On April 15, 1941, the small steamship Nyassa slipped out of Lisbon carrying 816 refugees, nearly double its legal capacity of 457. Among them were Siegfried Kracauer, former film and literature editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, and his wife, Lili, who had spent years on the run—fleeing Germany for Paris a day after the Reichstag fire, enduring exile and twice being interned in France, and finally navigating the desperate bureaucracy of visas, affidavits, and passage through Spain and Portugal out of Europe. Conditions aboard the Nyassa were “abominable.” Ten days later, it docked in Brooklyn Harbor.
Having witnessed the collapse of Weimar democracy and the consolidation of Nazi power at close range, Kracauer arrived in the United States with a question that was deeply personal and would shape his life’s work: How had a cultured, modern society come to embrace barbarism?
Lili found them an apartment at 56 West 75th Street, within walking distance of Kracauer’s new job as “special assistant” to Iris Barry, the formidable curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s legendary Film Library. Funded by a $2,000 Rockefeller grant, Kracauer spent a year researching German propaganda films, screening prints and scribbling notes in the dark. A year stretched into six, as he began to develop an exhaustive history of German cinema.
From that discipline came Kracauer’s thesis: To understand how a society drifted toward authoritarianism, one had to look at the archive of its collective psychology, where its obsessions were stored. In the screening room, patterns emerged—figures of authority and submission, paranoia and control—that seemed to anticipate the political reality to come. From Caligari to Hitler was his attempt to teach us to see the patterns.
Born in 1889 in Frankfurt into a middle-class Jewish family, Kracauer trained as an architect until World War I, after which he turned to journalism and criticism. At the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the era’s leading liberal papers, he became a central figure in a circle later associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his younger acquaintances was Theodor Adorno, who later recalled that Kracauer taught him to read Kant.
Kracauer’s Weimar-era criticism was shaped by currents from phenomenology to Marxism. But his distinctive move was to turn from high philosophy to the seemingly trivial. In essays collected in The Mass Ornament and in his sociological study The Salaried Masses, he argued that modern life revealed itself not in official narratives but in its surfaces and subconscious: leisure, office routines, dance revues, the choreography of crowds. Mass culture mattered because it was mass—its formulas, repetitions, and banalities were not defects to dismiss but evidence to read.
Kracauer befriended Walter Benjamin and shared with him an effort to corral and understand mass culture. Both saw Charlie Chaplin as an accidental critic of power, exposing modern cruelty through gesture and parody. Benjamin, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe like Kracauer, died by suicide in September 1940 after being denied passage at the Spanish border. It was a loss that devastated Kracauer. It happened a month before the release of The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s great anti-Hitler satire. Insights the two had traced in popular culture finally took urgent form on-screen, too late for Benjamin to see.
When Kracauer fled Europe, he carried not just trauma but a conviction that culture could offer early warnings of political disaster. In exile in the United States, he set out to trace a line from Weimar expressionism to the psychic conditions that enabled the Third Reich. If it had happened in Germany, who was to say it couldn’t happen in the United States? As he was in New York working on From Caligari to Hitler, the unthinkable was spreading in an unfathomable scope in Europe. In 1942, Kracauer learned that his mother and aunt had been deported to Theresienstadt and then “to Poland,” where they were murdered, likely in Auschwitz or Treblinka, but he never found out where.
A decisive essay he wrote while studying the German film reels at MoMA turned his method toward the present and toward his new home. In “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” (1946), Kracauer warned that “the kind of horror formerly attributed only to life under Hitler … has now been acclimated to the American scene,” and that this was “more than accidental.” In discussing movies like Henry Hathaway’s Dark Corner (1946); Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1945); Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946); George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944); Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Spellbound (1945); and even Disney’s The Three Caballeros (1944), he somehow noted a “genuine and constant affinity between sadism and fascism,” and suggested that the “sadistic energies” circulating in American society might be “specifically suited to provide fuel for fascism.” In a year, the McCarthy era would begin.
In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), Kracauer at last finished reading Weimar cinema as a kind of psychological archive, tracing a line from its haunted authority figures and distorted worlds to a growing readiness for authoritarian rule. “The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media for two reasons,” Kracauer famously put forth his reasoning. “First, films are never the product of an individual.… Second, films address themselves, and appeal, to the anonymous multitude. Popular films—or, to be more precise, popular screen motifs—can therefore be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires.” The films, he argues, register “psychological dispositions”—fear of disorder, a craving for control, a drift toward submission.
