The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  If German politics didn’t qualify as a crisis, it certainly fell into the category of a complication. Initially, Lorre had sought to stay out of it. “Peter was until the end of the 1940s an apolitical man,” said Eggebrecht, who was once a member of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party) and spent time in a concentration camp. “Then everything changes through conversations with many people—also me, and naturally through the experience of the German postwar world, with its reluctance to understand the criminal regime. I believe Peter eventually came to his political views.” In an interview given just before Der Verlorene began shooting, Lorre acknowledged the resentments that greeted returned émigrés and found them completely understandable. Others had knocked their heads against the same wall. Douglas Sirk, who briefly returned to Europe after the war, discovered an unwillingness to accept “any kind of interpretation of what life was like in Germany during the war…. I meet someone I knew from way back and he keeps telling me how bad things were for them, how they suffered, how they endured, how many examples he could give me of courage, and so on, and how splendid, comfortable and serene the life of an émigré must have been.”

  Lorre told the press he wanted to extinguish any ill feeling with tact. From the beginning, he claimed that his film would be psychological in nature: “It will not be a political film, that is politics will not be in the foreground, but people.” And for the most part, he held that thought. However, his firsthand view of postwar reality put a hard edge on his political sensibilities and turned his inside look out. “Five or six years after 1945,” said Eggebrecht, “we were all, naturally also Peter and I, burningly interested in the enlightening of the crimes of the Hitler State. We noticed already there were strong powers resisting the necessary reckoning.”

  Lorre discovered at close hand that the spirit of fascism was still alive, if not well, and more deeply ingrained than he had ever supposed at a distance. He found a devastated and demoralized but also cynical and self-pitying people who refused to accept responsibility for Nazi war crimes. Orson Welles expressed similar sentiments in a March 1951 issue of the Fortnightly. A German girl had told him that the German “feels naked without a uniform. He needs to march with lots of other Germans or he gets sulky. Also he must have somebody to bully.” The celebrated filmmaker wrote that far from breaking with the past, “millions of them are incurably Nazi-bent.” Like Lorre, Welles had come around to the numbing idea that there was “no cure at all for being German.”

  But which one, a “good” or a “bad” German? After drunkenly searching his hotel room for a mythical “good German” in Hotel Berlin (1945), Lorre’s Professor Koenig collapses in a fit of nervous laughter. Thomas Mann had no better luck turning up the “other” Germany. Unlike Brecht, who believed the few had forced their will upon the many, Mann held that the German character and Nazism were one and the same and divisible only by a purging of the national soul, which needed to begin with a decisive and utter military defeat: “Let the hour ripen when the Germans themselves settle accounts with the villains with a thoroughness, such as the world scarcely dares to hope from our unrevolutionary people.” There were not two Germanys, “a bad and a good,” as Brecht liked to believe, “but only one, whose best side had been turned by diabolic cunning into evil.”

  Germany’s “escape from reality,” wrote Hannah Arendt, an exiled intellectual who returned in 1950 to assess the scene, had become “an escape from responsibility.” Even the plight of the refugees, she observed, drew only public indifference: “This general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep rooted, stubborn, at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” De-Nazification ran only skin deep, like a cold cream applied to temporarily erase the wrinkles. Old ideologies hung on. “No one ever gave a thought to a ‘new’ beginning,” lamented Henry Pachter. Thanks to the 1951 Act of General Clemency, Nazis walked the streets, taught in the schools, and manned the city governments and business offices.

  Nonetheless, from the beginning, Rothe combined elements of both a good and a bad German. After all, it was the mixture of good and evil that gave Lorre’s screen characterizations depth and balance. However, if he had once sided with Brecht, he now leaned toward Mann.18 Only after he discovered that “crimes have been committed which no psychology can help to excuse” did Der Verlorene take a political turn and the neurotic doctor who “glided” into murder become a “murderer because the moral chaos of an unfortunate epoch had destroyed his equilibrium.”

