Afterlives: Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany 9781441175380, 9781441145208, 9781441186454, 1441175385

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 7
Introduction......Page 10
1 Two Postwar Masculinities Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919)......Page 32
2 Melancholy Specters F. W. Murnau’s The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922)......Page 70
3 The Temporality of Destiny Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921)......Page 110
4 The Cinematic Other Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920)......Page 146
5 Technologies of Revenge Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923)......Page 184
Conclusion......Page 226
Notes......Page 232
Bibliography......Page 266
Filmography......Page 278
Index......Page 279

Citation preview

Thinking Cinema Series Editors: David Martin-Jones and Sarah Cooper

Volume 2 Afterlives

Afterlives Allegories of Film and Mortality in Early Weimar Germany Steve Choe

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Steve Choe, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Choe, Steve. Afterlives : allegories of film and mortality in early Weimar Germany / Steve Choe. pages cm. – (Thinking cinema ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-7538-0 (hardback) 1. Motion pictures–Germany--History–20th century. 2. Motion pictures–Philosophy. I. Title. PN1993.5.G3C46 2014 791.430943’09042–dc23 2014006340

ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-7538-0 ePub: 978-1-4411-4520-8 ePDF: 978-1-4411-8645-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 Two Postwar Masculinities Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919) 2 Melancholy Specters F. W. Murnau’s The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922) 3 The Temporality of Destiny Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921) 4 The Cinematic Other Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920) 5 Technologies of Revenge Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923) Conclusion

1

Notes Bibliography Filmography Index

23 61 101 137

175 217 223 257 269 270

Acknowledgments The idea for this book was inspired by several exhilarating seminars that I attended about art, cinema, and intellectual history, led by Kaja Silverman, Anton Kaes, and Martin Jay at UC Berkeley. Encouraged by these seminars, I decided to research a project about Weimar cinema and philosophy in order to pursue an age-old question: the ontology of film. While contextualizing this question historically, I realized that a proper response to it could not be formulated without providing a sustained consideration of the human spectator, and positing a rigorous description on the relationship of the human to the cinematic technology. In this book, I have tried to show how this relationship may be understood both allegorically and philosophically, in order to draw attention to what I call an ethics of the cinema. My hope is that this allegory will resonate with the contemporary reader and illuminate ontological potentialities that belong to the moving image in general. I am thus eternally indebted to Kaja, for opening my mind to new adventures into capacious and ethical ways of thinking, and for disciplining my writing so that it remains hospitable to the other. I owe Tony my gratitude for providing me with unforgettable fragments of sage advice and for encouraging my interests in Weimar film and culture. I am grateful for Marty and his continued support of all my pursuits. I thank them for having commented upon preliminary versions of this project. I am extremely grateful for others who read and commented on the manuscript, either in its entirety or sections of it: Juho Ahava, Paula Amad, Carol Clover, Kyle Keough, Dimitrios Latsis, Karen Schiff, the participants of POROI (Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry), as well as the anonymous readers for Bloomsbury. I also thank my current and former colleagues at the University of Iowa for their advice and support of this work: Rick Altman, Corey Creekmur, Kathleen Newman, Garrett Stewart, Steve Ungar, Russell Valentino, and Sasha Waters-Freyer. And I acknowledge my friends who were valuable interlocutors during the time I worked on this project: Francis Chung, Jennifer Feeley, Sabine Gölz, Astrid Oesmann, Regina Range, Sarah Wells, Katherine Wilson, and Jeffrey Winter. The interlibrary loan staff in the UC Berkeley and University of Iowa libraries, and the assistants at the Filmmuseum Berlin and Filmarchiv Austria

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went out of their way to procure key primary sources. Following my return to the United States, they expedited materials to me in heroic fashion. It has been a pleasure working with the editors and staff associated with Bloomsbury Academic Books: Katie Gallof, Prof. David Martin-Jones, and above all, Dr. Sarah Cooper. German translations throughout, where otherwise noted, are mine. A section of Chapter 2 of this book was published in Jura Gentium Cinema in July 2012. I thank Filippo Del Lucchese for granting the permission to reprint it here. Thanks, finally, to my family and to An Song Mi, for their support and patience. This work is dedicated to them.

Introduction

I Das Filmkunstwerk muß eine lebende Graphik werden. (The film-artwork must become a living graphic.) Walter Röhrig, 19201 The dominant sense is the mere desire to see, the naked curiosity, in particular if the experience is enacted with emotional emphasis: fear, terror, horror. The expressions of this basic disposition toward the objects are multiple (cinema). Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920)2 A man stands silently inside a box. His slender body is upright and stiff. A dim light illuminates his visage, intensifying its hard features and giving it a peculiar, ghostly pallor. Though the viewer is offered a close-up on his face, little emotion is revealed, as his eyes stay closed and his physiognomy remains expressionless. The light reflected from his face shines in stark contrast to an overturned bowl of dark, straight hair and an equally dark turtleneck sweater. The man’s mouth is slightly pursed and his unwrinkled countenance expresses the quiet repose of sleep or death. Either way, the unmoving figure provokes unease, fear, and impending horror. We are in the cinema, yet the cinema is at odds with itself, for we are looking at an ostensibly moving image of an immobile body. The silent, unmoving face announces Cesare (Conrad Veidt) the somnambulist’s first appearance in Robert Wiene’s well-known film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) (Figure 0.1). The pale whiteness of Cesare’s chalky skin may be likened to the surface of a film screen, whose function is to reflect the play of light and dark back to the spectator. Conrad Veidt’s makeup is garish and coarse, appearing like black charcoal streaks on the surface of a white canvas. Cesare is not introduced in the posed and charismatic manner of Zukor and Lasky’s Famous Players of the mid-teens. His motionless face, striking in its disquieting minimalism, appears

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Figure 0.1  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

rather as a lifeless head on top of an embalmed body, like a still life, cosmetically treated for display. Has anyone yet failed to compare the cabinet of Dr. Caligari to a wooden coffin?3 Meanwhile, an ominous-looking showman in a tall top hat stands next to Cesare and gestures toward the stiff man. This eccentric carnival barker calls out to his attraction: “Cesare—Can you hear me? Cesare—I am calling you—I— Dr. Caligari—your master—Awaken for a moment from your dark night—” His lips mouth the words in the intertitle slowly and are accompanied by careful facial movements, escalating the uncanniness of the whole scene. Caligari’s physiognomy appears washed-out like that of a madman. Werner Krauss, the actor who plays the carnival barker, was a familiar presence in Max Reinhardt’s theater before coming to the cinema. A quick cut to his portly body shows us what he has carried over to the new medium: extreme gestures characteristic of the Expressionist acting style, and erratic corporeal rhythms that alternate between jerky nervousness and a much more measured, almost obsessive deliberation. In The Visible Man, published in 1924, film theorist Béla Balázs asserts that the cinematic medium expresses a fundamentally wordless language made up of bodily and facial gestures: “It is film that will have the ability to raise up and make visible once more human beings who are now buried under mountains of words and concepts.”4 In the age of cinema, the expressive body becomes visible once again. It speaks through the nonverbal language of gesture, exploiting the specific capacities of the moving image, while casting off the disembodying, metaphysical abstractions fabricated by the written word. Though the spectator

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3

does not hear Krauss’s voice as he motions toward the silent somnambulist, his animated corporeality nevertheless bespeaks a psychologically unstable, possibly perverse inner soul. In response to Caligari’s call to awaken, the film cuts back to Cesare’s face. In the close-up, we see wrinkles form in the forehead and around his barely quivering nose. Cesare’s painted eyebrows tighten in consternation while his sharp nostrils subtly widen. His delicate mouth opens slightly as if to take in oxygen for the first time. Meanwhile, the somnambulist’s eyelids begin to flutter like the wings of an emergent moth, taking time to become accustomed to the light. When Cesare’s eyes finally open, revealing deeply set eyeballs, the effect is hair-raising. His spheres for seeing strike white against thick, dark eyeliner, and unsettlingly gaze directly back at the viewer, addressing her directly. The “dead” man has awakened, and he has awakened us (Figure 0.2). Something grotesque seems to be taking place here as Cesare opens his nose, mouth, and eyes, and as the inside of his head is exposed to the viewer. The man’s strange transformation from stillness to movement and his returned gaze chillingly recall Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1908 poem, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” The poet describes the statue of the Greek god coming to life and addressing the viewer with the directive: Du mußt dein Leben ändern (“You must change your life”).5 It echoes the mysterious tagline featured on posters for Caligari that for months preceded its premiere: Du mußt Caligari werden (“You must become Caligari”). The scene turns increasingly bizarre and fantastic. Cesare’s eyelids widen further into circular rings, opening like a strange flower eager to take in the light

Figure 0.2  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

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that will sustain its life. His eyeballs seem to gain an agency of their own, as if to strain against the face that confines them. Cesare’s physiognomy expresses a kind of wondrous fascination in the fact that seeing is possible at all, eliciting both astonishment and horror in the miracle of his own resurrection. As the eyelids close and open, his charcoal eyebrows rise in unison, hypnotizing the viewer with their eerie rhythm.6 It is as if Cesare’s gaze were to reach out from the screen, to close the distance between looker and looked-at so that he can touch the seated spectator with his eyes. The experience of discomfort and the fear of physical contact remind the viewer that the ostensibly disembodied eyeball is in fact always already embodied, and that the phenomenon of vision cannot take place without the corpus that enables it. This well-known scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari returns the spectator to an experience that has remained repressed in the history of cinema. Its carnival settings explicitly recall the fairground attractions where short, non-narrative films and actualities were often exhibited.7 Brought face-to-face with Cesare’s awakening, one is returned to the wonder of seeing “living pictures” becoming animated and to the astonishing experience of the Lumière brothers’ handcranked cinematograph projections stirred to life: Cesare’s still visage is stirred to movement, recalling the dismal life featured in the Kingdom of Shadows.8 In an article roughly contemporaneous with Wiene’s film, published in March 1922, Arnold Zweig writes that “The attraction [‘Reiz’] that radiates from objects in film is constituted by seeing something inanimate become animate. Film is wholly based upon the free development of the living.”9 Zweig goes on to identify this “attraction,” cinema’s capacity to infuse inert objects with life, as one of the “theoretical foundations of film.” Cesare embodies and self-reflexively allegorizes cinema’s unique capacity to animate motionless objects and awaken slumbering bodies precisely in this regard.10 Describing the phenomenology of “film’s body,” theorist Vivian Sobchack writes that cinema “functions to visibly animate perception and expression in existence.”11 Upright, like the vertically positioned film screen, the stiff somnambulist manifests what Gilles Deleuze calls a “spiritual automaton,” evolving toward an autonomous cinema that realizes the image of “the way thought thinks and itself thinks itself.”12 In this, Cesare stands as an originary model for all the artificial forms of life represented in film history, forms that aspire to the condition of thought and self-reflexivity. Animation is a repeated trope in the German films of this period. One may be reminded of the mummy’s awakening in Ernst Lubitsch’s Eyes of the Mummy Ma (1918) or the mechanical automaton in his comedic film, The Doll (1919). In

Introduction

5

Joe May’s The Indian Tomb (1921), a dead yogi is resurrected to serve an Indian prince. Upon awakening, the revived mystic slowly turns his weary head and says solemnly, “Prince, you have restored me to life. The holy commandments direct me to submit myself to your wishes.” Reiterating the close-up on Cesare’s awakening face, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) also features a close-up on the face of the robot Maria as she is brought to animate life by the engineer Rotwang.13 F. W. Murnau’s vampire in Nosferatu (1922) has been interpreted as an allegory of the film image: its undead body manifests the resurrection of the dead past to the lived present.14 Paul Leni’s wax figures are animated in Waxworks (1924), and the hands of the dead criminal in Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), also starring Veidt, exploit the chiasmatic relationship between the living and the mechanical, expressed through the animative powers of the cinema. Other examples include Lilith and Ly (1919), about a statue coming to life, and Murnau’s early work Januskopf (1920), based on the story of Dr. Jekyll and his uncanny double Mr. Hyde.15 One might even point to the strange, geometrically shaped organisms that come into being and recede into the background in Hans Richter’s abstract film Rhythmus 21, or the abstract figures that flit and play in Walter Ruttmann’s Opus films between 1921 and 1925. When Zweig invokes life and the “free development of the living” in his 1922 article, he taps into a wider discourse for addressing the specificity of film. This discourse circulated not only in Weimar Germany, but internationally as well. As a rejoinder to the high modernisms emerging in the fields of art, architecture, music, and poetry, each emphasizing qualities specific to their respective mediums, the discourses of dynamism, movement, and life were utilized to isolate a cinéma pur that would allow film to transcend its nature as a commodity for the masses and emerge as a sister art. A screening of Golden and Porter’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1913) compelled writer Erwin Magnus to assert the artistic legitimacy of film and to declare, “Never has the expression ‘living pictures’ become so clear for me,” in a book titled Lichtspiel und Leben (1924).16 Jean Epstein, writing in 1923, celebrates a critical category borrowed from Louis Delluc: photogénie, the purest expression of cinematic life. Epstein stipulates that “only mobile aspects of the world, of things and souls, may see their moral value increased by filmic reproduction,” thus privileging the ontology of animate beings over the inanimate.17 The voices of Zweig, Magnus, and Epstein were part of a chorus of international thinkers and artists that privileged the vital potentialities of the film image. Bernhard Diebold, Germaine Dulac, Fernand Léger, René Clair, Dziga Vertov, and the Japanese Pure Film Movement

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underscored cinema’s unique formal properties and its exclusive link with living motion in order to legitimate its artistic value. When Balázs criticizes the disembodied constructs of words and concepts in The Visible Man, he also legitimizes the cinema by underscoring how film can present the “living physiognomy that all things possess” (emphasis in the original).18 Through the cinema and the close-up, we can observe not the “onceand-for-all rigid physiognomy, but a mysterious play of expressions” that is a key characteristic of all filmed objects.19 It is precisely this enigmatic, living play of expressions, each one evolving and transforming into the next, that is showcased in the sequence of Cesare’s awakening. “In Caligari,” Balázs writes, “the object world’s demonic play of features was so pronounced that it lost the naturalness that attaches to lifeless objects, and acquired instead the living naturalness of the human sphere.”20 For millennia, poets and thinkers have pondered the mysterious, vital essence that animates the cosmos, including the fish, birds, and mammals of the earth.21 This essential and enduringly mysterious life force could now be explored through the cinematic technology. Theorizing the transformation from lifeless object to living naturalness will be my main concern in this book. The language of cinematic life, utilized offhandedly at times by Balázs, Epstein, and others, calls out for historical contextualization and greater theoretical rigor. By elaborating on such articulations of “life” in early Weimar film culture, this book will explore a number of their key aesthetic, political, and ethical stakes in order to elucidate an ontology of the film medium. My vocabulary for theorizing its evanescent ontology will be drawn from philosophical and literary texts that appeared at the same time Weimar cinema began to self-reflexively frame the notion of life as specific to the art of film. Through the following historico-philosophical analysis, we shall see how and why the cinema remains the most important medium for thinking life in modernity. Balázs’s observations on the animation of Cesare’s physiognomy, considered in light of Henri Bergson’s description of the ontology of mobile objects, exemplify how the vocabulary of cinematic life may be understood both historically and philosophically. Between 1911 and 1912, Balázs had personal contact with the French philosopher during a stay in Paris.22 In his Spirit of Film from 1930, Balázs explicitly compares Bergson’s description of a melody with the play of facial expressions in the cinema, indicating that the former was intimately familiar with the latter’s ideas on the phenomenon of transformation and understood them in cinematic terms.23 Both were clearly interested in the problem of change

Introduction

7

and duration, and their theoretical affinity is bolstered by their shared historical contemporaneity. If it could be said that the investigation of duration undergirds Bergson’s philosophy in general,24 this pursuit is perhaps most forcefully articulated in his 1903 essay, “Introduction to Metaphysics.”25 Bergson makes constant reference to an ancient, metaphysical problem, the description of a moving object in space, in order to probe the nature of change as it appears to the human observer. According to him, there are two basic attitudes that may be taken in relation to a moving object: analysis and intuition. Analysis takes a disinterested, mechanistic view of the object, resolving its change of place into a series of immobile points in space. As the eye observes its movement in time, the analytical mind overlays onto this phenomenon a series of quantifiable points through which the object has moved. “What the immobile points are to the movement of a mobile,” Bergson writes, “so are the concepts of various qualities to the qualitative change of an object.”26 When representing this movement to herself, the observer reconstitutes the object’s original movement through a series of immobile points, as a procession of snapshots that represent its passing from point A to B. Bergson calls this consciousness the “cinematographic mechanism of thought” in his Creative Evolution from 1907. As we know, he will condemn the cinematograph for reproducing the “mechanistic illusion” of analysis.27 In “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson bypasses the epistemological limitations of the analytical attitude by appealing to another: intuition. Intuition stands in direct contrast to the disinterested cogitation of the analytical attitude. It is highly interested, and is “the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it.”28 Intuition lives with the movement of a mobile object in time, not by objectively observing it from without, but by understanding the object “from within.”29 Likewise, as Cesare’s face transforms from a sleeping to an awakened state, this change from A to B is experienced by the living viewer as a continuous transformation constituted through the moving image. The transformation takes place like an unfolding melody, as Balázs suggests in his chapter “The Play of Facial Expressions” from The Visible Man: “In the legato of visual continuity, past and future expressions merge into one another and display not just the individual states of the soul but also the mysterious process of development itself.”30 What matters for Balázs are not the individualized, in-between states of the awakening face but the flowing legato of its stirring and expressivity, its embodiment of the “living naturalness of the

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human sphere.” Only the intuitive attitude, as described by Bergson, one that “sympathizes” with Cesare’s vital impetus and his mysterious awakening, can do justice to the metaphysics of change. This study of Weimar film will work with the tension between what Bergson calls the analytic and intuitive attitudes toward change in order to seek a philosophical language adequate to describing the human experience of cinematic duration. This language will be rooted in how critics, theorists, and other thinkers posited “life” as somehow key to the experience of time. While most studies of Weimar film have approached films like Caligari to make analytical insights about its aesthetics or the cultural history surrounding it, this book attempts to describe cinematic change, allegorized through highly selfreflexive moments such as in Cesare’s awakening, “from within.” Bergson directs the living observer to look inward when describing the image of change, for she already embodies the same continuity of flow expressed by the image of transformation in time. If Cesare’s awakening may be read, as many have argued, as self-reflexive of the life of the film medium, the following analyses of his astonishing arousal and other key moments from the films of the early Weimar period aim to facilitate an “intuitive” understanding of the ontology of cinema. As we shall see, sympathy with the film image will yield profound political and ethical ramifications.

II Therefore, if philosophy is in harmony with the cinema, if thought and technical effort are heading in the same direction, it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology” (1945)31 Afterlives derives an ontology of the cinema by closely reading the films and philosophy conceived during the early Weimar period. While the philosophical texts I will discuss in this book do not reference the cinema explicitly, I will draw out theoretical parallels and allegorical correspondences between them: both utilized the category of “life” to describe the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent. Martin Heidegger’s early seminars on Aristotle, Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy, Georg Simmel’s vitalist sociology, Siegfried Kracauer’s redemptive

Introduction

9

Weimar writings, psychoanalytic texts by Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, Rainer Maria Rilke’s postwar poems and correspondence, Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology, and Martin Buber’s ethical writing all utilized the concept of “life” at the same time that writers like Zweig and Epstein were developing this concept to describe the “essence” of film. Accordingly, the films I analyze in this book aspire to philosophy, not by depicting philosophical concepts, but by enacting them through the powers of cinema. By placing texts and contexts, films and philosophy, in juxtaposition, this work bears out Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that filmmakers and philosophers “share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation.” More specifically, the forms of thinking and structures of feeling I trace across the films, philosophy, and cultural history of the early Weimar period elaborate what film scholar Sabine Hake calls “fictions of cinema.”32 In Cinema’s Third Machine, Hake deftly traces the vast complexity and diversity of Weimar film criticism, revealing how discourse about the cinema legitimated the new medium as an object of ontological inquiry. In Afterlives, I pursue a singular path through the diversity of Weimar film history by focusing on notions of “life” that appear in this historical literature. When observers of the time compared the film medium to life, this comparison was not merely metaphorical, but functioned as a shorthand for invoking philosophical notions of change and time. These notions belong to a generation of writers and filmmakers who lived in a particular historical time and place, and yet, as we shall see, this contextualized understanding has much to contribute to our philosophical thinking about the moving image today. The films covered in this book emerged at a watershed moment in modern human history. The defeat of the Great War brought ruin to German civilization, and the misery that followed reiterated the impermanence of all things in the world. The experience of war trauma and the humiliation of defeat affected all areas of public and private life in the Weimar Republic. Linear notions of time and history lost their power to consolidate ideological consensus between those on the home front who were shocked by the outcome of the war and those who returned from the war front shell shocked.33 Old forms and institutions lost their legitimacy, while traditional, idealized ways of knowing lost their relevance to explain the modern world. In their attempts to deal with the misery of the present, many expressed profound nostalgia for a prewar past, while others dreamt of an unrealizable, utopian future. Visions of a different world, of other times and other places, proliferated in literature, theater, architecture, and the

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cinema—anything to escape the overwhelming grief associated with the war. Yet despite not showing realistic scenes of infantrymen in trenches or soldiers manning machine guns, the fantastic films of the early Weimar years, set in alternative worlds and historical times, are nevertheless deeply informed by this “culture of defeat.”34 While death and trauma are topics that have concerned generations of artists and writers throughout history, the generation that survived the Great War understood these topics as inextricably linked to the epistemological upheavals of modernity. In his essay, “The Storyteller,” Benjamin calls attention to traumatized war veterans, who returned not richer, but poorer in their ability to communicate their experiences on the battlefield. “A generation,” he writes, “that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.”35 Many of the writers and filmmakers whose work I analyze in fact participated directly in military activities. Rilke was drafted to the Austrian Landsturm and later discharged for health reasons. Fritz Lang was a reconnaissance infantryman, decorated with honors. F. W. Murnau was a combat pilot for the Luftwaffe. Scheler, devoted to Germany’s war cause, was also drafted but later discharged from the front and placed in various diplomatic positions for the German Foreign Office. Freud’s three sons and son-in-law fought on both Western and Eastern fronts. Indeed, many of the filmmakers and thinkers whose work I will interpret fought for the Fatherland between 1914 and 1918. All lost loved ones or knew of someone who lost a loved one during wartime. Afterlives thus treats postwar cinematic and philosophical work as texts working through the ethics of survival. These texts were produced by individuals who outlived friends and family, carrying the memory of loss throughout their lives. The postwar context informs my insistence upon mortality and its connection to discourses that address the “living pictures” of the cinema. Recent books on film after the Great War have tended to generalize about the cinematic representation of trauma. Both Cinema and the Great War (2011), by Andrew Kelly, and Der Erste Weltkrieg im Film (2009), edited by Rainer Rother and Karin Herbst-Meßlinger, explore the relationship between war and film from an international perspective, examining films from many of the nations that sent soldiers to fight. This book will focus on the Weimar German context and the experience of loss that was central to everyday life after the war. My focus on early Weimar Germany will reveal that its culture of defeat enabled a

Introduction

11

specific interpretation of time and temporality, which has relevance, not only for the broad understanding of postwar trauma, but also for general questions of film-philosophy. One of the main goals of this book will be to show how a specific historical and cultural context grounds metaphysical inquiry, and that this inquiry is already a form of cinematic thinking. Throughout we shall reflect upon the ontology of the image as a model for theorizing human experience and for framing questions of temporality. It has been noted that the photographic image documents an irretrievable past, making it an appropriate medium for meditation upon loss. Film theorist André Bazin associates the photographic image with mummification, calling the photographic process “the preservation of life by a representation of life.”36 Accordingly cinema, in its representation of worldly objects, gives us “the image of their duration, changed mummified as it were.”37 Past events are extended into the present, doubled through their reanimation, and rendered capable of being replayed. Accordingly, through the image of preserved life, particularly of life that has passed away, films from the early Weimar period may be read as “sites of memory” that negotiate the status of the dead for the living—ghostly afterlives that enable reflection upon loss, temporality, and the ontology of the moving image for those who survived.38 The experience of loss and the realization of one’s own mortality, we shall see, are inextricably bound up with what I am calling the ontological “afterlife” of the moving image. The films I treat as sites of memory include both popular and art films: Nerves (1920), The Haunted Castle (1921), Phantom (1922), Destiny (1921), The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), The Nibelungen (1924), and Warning Shadows (1923). A number of recent studies have brought genre and popular films into the scope of Weimar film studies. The essays collected in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema (2010), edited by Christian Rogowski, attempt to counterbalance the tendency in German film studies to privilege the artistic masterpieces of Weimar film history. A recent example of this tendency is Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (2009), edited by Noah Isenberg. Perhaps more relevant to the present study, Philip Stiasny’s Das Kino und der Krieg (2009) explains how many popular films in this period inherited wartime genre conventions while working through the traumas of war. My choice of films reflects not only how the culture of defeat affected all types of filmmaking, both popular and those we think of today as classics of the era, but also how an analytical focus on questions of life and mortality casts light on overlooked films that have not been canonized as masterpieces.

