by Jürgen Fauth
“What pisses me off most is that these goons went and hassled Sam. Why would they do that?”
“To get to you.”
“He's in the hospital. They went into the hospital to ask him about me. My husband.”
She was more upset than she knew. Thinking about Sam got her upset.
“I used to be married,” Dr. Hanno said.
It took a moment before Mina decided she'd heard right. Dr. Hanno seemed much too young to be divorced; he was handsome and successful enough, but the look on his face told a different story. Mina asked the broadest possible question she could think of: “What happened?”
“I think she expected more from me. Writing about movies wasn't enough. She never saw the point of scholarship or criticism. She got married to a guy who manages a golf club.”
Ah, Mina thought. The movie geekery made her leave. Mina wondered how she'd get along with Dr. Hanno's ex-wife. She didn't even know, really, what it meant to be a wife yet. On the other side of the sauna's glass door, a naked man emptied a bucket of ice water over his head.
“How long were you married?”
“Would have been two years in June. We just signed the papers three weeks ago. She took all the furniture.”
“Oh,” Mina said. Just three weeks ago? No wonder Hanno seemed like a zombie at times. “I'm sorry.”
“It's okay,” Dr. Hanno said. “I think we're both better off this way.”
It was one of those phrases that people cling to when there wasn't anything left to do but mourn. Mina could tell he didn't believe it himself but perhaps it was better than nothing. Still, she couldn't help thinking the look of heartbreak on his face now wasn't anything like what she had seen on his face the morning after the film had been stolen.
“She cheated on me from the start,” he added.
“I'm sorry.” Mina didn't know what else to say. Dr. Hanno was a cuckold. The movies were all that he had left. She couldn't help but feel protective of him. She placed a sympathetic hand on his leg.
Dr. Hanno, misunderstanding the gesture, leaned over to kiss her.
Mina pulled back.
“Oh–,” Dr. Hanno said, and at that moment, a strapping spa attendant in shorts and a T-shirt burst in, bearing a bucket of water, a towel, and a sardonic grin: “Aufguss, die Herrschaften.”
“What does that mean?” Mina asked, but she could tell from Dr. Hanno's face that it couldn't be good. The spa attendant took a wooden ladle from the bucket and repeatedly, deliberately doused the sauna's coals with water. With a cascade of hissing, the water exploded into clouds of steam. Heat and humidity skyrocketed. Mina closed her eyes and pursed her lips to cool off the burning air in her mouth. She breathed as shallowly as she could. The spa attendant put down the bucket and used a large towel to fan the air in the sauna, creating more and more heat.
Mina thought she was going to die.
The projectionist, Frank, was waiting for them by the curb, engine idling. It had started to rain, a steady freezing downpour. Mina had been too impatient to dry her hair, and she regretted it when she stepped out into the cold Berlin air. Punta Cana, that's where she was supposed to be, by the pool with a stiff Cuba Libre. They ran through the rain to the car.
Frank was wearing a leather cap pulled low over his eyes, and he nodded wordlessly when they got in. Mina took the back seat. The rain was a constant drum beat on the roof. She grabbed a handful of wet hair and squeezed water onto the seat. Then she noticed the black Mercedes. “Is that car following us?”
Dr. Hanno eyed the mirrors. “Jawoll. Only one of them in the car. He must have waited where they lost us.”
“Kacke,” Frank said. It was the first word he'd said. He hit the brakes and took a sharp left down a one-way street. Rain water splashed up on the sidewalk. The Mercedes followed, leaving a few honking cars in its wake.
“Is this now a car chase?” Mina asked, trying to be funny. It came out sounding scared.
“We're not going over the speed limit,” Dr. Hanno said, but it was clear he was tense, too. They ran a red light–more honking, squealing tires–but the black Mercedes kept up. The car was close enough now that Mina could recognize the driver as one of the men who had shouted after her on the roof.
They crossed a river by the dome of a large cathedral. The rain was churning the water. There was another red light. Frank tried to swerve around the cars in front of him and get across the intersection, but there wasn't enough room. A busload of tourists–old French people with identical umbrellas–hurried across the street. Behind them, Mina could see the goon getting out of his car. He was wearing gloves and trying to protect what looked like a manila envelope from the rain.
