by Jim Shepard
The Freikorps: what wicked fairy placed that gift in our cradle?
The approach to the studios in Neubabelsberg has a depressing aspect even on a sunny morning. The carpenters’ and costumers’ shops, the great hall: everything seems temporary and messily utilitarian, scattered across weedy and empty lots. Trash heaps and temporary storage piles surround the buildings. Memories of that wilderness of railway tracks and Hans’s kiss. In the distance, scrubby pines eventually give way to Potsdam.
On the next lot they’re filming Zur Chronik von Grieshuus. Fifty or so day-hires toil on a fortress wall, slopping its facade with mortar. The car drops me at my office opposite the carpenters’ shops, so my day can begin with the endless noise of saws, and the clunk and thunk of wood thrown about.
The office is dark, with one small window. On the back wall I’ve hung a Chinese tapestry in blue and gold of a brooding spirit spied upon by two heraldic beasts. I spend the entire morning fussing around my workspace, cleaning up. Once I can see my table and chair and desk, I’m open for business.
The first meeting of the day is with Mayer, about script changes. He wants the camera to close in rapidly on the buttons of the doorman’s coat at the moment the uniform is stripped off. That seems to me a good example of a moment when the camera should not be moving. He’s constantly egging on the metaphysical meaning of every object. The doorman’s umbrella is his sceptre; the stripped buttons, a pseudo-military degradation; the revolving door, the whirlpool of life. To couple such objects with camera movement is to make them all the more ham-handed.
He’s sure to argue about this. His images are about intensity, not subtlety.
His childhood was a chapter from a Dickens novel. He was born in Graz, a Jew, the son of a man obsessed with gambling. When he was sixteen, his father, after losing a bet, asked the children to stand in the street and then killed himself. Mayer alone was responsible for his three brothers. During the day, he fixed barometers and advertised for an optician on street corners; at night he was an extra in peasant theaters and sang in choirs in Linz. He brought his brothers to Germany, seeking greater opportunity, and, during the early months of the war, earned a living drawing Hindenburg’s portrait on postcards in coffeehouses.
He spent the war years in a desperate battle with military psychiatrists. He was a pacifist. To avoid prison, he needed to prove himself mentally deranged. He would not become a soldier, not only because he refused to see his brothers sent to an orphanage but also because he refused to learn the “craftsmanship of murder,” as he put it. He was unabashed about speaking that way around veterans. For a while after we met, he called me the Flying Ace.
He said he refused to kill for a Fatherland gone mad. Apparently, his psychiatrist even tried hypnosis, under which he made Mayer repeat phrases like “I can kill.” The psychiatrist became the model for Dr. Caligari.
Mayer and Janowitz, his Czech friend, wrote Caligari in the winter of 1919 in Berlin, during the last days of the revolution. They were oppressed by the Molochs running the munitions factories, the icy “turnip winter,” the casualty notices in the newspapers. Their haunt, like mine, became the amusement park in the Kantstrasse, where the sideshows were so appalling that one couldn’t wrench one’s eyes from them. Horrible lusts were abroad. Hunger and misery festooned with electric lights and mechanical music. Adolescent girls tracked by sad-eyed shopkeepers wearing their one good suit, and occasionally lured into hansom cabs.
Like me, they found themselves drawn to the place after activities had ceased for the night, when only the romantically inclined and the sinister remained in the darkness under the scaffoldings of the rides. Black shadows stained our faces.
There, one night, they came across an attraction who seemed to be performing whether the fair was open or not—a man under a sign in huge letters that read MAN OR MACHINE? who, with dead eyes, in a seeming stupor, was tearing links off a chain and bending metal bars, while his “handler,” or hypnotist, looked on as if the show were just for him. Then and there, according to Mayer, the story of Caligari and Cesare was conceived.
They both write very imagistically. Mayer calls it “brain-photography.”
