"Coming so soon after a crushing military defeat and a failed socialist revolution, the birth of a new German cinema in the 1920s is frankly astonishing. More surprising still is that Weimar Germany, home to some of the modernist era’s most daring avant-garde thinkers, became such a powerhouse of innovative cinematic ideas that it rivalled Hollywood. Expressionist cinema is intimately bound to the events and fallout of the First World War. In the years immediately following Germany’s defeat, the nation was attempting to adjust to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and find a way of meeting the financial demands of the Versailles Treaty. ...”
Expressionist art offers examples of the uncanny "second sight": Beckmann pictures the Frankfurt synagogue in 1919 with its wall slanting as if they might topple at any moment.
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