The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  When the newspaper published the report, it drew no comment. In the “still burning and bleeding Europe,” no one cared “that one of the tortured humans lost his nerve and put a cruel end to his existence out of seeming hopelessness.” Such things happened every day. The obscure notice concerned Jameson, who thought it “pointed to a danger for our future lives.” Working then for Deutsche allgemeine Nachrichtenagentur, the journalist sought answers to the mystery shrouded in forged documents and dark existences. At the refugee camp Elbe-Düwenstedt, Jameson turned up a newspaper photograph of the doctor during his involvement as an expert witness in a poison murder case. The journalist circulated the picture, to no avail. He finally broke the case on assignment in Stockholm, where he uncovered a source that identified the man in the picture. Carl N. was actually Dr. Carl Rothe of Hamburg. Lorre listened intently to the tragic story. Suddenly, he interrupted the quiet that had crept into the conversation: “This will be my new film.”

  Actually, Lorre already had a film, but this new angle served other needs. The press reported that he had returned to Germany to, in effect, remake M and reclaim his international stature. Lorre denied it. “Movies that are classics or prove themselves to be hits of the time,” he later pointed out, “one should under no circumstances allow to come about again.” Any broad similarities between the actual tragedies were coincidental and incidental to his grand design of interfusing documentary sobriety and artistic symbolism. “I had promised myself never again to produce a film like M or a sex murder,” explained Lorre, “and until this time I have been able to be true to this course. Just recently I changed my mind because of this remarkable eyewitness report from Egon about a figure that touched me so strongly that I wanted to make this film.” Besides diffusing criticism for repeating himself, Egon’s story idea furthered the greater purpose of helping Germany overcome its recent past. “If my film helps to lighten the conscience of only a single man,” stated Lorre, “then it will not be made for nothing.”

  Having turned his room at Wigger’s into an office where he held consultations and took telephone calls, Lorre got down to the business of making his dream a reality. He first called on an old friend. Born in Pozsony, Hungary (Slovak: Bratislava), in 1885, Arnold Pressburger had abandoned a singing and acting career in Vienna and cofounded Verleihfirma Philipp und Pressburger, a film distribution company, in 1909. Four years later, he moved into production, specializing in multilingual versions, an expertise central to Lorre’s plans for bilingual translations of his new movie. In 1932 he established Cine-Allianz under the corporate umbrella of UFA. With the rise of Hitler, Pressburger left Germany for England to work with Alexander Korda and then emigrated to New York in 1939 and finally to Hollywood, where he produced Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (1943). In Hollywood Pressburger founded Arnold Productions, from which Lorre had received an offer in April 1945 to star in a film tentatively titled Vidocq. Based on the memoirs of François Eugène Vidocq, A Scandal in Paris (1945), as it was subsequently called, traces the life of a crook who becomes the head of the French Sûretè. Warner Bros. exercised its contractual rights and rushed Lorre into The Verdict (1946), aborting what promised to be an interesting role, ultimately played by George Sanders. It would appear that Pressburger cast Lorre over the objections of the director, Douglas Sirk, who later commented that “Lorre was a good actor. He could have been a very good Richard III on the stage. But he couldn’t do just anything. For example, he couldn’t have done the Vidocq part.” The “risk-happy” producer did not give up on the idea of putting Lorre in one of his films and even recruiting him as a director.

  Pressburger, now an American citizen, returned to Germany in January 1950 to explore new film possibilities abroad. Though he failed to get his foot in the door, the producer did win reimbursement from the German government for the confiscation of Cine-Allianz by the Nazis. “Desperate to make a film,” said Arnold’s son, Fred, “Peter wanted my father to arrange it. It was purely a kindness on his part, because he esteemed Peter as an actor.”

