Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16801, USA
Humanities 2024, 13(5), 119; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050119
Submission received: 10 August 2024
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Revised: 9 September 2024
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Accepted: 14 September 2024
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Published: 16 September 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Re-imagining Classical Monsters)
Abstract
:Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy—particularly within a framework pitting liberal representative democracy against authoritarianism. In times of anxiety about authoritarianism, Western artists repeatedly return to a masterpiece of relatively early cinema: Robert Weine’s silent film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This essay examines three twenty-first century adaptations: David Lee Fisher’s 2005 remake of the film; James Morrow’s 2017 novel, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari; and Georgie Bailey’s 2022 play Caligari. I argue that while the direct politico-cultural anxieties of Weine’s film have often been overstated, the emergence of adaptations during periods of heightened concern about authoritarianism reflects a deep-seated reception of the film as anticipating autocratic governance. However, for all its fears about power, control, and the loss of self-determination, Weine’s movie also contains the seeds of liberation. Cesare ultimately sacrifices his own life rather than murdering Jane. And it is this gesture that the adaptations examined here seek—a gesture of resistance. The sleepwalker can awaken and assert a form of just resistance in the world, even if the penalties are steep.
1. Introduction
I began writing this article in July 2024. That month saw elections in both the United Kingdom and France. In particular, the election in France returned results that surprised the majority of political commentators. As late as 27 June, Julie Carriat wrote in Le Monde that Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally party was projected to defeat both the left and the center (Carriat 2024). However, in both countries, the left/center-left decidedly defeated the right, as voters either removed or kept right-wing parties from power. In the UK, Labour gained two hundred and eleven seats, while the Tories lost two hundred and fifty-one (UK General 2024). In France, Le Pen’s National Rally came in third behind the New Popular Front and Ensemble! a coalition of leftist parties and an independent leftist party, respectively (Chrisafis 2024). In my own country—the United States—there remains concern that the November 2024 elections will see Donald Trump returned to power, with his sympathy for authoritarian leaders and promise to be a dictator on “day one” (Sherman 2023). Part of the fear many in the US and Europe feel about a rising tide of authoritarianism comes from the strengthening of autocratic rulers at the expense of global democracy.
Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy, particularly within a framework once again pitting liberal representative democracy against a form of authoritarianism. A kind of zombified Cold War, pitting liberal West against autocratic East. The US and Western Europe against Russia, China, and (portions of) Eastern Europe. This conflict shapes much of our contemporary political rhetoric, especially from leaders struggling to make the case for a liberal democratic model.1 This rhetoric of a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism ideologically divides the world between good and bad within Western political thought, between those on the side of the angels and those who hate freedom. This, of course, is a familiar framing recycled from the Cold War and the War on Terror. This cultural narrative emphasizing a conflict of ideologies, however, creates a horizon of expectations that begins to shape how the world is perceived. Anxieties about authoritarianism are not limited to the political realm and political rhetoric. Instead, they come to shape larger structures of cultural production, including mass media.
It is in this space of anxiety about authoritarianism that Western artists repeatedly return to a masterpiece of relatively early cinema: Robert Weine’s silent film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (hereafter usually just Das Cabinet). The 1920 German film is an incredibly influential piece, which has been adapted repeatedly over the last century through sequels, changes in genre, and straight remakes. This essay examines three twenty-first century adaptations: David Lee Fisher’s 2005 remake of the film; James Morrow’s 2017 novel, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari; and Georgie Bailey’s 2022 play, Caligari. I argue that while the direct politico-cultural anxieties of Weine’s film have often been overstated, the emergence of adaptations during periods of heightened concern about authoritarianism reflects a deep-seated reception of the film as anticipating autocratic governance.
Given the plot of Weine’s film, it is relatively easy to understand why some critics—most notably Sigfried Kracauer, whose work is discussed more below—take Das Cabinet to anticipate the rise of fascism. The film opens with a frame story in which a young man named Francis describes encountering a mysterious and vaguely sinister man named Dr. Caligari displaying a somnambulist named Cesare at a fair. Cesare predicts the death of his friend Alan by the next dawn. The next morning, Francis learns that Alan was murdered, and he becomes convinced that Caligari and Cesare are responsible. He enlists the help of his girlfriend Jane’s father to investigate. When Jane comes to the fair searching for her father, Caligari introduces her to Cesare, much to Jane’s horror. That night, while Francis guards Caligari’s hut and (unbeknownst to him) a dummy of Cesare, the real Cesare is sent forth by Caligari to murder Jane. However, Cesare breaks Caligari’s hypnotic control sufficiently to resist killing Jane; instead, he kidnaps her, fleeing over the rooftops with her unconscious body. Eventually, this flight overwhelms Cesare, who abandons Jane and succumbs to exhaustion. Francis pursues Caligari to a mental asylum, where he learns that Caligari is the director of the asylum. With the help of asylum staff and Jane’s father, Francis proves Caligari’s identity and defeats the director. However, it is at the point of this seeming triumph that the film returns to the frame story and we learn that, in contrast to the events we have just witnessed, Francis is confined in the mental asylum (along with Jane and Cesare), and the director remains in charge. As Francis is dragged to his room screaming accusations at the director, the film closes with the director saying that he now understands Francis’s delusion and can cure him.
2. Caligari as Monster
Before turning to political questions, which will occupy most of this essay, I want to discuss Weine’s film in the context of monstrosity, appropriate for this special issue. There are two particular levels at which Weine’s film functions as a horror film: the monster himself/themselves and the mise-en-scène. Understanding Das Cabinet’s lasting influence requires familiarity with both levels of horror.
Das Cabinet reproduces a variation of the conundrum of Mary Shelley’s (2022) Frankenstein, in asking viewers to decide who is the real monster: Cesare, the murderer, or Caligari, who uses hypnotic power to bend the somnambulist to his twisted will? For his part, Francis believes that both men are monsters, though his obsession is primarily with Caligari. And given Cesare’s refusal to murder Jane, the film itself seems to spotlight Caligari as the genuine villain. Indeed, he incorporates many tropes of traditional Gothic villainy: an almost hypnotic control over the wills of others, deception, an association with insanity/the asylum, a physical presence that suggests menace, and residing in dark, enclosed spaces.
