The Films That Foretold Fascism

Siegfried Kracauer believed movies could offer early warnings of political disaster.

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On April 15, 1941, the small steamship Nyassa slipped out of Lisbon carrying 816 refugees, nearly double its legal capacity of 457. Among them were Siegfried Kracauer, former film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, and his wife, Lili, who had spent years on the run—fleeing Germany for Paris a day after the Reichstag fire, enduring exile and twice being interned in France, and finally navigating the desperate bureaucracy of visas, affidavits, and passage through Spain and Portugal out of Europe. Conditions aboard the Nyassa were “abominable.” Ten days later, it docked in Brooklyn Harbor.

Having witnessed the collapse of Weimar democracy and the consolidation of Nazi power at close range, Kracauer arrived in the United States with a question that was deeply personal and would shape his life’s work: How had a cultured, modern society come to embrace barbarism?

Lili found them an apartment at 56 West 75th Street, within walking distance of Kracauer’s new job as “special assistant” to Iris Barry, the formidable curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary Film Library. Funded by a $2,000 Rockefeller grant, Kracauer spent a year researching German propaganda films, screening prints and scribbling notes in the dark. A year stretched into six, as he began to develop an exhaustive history of German cinema.

From that discipline came Kracauer’s thesis: To understand how a society drifted toward authoritarianism, one had to look at the archive of its collective psychology, where its obsessions were stored. In the screening room, patterns emerged—figures of authority and submission, paranoia and control—that seemed to anticipate the political reality to come. From Caligari to Hitler was his attempt to teach us to see the patterns.

Born in 1889 in Frankfurt into a middle-class Jewish family, Kracauer trained as an architect until World War I, after which he turned to journalism and criticism. At the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the era’s leading liberal papers, he became a central figure in a circle later associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his younger acquaintances was Theodor Adorno, who later recalled that Kracauer taught him to read Kant.

Kracauer’s Weimar-era criticism was shaped by currents from phenomenology to Marxism. But his distinctive move was to turn from high philosophy to the seemingly trivial. In essays collected in The Mass Ornament and in his sociological study The Salaried Masses, he argued that modern life revealed itself not in official narratives but in its surfaces and subconscious: leisure, office routines, dance revues, the choreography of crowds. Mass culture mattered because it was mass—its formulas, repetitions, and banalities were not defects to dismiss but evidence to read.

Kracauer befriended Walter Benjamin and shared with him an effort to corral and understand mass culture. Both saw Charlie Chaplin as an accidental critic of power, exposing modern cruelty through gesture and parody. Benjamin, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe like Kracauer, died by suicide in September 1940 after being denied passage at the Spanish border. It was a loss that devastated Kracauer. It happened a month before the release of The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s great anti-Hitler satire. Insights the two had traced in popular culture finally took urgent form on-screen, too late for Benjamin to see.

When Kracauer fled Europe, he carried not just trauma but a conviction that culture could offer early warnings of political disaster. In exile in the United States, he set out to trace a line from Weimar expressionism to the psychic conditions that enabled the Third Reich. If it had happened in Germany, who was to say it couldn’t happen in the United States? As he was in New York working on From Caligari to Hitler, the unthinkable was spreading in an unfathomable scope in Europe. In 1942, Kracauer learned that his mother and aunt had been deported to Theresienstadt and then “to Poland,” where they were murdered, likely in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but he never found out where.

A decisive essay he wrote while studying the German film reels at MoMA turned his method toward the present and toward his new home. In “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?”........

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