The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  Lorre was skeptical. “I was really a success on the stage and I did not want to appear in pictures,” he recalled in 1944. “I did not know then what it would be and I had no faith in it.” He remembered telling Lang that “my puss could not be photographed,” adding, “with a face like mine who could expect a career in films?” Lang held the thought, appreciating the irony in it. For now, Lorre balanced the fear of rejection against his “belief in miracles” and told Lang he would wait. “It was hard enough to turn down film offers just because of this future music,” confessed Lorre in an article for Mein Film, in which he reviewed his meteoric rise and naively announced plans for his next German film production. He posted the piece just days after fleeing Berlin in the wake of the Reichstag Fire.

  What Lorre failed to mention to Lang he also neglected to tell anyone else. Perhaps he attached no importance to it. Or maybe he had just forgotten about it. There was no reason to upset the director’s plans with news that he had already worked in film, albeit in a very small way. Anyway, Lang wanted to make a sound picture, not a silent one.

  Earlier in the year, Lorre had made his screen debut as a patient waiting to be seen by the dentist in Die verschwundene Frau (The Missing Wife), one of Austria’s last silent films. Despite his brief appearance, there was no mistaking his boyish looks and pained facial expressions. Produced by the Österreichisches Filmindustrie and directed by Karl Leiter, the “frightening occurrence in seven hilarious acts,” according to a publicity release, was originally released in Vienna on March 22, 1929 (and in Berlin on May 3, 1929). More curious than this inauspicious beginning in the movies was the fact that he told no one about it, not his brothers, not Celia, not the scores of interviewers who scoured his screen past. For the record—his record—M was his first film. He said it again and again. Far more crucial to Lorre was the fact that he had crashed upon the scene in an important film and catapulted to international success. He wanted to be remembered for M, not Die verschwundene Frau. And it worked … until 1996. Believed lost, a nitrate Belgian release print of the film surfaced in 1984. Twelve years later, during its restoration by the European Union’s Lumière Project, Lorre’s appearance was rediscovered. Not only was he uncredited on the film, but his name did not appear in any published cast lists, and obviously, as an obscure bit player, he was not mentioned in any review. His tracks were easy to cover.

  Although Alajos and Melanie had moved to Budapest in 1928, Lorre still had occasion to visit Vienna and see friends, drop by old haunts, and attend lectures by Alfred Adler at the Café Siller. Along with other members of the Kammerspiele, he also performed literary Kleinkunst for the film community at Café Kosmos. His performance in the variety show, along with a youthful photo of the actor wearing a white shirt and tie, even found its way onto the pages of Mein Film. There, too, Celia Lovsky drew him back to Café Central, whose “cool twilight” provided “the ideal lighting for recluses and eccentrics.” Its sky-lit inner court gave the café an “oddly ecclesiastical” impression, without the incense. In deep alcoves darkened with the “thick cloud-drift of cigarette smoke,” denizens cut circles of light with their intellectual vivacity.

  Satirist Karl Kraus, however, seemed more interested in cutting his opponents to ribbons. An acrimonious misanthrope, implacable cynic, and intransigent polemicist, he harbored a fanatical hatred for corruption in bureaucracy, vacuity in political life, and feuilletonism in the press.31 Kraus directed incessant attacks against Viennese newspapers from his militantly ethical periodical Die Fackel (the Torch), making mordant wit his shield and language his weapon in his war against the intellectual prostitution of the written word, whose impurity he considered a direct index of the moral decline of mankind. His outrage climaxed in the apocalyptic world-war drama Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Mankind), which Lorre later cited as one of his favorite books.

  Allegedly once “the great love” of Kraus’s life, Lovsky, who had appeared in productions of his surrealistic fantasies Traumstück (Dream Play) and Traumtheater (Dream Theater) in 1925, drew Lorre into his circle. The actor apparently satisfied Kraus’s stringent criteria for a great artist, who must act naturally and not rely on “pose and pathos,” and offstage must be a genuine, unpretentious, and warm person. Being a member of Kraus’s Stammtisch (reserved table), however, did not spare Lorre from his sarcastic wit. “My brother and I once went with Peter to the coffeehouse where Kraus used to hang out,” recalled Andrew. “And Kraus looked up over his glasses—he always peered above his glasses—and said, ‘Well, here is Peter with the boy scout troupe.’” At the lower end of the pecking order and owing what station he held to Lovsky, Lorre felt privileged to be at the center of the literary storm in Vienna.

