120 | Mass Media and Historical Change
as ‘cinemaclasms’ (Nowak, in Bösch and Schmidt 2010). As with protests in
theatres, movies that were considered morally reprehensible or unpatriotic
were disrupted. Especially foreign films dealing with the First World War
were attacked – like All Quiet on the Western Front, in which disturbance Josef
Goebbels and his Nazi party became famous (Jelavich 2006: 160–74). Not
even the talkies were able to silence the audience straight away.
The struggle for interpretation was also waged in the major newspapers,
which had included regular film reviews since the 1920s. Thus Siegfried Kra-
cauer of the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most important film critics of
the time, saw film critics as ‘social critics’, whose job it was to expose and
shatter ‘the ideologies hidden in ordinary films’ (Kracauer [1932] 1974: 11).
Weimar Republic critics also wrote brilliant groundbreaking essays on the
significance of film. Many of them linked film with the change in psychological
dispositions. One of these was Béla Balázs, who viewed film as a historic
break because it had initiated a turn towards the visual – a new language of
gestures and thus international communication that ‘led to a common psyche
of the white man’ (Balázs [1924] 2001: 16f., 22). Especially influential was
Siegfried Kracauer’s interpretation of film as a daydream that showed society
as it wished to see itself. His later work, From Caligari to Hitler, accordingly
attempted ‘to uncover deep psychological dispositions that prevailed in
Germany from 1918 to 1933’ by examining films (Kracauer [1947] 1979: 7).
It was above all the writings of Walter Benjamin that developed into seminal
texts of modern cultural media studies. Using examples from reproducible art-
works like movies and photographs, he postulated a perceptive change in
the modern age, characterised by the loss of aura and tradition, fragmented
perception and homogeneous forms of experience (Benjamin [1936]
2008). No less groundbreaking were Erwin Panowskys concurrent analyses
that ascribe a ‘dynamisation of space’ and a ‘spacialisation of time’ to film
(Schöttker 1999: 65–107).
Politics and Entertainment in the Mass Press
Compared to cinema and radio, the third great mass medium, the press,
seemed little changed from the pre-war period. In most Western countries
the developments of the late nineteenth century continued and reached their
peak. For instance, the concentration of ownership and the rise of press barons
increased; like Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere in Britain and Jean
Prouvost in France, Germany was dominated by the media mogul Alfred
Hugenberg. He had started his career as director of the Krupp plc, and rose
to become the owner of the biggest German media empire. Since Hugenberg
was both a member of the Reichstag and, from 1928, chairman of the major