  Shortly after the film’s release, Lorre admitted that the story had made it possible to take a critical look at Nazi Germany without direct explanations. How else could he benefit a people who, in Mann’s words, “learned nothing, understand nothing, regret nothing?” As his altruism soured into animosity, his focus shifted from the victim to the perpetrator and swept up Dr. Rothe in a political conspiracy reminiscent of the July 1944 mutiny of Reichswehr officers against Hitler.19 The “kitchen sink,” as it were, signified Lorre’s growing need to say more, to broaden his base from psychological mission to political platform. “Peter had a lot of hostility towards Germany,” said Pressburger. “He resented the Nazis and the crimes they committed and wanted to make Der Verlorene a sort of metaphor of Germany. I mean he was Germany. So he said this is me murdering a woman by accident, by anger, and it became a pleasure.” Friends who saw him shortly after he returned to the United States recalled that Lorre was deeply disturbed by conditions abroad. As late as 1962, he admitted that he could not swallow Germany’s desire for forgiveness and would never forget the lessons learned from the Nazi era.

  More than a case of mercy running dry, Der Verlorene reflected, however obscurely, Lorre’s struggle to come to grips with the issue of personal versus collective accountability. Hoesch’s arrival at the refugee camp reminds Rothe that man cannot sidestep his obedience to moral law. After all, debts must be paid. Like Rothe, the German people owed “interest and interest’s interest.” The film presented a darkly fatalistic correlate to Ludwig Marcuse’s conviction that “the rupture between the Fatherland and the émigrés from Hitler will heal only in the day that the last refugee who not only escaped but fought back is dead.” Could Germany cleanse itself by simply acknowledging its crimes? Or would it take the passing of a generation? Whatever hope Lorre held out for Rothe—that is, for Germany—seemingly vanishes in the final, foreboding scene when he steps into the path of a speeding locomotive.

  Early in 1951, the dark cloud that had been hanging over Der Verlorene since autumn burst, deluging the production with problems. As Eggebrecht and Lorre sharpened the story’s political edge, Mainz grew increasingly nervous. Whether or not he smelled a flop, as Fred Pressburger suggested, or hitched his star to the heroically happy Dr. Holl, FAMA’s first film, which was being shot at the same time, the Hamburg producer backed out, citing personal reasons. Despite growing friction with Lorre, Mainz agreed to extend FAMA’s “corporate cover.” The fractured consortium had no choice but to assume increased liability for the studio contract with Junge Film Union.

  Like John Gielgud on Secret Agent, Karl John filmed by day and appeared on stage in the evenings. Already stressed by Lorre’s loose working methods, the actor felt the additional pressure of getting to Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus by curtain time. On January 28, on his way home from a press ball, he broke his leg in a car accident that kept him in bed for six weeks. It was a lucky break for all but the actor, since it postponed outdoor shooting and bought muchneeded time to regroup. In addition, payment of insurance claims ended months of frantic scrambling for additional funds. Then on February 19, Arnold Pressburger died of a cerebral hemorrhage that Fred believed had been induced by production worries.

  With studio work near completion, tensions between Lorre and Grimm, his assistant director, had reached a boiling point and erupted into a “terrific fi
ght” in early January. In a letter tendering his apologies to Pressburger, Grimm said he had “accepted with joy” the job of collaborating on the script and working on the film, but that Lorre’s lack of dramaturgical experience caused him to question his own ability to meet that responsibility. By March things had again heated up. Before citing his reasons for leaving the film, Grimm reminded Fred he had been hired to “assist Mr. Lorre with his first directorial work … and to finish the production on time and within the planned budget.” Nothing in his “collective experience,” however, had prepared him for Lorre’s “novel kind of direction.” Wholesale improvisation of not only dialogue, but also the order of scenes and story line “meant that the script was … no longer a dependable foundation and that the schedule could not be met. Through this situation my work lost the basis for effective collaboration…. In this situation, artistic collaboration with Mr. Lorre became impossible.”

