The film examines German (especially Weimar Republic) cinema from roughly 1918–1933. It explores how the themes, imagery, characters, and “collective spirit” in these movies reflected (and in Kracauer’s view, sometimes anticipated) the social, psychological, and political conditions that helped lead to the rise of Nazism and totalitarianism. Kracauer (and the documentary following him) argued that films of the era—particularly expressionist works—revealed authoritarian longings, fears of chaos, fascination with tyrants/manipulators, and other undercurrents in the German psyche after World War I, during economic turmoil, and in the unstable democracy of the Weimar years.
