Four years after the end of the First World War, Germany’s film production was second only to that of the United States. The closing months of 1918 ushered in a period of prolonged social, economic and political upheaval for Germany. The old order fell and was replaced by a hesitant republic: political forms changed, but the social and economic forces that underpinned those forms remained largely unaffected. The revolution that had been anticipated did not materialize. Deprived of the liberating purge of revolution and the expected apocalypse, German artists in all spheres of artistic activity fragmented. Some artists endeavored to harness their talents for what they saw as the general good, exercising a social conscience and echoing many of the experiments that were being conducted in Russia, which for them was generally synonymous with an invigorating new world of socialism. In a sense many of them were enjoying revolution at second hand, and perhaps also at a safe distance. They tried to give art a definite social function and a clear political purpose. They also tried to broaden its social base, to bring art to the people and the people to art.

     It is perhaps curious and ironic that the cinema should apparently first have been used on a large scale as a propaganda weapon by the left-wing forces in Germany, for there is as yet no evidence that the National Socialists had recourse to the cinema before they took power. This use by the left is undoubtedly due to the Soviet example and to Soviet assistance. It cannot be denied that the commercial cinema in Germany, as elsewhere, produced an overwhelming majority of films that were either overtly or covertly politically conservative. The reasons for this are obvious, because the people who could afford to finance commercial film production had a vested interest in the preservation of the existing economic order, even if they were unhappy with some aspects of its politics.