by Jürgen Fauth
It was magic.
To Steffen, it was just one more outrageous night in Berlin, but I went back again and again. I must have seen Nosferatu twenty times. “Why do you hurry, my young friend?” an old man asks at the beginning of the film. “No one can escape his destiny.” Like Count Orlok, these magical moving pictures would never let go.
Three years later, I was in charge of my own set in Neubabelsberg, the largest studio in Europe, making a movie that I had written. The producers, the stars, the cameramen and the newspapers all called me Kino, the name I had given myself over Horcher's lamb stew. I was a prodigy, the youngest director in Ufa's history. The lie had become truth.
Herr Dokter: what do you call the power to turn your imagination into reality?
Steffen's reckless exuberance had one drawback: his joy never lasted past morning light, and the comedowns could be terrible. He was prone to melancholy, bitter bouts of disappointment and suspicion, and during those moments, everything he said was critical and cruel–until day turned into night and the next thrill came along. Like him, I spent my days cranky and irritable, cursing the sun and wishing it was show time at the Eldorado.
It was on one of those mornings that I took the tram out all the way to the Ufa studios and got myself a job. I liked the girls and the parties, but I was after something else. My father had been a bare-knuckles capitalist, and I had grown up rejecting everything he stood for. Now, all these years later, I can see how much I took after him. I did not judge the world by money, I never calculated human worth by mark or dollar, but his self-reliance and ambition lived in me.
And thus began my illustrious career in the Weimar film industry. I got myself hired as an extra, at the bottom of the ladder. Historical epics were all the rage, and Ufa was desperate for people to fill the frame. It was a miserable job that paid ein Appel und ein Ei; day workers doing manual labor on the sets were making twice as much. But I wanted to be close to the camera, so I grinned and followed orders and kept my wild dreams to myself. Rags to riches! I know you Americans gobble this stuff up like chocolate pudding. I walked through two or three Lubitsch pageants, and then every available man was assigned to Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen.
While Ufa geared up for the biggest production in its history, the situation in Germany was deteriorating. In June, a gang of assassins shot the foreign minister on his way to the chancellery, and just to be sure, they lobbed a hand grenade into his car, too. All confidence in the new republic went to hell, and the mark began falling against the dollar. What little money I had left was quickly becoming worthless. Instead of waiting for bankruptcy, I decided to celebrate. I spent everything I had on one raucous night: lobster dinner, dancing, alles drum und dran, and when the sun came up, I was sitting in the Lustgarten with Steffen and Ute the Mole Girl, blissed out on opium tea, and–for the first time in my life–broke. A few hours later, my landlord's daughter, little Susi Oberlin, found me passed out on the Hinterhaus staircase. I was still wearing my tux, a shiny chapeau-claque, and a white shirt smeared with vomit. I clutched the neck of an almost-empty bottle of champagne.
“Guten Morgen,” Susi said, ponytail wagging.
In the early morning light that was falling through the building's stained glass front door, I could see a wet trickle of urine running from my leg onto the linoleum floor. The opium had worn off, and I desperately wanted to be back in my room with the covers over my head. My mouth was dry. I took a swig of champagne. Without thinking, I offered the bottle to the little girl, who sat down next to me and lifted it to her lips, drinking until it was gone. “Nice bubbly for a lowly student,” she said. She let go of a monstrous burp and handed the empty bottle back to me.
My embarrassment gave way to something else–the sense that in this city, not even the school children could be counted on to do what they were supposed to. I was broke and wasted, and I wouldn't be able to pay the rent. I'd given my inheritance away but it was just as well; by November, all of it would have been barely enough to afford a turnip, anyway.
Susi said, “You should probably go to bed now,” and I was grateful for her small gesture of kindness. For the first time in my life, I felt that the travails of the time were also mine. I was a true Berliner.
“They call me Kino,” I said, and Susi Oberlin burped again.
