A look back at the arts in pre-Nazi Germany

From "The Week in Germany":

Germany was at the center of world culture in the 1920s. Yet the unprecedented flowering of the arts that took place at the time in Berlin in particular was abruptly arrested by the 1933 rise to power of a Nazi dictatorship that attempted to fill every single nook and cranny of German society - including its cultural output - with its insane fascist ideals.
Cinema's exiles
Sensing a very real threat to their creative freedom, artists and intellectuals repulsed by this rigid new societal straitjacket were among the first to flee the German-speaking world.
While Bertolt Brecht went into self-imposed European exile, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder went to Hollywood. The Berlin-born Dietrich, already established as an international celebrity by then, helped her fellow entertainers from Germany and Austria, many of whom were Jewish, settle in and seek work in Hollywood. A 2009 PBS documentary series, Cinema's Exiles: From Hitler to Hollywood, highlighted their influence on the American film industry, notably the birth of the Film Noir genre.
Nostalgia redux
The creative vacuum they left behind was initially hard to fill in postwar Germany, which had to rebuild itself from the ruins of violent conflict stone by stone before people had enough spare time and resources to return to such lighthearted pursuits as film or theater.
Beyond the innocent historic Sissi romance series starring a doe-eyed Romy Schneider and a few nostalgic yet corny Heimat movies, West German cinema of the 1950s did not leave much of a mark on the international film scene.
Trying (not) to toe the party line
Meanwhile, in Soviet-occupied East Berlin, the publicly owned DEFA Film studios began producing black-and-white dramas that now stand as testimonials to how far filmmakers could go in a communist dictatorship. Although critiquing the regime directly was not an option, some subtly "controversial" films, such as Rainer Simon's Till Eulenspiegel (1974), became cultural touchstones in the former East Germany.
The savior of German film
Enter Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the Bavarian-born wunderkind of postwar German cinema, an inspired workaholic who made 50 films in 13 years. His untimely death at age 37 in 1982 left a deep gash in the German film industry from which some critics claim it did not fully recover until the turn of the millenium, when a new generation of directors - Tom Tykwer, Fatih Akin, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - finally picked up where Fassbinder had left off.
To state this point too stridently, however, would be to deny the genius of Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, Michael Verhoeven and other German filmmakers who made memorable - and award-winning - movies in the late 20th century.
Tackling tough topics
Verhoeven, perhaps more than any other postwar German director, has taken on the darkest recesses of Germany's Nazi era past. His critically acclaimed films are testimonials to the horrors of war and the Holocaust.
German President Chrisitan Wulff on International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) became the first German head of state to speak at the annual ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz. His presence, along with survivors of the Shoah who accompanied him on his trip to Poland, served to underscore Germany's commitment to its historic responsibility.
A man for all movies
Bernd Eichinger's commitment to film, in turn, has served to preserve crucial chapters in his country's past in a manner accessible to widespread international audiences. A prolific producer at the helm of Munich-based Constantin Film, Eichinger died on January 24 at 61 in Los Angeles. Echoing the cinematically obsessed Fassbinder, he once reportedly described himself as "addicted to films".
From Das Boot (1981), to Nowhere in Africa (2001), the 2003 Oscar-winner for best foreign film, to Downfall (2004), for which he received an Oscar nomination as a screenwriter, to The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), Eichinger is credited with putting German film back on the international map and widely regarded as the most important German producer of his generation.
He is also credited with helping to launch the international careers of German filmmakers like director Wolfgang Peterson and the renowned cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who worked with Fassbinder. Luckily for them they were not fleeing a repressive dictatorship like their predecessors in the 1930s and '40s when they went to Hollywood. They were simply going west to make movies.
Charting a course for German cinema
Fassbinder was Germany's incomparable postwar cinematic mastermind, a director whose movies have stood the test of time and entered the cannon of classic German cinema.
Eichinger, who also had his hand in a few Hollywood blockbusters, will meanwhile go down in history as the man who helped German film make its mark at a time when many worried it had nowhere left to go.
Karen Carstens
Editor, The Week in Germany
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