Abstract

This chapter shows how Germany participated in the wave of cyberpunk fiction and film, both in its pre-history in German expressionism as well as in German cyberpunk’s expansion of the mode’s capacity for societal critique. German-born artists incubated the lighting, music, fashion, visual style, and architecture that would come to define cyberpunk, and films such as Metropolis and Welt am Draht and bands such as Kraftwerk function as clear precursors to its aesthetic. Other German cyberpunk works, such as Kamikaze 1989 and Nuclearvision, are treated in brief, before focusing on West German films Decoder and Dr. M, both of which deal with the capacity of technology to brainwash the masses.