Watching Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler yesterday, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari today, it struck me that a lot of horror's aesthetic is set during the Weimar period because those were, coincidentally, the people making movies that endured on these topics. Mutatis mutandis neo-gothic. But the association is kind of accidental--Weimar didn't strive to make scary things, there was just a lot of stuff that looked like that for entirely separate reasons, and they happened to use stuff that looked like that in the movies because that's the stuff there was. Some of it's stylized, to be sure, but that manner of stylization was also elsewhere.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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