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.
Little men and women are unfamiliar with literature, development, and direction. At
night, they shuttle through the streets, gossip under railway bridges, or stand gawking at
a fallen horse; they go out in search of excitement, stimulation, and thrills; they want to
burst out laughing. The stronger the fare, the better. It is all about experiencing torture
chambers and sea animals, and perhaps participating in revolutions.
There are freak shows, curiosity cabinets, and cinematographs. All of these attractions
are designed to astonish and shock spectators through and through. The value of a show
is directly proportional to the intensity of the goose bumps it produces. At the entrance
to the curiosity cabinet, a visitor hesitates with doubt: should he first pay his respects to
the mournful faces of a royal family or inspect the thumbscrews? He reels between reverence
and dread. Over there he spots a “mouth-pear”: “This was placed into the mouth
of delinquents and screwed open; it expanded in four directions and stretched the jaws so
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severely that the unfortunate victims were incapable of bringing forth more than a whimper
and often felt their oral cavities burst asunder.” The stranger gazes in wonder at a
tottering Count Bismarck that looks like a giant potato. He observes the cut-open belly
of a female sturgeon, producer of the beloved delicacy caviar; he sees a mentally deranged
mother—Exhibit No. 486—simmering her own child in a kettle. Dead from exhaustion,
he then drags himself toward a penitence cage from the region of Eisleben. And at the
exit, the sight of the torture boots of Württemberg still lies in wait to deal our horrified
stranger one final blow. For, you see, this highly educated man has very sensitive feet.
The situation is too much for him; he concludes uneasily that institutions such as this
provide a variable image of a progressing culture; he drinks a glass of beer at a decent
price.
Now he pushes his way toward the Kientopps. They lie in the north, south, east, and west
of the city, in smoky parlors, useless shops, large halls, and vast theaters. The finest of them
provide the opportunity to enjoy this photographic technology—the fabulous fidelity to
nature, the optical illusions, and, in addition, amusing little dramas or novels by Manzoni.1
How proper! Oh, this technology has the potential for development; it is almost ready to
become art. In the more ordinary theaters, Der Brand Roms [The burning of Rome]2
is
already glowing; human prey flees its pursuers across rooftops, through streets, and between
trees.
But the dives in the north are of a special genre; they exist well above the level of the
merely artistic. Glaring lamps burn enticingly above the streets; in their light, colorful
posters hang three feet high in front of the doors; a gigantic organ storms: “A murder has
been committed.” Lining the entry hall are stuffed monstrosities behind glass and amusement
machines. Inside the pitch-black, low-ceilinged room, a rectangular screen as tall as
a man shines over a monster of an audience, a mass spellbound by the fixed stare of its
white eye. Couples huddle in the corners and withdraw, entranced, their indecent fingers
from one another. Consumptive children breathe flatly and shiver lightly with their
evening fevers; the eyes of foul-smelling workers nearly pop out of their sockets; women
in musty dresses, the painted streetwalkers, lean forward and forget to readjust their
scarves. The call for “panem et circenses” finds fulfillment here. Entertainment becomes
as essential as bread; the bullfight, a popular need. The arousing thrill is as simple as the
reflex-like desire. One sees crimes with a dozen corpses, or terrible gangster chases rushing
one right after the other. These then give way to extremely sentimental motifs: the
blind man, the dying beggar, the dog that perishes on his grave, films entitled Achtet die
Armen [Respect the poor] or Krabbenfängerin [The shrimper],3
and scenes of battleships.
Upon seeing the kaiser and the army, the audience shows no patriotism, but rather a venomous
stupefaction.
Clearly the Kientopp offers the remedy of choice for alcoholism and the strongest
competition to the brandy shop. Perhaps the coming years will see a decline in cases of
cirrhosis of the liver and in the birthrate of epileptic children. Neither smut literature nor
the Kientopp should be withheld from the people and the youth; they need this very
bloody fare—and without the tasteless gruel of folk literature or the watery infusions of
morality.
But the more educated man leaves the place, glad above all else that the cinema
is—silent.
Notes
1. Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) was an Italian novelist and poet.
2. A likely reference to either Edwin Porter’s Nero and the Burning of Rome (1908) or Luigi Maggi’s
Nerone (Nero; Or the Fall of Rome, 1909), both of which were shown in Germany in 1909.