The most direct facets of Caligari’s monstrosity revolve around his control of Cesare and his interconnected deception of those around him. Like Victor Frankenstein, Caligari’s scientific experiments create a kind of living dead—the unnatural and uncanny inverse of living humanity. Caligari substitutes his own will for Cesare’s, depriving the somnambulist of his own humanity. Caligari does not go out into the night to kill the town clerk, Alan, or Jane. Instead, he wakes the sleeper and sends Cesare forth to do his bidding—a thing Caligari himself acknowledges that Cesare would never do of his own volition. Cesare’s loss of his ability to make ethical choices is a deeply terrifying notion, in part because it threatens to erase individual subjectivity and overwrite the subject as an object of another. It is, in this sense, a kind of psychic death made all the more apparent in this instance by Cesare’s somnambulism, which appears a state of constant death even as he lives. It is no accident, of course, that the box in which Caligari transports and displays Cesare resembles nothing so much as a coffin. When Francis and his party initially arrive to investigate Caligari’s hut, the doctor’s first sight of Cesare elicits a cry that he is dead. The ease with which Caligari deceitfully substitutes the dummy for the living Cesare when the somnambulist goes forth to commit the murders further heightens this impression of his deadness by aligning his living body with the non-living model. These elements—the objectification of Cesare under Caligari’s will and the emergence of the sleeper from a coffin—associate Cesare with the living dead. And yet, in contrast to something like Bram Stoker’s (1897) Dracula, in which the living dead vampire is the source of monstrous horror in himself, Das Cabinet is, ultimately, aligned more with Frankenstein, in which the creator of the undead bears the brunt of ethical responsibility. The loss of one’s will to the control of another is a traditional horror trope, particularly popular during the 1920s and 1930s.2
The other element of horror central to Das Cabinet’s lasting success and to Caligari’s individual monstrosity is the film’s German Expressionist mise-en-scène, which visually evokes the horror and insanity at the film’s thematic heart.3 Set designer Hermann Warm worked with avant-garde artists Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig to create sets reflecting the Expressionist aesthetic of the Weimar years, including sets tilted at precarious angles, stark paint lines on canvas backdrops, highly stylized depictions of the village, and steeply sloping roofs like the one Cesare iconically climbs while carrying Jane. Nothing in the film is realistic. Instead, the scenery embraces the angst and anxieties of the Expressionist movement, reflecting the same kind of existential terror as a painting like Edvard Munch’s (1893) The Scream. The angular, threatening nature of the set aligns with the film’s thematic questions about reality, sanity, and normalcy, thus heightening the psychological horror of the events. Simultaneously, this strengthens the impression of Caligari’s villainy by visually aligning him with traditional Gothic tropes like enclosed, claustrophobic spaces and the prison or mental institution. Typically, when Caligari is seen, he occupies relatively constricted spaces, like the clerk’s office, his circus tent, his hut in the village, or his office in the mental asylum. Each of these relatively dark, tight spaces puts the characters (and the audience) into a space of limited mobility, precluding escape. There is a feeling of being trapped with the threatening presences of Caligari and Cesare. Probably nowhere is this more readily evident than the scene in which Caligari invites Jane into the otherwise deserted fair tent and introduces her to Cesare. The scene exudes a suffocating restriction. Jane is symbolically trapped, if not literally trapped, by the combination of the terrifying space and Caligari’s hypnotic persona. Further, Caligari’s association with the space of the insane asylum reflects a deep-rooted terror because “in a madhouse authority may be exercised over others in a particularly frightening or humiliating way; and because the madhouse is a closed institution in which the problems of a particular society, the wounds inflicted and the violence unleashed by that society, can be depicted in heightened, concentrated, and frequently symbolic form” (Prawer 1980, p. 190). It is Caligari’s ability to exert control over those around him, combined with the angst-inflected scenery of the film, that makes this movie both a horror classic and such a deeply divisive film politically. A politics to which this essay now overtly turns.
3. The Politics of Das Cabinet
When considering the political meaning(s) of Weine’s film, it is essentially de rigueur to begin with Sigfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, the 1947 work of film theory that set the stage for much of how Das Cabinet has been received—though other scholars have often criticized Kracauer’s case, as we shall see. Kracauer’s book essentially proceeds at two key levels: a philosophical understanding of the relationship between cinema and culture and a specific reading of the cultural role of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. In short, Kracauer argues that cinema reflects the cultural psychology of a people at a specific time, and that films of the Weimar period—of which he takes Das Cabinet to be the archetype—reflect the cultural, psychological, and political tensions that would lead to the rise of Nazism. This section summarizes the main threads of Kracauer’s argument and then considers some of the criticisms of his reading.
Kracauer starts from the belief that film reflects a “psychological history”, to borrow the phrase from his book’s subtitle. He asserts that:
In other words, Kracauer assumes that there is a zeitgeist that exists in particular times and places, which is a common enough assumption. Certainly, particular historical, material, and cultural factors shape the experience of particular groups of people in particular historical eras. This is not especially controversial.The interest here lies exclusively in such collective dispositions or tendencies as prevail within a nation at a certain stage of its development…this book is not concerned with establishing some national character pattern allegedly elevated above history, but it is concerned with the psychological pattern of a people at a certain time.
From this starting point, Kracauer moves on to two more tenuous assumptions that underpin his understanding of the relationship between film and a particular psychologico-historical moment. These assumptions are intertwined, but they move in opposite directions. First, he assumes that films accurately reflect this zeitgeist; and second, he assumes that the zeitgeist can be reconstructed from an analysis of the body of cinema produced in a particular time and place. The position that cinema reflects the cultural concerns of its time is widely accepted. For instance, Christopher Sharrett writes of horror films, “The horror film, like all forms of art, continues to embody the ideological circumstances of the moment that contains it” (Sharrett 2017, p. 71). However, Kracauer seems to assume an unusually close correspondence between the thematic concerns of the cinema industry and the psychological history of a people. He claims, “The films of a nation reflect its mentality in a more direct way than other artistic media” because movies are collaborative productions and because they must appeal to a mass audience (Kracauer 2019, pp. 5–6). He argues that because many people work together on a film, it will naturally reflect a wide range of individual influences and ideas; therefore, in the aggregate, the movie will represent the psychological history of the time and place generally. He further asserts that because movies are a form of mass media, they will naturally be made in ways that reflect the views and experiences of those consuming them.
While Kracauer’s more macro-level argument is not the direct focus of my essay, it is an important starting point for understanding his micro-level argument about the thematic concerns in Weine’s film reflecting a cultural psychology that would give rise to Nazism. In particular, Kracauer argues that there were four major traits of Weimar-era German psychology that paved the road to Nazism, and that Das Cabinet reflects each of those traits:
- (1)
- A fascination with tyrants as protagonists (Kracauer 2019, p. 79),
- (2)
- A turn toward “instinctual” films, in which drives, impulses, and desires ruled over rational decision making (Kracauer 2019, pp. 96–97),
- (3)
- A pervading desire to escape the only apparent alternatives: tyranny or instinctually driven chaos (Kracauer 2019, p. 107),
- (4)
- And a predisposition to submit to authority, even tyrannical authority (Kracauer 2019, p. 115).
In Kracauer’s reading, Das Cabinet reflects each of these points through the combination of its characters, plot, and mise-en-scène, and the film therefore stands as the example par excellence of the Weimar psychological cinema.
Kracauer’s understanding of Weine’s film relies largely on his interpretation of the differences between the original script, written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and the final film produced by Robert Weine. He argues for a sea change between what he characterizes as the revolutionary original version and the counter-revolutionary and bourgeois final product. Kracauer claims that in Janowitz and Mayer’s original script, there was no frame story, merely the experiences of Francis, Alan, and Jane presented in themselves. According to Kracauer, this was a devastating critique of authority taking aim at the wartime governments of Austria-Hungary (of which both Janowitz and Mayer were subjects, as a Czech and an Austrian, respectively) and Germany. He writes, “The character of Caligari embodies these tendencies; he stands for an unlimited authority that idolizes power as such, and, to satisfy its lust for domination, ruthlessly violates all human rights and values” (Kracauer 2019, p. 65). This reading centers on a specific conception of Caligari as a figure of absolute authority, able to bend not only minds but the resources and trappings of authority to his will. It also sees Caligari as a rational actor pursuing power for its own sake. In other words, Kracauer sees Caligari as a tyrant figure, thus reflecting the first of his major traits of proto-Nazi cinema. And, of course, the Expressionist angst of the mise-en-scène and the introduction of the madhouse at the end represent anxieties about the chaos of an instinctual world absent rationality. In Kracauer’s narrative of the film’s conceptualization, this was how the authors originally conceived of the project. But, as we will see, Kracauer’s reading of the film proper—absent the frame story—does not necessarily hold up to scrutiny.
By contrast, Kracauer argues, when Weine was put in charge of the project and added a frame story making Francis a madman, this destroyed the revolutionary potential of the film. As Kracauer puts it, “While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Weine’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness” (Kracauer 2019, pp. 66–67, small caps in original). Rather than Janowitz and Mayer’s anti-authoritarian narrative, Weine undercut the critique by showing Caligari as a good doctor trying to help the lunatic Francis recover his sanity rather than a corrupt and insane official abusing his power. The frame story ending represents the third and fourth elements of Kracauer’s list. Caligari being a genuine psychologist means that the film ultimately escapes the dialectic trap of Caligari as simultaneously tyrant and madman by resuscitating authority as trustworthy and beneficial. The frame story, in other words, offers a way out of the binary posed by the conflict between the first and second trends—between the tyrant figure and the anarchy of instinct. And this re-legitimation of authority reflects a tendency to submit to authority (at least to the extent that we are supposed to trust Caligari in the final moments of the film). If the end of the film, with Caligari’s declaration that now he can cure Francis, is taken as a happy ending, then the film directly endorses the re-establishment of legitimate authority.
