the end of the war. It has been called'perhaps the most famous picture in post-war Europe... a masterpiece of unspeakable horror. Dix, like all other practising artists, was forced to join the Nazi government's Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, a subdivision of Goeb
Roaring Twenties
The Roaring Twenties refers to the decade of the 1920s in Western society and Western culture. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and Western Europe in major cities such as Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York City and Sydney. In France, the decade was known as the "années folles", emphasizing the era's social and cultural dynamism. Jazz blossomed, the flapper redefined the modern look for British and American women, Art Deco peaked. Not everything roared: in the wake of the hyper-emotional patriotism of World War I, Warren G. Harding "brought back normalcy" to the politics of the United States; this period saw the large-scale development and use of automobiles, movies and electrical appliances. Aviation became a business. Nations saw rapid industrial and economic growth, accelerated consumer demand, significant changes in lifestyle and culture; the media focused on celebrities sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home teams and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic sports stadiums.
In most major democratic states, women won the right to vote. The right to vote made a huge impact on society; the social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers and spread in the aftermath of World War I. The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus, when Germany could no longer afford to pay World War I reparations to the United Kingdom and the other Allied powers, the United States came up with the Dawes Plan, named after banker, 30th Vice President Charles G. Dawes. Wall Street invested in Germany, which paid its reparations to countries that, in turn, used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade, prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade known in Germany, as the "Golden Twenties"; the spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with tradition. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology.
New technologies automobiles, moving pictures, radio, brought "modernity" to a large part of the population. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in architecture. At the same time and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of World War I; as such, the period is referred to as the Jazz Age. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression brought years of hardship worldwide; the Roaring Twenties was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, driven by recovery from wartime devastation and deferred spending, a boom in construction, the rapid growth of consumer goods such as automobiles and electricity in North America and Western Europe and a few other developed countries such as Australia. The economy of the United States, which had transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy and provided loans for a European boom as well; some sectors stagnated farming and coal mining. The US became the richest country in the world per capita and since the late-19th century had been the largest in total GDP.
Its industry was based on mass production, its society acculturated into consumerism. European economies, by contrast, had a more difficult postwar readjustment and did not begin to flourish until about 1924. At first, the end of wartime production caused a brief but deep recession, the post–World War I recession of 1919–20. However, the economies of the U. S. and Canada rebounded as returning soldiers re-entered the labor force and munitions factories were retooled to produce consumer goods. Mass production made technology affordable to the middle class; the automotive industry, the film industry, the radio industry, the chemical industry took off during the 1920s. Of chief importance was the automotive industry. Before the war, cars were a luxury good. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became commonplace in the Canada. By 1927, the Ford Motor Company discontinued the Ford Model T after selling 15 million units of that model, it had been in continuous production from October 1908 to May 1927.
The company planned to replace the old model with a newer one, the Ford Model A. The decision was a reaction to competition. Due to the commercial success of the Model T, Ford had dominated the automotive market from the mid-1910s to the early-1920s. In the mid-1920s, Ford's dominance eroded as its competitors had caught up with Ford's mass production system, they began to surpass Ford in some areas, offering models with more powerful engines, new convenience features, styling. Only about 300,000 vehicles were registered in 1918 in all of Canada, but by 1929, there were 1.9 million, automobile parts were being manufactured in Ontario, near Detroit, Michigan. The automotive industry's influence on other segments of the economy were widespread, jump starting industries such as steel production, highway building, service stations, car dealerships, new housing outside the urban core. Ford opened factories around the world and proved a strong competitor in most markets for its low-cost, easy-maintenance vehicles.
