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In general, people are less worried today about schoolchildren visiting cinematographic
theaters. Not long ago, when motion picture theaters were still shooting up from the
ground like mushrooms, there was a general concern around the question of whether
children should be allowed into such events. The public took a vibrant interest in this
question, because the cinemas showed images that people believed to endanger the
morality of children. Such pictures have now disappeared. To what extent the police contributed
to this and to what extent it resulted from the better judgment of the cinema
owners is of little interest.
With this change in content, the question seemed settled for most people—but not for
teachers. They believed that these presentations posed a threat to education, and teachers’
associations continued to debate the question passionately. As far as I could tell, no one
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found a satisfactory answer. Some wished to ban children outright from the cinemas. But
the overwhelming majority of concerned teachers took the (surely more correct) viewpoint
that we must attempt to make all of our epoch’s technological advances useful for
instruction and education.
What, then, are the dangers arising for our children when they frequent such theaters?
Above all, there is the one great danger brought about by the development of the
entire urban lifestyle: that of distraction, confusion, and superﬁciality in the infant soul.
An example should make this clear. One hundred and ﬁfty years ago, a little boy spent
his childhood years in Frankfurt am Main, which was not an insigniﬁcant city by the
standards of its time. Later, he would write about these years as a man who could look
back on his entire development. This was Wolfgang Goethe. He tells of two events from
his childhood that would determine the course of his entire development: the excitement
and confusion brought to Frankfurt by the Seven Years’ War and the earthquake in Lis-
bon.1
Goethe describes what a decisive inﬂuence this single natural event exerted on him.
It so strengthened his religious views that, already in his youth, one can speak of his religious
thinking and feeling entering a new stage.
Now let us compare this example with a similar event from our own time, perhaps the
eruption of Mount Pelée (which, for our epoch, is no farther from Germany than Lisbon
was from Frankfurt in 1755).2
Let us ask our children how many of them have heard
anything about this catastrophe. Let us search for just one child for whom this single natural
event took on an indelible meaning. How is it that we all know this search to be
hopeless in advance? Because in our time, all great strokes of fate, wherever they happen
to occur on earth, are made instantly available to us; before our mind has had time to
absorb one overwhelming occurrence, the ﬁrst one has already been suppressed by
another. Today, the most tragic events only ever graze the surface of the soul.
When intellectual and emotional life become so superﬁcial, personalities can no longer
grow, and this is the danger threatening the entire generation of our youth; they will possess
no center or focus, no standard within themselves by which to judge all the phenomena
around them. Rather, they will be torn from one view to the next by every new experience.
We can see just how much less this danger threatens people living in calmer
environments when we observe a modest man from the country coming to the big city.
We generally smile with a feeling of superiority as we watch his astonishment at all the
inexplicable and magniﬁcent wonders the city has to offer. But we ought also to feel a
sense of envy as we see how all of these new impressions are unable to upset his equilibrium
or tear him away from his basic principles. We, on the other hand, are immediately
willing to give up all of our viewpoints and opinions about the various values surrounding
us as soon as some amazing new invention or surprising new theory impresses itself
upon us.
However, the formation of a strong and stable personality through education has
always been the noblest task of educators, and this goal is not likely to change. Because
the big city, with its abundance of impressions, already renders this education very difﬁcult,
we must defend ourselves when institutions such as the cinema cultivate this bad
side of urban life, especially when they do so in the sensitive domain of the emotions. The
moral education of a child should certainly include a few events that introduce certain
emotions into his life, and these events should be deeply anchored in the child’s mind. In
accordance with the still-tender mind of the child, such feelings should arouse only a certain
level of emotion, and above all, they must not occur close in time with opposing sorts
of emotions.
But what do we ﬁnd in the cinema? Serious scenes and scenes of jest alternate in rapid
succession, for the cinema demands variety. Anyone who has sat through a cinema
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program knows that over the course of hardly half an hour, more or less all of our inner
feelings are stimulated—or better yet agitated. And this occurs in the form of an utter
confusion of images, which possess a cunning ability—an ability that can only inspire
horror in every educator—to impress themselves upon the mind.