How good were Erich Pommer’s instincts? Janowitz and Mayer read him the entire weird and unprecedented script at four in the afternoon, and he’d paid for it by eight that same evening. That night the two writers dined in solitary splendor in the vast and empty dining room of the Hotel Hessler. Many courses, and an old Burgundy. The next morning they retrieved their most important valuables from the local pawnbrokers. And Pommer had in his hands the blueprint for the biggest international hit this industry has ever produced.
Despite knowing just about everyone on-screen, we were completely taken in, watching the thing. The usual world of smirking dolls with bared teeth and oxlike eyes was gone. With Caligari, the artist had slipped into that crude phantasmagoria and had begun to create. Space had been given a voice.
For Mayer and Janowitz, the script had to be a straitjacket for the director, tight, precise, and balanced, with strong belts and fasteners, so that nothing could escape from their instructions. Mayer still writes that way. Each change I consider causes other parts of the structure to unexpectedly totter.
While I’m still waiting for Mayer, I’m summoned by telephone to the great hall to adjudicate a dispute between Freund and the set designers, Herlth and Röhrig. Eight in the morning and they’re already an hour into their argument.
The four main city sets are already half finished. The hall is a tangle of scaffold towers and cranes, shouts and hammering. On one set the model skyscrapers that the doorman will view from his post are over seventeen meters high. I gape at them like a tourist. Behind them we’ve built a large asphalt expanse of cars and street signs, life-sized in the foreground and smaller as they recede, so that by the last row they’re only a foot tall. From the front there’s the undeniable impression of being in a plaza of great dimensions.
At the base of a skyscraper, both sides give an impassioned version of their case while I wait like a referee at a football match. Freund claims that their perspective in depth will flatten out through the viewfinder. Herlth and Röhrig claim to have taken that into account by exaggerating the relief on the models’ facades. Both sides attempt to cow me with the free use of technical specifications.
Herlth argues with the intensity of a zealot. He believes a production company should have the messianic fervor of a medieval cathedral-builders’ guild, with the film architect as the spiritus rector, the intellectual and artistic leader for his colleagues.
I decide in favor of Freund, since what’s paramount is what the camera sees, and on that he’s the ultimate authority. Herlth is devastated. Röhrig throws up his hands and calls the carpenters down from the scaffolds.
Back at my office, Mayer raises no protest at my suggestion about the buttons. He’s fixed on some other part of the scenario; if the idea works out, he’ll discuss it with me. He leaves like the somnambulist who made him famous.
It seems prudent to use the unscheduled free time to smooth ruffled feathers, so I return to the great hall. Herlth is nowhere to be found. When he returns, he will devote himself to his slide rule at the design studio, working out the changes.
Röhrig is completing the miniature elevated train on the adjacent set. He sees me approach. He has a sloping forehead and a sullen, apprehensive aspect, and always seems to have been badly shaven. He looks like a convict. His partner is Italian-looking, with a high forehead and wavy black hair, like a second-rate seducer of matrons from Capri. Herlth does the designing, Röhrig the building. They consider everyone to be implacably in league against them, and, feeling endlessly put-upon, they do superb work. Of the two, Herlth is easier to deal with. I watch Röhrig for a while before I’m moved to pitch in and help.
The train will only be a foot or so high. The camera mark is inches from the point where it will pass. Röhrig is busy working on litter and weeds for the roadbed—cloth fi
bers, glass wool, and tiny bits of paper, hand painted. The trestle is plywood, with small wooden buttons for rivets. Black paint mixed with graphite approximates the metallic sheen of iron.
I’m a little boy again. We work in silence. Röhrig occasionally gestures as to where he wants something to go. I’m reminded of something Herlth said: that this work is a kind of intoxication for me, an enchantment with process that’s familiar only to the research scientist or the surgeon during an operation. I spend twenty minutes I could have spent more profitably elsewhere on my hands and knees beside a Lilliputian crossing signal. If my brothers could see this: our little theaters in Wilhelmshöhe come again to life. Röhrig maintains his silence but in his own way seems pleased by my attention. Herlth returns with sketches and his figures-notebook and draws him back to the more pressing problem of the skyscrapers. Their crew slowly assembles around them. I give up on the miniature weeds, my hands spotted with sticky glue and fibers.