General Motors, to a lesser degree, followed. European competitors avoided the low-price market and concentrated on more expensive vehicles for upscale consumers. Radio became the first mass broadcasting medium. Radios were expensive. Radio advertising became a platform for mass marketing, its economic importance led to the mass culture. During the "Golden Age of Radio", radio programming was as varied as
New Objectivity
The New Objectivity was a movement in German art that arose during the 1920s as a reaction against expressionism. The term was coined by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim, who used it as the title of an art exhibition staged in 1925 to showcase artists who were working in a post-expressionist spirit; as these artists—who included Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Jeanne Mammen—rejected the self-involvement and romantic longings of the expressionists, Weimar intellectuals in general made a call to arms for public collaboration and rejection of romantic idealism. Although principally describing a tendency in German painting, the term took a life of its own and came to characterize the attitude of public life in Weimar Germany as well as the art, literature and architecture created to adapt to it. Rather than some goal of philosophical objectivity, it was meant to imply a turn towards practical engagement with the world—an all-business attitude, understood by Germans as intrinsically American.
The movement ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power. Although "New Objectivity" has been the most common translation of "Neue Sachlichkeit", other translations have included "New Matter-of-factness", "New Resignation", "New Sobriety", "New Dispassion"; the art historian Dennis Crockett says there is no direct English translation, breaks down the meaning in the original German: Sachlichkeit should be understood by its root, meaning "thing", "fact", "subject", or "object." Sachlich could be best understood as "factual", "matter-of-fact", "impartial", "practical", or "precise". In particular, Crockett argues against the view implied by the translation of "New Resignation", which he says is a popular misunderstanding of the attitude it describes; the idea that it conveys resignation comes from the notion that the age of great socialist revolutions was over and that the left-leaning intellectuals who were living in Germany at the time wanted to adapt themselves to the social order represented in the Weimar Republic.
Crockett says the art of the Neue Sachlichkeit was meant to be more forward in political action than the modes of Expressionism it was turning against: "The Neue Sachlichkeit is Americanism, cult of the objective, the hard fact, the predilection for functional work, professional conscientiousness, usefulness." Leading up to World War I, much of the art world was under the influence of Futurism and Expressionism, both of which abandoned any sense of order or commitment to objectivity or tradition. Expressionism was in particular the dominant form of art in Germany, it was represented in many different facets of public life—in dance, in theater, in painting, in architecture, in poetry, in literature. Expressionists abandoned nature and sought to express emotional experience centering their art around inner turmoil, whether in reaction to the modern world, to alienation from society, or in the creation of personal identity. In concert with this evocation of angst and unease with bourgeois life, expressionists echoed some of the same feelings of revolution as did Futurists.
This is evidenced by a 1919 anthology of expressionist poetry titled Menschheitsdämmerung, which translates to “Twilight of Humanity”—meant to suggest that humanity was in a twilight. Critics of expressionism came from many circles. From the left, a strong critique began with Dadaism; the early exponents of Dada had been drawn together in Switzerland, a neutral country in the war, seeing their common cause, wanted to use their art as a form of moral and cultural protest—they saw shaking off the constraints of artistic language in the same way they saw their refusal of national boundaries. They wanted to use their art in order to encourage political action. Expressionism, to Dadaists, expressed all of the angst and anxieties of society, but was helpless to do anything about it. Bertolt Brecht, a German dramatist, launched another early critique of expressionism, referring to it as constrained and superficial. Just as in politics Germany had a new parliament but lacked parliamentarians, he argued, in literature there was an expression of delight in ideas, but no new ideas, in theater a "will to drama", but no real drama.
