The Lost One

by Stephen D. Youngkin

  “If I correctly combine all the scribbles and the hints which are on these pages of the diary of Dr. Carl Rothe,” analyzes Jameson’s narrator, who keeps a clinical distance, “so is the unhappy man chasing through the empty streets without a purpose. In fear of himself. He is not able to think clearly or even to think to the end, as if he had to flee from that unknown which is in him, which grabs him, strangling him, who lets him do things he would never do with a healthy mind. His desperation growing every minute in which his perception becomes clearer. There is no escape.”

  “I didn’t murder because I wanted to,” resumes Rothe. “A second strange person living in me strangled her.”

  To atone for his sin, the doctor puts his own life at risk rescuing people: “I will save people. With the one-hundredth person I will be free again. If I die, all the better.” The hero of the burning street earns the nickname “Angel of Rubble.” However, the very private side of his public figure continues to kill young women, four more to be precise. And like Beckert, afterward he remembers only that he has “to kill. I must. I can’t live anymore without killing. Yes. Yes. I am broken apart into two different beings. Yes, and the one being has to kill.”

  Finally, Rothe resolves to kill in “full consciousness.”

  “One piece of dirt less! One piece of garbage of this time! You! Winkler! I! Away with us!”

  On a cynical note, Hoesch concludes, “You’re not going to accomplish anything, Rothe. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter! … no rooster is going to crow over us.”

  He lets the pistol fall.

  “I wasn’t prepared for so much impertinence,” reflects Rothe. “Or didn’t I have the strength to pull the trigger?”

  After the war, however, he succeeds.

  On his deathbed, Hoesch agrees to cooperate with the police only after seeing Rothe. When they refuse, he tells them, “Then I won’t talk.”

  On October 2, 1945, Rothe keeps his rendezvous with the train.

  National’s propaganda-drumming pressbook was stuffed with meaty text promoting the salutary nature of the film. “No Freely Invented Film” reviewed the factual basis of the story. In “Der unaufgeklärte Mord—ein Zeitproblem!” (“The Unexpected Murder—A Problem of the Time!”), Hamburg’s chief state attorney, Gerhard F. Kramer, praised the picture’s “enlightened explanation” of the soaring postwar homicide rate and even dragged Schiller out of the closet for literary ballast. Covering all bases—with the rebirth of the German cinema representing home plate—“A Historical Narrative and a Man’s Confession” spoke to the universal meaning of the film’s “indictment and admonition raised to humanity.” The remaining pieces introduced cast and crew and highlighted Lorre’s artistic personality, his pursuit of reality before and behind the camera, and his unselfish working methods. All was fodder for the newspapers willing to run it. Few did.

  More controversy brewed south of Germany. In clearing Der Verlorene, the FSK had paved the way for its entry in the Venice Biennale’s 12th International Exhibition of Cinematic Art, which ran from August 20 to September 10, 1951. Although more skeptical observers agreed with American actress Myrna Loy, who considered the Venice Film Festival “essentially a showcase for the burgeoning postwar Italian film industry,” it attracted entries from all over the world. Possibly hoping to curry favor with German audiences, Lorre publicly declared that he preferred to premiere the picture in Germany, not Italy. The statement, suggested Pressburger in 1985, should be taken with a grain of salt. Far from resisting the idea of entering Der Verlorene in the competition, Lorre was delighted. “We were both for it,” reiterated Pressburger. “Submitting a film to a festival is not a premiere, really. It could only help Lorre.”

  The filmmaker traveled to Venice on September 6, explicitly to request admission to the Biennale. “Rumor-mongers” had already speculated that Der Verlorene would be excluded from the program for political reasons.25 Some apparently feared it might cast Germany in a bad light. The same jury, suggested Die Welt’s Ernst v.d. Decken, that sought to publicly acknowledge “those films which testify to a genuine effort toward the progress of cinematography as a means of artistic expression” balked at lending credence to a film that fell short of “spreading civilisation and culture, and of promoting the brotherhood of Nations.” Even Fred Pressburger believed there was “a great deal of hostility towards the film, particularly by official or semi-official sources.” Decken indicated that Director Antonio Petrucci and a representative from the Bonner Bundeshaus had agreed to schedule only two German entries in Venice, Lockende Gefahr (The Allure of Danger, 1950), the story of a boy who saves a fisherman from acting on his criminal urges, and Das Doppelte Lottchen (Little Lotty Times Two, 1950), in which separated twin sisters happily reunite their parents. In the end, a press release from the committee officially quelled the rumors with news that Der Verlorene “was not included in the calendar because it was not certain that a good copy could be ready in time, and because it was not known whether the author [Lorre] had decided to enter the competition.” Whatever the reasons for its omission, German journalists fought stubbornly for its inclusion.