In Kracauer’s view, the four tendencies of Weimar cinema, as embodied in Weine’s film, represent the conditions that gave rise to Nazism. The fascination with tyrants fed into Hitler’s cult of personality. The fear of anarchic instinct led to a turning toward a highly regimented and organized society. The desire to escape the bind of choosing between tyranny or chaos led to the embrace of a dictatorship in which choice was removed from the people. And the willingness to submit to authority led to an acceptance of increasing horrors. It is a straightforward and simple conception of Weimar Germany’s psychological history.
However, Kracauer’s argument has been assailed by numerous critics who see it as too limited in its conceptualization and/or a misreading of the actual cultural work Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari does.4 Here I focus primarily on the comprehensive critiques as articulated in S.S. Prawer’s (1980) book Caligari’s Children, in which he challenges several layers of Kracauer’s reading.5
At the most basic level, Prawer undercuts Kracauer’s narrative of the film by providing an alternate understanding of Janowitz and Mayer’s original script. Although Kracauer claims in a footnote that his firsthand information about the development of the film comes from a manuscript supplied to him by Janowitz (Kracauer 2019, p. 61), he did not have the original script available, nor was the film itself available to him when he wrote From Caligari to Hitler (Schuenemann 2003, p. 128). Scholars now generally accept that the original script, rediscovered in 1977, significantly undermines Kracauer’s view (see, for instance, Prawer 1980, pp. 168–69; Queresima 2004, p. xliii; or Schuenemann 2003, p. 128). By contrast, Prawer examined a typed copy of the original script from the collection of Werner Krauss—the actor who portrayed the title character—and found that it contained a frame story already, in which Francis recounts the events of the Caligari murders years later to a group of friends in a country house (Prawer 1980, pp. 168–69). In this version of the script, nothing suggests that the events did not take place precisely as Francis narrates them. Further, Caligari does not, in this original script, represent the tyrant figure grasping for power in all areas of his life. Quite the opposite. Instead, “the typescript asks us to regard Caligari as a dedicated scientist whose mind has given way, as a man to be pitied, as a tragic figure. It offers little support for Kracauer’s thesis of a revolutionary or anti-tyrannical tendency that those who made the actual film then perverted” (Prawer 1980, p. 169). If this original typescript is more accurate than Janowitz’s memoirs—which seems to be the scholarly consensus—then Kracauer’s entire argument about the film’s original anti-authoritarian impetus and position within an arc of tyrant films becomes unreliable.
Even apart from the question of the film’s origin story, Weine’s film itself undercuts Kracauer’s selective reading. Kracauer’s presentation of Caligari as a tyrant figure ignores the scene with the town clerk, which positions Caligari not as dominant but as subjected to the same petty authorities that average Germans would likely recognize. When Caligari arrives in the town of Holstenwall, he goes to the town clerk for a permit to set up a tent at the fair. Here he is forced to wait, and then must slavishly put up with the insults and insinuations of the clerk. However, Caligari does not merely put up with this treatment; “If he has to cringe to authority, as so many of his fellow-Germans had to do, then he does so in a deliberately exaggerated, almost mocking manner and takes his revenge afterwards” (Prawer 1980, p. 177). Prawer describes Caligari almost as a Nietzschean Übermensch, someone beyond the limits of morality who embraces his own will regardless of the consequences to himself or others. This is certainly not a figure embodying authority in any socially sanctioned way. In fact, this iteration of Caligari represents a profound threat to authority because he refuses the submission that Kracauer claims is central to the Weimar psychological moment, the submission to authority that lent itself to Nazism. Similarly, Kracauer’s reading of the submission to authority also ignores Cesare’s actions in sparing Jane’s life. Though he does kidnap her—presumably out of love for the young woman—Cesare resists Caligari’s hypnotic order to murder her in her sleep, which certainly suggests the film’s admiration for resistance to authority.
Kracauer also ignores the aesthetics of the frame story ending. He argues that the frame story neuters Francis’s tale by reducing him to a madman, thereby making his entire narrative untrustworthy. However, the asylum itself remains constructed of stage flooring, cardboard, canvas, and insane slanted angles (Prawer 1980, p. 185). It is not the world of reality, of sanity. The asylum itself remains within the Expressionistic realm of the angst-ridden nightmare. If this represents the sane re-inscription of social authority, even of tyrannical authority, then that inscription remains coded within the same aesthetic world as the madman’s fantasy—in other words, the world of “authority” is still the world of Francis’s deranged phantasm. Far from reflecting a cheerful return to social order and authority, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, if anything, suggests that the social order of everyday life functions in the same register as that of a paranoiac’s fantasy. This hardly seems a persuasive advertisement for Germans to submit to a tyrannical authority in preference to a chaotic world ruled by instincts.
Although Kracauer’s work is well-traveled terrain in discussions of Das Cabinet and its politics, what ultimately matters to my argument is the specific role that Kracauer’s book has played in the reception of Weine’s movie. According to Dietrich Schuenemann, Kracauer’s book—alongside Lotte Eisner’s Haunted Screen—have largely defined the discussion of Das Cabinet, at least insofar as politics, revolutionary sentiments, and radicalism are concerned (Schuenemann 2003, p. 125). Schuenemann also notes that, although the 1977 rediscovery of the original script weakened Kracauer’s arguments, his work remains the critical starting point for discussions of this movie (Schuenemann 2003, pp. 126–27)—and this essay perpetuates that tradition. However, ultimately, I am less interested in the critical debates about Das Cabinet’s politics, and more interested in the apparent cultural association between the film and anxieties about authoritarianism. Even if, as many critics have argued, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari does not effectively anticipate the psycho-cultural trends that would lead to the rise of Nazism, adapters of the film continue to return to it at times of heightened anxiety about authoritarian governments/leaders. While this may be correlation, I will argue over my analysis of three twenty-first century adaptations for a causal relationship: that Caligari returns to haunt us precisely because tyranny threatens.
4. A New Film Version?
In 2005, American filmmaker David Lee Fisher remade Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari under its English title, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (D. L. Fisher 2005). And when I say remade, I mean this in a very specific sense. The film featured new actors and included dialogue, in contrast with the silent original. But it told the same story, following the original film’s plot line almost exactly. Apart from the addition of Jane’s brother, who kills Cesare, Fisher’s film is a near total re-creation of the original. On the technical side, Fisher’s film features many shot-for-shot re-creations from the original, and much of the film was shot in front of green screens with photos of the original 1920 set then added behind the actors. This was a special effects triumph in 2005—the movie won best special effects and best cinematography when it premiered at the 2005 Screamfest Horror Films Festival, along with the audience choice award (Screamfest 2005).
This combination of technical virtuosity and direct re-creation received mixed reviews from critics. Among the most critical was Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine, arguing that Fisher’s film is a “work of fanboyish gusto”, which ultimately reveals more about the limitations of Weine’s work than it produces any new effects or information (Gonzalez 2006). He even writes, “This new film’s expression is entirely borrowed: Actors perform before green-screen shots from the 1920 film, and though the frame’s depth of field never feels shallow…you may wonder what the fuss is all about” (Gonzalez 2006). Unlike the Screamfest organizers and audiences, Gonzalez clearly felt the film was both derivative and technically clumsy—in his assessment, the very innovations that were so impressive to others merely revealed the low-tech quality of the original Das Cabinet. On a more charitable note, Neil Genzlinger argued in The New York Times that while the film “has out-disoriented the original”, this primarily comes down to a gap between the expectation of a silent film versus the use of dialogue and to questions about how the green-screening effect was technically achieved (Genzlinger 2005). And The Village Voice’s R. Emmet Sweeney similarly identified a gap between the technical skill of the film and the movie as entertainment experience, calling it “Caligari embalmed” (Sweeney 2006). This combination of technical genius and stilted reproduction of an original is, in point of fact, what is ultimately so fascinating and important about Fisher’s cinematic exploit.