His early plays and Trommeln in der Nacht express repudiations of fashionable interest in Expressionism. After the destruction of the war, more conservative critics gained force in their critique of the style of expressionism. Throughout Europe a return to order in the arts resulted in neoclassical works by modernists such as Picasso and Stravinsky, a turn away from abstraction by many artists, for example Matisse and Metzinger; the return to order was pervasive in Italy. Because of travel restrictions, German artists in 1919–22 had little knowledge of contemporary trends in French art. However, some of the Germans found important inspiration in the pages of the Italian magazine Valori plastici, which featured photographs of recent paintings by Italian classical realists. Hartlaub first used the term in 1923 in a letter he sent to colleagues describing an exhibition he was planning. In his subsequent article, "Introduction to'New Objectivity': German Painting since Expressionism," Hartlaub explained, The New Objectivity was composed of two tendencies which Hartlaub characterized in te
Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic
Hyperinflation affected the German Papiermark, the currency of the Weimar Republic, between 1921 and 1923. It caused considerable internal political instability in the country, the occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium as well as misery for the general populace. To pay for the large costs of the ongoing First World War, Germany suspended the gold standard when the war broke out. Unlike the French Third Republic, which imposed its first income tax to pay for the war, German Emperor Wilhelm II and the German parliament decided unanimously to fund the war by borrowing, a decision criticized by financial experts such as Hjalmar Schacht as a dangerous risk for currency devaluation; the government believed that it would be able to pay off the debt by winning the war, when it would be able to annex resource-rich industrial territory in the west and east. It would be able to impose massive reparations on the defeated Allies; the exchange rate of the mark against the US dollar thus devalued from 4.2 to 7.9 marks per dollar, a preliminary to the extreme postwar inflation.
The strategy failed. The new Weimar Republic was saddled with a massive war debt; that was worsened by the fact. The Treaty of Versailles, with its demand for reparations, further accelerated the decline in the value of the mark, so that 48 paper marks were required to buy a US dollar by late 1919. German currency was stable at about 90 marks per dollar during the first half of 1921; because the WWI Western Front had been in France and Belgium, Germany came out of the war with most of its industrial infrastructure intact. It was in a better position to become the dominant economic force on the European continent. In April 1921, the Reparations Commission announced the "London payment plan", under which Germany would pay reparations in gold or foreign currency in annual installments of 2 billion gold marks, plus 26% of the value of Germany's exports; the first payment was made when it came due in June 1921. It marked the beginning of an rapid devaluation of the mark, which fell in value to 330 marks per dollar.
The total reparations demanded were 132 billion gold marks, but Germany had to pay only 50 billion marks. Since reparations were required to be repaid in hard currency, not the depreciating paper mark, one strategy that Germany used was the mass printing of bank notes to buy foreign currency, used to pay reparations exacerbating the inflation of the paper mark. Late in 1922, Germany failed to pay France an installment of reparations on time, France responded in January 1923 by sending troops to occupy the Ruhr, Germany's main industrial region; the German government ordered a policy of passive resistance in the Ruhr. Workers were told to do nothing. What this meant in practice was a general strike, but all the workers on strike had to be given financial support. The government paid its way by printing more banknotes. Germany was soon awash with paper money; the result was a hyperinflation. A loaf of bread that in Berlin cost around 160 Marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 Marks less than a year From August 1921, Germany began to buy foreign currency with marks at any price, but that only increased the speed of breakdown in the value of the mark.
As the mark sank in international markets and more marks were required to buy the foreign currency, demanded by the Reparations Commission. In the first half of 1922, the mark stabilized at about 320 marks per dollar. International reparations conferences were being held. One, in June 1922, was organized by Jr.. The meetings produced no workable solution, inflation erupted into hyperinflation, the mark falling to 7,400 marks per US dollar by December 1922; the cost-of-living index was 41 in June 1922 and 685 in a 15-fold increase. By fall 1922, Germany found itself unable to make reparations payments; the mark was by now worthless, making it impossible for Germany to buy foreign exchange or gold using paper marks. Instead, reparations were to be paid in goods such as coal. In January 1923, French and Belgian troops occupied the industrial region of Germany in the Ruhr valley to ensure reparations payments. Inflation was exacerbated when workers in the Ruhr went on a general strike and the German government printed more money to continue paying for their passive resistance.