By the camera shed, I have to negotiate the set of the back steps leading to the doorman’s apartment. The steps are more suitable to a line of heralds than a petit-bourgeois back garden. What are they thinking? In a pocket notebook I write, as I walk, Steps—???
Beside the shed is the field lined with parked cars and carts. Every so often, small boys are chased away halfheartedly by the retired policeman hired to oversee the lot.
Inside it’s badly ventilated. Some idiot has painted the corrugated roof black. Though large fans are blowing, everyone’s sweating like a horse anyway. Freund and his assistants are working on what looks like a child’s slide. All the exhausting preparatory work, without which the true work would be impossible! The camera operator is to sit on a greased wooden platform inside the slide. One of the assistants is testing it with a camera that’s long since been cannibalized for spare parts. Two others on the scaffold give him a shove, and he travels a foot or so and stops. They haul him back to the top, grease the slide more liberally, and give him a rougher shove. He flies off and bounces on the cement floor, the box frame of the camera flying apart like a prank substitute.
Freund huffs up the ladder for a look. His first assistant makes a quiet suggestion about raising the lip of the slide. Freund doesn’t answer, and instead sends his fourth assistant across the room for the toolbox. The boy is lanky, hard of hearing, and open-mouthed. We watch him hunt for the toolbox. He gets low to bring his head closer to the search. He drifts. “You know, masturbation is a dreadful thing,” Freund finally murmurs. The boy colors at our laughter.
I’m late for the last bit of casting, the role of the doorman’s daughter.
Mayer is back at the sitting room outside my office, the folding chairs and old sprung ottoman already filled with candidates. They recognize him, thrilled to be in his presence. They regard me with puzzled interest, as if thinking, And I should know you, too.… All the women are taller than Mayer.
The first woman’s features are too coarse, and her age too advanced. Despite that, there’s something remarkable in her line readings—suggestive of venomous energy—and we tell her to keep in touch. She’ll be of use, perhaps as one of the neighbors.
The fifth is perfect. A newcomer. When introduced, she thrusts out her hand with a shy abruptness. When we start to speak, she listens with flattering attention. Throughout she wears a look of piercing disappointment, as if she’s already been rejected. We’re both excited by her. Before our eyes, the role of the daughter takes shape. Thus the possibilities of leaving a character like a pencil sketch, to be filled in by the right person.
Despite her pessimism, upon leaving she kisses our cheeks with perfect aplomb. I’m always attracted to poise in women. The untrained actress looking for work needs either unusual beauty or a thorough knowledge of her strengths. If she has the first, she usually possesses the second; if she has the second, she can make people believe she also has the first.
By that point, it’s noon and everyone’s yawning. Four hours have slipped away. The rest of the candidates are sent home. Lunch in my office, brought in, is shared with a German shepherd we’ve named Pal, who arrived out of nowhere and became a fixture around the studio once he realized the stagehands carried lunches to work. Just like that, the dog leads me to a memory of Hans, and an immovable sadness shoulders into the room. The anniversary of his death is a month away.
The dog whimpers and waits and, after what he considers a sufficient interval, eases my sandwich off its waxed paper and onto the floor. In two or three head-bobbing bites it’s gone. I no longer have anyone who provides a sounding board for my nature.
I no longer have anyone with whom I can discuss the mysteries. I no longer have the certainty of being understood and answered. Now, whatever my current friendships, I have only this journal.
And yet for long stretches he disappears from my consciousness. I have made no headway as to the question of his death. For long stretches I seem to carry on regardless.
The dog gags and aspirates from eating too fast. Then the room is quiet. I call my car to take me home. I leave messages for Freund and Mayer to proceed in my absence.
The car is running poorly, and the chauffeur without ideas as to why. Why is there so much traffic at midday? He remarks on torrential rains in the south. Flooding in Bavaria. Hans, Hans, Hans. Only what’s entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: the mania to call upon the lost thing until it returns.
