The Other Camera — Aspects of Weimar Cinema

Abstract

Though Auden’s involvement with the cinema was less intense and sustained than Isherwood’s, his journal makes it clear that he was in the habit of frequently dropping into a ‘kino’ during his residence in Germany. Almost the first entry in the journal records that he went with John Layard to the cinema (where both, for unexplained reasons, were sick). As we have seen already, he took Gerhart there during the visit to Hamburg, an occasion on which Gerhart’s girl friend completed an uneasy threesome, and it had been his failure to gain admission to the house that was showing May’s Asphalt that had led to his first meeting with Gerhart. Humphrey Carpenter has noted that Auden ‘greatly admired contemporary German cinema’, and like Isherwood he was later to be professionally associated with the medium.