“Fahr schon,” Dr. Hanno instructed Frank, “los!” But Frank was helpless. He honked once, twice, and revved the engine, but the tourists didn't seem to care.
Dr. Hanno opened his door. “Auf Wiedersehen, Fräulein Koblitz,” he said, with a lot of drama. “Be good to your husband. For Kino!” He got out and slammed the door shut. He was immediately drenched with rain, his hair slicked to his forehead. He approached the agent, gesticulating wildly.
“What is he doing?” Mina asked, but it was obvious now: he was blocking the man's way and he, in turn, tried to push Dr. Hanno out of the way, waving towards Mina. His suit was soaked. The men locked in what looked like an embrace. Finally, the light turned green. One last woman pushed a stroller across the intersection. The man made his way around Dr. Hanno. Out of nowhere, an ancient Trabant smashed into the Mercedes. In the confusion, Mina thought she saw someone in a red leather jacket behind the wheel, but it was impossible to tell. As they pulled away, Mina watched Dr. Hanno and the man recede into the distance. Dr. Hanno give her a sad little wave.
The rain had stopped when they made it to Tempelhof Airport. “Good luck, Frau Koblitz,” was all the projectionist managed to say. Mina thanked him and he was off. For one panicked moment she looked around for her suitcase before remembering that she had abandoned it, broken, in the backyard. There was no time for an inventory now. Mina slung her backpack over her shoulder and walked through the terminal as if nothing had happened at all. She couldn't help but keep glancing over her shoulder, always expecting another suit. And hadn't she just been at the airport? She was developing a real distaste for flying. Mina was exhausted. The hour in the sauna had knocked her out. Earlier, she had practically jumped off a building. She would read the rest of Kino's journal on the flight, but first she'd sleep.
But there here was one more thing Mina had to do before she could go home. Whatever this was, it wasn't over. At the check-in counter, Mina pulled out her airline voucher and her passport. “Traveling to New York, JFK?” the woman behind the counter confirmed.
“In fact, no,” Mina said. “I need a flight to Los Angeles.”
Chapter 11
Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler on January thirtieth, nineteen thirty-three. The Weimar Republic had run out of time, und das Land der Dichter und Denker was about to sink into barbarism. I barely paid attention when those criminals took over. I was busy making movies.
The waning years of the republic had been difficult. I followed my “auspiciously poetic debut” (Rheinischer Merkur) with Land der Gnade, the story of an expedition to a tribal kingdom in the heart of Africa. Once again, I let pleasure and whim lead me, but this time, nothing came easy. When the stock market crashed, my budgets plummeted as well. Tastes were changing, and Land der Gnade didn't do as well as it should have. Jagd zu den Sternen was delayed by a ridiculous plagiarism suit, and Pommer ordered endless unnecessary reshoots for Meine wilden Wanderjahre.
You could be excused for assuming that history did me in: the war, the Nazis, the next war, the witch hunt that awaited me in America–but I know that I would have persevered if it hadn't been for Penelope. The deaths we witnessed in the basilica had a devastating effect on her. To me, it was just a coincidence that proved that my movies resonated with the world. As tragic as it had been to see the
professor die, I couldn't say I was surprised to come face to face with a scene from my movie. Why would that seem any stranger than seeing these images in the first place? It was like a wink from the universe, cruel and horrifying but also reassuring. Penelope, however, couldn't understand it, couldn't fit what had happened into her physicist's brain, and she convinced herself that I was to blame for the professor's death. It poisoned her relationship with my movies, and she began to undermine me.
Starting with Land der Gnade, she tried to wrest control from me, improvising new scenes and demanding co-writing credit. She began drinking in earnest and got used to a bump or two of Zement before her scenes. Who was I to argue? She gave the other actors notes and made impossible demands on set. When I was out of earshot, she abused the crew. She earned a reputation as a diva who was difficult to work with.