What Fisher’s aesthetic experiment actually does is center the simulacrum, which Jean Baudrillard famously argues is the guiding logic of modern society. According to Baudrillard, the governing logic through which subjects understand society, its organization, and their place in it is no longer rooted in reality, but in a complex of signs which refer only to themselves, rather than being guaranteed by the real. In Baudrillard’s words:
In other words, a network of signs takes the place of reality. It is this network that Baudrillard calls the simulacrum, a kind of Mobius strip of signs that never breaks to account for the real. Within a simulacrum, the sign is “never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 6). We operate within socio-cultural spaces not only understood through signs, but called into being and made virtually real through the self-referential networking of signs.It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself.
It is into this space of the reproduction of signs within a system of self-referentiality that Fisher’s film emerges. Weine’s film had disoriented at the visual level by virtue of its play with an Expressionist angst and at the thematic level by its questions about control and (in)sanity. But, as the critical response discussed above reflects, Fisher’s film disorients more because of its imperfect play with the signs of the silent film, Expressionism, and Das Cabinet as such. The audience’s anxiety is evoked not so much by the story being told—after all, Das Cabinet is one of the most famous films of all time; simply retelling the same plot could hardly be a surprise for many film fans—but by the technical aspects of the film, which refer back to Weine’s masterpiece. Green-screening the actors atop images of the original set disconnects the actors from any sense of reality, literally locating them within the world of the sign, as their grounding in a physical set is traded for grounding in a virtual set. What raises questions about Francis’s (and the audience’s) state of mind is the very physical structure of the film itself. In its repetition of not only the plot but the mise-en-scène of the earlier film, Fisher’s cinematic experiment is literally the self-referential repetition of a sign system.
Indeed, Baudrillard anticipated with almost uncanny directness the kind of cinematic simulacrum Fisher’s film reflects. He argued that media—particularly movies and TV, but also things like news media—play a central role in the creation of an economy of signs that take the place of the real. But within this economy, film becomes nostalgic even for itself as a lost real object. Within the world driven by the simulacrum,
Baudrillard’s suggestion that cinema “remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original” seems eerily to anticipate Fisher’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film as lost object takes the place of a lost real, and through the re-creation of Weine’s film, down to the original sets spectrally introduced behind the actors, Fisher tries to return to the lost object. But he fails to return to the object sought by Weine’s film, because Weine’s film gestured toward a lost real referent, whereas Fisher’s film functions only at the level of the sign.6 And the overtness of this functioning, this floating in the abstract economy of a sign that refers back only to another sign, is what is ultimately so unsettling about Fisher’s movie.cinema also approaches an absolute correspondence with itself…Cinema plagiarizes itself, recopies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes the silent film more perfectly than the original, etc.: all of this is logical, the cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object as much as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a lost referent.(Baudrillard 1994, p. 47, italics in original)
5. A Fantastical Novelization
In his 2017 novel The Asylum of Dr. Caligari, American author James Morrow takes a different approach to unsettling the Caligari story. Morrow brings the Caligari story out of the realm of the psychological, or quasi-psychological, and into the realm of straight magic. For all Caligari’s ability to control the will of Cesare in the original film, everything portrayed was rooted in psychological practice, primarily in Caligari’s use of hypnosis to dominate the somnambulist’s mind. While Morrow’s Caligari advocates the use of hypnosis as a psychological treatment, his primary activities in the novel are not rooted in hypnotism. Instead, he deploys sorcery in his contracts with the warring militaries of World War I.
Apart from sharing a few character names and having Caligari run a mental institution, there is very little that Morrow’s novel actually has in common with Weine’s film. The first-person novel is told from the perspective of Francis Wyndham, an aspiring but un-inspiring artist who takes a job as art therapist at Dr. Alessandro Caligari’s asylum at the outbreak of World War I. Wyndham and a patient named Ilona discover that Caligari has created a magic painting, entitled Ecstatic Wisdom, to inspire Kriegslust (the love of war) in viewers, and for a fee, the military units of different nations march past the painting, supernaturally instilling in the soldiers a desire for battlefield violence. Wyndham, Ilona, and the other inmates use Ilona’s magical painting abilities to paint a new version of Ecstatic Wisdom, inspiring the soldiers who view it to desert. When Caligari discovers the switch, the narrator and inmates flee the asylum, traveling magically through a painting with the help of Hans Jedermann—the protagonist of their painting, who has come to life to assist them—to a battlefield, where they meet a group of pacifist soldiers under the anti-war spell of their masterpiece. These soldiers attack the asylum with an experimental tank and use one of Caligari’s enchanted flamethrowers to destroy his painting. They are ultimately successful, but Wyndham is killed and Ilona grievously wounded. With her last bits of strength, Ilona uses her magic to paint a version of Wyndham, who comes alive; she then dies and he paints a magical version of her. The novel ends with the two paint-people returning to their canvases together and going into some kind of artistic netherworld.
On the level of plot, structure, and even themes, this novel is a far cry from Weine’s film. One link between them, however, is the troubled position of psychological practice in each—a concern deeply connected with the issues of control, power, and dominance in each work. In Weine’s movie, we learn that Caligari uses hypnotism to control Cesare and induce him to murder, though we never see this hypnotism actually being performed. The closest Weine shows us to the hypnotic process is the piercing stare of Werner Krauss, who played Caligari. Periodically, his menacing stare seems to compel people, notably Jane—but of course this is not proper hypnotism, much less any form of psychiatric practice. The only other reference to actual psychiatry comes at the end of the film in the frame story, with Caligari’s declaration that he can cure Francis’s psychosis now that he understands the nature of the disease, but we also never see this treatment, nor do we find out how successful it is.
Although the original film never delves into Caligari’s medical practice, it does establish that Caligari is a practitioner of psychology; Morrow’s Caligari has a more tenuous relationship to the discipline. When Wyndham first arrives at the asylum, Caligari expounds on his views of psychological best practices, which rely primarily on hypnosis and heteropathic treatment. Caligari critiques Freud in extreme terms, arguing that he “should never have turned his back on Charcot and the mesmeric tradition. The future of psychiatry belongs to hypnotism, not to some byzantine theory of sublimated fucking” (Morrow 2017, p. 19). The other side of Caligari’s practice—at least as he describes it in these pages—is what he calls heteropathic medicine, which involves hypnotizing a patient to believe the opposite of their current delusions and allowing the contradiction to snap their mind back into a healthy balance (Morrow 2017, p. 19). Although Caligari lays out this distinctive approach to mental health treatment, virtually none of these practices come up again in the novel. Wyndham is turned loose to do art therapy—for which he neither has nor receives training. This art therapy largely consists of having a select group of patients paint. As for Caligari, he disappears in any clinical sense. We never see him treat patients, never see him perform hypnosis, and apart from drugging Wyndham’s coffee at one point (Morrow 2017, p. 117), we never see Caligari utilize any medicines. In other words, despite initially presenting himself as having a distinctive approach to psychological practice, the novel’s Caligari effectively never practices psychology.