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While this book will move between close readings of films and philosophical writings contemporaneous to them, my intention is not to analyze The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a vitalist film, nor do I see Lang’s Destiny as simply illustrating Heidegger’s philosophy. I do not intend to read film through the “lens” of theory. Taking both as forms of thinking, I instead move more fluidly between philosophy and film, highlighting affinities between the two.39 Anton Kaes, in Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Cinema and the Wounds of War (2011), masterfully reads films and their intellectual contexts alongside each other—both are informed by and respond to the experience of war trauma. Through his book, one comes to understand films such as Nosferatu and Metropolis, not simply as waypoints on the teleological path toward inevitable doom, but as embedded in a culture dominated by melancholic loss. One also comes to a greater understanding of the cinema in general through his analysis, as Kaes’s historiography passes over, at key moments, into film theorizing. Thomas Elsaesser’s Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (2000) revolves around the question of what it is about “this cinema that allowed such a ‘fit’ between film and history to remain convincing for so long?”40 Like Elsaesser, I believe that an answer may be gleaned through the films’ highly self-reflexive aims and their utilization of mise-en-abîme framing devices. Thinking their own ontology, Weimar cinema reflects upon film as an experience that persists in time, staging not only its particular aesthetics, but also the viewer’s lived duration before the moving image. Recent scholarship has too often understood the ontological claims made by Weimar writers about the essence of film as “naïve” philosophizing. The aesthetic purity of film and the question of its medium specificity have lost their urgency in our postmodern era, so it is said, and what remains for Weimar film scholarship is to frame these ideological concerns culturally, as reflecting economic or institutional configurations. However, we will see how such claims can be read as both historical and philosophical, and in so doing see that ontological thinking about the cinema means facilitating the conditions necessary for the cinema to self-reflexively think its own conditions of possibility. My choice of texts reflects the belief that the philosophy of film not only cannot be separated from historical concerns, surrounding both the texts’ conception and reception, but also the specific, present-day interest of the historian writing about them. We will see how Weimar cinema and culture seemed to anticipate the contingencies of their futural interpretation, and the film historiographies to come, by rethinking philosophemes of history to make them more appropriate

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13

to the enduring challenges of modernity. Siegfried Kracauer already had some inkling of the profound implications of the reproducible image for the aims of historiography in his 1927 essay, “Photography.” There he writes that the turn to photography is the “go-for-broke game of history,” in that the use of mechanically produced images for historiography compels a decisive moment for those who write about the past.41 Photography challenges the historian to find a new, provisional order to the fragments of history jumbled by the modern episteme, and to “awaken an inkling of the right order of the inventory of nature.”42 Notably, Kracauer explains that “the capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film,”43 referring to the histories opened up through the “strange constructs”44 assembled through montage. In playing this game of go-for-broke, the Weimar critic points to the decisive transformations in theories of history concomitant with the modern era. Historiography’s aim is not simply to narrate a linear series of past events from A to B, but rather to piece together strange constructs that are akin to cinematic montage. These constructs illuminate films, philosophy, and other materials of the time through their juxtaposition, while drawing out key allegorical affinities between them. To be clear: In Afterlives, I do not simply show how films illustrate philosophical concepts. My aim is to reveal how the films aspire to the condition of philosophy, showing how they think through problems of ontology and duration. This ontology is derived from an intense engagement with the historical context of Weimar Germany after World War I, and revolves around questions of mortality, absence, and ephemerality, questions that are deeply informed by the experience of loss. My “strange construct” of Weimar film history puts forth two broad claims, which I will summarize below.45 First, the central premise of this book concerns the intertwined roles of life and death in relation to cinema and the postwar viewer’s experience of it. Beginning with the astonishment in seeing the inert, “dead” image come to life, Afterlives argues that the vital, moving image is at every moment haunted by its original, inanimate condition. Seen within the context of postwar Weimar culture, the cinema image itself may be thought of as an afterlife that allegorically resurrects and represents the lives of those who can no longer represent themselves. And yet, while film allegorically reanimates the dead, this resurrected life remains ghostly, uncanny, never separating itself fully from its previously lifeless condition. Film theorist Laura Mulvey, in Death 24x a Second, similarly links the existential problem of life and death to the theorization of the moving image:

14

Afterlives For human and all organic life, time marks the movement along a path to death, that is, to the stillness that represents the transformation of the animate into the inanimate. In cinema, the blending of movement and stillness touches on this point of uncertainty so that, buried in the cinema’s materiality, lies a reminder of the difficulty of understanding passing time and, ultimately, of understanding death.46

As we shall see, philosophy proposes that life is not opposed to death, but both stand as equal partners throughout the duration of worldly existence. Correspondingly, the moving image emerges from inanimacy, becomes resurrected as technological, animate life, and drives toward its end, aiming to return to an inanimate state. Cesare not only allegorizes the animation of the inanimate, but also the return to stillness after Caligari has concluded, signaled by the black leader that concludes its last reel and, more literally, by the shutting off of the film projector. “Life” and “death” do not simply function as metaphors in this book, but serve as pivot points between film discourse and philosophical discourse, mobilized toward the aim of describing the transience of film. For a generation who found it difficult to directly confront the fact of death, the cinema of this period draws attention to the capacity of film, again selfreflexively, to bring the spectator to affirm and perhaps even sympathize with her own possible death. It has been argued that film is particularly suited to enable the spectator’s confrontation with horrors that cannot be confronted directly in reality. In his Theory of Film, Kracauer, invoking Greek mythology, compared the film screen with Athena’s polished shield, whose reflection enables the spectator to behold “happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life.”47 Coming face-to-face with Medusa, Perseus was able to confront the horror of her monstrous countenance and avoid being turned to stone through the mediation of his shield. Without the mediation of film, the existential dread of mortality, and the inevitability of becoming inert material, would overwhelm the spectator, for “we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear.”48 The cinema, for Kracauer, offers the spectator the opportunity to confront the dread of that which must be disavowed in the flow of everyday life: the possibility of one’s own nothingness. This disavowal is inextricably linked to the metaphysics of instrumental reason in modernity as well as to the aporias of philosophical language, as we shall see. Lang subtitled the first part of his Mabuse series from 1922, “Ein Bild der Zeit,” (“A Picture of the Times”). The postwar films discussed throughout this

Introduction

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book are reflections of their time that make visible, like Athena’s shield, the horror of the transience of all things, an existential fact reiterated by the trauma of war. Correspondingly, my interpretations of early Weimar films foreground their capacity to function as momenta mori, reminding the viewer of her own finitude. This book explores how Weimar cinema imputes a film spectator that is not simply an imaginary, idealized construct, narcissistic in her demand for narrative continuity and transcendental wholeness, but an empirical, mortal human being existing in time. As Bergson puts it in his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” “It is, if you like, the unrolling of a spool, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming little by little to the end of his span; and living consists in growing old.”49 This experience of time passing is precisely what enables reflection on cinematic time, beyond the vulgar, mechanical understanding of time measured by the clock.50 Through a close reading of the films I have chosen, the experience of loss is reflected, not only as time passing, but also as passing toward death. My second claim emerges out of this and addresses the ethics of the relationship between the human spectator and the cinematic technology. If figures demonstrating the animation of the inanimate, like Cesare, allegorize the moving image, they also allegorize the spectator’s relationship to it. In this book, I consider how early Weimar films encourage human spectators to see their ontological correlative in the technological cinema. Philosopher Bernard Stiegler writes of this co-relation, noting that “between the inorganic beings of the physical sciences and the organized beings of biology, there does exist a third genre of ‘being’: ‘inorganic organized beings,’ or technical objects.”51 This third genre of being, while it does not evince the dynamic qualities typically associated with organic life, cannot be separated from questions of temporality that constitute and underpin human Dasein. For Stiegler, technics is “the pursuit of life by means other than life,” meaning that technics exteriorizes fundamental problems of temporality, retention and protention, that structure questions of ontology.52 In these ways the cinema is the technical object par excellence in that it models the lived experience of duration through technical means. Later Stiegler describes the relationship between the human viewer and the cinema as an interweaving flow: My time is always that of others. Cinema reveals this cinemato-graphically. Stream of consciousness is the contraction of time, whose initiation process occurs in a cinema in which my time, within the film’s time, becomes the time of an other and an other time.53

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In Afterlives, I read the allegories of cinematic life as technical objects that not only put into motion basic questions of temporality, that is questions of memory and futural anticipation, but also function as uncanny doubles of human life as it evolves through the continuity of the present. In this sense, the cinema teaches its spectators the futural possibility of death because its own ontology may be characterized as being-toward-death. Through this awareness, the cinema ordains the human viewer to take responsibility for the flourishing of the precarious, technological other. Spectators thus have something to say about life in relation to the moving image because they themselves are considered alive. In 1926, Curt Morek noted that “The life depicted by film is our own existence [Dasein],” and that in the cinema “we watch ourselves live.”54 This life is precisely what makes possible the “sympathy” of the human observer with a moving object, described by Bergson in his essay from 1903. In The Visible Man, Balázs argues that the cinema shows us how to see the expressive faces in the objects and settings of everyday life— tables, cupboards, sofas, the face of a friend or enemy in a landscape. This is not delusion, nor is it narcissistic anthropomorphization. The capacity to see the physiognomy of things appeals to what Balázs calls “the indescribable attraction of anonymously living the life of an other, a Doppelgänger.” Notably, Balázs is careful to maintain a separation between the spectator and her double: “It is an opportunity for the deepest psychological insight: how to be someone else and still be myself?”55 Recognition of the face of things enables an ethics of the faceto-face encounter between human and cinematic life, an encounter that brings the self in relation to the other while soliciting a dimension of exteriority, “to be someone else and still be myself,” beyond the epistemological confines of the Cartesian ego.56 Thus early Weimar films are not simply vehicles for escapist horror. Central to the formation of a “vernacular modernism,” cinema produces a sensorium that teaches viewers the ethical and political dimensions of living and dying within our mass-mediated context.57 And as a technical object, the cinema is not a living organism, yet it nevertheless raises questions of how humans may learn to more ethically coexist with their nonhuman, and human, others. Bypassing the imputation of a captivated viewer, seamlessly sutured to the cinematic apparatus, we shall see how Weimar cinema interrupts this interlock between spectator and screen, precisely in order to raise philosophical questions around the relationship of living viewers to the cinematic technology. This interpretation is inseparable from the temporality of the moving image, and inextricably

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linked to the manner in which the cinema figures the openness of the future temporality. A heightened sensitivity to the durational ontology of the moving image, “the time of an other and an other time” synchronous with the spectator’s own life, can enable new relations with the cinema, beyond those predetermined by the dialectic of the subject and apparatus. Afterlives will craft these two arguments cumulatively through five chapters. Chapters 1 to 3 will address the postwar survivor’s apprehension of death (argument one), and Chapters 4 and 5 will build from this in order to elucidate the ethics in relation to the cinema technology (argument two). In Chapter 1, I will look at Robert Reinert’s Nerves and delineate two masculine reactionformations: one characterized by paranoid delusion and the other by postwar recuperation. Drawing from writings by Freud, Abraham, and many others, I show how these masculinities illuminate an etiology of the postwar film spectator, as well as a corresponding ontology of the film medium. Chapter 2 continues this psycho-philosophical analysis and addresses the historicity of trauma in two films by F. W. Murnau, The Haunted Castle and Phantom. In contrast to the narcissistic subject who cannot abide the radical otherness of death, I privilege the role of the melancholic spectator, explicated through writings by Benjamin and Bergson, who has interiorized the absent other and who understands this introjection in a spectral, fantasmatic form. In Chapter 3, I further elucidate the temporality of the film image by analyzing how the three episodes in Lang’s film, Destiny, narratively play out the cycle of life, love, and death. Making reference to work by Heidegger and Rilke, I show how all three take place in a single moment, collapsing the past, present, and future temporalities in the blink of an eye. Chapter 4 moves from the death of the temporalized human being, which remains inaccessible to metaphysics, to the death of the living other by performing a close analysis of some key scenes from Paul Wegener’s Golem. This chapter begins to delineate an allegorical ethics of the technological other through writings by Freud and Buber, and to affirm the experience of difference manifest through the anthropomorphic Golem. Wegener’s well-known film shows how this mystical figure of Jewish mythology not only allegorizes the cinema, but also how we as human spectators relate to this technology. In Chapter 5, I discuss Lang’s Nibelungen and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows, bringing both of these films to bear on the problem of revenge. By setting these films in juxtaposition, and in context with ideas introduced by Scheler, Bloch, and others, I describe what the vengeful subject is in the process of becoming, righteous in her unyielding demand for retribution. By putting this

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uncompromising narrative in motion, I argue that these films teach spectators how to critique the metaphysics that grounds the ethics of total retaliation.

III And then the projectionist began to officiate at the film by Harold Lloyd. But who was there who could laugh? No mirth shook my diaphragm. My thoughts were on death, the grave, and the hereafter. And even as the man on the screen was performing some wonderful comic gag, I decided I would dedicate the rest of my life to God, and become a hermit. Joseph Roth, “The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace” (1925)58 An analysis of the moments following Cesare’s awakening demonstrates how I bring the cyclical nature of life and death to bear on the ontology of film. Through the interaction between the allegory of cinema and the human viewer, we shall see how spectators are reminded not only of their own mortality, but also of their relationship to the moving image. Cesare is now awake. He slowly raises his arms, as if to commence sleepwalking, while staring straight ahead in a trance. His master Caligari gestures for him to move forward. The unsettling thing then takes a few stiff steps, emerging bit by bit and deliberately from his wooden cabinet toward the edge of the stage closer to the viewer. After twenty-three years of sleep, Cesare evidently must relearn how to walk. A review published in Der Kinematograph on March 3, 1920, calls Conrad Veidt a “demonic type, playing a somnambulist that is simply uncanny [Unheimlich].” Indeed, Cesare’s movements do not derive from natural life, with the flexibility of organic limbs and appendages, but come off as bizarrely mechanical. This strange confluence of the mechanistic and the humanistic, and the inability of knowing where one category ends and the other begins, should be held responsible for creating the atmosphere of dread throughout the scene. Cesare’s transformation does not take place suddenly, as if A were to be immediately followed by B. Instead, his evolution toward life evinces vestiges of his previously inanimate state, as if to shed a dead membrane but without ever becoming fully separated from it. His chalky physiognomy does not stretch, is not elastic like the surface of human skin, and his rigid gestures somehow betray inflexible parts. It is unclear whether Cesare’s intentions for the world are good

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or evil—he seems only to express a will toward animate life. His awakening is not only astonishing; it is also uncanny. The language of the Kinematograph film review thus compels a brief foray into Freud’s 1919 essay, “The Uncanny,” which will allow me to put the relationship between cinema and mortality into greater relief. One year after the war ended and one year before Caligari premiered in German theaters, the psychoanalyst writes that “Apparent death and re-animation of the dead have been represented as most uncanny themes.”59 Freud links the feeling of dread when seeing the dead reanimated to the return of the repressed, a link that underscores the discursive slippage between the Unheimlich and Heimlich. One knows that inanimate things cannot be willed to magically come to life, for the rational, modern self knows that this primitive fantasy is precisely that: childish fantasy surmounted in adulthood. And yet, in this scene from Caligari, it is so. Before the image of the somnambulist’s awakening face, one may remark to oneself, with astonishment: “So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!”60 An experience may be characterized as uncanny when it conjures an immature belief that has been deemed false in adulthood, yet appears nevertheless as true. More fundamentally, Freud reminds us that the uncanny is a harkeningback to a moment when the ego had not yet delineated itself from the external world.61 During its early developmental stage, the ego narcissistically experienced time and space as boundless, and did not differentiate between itself and its surroundings. Never did the thought of death enter into the infantile consciousness. However, as the immature ego learns that life must be lived somehow in relation to civilized society, it also learns to recognize others as distinct from itself. Increasingly, life is perceived as a struggle as the appearance of uncontrollable strangers threatens the sovereign individual, who fears being lorded over by others. Nostalgic for the infantile experience of plentitude, the ego concocts defensive mechanisms that will safeguard its ontological unity, even as this unity takes on a fantasmatic form. In order for the modern subject to regain its infantile fantasy of unbounded living, it must shore up the truth of the self. In order to regain its sovereignty, the falsehoods and superstitions of man’s primitive past, including the belief in reanimated doubles, specters, and undead creatures of fictive myth, must be expelled from the realm of rational truth. Via the claim to enlightened reason, one is fantasmatically returned to the center of their own world. “But it is at this moment that the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”62 The fantasmatic

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double, instead of assuring the spectator of her unending life, evokes intense dread and reminds her of her own mortality. Uncanniness thus finds its source in the confusion between the ego’s infantile fantasy and that which is believed to have been expunged from the self.63 Seeing the immobile come to life, the ego is forced to question whether its primordial fantasies have been overcome at all, for the uncanny returns what was repressed in the name of eternal life: its own finitude. We see precisely this radical self-questioning take place when a human onlooker encounters the uncanny Cesare and reminds him of his own death. Caligari, satisfied that his attraction has had a great effect on his audience, tips his hat and invites someone to approach the stage. “Ladies and Gentlemen Cesare the somnambulist will answer all your questions—Cesare knows every secret—Cesare knows the past and sees the future—Judge for yourselves. Don’t hold back—Ask away!” He invites his audience to test their credulity. The two protagonists of the film, Alan (played by Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) and Francis (Friedrich Fehér), who have come under the spell of his astonishing show, audaciously rush to the stage. They are instructed to halt before Cesare by Caligari’s cane. He circumspectly waves it in front of them, as if to underscore the impassable boundary between the spectator and the show, or between the living and the undead. While Alan and Francis are allowed to take distanced visual pleasure in the fantastic attraction, touching remains strictly taboo. In a medium shot, Alan looks upward toward Cesare and poses his question, one that tests the limits of what mortal creatures should be allowed to know: “How long will I live?” Cesare leans in slightly to disclose his secret: “Till the break of dawn.” His words overwhelm the young Alan, sending him into convulsions as he draws his next breath. He chokes and smiles slightly as if the whole thing were a joke, and is rendered helpless before the calamity induced by the somnambulist’s dismal prediction (Figure 0.3). Instead of fulfilling the narcissistic dream of man’s immortality, Cesare, the allegory of cinema, becomes the harbinger of his own imminent death. Throughout, his pale face remains severe and his eyes intense, heightening the drama of his prophecy. Later that night, Alan and Francis run into Jane (Lil Dagover), their shared love interest, and escort her back home. Francis declares, “Alan we both love her. We’ll leave the choice up to her—But whomever she chooses, we shall remain friends.”64 In light of Cesare’s portentous prophecy in Caligari’s tent, his promise of friendship remains ominous. With a cut to the intertitle, “Night,” and then to a shot of Alan sitting up in bed in fear and confusion, the

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Figure 0.3  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920

somnambulist’s prediction is brutally realized. The young man struggles for the knife as he is repeatedly stabbed while his mouth screams in horror. Alan’s murder is depicted through a play of shadow and light, self-reflexive of the cinema screen, as the silhouettes of two struggling sets of hands are projected on the wall behind his bed. “How long will I live?” For Anton Kaes, this question restages “a central question for every soldier in the trenches; for every wife and mother on the home front, it was how long does he have to live? The mere question, asked in a film of 1920, recalled the war’s most traumatic presentiment.”65 Kaes notes that dying at dawn had a particular resonance for soldiers on the front. It was often early morning when they were commanded to emerge out of their trenches into the midst of enemy fire and ordered to expose their vulnerable body to anonymous gunfire and certain death. “In retelling Alan’s murder, Francis relives the shock of his friend’s untimely death at dawn—a suggestive allusion to the deaths of the dawn offensives, when soldiers often saw comrades near them killed in an instant.”66 The memory of loss in war is returned through the experience of the uncanny. Cesare’s body, awakening, and eccentric movement suggest a horrific hybrid between the organic and inorganic, occupying a zone of indeterminability between the human and the nonhuman. This scene suggests that the spectator’s life is implicated in the inorganic life of the cinema as well, allegorized through the intertwining relationship between Cesare and Alan. If the cinematic image is constituted by an uncanny ambivalence, that between animation and stasis,

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between profilmic past and present, Cesare’s prophecy coordinates Freud’s uncanny through the fundamental ambivalence of Alan’s own worldly being. His shock is connected, not only to the return of the repressed, but also to his realization that the progressive development of his life is simultaneous with his own death to come. The uncanny thus brushes up against this experience of finitude as a certain possibility: that while life grants duration to the living thing, it is simultaneously taken away as it moves toward this futural certainty (“Till the break of dawn”). The experience of war trauma makes this dialectic all the more significant, for it provides the historical context that underpins the profound ontology of animate life, explicated through the analysis of its temporality, existing somewhere at the intersection between past, present, and future. The ontology of film is thus particularly apposite in this regard, where the tension between analysis and intuition elaborated by Bergson in his “Introduction to Metaphysics” and the tension between death and life converge. Objects thought to be lost or forgotten are shown to have continued existence in the present, written by the pencil of nature on a light sensitive surface. This phenomenon overlaps with the fantasy of eternal life, precisely where, according to Bergson, we install ourselves in immobility: the dream of overcoming time and death, and the assurance that our loved ones, as well as ourselves, may transcend the unending passing of the now into the nonexistence of the past.67 The ontology of the photographic image lies in its capacity to satisfy, as Bazin puts it, “a basic psychological need,”68 to stave off death in perpetuity.69 And yet, the technological preservation of the past unavoidably invokes the uncanniness of death as soon as the intent to preserve is believed to have disavowed it. It is the uncanny, then, constituted through the undecidability between life and death, that seems to inspire Alan’s all too human question, and which will be repeatedly addressed throughout this book: “How long will I live?”

1

Two Postwar Masculinities Robert Reinert’s Nerves (1919)

Defeat and delusion The end of the war left Germany with many lives lost. Approximately 2,037,000 soldiers fell on the battlefield throughout the four years of the conflict. Most men born after 1871 joined the German Army as it was considered a family’s greatest honor to have a father, uncle, or son serve the empire. Young males born between 1892 and 1895—who were between nineteen and twenty-two when the war began—experienced the greatest losses: about 35 percent of this generation was reduced. In addition to war casualties, civilian casualties numbered 760,000, largely due to the influenza pandemic and mass famine that devastated the Weimar population following the armistice in 1918.1 Of the 4.3 million German soldiers who returned from the front, many came back severely maimed, physically disabled, shell shocked, psychically scarred, and unable to reintegrate into civilian life. Weimar’s tumultuous postwar politics only exacerbated their sense of bewilderment and futility. The economic and political disorder of the early years of the Republic reminded returned soldiers of their failure to bring honor to the Fatherland and of the pointlessness of their military sacrifices. Forced to confront the empty vanity of their wartime patriotism, some veterans were filled with feelings of pessimistic contempt and exaggerated nationalism in response to their shattered self-importance. Like the infantile ego, described in Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny, that retreats into a shell when confronted with a hostile external world, some returned soldiers reverted to hyperbolic versions of their prewar selves in defiance of the armistice, whose terms the international community largely dictated. Moreover, those who remained in the home front reacted with incomprehension at the end of the war, their worst fears having been realized.