  On October 20, 1929, Lorre appeared in Kraus’s documentary satire Die Unüberwindlichen (The Unconquerable), written between December 1927 and February 1928. The play chronicles the Békessy Affair, in which Vienna press czar Irme Békessy whitewashed a deadly crackdown on a political demonstration instigated by the city’s chief of police, Johannes Schober, in 1927. Kraus used the piece to expose the corrupt partnership between the press, the financiers, and the police of Vienna. He took his case to the progressive circle of Berlin, where he officially premiered the piece at the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz. Kraus had assembled an outstanding cast: Lorre as Barkassy (Békessy), Hans Peppler as police chief Wacker (Schober), Kurt Gerron as the shady profiteer Camillioni (Castiglioni), Ernst Ginsberg as the crusading journalist Arkus (Kraus), Leonard Steckel in the role of Veilchen, a goldentongued bureaucrat, and Celia Lovsky as a secretary. Playing the small role of a civil servant was Josef Almas, who had taken over the role of Moritz Stiefel when Lorre had dropped out of Frühlings Erwachen five weeks into its run. Doubling up on stage work and rehearsals may have compromised Lorre’s already fragile health. It is also conceivable that having made his mark as Moritz Stiefel, he accepted the lead role in Die Unüberwindlichen out of respect for its author.

  The production held few surprises. Kraus characterized Barkassy as a porcine figure with blond curly hair, soft manicured hands, and a nasal tone. The dogmatic publisher congratulates himself that his readers—who are spoonfed truth and lies until they see spots before their eyes—have come around to his point of view. In a split-stage technique, the journalist presents evidence of Barkassy’s criminal past—and present—to the police chief. True to life, he kicks the crook out of Vienna. Kraus, however, confuses fact and fiction by staging the newspaper magnate’s phoenix-like triumph over the forces of righteousness. The real journalist actually prevailed against Békessy, who fled to Paris and then to his native Budapest. Schober went on to become the chancellor of Austria in September 1929.

  Despite expectations of a longer run, the Volksbühne canceled the play after only one Sunday matinee performance, citing low ticket sales and Lorre’s health. “In reality, Lorre is well again and wants to play,” reported the Berliner Börsen Courier. Kraus surmised that the Volksbühne was not being honest about the “technical reasons” for dropping the evening performance and threatened to sue for damages. According to Kraus scholar Harry Zohn, the Austrian Embassy requested the cancellation of further performances, undoubtedly prompting Kraus to reflect about winning the battle but losing the war against the combined forces of his enemies.

  Given its topicality, Die Unüberwindlichen could not have sustained itself in Berlin. No one doubted Kraus’s ability to shred his victims with the sharpness of his words, but the audience regarded his mordacity as nonproductive, sterile, and monotonous, no matter how just the cause. Lorre barked, bellowed, and burst from within, but could not save the bone-dry piece. He yelled too much, although Kurt Pinthus, writing for the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, felt that “Lorre took the part with such devoting power one hardly noticed that he sometimes over-exerted himself.” The influential Herbert Jhering thought that the quick succession of roles had inhibited the maturation of Lorre’s acting skills: “He becomes loud instead of strong and,
unsure of such an extraordinary part which demands new sides of him, has to save himself in self-conscious shouting.”

  The stress and strain proved too much for Lorre’s perennially poor health. When a persistent cough triggered more bleeding from his bronchi, he took the advice—and probably the proffered financial assistance—of his friend Franz Theodor Csokor and sought shelter at a sanitarium in Badenweiler. From there he wrote Csokor on January 3, 1930, conveying deep appreciation for his friendship. “At a time when the fates had me in such a way in their claws,” wrote Lorre, “[there] seemed no residue of strength in me to carry further this senselessness. I thought I had finally reached an end … you know better about that than anyone else … the pain of those endless minutes in which the gray self of time took the last comfort and imposed sadness in eternity! … in these days it really went to an end with the old Peter with whom I have nothing any more in common, only this confounded image which you so often and flatteringly sang about.”