For example, one ﬁlm (and I myself witnessed what I am recounting here) shows the
so-called drama of a man who resorts to stealing in order to save his child from hunger
and then, having found work as a bricklayer, stands atop the construction site prepared
to live out his life as an honest person. But suddenly, when a policeman climbs up the
construction site to arrest the thief, the latter takes fright and falls from the building to
the ground. We see the man lying crushed on the pavement at precisely the moment
when his child, no doubt coming to see the father, arrives on the scene. Here, then, is a
shock, a horror, which, were it to happen to anyone in real life, would cause so much
emotional excitement that one would need weeks to recover. Children, whose imagination
surely transforms this representation into true life, experience every bit of this
intense emotional excitement with the child on the screen!
But the drama continues. The compassionate policeman takes the orphaned child into
his house, where the latter ﬁnds friendly siblings in the policeman’s children. Then we
see the child in winter kneeling in the snow and praying beside his father’s grave. Here,
feelings run high even for the adult spectator. I saw many a handkerchief, and I must
confess that the ﬁlm was made with such sophistication that even I could not contain
myself. In order to push this emotional stirring to the limit, a solemn prayer was played
on a harmonium. On the heels of horror, of shock, then, comes the most extreme feeling
of compassion. Children should be spared both of these forms of emotional excitement,
unless some merciless stroke of fate subjects them to such emotions early in life. Now
onto the next image: a real dose of children’s medicine! Hardly two minutes after those
scenes of the most profound and sacred emotion comes the comic story of a child who
pours the laxative he should be taking into his father’s cup of coffee. In countless variations,
the ﬁlm now shows how the father begins to feel the medicine’s effects already on
his way to work. One could debate about whether or not such scenes even belong to the
domain of humor, but this is not what interests me here. Rather, what troubles me is
these scenes’ success: the fact that the children are suddenly moved to the most exuberant
joy and now begin to laugh themselves to tears.
Let us imagine this rapid change of moods transposed into a real-life situation. A child
experiences a blow of fate and, at the very next moment, is capable of whole-hearted joy.
We would deeply regret the moral decrepitude of such a child. What we should criticize in
cinema theaters, then, is the threat this rapid rundown of the entire scale of emotions poses
to the truth and profundity of children’s feelings. And this danger is so great that the general
public must take it into account, rather than simply watching out for those moments
when children get a glimpse of a woman’s nude leg or exposed breast.
At the beginning of these observations, I counted myself among those who do not see
the solution in a full-scale ban on such events, but rather in making them useful for education.
In my opinion, such reform ﬁnds its embodiment in the sorts of ﬁlm presentations
offered in the Kosmos-Theater für Belehrung und Unterhaltung [Kosmos Theater
for Instruction and Entertainment] in Leipzig.3
The name alone tells us that this is an
institute serving public education. In every respect, this theater thoroughly differs from
other movie theaters. The walls and windows are not covered with those large and dreadful
(dreadful both in the scenes they contain and in their style) posters painted in loud
colors, which mock all of our efforts to give our children an aesthetic education. Rather,
in display cases in the entrance, one sees tasteful, colorful pictures from other countries
together with educational photographs of interesting technological processes.
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Entering the theater, one is pleased, ﬁrst of all, not to ﬁnd a bare room with whitewashed
walls, but rather a homelike space decorated with real taste. In addition, anyone
who cares about the morality of our children should be ﬁlled with joy to see that this
theater contains none of those dozens of machines and automatons that, insistent and
numerous as they are, burn a hole in children’s pockets. And everyone who cares about
our children’s health will be pleased to know that here, spectators’ nerves are not
systematically ruined by uninterrupted scandalous music. The only instrument present is
a piano, which with the help of a metronomic device has the same pleasant effect as a
phonola.4
If all of these features are already worthy of praise, this is especially true of the ﬁlms
themselves. In addition to motion pictures, the program includes a slide lecture that
changes every week. I myself saw quality hand-painted slides showing characteristic
images of the lowland plains of northwest Germany. These slides enabled the audience
to visit the city of Bremerhaven and take a tour of a steamer. They showed the Lüneburg
Heath, with all of its natural charms, in the most favorable light, and so forth. This was
accompanied by a lecture given in clear, comprehensible language, which provided the
necessary explanations for the images. The other “educational” images were all cinematic
sequences, including a great many ﬁlms of different geographical regions. Here,
too, the cinematographers demonstrated a very precise understanding of their craft. For
example, when shooting an image of the countryside in the Vosges Mountains, they
made sure to roll the camera just at the moment when a characteristic team of oxen and
typical members of the local population were passing by. The atmospheric and poetic
images of nature were so perfectly executed as to give the impression of artworks. And
by including the right amount of animation in these images, the cinematographer
attained something that the artist can never achieve. How poetic is a picture of a lake surrounded
by a forest! And how charming it is when a train glides past between the trees!