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Historian Ernst Troeltsch, writing in 1924, famously called the Weimar Republic in its early years a “dreamland,” referring to the panoply of defensive fantasies concocted by the shamed ego, unable to accept military defeat.2 SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) leader Friedrich Ebert, who lost his two sons in the war, was supposedly “seized with sobbing,” so devastating was the initial broadcast of Germany’s loss.3 News of military defeat suddenly put the nation’s destiny into question, propagating many cynical discourses of crisis.4 Troeltsch observed that desperation gave way to wild speculation about what will be, so that “everyone, without grasping the conditions and real consequences, could portray the future in fantastic, pessimistic or heroic terms.”5 Visions of imagined utopias or cynical apocalypse proliferated: both revealed more about the confusion of the postwar present than of anything concrete about the future. Traditional ways of understanding German nationhood lost their capacity to idealize and consolidate the people. The cost of Germany’s postwar reparations compounded the emotional toll of defeat. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, forced Germany to cede 13 percent of its prewar territory to Poland and France, and demanded recompense for all damage done to civilian property during wartime. During the armistice negotiations, France and Britain were particularly intent on placing full fault on the German nation. Reflecting their desire to place blame, article 231 of the Treaty obligated Germany to accept full responsibility for initiating the war, and “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”6 The total sum called for by the Allied Reparations Commission was set at 226 billion Reichsmarks, locking Germany into making long-term payments until the end of the century. At the end of the war, in the midst of increasing poverty, the polity splintered into a variety of political factions. Prewar solidarities within both the political left and right were broken up, giving rise to the consolidation of extreme political views. While pro-peace and pacifist coalitions were formed, other organizations advocated martial law and audaciously recapitulated grandiose annexationist claims in support of the military regime. Perhaps the most notorious example of the latter was the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Fatherland Party), founded in 1917. At the end of the war, when it was becoming increasingly clear that Germany’s loss would be imminent, this extreme right-wing group stubbornly rejected defeat and promoted desperate measures, insisting that winning more territories abroad would solve Germany’s domestic crises.

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Historian George Mosse, in Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World War, writes of the reverberation of wartime attitudes into civilian politics, the “brutalization of German politics, a heightened indifference to human life” that pervaded public life.7 For many after the war, militarism and authoritarianism retained their revered status. Nothing less than a return to Prussian discipline could rein in the postwar chaos that threated to break apart national unity and German identity.8 As Mosse observes, it is this unquestioned regard for authority and the culture of submission that gave way to the uncompromising and callous treatment of political adversaries. “The process of the brutalization of politics is most easily followed in Germany with its cycle of revolution and counterrevolution after the war, and the years of political uncertainty under the Weimar Republic which followed.”9 The partisan politics of civilian political life was a direct transposition of the friend–enemy distinction operative in wartime.10 In what follows I will connect the postwar experience of loss and the brutalization of politics to a reactionary understanding of the cinema in the Weimar Republic. Toward the end of my reading of Wiene’s Caligari in the introduction, I connected Cesare’s awakening to questions of life and mortality. While the cinematic reanimation of the dead unconsciously confirmed the viewer’s fantasy of her own immortality, we saw how Cesare’s awakening also uncannily reminded the viewer of her own futural death. In the following reading of Robert Reinert’s frenetic 1919 film Nerven (Nerves), I will show how the fantasy of immortality, aligned with the experience of the moving image, is linked to two distinct, but related symptoms of trauma: hallucination and defiant triumphalism. Nerves is an exemplary film for connecting contemporaneous discourses concerning the “nerves” and nervousness to postwar male hysteria. Through its main male protagonists, Roloff and Teacher Johannes, Reinert’s film depicts two reaction-formations that seem unable to mourn and remain incapable of working through the past. Their etiologies coalesce around a key psycho-philosophical idea: the narcissistic metaphysics of the “cool,” distanced spectator.11 It is this metaphysics that underpins both the brutalization of politics and the withdrawal of human mortality from considerations of film ontology. By depicting how the postwar ego disavows that which threatens its fantasy of self-reliant wholeness— through the denial of shame, vulnerability, defeat, and empathy for the other— Reinert’s film allegorizes an ontology of film inseparable from the disavowal of death. Both the male protagonists of the film, living survivors of the war,

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adopt the dispassionate technics of the nonliving camera, reiterating the fantasy of having conquered time and mortality while shoring up the fantasy of the pretraumatized self. Indeed, life in Reinert’s film becomes a principal matter of concern for the postwar subject, reduced through its biopolitical understanding as either healthy or unhealthy, productive or unproductive, for the defeated nation. Though I will argue that Nerves implicates the representation of nervous exhaustion and its relationship to concerns around postwar masculinity, this relationship implicates psycho-philosophical stakes for the cinema spectator who disavows as well, whose look allows the cinema to “live.” Film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry has written that film “lives on the denial of difference: difference is necessary for it to live, but it lives on its negation.”12 Baudry was speaking about the impression of continuity produced through the succession of discrete images on a filmstrip projected onto a screen. The difference between each image must be disavowed so that the illusion of movement may be sustained—notably, this is an illusion that for Bergson corresponds to the fallacies of metaphysical thought. We shall see that this act of negation, performed by the spectator, is self-reflexively and allegorically signaled in Nerves. Through Roloff and Johannes, Reinert’s film illuminates how disavowal enables a postwar, solipsistic form of thinking that claims sovereignty over life and its vicissitudes.

Nerves (1919) and the Great War That the powers of death might be matched against life in one supreme combat, destiny had gathered them all at a single point. And behold how death was conquered; how humanity was saved by material suffering from the moral downfall which would have been its end; while the peoples joyful in their desolation, raised on high the song of deliverance form the depths of ruin and grief! Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War (1915)13 In Shell Shock Cinema, Anton Kaes argues that Robert Reinert’s Nerves must be read through the experience of trauma that permeated all cultural production following the war. While the film does not show scenes of military combat, it nevertheless depicts the signs of the war’s aftermath registered in the bodies of returned soldiers—uncontrollable shakes, physical and psychic tremors, and

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visual and auditory delusions. The language of the nerves and nervousness, utilized to explain these symptoms of shell shock, pre-dated the war by decades, however. Throughout the nineteenth century, these diagnostic categories assessed the psychosomatic effects of life in modernity and the effects of industrialization on the collective nation. “Seen from this angle,” Kaes writes, “war and revolution were symptoms of a larger malaise: a collective neurasthenia in response to belated but frenzied modernization and urbanization. The discourse on nerves also allowed the filmmaker to create a nexus between the battlefield and the home front.”14 Through the discourse of the nerves, Reinert’s film links the symptoms of shell shock to an already existing knowledge about the shock of modernization on the human body. It also links the language of nerves with the biopolitics of the nation and the need for healthy, productive citizens after wartime. Nerves should be contextualized within Weimar’s brutalizing politics, not only because it expresses anxieties associated with the traumatized subject, but also because it explicitly prescribes images of healthy, self-sufficient postwar masculinities, set over against the abjected, unhealthy, and dependent other. In her essay, “Unsettling Nerves: Investigating War Trauma in Robert Reinert’s Nerven (1919),” Barbara Hales considers Nerves within postwar understandings of male hysteria and the highly politicized discourse surrounding the war malingerer.15 “In contrast to the neurasthenic, who has the will but not the stamina, the hysteric possesses a faulty genetic make-up, resulting in the rejection of the will to fight.”16 At a time when the interpretation of war neurosis was thought to be a condition of a weak individual will and faulty nerves, traumatized soldiers were vilified for expressing their inability and refusal to reenter the battlefield. This vilification is illustrated in the first half of Nerves, in a scene where a female character brutally chastises a love-struck man who refuses to take part in the emerging revolutionary movements. He is terrified of the gunfights taking place in the streets and in defiance of her emasculating reprimands, which exacerbates his frail nerves, he randomly murders a stranger on the street. Soldiers who expressed resistance to returning to the front were correspondingly belittled for requesting pensions and psychiatric treatment for their ailments, and criticized for becoming burdens on the already struggling postwar state.17 In her article, Hales concludes that the vilification of the war neurotic is indicative of a larger denial, that is “of Germany’s overall inability to accept defeat.”18 Both Kaes and Hales account for the way in which Nerves reflects the inability to accept loss in Weimar culture, but the film’s depiction of the nerves, as a diagnostic language,

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carries further reaching implications that call for additional philosophical and cinematic scrutiny. Reinert’s fervid film not only connects pre- and postwar notions of the human subject while linking home and war fronts through the depiction of male hysteria, it also allegorizes the encounter between the cinema and the nervous spectator. Nerves begins with a tumultuous prologue that dramatizes a mother on the home front and her soldier son, “thousands of miles from his Heimat.” The home and the war fronts are interrelated through parallel editing. Nerves alternates a shot of the mother, sensing impending danger, with a shot of a wounded young man gasping for life, crawling among dead bodies strewn about underneath a gnarled tree. Smoke floats in the background, suggesting the presence of gunfire (Figure 1.1). An intertitle indicates the existence of an unseen, telepathic connection between these different locations: “Mother, mother! And you feel it, thousands of miles away, at the same moment. What does it mean?” As the dying son cries out and slumps down, lifeless, the film cuts back to the horrified mother with her arms raised in exasperation. This episode seems to anticipate a sequence depicting Hutter and Ellen in Act Two of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from 1922, where a similar telepathic connection between the husband and wife is forged through montage. As in this opening sequence from Reinert’s film, Ellen also reaches out when she senses Hutter in danger many miles away. Despite the great distance, the mother senses the life draining from her beloved offspring through the power of filmic editing. In the second episode of the prologue, a nervous man approaches a sleeping woman. With his shadow projected on the wall, as in the depiction of Alan’s

Figure 1.1  Nerves, 1919

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death in Caligari, he violently strangles the vulnerable woman with his bare hands. The tense murderer then looks up and sees a small bird in a birdcage hanging near the woman’s bed. Suddenly feeling sympathy for the small creature, he remarks, “Poor little thing without any water: it is dying, dying.” He fills its small water silo and runs away from the scene of the crime. The relationship between these two episodes is not immediately apparent, but an intertitle that concludes the introduction suggests that both may be linked through the malady of troubled nerves: “Beware you peoples, shaken by nervous epidemics [Nervenepidemien], and terror and panic, or by wild, unbridled lust.” If Nerves reflects how an existing language of nervousness was connected to the symptoms of war trauma, the juxtaposition of these episodes utilizes the nerves to secure further connections between home and war fronts, and by coextension, the symptoms associated with both. Throughout the nineteenth century, the “nerves” were understood as lines of communication that connected the soul of a living being to its surrounding world, like a series of telegraph wires that connect the sender of a message to its receiver. American neurologist George M. Beard in 1869 coined the term “neurasthenia,” or nervous exhaustion, to describe the breakdown of these lines of communication. A reference text published in 1893, the Handbuch der Neurasthenie, indicates the speed and extent to which the discourse of nervous exhaustion, which Beard thought was a direct consequence of “American civilization,” entered into international scientific discourse. In a bibliographic chapter at the end of the text, hundreds of titles in German, English, and French that concern the symptoms of nervousness are listed. The category of the “nerves” concretized emerging scientific developments that linked psychology, physiology, and metaphysics in the nineteenth century, bringing together researchers from fields that were previously considered distinct. Understanding the nerves placed them in the shared task of explaining how they become excessively stimulated and exhausted in modern life. In Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity, historian Andreas Killen finds that while the discourse of hysteria has historically come to be associated with Vienna and Paris, “neurasthenia became closely connected to Wilhelmine Berlin.”19 Killen persuasively argues that the history of neurasthenia cannot be separated from Germany’s rapid industrialization between 1870 and 1914, as well as the myriad ways in which the Germanspeaking medical community debated the risks and pathologies of modern life. Physiologist Ludimar Hermann, in his Allgemeine Nervenphysiologie (General

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Physiology of the Nerves), published in 1879, famously distinguished animal from plant life through the existence, in the case of the former, of a rational will. He surmised that animal life remains particularly vulnerable to external threat because their bodies are constituted through an interdependent system of nerves, such that “a defect of a part of the central nervous system results in a corresponding failure of the nerve and animal muscles on which they are dependent.”20 This is why the deleterious effect of urbanization and the mental stresses concomitant with the introduction of new technologies (such as the telegraph and the telephone) are particularly hazardous for human beings. Modernity affects the human animal in its totality. Hermann advises suffering, nervous individuals to return to nature and take up physical exercise so that the nerves may be “toughened,” optimized, and returned to healthiness. In his 2008 study, Cult of the Will, Michael Cowan correspondingly shows how late nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of the will were mobilized to tame bodily and spiritual nervousness. Tics, spasms, paralysis, and other signs of nervous ailment attest to the weakness of the internal will, and its inability to rein in nervous pathologies. “More than any other,” writes Cowan, “the nervous subject appeared to be determined from the outside in and, correspondingly, unable to impose his subjectivity from the inside out.”21 The nervous subject, like the war malingerer, lacked the will to life, and was quickly deemed unfit to endure the shocks and stresses of modern civilization. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the discourse of the nerves gave way to further reaching speculations, and was often invoked to explain supernatural phenomena. Between 1900 and 1913 a journal series, Grenzfragen des Nervenund Seelenlebens, repeatedly utilized the vocabulary of nerves for understanding topics that did not fall within the discursive purview of contemporary science: somnambulism, hypnosis, the relationship between neurosis and creativity, and the etiology of hysteria. In the second volume, the neurologist Heinrich Obersteiner makes explicit a key connection between nerves and nervous exhaustion (Nervenabspannung): “Commonly all purely functional symptoms or groups of symptoms on the part of the nervous systems belong to a range of psychic symptoms, when they are manifest outward as in the case of hysterical paralysis.”22 Obersteiner identifies the pineal body as the “soul-organ of Descartes,” isolating this endocrine gland, located between the two hemispheres of the brain, as the seat of Cartesian epistemology. Mind and body congeal in the nerves, while idealist philosophy is inseparable from the physiology and morphology of the human body. Though he grounds his theory of the ego in the

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organs of the nervous system, Obersteiner nevertheless reiterates the sovereignty of the self as a singular, irreducible substance. When put through the torment of modern warfare, the nerves undergo unprecedented agitation. In his 1915 text Der Krieg und die Nerven (The War and the Nerves), neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer takes up the argument perpetuated by Obersteiner, and maintains that the constitution of the soldier is linked to the fitness of the nervous system, particularly to “the brain, the organ of our soul, where thinking, feeling and human action originates.”23 Alzheimer, who had already been recognized for identifying the symptoms of late-onset dementia now referred to as “Alzheimer’s disease,” emphasizes the relationship of the nerves to the mettle of the German people in wartime. He isolates the brain as the seat of courage: “Where we speak of tough nerves, a brave heart, or cold blood, we are really talking about the accomplishments of the brain.”24 Alzheimer links the strong warrior, in a seemingly Nietzschean vein, to the efficient and proper functioning of the nervous system. While the brain cannot be separated from the nerves, he nevertheless retains the privileged function of this organ as the site of cogitation. The discourse of the nerves connected physiology to psychic and emotional phenomena, but in wartime it allowed writers such as Alzheimer to posit a self besieged by external forces. Medical practitioners, philosophers, and many other thinkers invested in the notion of healthy nerves exploited this discourse to nostalgically recuperate the certainty of a self that pre-dates the experience of war trauma. Alzheimer recounts the life-changing physiological and emotional traumas experienced by soldiers on the front: They found themselves in the immediate vicinity of a grenade and were severely wounded by an exploding shell. Because of this violent terror, some have lost their ability to speak or hear and became deaf and silent, experiencing paralysis in both legs or in one-half of their body, having cramps, or entered into a dazed state, a traumatic, foggy condition of consciousness, in which the sick do not know their orientation in place and time, are confused, and often express experiences of terror or something to that effect.25

Alzheimer calls for the hardening of one’s nerves in wartime (this time in the vein of Ernst Jünger), in order to fend off the deleterious effects of combat and obviate the dulling of one’s “prudence, calm, and clarity of the faculty of judgment.”26 The whole self, defined as a tightly bounded set of nerves, may be regained by fortifying them against all unforeseen external threats. Alzheimer

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also acknowledges those on the home front who have also experienced traumas that are no less devastating—the loss of loved ones. He expresses concern for the future of the German family, and for those who must care for traumatized fathers and brothers returned from the battlefield.27 An intertitle from Reinert’s film explicitly figures the nerves as central to the healthy functioning of the human body, for their failure precipitates the devolution of the human soul: “Nerves, you mysterious avenues of the soul, you messengers of highest desire and deepest suffering. If you fail, man is but animal. Nerves, are you not the soul itself?” Healthy nerves constitute a healthy individual fit for civilized life, undergirded by a network of what Alzheimer calls “white strands that run from the brain and spinal cord through the body to the sense organs.”28 Reinert’s appropriation of the discourse of the nerves in 1919 parallels Alzheimer’s view of the nerves as central to physical and mental fitness formulated in 1915. The nerves must be prepared for endurance, both at home and on the war front, until the Fatherland achieves victory in the war. The cinema, as a medium that excites the senses, is particularly suited to reenacting the shocks of war on the nervous system, and for constituting a form of postwar thinking that struggles to recover some semblance of the prewar past. In Reinert’s film, it is the failure of the nerves and the subsequent disavowal of this failure that gives rise to the production of visual delusions. The indicators of neurasthenia resultant from the war and described by Alzheimer earlier correspond with those depicted in the character of Roloff in Nerves. Like “those who found themselves in the immediate vicinity of a grenade and were severely wounded by an exploding shell,” this character experiences sudden explosions and exhibits traumatic symptoms akin to shell shock. It is to him I will now turn.

Roloff: From trauma to vision Following the prologue, Nerves begins its narrative proper as the prominent industrialist Roloff (Eduard von Winterstein) and his wife Elisabeth (Lia Borré) celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of “The House of Roloff.” Marja (Erna Morena), his sister, is to be married to the aristocratic Richard (Rio Ellbon), the Count of Colonna. However, Marja loves Teacher Johannes (Paul Bender), whom she has known since her student days. In the film’s opening act, Roloff stands before a mass gathering and announces that his machines will allow him and his followers to conquer the earth and make them “masters of the world.”

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At the very moment Roloff announces his megalomaniac plans for global domination, and as his mesmerized listeners raise their fists in victory, the film suddenly cuts to a shot of his factories exploding into flames. Instead of allowing him to conquer the world, Roloff ’s machines collapse in a pile of rubble. Their detonations recall the experience of sudden blasts and unpredictable enemy fire that threatened the safety of the soldier during trench warfare. The explosion “destroys the newly opened factory,” and Roloff ’s followers are sent into pandemonium (Figure 1.2). Amid the mounting state of emergency, Teacher Johannes makes an appearance before the people and, to quell the rising chaos and confusion, begins speaking of the nation’s collective trauma. “The peoples are mourning on bloody battlefields,” he remarks. Making explicit reference to the recently concluded war, Johannes calls for the end of the “greed for power which marched across the earth like some hideous beast”. Meanwhile, Roloff convalesces at home, incapacitated with a serious case of the nerves (Figure 1.3). “I used to have nerves of steel, but since then,” he says to his wife Elisabeth, “I keep seeing the ghosts of the dead rising to wreak their terrible revenge on us, and especially on me.” Intercut with his words are two short shots that express his inner turmoil: one repeats the exploding factories in flashback and another depicts a young man holding a large sword and standing over corpses on a battlefield. The latter image corresponds to a shot from the prologue featuring the war dead and a gnarled tree. Here, however, it is more ominous, evoking the Sword of Damocles while also symbolizing two historical catastrophes: one that has already taken place and one that soon will occur.

Figure 1.2  Nerves, 1919

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Figure 1.3  Nerves, 1919

Film scholar Philipp Stiasny, in his reading of Reinert’s film, corroborates the connection between the exploding factories and the shock of military loss: “The collapse of his old factories through an unexpected explosion, the experience of shock followed by his disturbance, is a powerful metaphor for Germany’s defeat in the war and the collapse of the empire.”29 The collapse of the old order gives way to uncertainty and dread about the future. In his analysis, Stiasny makes a direct comparison between the fictional Roloff and the historical Wilhelm II. While the industrialist flees into a state of agitated nerves, the Kaiser fled into Holland after the war. Correspondingly, Stiasny notes, the shock of Germany’s collapse is registered through Roloff ’s breakdown. While riots take place in the streets, Marja challenges their nervous gardener, who has secretly loved her since childhood, to action. “Down there people are fighting for their lives and you’re running around love struck, you coward!” Her denunciation inflames him. “I am no coward,” he later protests to his mother and father. Highly agitated, he grabs an ax, enters a busy intersection of his town, and chops down the first stranger who accosts him. The humiliated gardener is quickly apprehended by passersby on the street, stood against a wall, and put to death by a line of bayonets. Meanwhile, people on the streets march and engage in firefights, as factions vie to gain control following the social and political chaos unleashed by Roloff ’s exploding factories. Reinert’s depictions of crowd mobilization, street riots, and mass chaos in Nerves reflect the demand for change driven not by ideology, but by the melodramatic politics of the postwar self.

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Indeed, these scenes and the emergence of an increasingly brutalized politics recall the dramatic events that took place between the end of the war and the signing of the Weimar Constitution. On November 7, 1918, over 60,000 war-weary workers and soldiers gathered in the Theresienwiese and forced the abdication of the Bavarian king. Filled with revolutionary zeal, and with no official government in place, they declared a new Soviet Republic, the Freistaat Bayern. One week after Lenin sent a message of greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic in early May 1919, the Freikorps and other soldiers, still loyal to the German Army, stormed Munich and defeated the Socialists in a series of gun battles and street fights.30 When the Weimar Constitution was signed in August 1919, Munich became a hotbed for extreme rightwing politics, gathering those who felt betrayed by the government and who demanded a return to the nationalist Fatherland.31 Reinert must have reflected upon these dramatic political turnovers as he was producing the crowd scenes and filming on-location in Munich during this period of great instability. According to a 1919 article from Der Kinematograph, he employed “thousands” of unemployed people to play the agitated masses.32 It is conceivable that many of these unemployed extras took part in the actual rioting that took place in Munich. So that she may prepare for the coming political utopia, Marja calls off her arranged marriage to Richard, rejecting bourgeois social affiliations. This bond would have maintained the long-standing reputation of Roloff and his lineage. Marja confesses that she does not love the count. On the other hand, she is driven by a passionate desire for a new societal order, one that will interrupt old habits and do away with traditional social relations. Her brother Roloff, shocked by her decision to call off the wedding, asks, “For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?” He desperately urges Marja to speak, violently shaking her shoulders and pleading with her. Overcome with shame, she is unable to explain why Johannes “possesses” her while Richard does not. Her continuing intransigence exacerbates Roloff ’s “overwrought nerves” (überreizten Nerven) and incites his delusional imagination. The film cuts to a brief hallucination, belonging to Roloff, of Teacher Johannes forcing himself onto Marja. Like the repeated memories of his exploding factories, the hallucination appears in a moment of extreme anxiety. In the brief cutaway scene, Johannes aggressively grabs Marja and, overcoming her resistance, kisses her. When the film cuts back, Roloff has already convinced himself that his sister was the victim of sexual assault. “I swore I saw it …,” he gravely remarks (Figure 1.4).