  What Lorre wanted was another M, a classic film that would put him back at the top of his profession. Eager to trade grease paint for a director’s chair, he imagined making a film, free of conditions and restraints, from beginning to end. The actor-director held on to an old dream of creating “a production team that sticks together and can go anywhere and do anything to make a film or a play” without “the responsibility to a company and the weight of departmental overheads.” Der Spiegel reported that “in making frequent trips to Munich and Hamburg, he keeps his finger on the German film pulse.” Lorre thought it “weak” and recommended fewer and better films. He believed that only such a team could bring about “a truly good and remarkable film.” Looking ahead, he envisioned German-and English-language versions and projected a new spirit of German-American filmmaking cooperation, which, he explained, had the obvious advantages of artistic freedom, economic savings, and an expanded market. Fast developing a producer’s sensibilities, he also emphasized the need to export movies.

  Pressburger cobbled together a shaky financial partnership with Hamburg connections. Sugar magnate Julius de Crignis’s Hamburger Filmfinanzierungs-GmbH (Fifi) supplied the bulk of the backing, with producer Friedrich Mainz and Pressburger picking up the balance.4 Director of the Tobis Film Company from 1929 to 1937, Mainz had established himself as an independent in 1946, producing more than two hundred films by 1950. That same year he established his Hamburg-based FAMA (Friedrich A. Mainz-Film GmbH), which provided the organizational infrastructure of a parent company. For studio facilities, Pressburger turned to Junge Film Union in Bendesdorf. The newly formed National Film GmbH, also under the de Crignis banner, would distribute the film.

  In July Lorre updated the press on his progress, noting his collaboration with Benno Vigny on an untitled script. If the coauthors were at a loss for words, the distributor was not. Anxious to begin publicizing the picture, National needed a name and slapped Bestie Mensch (The Human Beast) on the planned production. Lorre too had gotten well ahead of himself with expectations that shooting would begin in September. Not until August 15 did Pressburger actually sign Vigny for thirty thousand deutsche marks to write a screenplay based on his original short story. For another three thousand, he agreed to give up rights to novelization, but he was allowed to use his original story with the title “Das Untier” without reference to the Lorre film.

  What National had temporarily titled Bestie Mensch was now Das Untier. Lorre was at it again, implied the Hamburger Echo, which claimed he “is going to kill three women this time.” Although “Lorre wanted to escape his American fate,” remembered friend and screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht, “he consciously connected with M; that cannot be disputed.” C.O. Bartning agreed that “it was completely clear that he had taken up with M. Consciously, I don’t know. He probably would have denied it.”

  In an interview given several days after the premiere of the picture, Lorre said “it was just common sense to take the line I have become known for in the United States. As you can see, ‘The Lost One’ [Der Verlorene, the film’s final title] is a man who glides into murder. But I certainly did not want to repeat myself. So we set the story of my psychopathic hero against the background of Hitler Germany.”

  Continuing his thought for the Italian periodical Cinema the following week, he explained that the “Germany of the 1930s and that of Hitler during World War II is the same Germany. You can change without a break from one to the other. Without the murderer of Düsseldorf, the murderer of Hamburg would be unthinkable. Both represent in different form one and the same evil. The fifteen-twenty years in between are unimportant. One might have expected more explanation from Mr. Lang and his ex-wife (Thea von Harbou) about the meaning of M.”

  Catharine Lorre believed that her father “was afraid of breaking away from something in which he had been secured for so long, had made his living through and was known for.” Lorre, however, balked at the suggestion he was suf
fering an identity crisis. “I do not object to being typed, as the saying is,” he had generalized a year earlier, “so long as the role permits a certain amount of creative effort.”

  Invited to appear at Hamburg’s newly established Amerika-Haus, the first of seven Department of State-sponsored cultural and information centers charged with explaining America to the German people, Lorre arrived in town on August 9.5 The next evening, Egon Jameson introduced the actor to a packed house. Accompanied by Dr. Gerth at the piano, he recited “The Tell-Tale Heart” to a receptive German and American audience. According to a local reporter, those who met him for the first time found Lorre “radiantly fascinating.” Nonetheless, his unadvertised appearance drew only a postscript in the Hamburger Abendblatt, which took more interest in Orson Welles, whose traveling show, An Evening with Orson Welles, played Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg—overlapping Lorre’s appearance—before moving on to Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bad Oeynhausen, and Berlin.