  On September 9, one day before the festival closed, an unsubtitled print of Der Verlorene was finally screened. Reporting for Films in Review, Robert F. Hawkins wrote that “Der Verlorene, seen this afternoon, proved to be one of the best postwar German films. It is splendidly directed and acted (by Peter Lorre), and is marred only by a split script which tries to handle two major themes simultaneously: a man’s mental condition and German resistance movements during the Hitler regime.” Its entry generated some controversy and, by default, a good measure of publicity, but the film won no prizes. First place went to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) capturing a Special Jury Prize and the prize for Best Actress for Vivien Leigh.

  Der Verlorene premiered at the Turm Palast in Frankfurt am Main on Tuesday, September 18, 1951. Its ten-day run played to scant and restless audiences. Although Lorre accused National of not getting behind the film, he had only himself to blame for not taking up the slack in its marketing campaign. In one of his few promotional appearances, he turned up at the Heidelberg Film Club’s evening showing of Der Verlorene at the Capitol, where he received public thanks and heartfelt applause for donating the proceeds to the city’s building lottery.

  Bartning remembered feeling “mad and disappointed” when he saw the film at Berlin’s Delphi Theater. “My wife had to hold me down,” he angrily recalled, “because I would have run on the stage and proclaimed, ‘That is not the film,’ so wild was I…. I never saw it again.” Few Germans even saw it once, and those who did were not enthusiastic. “No one was there,” said Bartning. “People went out embarrassed. No applause. Nothing. People simply went out.”

  Heavy press coverage of the premiere told Lorre that he had struck a nerve. Quite predictably, Der Verlorene became an instant focus of controversy, “the hottest iron of the last five years, the lost one in the midst of those who are out of their minds.” German reviewers agreed to disagree on almost every aspect of the film. Disgusted with the mediocrity of postwar cinema, Alexandre Alexandre, writing for the Düsseldorf Der Mittag, pointed out that “not large sums of money make truly valuable films, not super-modern, technologically equipped studios, nor stars whose salaries often stand in opposition to their performances and their enthusiasm for the art of making movies … but poets—film poets.” Lorre proved it “possible to escape the pattern which threatened to strangle the German postwar movie.” German movie critics apparently agreed because they voted him Film Revue’s “Bambi” prize for the “most artistic film” of 1951. For others, however, renewing old forms did not signify new beginnings. Der Verlorene brought to mind a time of unparalleled expressiveness in the arts, but its sense of cynicism recalled too strongly a similar trend of the Weimar years.

  Der Verlorene‘s fusing of pathology and politics also raised eyebrows—and hackles. The Hamburger Echo’s �
��St-e” understood how the “regime of inhumanity breaks down the barrier between human and beast.” “G-z,” however, writing for the Stuttgarter Zeitung, argued that one “cannot mix a lust murder with an indictment of a political system.” In Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gunter Groll stated that the film didn’t clearly explain “how a man becomes a murderer in the witches’ cauldron of murderous times.” He believed it was wrong to show a “timeless type” as “typical of the times” and “an exception as universal and symbolic.” After all, lust murder was not specific to the Third Reich, but could happen anywhere and anytime—wherever conditions are right, Lorre might have added.26

  The Filmbewertungsstelle der Länder der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Film Evaluation Office of the States of the Federal German Republic), which stood next in line after the FSK to pass judgment on Der Verlorene, found for the critics, who believed that “one cannot touch the nerves with one crime and rouse the flaming moral anger with other crimes.” On September 6, 1951, shortly after beginning its rating system, the FBL awarded Der Verlorene the Prädikat “wertvoll” (valuable), which guaranteed a 50 percent tax reduction and a wider audience. Judging by the criteria—originality and difficulty of the theme, cultural and present value, artistic-technical form, single performances (e.g., direction, acting, photography, and so on)—the Lorre production might well have anticipated the Prädikat “besonders wertvoll” (especially valuable).27

