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Brecht, by his own account, regularly went to movies during his early days in Berlin. He certainly had a plethora of films from which to choose. Having taken root during the war, Germany’s film industry blossomed in the postwar era because its product was the perfect fare for impoverished but diversion-hungry audiences. “At night,” reported a New Yorker visiting in Berlin, “everybody flocked to the movies, at least those who couldn’t afford seats for Die Fledermaus at the classical theater of Reinhardt.” By 1919 there were more than one hundred film companies operating in the Friedrichstrasse area alone. In the early 1920s, however, the center of gravity shifted to a new “film city” in the western suburb of Babelsberg, which was indeed a city unto itself, with its own restaurants, stores, and fire department. This was the headquarters of UFA, now reconstituted as a private company, which in addition to making films operated ten of Berlin’s finest movie houses, including the splendid UFA-Palast am Zoo.

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