Strategien der Ornamentierung : Einfühlungsdrang und Abstraktionsdrang in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari und in der Grafik von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

Although expressionism in art peaked before the First World War, expressio nist stylistic practices that have been introduced into film at the end of the second decade appear to be equally relevant, even revolutionary. In this article we have explored this analogy with an example of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s prints from the first half of the second decade of the 20th century on the one hand, and from reconstructed set designs for the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) on the other. It turns out that both have in common – as we have termed it here – a “third ornamental line”, defined by Wilhelm Worringer in his 1908 essay Abstraction and Emphaty as an urge for abstraction and urge for emphaty. This would mean that in the works of the two artists, in Kirchner earlier and in Warm later, a theoretical conceptual ambivalence called “expressive abstrac tion” (Worringer) appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. In other words, this means that the ambivalence between the realistic and the abstract – as mimetic and ornamental – has found its formal expression in temporally and mediawise rather distant works of art. This is also a reflection of the declarative statement of Hermann Warm, one of Caligari’s set designers, t hat t he film (in which he was involved as one of the three scenographers) “must become graphic”. We claim here that the ornamentation is a paradoxical expression of the abstract pole of this duality