08-14-2008, 09:27 PM
Quote:Germany made some really impressive movies back then!Not just excellent movies. Between, say, 1750 and 1939 Germany was the motor of most cultural innovation in the world. Just think about philosophy: Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein are quite simply the top philosophers of that age - you may add the Wiener Kreis and Karl Popper.
Or think of ancient historians: Gibbon is the only one comparable to Niebuhr, Droysen, Curtius, the great Mommsen, Burckhardt, Delbrueck, Von Poehlman, Beloch, and Ed. Meyer. None of the James Frazer nonsense in Germany. Max Weber was a pupil of Mommsen and is easily the most clever-minded of the fathers of sociology. I almost ignored Winckelmann, Willamowitz, and Schliemann.
Music? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schoenberg all spoke German. I must not forget Sigmund Freud, Albert Schweitzer, and Thomas Mann - and I hope you will pardon me for including a couple of people from Austria, who were Germans until the events of 1865-1870. Boy, this really was a "nation of thinkers and poets".
The explanation is of course the economy. Although the Industrial Revolution started in England, Germany came alongside swiftly and surpassed it. In 1863, the British produced twice as many coal as the Germans; in 1914, the Germans produced four times as many as the British. There was a real culture of innovation - Strawinsky's Sacre du Printemps was booed in Paris and London, and hailed as a triumph in Berlin.
What always puzzles me, is why things went wrong in Germany. If one had predicted in 1900 that a European nation would build factories to gas the Jews, everyone would have said that it would have happened in France. Somehow I think that -among many other factors- this "culture of innovation" was also important, because it gave the Germans the self-confidence to embrace one innovation they ought to have ignored, Nazism.
Back to cinema now, after this uncalled-for testimony of philoteutonism.
