Stefan IG April 29, 2020 November 18, 2020 / Leave a Comment View this post on Instagram “The Cavaliere's performance was to take place in a hall where during the season there had been a cinema with a weekly programme.” – This line from Thomas Mann’s 1930 “Mario and the Magician” locates the magician’s or Cavaliere's performance in a cinematic space. Weimar cinema in particular is populated with characters like Mann’s magician hypnotist, a deranged artist and backwoods dictator. Jewish-German film critic and U.S. immigrant Siegfried Kracauer explained this “procession of tyrants” such as Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu and Dr. Mabuse with a collective unconsciousness overwhelmed by freedom and prone to submission under absolute order. Unlike these films but like Kracauer’s critique, “Mario and the Magician” brings to light a fatal political psychology that needs to be confronted with the complex layers of reality and the demands of reason. Mann and Kracauer exchanged friendly letters from 1934 to 1945 while they both lived in exile. In 1938, the Nobel laureate recommended the critic for a scholarship to enable him to write his book “From Caligari to Hitler,” which was finally published in 1947. The picture shows Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the title character in Fritz Lang’s 1922 "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler." The quote is from Thomas Mann: Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories. Vintage International, 1989, p. 144. #MutuallyMann #thomasmann #siegfriedkracauer #fritzlang #rudolfkleinrogge #germanliterature #germanfilm #germanexpressionism #filmtheory #weimarcinema #weimarculture #exile #literature #exileliterature #marioandthemagican #marioundderzauberer #fromcaligaritohitler #drmabuse #nosferatu #drcaligari #thomasmannhouse #thomasmannarchiv Call no. B-I-KRAC-5 #kepplertasaki #sfischerverlage @thomas_mann_house @_s_fischer A post shared by keppler-tasaki (@kepplertasaki) on Apr 27, 2020 at 7:32pm PDT