  Lorre recovered and credited his newfound health a “miracle” in which Csokor played a large “and maybe the most beautiful” part. He told Csokor:

  There can be no sense in the creation that I should store up this investment of sorrow and experience and fate to be dry and barren and should like the old Rockefeller play golf.

  (That’s certainly meant symbolically, Herr Doctor.)

  We shall sit together quite often and maybe I will tell you as the only one about it. And you will see an abyss which will make you shudder.

  But I am redeemed! As if a destiny is fulfilled and has freed me to act now. (You once wrote the face is there which is waiting for a destiny.) You can imagine how happy it makes me that a friend is there who has faithfully believed and waited where there didn’t seem to be any more sense and gave me a credit in his heart—far above the incidents of the profession—up to a calling!

  Lorre asked Csokor if he knew “how much it means to me to have you as a friend?!” Lorre knew and never forgot Csokor’s kindness. He believed that the curtain did not go up and down on a lasting friendship with him who had “seeing eyes and a knowing soul for me.” Although many of his friends had “behaved inhumanely,” said Lorre, it was “too small an experience to be named disappointment. Many friends behaved humanely and made it possible for me to recuperate here.”

  Anxious to tell Csokor everything, Lorre broke the news that he and Celia had become engaged at Christmas. “Believe me, it is good and we are good for each other. That all will be told. She comes now up to me and we shall probably stay here for fourteen days.”

  Obviously reluctant to jump back into the “witches cauldron,” he confessed that he “missed a lot—meaning nothing. I have a kind of Heimatgefühl here! For a gypsy—like me!! Write right away. I am full of joy.”32

  After a brief run in Carl Sternheim’s Der Kandidat (The Candidate), a political satire translated unsuccessfully from the French to the German political scene and staged at Berlin’s Kammerspiele, Lorre took a breather that ate up much of the rest of the year. By fall he felt sufficiently recovered to accept the first of what would become a long and happy association with radio. On October 5, 1930, he debuted on Funkstunde Berlin (Berlin Radio Hour), as a counselor in Jacques Offenbach’s Die Seufzerbrücke (The Bridge of Sighs), a two-act operetta set in Venice and arranged by Karl Kraus.33 Celia Lovksy played the part of a confidant to the wife of the doge.

  That same month, two years after Lorre’s introduction to Rudolph Joseph, he finally played at the Renaissance Theater, supplying some of the few laughs in an otherwise riveting murder mystery by celebrated Berlin jurist Max Alsberg and newspaper editor Otto Ernst Hesse.34 Voruntersuchung (Preliminary Investigation) underscored the mistakes of modern jurisprudence. Even the crown prince and Albert Einstein, who attended the premiere, “had a chance … to think about the relativity of the legal process and research of the law.” Contributing to the thundering success of the production by comically shading their parts were Lorre, Julius Falkenstein, and Ludwig Stössel. Already experienced in “proving again and again [his] impressive liveliness and performing power with smallest means,” Lorre squeezed every comic possibility from the supporting roles with the “amusing impudence of the cabaret performer.”

  Lorre returned in December to the Schiffbauerdamm Theater, where he appeared in Die Quadratur des Kreises, a love story set against the Russian housing shortage. Unbeknownst to each other, roommates and fellow Kosomols Wasja (Lorre), “a boy of normally serious inclinations … somewhat uncomfortable and self-conscious in his gaudy butterfly tie, the shiny puttees, plastered hair and well-pressed coat,” and Abram (Heinz Rühmann) marry on the same day. In order to accommodate both couples, they use a chalk line to divide their quarters into two apartments. Each half assumes the personality of its mistress. Wasja’s wife, Ludmilla (Hilde Körber), adorns her half with middleclass comforts, while Abram’s spouse, the liberated Tonya (Lotte Lenya) favors empty-walled austerity. Dividing their lives along party lines proves impractical. Abram finds Ludmilla’s home-cooked cutlet more filling than Marxist ideology, and Wasja satisfies his intellectual craving with Tonya’s party literature. The four decide they are mismatched and swap partners after the prerequisite divorces and marriages.