One can only make out parts of the train, but it leaves a trail of blinding white steam
among the trees, whose reﬂection in the play of the water renders the image even more
painterly. An artist could never attain such images, which are possible only for nature—
and the cinematographer. In my opinion, this is the domain in which motion pictures can
truly become a form of art: the domain of “living nature”! In addition to these geographical
views and lyrical scenes of nature, the theater also showed very interesting ﬁlms of
athletic events, scenes from everyday life, and modern transportation. (For example, the
shot of a snowplow clearing out a snowed-in stretch of mountain railway made a great
impression on the spectators.)
Among these stimulating pictures, there were also images designed for entertainment.
It was nice to see how much good taste went into choosing the latter. Unfortunately, up
to now, cinemas have been guilty of cultivating that so-called American brand of humor
taking our epoch by storm, which has very little in common with our German notion of
humor. Truly funny pictures, pictures that bring joy to the “heart” and call forth that
refreshing laughter of children, are very few and far between. But the Kosmos-Theater
had carefully sought out precisely these few images. It was here that I ﬁrst saw a new sort
of game, which consisted of “animating” white stick ﬁgures drawn on a black background—just
the kind of ﬁgures that little Moritz likes to draw. Such a picture was proof
to me that there is no shortage of ideas, as long as people make an effort to ﬁnd funny
images that we can present to children as humor with a good conscience.
If I have described the achievements of this theater too thoroughly, this was in order
to show that it is possible to create a cinema program corresponding to all of our
pedagogical demands. It seems to me that we cannot start imposing rules on these
theaters until we are able to tell them what they ought to be playing. But now that we
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have made suggestions, we should in all seriousness try to make the theaters carry
them out.
Will these motion picture theaters then be able to stay in business? In my view, they will
have to raise the prices of their shows with the introduction of reform. And what about the children?
Will they also welcome reform? There is only one answer to this question: we are not
asking for their opinion. As parents and teachers, only we can decide what’s good for our children.
Given the choice between a tastefully bound book of high quality and a Wild West tale
or Nick Carter covered in dreadfully garish colors,5
I have no doubt which book the majority of
children would choose; thus I am no more convinced that, if asked for their opinion, they would
prefer a well-chosen and quality cinema show to one with a “wild” program. But who would
think of claiming that children should read Wild West tales just because they like them?
If children were only once given the chance to see such reform programs, and if these
programs were accompanied by explanations to direct their attention to the subject matter,
such shows would undoubtedly bring them great joy. We all know how much pleasure
we can give children in school simply by showing them a still picture, when we
accompany it with sufﬁcient explanations to make it more accessible.
But motion picture theaters are not only for children, perhaps not even primarily for
children. We ought to compel adults as well to give up the current form of entertainment
and be educated by reform programs! However, as much as I wish that cinemas would
become a means of public education, that they would play only educational programs even
for adults, I am nonetheless of the opinion that every adult must be free to choose for
himself. We should thus try to convince adults to voluntarily demand better programs.
For our youth, however, we should insist that cinemas play such educational ﬁlms and
nothing else.
The proper authority in questions of education is the school, not the police.
Notes
1. Goethe’s autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and
Truth), contains his accounts of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63).
2. The eruption of Mount Pelée on the island of Martinique occurred in 1902 and caused the death of
thirty thousand inhabitants.
3. Founded by the ethnologist and explorer Richard Laube, the Kosmos-Theater was in operation
from 1908 to 1911.
4. Similar to the American pianola, the German phonola was an automated mechanical piano which
used a roll of perforated paper to operate its keys. Invented at the turn of the twentieth century, it was
replaced by the record player and radio.
5. Nick Carter was a ﬁctional private detective popularized through pulp ﬁction and ﬁlm serials.