  If the Sturm und Drang of directing his first film weren’t bad enough, Lorre still faced the problem of naming his picture. The working titles, Bestie Mensch and Das Untier, would only inflame an already reactive public. Carl Rothe, Doctor of Medicine went too far in the other direction. To stir up positive publicity and come up with a suitable title, National decided to put the question to a group of viewers at a special screening of the film in late February 1951. The winner would receive one thousand deutsche marks. Among the 684 suggestions were “Gott führt uns wunderbar [God Leads Us Wonderfully], Augen sehen dich an [Eyes Look at You], Auswurf [Outcast], Kolportage [Rubbish], Raserei [Rage], Katharsis? …, Mysterium [Mystery], and Pfui.” In the end, the reward for the title, Der Verlorene (The Lost One) went to Eggebrecht. “Naturally this theme,” said the writer, “reflected Peter’s totally depressed situation.”

  Lorre had completed filming without a finished script. “We had always improvised with script pages,” said Bartning, “and one day I got a weird feeling in my stomach. ‘Listen,’ I said to Lorre, ‘the only thing that we have of the film is the rough-cut copy and otherwise no script. Nothing.’” Bartning recommended that he write a continuity script, which would be “completely without artistry or literary ambition.” For several days, he worked alongside a secretary dictating dialogue and recording and numbering takes, which, with the help of a shooting report, they arranged in chronological order. On March 22, or Green Thursday, as he remembered it, Bartning took a taxi to the train station.20 Climbing aboard, he heard fire sirens but took no special note of them. He sat down and lightly dozed. Suddenly, he heard someone call his name.

  “‘Is Mr. Bartning here?’ shouted a train official.

  ‘Hello, I’m he.’

  ‘You’ve been called back at once to Hamburg. Your cutting room has burned down.’ Yes, that was a wrench in the works,” recalled the editor with classic understatement.

  Bartning had left his assistants, Margot Schubert and Hanni Schäfer, at the Rhythmoton film synchronization studio on Harvestehuder Weg. When an electric heater shorted, flames shot out and ignited a roll of film. The women cracked the door and yelled for help, then slipped out and closed off the room, robbing the fire of oxygen and preventing its spread. Schubert tore the fire extinguishers off the wall, but the intense heat forced her to retreat. An hour later, firemen had the flames under control, but the editing room had been completely destroyed.

  Bartning re-edited the work print from thirty thousand meters of negative film stock that had been stored at a copying facility. “The reconstruction was tedious and boring,” he later recalled, “but relatively possible.” On Good Friday he and his assistant worked through the charred and soaked shooting report, turning fragile pages that disintegrated on touch. Barely able to read the numbers, they compiled a new list for the copyist, so that Der Verlorene could rise again after Easter.

  Lorre did not stick around for the resurrection. Having amassed numerous debts, he left Hamburg without good-byes. “He suddenly disappeared,” remembered Bartning, “and the grocery where they were getting their groceries was looking behind sadly. He had received a lot of money from the firm and he hadn’t paid a single penny in taxes. It is supposed [the tax collector] was after his ass.”

  Junge Film Union, which had not been paid the last installment for the use of its studio, knew just how the tax collector felt. Facing bankruptcy, National was no longer a player in what turned into a production war. Junge Film Union turned to Fifi, which, in turn, turned on it. Brought in to help sort out the tangled issues of sale, distribution, and foreign rights—and the incessant question of how Lorre could be prevented from taking money out, “because he tried like crazy”—Pressburger called on German producers Erich Pommer and Günther Stapenhorst (as arbitrators) and the requisite number of lawyers, who fed the ongoing negotiations.

  Pressburger also saw to it that the film was completed. As a film editor, he had ideas of his own. “Pressburger sat down with me at the cutting room table and was very complaining,” said Bartning, who chalked up his distrust—“perhaps he didn’t know who had previously been a Nazi”—to “crazy” Jewish complexes against Germans. “He probably found that everything wasn’t as good as he expected and that one had to do everything completely differently.”