The archaic period of German cinema, roughly 1895 to 1918, produced films that treated myths and legends as nightmares—forebodings. A key example is The Student of Prague (1913), produced by Paul Wegener, in which a man sells his mirror reflection and is destroyed by his double—a story that introduced what Kracauer calls a lasting obsession with the divided self. Another is The Golem (1915), this time directed by Wegener, where a clay figure brought to life to defend the Jewish ghetto of medieval Prague ends up nearly destroying it. Together, these films anticipate modern psychological concerns—split identity, ambition, and the dangers of creating powers that escape control.
The postwar period of German cinema, roughly 1918 to 1924, reflected a society shaken by defeat, upheaval, and a profound uncertainty about authority and order. Filmmakers turned to stylized, psychological storytelling—what became known as German expressionism—to register these anxieties, projecting inner turmoil onto the screen. The period’s defining work, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), with its jagged sets and nightmarish plot, tells of a hypnotist who controls a sleepwalker to commit murders. The film depicts a world of hidden power and unstable reality, where individuals are reduced to instruments and the boundary between sanity and madness collapses—what Kracauer called the “soul at work,” revealing a collective psyche caught between chaos and submission. “Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool—a technique foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale.”
At its core is what Kracauer saw as an obsession with tyranny—he called it the “procession of tyrants” as he applied it to other films of the period: Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922)—again, about a master criminal and hypnotist; F.W. Murnau’s symphony of horror Nosferatu (1922); and Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), where an old hotel porter who derives his authority entirely from his uniform—a symbol that binds him to a social order he reveres—gets it taken away. He collapses into humiliation and self-pity, shunned by the very people who once admired him. “The forlorn old man would have little to look forward to but death,” the film’s only title card reads, in part.
During the stabilized period of Weimar cinema—roughly 1924 to 1929—German film moved away from expressionist distortion toward the cooler realism later termed New Objectivity. The mood had shifted: Inflation stabilized, cities expanded, and filmmakers turned to the textures of modern urban life. Yet beneath this surface calm lay a fixation on class division and the tensions of industrial capitalism, epitomized by Metropolis (1927), Lang’s vision of a futuristic city split between a glittering elite above and an oppressed workforce below. It portrays a society built on invisible exploitation, where prosperity rests on labor reduced to mechanical servitude.
The years 1930 to 1933 mark what Kracauer called the pre-Hitler period, when the republic’s political crisis could no longer be ignored. Films of this era abandon expressionist allegory and New Objectivity’s detachment, instead depicting a society gripped by fear, suspicion, and moral breakdown. Kracauer saw them as portraits of a democracy in total collapse.
In Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), a tyrannical high-school professor falls in love with the cabaret star Lola Lola, played by Marlene Dietrich, loses his job, and ends up performing as a clown in Lola Lola’s troupe. “The masses are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of torture and humiliation,” Kracauer warned. “Their sadistic cruelty results from the very immaturity which forces their victim into submission. It is as if the film implied a warning, for these screen figures anticipate what will happen in real life a few years later. The boys are born Hitler youths, and the cock crowing device is a modest contribution to a group of similar, if more ingenious, contrivances much used in Nazi concentration camps.”
Another defining film is M (1931), again by Lang, the story of a child murderer hunted by police, criminals, and ordinary citizens alike. Society organizes into an informal surveillance network, with authority both everywhere and nowhere. As trust in institutions erodes, the public grows willing to bypass the law. The climactic criminal tribunal exposes a society rehearsing authoritarian justice, driven by panic rather than principle.
In the end, “economic, social and political factors do not suffice to explain the tremendous impact of Hitlerism,” Kracauer insists. “Many observant Germans refused until the last moment to take Hitler seriously, and even after his rise to power considered the new regime a transitory adventure.” Films like The Blue Angel and M tell the story, however: “In the wake of retrogression terrible outbursts of sadism are inevitable. Both films bear upon the psychological situation of those crucial years and both anticipate what was to happen on a large scale unless people could free themselves from the specters pursuing them.”
Kracauer was, above all, a diagnostician. What happens if we turn his method on today’s American cinema? Looking back from the rise of Trump to now, what patterns emerge if we treat our movies as clues to the deeper currents shaping political life?
The modern equivalent of Kracauer’s archaic period can be glimpsed in films like Mulholland Drive (2001), There Will Be Blood (2007), and The Dark Knight (2008), which interrogate enduring anxieties about identity, ambition, and authority in audacious ways. The figure of the golem—the protector who risks becoming uncontrollable—finds a clear echo in The Dark Knight’s Batman, summoned to restore order. Yet his power places him outside the law, raising the same question posed a century earlier: What happens when the force meant to save society becomes one it can no longer contain?
