Tiago's brain dump

The history of the  Weimar Republic  is as short as it is fascinating. Established in 1918-19 by reformist civilian politicians who aimed at introducing modern democracy to a Germany used to nothing but the authoritarian  Hohenzollern monarchy , its formative years were far from the democratic-republicanist utopia its creators had aspired. With its economy crippled by the maintenance of the blockades imposed during World War I, famine was generalized; the humiliating terms of the  Treaty of Versailles  infuriated right-wing extremists, who brewed hate and antisemitism; political instability caused by power struggles among several party coalitions made it nearly impossible to run the young republic efficiently; lastly, the German people, once suppressed by absolute state power, commanded to follow and obey, felt severely at a loss about their newly given rights, retreating  instead into themselves, yearning for a strong leader to show them ...

With most of its factories destroyed and a great deal of its able-bodied population wiped out, the years following the end of World War I  were marked by great economical instability in Europe. With exception of the  Weimar Republic , where  UFA -sponsored cinema  was seen  as a tool to restore its people's morale after having lost the war, little to no money was being invested in the European entertainment industry as a whole. Correspondingly, most domestic film companies opted to avoid altogether the risks inherent to movie production, by concentrating their activities in the more stable motion picture distribution business instead. As a consequence, film production came to an all time low in Europe in the early 1920s, whose home market was then flooded by Hollywood. Seeing themselves unable to compete with the powerful US film industry given their meager budgets, a group of French directors decided to take an orthogonal approach, striving to dif...