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THE DESCENT, 239
shevist Russia, where both the Theatre and the Cinema have been consciously organised to cultivate in 150,000,000 or so people a consciousness of the meaning and significance of liberation as dreamed of in the philosophy of Marx and brought within practical politics by Lenin. The German cinema, in fact, came to serve an " ennoblement " purpose rather automatically than otherwise, like a man who, suddenly finding himself with his back to the wall surrounded by relentless foes, seeks to overcome them either by persuasion or by such pacific means as he can command.
If we wish fully to realise the two paths followed by the German cinema since 1919, we must first know and understand the conditions, political, economic and social, which have imposed themselves upon the Cinema, and by doing so have largely determined its content and method of expression. Such conditions were consequent upon Germany's defeat. They have given rise to a long-continued Political and Economic War in what must be to the Germans an Inferno of the senses. I say an " Inferno of the senses " although the fight for life and light brought about by the unprecedented military disaster has not been without its lessons and compensations for those who took part in it.
I shall not attempt to state here in chronological order the series of political, economic and social events and cinema consequences. I have already made a fairly complete statement of events and Theatre consequences in another book.1 Those events also operated upon the Cinema. But a clue to the nature of the events that did influence the Cinema may be given. They are some of the events that fixed the mind of the German people upon the wavering fortunes of its country and sent it to the Cinema for relief from dreadful Fear, and for Hope in the highest degree. From the moment the War ceased Fear possessed and consumed the German people, and we may believe
1 See " The New Spirit in the European Theatre " (1914-25), by Huntly Carter.