A modern analogue to the postwar moment is Get Out (2017), which, like Caligari, centers on hypnotism, domination, and a kind of waking sleep. In both films, a master hypnotist exerts control that strips individuals of agency: Cesare sleepwalks under Caligari’s command, while in Get Out, Black victims are subdued by their white overlords into the “Sunken Place”; they remain conscious but become powerless in an imposed social order. The horror lies in this enforced passivity—a state in which one sees but cannot act—revealing systems of control that operate not through open violence but through psychological domination that renders resistance impossible.
The New Objectivity period appears in films that confront crisis with stark clarity. Joker (2019) echoes The Last Laugh: Arthur Fleck seeks recognition but finds only humiliation, which erupts into broad social breakdown. Parasite (2019) returns to the architecture of inequality. Like Metropolis, it stages class division as spatial separation—wealth above, poverty below—and shows how a society that appears stable conceals profound divides and shaky foundations.
The pre-Hitler mood captured in M finds an echo in films like Civil War (2024) and One Battle After Another (2025). Conflict no longer appears as a temporary crisis but as a permanent condition; politics becomes an endless chain of confrontations rather than a system capable of resolution. Like M, these films imagine a world of eroding norms and ambient violence. Kracauer’s warning, reaching across decades, is not that such outcomes are inevitable but that when a society begins to normalize this atmosphere, it grows more susceptible to the promises of demagogues—and to the conflicts that follow.
That films carry with them “psychological dispositions” may not seem like a shocking thing to say today, but nobody thought like that at the time, and Kracauer’s novel approach to criticism was met with considerable ridicule. After all, he didn’t publish From Caligari to Hitler in 1933, but 1947. He wrote it during the 1940s, not as a prophet, but reconstructing a pattern after the fact, years after Hitler had seized power and while the destruction of European Jewry was underway. He could select, emphasize, and connect films in light of what he knew had happened, tracing a line that may feel inevitable in retrospect.
Critics argued that From Caligari to Hitler risks confirmation bias. The same danger applies to any attempt to apply his method to recent American films: We too are tempted to see patterns that confirm what we already suspect. And in any case, the rise of authoritarian tendencies has hardly been hidden. One did not need cinema alone to register it; political rhetoric, media ecosystems, and public life have made the signals unmistakable.
But applying Kracauer’s method to contemporary cinema still yields something valuable. He was among the first to treat films as social symptoms, but today we do it all the time. In fact, Kracauer’s urging was to keep doing it, to persistently and perpetually train our eyes to read the signs and see the patterns. “I have reason to believe that the use made here of films as a medium of research can profitably be extended to studies of current mass behavior in the United States and elsewhere,” he wrote in the preface of From Caligari to Hitler. “I also believe that studies of this kind may help in the planning of films—not to mention other media of communication—which will effectively implement the cultural aims of the United Nations.”
Across genres, our films today are loudly warning about the failure of appeasement—the sense that conflict cannot be absorbed, only deferred until it erupts. The movies of 2024 and 2025 signal almost zero confidence that democratic systems can manage antagonism without collapse. Kracauer would not ask whether these films are “about” authoritarianism. He would ask what they assume: whether democracy feels resilient or already compromised, whether catastrophe appears exceptional or inevitable.
What matters, then, is how we respond. Kracauer is not offering prophecy, where fate is fixed and agency disappears; he is offering diagnosis. And diagnosis calls for treatment, not capitulation. The films he studied revealed a widespread longing for order, submission, and escape from democratic instability. If such longings can be identified early enough, they might also be confronted—before they harden into political reality.
There is something almost poignantly optimistic in his appeal to the “cultural aims of the United Nations.” After everything he had witnessed, Kracauer still believed mass media could be directed toward a more stable, peaceful world. That faith now reads as one of the most striking parts of his project.
Conflict may be a recurring theme on-screen. Whether it becomes destiny off-screen in the United States is still undecided. Kracauer’s answer was modest and demanding at once. “Fear can be exorcised only by an incessant effort to penetrate it and spell out its causes,” he wrote. The task is to understand what our fears reveal. He imagined films that could stage not just collapse but resistance—works that would show “the principles of human integrity at grips with a deranged world,” as positive forces equal to cruelty and violence. Yet even he conceded that cinema alone cannot supply those principles; it can only reflect them. Their truth must be proven in life.
