118 | Mass Media and Historical Change
80 per cent of the imported films were German. Hollywood had a brief success
in the mid-1920s, but then all foreign films disappeared (Kenez 2001: 63–65).
In Europe, Germany was the country most able to compete with Hol-
lywood, and now it became the biggest film-maker on the continent. This
was partly due to postwar inflation, which reduced the price of German film
exports, but made the German market unattractive for foreign film companies.
Another factor was that Germany profited from the concentration of capital
that occurred in 1917 with the establishment of the Ufa, which developed
into Europe’s biggest film corporation (Kreimeier 1992). By setting quotas
for films, the state also helped Germany to maintain a market share of 40 per
cent, even into the mid-1920s. Yet this success had a shaky foundation: the
debts of German film companies and also the Ufa were increasing steadily,
and after the financial disaster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the Ufa was sold to
the Conservative politician and media mogul Alfred Hugenberg and therefore
came into the Nationalists’ sphere of influence (Kreimeier 1992: 158–73).
The establishment of the talkies, which occurred quite suddenly in Germany
in 1929, again slowed down the triumph of Hollywood and led to a certain
renationalisation of film, especially in Germany. Films with dubbing met with
little approval, as voice synchronisation was considered artificial. Initial exper-
iments with movies filmed in several languages also had scant success. In any
case, the economic crisis caused the number of cinemagoers to drop signifi-
cantly in 1932 (Müller 2003: 299–308; Ross 2006: 177).
For this reason, the 1920s are considered the Golden Age of German
cinema. There is no doubt that the films that are best known internationally
were made at this time. Precisely during the early Weimar Republic, when
there was little censorship, expressionistic art films were made, such as The
Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror (1921).
Yet if one looks at the number of cinemagoers, a different picture of Weimar
film culture emerges. In its early phases, adventure and detective films pro-
duced as cliffhangers were the most popular, also melodramas with long-suf-
fering women (Kaes, in Jacobson, Kaes and Prinzler 2004: 39f.). During the
late Weimar Republic the cinema also experienced a political turnabout. As
the quantitative analyses of Helmut Kortes have shown, the already small pro-
portion of socially critical films dropped swiftly after 1931, while cheerful and
nationalistic films met with great public success (Korte 1998: 423). In any
case, oft-quoted socialistic films like Kühle Wampe were much less popular
than patriotic historical movies like Fridericus Rex. Historical films actually
accounted for over a quarter of the successful films at the end of the Weimar
Republic (ibid.: 160), a state of affairs that documents the escapism of the
time.
Yet not only the viewer, but also the state determined film content. Since
movies were considered to exert an especially powerful influence, most coun-