Penelope claimed she kept seeing scenes from my movies out in the world–striking workers on Wittenbergplatz facing off with the police as if reenacting the climactic confrontation from Land der Gnade, the exact framing of the establishing shot of Saturn from Jagd zu den Sternen on a weekend trip to the Baltic Sea. I saw it, too, but it never made any difference to me. It seemed only fitting that these images would appear everywhere, on screen, off screen, in my dreams–and I didn't particularly care about the distinction. But Penelope seemed personally offended, and each time she got angrier, more confused, more shaken. On our way to the premiere of Der Blaue Engel, we happened upon the wedding scene from Meine wilden Wanderjahre, in front of the Dom, and she begged me to stop making movies.
Can you believe it? I laughed in her face. Because she was upset about a coincidence or two? My art is fueled by bliss, by instinct, and I refused to let fear of the unknown stop me. I was shocked by her lack of faith. The unknown was exactly what I was after. To make the most powerful images possible, I had to give the mystery free reign. If you try to understand it, it disappears.
She would not listen. I swore that I would never stop making movies.
After that, the fighting never ceased. Penelope was still beautiful and witty, and I was too loyal to her to see what was happening. I mistook her for my muse while she systematically undermined me. It was Penny who advised me to turn down the deal with Nebenzal that could have landed me Pandora's Box. It was Penny who embarrassed me so miserably at the Adlon during Chaplin's visit. It was Penny who threw my first draft of Jagd zu den Sternen out of the window of a speeding train, the pages trailing in the slipstream as if they'd never have to touch the ground. It was Penny who refused to work with the young Rühmann.
Our life at home got much more difficult as well. I had never wanted children–cinema would accept no distraction–and Penelope had agreed. But after her mother died, she asked her father to live with us. I relented, aware right away that it was a mistake. The old man brought a sour smell into the house, shuffling around in his Filzpantoffeln and spiking his coffee with Asbach Uralt. When he wasn't bent over his books or the Morgenpost crossword puzzle, he held court in the salon. Former students came and went at all hours, discussing politics, art, science, and metaphysics.
Penelope joined these debates with an ever-rotating group of disciples. Talk was heated, there was the occasional slammed door, and more than a few visitors were banished because of unwelcome political alliances. They had theories about everything. Schnickschnack! What good are theories? There is nothing to understand.
When subatomic particles and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle failed to enlighten, they turned to the occult. I don't know who first brought the tarot readers and turban-wearing spiritualists to the house, but soon Penny and Leo engaged in séances and other kinds of mystical hocus-pocus. The talk was all about Aleister Crowley and Hanussen, Madame Blavatsky, black holes, morphic resonance, and the Copenhagen Interpretation. Penny ran her coked-up mouth all night, shoring up her hatred of me and my work.
Meanwhile, my new script was stalled. Die Piraten von Mulberry Island, the thrilling and romantic story of daring Captain Darius Silko and his trusty crew, my most ambitious project yet, would be my return to form–if I could only finish it.
Working with Penelope had become a nightmare, but we had signed a five-film deal with Pommer, and the public expected her in my movies. She would play Bonnie, the young bride who is abducted by the pirates and falls in love with Captain Silko. Penelope took up fencing and agreed to take acting lessons in the new style required by sound. Jonas Krugel was cast as the dashing pirate captain. We began shooting on the day of the Reichstag fire: I was so busy it barely registered. Politics didn't concern me, not until a month later, when the NSDAP announced the formation of the Reichs-Film-Kammer and invited the elite of Germany's film industry to a meeting at Hotel Kaiserhof. This was March twenty-eight, nineteen thirty-three. You can look it up in a history book.
When I was a child, my mother hosted an annual Christmas dinner for the local Bonzen. In the last year of the Great War, while the masses went hungry, we ate goose. After dessert, the children were excused from the table, and when I got up, Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers slipped out from under my holiday suit. The book fell to the carpet between my mother and Friedensreich Thyssen, the steel magnate. Thyssen–a grotesquely obese man–leaned over with a huff and picked it up. When he saw the title, he frowned, and that was enough: my mother grabbed the book from her guest's hand, slapped me across the face, and tossed it into the fireplace.
“Alexandre Dumas?” she shouted. “Strengstens verboten!”
