Smith’s chapter focuses on the continued influence of the idea of Weimar Berlin in contemporary popular culture. The chapter takes as its starting point recent cultural expressions, such as the television series Babylon Berlin, focusing on previously unexplored aspects of how Weimar is depicted as a modern Babylon. Smith identifies two particularly salient aspects in these depictions: first, that the portrait of right-wing political cultures within Weimar are given more depth and nuance than are afforded center-left and left-wing ones; and, second, how the depiction of sex and violence leads us back to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and its apocalyptic vision of Weimar, along with Anglo-American visions of Weimar that have particularly long staying power, in particular Christopher Isherwood’s depiction of 1930s Berlin and its iterations and adaptations on stage and screen. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which Weimar retains its grip on aspects of our contemporary popular culture and how the particular forms these cultural expressions take may tell us about the lessons drawn from Weimar.

Same River, Different Sides

ON A SWELTERING SUMMER DAY in 2001, the writer Juli Zeh stood on the banks of the river Drina in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not far from the town of Srebrenica, where, in the summer of 1995, Serbian forces killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in plain view of United Nations peacekeeping forces. The Drina does not flow through Srebrenica, but it does flow through Višegrad, one of the first sites of the brutal expulsion of Muslims from northeastern Bosnia. As Zeh struggled to clear her mind of images of bloody corpses floating in the Drina near Višegrad, she turned her thoughts to another German-language writer who journeyed to former Yugoslavia: Peter Handke. Zeh writes:

This brief episode comes from Zeh's Bosnian travelogue Die Stille ist ein Geräusch (Even Silence Is a Sound, 2002), a literary rendition of the travel diary the author kept while on a five-week trip through Bosnia in 2001. With only her dog Othello as her constant companion, Zeh journeyed through various Bosnian towns and cities, taking in the landscape still marred by war and littered with landmines, and interacting with locals, with Western journalists, and with members of international peacekeeping forces. The text has a complex narrative structure; Zeh interweaves the first-person account of her trip through Bosnia with geopolitical references to the conflict in Yugoslavia and with cultural references, both implicit and explicit, to literary works by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Joseph Conrad, contemporary films, and even the beloved Asterix comics. The passage on Handke itself is multilayered, pointing first to a particular moment in Handke's own account of his 1995 journey to Serbia, Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien (A Winter Journey to the Rivers Danube, Save, Morawa, and Drina, or Justice for Serbia, 1996; published in English as A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia, 1997), and then to the controversy that immediately followed its publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

There are plenty of reasons to remember Richard Oswald in the context of Weimar film history. Born Richard W. Ornstein to a middle-class Viennese Jewish family in 1880, Oswald initially embarked upon a career in the theater. After fourteen years of acting, writing, and directing for the stage in Vienna, southern Germany, and Düsseldorf, he took up residence in Berlin in 1913 and began working as a director and screenwriter for Jules Greenbaum's film production company Vitascope. His first film script for Vitascope, a screen adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes detective drama Der Hund von Baskerville (The Hound of Baskerville, 1914), was immensely successful. Oswald spent the next twenty years of his life in Berlin and became one of the most popular and prolific filmmakers of his time. Between the years 1918 and 1933 he directed seventy feature films, most of which he also produced and wrote or co-wrote (Kasten/Loacker, 9, 12, 547–59; Bock, “Biographie”; Berger).

Employing strategies and business models that are traditionally associated with Hollywood cinema, Oswald measured the quality of his films by their popularity, and hence by their financial success (Belach/Jacobsen, 68). He recognized star power when he saw it, and in addition to working with already established film actresses such as Asta Nielsen, he is credited with kick-starting the film careers of controversial performance artists such as Anita Berber and the stage actors Conrad Veidt, Werner Krauß, and Reinhold Schünzel, all of whom became icons of Weimar Cinema. A savvy businessman, Oswald founded his own film production company, Richard-Oswald-Film GmbH (Ltd.) in 1916, which by 1921 he transformed into an Aktiengesellschaft, a public corporation with shareholders. The breadth of Oswald's body of cinematic work is staggering, including detective films, social melodramas, adaptations of crime, fantasy, and romance literature, epic historical dramas, and, after the transition to sound film, musical comedies and operettas. Film scholars in Germany who have recently rediscovered Oswald argue that his works offer us unrivaled insight into popular Weimar film and the tastes and whims of that era's mainstream audience (Kasten/Loacker, 12; Goergen, Introductory Essay, 3).

Despite the sheer number of films and range of genres attributed to Oswald, he is best remembered for one specific genre: the Aufklärungsfilm (social hygiene film).