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Figure 1.4  Nerves, 1919

Roloff ’s imagined testimony is later used as evidence in the film’s courtroom sequence, proof that indicts Johannes as an adulterer. While Roloff confuses delusion and reality, he is nevertheless clearheaded about the political opportunity that has arisen from Johannes’s guilt and besmirched reputation. In a conversation with the district attorney following the trial, Roloff notes that this is their opportunity to “eliminate our most powerful enemy.” His cynical politics would have resonated with Munich audiences who witnessed rapid exchanges of power in 1918 and 1919, exchanges founded on delusions of the other and driven by the thirst for revenge. These bitter sentiments, like those held by Roloff, reiterate stark political lines that were drawn between political factions in the Weimar Republic, particularly between the Spartacist League, the SPD, and the nationalistic right. Roloff ’s delusion is shown two more times in Nerves, like a repetition compulsion, each constituting key moments in its plot. With each reiteration, Roloff begins to question whether the memory actually took place. He is unable to exculpate his traumatic memories, while his desperate self-scrutinizing only further escalates his nervous suffering. Meanwhile, as the film unfolds, his delusions become increasingly bizarre and extreme. Portrayed through in-camera special effects, Roloff sees himself wandering through a distorted forest, then drifting through an angry crowd of people, and later choking his wife. While the discourse of the nerves and nervousness describes his agitated condition, Roloff ’s mounting anxiety and hallucination, particularly the sexual content of his vision of Marja’s assault, seem to gesture toward another mode of explanation that was quickly gaining currency after the war: the

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science of psychoanalysis. It is this discourse that will allow us to clearly see how and why Roloff continues to hallucinate as a massive effort to shore up his traumatized self. Freud’s 1908 essay, “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness,” shifts the analytical concerns regarding neurasthenia away from the nerves themselves to the area of psychic life. The essay responds directly to Christian von Ehrenfels’s paper “Sexualethik,” published in Grenzfragen des Nervenund Seelenlebens, and quotes at length passages on the nerves from Wilhelm Heinrich Erb, Otto Ludwig Binswanger, and sexologist Richard von Kraft-Ebbig. While commenting on contemporaneous tracts on neurasthenia written by these and other researchers, Freud moves away from “the less definite forms of ‘nervousness’ ” in order to consider “the actual forms of nervous disease.”33 The psychoanalyst argues that neurotic disorder may be linked to the interdictions imposed by modern sexual ethics, and that the actual origins of what is called neurasthenia may be traced back to “the undue suppression of the sexual life in civilized peoples (or classes) as a result of the ‘civilized’ sexual morality which prevails among them.”34 Freud thus shifts from the organic-mechanistic terminology of neurasthenia to the psychoanalytic vocabulary of neurosis and the politics of civilized sexuality. Still, Freud acknowledges the crucial link between neurosis and the stresses of modernity, yet a negative one, by asserting that neurosis remains a type of sexual expression that defies societal prohibition. Neurosis is a flight from psychic conflict into disease when the libido cannot find its normal path to satisfaction in modern life.35 In short, neurosis in psychoanalysis is the symptomatic expression of illicit wishes repressed by society. This interpretation of sexual desire allowed Freud to consider cases of nervousness beyond the discourse of the nerves, beyond their excitability and exhaustibility, theorized by writers such as Obersteiner and Alzheimer, and to reconsider symptoms such as melancholy and anxiety. If Nerves is an allegory about war trauma, then a psychoanalytic consideration of damaged nerves allows us to assess its psychophilosophical etiology. Freud’s colleague, analyst Karl Abraham, was afforded the opportunity to observe the symptoms of war trauma directly during his service to the Fatherland as the chief physician of the Berlin Grunewald military hospital. Donning an official uniform, sword, and heavy boots, he received injured soldiers and treated their physical and mental wounds.36 In January 1915, Abraham wrote to Freud describing his observation of nervous symptoms already familiar to him:

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Afterlives I have seen a number of traumatic neuroses, well known to us from peacetime, in a typical form. They were all men who had had accidents at the front, such as being run over; they had not been wounded. I have also seen several severe cases of hysteria in men knocked unconscious by explosions. They mostly have aphasia-abasia and hysterical attacks.37

Two months later, in early March, he was relocated to Allenstein in East Prussia in order to continue his work with traumatized soldiers. There he observed signs of male hysteria, corresponding to archetypes of the prewar “impotent male.” This correspondence between prewar and postwar subject formations quickly confirmed for Abraham that the symptoms of war trauma should be diagnosed as stemming from some unknown, unconscious sexual irregularity. Abraham’s experience with returned soldiers thus convinced him that psychoanalysis could serve as a viable curative method. His analysis of neurosis, and its link to sexual repression, suggested therapeutic solutions other than those resolved by Fritz Kaufmann’s electrotherapy, the most popular method of dealing with war trauma at the time. “Kaufmannization” combined verbal suggestion with five minutes of high-voltage electrical current, in order to “reset” the nerves back to health. In a lecture presented at the 1918 Symposium of the Fifth International Psycho-analytical Congress in Budapest, a conference significant for reconvening colleagues under the banner of psychoanalysis,38 Abraham attests to the superiority of the psychoanalytic method over “ ‘active’ curative procedures”39 such as shock therapy. He also rebuffs popular skepticism surrounding the illegitimacy of the mentally disturbed soldier, rejecting the charge that traumatized veterans assert their victimization so that they may avoid returning to the front or win a pension. Instead, Abraham explains that their neurosis should instead be described as “the impulse to a regressive alteration which endeavours to reach narcissism.”40 The symptoms of male hysteria that result from this effort to recoup the narcissistic self describe those exhibited by Roloff in Nerves. In his Budapest lecture, Abraham recounts a case involving a patient, who before the war had demonstrated neurotic tendencies and “behaved like a terrified little child” after standing in the proximity of a mine explosion. His portrayal uncannily corresponds to Roloff ’s terrified response to his exploding factories. The psychoanalyst writes that “For many weeks he could only reply to all questions about his trouble with the two words, ‘mine bombs.’ He had therefore gone back to the mode of expression of a child hardly two years old.”41 Many neurotics, despite their propensity toward thoughts of death and bouts of depression,

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have nevertheless maintained their healthy demeanor by believing in a narcissistic fantasy of immortality, according to Abraham. However, the effect of an explosion, a severe physical wound, or other extreme experience quickly annihilates this belief, and “the narcissistic security gives way to a feeling of powerlessness and the neurosis sets in.”42 Abraham’s analysis also matches that of Alzheimer’s in his description of traumatized soldiers in 1915, and both participate in a postwar discourse that clearly informs the representation of Roloff in Reinert’s film. In a handful of cases, the psychic trauma of the returned soldier gives rise to the formation of delusions. These cases shed greater light on the specific role of sexuality in the etiology of war trauma while illuminating the primacy of sexuality in psychic life in general. Delusions point to a libidinal undecidability, Abraham writes, concomitant precisely with the symptoms of shell shock: In the cases I have seen the delusions are partly of jealousy, partly of homosexual persecution by comrades. I might mention the paranoid illness of a soldier which broke out when he, after long service in the field, went home on furlough and turned out to be impotent with his wife. A very transparent symbolism and other signs pointed with certainty to the significance of homosexual components as the fundamental cause of the delusion.43

The soldier’s peacetime narcissism comes into conflict with homosexual desires that had found an outlet in the community of male soldiers during the war. On the battlefield, soldiers must be prepared to give themselves over completely to their military unit and identify with the Fatherland. Through the homosocial bond of the unit, the ego is forced to renounce all individual narcissistic privileges and transfer his libido onto the group. Following the return to peacetime, the exclusive relations with men that were constitutive of the military unit come into intense conflict with the soldier’s heterosexual relations with women. The narcissism breaks out. The capability of the transference of the sexual hunger (libido) dies away as well as the capacity of self-sacrifice in favour of the community. On the contrary, we now have a patient before us who himself needs care and consideration on the part of others, who in a typically narcissistic manner is in constant anxiety about his life and health. The obtrusiveness of the symptoms (tremors, arrack, etc.) is also narcissistic. Many of the patients show themselves complete female-passive in the surrender to their suffering.44

Delusions, according to Abraham, occur as the wartime libido attempts to reconnect with the external world. They arise through the conflict that comes

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about when homosexual tendencies associated with wartime are forcibly redirected toward normative, heterosexual aims in peacetime. According to psychoanalysis, the severely traumatized self concocts hallucinations to rebuild a shattered external reality. In Reinert’s Nerves, the industrialist Roloff hallucinates the rape of his sister Marja by Teacher Johannes. The explosion of his factories precipitates these delusions. If we interpret this explosion as being allegorical of the exploding shells experienced in the trenches, then Roloff ’s unreal visions could be said to correspond to the delusions concocted by the traumatized soldier. And if we follow the logic set out by Abraham in his 1918 paper, we see how Roloff ’s hallucinations may be connected to his regression to a narcissistic state, and to his behaving like a “terrified little child” in response to the struggle to return to normalcy following the trauma of his exploding factories. Up to this point, Nerves consolidates a form of thinking and “working through” with a repetition compulsion that belongs to the ontology of the reproducible image. However, if this regression represents a retreat from the world, it is not clear why Roloff mistakes his inner delusions as external reality while simultaneously claiming to recognize the differences between them. As an intertitle from Nerves indicates, the paranoid industrialist keeps hallucinating and “seeing the ghosts of the dead rising to wreak their terrible revenge on us, and especially on me.” It remains unclear why these visions must remain conspiratorial and even persecutory in nature. I would like to explore this further by delving deeper into the psychoanalytic theory around trauma and delusion elaborated at the time, returning to Freud’s prewar writing on the nerves and paranoia. Because of its importance for Abraham’s wartime observations, Freud’s key study of paranoiac delusion will allow us to understand the narcissistic subjectivity that underpins Roloff ’s postwar hallucinations, and shed light on the nature of the delusions depicted throughout Nerves. The following exegesis is not simply a historical digression, but will come to furnish a theory of the damaged subject depicted through the delusions of film, and will eventually reveal an ontological possibility, allegorical of the experience of trauma, that belongs to the cinema image. Reinert’s film seems to think itself, and propose an ontology, by exploiting powers specific to the medium. In this, Roloff ’s repeated, compulsive delusions showcase the basic capacity of film to repeat images of the past—images that, like his visions, blend hallucination with reality. Freud first articulated his theory of paranoia in his “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” published in 1911. He takes

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as its object of analysis not a living subject, but a written memoir: Daniel Paul Schreber’s 1903 chronicle, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of a Neurotic). Freud interprets the discourses of nerves and nervousness that thread their way throughout the writing in order to mine the text for its psychoanalytic insights. Schreber relates a number of significant disappointments that preceded his mental collapse. In the 1884 Reichstag elections, he ran as a candidate of the National Liberal Party and humiliatingly lost to the socialist Bruno Geiser. His defeat resulted in a mild nervous breakdown and a six-month stay at the psychiatric hospital in Leipzig under the care of the neuropathologist Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig. Following Schreber’s treatment, and adding to his despair, his wife suffered a series of miscarriages. However, it was following his nomination to the position of presiding judge, or Senatspräsident, in the Supreme Court of Appeals in 1893 when he began to experience severe symptoms of anxiety, sleeplessness, and hallucination. Schreber’s memoirs recount details of his megalomania, his fantasies of becoming a woman, delusions of persecution, and finally his paranoiac communion with the sun and God. Appropriating contemporary neurasthenic discourses, Schreber delusionally asserts that the human soul is constituted in and through the nerves of the body, “extraordinarily delicate structures—comparable to the finest filaments—and that the total mental life of a human being rests of their excitability by external impressions.”45 Reiterating received knowledge, he writes that the nerves bring impulses to their destination so that the body can perform its directed tasks. By contrast, God is without body, and is nothing but nerves. Schreber bizarrely asserts that God’s nerves “have in particular the faculty of transforming themselves into all things of the created world; in this capacity they are called rays; and herein lies the essence of divine creation.”46 Contact between man and God can only occur in the afterlife, when the soul may avail itself to the divine gaze. The paranoid judge believes that his purpose on earth is to prepare for his adjudication before God. Continuing his psychotic discourse, he claims that the “nerves of morally depraved men are blackened; morally pure men have white nerves; the higher a man’s moral standard in life, the more his nerves become completely white or pure, an intrinsic property of God’s nerves.”47 Schreber’s account recalls the first intertitle of Reinert’s film that asserts the nerves to be the “mysterious avenues of the soul,” “messengers of highest desire and deepest suffering,” and even constitutive of the “soul itself.” Both memoir and film operate from the nineteenth-century premise that the self exists only

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insofar as it may be reduced to a network of nerve fibers, and thus cannot be localized in a single organ.48 In Freud’s reading of Schreber’s memoirs, the signifiers that constitute his corpus avail themselves not to God, but to the hermeneutics of psychoanalysis. In his analysis, he proposes first that Schreber’s persecutory God is actually the neuropathologist Dr. Flechsig. This person is someone who at one point had been a particularly respected figure and is now considered hated and feared: It appears that the person to whom the delusion ascribes so much power and influence, in whose hands all the threats of the conspiracy converge, is either, if he is definitely named, identical with someone who played an equally important part in the patient’s emotional life before his illness, or else is easily recognizable as a substitute for him.49

Through another hermeneutic substitution, Freud notes that Schreber had discovered in Flechsig a replacement for his father, Moritz Schreber. The senior Schreber had published, among a number of other books, Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik (Medical Indoor Gymnastics) in 1855, an instructional text for children that details exercises and rearing techniques for proper health and hygiene. If, Freud concludes, all intimate relationships are characterized by a fundamental sexual ambivalence between love and hate, Schreber’s characterization of Flechsig as a feared figure coexists with the judge’s homosexual attachment to the neuropathologist.50 “The intensity of the emotion,” Freud explains, “is projected outwards in the shape of an external power, while its quality is changed into the opposite. The person who is now hated and feared as a persecutor was at one time loved and honoured.”51 When Schreber’s libido had retracted from the external world onto himself, this led to a struggle between the narcissistic and homosexual impulses that had been revived in connection with his increasing dependence on Flechsig. Throughout his memoirs, Schreber writes that Flechsig had repeatedly attempted to commit “soul-murder” upon him, and he regarded the physician as the one true enemy, over against which he had placed the almighty God. This juxtaposition suggested to Freud that Flechsig functioned as the person to which Schreber had become erotically attached as an esteemed figure of authority. At the same time, the neuropathologist was also his hated persecutor in connection to his disavowal of these unconscious homosexual impulses. Freud provides a theory of delusion that helps us understand Roloff ’s hallucinations in Nerves. The psychoanalyst schematically works through the

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ways in which the paranoiac unconscious struggles against the socially censured proposition, “I (a man) love him.” He articulates this as a series of negations, not unlike those worked through in his 1919 essay on the etiology of masochism, “A Child is Being Beaten.” With respect to the paranoiac, Freud lists: “I do not love him—I hate him”; “I do not love him—I love her, because she loves me”; “It is not I who love the man—she loves him.” Finally, in the last movement of this series of renunciations, the paranoiac performs the final claim that enacts an extreme form of regression: “I do not love at all—I do not love any one.” This constitutes the most significant substitution. Here the ego performatively renounces love yet unconsciously diverts the libido back onto the self, causing the self to retreat into a shell. For Freud this narcissistic movement, this performative disavowal of love, originates the delusions of the paranoiac. In order to explain how this comes to be, Freud begins by observing that the statement, “I do not love at all,” places the ego in a passive relationship to the external world. What has been rejected and made unacceptable, namely the homoeroticism of the first proposition, is displaced as a threatening perception that emerges from outside the ego. This shift is essentially part of a series of reaction-formations that attempt to expunge what is thought to be foreign to the paranoiac self. “An internal perception is suppressed,” Freud writes, “and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain degree of distortion, enter consciousness in the form of an external perception.”52 This allows us to understand Schreber’s apocalyptic delusions and his forebodings of a forthcoming catastrophe. In a passage that will be key for my reading of the hallucinations in Reinert’s film, Freud explains that such delusions are not simply the result of a series of distortions that deflect what is undesired from the self, but are attempts to rebuild the world: And the paranoiac builds it up again, not more splendid, it is true, but at least so that he can once more live in it. He builds it up by the work of his delusions. The delusion-formation, which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction. Such a reconstruction after the catastrophe is more or less successful, but never wholly so; in Schreber’s words, there has been a ‘profound internal change’ in the world.53

Delusion is thus an attempt to reconnect with the external world, after it has already been decathected, and is the result of an undecidable aporia that moves between negation and projection. As a massive psychic effort of homophobic repression, this “profound internal change” is brought about by the withdrawal

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of libidinal cathexes from entities external to the self. Delusions are thus the fantasms of an ego that has retreated to a narcissistic state and cannot abide by the homosexual components of this dramatic regression.54 The psychoanalytic explanation of delusion is contingent upon the narcissistic belief in a fallen external world, which is disavowed and subsequently reconstructed through fabricated images. This explanation provides a psychoanalytic, yet historically grounded, way of interpreting the delusions that belong to Roloff. However, by understanding the nervous, hysterical industrialist along this line of argument, my aim is not to symptomatically read the truth of his sexuality. The homosexuality of Roloff is not an explicit or implicit fact within the film’s narrative. My aim rather is to show how the experience of trauma and the discourse of the nerves produce a delusional subject, and to demonstrate how this depiction of paraphrenia provides insight into the potentiality and ontology of life in postwar modernity. If Roloff may be read as allegorical of the traumatized, postwar male subject, the theory of paranoid delusion as understood by psychoanalysis allows us another key allegorical parallel: an understanding of the cinema’s specific capacities to portray delusion. That is, the film itself “reconstructs” a lost world by a traumatized, postwar filmmaker who responds to a hostile, chaotic environment, a reconstruction made manifest through film’s strange juxtapositions and superimpositions. The depiction of delusion in Reinert’s film exploits specific possibilities of the cinema; yet in saying this, I am also arguing that the etiology of delusion and the moving image are underpinned by a narcissistic metaphysics. These parallels may be brought into further relief as we continue following the narrative of Nerves. Based on the testimony of Roloff ’s hallucination, the sexual criminal Johannes is sentenced in court to six years hard labor. Soon, however, Roloff begins to feel guilty for having been responsible for Johannes’s indictment. In act four of Nerves he protests that “I saw it. After all, I swore that I did,” and violently shakes Marja again, even as she denies that the assault took place. In order to convince himself of the validity of his testimony, Roloff swears once more of having witnessed the event. Nonetheless, he privately asks himself, as his paranoia grows, “Am I a fool, or a criminal?” Seriously questioning the truth content of what he has perceived, he remarks to his wife Elisabeth, “We must keep it a secret, Marja has to remain silent. I took an oath …!” At this moment, he comes to a watershed realization: “I have committed perjury. I am the most vile of all creatures.” Finally giving in to the untruth of his delusions, Roloff also acknowledges his culpability for putting an innocent man in prison.

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Roloff consults a nerve specialist and asks for his advice. Leading him through the psychiatric ward, the doctor explains that while his patients look healthy, they are actually seriously ill, for they suffer because of “the progression of civilization [Zivilisation], the struggle for existence, anxiety and the terrors of war, the sins of the parents ….” He explicitly links the sufferings of the mentally ill to the turbulent times that characterize the early Weimar period. To the neurologist’s list may be added the unhealthy effects of the cinema on the nerves. Since its beginnings in Germany, the cinema had been stigmatized for its harmful, agitating effects on suggestive audiences. In 1919, journalist Wilhelm Stapel explains in an essay called “Homo Cinematicus” that the flickering images destroy the mental and moral stability of its viewers because the viewer is “jerked from idea to idea in an abrupt and unmediated fashion.”55 Similarly, Walter Benjamin compares the montage of film editing on the viewer to the confusion of moving through the traffic of a large city: “Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery.”56 However, a review of Nerves, published in the January 1, 1920 edition of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, makes the agitating effects of the cinema even more explicit: “there is always the danger that the spectator, who must experience the film’s agitating elements, could also become nervous.”57 In this, the psychoanalysis of delusion, manifest in Roloff ’s visions, may be linked self-reflexively to the effects of the film medium, and its capacity to agitate and elicit nervousness among the film’s audiences. Sergei Eisenstein’s contemporaneous theory of film explains this linkage, through an essay that mobilizes the unsettling effects of the cinema toward a politically engaged aesthetics of film. In one of his first published pieces from 1924, Eisenstein explains that the aim of the modern cinema is to influence the audience “through a series of calculated pressures on its psyche.”58 It provokes this response in the spectator through radical montage, juxtaposing and accumulating image fragments to shock the spectator into recognizing her class situation. While for Stapel montage is condemned for its deleterious effects, for Eisenstein montage is exploited to shock the spectator into a position of critical distance. He calls this the “montage of attractions,” a highly political approach toward film production that purposefully heightens cinema’s capacity to disrupt linear expectations of time and space so as to assault the viewer with calculated, yet aggressive, psychological force. Film scholar Tom Gunning, in his well-known essay on the “cinema of attractions,” underscores this aspect of exhibitionist confrontation

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in Eisenstein’s essay, linking it to the force of spectacle that is intrinsic to the aesthetics of the cinema technology.59 The montage of attractions explains the shocking effects Reinert’s film had on writer Josefa Halbinger and her friend, in an account conveyed by Halbinger’s daughter, Carlamaria Heim. “It must have been 1921,” she writes, “when a film called ‘Nerves’ played in Munich, and something extraordinary happened. The film was—in my opinion at the time—very good. However there were some people who saw the film and were delivered to a Nervenklinik. Afterwards the film was banned.”60 She advised her friend Bettl not to see the film. Curious and perhaps even a little defiant, Bettl promptly went to see it. Nerves had a profoundly traumatic effect on her. One night after the screening she woke up and ran out in the street screaming, “I’m dying! I’m dying! Now I’m dying!”61 Bettl began to insist that her mother be sent to the Nervenklinik, convinced that she was the one who was mentally disturbed. Halbinger finally persuaded Bettl to admit herself to the clinic where she stayed for four months. Originating in the delusions of Roloff, Nerves disturbs the psyche of the spectator through film’s own medium-specific means. Montage, delusion, the depiction of hysteria and uncontrollable nervousness: these were all quite effective in unsettling Halbinger’s friend. Yet her mental state is mirrored in Roloff ’s own interior instability. Both are reflected once more in the unsettled and highly agitated psyches that lived in the Republic immediately following the war. The cinema puts into motion this delusional, traumatized thinking through its characters, form, and aesthetics. An intertitle from act four unambiguously keys the spectator to these selfreflexive mirrorings with a single word: Verfolgungswahn (“Paranoia”). The word seems to describe the spectator’s own disturbed state at this late moment in the film. It appears after Johannes had been released from prison and before a series of images that depict Roloff ’s paranoid delusions. Their extent seems to know no end. Roloff walks in a stupor through his large mansion, and he asks himself where he is. His familiar surroundings are made strange as the floor psychedelically reflects the walls of the building in pools of water, while his image and then its double appear through superimposition. In the most extended of these delusions, Roloff accompanies Johannes’s ghost into his house, and an intertitle appears that reiterates his culpability: “Roloff, you have killed me!” They continue to walk and encounter the doubled body of Johannes, lying dead on a funeral bier. Roloff ’s wife Elisabeth stands to the side, mourning Johannes’s death. “No one ever went to heaven the way he did!” The film then

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cuts to a strange occult scene of Johannes in robes, climbing the steps of a small neoclassical temple. Open hands wave and reach toward it from below the screen. Overwhelmed by these delusions, Roloff runs to the real Elisabeth with his hands over his ears and exclaims that “I am no murderer: he killed himself!” She is shocked and they revisit the spot where Roloff had seen Johannes’s dead body. The bier has disappeared. He desperately asks himself if he is “really that ill,” while his wife stares incredulously at her delusional husband (Figure 1.5). In Roloff ’s visions, Teacher Johannes is both loved and hated. At the moment of his death, the paranoid industrialist experiences guilt for having murdered Johannes, his primal father-substitute. Roloff ’s dream of controlling the world was shattered by the explosion of his factories, bringing about a profound internal change, like that claimed by Daniel Paul Schreber. The trauma of the catastrophic explosion, following this psychoanalytic logic, forced a regression to an infantile narcissistic state. He becomes a male hysteric, allegorical of the soldier wounded from war and who, according to historian Paul Lerner, “symbolized Germany’s social, political, and economic catastrophes.”62 It is Roloff ’s struggle in reestablishing connections with the external world, and his fundamentally ambivalent attitude toward Johannes, that give rise to his particular delusions. That such a profound change has taken place may be attested to by Roloff ’s increasingly delusional state, for he finally exclaims that “My own nerves mirror the nerves of the world. And the world’s nerves are ill!” His megalomania is now complete. The collapse has taken place “inside” the paranoiac as well as “outside” in the world.63 His nerves mirror the sick nerves of the world, which in

Figure 1.5  Nerves, 1919

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turn are mirrored in the nervousness induced by the film itself for its spectators. The cinema induces a temporary regression, offering up, as Baudry put it, “representations experienced as perception.”64 Roloff ’s internal state is externalized through the cinema, and made manifest through its formal capacities: montage creates sensori-motor linkages that connect one shot to another, so that postwar audiences in early Weimar Germany may mourn their losses once more. In the final pages of his case study, Freud links Schreber’s “rays of God” to the projection of his internal collapse. The rays of God, “which are made up of a condensation of the sun’s rays, of nerve-fibers [Nervenfasern], and of spermatozoa, are in reality nothing else than a concrete representation and external projection of libidinal cathexes; and they thus lend his delusions a striking similarity with our theory.”65 If Schreber’s interpretation of God as “nothing but nerves” may be read in this manner, the delusions made manifest in Nerves may be historically read in a similar way. For the techniques, special effects, and juxtapositions specific to the aesthetics of the cinema that depict Roloff ’s paranoid hallucinations are strikingly similar to those described by Freud and Abraham in their theory of postwar trauma and delusion. This historical correspondence moreover reveals an ontological possibility that belongs to the film medium. The filmstrip, like the nerves that connect Schreber to his God, connect a series of expressionistic images that depict “internal” psychic tensions and anxieties that arise in response to a past catastrophe. They return what has been repressed in the form of cinematic hallucinations. A statement by Roloff, articulated moments before his death, corroborates this: “These dreadful images, which the nerve doctors call illusions, are back again.” Though he ostensibly speaks about his own delusions, with which he attempted to recoup his postwar self, his words seem to reflect on the nature of the film medium itself and its capacity to rebuild a collapsing world through image and montage. These dreadful images in turn express the desperation, paranoia, and sense of apocalypse pervasive in postwar Weimar culture.

