Het (on)gewapend oog: Modernisme en realisme in DER WELTKRIEG en WESTFRONT 1918

During the Weimar Republiek, some thirty films were made in Germany about the First World War. That the film makers largely represented the state vision of the war is hardly surprising. Less predictable is that some films attempted to find a cinematographic form to represent the sufferings of war in general - which made the films considerably less unequivocal. The documentary DER WELTKRIEG (1927) and the feature film WESTFRONT 1918 are two exponents of the latter approach. Bernadette Kester analyses the ambiguity of the two films that are generally accepted as simplistic propaganda films.