Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships | 119tries now began to practise censorship based on moral and ideological crite-
ria. In Germany this intervention was regulated by the Reichslichtspielgesetz
(Reich Cinema Law) of 1920, with supervisory centres in Berlin and Munich
scrutinising films before release. What had previously been the responsibility
of the police was now taken over by censorship boards, whose members were
made up of welfare and youth agency workers and people who came from the
film trade or were knowledgeable about movies. Having judged how the films
might influence the youth, what impressions they might create in other coun-
tries and how they might affect social class structures, the boards prescribed
appropriate cuts, prohibitions or age limits. Although political censorship was
not intended, the claim that a film endangered security provided an opening.
The state likewise intervened by means of quotas. In 1928 the German gov-
ernment restricted the number of imported films to 260, and a bit later French
films were limited to only 120. In 1927 the British introduced a ‘screen quota’
requiring that at least 7.5 per cent of films were to be domestic productions. In
fact this protectionism did lead to a rise in home-grown productions, a trend
that was further increased by the talkies.
Between 1910 and 1930 the number of cinemas and cinemagoers grew
continuously. Contemporaries were already seeking to explain this by a greater
need for amusement in times of want. In 1928 there were 5,267 cinemas
in Germany with 1.87 million seats, which was twice as many as ten years
before. It is estimated that the weekly number of cinemagoers at the end of
the 1920s came to approximately 6 million. Thus it appeared that cinema
had created a mass culture spanning all class divides. Yet in fact it remained
disparate (Führer 1996; Ross 2006 and 2008). Cinema attendance was great-
est mainly in cities with middle-class culture. The working-class cities of the
Ruhr region had much lower attendance figures than did the neighbouring
middle-class city of Düsseldorf. It was particularly because cinemas had been
turned into ‘movie palaces’ that the core audience stemmed disproportionately
from higher income groups – and did not consist mainly of ‘little shopgirls’,
as has often been claimed on the basis of Siegfried Kracauer’s essays. The eco-
nomic crisis and the talkies reinforced this trend. In spite of the mass public,
different social classes met in cinemas only rarely. While workers still preferred
the inexpensive suburban cinemas, the middle classes attended the movie
palaces in city centres. Furthermore, labourers and bourgeois groups tended
to watch different types of films, even when they went to similar cinemas: the
upper-middle class literary films and expensive American or German block-
busters, and the working class adventure films or American westerns; the low-
er-middle class preferred mainly German films (Ross 2008: 157).
In the big cities at least, it often came to political disputes either in
cinemas, in front of them, and in public. Especially in Germany there were
many deliberate protest demonstrations in cinemas, which can be described