A scene from The Cabinet of Doctor Galigari, directed by Robert Wiene
Many of the films on display were generic escapist comedies, but the best ones mirrored, even magnified, aspects of the horror-drama playing outside in the streets. F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) features a vampire on the loose, killing innocent people wherever he travels in the world. Fortunately for the world, the vampire dissolves into thin air when he finally confronts someone who does not fear him. Robert Wiene’s expressionist The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) tells the story of a maniacal insane asylum director who manipulates a somnambulist to commit murder. Viewing the film at its premier at the Marmorhaus on the Kurfürstendamm, Kurt Tucholsky wrote: “Not for years have I sat in the cinema so riveted as I was here. This is something quite new.” Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) showcases another evil genius, this one a gangster-mastermind who uses his hypnotic powers to accentuate people’s speculative fevers and hunger for sensual pleasure. In one scene, set in a seedy Berlin nightclub, a rich young American is offered the choice between cocaine and cards; choosing the latter, he loses all his money, and then his life, to Dr. Mabuse. The contemporary film critic Siegfried Kracauer observed: “In these films the soul can only choose between tyranny and chaos, a desperate dilemma. For every attempt to cast off tyranny leads straight to chaos. As a result the film creates an all-pervasive sense of horror.” Yet it was precisely the nightmarish sense of helplessness conveyed by these films that made them so apt for the times. They reinforced their viewers’ masochistic perception of being the playthings of superhuman figures who took cruel pleasure in their powers of manipulation. They also appealed to their audiences’ sadistic side. As Ilya Ehrenburg recalled: “I observed [in movie houses] more than once with what rapture pale, skinny adolescents watched the screen when rats gnawed a man to death or a venomous snake bit a lovely girl.”
Fritz Lang was clearly the master of this genre, as well as an artist whose own life and career closely mirrored the times. Born and raised in Vienna, Lang moved to Berlin in 1918 to work as a dramaturg for Erich Pommer. In 1919 he wrote the script for a Pommer production entitled Die Pest in Florenz, featuring a courtesan who transforms the Tuscan town into a place of debauchery, fratricide, incest, and mass death. In its heady blend of eroticism, crime, and the supernatural, it established a model for Lang’s future work as a director. The young Austrian’s first real success in this capacity came with Die Spinnen (The Spiders), a two-part film depicting a race for buried treasure between an explorer-hero and an evil secret society that leaves deadly tarantulas as its calling card. Along the way the hero must contend with a Chinese temptress, crystal-gazing mirrors, balloon and train chases, Inca sacrificial rites, and giant snakes. Spiders Part I was such a success that Pommer offered Lang the job of directing Dr. Caligari, but he was too busy with Spiders II, and the project passed to Wiene. Lang did, however, make suggestions for changes in the script that became part of the final product. He proposed framing the film with sequences establishing the asylum director as a madman. The film’s original authors complained that this alteration undercut their desire to attack authoritarianism as consciously manipulative.
Fritz Lang, photographed in 1945
Lang was becoming something of an authoritarian himself. “Everybody in Berlin was talking about him,” recalled a colleague. “He had joined the ranks of the biggest directors overnight because of the films he had made recently, which everyone admired for their striking images. Insiders told real horror stories about his fanatical devotion to work and the huge demands he made on his crew.” Needing a pubescent beauty for a floor-show scene in his film Der müde Tod (The Tired Death), he scoured Berlin until he found a young lady who was perfect for the part save for her abundance of pubic hair. He demanded that she shave it off. When she refused, protesting that she did not want to hop around on stage “like a sparrow that’s molting,” Lang insisted that she cover the offensive tuft with flesh-colored adhesive.
As a newly famous director, Lang made a profitable alliance with one of Berlin’s leading screenwriters, Thea von Harbou, who also became his mistress. When his wife, Lisa Rosenthal, expressed outrage over the relationship, Lang threatened her with a pistol. Not long thereafter Rosenthal died of a gunshot fired from Lang’s Browning. The police ruled the death a suicide but many in Berlin believed that 196 the director had killed his wife to get her out of the way. Whatever the truth of the matter, suicide, false accusations, and inadvertent killings became staple ingredients in his films.
Lang’s obsession with his work did not prevent him from becoming a devotee of Berlin’s demimonde. Like the pleasure seekers in Dr. Mabuse, he spent his nights flitting from one sex club and drug den to another, dropping devalued marks by the billions. He regularly dined on venison at Horcher’s and drank at the bar of the Hotel Adlon. The elegant apartment he shared with von Harbou was crammed with paintings by Egon Schiele, exotic masks, and folk art of a decidedly macabre nature. As he bragged in an interview:
Innocent visitors who enter our apartment for the first time find themselves confronted with human scalps, petrified but creepily real, with tiny slivers of mother-of-pearl, the last tears of the victim, gleaming in the eyeholes. But once I tell them the story behind these grotesque and beautifully painted heads, they are no longer horrified but are transformed into a similar but completely different state; for, as Goethe would have put it, ‘Schaudern ist der Menschheit bester Ten’ [The chill of dread is mankinds best quality].
Unluckily for Lang and other German directors, domestic films were experiencing increasing competition from imports, especially from Hollywood. By 1923, the number of American films showing in Germany almost equaled that of the homemade product. German commentators complained about the intellectual vacuity of the American imports, but the German public found these films, with their canned sentimentality, images of fabulous wealth, extreme violence, and wild chase scenes highly compelling. The Hollywood imagination, it seemed, was more closely attuned to German realities than the critics wanted to believe. Within Germany, Hollywood found its most avid audience in Berlin, which after all was Germany’s best answer not only to gangster-ridden Chicago but also to the shoot-’em-up Western frontier—Dodge City on the Spree. Local directors were divided over whether they should resist the taste for Americana or cater to it. One film expert, however, had no doubts about the path Germany must follow: “America is currently in style. We must imitate it in order to steal a march on it and should if possible try to be more American than the Americans.”
Fritz Lang was among the German directors who became swept up in the American tide. He made his first trip to the United States in 1924 and was overwhelmed by the sight of the New York skyline. Later he would claim that this vision inspired his brilliant film Metropolis (1927). In the end, however, German directors could not stave off American competition by out-Americaning the Americans. In addition to aesthetic reservations, they lacked the capital to keep up. The technology for the new talking pictures was conceived in Germany but a dearth of development capital resulted in the patent’s being sold to Fox. Paramount and MGM bought into UFA, ensuring both American influence over German production and a continuing influx of American films. As the capital of the domestic film industry, Berlin remained at the forefront of Germany’s “Americanization” during the Golden Twenties.