  “My suggestions were very minor actually,” countered Pressburger. “I thought things were too long and I wanted to edit. I suggested that they should cut certain things shorter.”

  The German news media added to the problems that plagued the film by giving Lorre a dose of negative publicity. He had quietly gone about the business of filmmaking unaware that his secrecy was alarming the German public.21 Pulp fiction featuring “murder and violence” as well as “seduction, naive love, sweet life, depravity and unbridled longings” flooded West Germany after 1950, sensitizing citizens to inflammatory themes. Before anyone had screened even a rough-cut print of Der Verlorene, the press rumored that the picture showed seven graphic sexual crimes. When the Münchner Merkur, in an article titled “Das Untier vor den Toren” (“The Monster before the Door”), stated that the murder of “numerous” women “is committed here continuously psychopathically,” publicist Hellmut Schlien directed a reply: “The fact is that the entire film only contains four deaths. Singled out in one case the superficial observer would view the murder of the unknown woman in the overhead railway to be a Lustmörder.”

  Fearful that scenes of violence and willful murder would incite youthful audiences, a “Bonner Dramaturgie” had reportedly warned Lorre to tone down any contentious material.22 A misinformed press even claimed that the production team had responded to impending censorship by eliminating all but two murders and substituting a subplot about a political conspiracy. Eggebrecht disputed the charge, maintaining that “censors did not force us to make changes, as far as I was involved in the work. I can assure you of that.”

  On June 21 an “already suspicious” Freiwillige Selbskontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK), a voluntary control board of film administration charged with preventing movies from exerting negative moral, religious, or political influences, actually approved Der Verlorene and imposed only two minor restrictions: it could not be shown on designated religious and legal holidays or to viewers below sixteen years of age.23

  Attempting to stem the tide of supposition, Lorre held a special screening in Munich on June 26, his forty-seventh birthday, for friends and members of the press. They discovered that he had, like Fritz Lang twenty years earlier, left the murders of Renate Mannhardt and Lotte Rausch to the imagination and had very simply staged that of Karl John. However, the little positive publicity that resulted from the preview failed to check the picture’s growing notoriety.

  Three days before the film’s Frankfurt premiere, the Münchner Illustrierte ran the first installment of a serialized version of Der Verlorene “von Peter Lorre.” Its appearance added fuel to the fire. It is hard to say on which side of the argument the publication fell. As publicity, it ushered in and supplemented the run of the film—the twenty-two-chapter serial
actually outlasted the showing by nearly two months. It also repaid Lorre’s debt to Egon Jameson. If the journalist was to realize anything from the project based on his own research, he might at least earn credit in the press. For purely financial reasons, however, he apparently agreed to drop his byline. The paper undoubtedly preferred to trade on the strength of Lorre’s name.

  A small note in Film Press, August 15, 1951, reported that Jameson was writing a novelization of Der Verlorene, loosely based on the film script, for the Münchner Illustrierte.24 Clearly inspired by the original concept of Das Untier, the serialized story reinforced rumors that Lorre had indeed reached into the past for the pathological roots of the film. Egon Jameson incorporated dialogue taken verbatim from an early version of the script, indicating either that he contributed to the development of the screenplay or that he had a free hand to plagiarize lines eliminated during the evolution of the story.

  After “discovering” Rothe’s diary—written in green, red, and black ink—in a leather briefcase, Jameson set up a first-person narrative reminiscent of Maupassant’s “The Horla.” He presents the doctor as a grown-up M, who gives a mature, albeit introspective, voice to his urges. Rothe’s love/hate relationship with the fiery Inge, who has caught him on the rebound, thoroughly deranges his rational sensibilities. While resisting his proposals of marriage, she nonetheless steals his research, extorts money from him, and dallies with “Wölfchen” Hoesch. True to the film, his deadly alter ego steps forward to revenge the wrong: “My hand. It doesn’t obey me anymore…. Fatigue is paralyzing my muscles…. The eyes are closing. A rustling is starting. I see colorful circles, which, like color games, dance around each other.”