Instead, in Morrow’s novel, Caligari relies principally on magic, which has the narrative benefit of removing any real constraints on what he (and by extension, Wyndham and Ilona) is able to do. Caligari’s actual sorcery is remarkably stereotypical. His painting of Ecstatic Wisdom takes place in an underground cavern occupied by a black cat (Cesare) and a shrine consisting of a human skull, stuffed raven, and four eggs (Morrow 2017, pp. 29–30). Wyndham sneaks into this sanctum one night and observes Caligari’s process. In order to enchant the paints themselves and bring about the sinister Kriegslust, Caligari uses classic elements of stereotypical witchcraft:
Later in the novel, Wyndham attempts to burn Ecstatic Wisdom with turpentine and finds it resistant to normal fire, a further sign of the magic at work (Morrow 2017, pp. 73–74). And while the supernatural nature of these events does allow Wyndham, Ilona, and co. to eventually strike back at Caligari by using his own magics against him, the reliance on magic at the heart of this novel provides a clear divergence from Weine’s film in a way that undercuts the terror of the original movie. In Weine’s work, the horror of Caligari is that control, dominance, and even the loss of will are existential fears, things that may impact the viewer in the real world—even if not in the way depicted in the movie. And while the novel peripherally involves such a loss of will, the enchanted soldiers exist only as abstractions, and the depiction of Caligari’s magic is so hokey, so stereotyped, that it cannot inspire real anxiety in the reader. Who could believe that a sorcerer putting salamanders, beetles, toads, and slugs into magical paint bears any meaningful connection to the world that we as readers inhabit? No, here we are without direct fear that these events could, in fact, befall us. However, there is a level at which Caligari’s magic represents a genuine fear, a genuine concern about the nature of control—and at which Morrow adds something distinctly novel to the Caligari that Weine gives us—an official stamp of approval.The first beaker in line, containing vermilion paint, received a wriggling red salamander. To the cadmium yellow the alienist added a twitching golden beetle. To the veridian he sacrificed a small glaucous toad. The ultramarine received a blue slug. With each fillip, the steam rising from the elixir thickened, the vaporous columns mixing with the preternat ral [sic] rainbow I’d seen pouring from the elevator hatch.
The fantastical nature of Caligari’s control does link the novel and the movie. The nature of that control differs, but the concern with the ethics of exerting a hypnotic power over others remains central in both versions. Ilona even asks Wyndham at one point whether “By shaping the souls of unsuspecting schoolboys, are we not indulging in a species of hubris as monstrous as Caligari’s?” (Morrow 2017, p. 111). And although this ethical issue is not dwelt on for any length of time, merely asking the question about the ethics of magical hypnosis—whether used for war or peace—does force the reader to reflect on issues of individual freedom, will, and control. But these questions are inherently more politically charged in Morrow’s novel than they are in Weine’s film. Although Weine’s Caligari is the head of a mental asylum, and therefore a figure of some authority, his experiments with Cesare are purely personal and exist outside his official duties, therefore outside the sphere of his authority. By contrast, Morrow’s Caligari rents his painting to the militaries of the various combatant countries. As Wyndham puts it after his failed attempt to destroy the painting, “Ecstatic Wisdom would rule the Western Front, the Eastern Front, and whatever additional murderous circuses the generals cared to convene. A half-dozen governments, and perhaps many more, would fill the sorcerer’s coffers with gold and his soul with unholy satisfactions” (Morrow 2017, p. 74). Although the painting may not have been created under the direct orders of a government/authority, the authorities decidedly make use of Ecstatic Wisdom, and they pay handsomely for the privilege. Thus, there is a gap between the unauthorized, almost rogue experiments of Weine’s Caligari and the officially utilized magical painting of Morrow’s magician. In the context of a film like Das Cabinet, which has such a strong cultural association with authoritarianism, the official sanctioning of Caligari’s magical hypnotism must certainly raise different concerns from the individual quest of a psychiatrist obsessed with a legendary mystic. In Section 7, I turn in more detail to how this official link with Caligari’s power, dominance, and mind control is relevant to concerns about authoritarianism circa 2017.
6. Staging Caligari
In 2022, British theater company Chewboy Productions premiered co-founder Georgie Bailey’s new play Caligari, which riffs off Weine’s film but brings in substantial elements of psychoanalysis, Brechtian alienation, and postmodern self-referentiality to produce a more complex, multi-layered exploration of power and freedom. The play follows a set of actors—most of whom are given letters, rather than names, though they play named characters within the meta-play; Cesare is the only performer with a single name—repeating a seeming endless production of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. However, during the performance itself, they make various attempts to break from the structure of the plot line and either escape telling the story at all, alter the structure of the play, or envision new “happy” endings. These Brechtian gestures of rebellion invariably fail as the actors are pulled back into performing their Sisyphean cycle, often at the command of Cesare himself, for whom there seems to be the least distance between the actor and the role (that is, the actor within the play, not necessarily Hal Darling, who played Cesare in the original run). As the meta-actors try and fail to escape the clutches of Caligari/Caligari—i.e., both the figure of the hypnotist and the plot of the story—they explore questions of self-determination, dominance, and freedom. In this section, I analyze first the psychoanalytic approach to control and power embodied in the figures of Caligari and Jane’s father, and then the Brechtian and postmodern self-referentiality of Bailey’s play as forms through which the contemporary drama stages the themes of Weine’s original film.
Within Bailey’s play, there are two major levels of psychoanalytic influence: Caligari is associated with the Lacanian Real, and Jane’s father is linked to the Name-of-the-Father that guarantees the Symbolic order’s coherence. Each of these elements is central to the Lacanian triad of Imaginary–Symbolic–Real, which Jacques Lacan argues structures psychic experience. In short, the Imaginary is the world experienced before the subject’s entry into language, a world in which they felt no disconnect between themselves and existence as such. However, when the subject begins to experience the world through language, they enter the Symbolic order, which inherently creates a sense of loss/castration because language always fails to adequately represent the world. Beyond the Symbolic, however, remains the Real, a shadowy space that threatens the order constructed within the Symbolic, thus representing both a kind of liberation and an existential terror. It is the Name-of-the-Father—a symbolic structure of authority rooted in the myth of the primordial father who represents authority—that gives the Symbolic order its structure and ensures that the subject remains (generally) within the Law of the Symbolic. And Bailey stages figures representing these two forces—the Real and the Name-of-the-Father—as oppositional within Caligari.
Caligari himself represents the Real in that he is consistently figured as coming from outside the town, from outside the theater space, even from outside reality; additionally, he is an unknowable, malign force which cannot be reasoned with, bargained with, or persuaded. In other words, Caligari is presented as beyond the logic of the Symbolic. Caligari’s approach to the town is described in chilling obscurity, referring to him as “Dunkelheit. Darkness”, “a creature”, “A monster”, “A thing beyond imagination”, “A voiceless, faceless thing, “Lurking, always there. Ready…” (Bailey 2022, pp. 6–7). The language describing Caligari suggests the ambiguity, the indescribability of something beyond language, representing a deep fear. This indeterminacy aligns with how Lacanians describe the Real. Lacan himself, in Écrits, often describes the Real in negative terms, in terms of what it is not: “what did not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real” or “the real insofar as it is the domain of that which subsists outside of symbolization” (Lacan 2006, p. 324, italics in original). And Slavoj Žižek writes that the Real is “the pulsing of the presymbolic substance in its abhorrent vitality” (Žižek 1991, pp. 14–15). In other words, the Real, like Caligari, is that which cannot be named, cannot be described, cannot even be perceived properly because it haunts the space beyond the Symbolic order through which subjects attempt to make sense of their world.
The structuring force of the Symbolic order is the Law, which derives its authority through the Name-of-the-Father. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud identified the origin of the superego—the mechanism through which behavior is regulated by an internalization of the child’s belief in their father’s authority (Freud 1989, pp. 92–96). Freud describes the ambivalence of affection and hatred for the primordial father by his sons, and when they rose up to kill the father that wielded absolute authority over them, the superego was born (Freud 1989, p. 95). While Freud sees the superego primarily as restrictive, Lacan paradoxically asserts that the restrictions of the Father, principally the incest taboo, structures the Symbolic order itself, thereby giving shape to the world of subjectivity (Lacan 1981, p. 34; 2006, p. 723). The Law, embodied in the Name-of-the-Father, preserves the Symbolic order through its structures, rules, and seemingly external authority.