  Dominated by government officials, with minority representation by professionals in private practices, film journalists, representatives from the film industry, and churches, the commission explained that after “long and intensive discussion,” it could not give the higher of the two ratings: “The first reason was that, despite the horrible consequences for which the environment is to blame, in the beginning it deals with an act of pathological insanity. It is through this that the first deed is missing a last motivation. It cannot be based directly on the circumstances of our state system in the Third Reich and also not alone from the human aspects. Even if it is recognized that the movie in its further handling shows an ethically and politically positive tendency, the macabre starting point does not allow the granting of a higher Prädikat.”

  Salvaging what they could, National excerpted another paragraph from the commission’s opinion that put a better face on the “wertvoll” rating and pushed it into print: “This action, which rests on a true occurrence, has been formed with very unusual forcefulness. The quality of the acting by Peter Lorre and the other actors, and the direction and the camera are from a cinematic power of expression as no other German film of the last years and as almost no foreign film of the postwar period has shown. In addition to this very special artistic performance stands also the tendency of the film, which shows in an extremely necessary and impressive way to what kind of destruction of an individual a dictatorially guided state can lead.”

  Few newspapers took the bait, however, undoubtedly reluctant to fly in the face of a growing consensus that acknowledging the past meant succumbing to it. “Etched black on black,” Lorre’s film reputedly shrouded viewers in a “nihilistic fog” that presumed the world is inherently bad and man bestial. Der Verlorene “burdens the senses, troubles the heart and suffocates the hopes,” warned Manes Kadow in the Frankfurter Neue Press. He cautioned audiences to defend themselves against the “smartly shaded excuse of our mental fatigue. It is trapped in analysis. Even in psychoanalysis. Its statue is hatred and revenge, the helplessness and longing. We need more.” Setting Lorre’s “hopeless hero” against the chaos and confusion of the times, such critics deplored the dark fatalism of a human being “not worth pitying in his passivity, in his soft drifting away.” Psychopathic impulses neither merited sympathy nor served a tragic function. However artistically courageous Lorre’s walk through the “jungle of art,” it belonged to the “boundary zone of life” and Dr. Karl Rothe’s pathological excesses in the psychological textbooks.

  Alexandre Alexandre, writing for Frankfurt’s Abendpost, declared that if Lorre had gotten into “the devilish workings of hypocrisy, unconcealed cynicism, easy responsibility, wormy morals, bestiality and unchained madness of our epoch,” he had no right to do so, having trespassed on history through which he had not lived. Vocal detractors even took sharp aim at his “small boy’s picture of the resistance,” which played like a parody of the “July putsch.”

  While some critics did not like what he was saying, others liked the way he said it. “He alone convinces,” wrote Christian Ferber in Munich’s Neue Zeitung, “a guy like a well-built cello; elegant in the curves, carrying away with each tone; touching, charming, human; terrifying, when the compulsion to murder arises; creaturely poor, when the fear of himself overcomes him; brother Abel and brother Cain in one body; a great actor.” Others likewise credited his “brilliantly moderated” acting, which “etches the hell visages of his criminals into our consciousness.” Even when the story was not convincing, his “painful impressiveness” put it over “because barely before was one of our film actors so eerily intensive, so economical in means and so suggestive in effect.” A few even praised his understanding of form, rhythm, and the language of pictures and predicted that he stood on the brink of a distinguished career as a director.

  Looking at Lorre (which is difficult to avoid, given the number of intense close-ups), he seems to be carrying the pain of the world in his face: rage, regret, longing, anguish, isolation, resignation, disgust, apathy. As a landscape of human expression, it had matured into a fretwork of lines, angles, and contours that reflected “the lostness of a human being in the time,” wrote Hans Hellmut Kirst in the Münchner Merkur. “Convincingly caught in a depressing milieu, expressed by posture and pace, it can be read in helpless facial features which are eaten up by loneliness, longing and restlessness. Peter Lorre as Dr. Rothe above on the screen surrounded by shadow and light, wearily lurking, pursued and resigned, with a twisted smile of the marked one—one of the greatest acting accomplishments which the German film has ever shown.”