The government ordered the newspaper presses to print more money in ever higher denominations. Workers got paid at noon and ran out to spend it before it became worthless. Though I had nothing left, I never went hungry–I was Steffen's friend, and Steffen knew people with dollars, first among them his latest benefactor, Ray, an American art dealer who hosted a never-ending party at the Belvedere, a fantasy castle on the western shore of the Grosse Wannsee looking out across the sailboat-studded bay to the Lido. Ray proclaimed that he'd fallen madly in love with Steffen. Magnus Hirschfeld and some of his students were hanging out naked by the pier, there was dancing on the terrace, and in the west wing, somebody read aloud from a dirty novel they had smuggled in from France, “the most modern book ever written!” There was always enough to eat and drink and snort at the Belvedere.
Demand for drugs was on the rise, and there was more pussy to be had than ever. Can you blame me, Herr Dokter, for helping to move a little bit of both? A few deliveries here and there, the exchange of a package at Zoo station, selecting a few Tauentziengirls and boys to join us out at the Belvedere? Jawoll, I did my share of drug dealing and whore mongering, but I had dollars, and if you had dollars, you could live like a king. When the French invaded the Ruhr, prices went up further, but the parties at the Belvedere never slowed down: there was an insane edge to everything, absurd desperation in the air. When winter came, the Oberlins, my landlords, began heating the building with buckets of last week's money like everybody else. Germany's undernourished children died of tuberculosis and war veterans dragged themselves through the streets begging for a bite of stale bread or a ladle of cabbage soup. You could have an entire Kneipe dancing naked for a few coins but a billion marks bought you a cigarette. People were sniping from the rooftops out of hunger and desperation. Misery stared us in the face but we danced at the Kleist Casino.
In my sheltered, privileged life in Königstein, we had profited from pain. My new family just happened to survive very well.
In Neubabelsberg, the studio was stockpiling food for the cast and crew. Inside the Grosse Halle, there was only one law, one rule, one thing that had to be done: whatever Fritz Lang wanted.
Fritz Lang. Even before I ever met the miserable son of a bitch, with his monocle and superior airs, I hated him. Hot off Dr. Mabuse, Lang had been all over the papers with his marriage to his screenwriter bride, Thea von Harbou. In bad times, a little bit of celebrity goes a long way, and the public was eating up every idiotic rumor about the master and his muse. I had heard things, too: that the suicide of Lang's first wife had been anything but, that he couldn't climax unless he had the taste of blood on his tongue. On set, Fritz and Thea were aloof and unapproachable, like King Gunther and his Queen in the German legend we were filming, a turgid saga without hope or love.
I detested Lang's histrionic style, the ghastly overacting and oppressive angles. In person, he was an insufferable asshole. He bellowed orders and treated people like puppets. He made his actors repeat scenes for twenty, thirty, fifty takes and directed by assigning numbers to gestures and facial expressions. Then he'd count them off while the camera rolled: one, two, turn your head, smile, six, seven, faint, nine, ten. He had nothing but disdain for actors; he was a bully and a bore. And yet I watched him closely, learning as much as I could.
On the day Lang shot Siegfried's arrival in Worms, I was coming down from a three-day bender, having trouble standing up straight in the knight's heavy chain mail and helmet. Holding the shield before me, I stood shaking where Lang had placed us on a tiled floor, lined up symmetrically. By the time we redid the scene for the twentieth time, I was itchy in the ill-fitting costume. I had loosened the strap that held
my leg in place. Just when Kriemhild was descending the staircase again, I could feel my leg slip until, with a slight thud, it fell flat on the ground before me.
“Cut!” Lang barked through his bullhorn, his monocle dropping out of his eye. I had ruined the take. “We are hiring cripples now? All I needed was somebody to stand there, and you get me a guy who's missing a leg? The warriors of Worms don't suffer from runaway limbs!”
Out of the darkness behind him, Thea von Harbou appeared, cradling her lap dog like a baby. She was always on set, wearing the same green outfit every day. She knitted sweaters and dictated novels to an assistant.
“Fritz,” she said, putting a calming hand on his arm. I had witnessed this before, Thea smoothing over Lang's rough edges, calming his fearsome tantrums for the sake of the production. “Everyone's good for something.”
With my leg in my hand, I went blank. She was buying me time, giving me an opportunity to speak up for myself, but I didn't know what to say. What was I good for? The only job I wanted was Lang's, but if I'd told him that, he would have pulled out his Browning and shot me on the spot. My career would have been over before it started–if Gerhard Gruber, the set designer, hadn't explained that he was having trouble setting up Siegfried's epic battle with the dragon. Gruber had constructed a huge beast, a monster of twenty-five meters that was operated from the inside, but the man who worked the tail complained there wasn't enough room for his legs.