Teacher Johannes: The triumphalism of the postwar survivor The moment of survival is the moment of power. Horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1960)66

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Overcome by his delusions, Roloff commits suicide, seeking release from his suffering. Toward the end of Nerves he emphatically begs his nerve specialist for a toxin so that he may die a “beautiful” death. “Do not let me degenerate,” he implores, “Honor the man in me, do not let me turn into a brute-beast.” When he drinks what an intertitle calls the “wondrous” quaff, Roloff becomes calm and expresses an understanding of “euthanasia,” as “the Greeks called it.” Clearly, his fate is tragic. Yet by linking his suicide with the ancient Greeks, Roloff nevertheless lends his death a heroic justification through his selfaggrandizement. He deems himself, to adopt the vocabulary Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche used to defend the legality of euthanasia in their 1920 text Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, a life “unworthy” of living.67 Traumatized and shell shocked, presumably of little “worth” to the postwar nation, the damaged Roloff should, following this biopolitical logic, be allowed to die. On the other hand, Teacher Johannes, recently released from prison, beseeches the weary masses, calling for them to leave the streets and become productive members of society once again. “Human ideals cannot be achieved by violence! Just as a man who doesn’t work will be damaged in body and soul, a people which doesn’t work will perish!” He commands his rapt listeners to “Go to your work! Work is power! [Geht an die Arbeit! Arbeit ist Macht!]” Unlike Roloff, the commanding and confident Johannes will survive the traumas of the exploding factories and continue to live until the conclusion of Reinert’s film. Moreover, he will come to embody the stubborn ideology of postwar absolutism. From reading Roloff ’s diaries, Johannes later discovers that Roloff recognized Elisabeth’s love for the respected teacher and was willing to give her up as his wife. The teacher immediately feels guilty for having played a role in this rift and leaves the country with his blind sister (Lili Dominici).68 Meanwhile Elisabeth, now a widow, regrets her decision to break all ties with Johannes and, acting out in desperation, she burns down her late husband’s castle with Johannes’s sister still inside. Seeing the flames, Johannes rushes to save the two women but he can only bring Elisabeth to safety. She comes to feel immense guilt over the death of his sister. “Elisabeth doesn’t dare to confess to her deed. She disappears without a trace,” an intertitle tells us. Over time, Johannes overcomes his guilt over Roloff ’s suicide, and Elisabeth overcomes hers for the loss of Johannes’s sister. Working through and then forgetting their collective guilt, they finally come together to consummate their love. Meanwhile, Marja commits suicide, and at the moment of her death,

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she defiantly declares her undying belief in the ideals of radical upheaval and revolution. The film ends with a triumphant epilogue that plays out what it calls the “recovery of mankind.” Annulling all debts linked to their losses, Johannes embodies the fantasy of starting life anew, unencumbered by the burdens of the past. He and Elisabeth climb a mountain as Nerves declares these two the “progenitors of a new and happy humankind.” Like the biblical Adam and Eve, suggested by an intertitle that calls them “man and his mate thirsting for beauty and truth,” they are to give rise to a new race of healthy, fit individuals. Nerves then interpellates the spectator herself to return “Back to nature! Work!” in order to promote “New nerves, new human beings!” This discourse of renewed, postwar health coincides with the Körperkultur (“body culture”) that became increasingly fashionable in the Weimar Republic. This culture promoted physical and mental fitness following the misery wrought by the war, and encouraged a nostalgic return to nature as a response (to quote the nerve doctor once more) to the “the progression of civilization, the struggle for existence, anxiety and the terrors of war, [and] the sins of the parents.” In the final shot, in a display of nostalgic pastoralism, Johannes and Elisabeth are shown working a plough and farming. They are the ostensible models by which postwar Germans should continue their lives, rebuilding by returning to their roots and lording over the land. This outcome stands in stark contrast to the fate suffered by the paranoid industrialist Roloff. Those “unfit” for modern life are gone, and Johannes and Elisabeth are not depicted mourning their losses. Nerves concludes with a happy ending, yet one that seems only to perpetuate the fantasy of triumphal survival and an ontology of the undying self. In the previous section of this chapter, I described a crisis in postwar masculinity allegorized through Roloff ’s exploding factories, which, like exploding bombs in war, traumatized the ego’s security. His attempts at selfrecovery took the form of obsessive delusions. Johannes’s insistence on postwar fitness, depicted in the conclusion to Nerves, would have registered with a different Weimar reaction-formation, namely that of national recovery and the rejection of finitude, that responded to the decimation of Germany’s male population in the war. Healthy, new nerves were required for carrying out productive work, to rebuild the Reich and to pay off war reparations. This cultivation of health took on many forms, spurred on by the Lebensreform (“Life Reform”) movements. Nudism, sunbathing, habituation to nature, vegetarianism and dietary reform,

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physical fitness, sport, and dance: these naturalistic health trends were believed to restore an individual’s will to life, a will hampered by the unhygienic conditions of urban living and the stresses of modern civilization. The discourse of fitness was thus intimately linked to questions of postwar survival, in order to restore the body’s weakened nerves and to stave off death. I will now proceed to show how Johannes allegorizes this stance toward life, taking recourse in the cultural context of Reinert’s Nerves as well as to a short, animated promotional film produced for a national exhibition on hygiene and fitness by Walter Ruttmann called Der Aufstieg (The Ascent). Cultural historian Michael Hau, in The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, argues that popular hygienic culture and “un-scientific” natural therapies of the Lebensreform movements practiced between 1890 and 1930 were not simply alternatives to established medicine. The culture of Weimar medicine and health made up “a discursive field that was shaped by laypeople, alternative medical practitioners, and university-trained physicians.”69 Hau analyzes alternative and scientific approaches to health in Weimar Germany in tandem, arguing that both contributed to a singular historical discourse, one that deployed “aesthetic concepts, tropes, and images in order to make their ideas visible, or anschaulich, for a lay public.”70 He shows how information about health not only brought together discourses from diverse levels of scientific legitimacy, but also that this bringing together was consolidated under the banner of nationhood. Perhaps the most well-known filmic example of this Weimar obsession with physical and spiritual health is UFA’s Ways to Strength and Beauty from 1925. This Kulturfilm depicts scenes of nude bodies bathing in light, sun, air, and water in the celebration of corporeal beauty and exercise. Echoing Johannes’s call for new human beings, the advertising flyer for the film observes that “In contrast to underdeveloped young people, we see the representatives of a new race for whom body culture is uppermost, who know how to strengthen themselves and stay robust.”71 Körperkultur counteracted the ravages of modernity on the corpus through the optimization of the body and strengthening of the nerves.72 A key example of the culture of hygiene and the body is the Gesolei exhibition that took place in 1926 in Düsseldorf. Occupied by the French from 1921 to 1925, Düsseldorf was an important location for presenting an exhibition concerning the health of the nation and its citizens. The Gesolei would not only promote Germany’s productivity by showcasing the ideal model for physical and spiritual health, it would also provide a much needed morale boost for the citizens of this economically stressed city. The title Gesolei is a contraction of the letters

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that begin three Weimar catchwords: Gesundheit (health), Sozialfürsorge (social welfare), and Leibesübungen (physical exercise). Occupying 400,000 square meters of building space and attended by seven and a half million people, it was one of the largest exhibitions of the kind put on during the period. Mounted interactive displays at the Gesolei highlighted the German Man, who embodied the highest level of physical efficiency and productivity. The exhibit emphasized the importance of choosing an appropriate profession according to each individual’s capacities. Sections of the exhibition emphasized quantitative diagnostics of the body, through psychotechnical tests designed to assess an individual’s manual dexterity, reaction time, and ability to concentrate. Through these tests, a future profession would be assigned, one that would take full advantage of one’s own essential, ingrained capacities. This biometric understanding of the human body presented its idealized form in an educational, visual format (Anschauungsunterricht) throughout the Gesolei, framed by nationalist aspirations. In his review of the exhibition published in 1927, medical historian F. H. Garrison reports that: Precisely the merit of the Gesolei is that it is designed to instruct the people by methods common to the picture-writing of savages, the tavern-sign, the placard, the poster and the movies. Thus the recent birth and mortality rates of Germany are conveyed by a bell and clock-dial arrangement, punctuating the facts that every 24 seconds a child is born, every 72 seconds a couple is married, every 42 seconds someone dies. The longevity of the German population since the war is indicated by pyramids of dolls, tapering off into solitary dolls of advanced age, the decline in the birth rate and of the male population from battle losses being graphically emphasized.73

In clear and accessible terms, the trajectory from life to death is represented at a glance by a series of dolls, translating life’s transience into a frozen moment in time. Its immortalized, quantified representation signifies the mortality of the body, allowing the spectator to take up an essentially analytical view of the life span. After the war, the ideology of eugenics gained legitimacy in Germany as a means to counteract the war’s dramatic demographic fallout and to control the “racial hygiene” of the population. This ideology was evident in many displays at the Gesolei, which, according to medical historian Paul Weindling, “included a section on prisons with photographs and tables from Fetscher’s eugenic criminal biological survey.”74 Exhibitions on eugenics and heredity advised individuals

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on how to select marriage partners to ensure the fitness of future offspring and provided a visualization of recovery following the war. Walter Ruttmann, creator of the avant-garde Opus animations between 1921 and 1925 and later in 1927, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, made a number of film promotionals, including one for the Gesolei.75 The Ascent, a four-minute short animation produced in 1926, traces a narrative arc identical to the one delineated by Johannes’s recovery in Reinert’s Nerves. Retooling the Cubist triangles, rectangles, and circles featured in his earlier absolute films, The Ascent begins with sharp, triangular bayonets made up of quadrilaterals and curved blades entering and exiting the frame. An intertitle places the audience in the midst of the war: the year “1914-” fades in and out of focus, the hyphen suggesting that the war had not yet ended and that its traumatic conditions continue into the present day of the Weimar viewer. Ruttmann depicts bombs exploding in the air surrounded by debris while a building goes up in red flames. The rest of the film depicts the detrimental effects of the war on the postwar self and delineates a path toward health and recovery. Cutting to a close-up on a male figure’s shell-shocked face, surrounded by threatening daggers, it recalls the misery and exhaustion of combat. His abstracted physiognomy is constructed from geometrical shapes resembling machine cast parts, inorganic pieces assembled to constitute the semblance of organic life. His cheeks contract into a skull-like visage, signaling the struggle for life against death. The daggers approach and intersect each other and create a latticework that separates the bewildered face from the spectator. A bell rings, announcing Gesolei. When we see the traumatized figure once more, we see his whole, skeletal body, again assembled from squares, triangles, and rectangles, and resembling a lethargic puppet. For a brief moment, he leans on the word Gesolei as a threatening snake approaches—a common right-wing characterization of the political left during the interwar years. As the snake slithers forth, the letters Ge, so, and lei fall and pounce the legless reptile (Figure 1.6). Ruttmann then presents the word Gesundheit, followed by Sozialfürsorge, while the distressed figure is given a healing tonic. The skull’s cheeks are rounded out after consuming the remedy. Our hero then takes up sporting activities popular during the athletics-obsessed Weimar period: golf, soccer, boxing, and gymnastics. In doing so, his marionette-like body begins to dance, as if controlled by forces outside him. Indeed, he moves in a manner similar to Charlot, the Charlie Chaplin cut-up featured in Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique (1925).76 Most significantly, the plot of The Ascent

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Figure 1.6  The Ascent, 1926

concludes in a manner similar to Nerves. The geometrically arranged figure ascends a set of stairs, celebrating his revitalized state, and raises his arms while a red sun also rises in the background, suggesting a new day for himself and his nation (Figure 1.7).77 In a parallel fashion, Johannes in Reinert’s film survives the “anxiety and the terrors of war” by devoting himself to a life lived in harmony with nature and productive work, presumably toward the rehabilitation of the nation. New scientific techniques of the body, including biometrics, genetics, and prosthetics, promoted through Weimar body culture and exhibitions such as the Gesolei, would inaugurate the new German man. The fit survivor of war, who seems to have emerged from its tribulations unscathed, entitles himself the privilege of assessing life at a glance, of evaluating the death of others as a quantified

Figure 1.7  The Ascent, 1926

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representation, and, as I shall show in a moment, of claiming a theory of the image that exempts itself from the vicissitudes of time and duration. Thus, both the conclusions to Nerves and The Ascent should be contextualized, not only within a broader discussion about hygiene and well-being in Weimar Germany, but also within the metaphysics of continued life. This metaphysics underpins the attitude of a generation of chauvinistic World War I veterans, who remained defiant in their triumph over death. It resonates with the Weimar “dreamland” identified by Ernst Troeltsch, dreamt by those overly eager to concretize their vision of the future while making a clean break with the past. In order to concretize these connections, we need to see how this triumphal attitude, expressed in the endings of both Nerves and The Ascent, is constituted through the cinema, conceived through a distanced, analytical stance toward life. In order to make this connection, I turn to another important text that is historically relevant to both of them. Published in early 1915, Freud’s essay, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” works through the change in the attitude toward death as a consequence of the all-out world war.78 In it, Freud analyzes the disillusionment experienced by a generation who endured military conflict, arguing that their understanding of mortality allows us to ponder the set of beliefs that sharply contrast the living from the dead. On the one hand, he writes, death remains an everyday occurrence. Plainly, one reads in newspapers and gleans through statistics that everyone dies, some by natural causes, others less fortunately because of accident, suicide, or murder. On the other, these everyday notions of death necessarily speak of it from the perspective of the living. Death is not woven into the fabric of life at the moment it is thought, but understood as if the two were ontological opposites, mutually exclusive of each other. In a passage that incorporates both of these beliefs, Freud remarks, thinking at once of the death of fallen soldiers as well as of death generally: We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up; indeed we even have a saying [in German]: “to think of something as though it were death”. That is, as though it were our own death, of course. It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.79

In other words, when thinking of our own death, we are only able to conceive of it by taking ourselves, perhaps our own imagined corpse, as an observable object. Thus we remain present, beside ourselves, as a spectator observing our deceased

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double: an uncanny, inanimate version of our own ostensibly cogitating, animate state. The dead self is set up in opposition to the living one, and insofar as we can imagine our own death, we unavoidably side with the latter over against the former.80 Circumscribed by rationalized modernity and the habit of thinking the self metaphysically, a habit that may be traced back to Descartes and his taking himself as an object of meditation, the modern human being is able to think death only as a concept that posits an ontological absence as a reified presence. In this, Freud’s thoughts on war and death delineate the ontological distinctions that underpin the depiction of well-being in Ruttmann’s Ascent, as well as in the jubilatory conclusion to Reinert’s Nerves. Both films present male protagonists who triumph in their own survival and make appeals to a new generation of fit nerves, while leaving the traumas of the war and the experience of loss unmourned. Moreover, their triumph may be aligned with an everyday understanding of the film medium: both are inextricably linked to the impossibility of imagining one’s own death and the repudiation of the philosophical aporias inherent to the representation of pure absence. The spectator who disavows these aporias does so by aligning herself with discourses of survival, buoyed by the assurance of immortality expressed through the cinematic reanimation of the dead past. In order to secure this assurance, for both the triumphal postwar subject and the film viewer, death and the memory of loss must be expunged from the ego. This objectification of death, separate from the living self, was of concern to theorists who understood the nature of the film medium as rooted in the ontology of photography. If, to paraphrase André Bazin, death is the victory of time, then photography, rescuing the profilmic subject from the vicissitudes of decay, represents the technological victory over death. As a preserved, possessable thing, the image of those who are no longer with us reiterates the viewer’s status as an enduring being like Johannes at the end of Nerves. This technological victory in turn ensures the authenticity of the reality documented by film, since it is produced by a machine, and not by mortal man. In his essay on photography from 1927, Kracauer writes that the photograph functions mainly to eternalize the present, to make one forget its implicit memento mori: “What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image.”81 Insofar as death is represented as an absent presence, it is always from the triumphal perspective where the privilege of looking is granted to the survivor. In this, the perverse curiosity involved in the filming of death is necessarily

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linked to the unfettered joy of one’s continued life, and to the assurance, secured through the reproduction of reality, that life will continue, unabated. Like the everydayness of death represented metaphysically as an object of rational thought, the everyday notion of the moving image includes the belief that it documents reality objectively as it unfolds independently before the spectator’s gaze. The triumphal human being appropriates the technics of the disinterested, mechanical camera, thinking the mortal other as an object of representation. She adopts, as Edmund Husserl put it in 1929, a “phenomenological egology,” appealing to a universal, transcendental philosophy.82 Johannes’s uncaring metaphysics thus reveals a critical insight relevant to thinking film more generally, for this is the ontology of the moving image and the formation of the spectating self most common for us today. The observations by Freud and Kracauer culminate and find their most inhumane articulation in Ernst Jünger’s 1934 text On Pain, where the veteran of war describes the presence of a “ ‘second’ consciousness. This second and colder consciousness reveals itself in the ever-increasing ability to see oneself as an object.”83 In this text, Jünger identifies a new definition of pain, one closely linked to optical technologies that “stand outside the zone of sensitivity.”84 Bodily pain can now be precisely documented and its representation given up to objective analysis through photography, which observes suffering with an “insensitive and invulnerable eye.”85 Echoing Freud’s observation that whenever we imagine our own death we do so only as spectators, Jünger’s second consciousness perceives death, whether his own or others, as an abstracted thing. This detached second consciousness “is most evident where we confront our own reflection, whether by watching our movements on film or hearing our voice as if it belonged to a stranger.”86 This remains the malady inherent to the modern attitude toward death: for our civilized, rational appropriation of it cannot embrace the possibility that our own death might lie sometime in the very near future.87 “In the unconscious,” Freud reiterates in his essay on the uncanny, “every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.”88 Fundamentally, we do not believe in our own possible death, and we remain unwilling to welcome our uncanny double as the harbinger of our own finitude. The inability to recognize the facticity of death is made more acute, the more it is made into a thing of perception and separated from the realm of the living through technological means. Teacher Johannes’s enduring life resonates with this metaphysics of survival, for he lives longer than those whose nerves collapsed under the strain of shell

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shock. Johannes disavows postwar melancholy, and sheds individual debt, guilt, and the traumatic memory of the past so that he may originate a new community of healthy nerves.89 His survival categorically marks the ontological difference between the living and the dead, and reinforces the narcissistic fantasy of a life that does not include the possibility of death. It is the other who dies, not the self. It is the other who is mentally unstable, unfit, degenerate, and unhealthy. Life is unable to sympathize with that which has been deemed ontologically separate from it, for it judges these beings as useless for its own survival and for the survival of the nation. As Elias Canetti writes, in his 1963 study on the history of crowd psychology, the sense of triumph felt by the survivor is linked to “the desire to get other men out of the way so as to be the only one; or, in the milder, and indeed often admitted, form, to get others to help him become the only one.”90 At the end of Nerves, Johannes embodies the belief that survival proves the exception to the rule, and the exception to a life includes the possibility of death, its finitude, and precariousness. My analysis of early Weimar film continues in the next chapter by analyzing the strict delineation between life and death, one that is subtended by the objectifying look and allegorized in Johannes’s character, in order to redeem other aesthetic and ethical possibilities afforded by the afterlife of the moving image. As we shall see, these possibilities can be realized only if death is affirmed as a possibility of life.

Stand fast or go under A picture represents its subject from a position outside it. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)91 In volume two of his Decline of the West, published in 1922, Oswald Spengler describes a pattern typical of civilization as political conflicts between competing nations give way to the firm hand of an authoritarian leader. He explains how modern democracy inevitably gives way to revolution and upheaval, as well as to the destruction of ancient institutions and beliefs. This period of “Contending States” elicits the desire for social order, preparing the appearance of an authoritarian “Caesar” figure. Drawing examples from Classical, Asian, and Arabian world histories to argue his grandiose claims, Spengler asserts that the transition from conflict to order develops in the same way in all of the

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major world civilizations. Crucially, Spengler points to the imbrication of the personal and political as key to the evolution of civilizations: “Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power.”92 The public war of competing ideologies is intertwined with the “internal” politics of the self, which poses fundamental problems for the pursuit of sovereignty in a world where claims to selfhood have become increasingly untenable. Film scholar Jan-Christopher Horak calls Nerves “Reinert’s conservative interpretation of the civil war that raged in Germany after the fall of the Imperial German government, just as Homunculus had been a conservative interpretation of the connection between World War I and the rise of the Social International.”93 Horak also argues that Nerves depicts a “Caesarist” individual in the character of Teacher Johannes, an authoritarian personality who, according to Spengler, is believed will unify the nation following the decline of Western civilization. In the midst of massive political and economic upheaval, this image of sovereign authoritarianism would have resonated with Germany’s postwar, traumatized audiences. I agree with Horak’s critical reading, but my analysis of both Johannes and Roloff allows us to nuance this interpretation. While my two claims toward modern masculinity in Nerves respond to the destruction wrought by the war in seemingly distinct ways, both pivot around a gesture, whether performed consciously or not, of disavowal. In both cases, disavowal as a discursive strategy attempts to expunge all exposure to difference in order to recoup the self and the nation. For the Spenglerian “Caesarist,” this disavowal is made in the name of triumphant survival, which characterizes Teacher Johannes in Reinert’s film. It is the dream of eternal life that traumatically fails in the case of Roloff, leading to the production of delusions. Both men are highly narcissistic and relentless in their negation of that which is unfamiliar and uncanny. Moreover, their attempts to recover the conditions that pre-date their respective war traumas may be allegorized by the capacity of the film image to reproduce a moment from the past. The cinema fulfills the nostalgic, narcissistic dream of immortality, perpetuating the dream of the traumatized to continue living in denial. Spengler later directly references the Great War, making explicit the connection of Germany’s defeat to his cyclical theory of world history: The Hague Conference of 1907 was the prelude of the World War; the Washington Conference of 1921 will have been that of other wars. The history

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Spengler’s either–or thinking betrays his crude dialectics. The rise of a Caesarlike figure, one who will restore order to a fragmented, disillusioned world, presumably transcends the deadlock of representative politics, and should make appeals toward a more primordial, “formless” metaphysics grounded in categories such as “nature,” “work,” “hygiene,” or “survival.” Indeed, Caesarism,95 according to Spengler, is “that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness.”96 On the very next page he quips that with the arrival of the Caesarist “Imperial Age,” “there are no more political problems.”97 The mechanisms of disavowal inevitably operate within a metaphysics that ossifies concepts into representations that, to appropriate Wittgenstein, “represents its subject from a position outside it.” However, the ontology of cinema is more complex and nuanced: its basic transience opens up ways of representing the war that cannot be reduced to the binary of victory or defeat. This I believe pivots around the impossibility of representing one’s own death, or to put it another way, around the necessary absence that is intrinsic to death’s representation. In contrast to the strict delineation of life and mortality described in this chapter, in the next chapter I will read the ontologies of both loss and life as simultaneous in the film image.