  Lorre knew he could express more with his face than his staff of writers could say in six scripts. For many critics, however, overstating his strength weakened his performance. Placing himself too much in the foreground made him an easy target for accusations of egocentrism. The director Lorre, they maintained, should have reined in the actor Lorre, whose “face doesn’t let go.” “Even the most expressive countenance cannot hold out continually,” pointed out Gerd Schulte in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. “Artistic usages, which, economically used, have the strongest effect, are worn out in this way. One should not stereotype his own stereotype.”

  Faint praise came late when the Bundesinnenminister Dr. Lehr declined to award the German Film Prize for the best feature film of 1952. The mostly political committee, whose disregard of artistic criteria caused many to question its judgment, believed, not surprisingly, that movies should serve “the cultural advancement and development of taste.” Unable to overlook one of the most important and controversial postwar films, however distasteful, it awarded Der Verlorene “lobende Anerkennung” (praiseworthy recognition) and stated that the film “possesses without question high preferences: the acting capability of the main actor Peter Lorre, the cinematography, the music, the bold discussion of the destructive powers of the recent past.”

  German censors kept audiences looking forward, not back. Tired of “accusatory” films, moviegoers thirsted for escape from their problems. In pictures that portrayed the “idealized pleasures of country life,” they drank their fill of Heimatschnulzen (homegrown schmaltz), “heather and heartache” daydreams doused in sentimental fatalism.28 Accustomed to seeing its doctors as self-sacrificing, dedicated heroes, audiences thought ill of Rothe’s bedside manner.29 Instead of saving lives, he took them. Even that sharp contrast, however, faded against the moral ambiguity of the film’s postwar backdrop, making it difficult to know where American film noir began and German rubble left off.30 First-person na
rrative from a deserted, rundown, and underlit canteen, gloomy basement corridors, cold and lonely city streets, starkly nuanced dialogue, and through it all the hollow echo of gallows humor gave visual and verbal texture to the cynical, disillusioned, and despairing tone of the times. Seemingly swept up with the prevailing postwar pessimism, Lorre turned the lights lower with what a recent essayist labeled his “hardboiled melancholy.” It was a bitter pill to take.

  Lorre was convinced that German audiences had misunderstood Der Verlorene. Fred Pressburger disagreed: “They didn’t misunderstand it. The problem was they understood it only too well. They didn’t want any part of it. In a way, maybe the film was not good enough to overcome that…. The final rejection was that they just didn’t go and see it.” It wasn’t simply a matter of Lorre being out of step with his German viewers. “He wanted to be out of step,” said Pressburger. More important, he was also out of time. After the war, the Allies closely monitored cultural reparation of occupied Germany. De-Nazifying the cinema took high priority. Any films that intimated nationalist tendencies were impounded and replaced with innocuous imports. Often escapist, these pictures looked to the future rather than the past and stressed the importance of democratic values to Germany’s moral reconstruction.

  The Allies also helped put the German film industry back on its feet, with the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktiengsellschaft) taking the lead. The first postwar films fell under the heading of Trümmerfilme (rubble films), a realist movement that treated contemporary social problems: the assimilation of returned soldiery (Irgendwo in Berlin [Somewhere in Berlin], 1946), war crimes (Die Mörder sind unter uns [The Murderers Are amongst Us], 1946), land reform (Freies Land [Free Land], 1946), anti-Semitism (Ehe im Schatten [Marriage in the Shadow], 1947). In cold theaters audiences huddled together for commiserative exercises in self-examination, all part of the plan for spiritual recovery. “The Germans must make films which have some connection with the times,” said producer Erich Pommer, “and show a way into the future.” Too late to be a “rubble” film, Der Verlorene fell into the category of generic hybrid. Axel Eggebrecht eventually dismissed it as “a sensational thriller with political shading.” Although it rose from the ruins, Der Verlorene was no Trümmerfilm.