In Bailey’s play, the figure of the Law is taken up by Jane’s father, to whom Francis turns when the police refuse to investigate Caligari. In an almost too on-the-nose passage, the actors realize they cannot remember the name of the character and so re-christen him “Mr Father” (Bailey 2022, p. 19). The passage, playing at the most literal level with the name of the father, reflects the remove at which the symbolic Name-of-the-Father stands. It is never the name of one’s own father, but rather the lost name of the primordial father, which exists only through the signifier Father. However, within that signifier is encoded all the authority endowed by the child in their own parent—an absolute authority that demands submission to the Law. Indeed, Mr Father even promises such boundless authority. When Jane asks him to look into Cesare and Caligari because the police will not, he says, “They will listen to I! The great Mr Father! Children, I shall inspect this Cesare, and the world will be restored” (Bailey 2022, p. 20). Outside of the structures of the Law, the Name-of-the-Father, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, such a claim to restore the world is incomprehensible. Even if Mr Father persuades the police where Francis and Jane failed, this represents very little in the broad scheme of things. However, if this grandiose claim is taken as a promise to restore the Symbolic order by expelling Caligari (and Cesare) as representatives of the non-symbolizable Real, then the truth of the claim becomes apparent. Mr Father stands in for the Law, while Caligari stands in for what exists outside, below, and in the gaps of the Law.
However, it is not only at the level of psychoanalysis that Bailey’s Caligari grapples with a form of stringent authority, but also at the narrative level. It is here that we must turn to Bertolt Brecht and postmodernist poetics. The play deals with the authority of the story itself, which restricts what the actors can and cannot do. The performance technique through which this challenge to textual authority occurs is Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, often translated as the “alienation effect”, “distancing effect”, or “A-effect.” In essence, the Verfremdungseffekt involves highlighting the gap between the performer and the character, between the stage and the world depicted. In Brecht’s words, “In order to produce A-effects the actor has to discard whatever means he has learnt of getting the audience to identify itself with the character which he plays. Aiming not to put his audience into a trance, he must not go into a trance himself” (Brecht 1992, p. 193). The A-effect prevents the audience from willingly suspending disbelief to take what they see depicted as reality—instead, they are pushed to see the performance as a constructed artwork and to critically consider what it says about society and its functioning.
Many post-WWII playwrights have written A-effect-producing gestures directly into their plays in order to ensure the illusion of theater is broken. Caligari includes gestures early in the play to ensure the audience is fully cognizant that they are watching a play. At the beginning of act one, the entire ensemble announces: “DER MARKT! DER MARKT! DER MARKT! WIR SIND AM MARKT!” (Bailey 2022, p. 5, caps lock in original). A few pages later, the actor playing the Head Clerk announces, “I’M SNORING, I’M SNORING, I’M FAST ASLEEP”, and B and C have a debate about whether the theater requires someone to announce a change in location (Bailey 2022, p. 9). Announcements of what is going on and direct metatheatrical statements, rather than simply performing the actions, constantly break the illusion. Viewers cannot believe that they are actually in a German market or seeing a clerk sleep under these performance conditions, and so they remain aware of the performance as art.
Much of the thematic focus of Bailey’s play is self-awareness of art as a form, particularly when it comes to adapting someone else’s story line—and it is here that Caligari explores the themes of power, freedom, and self-determination at the heart of Weine’s original, but with a postmodern twist. In Bailey’s play, the plot of the original Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari becomes a kind of performed prison in which the actors are trapped, unable to escape and determine their own destinies.7 And the performers do, several times, try to escape the cycle of Caligari, but they are unable to:
A. No, no Francis, I don’t want to do this anymore.
I don’t want to perform anymore I
I don’t want to
I don’t
C. We don’t have a choice.
A. We always have choices.
C. It’s too late for this!
A. My fate’s the worst! I have no true ending, and I have to relive it constantly for what? For what reason?
C. We’re nearly finished.
A. Francis, what is all this? A chance for you to make it better?
Or, what, so you get some power over him? Finally?
Is that/it?
C. No, we stay true to the story, so that—
B. But that’s just it! That’s it! We’re having to relive all this scheisse, what happened to us and our home for what, entertainment? So that people can walk away feeling cultured? Because it isn’t happening to them, is it?
D. Why does Caligari even have to be in the play?
C. We need someone to play him so our stories can live!
A. This should be our story, and ours alone.
The players function as though under a repetition compulsion. Even when they try to imagine alternate endings to the story—Cesare living a normal live; Alan, Jane, and Francis living happily ever after; the destruction of Caligari (Bailey 2022, pp. 39–40)—none of these endings can be brought into existence because they remain compelled to perform the cycle of their story. They are forced to repeat the performance of their trauma endlessly—but by what force?C. I’m sorry but this is how it has to be.(Bailey 2022, p. 32, italics in original)
The story itself, the truth of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, is the driving force that pushes the actors endlessly to perform, endlessly to repeat. Despite what the actors hope for, they are trapped within the structure of the plot. The plot’s power to constrain the performers/characters aligns with the aesthetics of later postmodernism, which turned toward a critique of the power of texts and institutions. Inspired by the historicist investigations of power structures in the work of Michel Foucault, postmodern art “then shifts to its interrogation of the discourse of art itself and its supporting institutions (such as the museum), and how art can more broadly function as a political intervention” (Bertens 1995, p. 68). More is said about the political dimension of Bailey’s play in Section 7. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that following Foucault, postmodernism embraced challenges to the power structures of aesthetics, texts, and institutions, as seen in the recurring nature of Caligari.
The play ends with a return to the beginning, as they resume their positions from the beginning of the Prologue, but this time when the audience sees those opening lines, it is couched in the knowledge that this is not what the performers want to do—it is what they are compelled to do. The play ends:
B. Again…we go again.
C. Someone will hear us eventually.
CESARE. We don’t know what lives we could have had.
B. We can imagine.
CESARE. What did you want to be when you grew up?
A. I think I wanted to be happy.
B. I think I wanted to love.
D. I wanted to be proud.
C. I wanted to be remembered.
A. Maybe let’s get that in for next time.
Beat.
C. So.
B. So.
A. So.
D. So.
CESARE. So.
C. Shall we?
CESARE. I hope we can rest someday.
The actors take up their positions from the beginning.
They draw straws for who will play Caligari.
C gets the short straw.
B. What did you want to be, Cesare?
Beat.
CESARE. Free. I want to be free.
Cesare takes a slow walk to the cabinet, one step at a time.
Locks themselves in. The shadows from the opening re-emerge.
The shadow of Caligari appears. They all close their eyes. The drone starts up.
Ready to begin, again.
ENSEMBLE. Step right in…
Come inside…
The narrative itself becomes the repetition compulsion because there is no version of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari in which the characters are happy, able to love, proud, or free. They can only live the lives that exist within the world of the story. Cesare even asks, rhetorically, “We don’t live outside of this story, do we?” (Bailey 2022, p. 44).And the world fades to nothing.
Strikingly, Cesare is the one who forces the production to continue when the other actors seem ready to abandon it. When B and A question whether they are playing the truth and whether the performance must be interesting, Cesare awakes from his slumber with the imperative “Weitermachen. [Continue]” and then tells them, “Wir müssen weiterspielen. [We must keep playing]” (Bailey 2022, p. 24, translations in original). These commands, however, are soon softened with the addition of “Bitte? [Please?]” (Bailey 2022, p. 24, translation in original). The question, which Cesare repeats twice, reflects his recognition of how difficult it is for the actors to play these roles over and over, to be deprived of their freedom and self-determination. When he is later asked directly by C whether the play should continue, he again asserts, “Wir müssen weiterspielen. [We must play on.]” (Bailey 2022, p. 33, translation in original). In a sense, it is fitting that Cesare votes to continue with the endless performance, because Cesare is the most closely aligned with his character and because in Weine’s film, Cesare is the most obvious example of a character lacking free will. All of the actors, apart from Cesare, have at least dual identities: A is A and Jane; B is B, Alan, the Head Clerk, and Mr Father; etc. But in the Characters list, Cesare is listed only as Cesare. He has no other identity which he could assert in contrast to that one. The other actors draw straws at the end to see who will play Caligari next, suggesting a rotation of roles—but Cesare remains Cesare. This means there is a minimal gap between the actor and the character, and so in this sense they are most identified with the role. And the role we know from Weine’s film is that of the somnambulist under the control of Caligari, a man who kills against his will. Cesare represents, more directly than anyone else in the film, Caligari’s direct authoritarian power and its dire consequences.
