The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

This is an archived critique from my work at Brandeis University in the American Studies department.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a revolutionary film for its time. Created in a period

without authoritative leaders to guide Germany through the chaos of the post-WW1 period, the film is a microcosm of Germany and the German spirit. Before 1924, Weimar Germany had not yet entered relative stability. Germans were still reckoning with the republican government and its effects on daily life. Director Robert Wiene designed this film amidst that political shift. In studying the Weimar period, it is nigh impossible to disengage the realities of 1939 and the lead-up to the Second World War from the films of the 1920s and 30s. In this analysis, popularized by Siegfried Krakauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, war is perpetually on the horizon in Weimar film. This is no different. Caligari is as much a creature of this temporary period as any of the other German creations. The narrator, Francis, leads us on a path through the horrors that the feared Dr. Caligari unleashes in the village of Holstenwall. Via Francis, the audience is given insight into the psychology of the German people during this time of great pain and change. Wiene represents that psychology aesthetically through the consistent distortion of buildings, hallways, and other structures, carefully curating a dream through which the chaos and tragic tyranny of authority reveal themselves. Ultimately, the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a revolutionary film that, through Francis, exposes the tragic hopelessness and lack of freedom in Weimar Germany.

Francis’ story is replete with the absence of authority. Throughout the picture, we

continuously witness that absence. The core plot centers around a series of murders that the

authorities fail to handle. First, the clerk, a representation of authority, is murdered. Then, despite the efforts of the police throughout the film, his end goes unpunished. And once Alan meets his death, it falls to the non-police characters to investigate it. Francis, Dr. Olsen, and Jane take up the mantle that ultimately the authorities should hold. The missing role of authority in the film is intentional. To Francis, he is the first player in the story. Francis’ path through his story is a continuous search for answers and truth. Each plot point is effectively a moment in which he can exercise choice. He is able to search for truth unrestricted by authority. Even the police are largely acting on his direction, as the film shows us in the end of the film when Francis brings the police into the asylum. In his work, Krakauer declares Caligari to be a “conformist” work that celebrates the hallmarks of authority while destroying the revolutionary spirit. However, in doing so, he ignores the fundamental reality that the film uplifts individual freedom over authority, not the reverse. Francis’ only delusion is the delusion of freedom. In the dream that he concocts for us, he has some degree of power, which he exercises to investigate the crimes of Dr. Caligari. This is how Wiene’s work undermines authority, by valorizing Francis’ journey.

Francis is leading us through this dreamscape, which inevitably culminates in the realization that this was all a delusion of Francis’ own conjuring. In a sense, the artistic choice to end the story in an abrupt twist mirrors the sort of phenomenon that occurs at the end of a nightmare. Often, such dreams end in a sudden thrust into reality. Here, Krakauer is correct. It increasingly appears like Francis, and the film by extension is an allegory for the German national psyche in this period of tumult. Restrained by hopelessness and a natural depression, Germans sought freedom from their own despair. It is doubtful that Wiene predicted the rise of Hitler when he completed Dr. Caligari. From our point of view, however, the film was oddly precognitive of the rapid change into authoritarianism that Germany experienced. Just as the dream ended so quickly, so did Hitler rise to power. Francis’ brief search for freedom in his delusional state sort of mirrors the brief cosmopolitanism of Weimar Germany between 1924 and the Nazi seizure of power. Inevitably however, they were forced, as Francis was, out of the dream into the harsh reality that Nazi Germany presented.

Our sympathy for Francis is rooted out of our empathy for his lack of control. Krakauer

misses this. By relegating this reading of the story to a “madman’s fantasy,” a fantasy which he imagines the audience immediately disregards, Krakauer underestimates the pathos in the film. His plight is ultimately sympathetic. It does not matter that this whole episode is a fabrication, because, if anything, it is an image of the sort of personal freedom Francis would like to have. Although it was just a dream, Francis’ recollection of the events in Holstenwall represented the belief that even unbound chaos is better than the tyranny of the real world, an idea that was inherently logical given the horrors that the film associates with authority. It is not a conformist production, but rather the opposite.

The aesthetic nature of the film is dreamlike, perfectly serving the idea that the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a metaphor for the shared feeling that Germany was experiencing in the post WW1 period. Often, the architecture of a dream (or hallucination) defies the physics of reality. Things work that shouldn’t work. The world of Caligari echoes that unnatural reality. Wiene created a film whose world is warped and distinctly supernatural. The odd geometry of Francis’ story displays itself in twisting hallways and leaning buildings. This visual style reveals that the world is not reality. The instinctively dark and mysterious aesthetic mistakenly leads the viewer to the idea that this dream of Francis’ is a nightmare. However, while scary, it is the only place where he has any sort of individual power. He retells this story to give himself the feeling of agency that he believed he had in his search for the murderers. Perhaps subconsciously the dream is not scary at all, but rather a source of comfort. Outside the distorted world his mind has created, he was merely an insane patient restrained by authority. There is a sort of beautiful freedom in chaos, and Wiene carefully draws out that idea. The conclusion that Francis could now be ‘cured’ by the asylum represents the tragic end of that freedom. The authorities had gotten to him and ended his pursuit of individual independence. And if to put this reading of the end of the film in the Krakauer model, the curing of Francis would mark the recapture of authority by the Nazis. The unfortunate conclusion makes the film definitively revolutionary because as we witness Francis fall to the authorities, we instinctively side with him and bemoan the loss of his free spirit. Caligari is a nightmare not because the delusion that Francis has is frightening, but because it depicts the hopeless inability to free oneself from authority.