The Image in Our Cultural Mirror: Weimar Germany : Culture: Arts reflect society and as reality grows ever more surreal, so do the arts. ‘90s Hollywood may reflect a Weimar America.

What with Bill Clinton’s post-election maneuverings, the Marines’ benevolent assault on Somalia and renewed aggressions in Iraq, we have all but dismissed as trivial or even silly the debate over “the cultural elite.” Too bad, for there’s nothing trivial or silly about the underlying issue: America’s discomfort with itself. By slashing at “them,” Dan Quayle and the Republican right were attacking “us,” what we have become.

Rightly so, but what we have become--depressingly unethical, commercial, crass--is more likely the product of Quayle’s beloved free-market economics than culture, which fundamentally reflects (rather than creates) the society in which it is popular. We can certainly use a few shots fired across our cultural bow, but lest we seriously entertain reading Prince Charles on architecture, Ross Perot on the media and Quayle on TV, would they come from someone who can shoot straight--or at least spell.

Siegfried Kracauer’s “From Caligari to Hitler,” the seminal study of movies in Weimar Germany and their anticipation of the rise of the Third Reich, showed how effective a barometer popular culture can be. It’s not to be taken lightly: The Germans, Kracauer saw in their projection screens, retrospectively, were ready for the Nazis. But the strange mixture of E.T.A. Hoffman and Edgar Allan Poe, of Expressionism and supernatural doppelgangers, of post-World War I depression and awkward groping for a better future, could not have been the inorganic product of the Weimar Republic’s varied cultural elite any more than Murphy Brown’s baby or Roseanne’s lesbian neighbor--or even Ice-T’s “Cop Killer”--are of Hollywood circa 1992.

We are in a peculiarly reflective stage. As television, in particular, becomes more and more a mirror to real life, real life becomes stranger and stranger. No sooner does a woman plot to murder the mother of her daughter’s high-school cheerleading rival than Leslie Anne Warren is playing her with devilish glee during Sweeps Week. And Jean Smart’s first role after “Designing Women” was Aileen Carol Wuornos, a serial killer.

Stories such as these still receive exceptional attention, but, alas, they are no longer exceptional. As Jeffrey Dahmer’s father is busy pitching his son’s horrifying story to the highest bidder, a man is arrested in New Jersey for the abduction and murder of a young mother, and an HIV-positive lay minister is accused of raping five children in Oregon. The sad, awful truth is that, try as it might, popular culture cannot keep up--or down--with reality. The cultural elite, like nearly everyone else, is left gasping.

We gasp for an America gone by, a real America, when the Oscars went to names like Frank Capra and George Cukor, and no-names like Harold Russell, a non-professional actor who lost his hands in World War II. We long for our past lives. What we get is Weimar--the child-murderer of Fritz Lang’s “M” (originally titled “A Murderer Among Us”); the fatal attraction to Marlene Dietrich’s thighs in Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel”: the titillation of base instinct, sex and murder and revenge, followed by a heady dose of higher calling. Sound like any Hollywood movies you’ve seen lately?

Someday, someone will perhaps write a book about the Weimar Republic and its cinema--”The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Metropolis,” “Dr. Mabuse,” “Joyless Street,” “Waxworks,” “Nosferatu,” “The Golem”--and the mysterious parallels to ‘90s Hollywood--”Silence of the Lambs,” “Kafka,” “Shadows and Fog,” “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” “Boyz ‘N the Hood,” “Cape Fear,” “Basic Instinct,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” And perhaps they’ll write about Stephen King’s horrors, Anne Rice’s vampires and the renewed popularity of gothic fiction; about German-accented, Golem-like Terminators, and baby-sitters, tenants and roommates who cannot be terminated; or about the appearance of “Malcolm X” and “The Unforgiven,” at a time when questions of justice and the law, of anarchy and authority, fill the American mind--as they did in the Weimar Republic 60 years ago.

In 1930, a German film critic named Harry Potamkin wrote: “There are indications in Germany that the serious-minded will force the German cinema out of its lethargy and studio impasse to a treatment of important subject matter. Germany is approaching a political crisis, and with it an intellectual and aesthetic crisis.” Words to ponder. An example of their accuracy, suggested Kracauer, was “The Blue Angel,” based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, whose works attacked German bourgeois society. For his concerns, Mann was stripped of his citizenship and wound up in, of all places, Hollywood.

It is Quayle’s right--his duty as long as he is in public office--to care about his country, his society, his culture. As Kracauer reminds, “Any nation depends upon critical introspection as a means of self-preservation.” However, the message of November’s election is that, to a significant majority of Americans, Quayle’s introspections into culture or character held as much sway as, say, Madonna’s “demystification” of sex.

The message for the President-elect is: Beware the hands that reach for yours on Joyless Street; they seek much. Lead by example, honestly and morally, and invest in the society from which our popular culture grows--it is in transition. Help define what it becomes; listen to its critics.

The message for the critics is: Speak loudly, clearly; invoke Heinrich Mann.