7. Whither Caligari?
Each of the three twenty-first century adaptations discussed here approaches the Caligari story in its own way, diverging with greater or lesser latitude from Weine’s (1920) film. However, one contextual element binds these three reworkings together: each emerges at a time of heightened anxiety about authoritarian politics. In this sense, the three reflect Kracauer’s principle that “The insistence with which, during those years, pictorial imagination reverted to this subject [tyranny] indicates the problem of absolute authority was an intrinsic concern of the collective mind” (Kracauer 2019, p. 86). Although, as we saw above, Kracauer’s reading of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is contested to the point of being outright dismissed by some scholars, his interpretation of the film as working through Weimar-era anxieties that would feed into Nazism remains a powerful idea in the popular reception of Caligari—at least if these adaptations are taken as evidence. This concluding section addresses the authoritarian anxieties underlying each adaptation, and then turns to the hope that Caligari and his cinematic/literary/theatrical descendants offer in times of autocratic crisis.
As adaptations, all three texts fundamentally work at the level of signs—that is, they create meaning by reference to other symbols, rather than necessarily referring to external reality. (Though, as we shall see, these adaptations do find their exigence in external reality). To the extent that these works call back to Weine’s film, they construct their internal realities through the mechanism of the simulacra by treating Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari as a sign. In her field-defining book, A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon points out the relationship between an adaptation and its source material, arguing that adaptations are “haunted at all times by their adapted texts. If we know that prior text, we always feel its presence shadowing the one we are experiencing directly” (Hutcheon 2013, p. 6). What this means is that—while a good adaptation can stand alone as its own work of art—the richness of an adaptation’s meaning is constructed through its relationship with the source material. By challenging, expanding upon, responding to, or otherwise altering the message of a source text, an adaptation produces a new artistic meaning through reference to an existing sign/network of signs. In this case, the signs drawn upon include not only Weine’s film, but Kracauer’s work and the influence of Kracauer’s thesis in shaping popular perceptions of Das Cabinet. However, as Baudrillard argues, the simulacrum is a dangerous and often unpredictable space, in which many possible meanings come to exist—meanings that jump the track from the level of the sign into the level of reality.
For Baudrillard, instead of signs being guaranteed by the real, they are guaranteed by models of the real. As he puts it, “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 2). At the same time, the simulacrum actually calls new realities into being, detached from an objective referent. And the major problem with the rise of the model as a substitute for reality is that it bears almost infinite interpretations. Because a model functions at the level of possibility, rather than certainty, it is detached from the question of truth and instead can call into being a multitude of potential realities—each of which, within the logic of the simulacrum, bears the marks of reality without being in any way tethered to the real as such. Baudrillard explains:
What, in other words, takes the place of reality is the infinite possible realities that can be extrapolated from any given data point, and each possible reality swirls through the simulacra with the same relative truth value as any other possible reality. All that exists, all that is real, is the sign system referring back to the sign itself. A copy without an original.we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact—the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of a bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity, no more negative electricity, implosion of agonistic poles), is what allows each time for all possible interpretations, even the most contradictory—all true, in the sense that their truth is to be exchanged, in the image of the models from which they derive, in a generalized cycle.(Baudrillard 1994, pp. 16–17, italics in original)
As an American filmmaker in 2005, the context in which Fisher made his remake was dominated by the War on Terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Patriot Act. These cultural/historical events were driven by a vast expansion of the US government’s autocratic powers, but also by a turn to the simulacrum itself as a basis for real-world actions. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the US government quickly passed the Patriot Act, which vastly expanded its power to surveil and detain people provided the subject was “suspected” of terrorism. Combined with then-President George W. Bush’s hardline rhetoric pitting the US and its allies against “every terrorist group of global reach” (Bush 2001) and the 2004 revelations about the torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, concerns about the power and violence of the US government’s War on Terror were mounting. The brakes of law, decency, and human rights seemed to have been taken off the US government.
At the same time, the War on Terror was a war waged at the level of the simulacrum, and it is this anxiety that Fisher’s film captured. This is true on two levels: first, that the simulacrum is used to maintain power precisely through power denouncing itself in inverted form, and that the construction of a narrative calls into being the reality of that narrative. Baudrillard takes the example of Watergate and argues that it was not, in reality, a political scandal, but was set up as a scandal to hide the very banality of the events (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 14–15). The same methodologies of subterfuge and secrecy are regularly used by groups like the CIA or FBI, as well as by reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to gather information. And the pretense of being scandalized by Watergate allowed these systems to continue unimpeded. As Baudrillard puts it, “All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimpse of existence and legitimacy” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 19).
In the early 2000s, the Bush administration sought to reinvigorate the American cowboy image, which required the binary worldview of an us-versus-them mentality. The key to this mentality was handed to them by the 11 Sept. attacks. However, with the almost immediate fall of Afghanistan’s Taliban government, that invasion was simply not sustained enough to hold the public interest and rebuild a conflict-based world model. And so, the Bush administration turned to Iraq. The problem, from the perspective of reality, was that Iraq had nothing to do with the 11 Sept. attacks, and so targeting the country as part of the War on Terror would not make sense. It was necessary to construct a kind of virtual world in which Iraq’s guilt was unquestionable, and therefore the invasion could be justified, and an enemy the American people already knew—Saddam Hussein, the country’s adversary during the first Gulf War—could be set up as an opponent. This virtual world was built through rhetoric and signs read to mean what the administration interpreted them to mean. The groundwork for claims of weapons of mass destruction had been laid as early as Bush’s Jan. 2002 State of the Union address, in which he said:
Notice the future tense and conditional phrasing. The regime has plotted to, the axis of evil is arming (as opposed to armed), they could provide weapons or threaten the world—assuming they actually develop these hypothetical weapons of mass destruction. Even by the start of the 2003 invasion, the major selling point was still a model of the Iraqi regime’s weapons development and potential terrorist acts in the future (Security Council 2003).Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade…This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.
Whether he was conscious of this link or not, Fisher’s use of the simulacrum to re-create Weine’s film connects his aesthetic experiments to the US exercise of global power on the basis of sign systems. The cinema plays a central role in constructing the world of signs that upholds the simulacra, because mass media present the world to the populace in specific ways. According to Baudrillard, in times of violence or crisis, the cinema becomes fascinated with history in an attempt to recreate a phantasmatic past where reality was possible—a time before the simulacrum (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 43–44). However, this cinematic past does not exist as some kind of representation of the real, but rather as a kind of feeling, a kind of sensation that in the past things were better—in other words, a sense of loss that empties the cinematic depiction of the past of all positive content and makes the structure of representation what works at the ideological level. The past is important in itself, rather than because a particular historical moment represents anything in particular. The cinematic past is a sign, but a sign divorced from the real of history. This obsession with historico-mythic signs is characteristic of fascism, and Baudrillard does link the turn to signs with fascism: “The melancholy of societies without power: this has already stirred up fascism, that overdose of a strong referential in a society that cannot terminate its mourning” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 23). When Fisher returns to Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, he is returning to the sign. His film depends, literally, on the image divorced from reality: the green screen that seemingly transports his actors to the 1920 set, though their reality was acting in front of the green screen itself. But why should Fisher wish to return to this particular historical/cinematic moment at this particular time in history? It is precisely because Weine’s film does/is perceived to explore the issues of perception, freedom, and control linked with the rise of authoritarianism. The War on Terror had resurrected concerns about the power and violence of the US government, and these were linked to questions about truth and the power of the sign. To this extent, Fisher’s movie blends the two concerns by asking us to rewatch not Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari itself, but rather a version of it filtered through the sign of the film itself.