By November 1923, the US dollar was worth 4,210,500,000,000 German marks. The hyperinflation crisis led prominent economists and politicians to seek a means to stabilize German currency. In August 1923, an economist, Karl Helfferich, proposed a plan to issue a new currency, the "Roggenmark", to be backed by mortgage bonds indexed to the market price of rye grain; the plan was rejected because of the fluctuating price of rye in paper marks. Agriculture Minister Hans Luther proposed a plan that substituted gold for rye and led to the issuance of the Rentenmark, backed by bonds indexed to the market price of gold; the gold bonds were indexed at the rate of 2790 gold marks per kilogram of gold, the same as the pre-war gold marks. Rentenmarks were not redeemable in gold but only indexed to the gold bonds; the plan was adopted in monetary reform decrees, on October 13–15, 1923. A new bank, the Rentenbank, was controlled by new German Finance Minister Hans Luther. After November 12, 1923, when Hjalmar Schacht became currency commissioner, Germany's central bank was not allowed to discoun
German Expressionism
German Expressionism consisted of a number of related creative movements in Germany before the First World War that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments in Germany were part of a larger Expressionist movement in north and central European culture in fields such as architecture, painting, sculpture, as well as cinema; this article deals with developments in German Expressionist cinema before and after World War I. Among the first Expressionist films, The Student of Prague, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, From Morn to Midnight, The Golem: How He Came into the World, Nosferatu, Phantom and The Last Laugh were symbolic and stylized; the German Expressionist movement was confined to Germany due to the isolation the country experienced during World War I. In 1916, the government had banned foreign films; the demand from theaters to generate films led to an increase in domestic film production from 24 films in 1914 to 130 films in 1918. With inflation on the rise, Germans were attending films more because they knew that their money's value was diminishing.
Besides the films' popularity within Germany, by 1922 the international audience had begun to appreciate German cinema, in part due to a decreasing anti-German sentiment following the end of World War I. By the time the 1916 ban on imports was lifted, Germany had become a part of the international film industry. Various European cultures of the 1920s embraced an ethic of change and a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles; the first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd angles, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films dealt with madness, insanity and other "intellectual" topics triggered by the experiences of World War I. Films categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionism include Metropolis and M, both directed by Fritz Lang; this trend was a direct reaction against realism.
Its practitioners used extreme distortions in expression to show an inner emotional reality rather than what was on the surface. The extreme anti-realism of Expressionism was short-lived. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery, etc. to enhance the mood of a film. This dark, moody school of film making was brought to the United States when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood; these German directors found U. S. movie studios willing to embrace them, several German directors and cameramen flourished there, producing a repertoire of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on film as a whole. Nazi film theorist Fritz Hippler, was a supporter of expressionism. Two further films produced in Nazi Germany using the expressionist style were “Das Stahltier” in 1935 by Willy Zielke and “Michelangelo. Das Leben eines Titanen” in 1940 by Curt Oertel. Two genres that were influenced by Expressionism are horror film and film noir.
Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's The Phantom of the Opera. German filmmakers such as Karl Freund set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing a model for generations of horror films. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Carol Reed and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1940s, expanding Expressionism's influence on modern filmmaking; the German silent cinema was arguably far ahead of Hollywood during the same period. The cinema outside Germany benefited both from the emigration of German film makers and from German expressionist developments in style and technique that were apparent on the screen; the new look and techniques impressed other contemporary film makers and cinematographers, they began to incorporate the new style into their work.
In 1924, Alfred Hitchcock was sent by Gainsborough Pictures to work as an assistant director and art director at the UFA Babelsberg Studios in Berlin on the film The Blackguard. The immediate effect of the working environment in Germany can be seen in his expressionistic set designs for that film. Hitchcock said, "I...acquired a strong German influence by working at the UFA studios Berlin". German Expressionism would continue to influence Hitchcock throughout his career. In his third film, The Lodger, Hitchcock introduced expressionist set designs, lighting techniques, trick camera work to the British public against the wishes of his studio, his visual experimentation included the use of an image of a man walking across a glass floor shot from below, a concept representing someone pacing upstairs. This influence continued through the successful movie Psycho in 1960, wherein Norman Bates' blurred image, seen through a shower curtain, is reminiscent of Nosferatu shown through his shadow. Hitchcock's film-making in turn influenced many other film makers, so has been one of the vehicles that propelled the continued use of German expressionist techniques, albeit less frequently.