2

Melancholy Specters F. W. Murnau’s The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922)

In the previous chapter, I argued that Robert Reinert’s Nerves depicts two allegories of postwar disavowal that correspond to two potentialities of the cinema image. In the following, I will look at two films by Friedrich W. Murnau, The Haunted Castle (1921) and Phantom (1922), in order to show how they, in contrast to Johannes’s allegorical characterization in Nerves, affirm mortality as a necessary condition of animate life. While “life” was a privileged category for speaking about film art and the “essence” of film in the early Weimar period, journalists and intellectuals also utilized metaphors of the undead—specters, ghosts, spirits, and phantoms—to describe the phenomena of moving images projected on a screen. Ghosts allegorically correspond to the play of light and shadows, while signaling a zone of indeterminacy between animate life and inanimate death. Drawing from this language, I turn to Murnau’s films to show how they utilize ghostly figurations that self-reflexively illuminate key aspects of the afterlife of film: first, the indexicality of history and, second, the apprehension of nothingness as a condition of presence. Both of these aspects are underpinned historically by the experience of loss, acknowledged in early Weimar film through the trope of haunting. At stake in the following discussion is the capacity, or rather the incapacity, of metaphysics to describe the nature of cinematic change, inextricably linked to the impossibility of representing death from the perspective of life. The ghostly play of absence and presence, however, intimately connected to the history of trauma, provides an alternative philosophical ground from which I will work through cinema’s fleeting ontology. This play circumvents the aporias imposed by the metaphysics of the analytical attitude when describing the ontology of transience. Moreover, by putting this perpetual oscillation between presence

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and absence into relief, we shall also begin to see how the cinema constitutes a form of thinking. The temporality of loss, integral to Murnau’s films immediately following the war, is not only allegorical of the temporality of the moving image. It also describes the temporality of “the way thought thinks and itself thinks itself,” or the duration of thought’s movement, and the manner in which the past impinges upon the present as it is made an object of consciousness.1 To this end, this chapter will proceed by utilizing cinema to think philosophically, and in the intervening sections, utilize philosophy to think cinematically. Like Cesare in Caligari, undead creatures confuse the distinction between the living and the dead and provoke feelings of uncanny dread because they represent the return of what was supposed to have been overcome. The return of the past as a ghostly figure reveals the cyclical nature of the past in modernity. Ghosts and phantoms disrupt mechanistic, analytical notions of time and temporality that underpin conventional forms of determinist historiography, challenging its inevitability, while forcing the living to understand what has been without the props of origins. The specter serves as a privileged figure for signifying the claims of the past on the present. To acknowledge their liminal, uncanny existence, despite their ostensibly belonging to the realm of falsehood and childhood superstition, means to acknowledge the historicity of the present. In the following analysis of Murnau’s films, I aim to put this capacity of acknowledgment into greater relief, for in doing so one affirms the basic historicity of the moving image.

Taking leave in The Haunted Castle (1921) I have become the most extreme pacifist because I have lived through the most lurid realities of [the war’s] destructive force. It is my aim to do a war picture soon, but not the kind that would treat of the glorification of gore and wholesale slaughter, but rather disclosing its perniciousness and convincing people of the utter futility of physical combat. F. W. Murnau, “The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles: By Its Very Nature the Art of the Screen Should Tell a Complete Story Pictorially” (1928)2 Murnau directed Schloß Vogelöd—Die Enthüllung eines Geheimnisses (The Haunted Castle: The Exposure of a Secret) while living in a villa in Berlin that

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belonged to the family of his friend and artistic colleague, Hans EhrenbaumDegele.3 Relatively underappreciated, The Haunted Castle is a film about departures and returns, characters that were once there and are now gone, appearing and disappearing under mysterious circumstances. It is not their actions that propel the plot, but their absences, haunting the castle interiors and distressing the guests. Moving between life and art, we will see how the postwar experience of traumatic loss inhabits the spaces of the historical EhrenbaumDegele villa in which Murnau was staying as well as the rooms of Castle Vogelöd, the fictional mansion of The Haunted Castle. Both entomb memories of the past within their walls, manifesting the appearance of specters. In October 1914, a few months following the official beginning of the Great War, Murnau and Ehrenbaum-Degele volunteered for the German military. Interrupting his budding acting career with the Max Reinhardt Theater, the twenty-six-year-old Murnau joined the First Regiment of the Foot Guards in Potsdam, completed military training, and participated in heavy fighting on the Eastern front as an infantryman. He was made a commander in Riga and transferred to the air force in 1917. In December of that year, Murnau made an emergency landing in Switzerland due to dense fog conditions and limited visibility. He remained there until the end of the war, but managed to restart his artistic career as the director of a newly founded theater. In 1918, Murnau wrote his first film script. The promising young poet Ehrenbaum-Degele had been close to Murnau since 1910, when they studied art history and literature together in Heidelberg. They returned to Berlin following their studies and quickly became acquainted with the burgeoning literary and artistic avant-garde. In 1913 and 1914, Ehrenbaum-Degele, along with the poet Paul Zech, edited Das neue Pathos, an Expressionist journal that published work by artists and writers belonging to their circle, including essays and poems by Gottfried Benn and Walter Hasenclever, and lithographies by Raoul Hausmann. During the war, Ehrenbaum-Degele served as an infantryman and was killed in action on the Russian front in the summer of 1915. A postcard sent from Murnau to Lothar Müthel, a fellow actor from the Max Reinhardt Theater, declares his passing: “Hans Ehrenbaum fell on July 28 in Russia!”4 Murnau remained loyal to his fallen friend and attended a memorial in Ehrenbaum-Degele’s Berlin Grunewald mansion, organized by some of their closest acquaintances and colleagues. In a letter addressed to Zech, dated April 22, 1917, Murnau reports on his current activities:

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During my vacation in Germany four weeks ago I received your letter. As you know, I attended a memorial for Hans. Then it was back to the Front for two serious days, and now back here for another few days, a stopover so to speak. I signed up to be pilot and wait here to be called to duty by my request.5

Later that year, Murnau was instrumental in getting a small collection of Ehrenbaum-Degele’s lyric works published, including a series of thirty-seven poems under the title, Das tausendste Regiment (The Thousandth Regiment), about the experience of trench warfare and, rather prophetically, death.6 “It was a sad but beautiful memorial,” Murnau continues in his letter to Zech, “more cannot be said.”7 After the war ended, Ehrenbaum-Degele’s mother offered Murnau hospitality in their villa in Grunewald. She died a few years later and in her will bequeathed the house to the University of Berlin, under the condition that Murnau live there permanently. He remained in Grunewald until 1926, the year he left for Hollywood. The villa, once occupied by Murnau’s friend, finds its allegorical counterpart in the aristocratic Castle Vogelöd of The Haunted Castle (Figure 2.1). Both house absence within their walls. The program notes, published by Decla-Bioskop for the film’s premiere on April 7, 1921, describes the settings: “Castle Vogelöd. Deep in the forest. At this moment the October hunt. However! Rain and only rain. For days! Not a shot has been fired. The guests sit in the hall, play chess, drink wine, smoke and while their time away.”8 Vogelöd’s butler suddenly interrupts their socializing and announces that

Figure 2.1  The Haunted Castle, 1921

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Count Oetsch (Lothar Mehnert) has arrived at the castle. Everyone pauses. A retired judge lowers his cigar and mutters that Oetsch had been accused of murdering his brother three years ago. Even though Oetsch was found innocent, “every single person who followed the proceedings at the time is convinced that he is the murderer!” By chance, the dead brother’s widow (Olga Tschechowa) is expected to join the party. Now a baroness, she still mourns the loss of her husband, despite her efforts to move on by marrying Baron Safferstätt (Paul Bildt). Upon her arrival, the baroness makes her feelings regarding Oetsch’s presence clear, refusing to make eye contact with the count and signaling her disapproval through contorted facial expressions. She deliberates whether to leave the castle in view of the circumstances, but is notified that Father Faramund from Rome (Victor Blütner), a relative of her late husband, will soon join them. His impending arrival elates the baroness. Faramund has been on pilgrimage and has not seen her for years. She decides to stay in Castle Vogelöd and wait for him. The psychological tension at the center of the plot takes place within the patrician, suffocating settings of Vogelöd. Hermann Warm, who designed the sets for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Phantom, also worked on The Haunted Castle. Like Reinert’s frenetic Nerves, yet in contrast to the highly stylized surroundings of Caligari, the mise-en-scène in Murnau’s 1921 film is straightforward, not obviously “Expressionist.” Doors are mundanely quadrangular, chairs invite seating, and no artificial shadows are painted on the walls. Willy Haas, in a review of the film published the day after its April 8 premiere, comments on these sober settings while noting their “psychological” affinity with the cinema: “It is treated with subtle finesse and great restraint. A film cleansed, manicured and clothed in Poole-London: I mean this psychologically [seelisch]. This is a delicate filmmaking; for the cinema lives through gesture, and Murnau’s aristocratic manner comprises the most powerful gestures within the most subtle.”9 The chamber play of The Haunted Castle unfolds wholly indoors, similar in this regard to Leopold Jessner’s Backstairs (1921) or Paul Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923). When Faramund finally arrives, the baroness recounts the story of her marriage to her late husband, as in a Catholic confession. “Our marriage was … at first … like one long day of bliss,” she remarks, as the film cuts to her flashback. The baroness and her husband embrace each other as she reminisces that for months she was “drunk” with happiness. One day, without explanation, he suddenly took leave. “He went away,” she remarks, and remained absent for

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some time. Her husband did eventually return, but came back a completely changed man: “After weeks he came back … he was a different person. He buried himself in writings … holy books …” Her young husband had apparently experienced some sort of unspeakable trauma while away, rendering him unable to recount his experience. He became celibate and lost all interest in the baroness. Describing this plot point, film critic Frieda Grafe writes that “The Exposure of a Secret, the subtitle to the Haunted Castle, does not take place. The core problem around which the plot revolves, why the man turned away from his wife, burying himself in books, is given no explanation.”10 The husband became a mere shadow of himself, of the man he was before having experienced some incommunicable, unrepresentable trauma (Figure 2.2). His departure and subsequent return recall the experience of men going off to war, facing its horrors, and then returning, dispassionate and silent. Profoundly disturbed by these experiences, the veteran fails to regain his prewar masculinity, somewhat like Roloff in Nerves. Murnau reflects upon war trauma and the communicative impotence of returned veterans in an essay published in 1928, the topic of which ostensibly deals with the art of film: Don’t you find that the man who has gone through the most horrible experiences is usually the one to say the least about them, and when asked whether he had suffered such and such a shock or witnessed such and such a catastrophe, will answer laconically “Yes” or “No” and dismiss the subject?11

Oetsch responds laconically to the baroness, seemingly unable to incorporate and remember some evidently catastrophic occurrence in the past. Benjamin

Figure 2.2  The Haunted Castle, 1921

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observes the same phenomenon of returned veterans in his essay “Experience and Poverty,” writing that “Experience has fallen in value amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world .… Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in communicable experience?”12 Allegorizing the narrative of the returned soldier, the baroness’s flashback recalls the postwar life of many military men who experienced unprecedented horrors while away, and returned unable to convey these experiences. The baroness continues her confession, reiterating that Oetsch refused all sensual pleasures. He began to profess that true happiness could only be realized through the renouncement of worldly things. “I grew cold,” she comments to Faramund, “the more pure he became, the more terrible my earthly bonds seemed …!” Her frustration growing, the baroness, after several months of being with her celibate husband, began to express a manic desire to “see evil … to desire evil.” Her husband’s changed character also caused conflict with his brother, who disapproved of his worldly refusals. It was during these marital difficulties, the baroness recounts, when she became acquainted with Safferstätt and began to confide in him. The day after meeting Baron Safferstätt, her husband was shot. This narrative of the husband’s disappearance and return shapes a trajectory of loss and recovery that corresponds to a contemporaneous tale of absence and subsequent presence: that of the wooden toy described in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this 1920 text, the psychoanalyst observes how his 18-month-old grandson, Ernst, threw a wooden reel and proclaimed fort (“gone”), and in the next moment pulled it back, exclaiming da (“there”). According to Freud, the child concocted the fort-da game in order to stage the disappearance and return of his mother (Freud’s daughter Sophie). The game revealed the grandson’s “great cultural achievement,” in that it trained him to accept that his mother at times had to go fort.13 His reenactment of the cycle of loss and recovery helped him to master the anxiety associated with her absence. Freud’s explanation of the fort-da game allows us to delve into the dialectic of presence and absence, as well as the psychic logic of the ego subjected to this dialectic, specifically that of the baroness. Through this, the psychological tensions at the heart of The Haunted Castle correspond to the experience of Murnau’s film and compel deeper theorization into its self-reflexive, allegorical nature. Other parallels between Murnau’s film and Beyond the Pleasure Principle are particularly striking, and allow us to see how the narcissistic subject deals

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with loss in general. Freud later recounts, with some puzzlement, how little Ernst had exclaimed Geh’ in K(r)ieg! (“Go to the fwont!”) while throwing the reel vigorously away.14 Apparently frustrated with his father’s extended tours of duty, Ernst expressed not anxiety at his absence, but a desire that he be placed in harm’s way. A sadistic pleasure corresponding to little Ernst’s is played out in Murnau’s film. In her desire for “evil,” the baroness expresses a similar infantile desire, resultant from her sexual frustration, to act out and wish that her glum husband go away. Taking an active role in relation to the cycle of pleasure and its opposite, Freud explains that this sadism is an act of revenge for the pain produced by the loved one’s absence: “In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ ”15 Little Ernst’s defiance allowed him emotional distance from his father, or a kind of “spectatorial” distance that induces an aggressive relationship toward the loved other. The father becomes an abstracted representation, whose ontology is consigned to a place outside the boy’s ego. Through the fort-da game, the vengeful child achieves a “pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one,” which finds its source in little Ernst’s emotional ambivalence.16 Meanwhile the boy’s separation anxiety is placated through an imaginary form of enjoyment, one that reinvests his love in a substitute, ghostly object that commemorates his father’s absence. In short, while the loved father leaves for the front, the child builds up his own narcissism through this imagined, autoerotic pleasure. Sending the father away would also allow him finally, caught in the Oedipal drama, sole possession of his mother.17 The boy’s father, Max Halberstadt, would eventually return from the front after the war and take up a career as a professional photographer in Hamburg, while his mother would pass away in January 1920 from complications associated with influenza. In a letter dated January 27, Freud writes that his daughter Sophie was “snatched away in the midst of glowing health, from a full and active life as a competent mother and loving wife, all in four or five days, as though she had never existed.”18 The elder Freud was forced to deal with the loss from a distance, for there was apparently “no train” from Vienna to Hamburg. “The loss of a child,” he writes, “seems to be a serious, narcissistic injury; what is known as mourning will probably follow only later.”19 Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” written in 1917 in the midst of war, elaborates the etiology of losing loved ones, and deepens the analysis of the psychic politics operative in the fort-da game. He explains that while mourning

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is associated with the cycle of loss and subsequent decathexis of the love-object in the process of working through, melancholia does not terminate with the process of libidinal withdrawal from the loved person. Melancholia is associated, not only with the loss of the loved other, but also “points to a loss in regard to his ego.”20 Freud expresses something similar in response to Sophie’s death. In his January 27 letter, he writes that “deep down I sense an irreparable narcissistic injury.”21 In his 1917 essay, Freud notes that melancholics often exhibit signs of extreme self-deprecation followed by moments of mania and defiance, and explains that in order to preserve lost love, which cannot easily be given up, the grief-stricken ego introjects loss into itself. Freud calls this introjected absence a “shadow”: But the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego. There, however, it was not employed in any unspecified way, but served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego [Der Schatten des Objekts fiel so auf das Ich], and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object.22

By describing introjection in this manner, Freud frames the melancholic preservation of loss as a kind of image projected onto the ego, which signifies a fusing of the self with the lost, loved other. Mourning, he later writes, “impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live.”23 By taking loss into herself, the melancholic “devours” the absent object while keeping it “alive,” taking refuge through narcissistic identification with lost love in order to preserve it. The shadow of this absence, mummified through memory, takes up residence within the boundaries of the ego. This explains the psychic predicament of postwar melancholics, who lost loved comrades in the war and embalmed their loss by commemorating it, like Murnau and his memorial to Ehrenbaum-Degele. Melancholy and memorialization suggest an ontology of life that differs markedly from that shown to us by Johannes in Robert Reinert’s Nerves. While he survives through the defiant denial of loss, melancholy incorporates it as part and parcel of the ego’s own anguished survival. Throughout the war and following it, Karl Abraham was in constant dialogue with Freud on the intertwined problems of mourning and melancholia. In his principal work on melancholy published in 1924, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders,” Abraham

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recounts a patient’s dream about an autopsy performed on his late wife that illustrates the psychoanalytic theory of introjection. While looking fixedly at her motionless body on an examination table, the dreamer observed her disassociated parts growing back together. The patient saw, according to Abraham, that “the dead woman began to show signs of life, and he embraced her with feelings of the liveliest joy.”24 He noted later that his wife’s dissected body reminded him of a meat dish he had eaten the night before. Abraham interprets the first part of the dream as expressing the husband’s wish to reanimate the dead, and the second part as expressing his cannibalistic desire. He also surmises that both parts functioned as fantasmatic images, like those produced by the cinema, that served to satisfy the dreamer’s unconscious wish for his wife’s resurrection. Abraham writes that for melancholy patient, “Consuming the flesh of the dead wife is made equivalent to restoring her to life.”25 He continues the undead metaphor to describe the process of melancholic introjection: “by introjecting the lost object the melancholic does indeed recall it to life: he sets it up in his own ego.”26 The dream pairs a narcissistic oral-consumptive fixation with the preservation of loss through reanimation. The dead wife becomes resurrected in the surviving husband’s imagination, and through the internalization of her undead afterlife, she becomes like a ghost haunting his interior. Her spectral presence corresponds with the absences that haunt Murnau’s film as well as the historical Ehrenbaum-Degele villa. All of these absences are produced by melancholy souls who must cope with the loss of their loved ones. As The Haunted Castle continues, other leave-takings take place, other characters go fort, and other absences occupy the rooms of Castle Vogelöd, further illustrating Freud’s and Abraham’s contemporaneous ideas on melancholy and introjection. After the baroness finishes confiding in Faramund, she returns to her room. Night has fallen and the guests prepare for dinner. They knock on the priest’s suite and are shocked to find that he has disappeared. Oetsch then appears and nonchalantly remarks that he had dreamt of murder the previous night. Anxiety escalates among the guests and they begin to believe that Oetsch had something to do with Faramund’s absence—perhaps the priest was murdered in his sleep. Their unfounded and wild speculations nevertheless incite the imaginations of those gathered. “Today I will reveal it,” the baroness abruptly announces in the midst of mounting suspicion and panic, “Oetsch killed my husband!” In fear, a number of guests promptly leave the next day. One anxious lodger recounts a nightmare of giant hands grasping at him, while awkwardly justifying

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his departure: “I’m sure you understand—important matters—require my immediate attention.” Lord Vogelöd becomes exasperated at the dispersal of his party, as it seems that the hunt will not take place after all. “Is there anyone who isn’t frightened by my house?” Meanwhile Count Oetsch has taken leave as well, followed immediately by the sudden return of Faramund. (By now the spectator will have perhaps surmised that the two are the same person.) The unexplained disappearance of one and then the other does not fail to renew panic among the remaining guests. The dénouement that unravels this knot of comings and goings is provided by the baroness’s second confession, which provides more narrative details of her marriage. She confides once more to Faramund after his return, because he “as a priest must remain silent.” As the film goes into flashback again, the baroness explains once more that a few days before her husband’s murder took place she became fed up with her husband’s “holiness.” In response to his indifference, she repeatedly remarked, “I would like to see something evil, something utterly evil! … a murder!” She then explains that Safferstätt overheard her sadistic desire to see evil and volunteered to become the instrument of her death wish. Out of love for her, Safferstätt shot her husband, making him go fort so that he could have the baroness to himself. “I recognized my guilt as well!” she remarks to Faramund, recognizing that the murder was instigated by a misunderstanding. Together “cursed,” “fearing life, fearing death,” she explains that they were eventually forced to marry so that their secret could remain safe. In order to displace her guilt the baroness accused Count Oetsch, the brother of her dead husband, of fratricide. Finishing her confession to the priest, she announces that “Today I have redeemed him!” Jo Leslie Collier pejoratively calls Murnau’s Haunted Castle “pedestrian,” commenting that the director seemingly “had not yet learned to charge these still, empty frames with the emotional intensity he was later to be known for.”27 Here I am arguing precisely the opposite—that these empty frames are occupied by the presence of absence throughout Castle Vogelöd and are precisely the source of the film’s emotional intensity. The guests cannot abide by the sudden vanishing of Faramund and Oetsch, and the empty frames left following their mysterious disappearance induces psychological tension in the viewer. Murnau’s film plays a fort-da game with the tense spectator by self-reflexively staging the presence of absence through the departure of Castle Vogelöd’s guests, while underscoring the ghostly ontology of the moving image through the presentation of these absences.

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The Haunted Castle thus plays out the experience of loss, of missed loved ones who went away and came back silent, both allegories for the ontology of film. Melancholy emerges as the lost loved one is introjected into the self, as a “shadow” projected onto the ego, reanimated through the wish that these loved ones live on. This reaction to loss stands in contrast to the triumphalist survivor, who as I discussed in the previous chapter was intent on expunging all traces of mortality from the self. The leave-takings in The Haunted Castle suggest a much more melancholic metaphysics, and subsequently a response to loss that allows absence to comingle with the ontology of presence. It has been said that the film image photographically indexes a past moment that has been lost to the present. Allegorized through Murnau’s film, this lost moment may be understood as introjected into the image frame in that the presence of absence inhabits the space within its borders. When moving images are projected onto a screen, they appear as ghosts, drawing attention to how the past continues to haunt the present moment of the spectator. In his essay on photography, Siegfried Kracauer associates photographic images with this ontology, writing that “Ghosts are simultaneously comical and terrifying.”28 Ghosts are terrifying because they are harbingers of death; comic because ghosts strike one as irrational and ridiculous when compared to the concrete presence of the living. The ontology of ghosts signals the presence of a past moment, resurrected in the present—precisely the temporality constitutive of the photograph index. In the following passage from his 1927 essay, Kracuaer seems to be thinking of Murnau’s film: Now the image wanders ghost-like through the present, like the lady of the haunted castle. Spooky apparitions occur only in places where a terrible deed has been committed. The photograph becomes a ghost because the costumed mannequin was once alive.29

What continues in the afterlife of the image is the detritus of the past, excavated fragments that evoke feelings of uncanniness and dread. For Kracauer, the shudder evoked by the encounter with the photographic specter was particularly dramatic when he screened the prewar avant-garde films in the “Studio des Ursulines” in Paris—“film images that show how the features stored in the memory image are embedded in a reality which has long since disappeared.”30 As the past returns to Kracuaer, he is startled by the difference between what he remembers and the fragmented truth of the past presented in the image.