Both Morrow’s novel and Bailey’s play engage in comparable reworkings of the Caligari story at the level of the sign itself, and both suggest their critiques of contemporary authoritarian politics. In Morrow’s novel, Caligari’s painting Ecstatic Wisdom directly represents the power of media to control the mind, even though it is heightened in the novel through the use of Caligari’s magic. The painting functions at the level of the sign, and it creates in the real world (of the novel) impacts on those exposed to it—as does the painting that Wyndham and Ilona paint to replace it. In each instance, media manipulates viewers, manufacturing consent either for the slaughterhouse of WWI combat or for pacifist desertion. And so, in this sense, Morrow explores the role of the sign in constructing its own reality divorced from the real as such. Bailey’s play, for its part, is more abstracted in its postmodern exploration of art’s power to constrain. Drawing on Foucauldian discourses about the role of art in delimiting the narratives through which we understand the world, Bailey’s Caligari traps the players in the world of the play. As we saw, the actors no longer bring to life the production, but the very structure of the production delimits their possible lives. They can only enact what they are virtually authorized to enact—their will is nullified by the play itself.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the 2010s and 2020s (so far) have seen a rise in international authoritarian leadership, including Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban, and others. In Morrow’s native United States, the year 2016—just before the publication of The Asylum of Dr. Caligari—saw the election of Donald Trump, who has publicly stated his admiration for dictators and whose policies are widely accepted as authoritarian.8 But the strongest link between Morrow’s novel and the rise of Trump as a political leader is certainly the hypnotic power Trump and Caligari wield. Unlike most US politicians, Trump has focused on building a cult of personality with himself figured as the only person capable of saving the US from a largely phantasmatic carnage and chaos. His followers have embraced this imagery of Trump as their savior in both secular and religious senses.9 For many in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, neither Trump’s personal moral failings, nor the relatively limited scope of his legislative accomplishments as president, nor his praise for dictators and continual suggestions that he will violate Constitutional law impact their absolute faith in him. In this sense, there is a synchronicity between Trump’s cult of personality built through the illusion that he is a strongman on the side of the people on the one hand, and Caligari’s ability to magically mesmerize soldiers on the other. Both rely on a constructed image, which persuades those subjected to it to surrender their will to a centralized authority and embrace things that are objectively bad for them. Many of Trump’s policies have objectively hurt his constituents.10 And being sent into the meatgrinder of World War I combat was certainly destructive to the young men of that generation, not to mention their families who lost loved ones or experienced mangled and traumatized veterans returning home. In both cases—Morrow’s novel and Trump’s cult of personality—imagery helps to create the reality it seeks to call into being. Both Caligari’s painting and imagery figuring Trump as a savior or oppressed martyr create the realities that exist only at the level of signs.
Bailey’s play reflects the Foucauldian analysis of the power of signs, but it also relies on the Brechtian A-effect, meant to shock viewers out of their complacency and encourage a critical analysis of the world around them. In fact, the performers assert the synchronicity between their own experiences and the world of the audience—they present the story of Caligari as history, but a history that repeats itself in the present. C makes the argument for performing the reality of their experience:
C. We must tell it how it happened.
A. We must? Or they want us to?
C. They need us to. We need to give it to them. To live on, to survive, to be free. If the details get murky, they find a way to justify it. ‘It can’t be as bad as we thought it was, something doesn’t add up, it must be a lie, we’re the ones not getting it right.’ And then? It happens again. The minute something is forgotten, it dies and gets reborn. Worse, often. Worse than it was. We will kill Caligari, by letting the idea live on. We will stop history from turning in its grave and spearing a hand from the dirt. Friends, we have no other option. If we don’t do this how we’re supposed to, our memories, our days in the sun, will fade faster than they already are. And more will begin taking our place before we know it.
Beat.
So?
CESARE. So.
A. So.
What could it mean, this anxiety about history turning in its grave? What could it mean, this terror of what will be reborn, worse than before? In the context of the Caligari story, this must be the authoritarianism so popularly associated with Weine’s film. By performing this Brechtian adaptation, the actors hope to keep the story of Caligari before the public, thereby resurrecting the anxieties about authoritarianism and the loss of freedom.C. The true ending. Our ending. Die Realität.(Bailey 2022, p. 41, italics in original)
This goal is most overtly stated in Bailey’s play, where the thematic of self-determination and the power of a narrative is directly confronted. However, both Morrow’s novel and Fisher’s film—not to mention Weine’s original—also raise concerns about freedom and self-determination in the context of rising authoritarian regimes. While the political world has many authoritarian leaders right now, it is not a foregone conclusion that they will maintain power. It is not a foregone conclusion that history will repeat itself and another crop of dictators rise to prominence. Kracauer overstates his argument linking Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to Nazism. Caligari need not inherently pave the road to Hitler. While Caligari does bend Cesare to his will, we must also never forget that “the inner story of [Weine’s] film shows the sleep-walker Cesare finding a vestige of resistance when, sent out to kill a sleeping girl whose father and lover had offended his master, he refrains from using his dagger” (Prawer 1980, p. 57). For all its fears about power, about the loss of self-determination, Weine’s movie contains within it also the seeds of liberation. Cesare ultimately sacrifices his own life rather than murdering Jane. And it is this gesture that the adaptations examined here seek—the gesture of resistance. The sleepwalker can awaken and assert a form of just resistance in the world, even if the penalties are steep.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
| 1 | For instance, US President Joe Biden (Biden 2021), French President Emmanuel Macron (Euronews 2024), or US Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Thom Tillis (Shaheen and Tillis 2024). |
| 2 | For example, Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Lang 1922), Tod Browning’s Dracula (Browning 1931), or Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (Halperin 1932) are examples of early horror movies centering hypnotism or mind control. |
| 3 | For examples of Das Cabinet’s German Expressionist aesthetic, see production images in (Filmgrab 2021). |
| 4 | The 2004/2019 Princeton University Press edition of From Caligari to Hitler actually includes a five-page “Note on the Inaccuracies” of Kracauer’s work (Kracauer 2019, pp. 309–13). |
| 5 | For additional critiques, see, for instance, (Cardullo 1982; Donahue 1994; Gilloch 2015; Schuenemann 2003; or Walker 2006)—though Walker provides a relatively moderate critique of Kracauer, writing, “Sigfried Kracauer is right to read [the film] as an expression of cultural anxiety (even if he is wrong to read it in presciently political terms)” (Walker 2006, pp. 617–18). |
| 6 | The claim that Das Cabinet refers to the real is complicated by Thomas Elsaesser’s assertion that Weimar cinema was already deeply self-referential as they negotiated the place of German cinema alongside other German art forms and Hollywood’s emerging dominance (Elsaesser 2000, p. 5). |
| 7 | In this sense, Bailey’s play is also an intellectual inheritor of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello 2009), in which a group of characters arrive at a theater and beg the Director to create a play telling their story, since they as fictional characters cannot live outside the narrative. However, unlike Bailey’s Brechtian play, Pirandello blurs the line between art and reality rather than creating a definite distance. |
| 8 | For examples of Trump’s praise of authoritarians, see, for instance, (ABC News 2016; Montaro 2017; Cillizza and Williams 2019; or Garrity and McGraw 2023). For analysis of Trump’s authoritarian politics, see, for instance, (MacWilliams 2020; Yousef 2023; or Beauchamp 2023). |
| 9 | One of the most blatant secular symbols is the infamous golden statue of Trump from the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (Warren 2021). For more on religious iconography aligning Trump with Jesus, see, for instance, (Nelken-Zitser 2022; Hartmann 2023; M. Fisher 2023; or Reid and Coster 2024). |
| 10 | For instance, Trump’s trade war begun in 2018 with China hurt US consumers (Lobosco 2020), and particularly soybean farmers (Lobosco 2022). However, farmers and rural people in general remain a major voting block for the Republican party. |
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Zapkin, P.L. Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Humanities 2024, 13, 119. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050119
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Zapkin PL. Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Humanities. 2024; 13(5):119. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050119
Chicago/Turabian StyleZapkin, Phillip Louis. 2024. "Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari" Humanities 13, no. 5: 119. https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050119
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