She was right. After Verdun, father had proclaimed all English, French, and Russian books off-limits, the reason The Three Musketeers had been hidden under my jacket in the first place. To save face in front of his powerful guests, father ordered all “enemy literature” burned in the morning. I didn't sleep that night.
We were ushered into the courtyard after breakfast. The servants had built a fire. Father made us watch as the Hofmeister threw our books into the fire one by one: Dumas, Verne, Ryder-Haggard, Conan Doyle. These stories had meant everything to me.
Herr Dokter, I'm telling you about my parents' bonfire because it's easy, afterwards, for everybody to agree that we didn't know and we didn't understand and we didn't see it coming. Don't believe a word of it. It was obvious that the bastards were up to no good, with their boots and their national revolution. I hated their certitude, their pathological lack of doubt, their complete absence of humor. Even in the early days, when they marched in the streets and sang songs, they looked like Death to me, goose-stepping and staring straight ahead toward some frightful destiny. I hated their torchlight parades, barking speakers, and hero's funerals. Their symmetrical spectacles were Metropolis made flesh. My poetic utopias lost out to Lang's nightmare futures. Die Nibelungen, dedicated, after all, to the German people, was a tale of blind loyalty that ended in an epic cataclysm. Sound familiar? And who was Adolf Hitler but a real-life Dr. Mabuse?
Yes, we saw them for what they were, but politics always disgusted me. I was bored by the speechifying and the grandstanding. Simple-minded, authoritarian, repressive Scheissdreck–that's all politics ever was, from the Kaiser to Hitler to your Mr. McCarthy. They were all the same to me, the Communists and the Nazis, the old Nationalists who wanted the Emperor back, the stiff-necked Republicans, the Social Democrats–all of them corrupt and evil. The mission of my movies was to imagine a life beyond politics.
I was wrong, of course. But it's not Vergangenheits-bewältigung you're after, is it? I've been called many things–hack, pimp, wastrel, genius, traitor, sell-out–and most were well-deserved. But I was never a Communist, and I was never a Nazi. Did Penny tell you that, too? I never joined the NSDAP. I never made propaganda. All of this was established during my immigration hearings, where I made my case with overwhelming evidence, all of which is, along with transcripts, on file with the INS. My politics are not what's at stake here. I always hated them, even before the ovens. They burned people, and they burned my movies.
Everyone who was anyon
e was there that night at the Kaiserhof: Albers, Fritsch, Veidt, Jannings, Lorre, Dietrich. The walls were lined with goons in uniforms, and many of the assembled actors, directors, and producers arrived in party uniforms. Lang was wearing one, and he'd pinned on some sort of medal he'd won in World War I. He was in bad shape, pale and haggard. He'd gotten divorced from Thea von Harbou after he found her in bed with an Indian prince by the name of Ayi Tendulkar. The entire city had laughed about it for weeks. His new movie, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, had been held up by the censors for months, its future uncertain.
Penelope had not received an invitation to the meeting; like Lang, I came alone. Reichspropagandaminister Goebbels, the limping lying crippled sack of shit, came in flanked by stormtroopers, Prince Wilhelm August of Prussia, and Count Wolf Heinrich Helldorf. Some Arschloch from the Reichsverband der Lichtspieltheaterbesitzer gave a speech. I didn't listen until Goebbels got up to speak. He moved like one of Lang's actors, with brisk, controlled gestures that might as well have been counted off by a metronome. It was chilling. He called himself “an impassioned devotee of cinematic art” and assured us that he did not want to put boundaries on anyone. I might have sneered if it hadn't been for the SA men. “Tendentious art can also be great art,” he said, and then he singled out five movies for praise: Edmund Goulding's Love, Battleship Potemkin, Trenker's Rebel, Die Nibelungen, and Tulpendiebe. It was incredible: three of these movies were directed by Jews, Potemkin glorified the Bolshevik revolution–and Tulpendiebe? Goebbels liked my film? How was this possible? How dare he!
But I admit–I was also intrigued. Did Goebbells's taste trump his ideology, or was this just one more blatant attempt at manipulation? But to what end? I needed to know what this meant, for my movies and for my future.