A day and night devoted to mourning, and pointless calls around to our old acquaintances. Those I am able to reach are baffled by my questions. Sandri keeps his distance. With the new day, Frau Reger sits me up in bed and spoons potato soup into me. After taking away my tray, she returns to open the curtains and dump a pile of telephone messages onto the comforter.
More sleep.
A dismal few weeks of work. Mayer and Herlth ask discreet questions about my health. A month of shooting and already we’re behind. Herlth and Röhrig keep wailing: more money! Fierce ongoing battles with Pommer, which fall to me to settle. My duties include, apparently, pedagogy and demagogy.
Yesterday a general meeting was called; I had to be driven back in for it. Pommer claimed he should stay out of it, and said I should speak for him.
Everyone was complaining as if the Apocalypse had arrived. The stipends were pitiful and unfair; the price of meat had gone up. What was I supposed to say? I sat there looking blank. The electricians delivered a declaration that they stood united behind the carpenters. And where did the carpenters stand? What did that mean? Had everyone lost their minds? Freund shushed me, and dealt with emissaries from both groups.
In terms of the inflation, the general situation is indeed catastrophic. That an undertaking like this is possible is a miracle. Emergency legislation and upbeat pieces on “What Every Citizen Can Do” fill the newspapers. A bitter winter is predicted. Or, rather, assured. A year ago it was even more dire. Then, the cashier at my pharmacy gave me change of two and a half million in five-thousand-mark notes, five packets as thick as two fists. How to get rid of them? A nice white shirt in a shopwindow, too expensive. A book? Ten million for a slim volume of Rilke. Instead, a café, the waiter willing to accept such small bills.
Germany was a house with the roof torn off, with the room-by-room disaster exposed for all to see. That night in a club, I watched a young American throw coins in his currency on the floor and call out that only naked women were allowed to pick them up. The eyes of the men in that room! But they did nothing. And two women, middle-aged, silently stripped off their clothes and got down on their knees.
I must wake earlier and get started sooner. In the morning I’m shrewdest, and most anxious, since anxiety is a form of shrewdness. Instead of six-a.m. starts, by five I’m up, but standing around gathering wool. Instead of tea I’ll have tea and yoghurt; fruit later, to reward myself. I’ve taken to working in an old felt hat. Odd looks from the crew.
The Tageblatt Sunday supplement had a piece on the status of the production, entitled UFA’S 2 MILLION MARK GAMBLE.
The subheading read Unprecedented Battle of the Minds, While the Meter Clicks Away. “Oh, obscenity the Tageblatt,” Mayer said when he saw it. The phrase was immediately adopted as our rallying cry: Obscenity the Tageblatt.
While the camera agonies inch toward improvement, we work on simpler scenes with Jannings. For a while, everything is centered around him, which is one of the reasons the project delighted him so. Two interiors come off without incident: the doorman exhausted by his heavy load, accepting a drink and a rest; and the doorman waiting to see the manager. A metronome sets the rhythm for everyone’s coming and going. Jannings performs with appropriate aplomb. It’s occurred to everyone that this may be the role for which he was put on this earth.
Emboldened, we attempt the dream-sequence of him juggling the supersized trunks. A disaster. The cables are visible, and the trunks are clearly not being hefted by Jannings. He’s no acrobat, and is continually nervous under all the spinning and colliding. He flinches and ducks, trying to hide his fear with a lot of operatic smiling. For a huge star, he’s an interesting type: a man whose instincts come and go, like my own. I realize that I watch each take with my legs crossed, jogging my raised foot as if conducting the scene with my shoe. The crew has already figured out that when the shoe stops, I’m displeased.
Collaboration has always been a trial for me, since I want to carry everything about with me in silence, not wanting to share until the whole feels completed.
When I’d mentioned that to Hans, one giddy night in school when we’d been designing a parodic coat of arms for our room, his laughter quieted and he said, “That seems clear.”
Lang has pointed out in a telegram wishing the project well that the tragedy we’re filming could never occur, since no doorman would stoop to doing the job of a luggage porter or valet. “The old bitch,” Jannings says when he hears.