  Meanwhile, preparations to begin shooting ground forward. In mid-September, Mainz signed an agreement with Rolf Meyer of Junge Film Union spelling out the terms for the use of its studio. The Lorre production team guaranteed thirty days of work, at a daily rate of eighteen hundred deutsche marks. Meyer would be paid in four installments.

  Several weeks later, Brecht, Ruth Berlau, director Jacob Geis, and writer Emil Burri dropped in on Lorre, whom they had expected to possibly show up in March. Although jaundiced, he was “as fresh as ever,” said Brecht in a letter to Elisabeth Hauptmann, and very much impressed Burri and Geis. In January, apparently unaware that Lorre had returned to Germany, Brecht had couched an appeal in the form of a poem, “An den Schauspieler P.L. im Exil” (“To the Actor P.L. in Exile”):

  Listen, we are calling you back. Driven out

  You must now return. The country

  Out of which you were driven flowed once

  With milk and honey. You are being called back

  To a country that has been destroyed.

  And we have nothing more

  To offer you than the fact that you are needed.

  Poor or rich

  Sick or healthy

  Forget everything

  And come.

  Already, Lorre’s poor health had disappointed Brecht’s hopes of starring him in a performance of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Herr Puntila and His Servant Matti) at the opening of the Berliner Ensemble the previous November. Reluctant to give up on the actor, he now held out a very attractive carrot, the role of Hamlet. Moreover, Brecht told Lorre that he and Burri planned to move forward with Der Mantel. He remained silent on a third project in which he wanted to involve Lorre: a two-part morality play titled Salzburger Totentanz (The Salzburg Dance of Death). Brecht cast Lorre as Death, not a macabre or horrific apparition after Hollywood fashion, but as a dead-again wheeler-dealer. He apparently never told the actor of his plans, possibly because he had produced only five tiny fragments of the play by 1950–51.

  Brecht’s overtures did not bring Lorre to East Berlin. The actor had not returned to Germany—poor and sick—to work with his old friend, but to take his first, awkward steps toward independence. Brecht did not react in either letter or work journal. Whether Lorre was chasing windmills or honestly struggling to rise from the Hollywood morass hardly mattered. The invitations stopped. By failing to choose, he had chosen.

  On October 27, 1950, Benno Vigny delivered a screenplay, “that he has worked on with Peter Lorre,” to Pressburger. His inability to continue work because of health reasons marked the first chapter in the troubled history of a script that never reached completion. Unhappy with the screenplay and intent on integrating the story of Dr. Carl Rothe, Lorre enlisted the help of directorscreenwriter Helmut Käutner. During a two-week workshop in Munich, Lorre, Käutner, and assistant director Hans Grimm produced what a cued press enthusiastically described as a second script. The revised screenplay weighed the enormity of the mass crimes sponsored by the state against the fate of a single human being, a murderer who becomes a victim of murderous times.

  To shoot the picture, Lorre enlisted the soft-spoken, self-possessed Vaclav Vich, a Czechoslovakian with a strong postwar background in Italian neorealism. Bumping into many available actors in Hamburg afforded Lorre the luxury of selectively choosing his cast. He filled the male roles with experienced actors from stage and screen. Helmut Rudolph, looking more like a bank president than a Nazi officer, played the Abwehr colonel who cannot stand the sight of blood. Karl John, a featured character actor from Berlin’s Deutsches Theater, assumed the more important role of the Gestapo agent.6 For the role of his elderly landlady and mother of his fiancée, Lorre cast Johanna Hofer, the wife of actor Fritz Kortner.

  One can’t help believing, given their reports, that Lorre gave more attention to filling the other four female parts. After all, as murder victims, they defined the darker side of his character. Renate Mannhardt, who played his fiancée and the first murder victim, had worked with Käutner on Auf wiedersehen Franziska (1941), Zirkus Renz (1943), and Via Mala (1948). Gisela Trowe, who portrayed the prostitute, was recommended by Brecht. Eva-Ingeborg Scholz came up from Berlin’s Renaissance Theater. Lotte Rausch, who had gotten her start as a comedienne under Carl Froelich in Wenn wir alle Engel wären (If We Were All Angels, 1936), stepped into the unlikely role of a war widow whose overtures of availability end in death.