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As if to respond to the penultimate line from the baroness’s confession in The Haunted Castle, Kracauer writes in his essay that “This ghost-like reality is unredeemed.”31 In this, he holds out for the possibility for redeeming the fragmented truth returned to him through photographic reproduction. Accordingly, those who took leave in The Haunted Castle roam the lofty rooms of Castle Vogelöd as ghosts and await redemption by becoming visible once again before the eyes of the living, and to compel them perhaps to joyously remark da. In the following section, I will work through the historicity of this possibility and expand on it by aligning the ghostly film image with the notion of allegory as historiography.32 “There is a scene in this film,” Willy Haas writes in his April 1921 review of Murnau’s Haunted Castle, “introduced by the title ‘The confession.’ In a large lofty room stand a murderer who has killed for love, and his beloved; and they both remain there motionless like statues (Figure 2.3). Such a thing has rarely been seen in the whole existence of the cinema …”33 Lotte Eisner calls this shot “one of the most beautiful pictures Murnau ever created.”34 The sparse beauty of this image is linked structurally to the melancholy of the absent rooms in Castle Vogelöd, and allegorically to absent loved ones who have taken residence in the psyches of those who survived. Perhaps no other image of the film better evokes the sense of despair that characterizes the postwar consciousness. Haas writes that the baron and the baroness stand “motionless like statues.” A vast space not only separates them, but the emptiness of the room stretches back behind them as well. This space may be connected, not only to the etiology of melancholy

Figure 2.3  The Haunted Castle, 1921

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as understood by psychoanalysis, an analytical discourse inseparable from the experience of war, but also to the haunted ontology of the cinema image itself. After the war ended, there remained no survivor who did not remember a father, brother, an uncle, cousin, or neighbor who left for the front between 1914 and 1918 and did not return. Murnau’s film was produced in the midst of this culture of loss, while a nation suffered from grief. Loved ones took leave, disappeared, and went fort. Like the wooden reel for Freud’s grandson, the cinema for Murnau becomes a toy that signals absence, symbolizing profilmic objects that were once there, persons once living and now gone. The photographic image returns what or who-has-been to the spectator and in so doing memorializes their absence. In The Haunted Castle, allegories of their absences wander “ghostlike” through the walls of Castle Vogelöd, as well as within the interiors of those who remember.

Philosophy as cinema 1: The historicity of film Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the science of ghosts. Jacques Derrida, from the film Ghost Dance (1983) by Ken McMullen Kracauer’s essay on photography is not unusual in suggesting an ontological linkage between ghosts and projected film images. It draws from an already existing discourse in Germany that utilized the language of specters and phantoms to describe, often pejoratively, the nature of the new medium. In the following, I would like to see how this language could help us understand the filmic representation of the past, as well as the presentation of absence in The Haunted Castle, and show how the language of ghosts implicitly puts forth a philosophy of history specific to the film medium. The ability to recognize ghosts is not a symptom of degeneracy, but their appearance self-reflexively reminds the living of the claims of the past, and of the legacy of history, on the present. Film scholar Bliss Cua Lim, in her analysis of contemporary fantastic cinema in Translating Time, takes seriously the “persistence of supernaturalism, of occult modes of thinking encoded in fantastic narratives” enabled by the ghostliness of the film medium.35 The uncanny, supernatural figures depicted in early Weimar film suggest a similar reading. Focusing on the temporality of presence and absence and the language of ghosts deployed in Weimar film criticism, I aim to take the ghostly film image

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seriously as a form of historiography and as a general model for how the past is encoded by historiography. This discussion is crucial for my analysis of Weimar film since it also confirms the historico-allegorical approach I take throughout this book. Many Weimar writers, mistrustful of the artistic potential of the cinema, compared its illusions to unreal apparitions and phantoms. Such a comparison enabled the moral judgment of passive masses that sit duped and captivated before the unrealities offered up before them. Roloff in Nerves was overcome by his cinematic hallucinations, as we saw in the previous chapter, becoming mentally sick and incapable of distinguishing the real from the unreal. We also saw how the surreal images offered up by Reinert’s film overstimulated the nerves of its spectators, causing them to lose their grip on reality as well. To suffer from delusions, according to this line of thinking, is a sign of intellectual and moral immaturity. From the standpoint of instrumental rationality, ghosts are thought to be mere figments of the imagination, hallucinatory visions concocted by a traumatized psyche, fantasms fabricated by highly impressionable personalities who have not freed themselves from the falsehoods of superstition. Both there and not there, the ghostly film image threatens to damage the delicate nerves of weakwilled individuals. Before the war, scientists such as Naldo Felke wrote of the damage film exerts on the eyes. The flicker of the screen, combined with the rapid fluctuation of the images and the projector’s bright light, tires the eyes of “nervous artists with weak optical nerves.”36 Lawyer Albert Hellwig, who coined the term Schundfilm (“trash cinema”), warned of the suggestive powers of the cinema, singling out its capacity to confuse the senses and threaten public safety through prolonged exposure to its visual trickeries.37 The images of the cinema are always deceptive, somehow in league with the supernatural, and above all, unhealthy for the soul. This “trashing” of the cinema continued after 1918, and intellectuals continued to dismiss the cinema as an artistic medium along the lines of morality and hygiene. Thomas Mann, in his chapter “Danse Macabre” (Totentanz) from his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, describes an encounter with the cinema in terms of phantoms and ghosts. This chapter is exemplary of the tendency in Weimar culture to dismiss film as a medium that appeals mainly to suggestible, even irrational, individuals. Apparently deemed important enough to excerpt, passages from this chapter were published separately in 1926 under the title, Kino: Romanfragment.38 In this twenty-page publication, Mann emphasizes the

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relationship between “all sorts of life” and the “phantoms” offered up by the cinematic image when the perpetually ill Fräulein Karstedt goes to the Bioscope Theater: They even took Karen Karstedt to the Bioscope Theater in Platz one afternoon, because that was something she truly enjoyed. Being used to only the purest air, they felt ill at ease in the bad air that weighed heavily in their lungs and clouded their minds in a murky fog, while up ahead on the screen life flickered before their smarting eyes—all sorts of life, chopped up in hurried, diverting scraps that leapt into fidgety action, lingered, and twitched out of sight in alarm, to the accompaniment of trivial music, which offered present rhythms to match vanishing phantoms from the past and which despite limited means ran the gamut of solemnity, pomposity, savagery, and cooing sensuality.39

Here phantoms from the past are represented in chaotic montage as cross sections of life chopped up and haphazardly put back together. Banal music accompanies the decadent temptations offered up by the moving image, presented one after another to satisfy all sorts of diverse desires. Yet the sickly Karen Karstedt, who is described with bandages on her fingers, “the result of open sores from the toxins in her body,” is not the only one captivated by the screening.40 The following paragraph critically observes the reaction of the audience after the film’s conclusion: When the last flickering frame of one reel had twitched out of sight and the lights went up in the hall and the audience’s field of dreams stood before them like an empty blackboard, there was not even the possibility of applause. There was no one there to clap for, to thank, no artistic achievement to reward with a curtain call. The actors who had been cast in the play they had just seen had long since been scattered to the winds; they had watched only phantoms [Schattenbilder], whose deeds had been reduced to a million photographs brought into focus for the briefest of moments so that, as often as one likes, they could then be given back to the element of time as a series of blinking flashes.41

Mann describes an alienated audience, not knowing what to do after the play of light and shadows has finished. He writes of “something repulsive about the crowd’s nerveless silence.”42 In contrast to the theater, where live actors interact with a live audience, the cinema is incapable of bringing actual human bodies to interact with human audiences. The actors in the film have been dematerialized into a “million” individual photographs that no longer exist in time. What exactly does the film image index? Bodies that once lived or ghostly bodies presented

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in the here and now? Like the naïve prisoners watching shadows projected on a wall in Plato’s cave, spectators in the Bioscope Theater are duped by the sensual images that appeared before them. Evidently, these “phantoms” do not take the true form of reality, for they appear merely as “a series of blinking flashes” that present only life’s semblance. The Weimar novelist excoriates the cinema through the vocabulary of unreal phantoms, and in other moments refers to this vocabulary when speaking of the technology. In his 1928 essay “Über den Film” (“On Film”), Mann concedes that he goes often to the cinema, yet nevertheless maintains that the characters represented on screen do not have a “bodily presence” and are simply “living shadows” that once were, and do not exist in the present moment.43 For this reason, film fails to satisfy his humanist definition of art. These and other condemnations of the cinema are unfortunate, yet I believe the language of Mann’s condemnation, if read in a more affirmative manner, nevertheless sheds crucial light on the historical ontology of the film medium. Literary scholar Laura Marcus reminds us of a key aspect of Mann’s thinking on film: “In The Magic Mountain, as in many other representations of early film, cinema, for all its conjuring of ‘life,’ was a simulacrum operating on the side of death.”44 For despite Mann’s indictments, his comparison between film and the haunted world represented on the screen invites further scrutiny, particularly for our purposes, for his utilization of the categories “life” and “death.” My interest here goes beyond simply showing how Mann echoes what others have said about the cinema at the time. Drawing out the allegorical meanings embedded in the language of apparitions and phantoms, beyond the familiar criticisms Mann and others evidently intended in their evaluation of the cinema, provides insight into how this postwar language illuminates the ontological historicity of the moving image. Indeed, this was a postwar language that some cinemagoers in Weimar Germany utilized to explain their experience of the film medium and its interplay between presence and absence precisely to speculate on questions of film ontology. In 1920, journalist Friedrich Sieburg published an article called “The Transcendence of the Cinematic Image,” in Die neue Schaubühne. Like Murnau, Sieburg served as an infantryman and became a pilot in the air force in 1916. Also like Murnau, he saw many friends and colleagues lose their lives in the war. After the military conflict concluded, he went a screening of Der Fürst der Diebe und seine Liebe (The Prince of Thieves and His Love) in 1919. In his article, he describes what happened when the small orchestra accompanying the film suddenly went on break for dinner. Responding like Freud’s nephew as

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his father went away, Sieburg experienced anxiety as the musicians took leave: “The music stopped. Silence. The film reel whirred. The light hissed. The action hastened further.”45 Sieburg was suddenly left alone before the mute image. “I tell you, it was terrifying. It was as if I were encountering my own burial. Only with difficulty could the figures on the screen be carried through by the action. Depth disappeared, roads lost their distant curves, the actors seemed as if they were slumbering, silent animate corpses.”46 And like the baroness’s reaction to her husband’s leave-taking in Murnau’s Haunted Castle, the orchestra’s leavetaking induced anxiety in Sieburg. In the same year of Sieburg’s article, SPD politician and writer Carlo Mierendorff made a similar observation of the silent cinema: “When the music stops, things become frightening, spectral and eerie [gespentisch und Spuk]. Things are no longer present: Gentlemen raise their hats, cars hurtle by, girls give in, someone puts a gun on a forehead … silent, distant, horrifying, and that is the decline of the world.”47 As Mierendorff discovers the ghostliness of the image when the accompanying music is removed, his certainty in the existence of things is questioned and his confidence in the reality of the world “declines.” For both Sieburg and Mierendorff, it is music that bestows the wispy images they accompany their weight and density, the “fleshiness” of the real. “The secret of the silent ghostliness [Gespenstigkeit] must lay in the essence of music,” Sieburg notes.48 While music puts one in relation to the “Absolute,” the silent film image presents only the “alienating impression of the loss of relation.”49 An article by Robert Wiene, “Expressionism in Film,” published in Berliner Börsen-Courier on July 30, 1922, goes even further to tout the potential of film through the recognition of ghosts. Wiene maintains that the importance of film art lies in its aesthetic contrast to realism, as “the negative, the opposite of realist art.”50 Expressionist cinema is indifferent to the documentation of external reality, for it emphasizes “the unprecedented [Niedagewesene], the intuitive, the outward projection of an inner soul.”51 In this the cinema aspires to stage the “realm of the unreal—the ghostly, and the expressive,” aspirations that are not, as many in the Kino-Debatte may claim, testimony to its decadence, but indicative of its freedom from the discursive constraints imposed by the modern, scientific world.52 Wiene expands in the following: Few among us are still sensitive to the unreal, spectral [Gespenstige] qualities of film. During the war, a friend told me how, in a village in the Carpathians where troops were stationed, the peasants went to the cinema for the first time and came running out of the dark room, screaming out of fear; they believed they

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saw ghosts. How crude the bodies of ghosts—Banquo’s spirit of Hamlet’s father— appear on the stage! But in the cinema the strongest corporeality is spiritualized, and the spirit maintains its transparent, shadowy body through which it becomes visible. Film technology itself accommodates the representation of the unreal, representation that is in the sense of expressionism.53

We may recall that the Carpathians, the great stretch of mountains that borders Europe’s eastern edge, is also the strange region depicted in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the film produced immediately following The Haunted Castle. Hutter’s journey to the undead vampire’s castle is depicted through a series of supernatural special effects: double exposure, negative reversal, and fast-motion, time-lapse photography. This strange territory, where soldiers were stationed far from their home during the war, evidently demands a correspondingly aberrant, nonrealist use of the film medium. In the above passage, Wiene also describes unsophisticated Carpathian peasants as other to the technological modernity of the West. With their first experience of the ghostly images of the cinema, the peasants were struck by a feeling of intense uncanniness, for they seemed to confirm a repressed belief in the revenant, and the infantile notion (which was supposed to have been surmounted) that the dead live on as specters. Yet Wiene does not condemn the Carpathian peasants’ naïveté, for it is precisely their “primitive” nature that grants them a kind of special sensitivity to “the unreal, spectral, qualities of film.” In other words, for Wiene these peasants possess a special awareness of the nature of the cinema because they remain excluded from the rational accretions of Western modernity. When the spirit of Hamlet’s father appears on the stage, ghosts appear to them because time has come out of joint for these peasants. They are more sensitive, Wiene suggests, to the indeterminable temporality allegorized by the ghost. These accounts of the ghostly film image compel a deeper exploration into the relationship between film and the past. If in early Weimar culture the language of ghosts was linked to the cinema, then a philosophical account of the ghost, as both terrifying and comic, may provide philosophical insight into how the past returns in the cinematic image. “Ghosts [Gespenster],” Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), “like the profoundly significant allegories, are manifestations from the realm of mourning; they have an affinity for mourners, for those who ponder over signs and over the future.”54 For the remainder of this section, I will explain how the ghost serves as a figure of history in its claim upon the present, and which sets

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upon the melancholy historian and spectator of the cinema the ethical task of reading the fragments of the past in order to bring them into fruition. In order to elucidate this claim on the melancholy spectator, I will show how and why Benjamin turns to allegory and the hermeneutics of ruins. Ghosts function as ideal models for historiography in that they point to the past, while remaining open to redemption in the future. This historiographical model illuminates the basic ontology of film as well. Like the historiography of allegory, the cinema restores the possibility of becoming that is intrinsic to the past in the image of its repetition. The image does not repeat the past, which would be impossible, but projects possibility into this impossibility through its reproduction. According to Benjamin, one of the principal tasks of modern historiography is to acknowledge the presence of death as intrinsic to the materials of history. Past artifacts remain mute, immobile, and fragmented, and thus require elucidation. He writes that “in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.”55 For those living in the present, the petrification of knowledge, not its vitalist revival, remains crucial for allegory. The task of allegorical historiography is to read the physiognomy of these historical objects, to remain sensitive to the temporality of their finitude that marks them as artifacts of the past, and affirm their corresponding failure in the light of materialist history. In this, baroque allegory finds its most eloquent expression in the ruin. As a fragment that points to the trace of something that once existed, the ruin attests to the death of the historical artifact and its ghostly afterlife, already decayed in the passage of time: The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin [Ruine]. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.56

The historiography of the ruin is not the history of the thing as it persists into the present, “the process of an eternal life,” or the narcissistic fantasy of one’s own immortality, but the history of its finite earthly existence. The ruin is marked not only by time, but also by failure, for it remains inassimilable

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to the progressive history of victors that is part and parcel of the narrative of historical materialism. The allegorical figure marks its own discursive finitude in its presentation as fractured and incomplete. This is why the allegory may seem illegible or irrelevant to its contemporaries. Its meaning comes to fruition when a future allegorist carries out its posthumous elucidation. Accordingly, Benjamin writes that: What has survived is the extraordinary detail of the allegorical references: an object of knowledge which has settled in the consciously constructed ruins. Criticism means the mortification of the works. By their very essence these works confirm this more readily than others. Mortification of the works: not then—as the romantics have it—awakening of the consciousness in living works, but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones.57

This is the dialectic that is constitutive of allegory: death and decay that preserve the hope for knowledge in the ruin, and the careful gaze of the allegoristhistorian-philosopher that, according to Craig Owens, “supplements” their allegorical meaning and brings their content to life.58 Not life as described by vitalist philosophy, but a strange, uncanny life that preserves its past death through melancholy introjection, in a manner described by Abraham in his contemporaneous psychoanalytic writings. Moreover, the Benjaminian ruin functions in precisely the same manner as the unredeemed ghost-like reality of the photograph, described by Kracauer in his 1927 essay.59 By keeping knowledge safely housed within the ruin, its decay accordingly constitutes the historical allegory and makes way for the possibility of its redemption.60 Rather than joining the chorus of cynics who lamented the decline of German culture in the period immediately following the war, Benjamin took this opportunity to ground new ways of thinking history made possible through the profound epistemological break with the past. And instead of nostalgically mourning the losses reaped by the war, Benjamin’s method in the Trauerspiel work proposes a means to survive despite the historical debris that, as he puts it in his reading of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, continues to “grow skyward.”61 This condition of upheaval and fragmentation continues into the present day of the film philosopher. Benjamin’s philosophy of history is inseparable from the possibilities of being and the forms of its elucidation that belong to the age of cinema. His manner of comportment toward the past provides us a way of thinking history that is congruent with cinema’s afterlives. In this sense, the redemption of the allegory reveals the way the present inherits the legacy of thinking ontological questions of being and time. Past

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events do not have bearing on the present insofar as they represent discrete links in the linear chain of history. Rather, past events continue to haunt the present in their posthumous survival, a dialectic that guides how the present is simultaneously understood and projected into the future. For this reason, the allegorist is necessarily also the melancholic philosopher of history, for she learns to live with these ghosts and ruins, not to “work through” their trauma, but to allow them their coexistence with the world of the living. The historical present of the “now” (Jetztzeit) is made possible by allowing phantoms and specters from the past to mingle into life lived in the present, as uncanny doubles of our living selves. Like the afterlife of film, allegory occupies a zone of indeterminability between past and present, life and death. With this discussion of the ruin in mind, we may recall and more fully understand the very last shot of Murnau’s Nosferatu, the film produced between The Haunted Castle and Phantom. Perhaps this image of Orlok’s ruined castle is what Castle Vogelöd will look like, after many years have passed (Figure 2.4). As an intertitle from the film tells us, Orlok’s abode is located in “the land of thieves and phantoms”—in the Carpathians where Wiene’s peasants ran out of the film theater in fright after having seen the ghosts of the cinema. Read allegorically, Orlok’s crumbling castle emblemizes film’s basic historicity, highlighting how the film image returns the past to the present in the manner Benjamin theorizes in his study of the Trauerspiel. In The Visible Man from 1924, Béla Balázs notes that “In the image, everything tends toward allegory,” suggesting that it is the image itself that makes allegory possible.62 The film image of ruin reiterates this

Figure 2.4  Nosferatu, 1922

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possibility, as an allegory of allegory, for the ruin reiterates the claim of the past represented in the image to the allegorist of today. In his reading of this shot of Orlok’s castle, Anton Kaes makes explicit the relation between ruins and the artifacts of history, writing, “Like any other fragmented object, the ruin asks for completion—demanding, provoking, and spurring the spectator’s imagination.”63 These ruins are overgrown with nature, signaling the time that has passed since Orlok’s presence and his subsequent absence from the castle. Kaes concludes by making explicit the connections between film, ruins, and the experience of war: Nosferatu, then, ends with the demise of Nosferatu’s reich. It is the film itself that has recorded and remembered the story. By replaying it again and again, film acts as an enduring memorial of a time swiftly engulfed by forgetting. The film endows the site with a mythical narrative that imparts coherence and meaning to the events that transpired there.64

The melancholic, as allegorized in Murnau’s cinema, not only interweaves real and unreal, but holds out for a future, and by coextension for other possible histories, produced by the appearance of ruination and for which the thinker of the film image has particular affinity. Her task is aligned with that of recognition. For her interest in the present, constituted through a precarious conglomeration of aspirations and tendencies, enables the recognition of ghosts, the perception of ghostly images, and the acknowledgment of absent presences. I have endeavored to undertake this approach in this book, drawing correspondences between film, philosophy, and the thinking of loss through allegory in the early Weimar period. If the cinema is essentially expressive in form—which is to say, necessarily fragmentary and requiring of interpretation— Benjamin explains how one might take this form as the grounding for an ontology of film. In the next section, I will work through Murnau’s Phantom and show how it self-reflexively stages the dialectic between absence and presence. As we shall see, this allegory will bring greater rigor to the linkage between the ghost and the philosophy of film.

