The Haunted Screen

Seems to me this was written in large part to counter the arguments of Kracauer's notorious 1947 “From Caligari to Hitler” which argued that the prewar German movies, including the expressionist films, presaged Hitler and represented a traceable trajectory in the German mindset. Eisner instead spends most of this book talking about what Expressionism wasn't, as overly simplistic generalizations have been quick to call every German film “expressionist”. The book starts with more immediacy than it finishes but it does a good job of laying out the influence of German Romanticism, the theater of Max Reinhardt, and of the small stable of competent German filmmakers on one another.