Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) begins with Francis (Friedrich Feher) telling the strange story of Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), a mysterious man who comes to a German town to display his somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), at the town fair. After several murders, Francis investigates Caligari and learns that he is the director of an insane asylum, and that he has taken on the name and persona of an 18th century Italian mystic. For his murderous crimes, Caligari is apprehended and put in a straightjacket. However, the film ends with Francis as a patient in an insane asylum run by Caligari; after trying to attack him, Francis is then restrained and put in a straightjacket himself.
When Caligari is first presented to the audience via Francis’ recollections, he is not named, but simply introduced with an intertitle reading “Er…” (“He…”). The scene changes and Caligari appears, walking slowly with a cane and wearing glasses and a top hat, entering the scene via a staircase in front of a backdrop of a German town, as if he were an actor walking onstage in a play. The camera remains still, but Caligari moves closer and closer, even looking directly into the camera for a brief moment. The shot then narrows and obscures the scene except for Caligari’s face, while his eyes move shiftily back and forth. The movement of Caligari towards the camera, and thus towards the audience, coupled with him looking into the camera, gives the ominous feeling that he is invading the space of the film, and even possibly the viewer’s space outside of the film.
This scene presents Caligari as the “outsider” in the film, and seemingly a malevolent one; one can then see Francis, a German and ostensibly the film’s main character, as representative of Germanness in the film. However, the film’s twist ending creates confusion, as Caligari is shown to be the asylum director with Francis as his patient. Thus by the end of the film, what is “German” and what is “other” is completely blurred. Anton Kaes sees this ambiguity and confusion, in the film’s content and in its cinematic style, as representative of the “physical and mental wasteland left behind” by the First World War (Kaes 86). So, the film’s Germanness perhaps still lies in the figure of Francis, a stand-in for the shell-shocked German soldier of this time period, and what makes him particularly German is his madness.
Identifying "Germanness" in German Film 