Lang lifted the eyebrow that didn't hold the monocle and grinned.
Siegfried's fight with the Lindwurm was a marvel. The contraption was heavy as a tank and took ten men to move. For endless, claustrophobic days, I had to kick my stump, which was attached to the lever that manipulated the dragon's crocodile tail. We moved the creature's eyes, mouth, legs, and tail, we made it breathe fire and smoke, we pumped the blood that gushed from the wound where Paul Richter, the foppish son-of-a-bitch who played Siegfried, pierced the rubber skin with his sword. We damn near suffocated on the fumes. It was the most grueling work I have done in my life. The only way to bear this wretched work was to stay perpetually high, and every morning, I doled out a generous allotment of cocaine for every man inside the monster.
Word got out. One person introduced me to three others, and soon I was providing Zement to the entire production. The cinematographer, the camera and lighting crews, and the costume designers bought huge quantities for their departments, and Steffen started coming to the set to make deliveries. I became the best friend of crew and cast. Thea von Harbou sniffed lines and dictated with such speed that white foam formed in the corners of her mouth. She was full of ideas, she was efficient. Thea was the one with talent.
As the shooting of the dragon scene dragged on, a peculiar bond formed between the ten of us who made it come alive from within. We were the bones of the beast, it was our blood that circulated through its veins, our breath that fanned the flames from its nostrils. We made the creature move and fight. Through the alchemy of Kino, we became the dragon. The dragon taught me the power of the crew, coming together to make a film like the craftsmen who built cathedrals in the middle ages. Everyone's contribution, every single detail, was essential. Inside the dragon, Herr Dokter, we all understood that.
But Fritz Lang didn't know how to marshal the talent at his disposal. In my version of Die Nibelungen, the dragon would have killed that Arschloch Siegfried and eaten his entrails, but Lang was too stupid and too proud of his silly script to see. He didn't know how to let an idea flourish. Under his rigid dictatorship everything turned into a grotesque, lifeless pageant. Can you understand why the dragon's preordained fate did not sit well with us? It seemed unfair to stage this tremendous battle and not give the creature a chance. Paul Richter, prancing about in his sexy loincloth–it was a lie the monster we had created could not abide. There wasn't a word spoken, but somehow, we reached a decision nonetheless.
Lang's counting method should have left no room for mistakes–one, two, the dragon's eyes roll while Siegfried jumps left, three, a blast of fire as he strikes, four, five, a whip of the tail, and six, he impales the Lindwurm on his sword. It was during what seemed like the hundredth take of Siegfried jumping from rock to rock and striking at our vulcanized rubber skin that I flung the tail into Paul Richter's leg, a move he wasn't expecting till four or five count higher, and delivered a mighty whack that sent him flying backwards into the pond.
All ten of us inside the dragon cheered!
Curses from Lang, laughter from the crew.
A Dokter, so old he must have served under Bismarck, came along swiftly. Richter had suffered a contusion and would be unable to work for a week. The shoot was now delayed, the production bleeding money, and Lang was raging with anger. Gruber, who had saved me the last time Lang wanted my head, fingered me as the one responsible. I swear I saw him reach for the gun he kept inside his vest. But Thea was back at Lang's side, reminding him that I provided the Zement. In the throes of hyperinflation, I was the one who kept the production going, and he knew it. Even Paul Richter, that oaf, couldn't hold a grudge when we sent Ute the Mole Girl to visit him in his hospital room. Siegfried recovered quickly.
I had learned something crucial: the dragon beat Siegfried, but that's not what Die Nibelungen showed. Lang's movies didn't allow room for the incidental; he imposed his will on every element on the set. He was a liar and a fraud. But I had felt the power of the dragon, had tasted the unfettered potential of cinema to create something true and beautiful and dangerous, and I had to have more.