  The audition process was anything but typical. Gisela Trowe met Lorre and Vich at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg. He asked her to sit down, while “he walked up and down in the room, then stood in front of me and had a little leather riding crop which he whipped against his thigh.” After telling her that he was making a film, Lorre suddenly, “without transition,” asked her to walk to the door.

  “That was quite nice. Would you please take off your shoes?” Then he asked me to wiggle my bum, which I did.

  “Now come back relaxed and a little bit provocatively.”

  I have to say this appeared very strange to me. I had never had to do this before in my life.

  When Trowe asked what the film was about, Lorre sidestepped the question, telling her he didn’t really know yet. He then proceeded to “ask holes in her stomach” about Berlin, the theater, Gründgens, and so on. “He was enormously patient when one was talking,” recalled Trowe. “I always had the feeling, how can he judge if one is an actor or not. But then he said, ‘You can leave that to me. I know what I want.’” If the interview had only been strange, she later admitted, she might have run away. But Lorre’s “strong sensual radiation” held her there: “He filled the room … though he was very thin and fragile. I had never met a man with this radiation, this aura.”

  Lotte Rausch arrived thinking she would be asked to supply comic relief between the darker moments. Instead of discussing the role, Lorre just sat there.

  “Yes, make it good, Lotte,” he finally said. As he continued to stare, wordless, into her eyes, she became frightened.

  “Why are you staring at me?”

  “Just be calm, yes. Nothing will happen to you,” he answered with his “mocking attitude and always tortured, effective laugh.”

  The next day, the same thing. She wanted to run away, but he pushed her gently back into her chair.

  “Fear? That’s good. And—I mean by that, what happens between us in the film must also be fear. But yet still more: Hunger for life. And that strangles fear.”

  Nerves shot, she nonetheless returned a third time.

  “Something in Lorre the demon bound her,” related his publicist. “And then everything else fell away.”

  “Now I know what I have to play and how I have to play it,” said Rausch, expressing her “moment of sudden enlightenment.”

  “Everyone felt at first that there was a forcing of a foreign will upon themselves,” explained the pressbook, “and fought against it until they sensed that Lorre was not trying to destroy the self-assurance of the actors with his methods, but rather was pressing to the c
ore, and wanted to dissolve layer by layer that which other directors had put into the actor or the actress.”

  Renate Mannhardt waited for Lorre in his dressing room. In stepped an unshaven and tired-looking little man. When she looked into his eyes, however, her initial impression melted away. “I knew in the same moment,” she said, “that I would be able to trust myself to this director unreservedly, because in his expression lay goodness and knowledge about all human suffering and overcoming it.”

  In the smaller but nonetheless important position of personal assistant, Lorre cast Annemarie Hanna Brenning. Born in Cuxhaven in 1922, the attractive brunette graduated from the Staatlichen Schauspielschule in Hamburg in 1940. Stage work soon brought her to Berlin as one of the bright lights in UFA’s new generation of artists, but the war arrested her development as a screen actress. After serving in the army, Brenning appeared at the Jungen Theater and Kabarett Bonbonniere in Hamburg before accepting work as a script assistant. A leg injury, sustained while running an errand for National Film, put her in Wigger’s Kurheim. There she met Lorre, who hired her to help him with his new screenplay. Annemarie’s contribution appears to have been more personal than professional. Although she served no clearly defined function and received only a nominal salary, she never left Lorre’s side. “She wasn’t really taken seriously by anyone,” recalled Pressburger. “She was sort of a floating girl [who] appeared to be absolutely devoted to Peter.”

  He held an unusual track record that way. How he consistently attracted such handsome women always baffled him. After being shown a photograph of Annemarie several years later, writer Herb Meadow asked him, “How is it possible for anybody as ugly as you to be married to anybody as nice as that?”