GW Pabst entered film history as a luminary of Weimar cinema, an astute observer of social struggle and psychic process, the espouser of a progressive and engaged film art. He gained international renown as the director of The joyless street, Pandora's Box, Westfront 1918 and Kamaradschaft. After 1933, the once-revered auteur would become a voice incessantly modified and modulated by socio-political forces more sovereign than his best intentions, experiencing exile, emirgration, a sojourn in Holywood, a fateful return to Germany and an unsuccessful postwar attempt to regain a once considerable reputation. This collection of essays presents the first truly comprehensive image of a problematic firmmaker whose life and oeuvre compellingly reflect both the turbulent character of recent German history as well as the fate of artistic producers in the transcultural machinery of the modern world.