In her memoir The Possessed, the critic Elif Batuman writes, “There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover.” Such was the first time I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920). The summer after my older sister’s first year of music school, she returned home to San Francisco with a seemingly infinite list of niche movies, albums and books. Near the top of this list was an old German silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

“You have to watch it,” she said to me.

“Huh,” I said. “Okay.”

Like most summers in San Francisco, this one was terribly cold and foggy. It would often get so windy that our windows would rattle in their frames — and it was on one of these gusty evenings that we watched Caligari together. My sister and I sat on my bed and watched it on the chunky Chromebook I rented from my high school. The film clocks in at a mere hour and twenty minutes, but by the time it was done, I was thoroughly shaken. It registered in my mind like some art deco nightmare, something that was far too big for my fifteen-year-old brain to appreciate.

“Why did you make me watch that?” I asked my sister.

She shrugged. “I knew it would scare you,” she teased.

I slammed my Chromebook shut and kicked her out of my room.

But The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is much more than just a scary movie. In a talk at the Townsend Center this November, assistant professor of German Nicholas Baer sat down to chat about his new book, Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (2024). In the book, he shows how five German films (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis) grappled with the "crisis of history" in the early twentieth century. In his talk, Baer noted that the study of history doesn’t always sufficiently address inner experience. What did it really feel like to live in Germany in the 1920s? What did people wear? What did they worry about? Films offer a solution to this problem: they depict the anxieties of a certain place and time, and show us how historical events affected artistic imagination. Weimar cinema, Baer noted, “lent a vivid expression” to those unprecedented times.

The early 1900s were chaotic decades for Germany. In 1918, after the end of World War I, the country established a new system of government called the Weimar Republic. The period was defined by economic instability and constant political crises, eventually collapsing in 1933. Many German philosophers called this moment “a crisis of history.” The question of “what happened” suddenly felt impossible to answer: there were far too many contradictory accounts of how Germany had gotten itself to this point, and the line between truth and fiction felt increasingly blurred. Baer argues that German filmmakers thrived in this hazy space between the real and the unreal. Their films critique the notion of history itself, suggesting that, as Baer noted in his talk, “we can never really know what happened.”

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a central film in Baer’s book. The classic work of German expressionism opens with a miserable young man named Franzis sitting on a park bench. As his equally miserable fiancée wanders around the park, Franzis recounts his troubled past to a passerby. Not long ago, a traveling hypnotist named Dr. Caligari had appeared in Franzis’s hometown of Holstenwall, and had used a hypnotized sleepwalker to murder several civilians — including Franzis’s best friend, Alan. Franzis discovers that Dr. Caligari runs a mental asylum, and the doctor is eventually institutionalized in his own facility for his crimes. However, at the end of the film, it is unclear who is the madman: who's telling the truth, Franzis or Dr. Caligari? Baer calls it “a radically ambiguous ending,” again challenging the idea that the story of “what happened” is truly knowable.

In a nod to the modernist James Joyce, Baer’s book begins with a quote from Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Films like Caligari portray this kind of nightmare, one in which the truth is as distorted and slippery as our dreams. Even Dr. Caligari’s costume intentionally resembles that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that the world can’t be separated from the way we perceive it. Referencing Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation, Baer calls Caligari “the world as the will and representation of a mad man.” There are as many representations of the world as there are people within it, the film suggests, and this kind of multiplicity makes traditional, consolidated historical narratives impossible.

Baer pointed out that this crisis of historicism partially had literature to blame. The rise of literary realism in the 18th and 19th century made it increasingly difficult to differentiate between fiction and history. A classic example is Daniel Defore’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, which was widely mistaken for a piece of nonfiction upon its release. Another classic novel, George Eliot’s 1871 sprawling epic Middlemarch, chronicles villagers in the town of Middlemarch in the 1830s. When I finished the book, I googled the titular town, hoping to plan some kind of literary pilgrimage to this epicenter of human experience — only to find out that Eliot had made it up. Middlemarch was as real as Caligari’s Holstenwall. Fiction had become so believable, Baer suggested, to the point that it could challenge the authority of history.

Weimar cinema, on the other hand, is distinctly unbelievable. It finds a way to comment on the world by completely deviating from it. Films like Caligari and Metropolis have stylized, visually stunning sets, and shaped the nascent genres of horror and science fiction. And yet, these odd, dreamlike films still speak to the philosophical stirrings of their time. Before Baer’s talk, I hadn’t thought about Caligari for a long time. But as Baer spoke, I remembered how suspenseful the film was, how frightening and otherworldly it seemed when I watched it with my sister that cold summer night. Baer’s criticism shows how popular culture captures historical sentiments in a way that other sources can’t. Caligari’s expressive, unsettling visuality and its narrative confusion mirrors the instability of the Weimar period, revealing unexpected truths about the unique historical moment in which it arose.