Die Nibelungen kept shooting into the New Year. To celebrate the end of production–in Hollywood, they call it a wrap party–Ufa turned Grosse Halle into a beer garden, serving up Bretzel and Schultheiss to the legions of extras who had all dutifully died for Lang's horrid epic. Later that night, Thea and Fritz hosted a more exclusive affair at their notorious Hohenzollernstrasse apartment. Thea asked me to make sure that cast, studio bigwigs, and investors were properly entertained. Together with Steffen, I supplied bowls of Zement, a samovar of opium tea, a hookah packed with Turkish kif, and a dozen Friedrichstadt dancers.
Thea and Fritz had turned their apartment into an exotic museum, stuffed with paintings and art objects, Chinese carpets, Japanese temple flags, sacred vases, Buddhas, shrunken heads, and cabinets filled with trinkets so Lang could brag about his travels. He was a bore, but no matter: we had made it into the inner sanctum, a place I'd only seen in the photo spreads of glossy movie magazines. In the purple library, filled with grimacing South Sea sculptures, I spotted Erich Pommer, the most successful producer in Europe, responsible for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and all of Lang's successes. Here was the man I needed to impress! Next to a cage with a large blue-and-red parrot, Thea von Harbou, who listened to an animated Rudolf Klein-Rogge, waved me over. Her black Schnauzer shook his tail at me.
“See?” Thea said. “I knew you'd be useful.”
Klein-Rogge excused himself to follow Ute the Mole Girl down a corridor.
“Making a movie is like constructing a creature,” I told Thea. “The cast is the face, the director the brain, the cinematographer the eyes and the crew the hands. You, meine sehr geehrte Frau, provide the heart.”
Thea smiled. “It appears that your domain is the nose.”
I proffered the tin of cocaine. Two Tauentziengirls in flapper dresses had talked Lang into taking down wooden African masks from their showcases on the library wall, Carl Meyer had procured some bongo drums, and together, they began an obscene tribal dance. A small crowd gathered to watch them. Lang, Pommer, and Richter sucked on cigars and clapped along to the jungle beat. Margarete Schön, who had played Kriemhild, joined the dancers.
I had another sniff and took the risk. “Can I ask you something, Frau von Harbou? Something that has been bothering me about Die Nibelungen. If you're going to make a movie in two parts, shouldn't one of them have a happy ending?”
“Don't be a Dummkopf,” Thea said. “Die Nibelungen is a story about inexorable trag
edy. The first sin entails the last atonement. There can be no happy ending.”
“Sounds gloomy!” Steffen, drawn by the syncopated bongo beat, had come dancing into the room. “You and your tragedy. I can't believe that's what people want. Look around! They want beautiful women and a good time! Why are you trying to depress them with tragedy?”
“My, my.” Thea smiled, gesturing for another bump. “Your friend can dance and insult the highest paid movie writer in Europe at the same time. I suppose you have better ideas, my red-faced dervish?”
“I don't,” Steffen said. He pointed his thumb in my direction. “But he does. That's why they call him Kino.”
“They do?”
I gave Steffen a look–this wasn't how I would have approached it. “Well yes,” I admitted. “They do. If anyone gave me the chance, I could do great things. I am full of ideas.”
“He has ideas!” A familiar voice barked over the drums, loud enough to make them hesitate and stumble. Lang had noticed me talking to his wife and turned away from the jungle dance. The drumming stopped. Every head turned. “Extras, drug dealers, and pimps have ideas now?” Lang said. He projected as if he were making a toast. “What is this business coming to?”
Erich Pommer let out a belly laugh. He was bleary-eyed and in a jolly mood. “Now, now Fritz! Isn't this the young man who kept your production on schedule? Let him talk. You know I'm always looking for talent in unlikely places. Lubitsch is gone; we need to think quick if we're going to stay ahead of the Americans! This Schelm here calls himself Kino and says he has ideas? I want to hear them!” He folded his hands over his belly. “Talk.”
Suddenly I was the center of attention, my mind raging from the cocaine. Pommer was calling my bluff. Here was a room full of Ufa-Bonzen, producers, actors, directors, Thea, Lang, Richter, Klein-Rogge, even Steffen, waiting for me to deliver on the name I'd given myself. I had nothing, but I knew that there was nothing worse than saying nothing, that I had to say anything at all, and say it with confidence. Everything else would follow if I just took that first step into the void. I looked around the room, my eyes came to rest on a picturesque oil painting of a windmill, and–