Nerves (1919)
In the aftermath of the First World War, a factory owner, a schoolteacher, and a radicalized woman are each pushed toward breakdown and violent unrest, their fates intercut as a nation's nerves fray toward collapse.
Nerves was long feared lost — only a single incomplete print survived — and its fractured, expressionist editing anticipates landmarks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released the same year, while channeling the shell-shock and unrest of a defeated, revolution-wracked postwar Germany.
Background
Nerves (Nerven) was directed by Robert Reinert and released January 22, 1919, starring Eduard von Winterstein, Lia Borré, and Erna Morena. Set in Munich in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, it follows a factory owner, a schoolteacher, and a radicalized woman toward breakdown and violent unrest, intercutting their stories to suggest a whole society’s nerves fraying at once. The film was long feared lost, surviving only in a single incomplete print, until the Munich Film Museum completed a careful reconstruction in 2008.
What to watch for
Reinert’s fractured, heavily symbolic editing style anticipates the expressionist look that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released the same year, would make famous, though Nerves arrived from a very different, more explicitly political place, channeling the shell shock and revolutionary upheaval of a defeated, economically devastated Germany. Contemporary stories claimed audiences were hospitalized after seeing the film, though these remain unproven legends rather than documented fact; what the surviving footage does show clearly is a director reaching for visual techniques — rapid cutting, layered imagery, disorienting angles — that German cinema would spend much of the next decade refining.