Werner Herzog's 1979 film Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht was a tribute to F. W. Murnau'
Weimar culture
Weimar culture was the emergence of the arts and sciences that happened in Germany during the Weimar Republic, the latter during that part of the interwar period between Germany's defeat in World War I in 1918 and Hitler's rise to power in 1933. 1920s Berlin was at the hectic center of the Weimar culture. Although not part of the Weimar Republic, some authors include the German-speaking Austria, Vienna, as part of Weimar culture. Germany, Berlin in particular, was fertile ground for intellectuals and innovators from many fields during the Weimar Republic years; the social environment was chaotic, politics were passionate. German university faculties became universally open to Jewish scholars in 1918. Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein. Nine German citizens were awarded Nobel prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine. Jewish intellectuals and creative professionals were among the prominent figures in many areas of Weimar culture.
With the rise of Nazism and the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, many German intellectuals and cultural figures, both Jewish and non-Jewish, fled Germany for the United States, the United Kingdom, other parts of the world. The intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research fled to the United States and reestablished the Institute at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the words of Marcus Bullock, Emeritus Professor of English at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, "Remarkable for the way it emerged from a catastrophe, more remarkable for the way it vanished into a still greater catastrophe, the world of Weimar represents modernism in its most vivid manifestation." The culture of the Weimar period was reprised by 1960s left-wing intellectuals in France. Deleuze and Foucault reprised Wilhelm Reich. By 1919, an influx of labor had migrated to Berlin turning it into a fertile ground for the modern arts and sciences, leading to boom in trade and construction.
A trend that had begun before the Great War was given powerful impetus by fall of the Kaiser and royal power. In response to the shortage of pre-war accommodation and housing, tenements were built not far from the Kaiser's Stadtschloss and other majestic structures erected in honor of former nobles. Average people began using their backyards and basements to run small shops and workshops. Commerce expanded and included the establishment of Berlin's first department stores, prior WWI. An "urban petty bourgeoisie" along with a growing middle class grew and flourished in wholesale commerce, retail trade and crafts. Types of employment were becoming more modern, shifting but noticeably towards industry and services. Before World War I, in 1907, 54.9% of German workers were manual labourers. This dropped to 50.1% by 1925. Office workers and bureaucrats increased their share of the labour market from 10.3% to 17% over the same period. Germany was becoming more urban and middle class. Still, by 1925, only a third of Germans lived in large cities.
The total population of Germany rose from 62.4 million in 1920 to 65.2 million in 1933. The Wilheminian values were further discredited as consequence of World War I and the subsequent inflation, since the new youth generation saw no point in saving for marriage in such conditions, preferred instead to spend and enjoy. According to cultural historian Bruce Thompson, Fritz Lang movie Dr. Mabuse the Gambler captures Berlin's postwar mood: The film moves from the world of the slums to the world of the stock exchange and to the cabarets and nightclubs–and everywhere chaos reigns, authority is discredited, power is mad and uncontrollable, wealth inseparable from crime. Politically and economically, the nation was struggling with the terms and reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I and endured punishing levels of inflation. During the era of the Weimar Republic, Germany became a center of intellectual thought at its universities, most notably social and political theory was combined with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the influential discipline of Critical Theory—with its development at the Institute for Social Research founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main.
The most prominent philosophers with which the so-called'Frankfurt School' is associated were Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer. Among the prominent philosophers not associated with the Frankfurt School were Martin Heidegger and Max Weber; the German philosophical anthropology movement emerged at this time. Many foundational contributions to quantum mechanics were made in Weimar Germany or by German scientists during the Weimar period. While temporarily at the University of Copenhagen, German physicist Werner Heisenberg formulated his Uncertainty principle, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, accomplished the first complete and correct definition of quantum mechanics, through the invention of Matrix mechanics. Göttingen was the center of research in aero- and fluid-dynamics in the early 20th century. Mathematical aerodynamics was founded by Ludwig Prandtl before World War