  Always the businessman, Aufricht pushed the play’s comic appeal at the expense of its political overtones. Given its warm reception—“so much laughing … that the walls shook and so much clapping the people’s hands hurt”—he comfortably projected at least a six-month run. After a few weeks, however, the turnout fell off. The worsening financial crisis ate away at Berliners’ pocketbooks, putting expensive theater tickets beyond reach. Street fighting between Communist and Nazi youths also discouraged theatergoers from venturing out at night. Aufricht made tickets available at discount prices, but he could not fill the theater.

  If critics faulted director Francesco von Mendelssohn for losing sight of the play’s instructive quality and for overemphasizing nonessentials, they rallied to the support of the actors, crediting Lorre and Rühmann with “terrific” virtuoso performances. “Peter loved the play,” observed Lotte Lenya, “because he was very funny when he did it. He loved anything which furthered his talents.”

  In 1946 scholar, critic, and translator Eric Bentley, who was the first to champion Bertolt Brecht’s cause in the United States, told the playwright that he had “a conception of art which few understand” and encouraged him to explain himself to American audiences. Since the 1920s, when he had borrowed the term epic to describe his own theater, Brecht had muddied the waters of understanding, first frustrating critics who scoffed at his ideas and later perplexing scholars, who took on the thankless task of doing what he should have done in his own lifetime. Like Brecht himself, of whom set designer Wolfgang Roth said, “he was very human, but it didn’t come through,” his epic theater suffered in translation.

  Brecht had begun railing against traditional theater, which he condemned as bankrupt, stupid, lazy, and degenerate, in the early 1920s. Always ready to take a swipe at “culture,” he championed boxing, which satisfied the demands of its audience. If German theater found its own form of sport, suggested the playwright, perhaps it too might connect with the public. The rules of the game lent character to his idea of creating a useful, objective, and entertaining activity that reflected “the mentality of our time.” In his 1926 stage production of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, he began laying the foundation for his epic style—simple gestures; clear, cool delivery; emotional realism. While sports gave him a new perspective on theater, Brecht’s studies in Marxism structured his theories with scientific method, further estranging him from the “sentimental element of a worn out bourgeoisie.” To his mind, by not keeping up with the times, classic theater, where “wit sparkles like fireworks or some sad occurrence moves my heart to compassion,” had become static, cramped, and superficial. The logical cycle of change demanded an adaptable form, at the same time dynamic, realistic, and functional. Brecht lear
ned that diagnosing an illness and treating it were not one and the same. “Invent a theory, dear Brecht!” advised Kammerspiele director Rudolf Frank after witnessing the artistic chaos of his Edward II. “If one presents Germans with a theory, they will swallow anything.” One theory, however, did not allow room for growth. For what ailed the theater, Brecht prescribed a course of treatment that borrowed eclectically from the medieval Japanese playwright Seami, Soviet director Vseolod Meyerhold, Karl Marx, Charles Chaplin, and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), among others. He built his theories from the ground up with methods that invited radical changes in form and content. While “bourgeois” theater lulled its audiences into a “magnetic sleep by warming up the numbed senses and giving the imagination a gentle rocking,” what Brecht wanted to do, wrote Eric Bentley, “is something closer to waking them up.” Peeling away the decorative layers of “irrelevant emotion” to uncover “not … a higher reality, or a deeper reality, but simply … reality” amounted to an intellectual adventure. Only by appealing to reason—and de-emphasizing emotion—could theater open the door to change.

  Brecht’s actors bore the burden of putting his theories into practice, but not before another blackboard lesson. In 1931 the dramatist schematized a formula that suggested “changes of emphasis” contrasting dramatic and epic methods. To limit the swept-away feeling of illusion inherent in “culinary” theater, an actor must detach himself from his character, not so much by stepping out of his role but by placing himself between it and the audience. By cooling off his performance, he could distance the spectator from feelings that dulled his ability to think critically about what he had just seen. Making the familiar seem unfamiliar challenged the audience to see things with fresh eyes.