The apprehension of absence in Phantom (1922) Murnau’s Phantom is an adaptation of a newspaper serial published in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung by Gerhart Hauptmann. The entire story was

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collected and published in a 1923 hardcover edition under the title, Phantom: Aufzeichnungen eines ehemaligen Straflings (Phantom: Notes of a Former Convict). When the film premiered in October 1922, Weimar Germany was mired in dismal economic circumstances. In the span of this month, the currency drastically decreased in value from 3,181 to 7,183 Papiermark to the dollar. This trend would continue and accelerate into the New Year and beyond. In the summer of 1923, the exchange rate of the Weimar currency tumbled to 109,966, and by the end of the year plummeted to an astounding 4.2 trillion to the dollar.65 Describing the unprecedented chaos of postwar hyperinflation, cultural historian Bernd Widdig writes that: Shabbily dressed women setting off to go shopping with large baskets full of money, children building paper airplanes out of banknotes, speculators showing off their expensive clothing on the boulevards of big cities—these are popular images of the inflation that for generations have been branded into the collective memory of Germans.66

The skyrocketing cost of everyday necessities like food and clothing manifested the devastating effects of the postwar inflation period. Rice that was priced at 80,000 Papiermark would double the very next day. Savings accounts became suddenly worthless, dissolving any future financial security. Planning ahead became impossible. Wages could not keep up with the rapid devaluation of the currency, and unemployment quickly spread throughout the Republic, making even the most basic provisions unattainable for the vast majority of Germans. This economic situation affected the production of Phantom as well. All aspects of its budget were given extra scrutiny in order to eliminate any unnecessary expense. Despite the extremely unfavorable financial conditions, its producer, Erich Pommer, pushed forward to finish the film. In a letter dated August 1922, he writes that: In the future, production will have to be very efficient and economical. Just as unnecessary travel needs to be avoided, we need to economize on everything in the future, on time to save actors’ salaries, and above all on material (these days, a meter of negative already costs more than 30 Marks). For better or worse, we have to adapt to complete Phantom, and make adjustments on the next films too, because the funds necessary for film production in Germany cannot be secured at this time even with support from the major banks. In the future, calculations and planning will have to be done entirely differently than before.67

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Pommer surged forward, in order not to squander the connection between Phantom and its Nobel Prize–winning scriptwriter and to show that the highly regarded dramatist was supportive of film as an artistic medium. Hauptmann himself, in simple Biedermeier clothing, appears in the very first shot of the film, walking down a country path toward the camera while carrying a book. The author will play no other role in the film’s plot—his appearance here serves only to confer onto Phantom his authorial signature, linking artist and art. Overcoming financial difficulties, Murnau’s film was also finished in time for its important premiere: the commemoration of Hauptmann’s 60th birthday.68 Phantom plays out the dire straits of many who lived during the economic disorder of the early Weimar period. Its protagonist, Lorenz Lubota (Alfred Abel, star of Lang’s Metropolis), struggles with getting his poetry published and with family and friends who disapprove of his literary career aspirations. One cannot help but to see some of the fictional Lorenz in the historical Benjamin in late 1922: both would defy their parents’ wishes to discontinue their literary aspirations, and both would continue to strive for literary legitimacy at a moment when intellectual and creative labor was becoming increasingly devalued.69 Thus if connections may be made between Ehrenbaum-Degele’s Grunewald mansion and Castle Vogelöd in The Haunted Castle, similar historical-allegorical affinities may be drawn between Benjamin’s postwar situation and that of the main protagonist of Phantom. Both manifest anxieties of those after the war who found themselves unemployed and destitute. In a letter to his friend Florens Christian Rang, dated October 14, 1922, and as Murnau’s film was premiering in Berlin theaters, Benjamin describes a recent squabble with his father, who had refused to continue financially supporting the thirty year old. Like Lorenz’s father in Phantom, the elder Benjamin did not support his son’s intellectual endeavors: “My father declared some time ago that any further support would be contingent upon my taking a job in a bank. I rejected this and consequently a complete break was imminent, at which point my father-in-law appeared, summoned by my mother.”70 Due to his troubled financial status, Benjamin and his wife Dora were forced to live with his parents in Berlin. Their proximity only exacerbated their already tense relations. “Because of their pronounced pettiness and need for control,” grumbles the young writer, “it has turned into a torture devouring all the energy I have to work and all my joy in life.”71 Benjamin thought that finishing the Trauerspiel study, which would become his Habilitation, and procuring an academic position would be the only way to escape the strained circumstances of his parents’ household. His frustration

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seemed to embolden him: “The more obstinate my parents prove to be, the more I am forced to consider acquiring this certificate of public recognition, which would bring them into line.”72 Lorenz in Phantom would fail in becoming a celebrated poet, and Benjamin would be unable to secure a university position, and vindicate his financially unprofitable literary work. Lorenz is a mild-mannered city clerk whose delicate features and timid portrayal characterize the typical sheltered bookworm. Admonished by his doting mother for purchasing books he cannot afford, he nevertheless protests that they “let one at least dream about all the things one would never experience.” Despite his constant daydreaming, Lorenz is well-liked among family and friends. One morning, while walking through the streets of his town, he becomes so immersed in his fantasies that he absentmindedly forgets to attend to his office day job. Quickly glancing at the clock tower, Lorenz hurries through the busy intersections, and neglects to see a horse-drawn carriage rushing toward him. Without warning, it crashes into the city servant and knocks him to the ground. The woman driver (Lya De Putti) hurries over to see if he is injured. As Lorenz returns to consciousness, he is immediately captivated by the young woman’s lovely face, as they look intensely into each others’ eyes (Figure 2.5). When the woman finally confirms that he is unhurt, she returns to her white carriage and rides away. Lorenz, still in a daze, is so taken by this image of beauty that he chases after her through the busy town marketplace. The collision marks the watershed moment in Lorenz’s life, putting into motion his obsessive efforts to gaze upon the beautiful woman and her gleaming

Figure 2.5  Phantom, 1922

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carriage once more. He later finds out that she is named Veronika and is the daughter of the well-regarded Harlan family. When Lorenz also hears of her impending marriage to a rich suitor, a man who is of her privileged class, he goes to the courtyard of the luxurious Harlan house and demands to speak to her parents. He has a long, awkward conversation with them, and audaciously requests their daughter’s hand in future marriage. The father responds only with a blank look. Throughout this conversation in the Harlan house, Veronika never appears. What is more, she is not seen again for the remainder of Phantom, disappearing for the two-hour length of the film. Like the leave-takings that occur throughout The Haunted Castle, her disappearance becomes the thematic focal point around which the narrative of Phantom revolves. Her physical absence produces her ghostly presence within Lorenz’s imagination, haunting his interior, while also becoming an allegory for film and the fantasmatic object of the film viewer’s desire. In Murnau’s Haunted Castle, this process of melancholy introjection was played out in the empty spaces of Castle Vogelöd, but in Phantom this psychic interiorization is manifest through hallucinatory flashbacks that play with cinematic time. Lorenz’s memories of Veronika are compulsively repeated, blending trauma and desire, overlapping the image of her oncoming carriage and his imagination through filmic double exposure. With each reproduction, the past collides with the present, repeating the traumatic moment of collision on the narrow street at the start of the film. And through the repetition of these collisions, Phantom illuminates the temporality of film image, reiterating its allegorical affinity to the historicity of the present. As the film continues, Lorenz’s fantasies become increasingly delusional and unreal, progressively divorced from reality. His desperate obsessions and mounting self-aggrandizement isolate him further from everyday life and others around him. After speaking to Veronika’s parents, Lorenz shows his poems to Starke, the town bookbinder. He praises them and offhandedly calls the young writer the “next Schiller.” The old man promises to show the poems to a literary critic so that they may be published. Lorenz excitedly leaves his shop, and with the words “literary genius” echoing through the budding poet’s mind, the film cuts to a hazy daydream sequence where he is honored before his peers. Lorenz envisions himself celebrated and legitimized as an author while lovingly embraced by Veronika. Cutting back to reality, he rushes outside and hails a horse-drawn taxi, demanding that he be taken to the “best tavern in town.” Upon entering the

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high-society establishment, packed with distinguished customers, Lorenz spots a seated woman whose appearance uncannily matches that of Veronika’s. The film cuts to a close-up of this woman, who we later learn is named Melitta. Drawing attention to her resemblance to Veronika’s face and hair, Murnau makes the match between the two women explicit by momentarily superimposing one face over the other, vacillating between Veronika and Melitta, past and present. Both the original and the substitute are played by Lya De Putti. Lorenz introduces himself and accompanies Melitta home, clearly enamored by Veronika’s double. Apparently, when the original object of desire remains unattainable (following the logic of the fort-da game), the substitute will suffice (Figure 2.6).73 Over the course of the subsequent evenings, Lorenz showers Melitta with money and gifts. She remains reluctant, however. When Melitta apprehensively pulls away from his unrelenting attention, he exclaims, “No—No—Don’t run away from me—Not you too!” Annoyed by his obsessive infatuation, she asks, “Who are you? I want to know … what drove you to me, like a sleepwalker …? I want to know, who do you imagine kissing when you kiss me?” He glumly responds, “I … am a poet … a man with no luck … who chases a shadow [Schatten] … a phantom [Phantom]!” The shadow referred to here is presumably Veronika’s absent presence in his imagination. Lorenz’s rare moment of self-reflection concedes his own turbulent sickness and obsessive melancholy, and through this seems to acknowledge that what he desires remains an unreal hallucination. He chases an unreal phantom and Lorenz describes himself as a phantom as well. The film’s title is here made explicit,

Figure 2.6  Phantom, 1922

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recalling Hauptmann’s popular serial novel. It will not be uttered again for the remainder of Murnau’s film. Mann’s “Danse Macabre” from The Magic Mountain also uses the words “shadow” and “phantom” (identical to their use in Phantom in the original German) to describe a desirous, albeit unreal, image of a woman. A relevant passage, where Mann recounts the audience’s reaction to a cinematic representation of an exotic Moroccan woman, corresponds closely to Lorenz’s infatuation with Veronika: People stared in bewilderment at the face of this charming specter [Schatten], who seemed to see them and yet did not, who was not at all affected by their gaze, and whose laughter and waves were not meant for the present, but belonged to the then and there of home—it would have been pointless to respond. And so, as noted, their delight was mixed with a sense of helplessness. Then the phantom [Phantom] vanished.74

The “charming specter” and “phantom”: Mann deploys these categories pejoratively to indicate that what the cinema offers is only an illusion. It would be pointless to attempt to interact with its projected images, for they belong not to the present moment of the spectator, but to the past. There is no record of his seeing Murnau’s film, but Mann might have read Phantom as a kind of cautionary tale, a film that depicts a character who “stared in bewilderment at the face of this charming specter”: Veronika/Melitta. It warns the spectator of the neuroses that may befall if she were to willingly submit to the cinema’s captivating apparitions. It is evidently best to keep such imaginary concoctions at bay and repress, at all costs, their appearing in the real world. In his obsessive infatuation with phantoms, Lorenz typifies the obsessive Weimar subject in crisis, examples of which we have already seen. Like the baroness’s late husband in The Haunted Castle, he experiences a trauma that affects him in unprecedented ways and that seemingly cannot be worked through. Yet because Lorenz’s suffering is of a fetishistic nature, his phantoms accrue greater depth as self-reflexive allegories of the cinema and its power to elicit the visual pleasure of its spectators. Once again, Mann’s 1924 excerpt on film is instructive, not for pointing out how such phantoms encourage irrational obsession, but for describing how the issues of presence, absence, and temporality are implicated in questions of film ontology. Murnau’s Phantom plays out the experience of the “charming specter” described above, but the film also reveals how the moving image is intimately connected to a lost past

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and its repeated, fantasmatic appearance in the present. As I have shown in the first half of this chapter, this temporality, a hybrid constituted through past and present moments, is part and parcel of the condition of postwar melancholy as it was understood at the time. Lorenz’s hallucinatory misrecognition of Veronika/ Melitta in the restaurant not only keys the spectator into his mental state, but also highlights how his subjective memory is ontologically aligned with the temporality of the film image. Exactly like Roloff in Nerves, moments of anxiety trigger further hallucinations in Lorenz, images that recall his fateful accident on the street. In another turning point in Phantom, Aunt Schwabe admonishes him for taking money from her and lavishly spending it on the selfish Melitta. Schwabe demands that he return the borrowed money, but none of it remains. Lorenz exits her home and despondently wanders through the empty streets of his town. Suddenly, the houses come to life and menacingly lean as if to judge him. Their shadows become animated as well and threateningly follow the hysterical clerk down the city streets (Figure 2.7). Referencing moments precisely such as these from early Weimar film, Deleuze writes of things that come to life in German Expressionism and the play of light that make this life possible: The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of Nature, that is, for the unconscious spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum.75

For Deleuze, montage in German Expressionism produces environments of visual contrasts where light and dark clash. Through this chiaroscuro,

Figure 2.7  Phantom, 1922

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Expressionism reduces the world to a surface where ontological differences between the organic and inorganic are confused. And through their filming, nonorganic things move of their own accord, acquiring personalities with questionable intents, to betray their human interlocutors. Deleuze continues, “A wall which is alive is dreadful; but utensils, furniture, houses, and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce. Shadows of houses pursue the man running along the street.”76 Lorenz’s visions are not merely expressions of a sick, impressionable mind; they self-reflexively present the nonorganic life of things in the cinema. If the phantom allegorizes the forceful reappearance of a traumatic past in the present, it is the dark, “Expressionist” reappearances of Veronika and her carriage, interspersed throughout the film, that are the most dramatic in the animation of nonorganic life in the cinema image, but also in allegorizing the nonorganic life of the cinema itself. Like Roloff ’s hallucinations, they appear three times throughout the film. There are no corresponding literary moments in Hauptmann’s source text, for the appearances of Veronika’s ghostly carriages function mainly to exploit possibilities specific to film and to showcase its hallucinatory art. The imagery of these three sequences seems to derive from Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage from 1921, which was shown in Germany in December of that year and may have been known by Murnau. The film tells the story of David Holm, played by Sjöström himself, who dies at midnight on New Year’s Eve and is then forced to drive a carriage to collect the dead for the coming year. In-camera special effects are utilized to portray a transparent, ghostly carriage traversing streets and even into the ocean. Appropriated for more self-reflexive purposes, the carriage sequences in Murnau’s Phantom depict Lorenz’s inner trauma and obsession in order to highlight, more explicitly, the art and ontology of the film medium. In the first hallucination, which takes place approximately twenty-four minutes into the film, Lorenz has returned home after the collision with Veronika, looking entirely ill from the experience. His mother weakly tells him that his sister has turned to prostitution. Though he hears the shocking news, it hardly fazes him. Lorenz turns toward the camera, as if to address the viewer, just as the mise-en-scène dissolves into a hazy, theatrical backdrop of flat, jagged buildings. A ghostly image of the carriage driven by Veronika emerges from the darkness. Lorenz turns to pursue her while his hands grasp for her image in vain. He continues to run after her and exits offscreen left (Figure 2.8).

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Figure 2.8  Phantom, 1922

The scene is repeated thirty minutes later, however, without the artificial backdrop. In this iteration, the screen remains completely dark except for the hazy white carriage and Lorenz himself, chasing her once again. Without any reference to the external world, they seem to traverse through a negative space, as if to glide toward the spectator. The absence of the jagged buildings from the first sequence suggests that his delusional sickness has progressed. Lorenz has become increasingly isolated from external reality and fallen further into his subjective unreality (Figure 2.9). The third and last daydream sequence in Phantom takes place another thirty minutes later. At the beginning of the last act of the film, Lorenz’s hopes of

Figure 2.9  Phantom, 1922

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becoming a published writer have been completely dashed, for his poems have been deemed mediocre and will not be published. The guilt from the money he has swindled from his aunt now completely overwhelms him. Filled with despondent remorse, he walks through the streets of his town and meanders back to the marketplace, which, like a photograph shot by Eugène Atget, is now completely devoid of people. Without warning, the spectral image of the carriage driven by Veronika appears from below the screen and rushes toward him. Although it is a transparent representation, a mere phantom, the carriage passes through Lorenz and physically knocks him to the ground. It continues through the town until it reaches the Harlan house and vanishes once again. The poor city clerk quickly picks himself up and desperately follows the ghostly Veronika with outstretched arms. His traumatic compulsion is now fully incorporated into his everyday reality: real and unreal converge in the camera, and both are reduced to animate, projected shadows. What previously existed only in the confines of his imagination merges with Lorenz’s everyday reality, rendering real his personal, fantasmatic obsessions while invalidating what was thought to be empirical. When the exasperated writer reaches the door of the luxurious house, he collapses and exclaims, “I can’t break away from her!—I can’t break away from her—!” Defeated, Lorenz picks up his crumpled hat and retreats from the closed door (Figure 2.10). Despite Lorenz’s melancholy, the depiction of delusion in Murnau’s Phantom is not merely symptomatic of an unhealthy mental condition. His daydreams also showcase the unique powers of the cinema, beyond that of rational

Figure 2.10  Phantom, 1922

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consciousness, privileging neither reality nor illusion toward the consolidation of a specifically filmic representation. If, according to Wiene, the moving image has a special capacity to meet and accommodate the representation of the unreal, then Lorenz’s allegorical hallucinations express his inner anxieties outward through their fusion with the external world. The three hallucinatory carriages recall Lumière’s train, barreling toward the film viewer, but Phantom takes this aesthetic of astonishment further. The last of Lorenz’s delusional daydreams most obsessively allegorizes the undecidability between reality and illusion, presenting hallucinations that attest to the facticity of the cinema. Béla Balázs expressed great appreciation for film’s ability to bring phantoms into contact with objective reality. For the Weimar theorist, the cinema essentially defies traditional aesthetics such that its ontology may be most compellingly realized when its depictions are allowed to violate the boundary between reality and dream. In contrast to Mann, Balázs in The Visible Man believes that film can aspire to art because its representations bypass the ideological assumptions of rational certainty. In the following, he describes Phantom by utilizing this vocabulary: A film based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s novel Phantom sets out to photograph a reality overwhelmed by dream, a world as it might appear to the overexcited imagination of a fantasist who refuses to accept objective reality. This is interspersed with dream visions, and both merge into one another, with no clear boundaries between the dream and a reality seen through an ecstatic haze.77

The border between dream and reality dissolves through cinematography, while the outlines of what is real appear as a hazy fog. Objective reality loses its priority as fleeting subjective impressions are channeled through the perspective of the main character. “The hero’s subjective point of view,” Balázs continues, “only conveys to us close-ups of seconds, not time in a long shot. That is the nature of impressionism in film. We see only what makes an impression on the hero. Everything else is left out.”78 The hierarchy between the real and unreal is flattened on the surface of the film screen, and the cinema ceases representing a given world while inaugurating a world made possible only by film. Balázs is corroborated by film theorist Jean Mitry who observes of Phantom that: The locations symbolize a concept at the same time as they reflect a state of mind. The expressionist method is revealed in the way the states of mind “expressed” by the setting reflect on the characters—with the reservation that having genuinely become the Weltanschauung, the setting assumes the appearance of a universe.79

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Lorenz’s three hallucinatory scenes attest not to an objective reality constituted through linear reasoning and narrativity, but to a potentially arbitrary chain of subjective impressions, divorced from the world as it is commonly experienced. They take place in an indeterminable zone between the actual and the potential, construed through the powers of movement and time specific to the cinema.80 If these three sequences, and others depicting Lorenz’s hallucinations, do not document a given reality, as well as neutralize distinctions between the real and the imaginary, they eschew the binaries of metaphysics in order to prepare another aim: cinema as a form of thinking. At the beginning of Cinema 2, Deleuze explicitly references Murnau’s 1922 film in order to show how nonorganic things, brought to life by the cinema, develop an uncanny consciousness. “In the nightmare in Murnau’s Phantom,” he writes, “the dreamer pursues the carriage, but is himself urged on by the shadow of the houses which pursue him.”81 If Expressionism may be characterized by the “nonorganic life of things,” a cinema that collapses ontological differences between organic and inorganic by translating both into image, then key moments in this cinema also pave the way for a logic of images which “itself moves in itself,” for a cinema that Deleuze calls the “image of thought.”82 The hallucinations from Murnau’s film seem to exemplify a free, indirect camera that is neither objective nor subjective, and which disrupts the habituated paths of the sensory-motor schema, while putting the direct image of time into relief. Deleuze argues that the time-image came to fruition in cinema history after 1945, but he also writes that “The direct time-image is the phantom [fantôme] which has always haunted the cinema, but it took modern cinema to give a body to this phantom.”83 This sentence is relevant, not only for its suggestive diction, but also for suggesting that the direct image of time has remained a potentiality of the film image since its historical beginnings. Following the traumas of World War I, Phantom releases this potential by allowing the ghosts of the past to mingle with the present, fusing past and present in a manner akin to what Deleuze calls the “crystal of time.”84 This hallucinatory image of memory haunts both cinema and thought. The pursuit of the phantom that is the time-image, virtual in relation to the actual movement-image, is not simply an obsessive, unhealthy, and compulsive endeavor, but is a means for holding out, for remaining “sensitive” to cinematic notions of time that may prove to be nonlinear and deterritorializing. Such an obsession is not irrational delusion, but is an attempt to reconnect with the world (or, perhaps, to rebuild it, referring back to my analysis in the previous

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chapter). For Deleuze, the nonorganic life of things featured in early Weimar film foreshadowed the rise of the “Hitlerian automaton in the German soul,” but Murnau’s film, working through the dialectic of absence and presence, provides a means of abandoning this telos of Weimar film history in order to release other capacities, both spectral and fantasmatic, that had been subordinated to the fascist automaton.85 In a later chapter, I will bring this relationship between the historical ontology and politics of film into greater relief. As I have tried to show up to now, the depiction of Lorenz’s hallucinations coincides with the self-reflexive, cinematic allegory through figurations of spectrality. The image of Veronika’s translucent carriage allegorizes the repeated return of past events as unreal phantoms, embalmed and reanimated through the cinematic image. Indeed, these sequences from Murnau’s film may be likened to the ghosts perceived by the Carpathian peasants described in Wiene’s article from June 1922, uncanny phantoms reproduced by the cinema that invoke intense fear and anxiety. The past reappears in the present as history, resurrected through double exposure, and through the superimposition of the image of the past onto the present.

Philosophy as cinema 2: From nothing to something Working with a key chapter from Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution dealing with the cinematograph, in the final pages of this chapter I will show how the recurring obsessions depicted in Phantom inform a general theory of the moving image. As we have seen, the experience of Murnau’s film reminded the viewer of the intimacy of the past with the present, self-reflexively worked through the traumatic hallucinations depicted in Phantom. This experience may also be understood as the experience of perpetual loss, as the present continually sinks into the past through the course of time. Bergson’s writings occasion this theorization of loss because they introduce the problem of nothingness, and by coextension death and absence, in conjunction with the theorization of change and duration. In the fourth chapter to Creative Evolution, published in 1911, Bergson describes what he calls “The Cinematographical Mechanism of Thought and the Mechanistic Illusion.” Addressing the nature of perception, he first describes its limitations as perception is confronted with the continuous becoming of reality. “Of becoming,” Bergson writes, “we perceive only states, of duration only

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instants, and even when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is another thing that we are thinking.”86 Perception is limited by its habit of isolating discrete instants from an external flow, and thus cannot fully comprehend the duration of becoming, except as a series of now-points overlaid by cognition. Bergson likens this perceptual habit to the cinematographic mechanism, placing discrete instants in correspondence with discrete photographs. Both are isolated moments that, through their rapid succession in time, reconstitute life’s flow. The movement produced by the cinema is not actual movement, but “a movement hidden in the apparatus and whose function it is to superpose the successive pictures on one another in other to imitate the movement of the real object.”87 Bergson even pejoratively calls this hidden, cinematographic movement a “fundamental absurdity” that must be abandoned, as it cannot present the real, perpetual flux of things.88 Such an absurdity already surfaced in my discussion of Bergson’s 1903 essay, “Introduction to Metaphysics.” What he called “analysis” in the earlier piece corresponds here to the cinematographical mechanism of thought. As an invention of scientific and rational thinking, the cinema reiterates the rational view of the analytical perspective and in this, Bergson posits human consciousness as already cinematic. Organic perception and inorganic camera— apparently neither escapes the “mechanistic illusion.” This well-known discussion about the cinematograph appears in the middle of Chapter 4 of Creative Evolution. However, before launching into his critique of the cinema, Bergson begins his chapter with a discussion of “The Idea of ‘Nothing,’ ” and the elucidation of a more fundamental ontological problematic that deeply informs the fallacies of the mechanistic attitude. This discussion is crucial to theorizing the movement of the cinematograph, for it stages an ontological problem fundamental to thinking change through the cinema image: the flicker of discrete images corresponds to the philosophical problem of thinking one thing in time followed by another, or being alternated by nonbeing. Bergson observes that as soon as the notion of “Nothingness” is conjured up by the mind, one already thinks of Something; as soon as one begins to think the concept of nonbeing, this thought already asserts being as a metaphysical category called “nonbeing.” This fundamental aporia of thinking the Nothing metaphysically reflects that of the analytical attitude toward the becoming of life, as well as the incapacity of the cinema to fully capture its flux. Bergson restates the ontological problem between the Something and the Nothing by recalling a question posed by Leibniz on the principle of sufficient reason: “How—why does this principle exist rather than nothing?”89 The question

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reformulates the ontological question, traditionally cast as a straightforward query, “What is being?,” such that the being of the one who questions is put into question as well. The one who questions is the mortal human being, who possesses language and is thus capable of asking such a question, and who lives somewhere between the existential horizons of birth and death. Rather than pursue the ontological question from a place outside the flow of time, the questioner is embedded in its duration. And instead of pursuing a scientifically verifiable answer to the accumulative complications raised by the science of ontology, the philosopher is left to wonder how such questioning is possible at all. Indeed, as soon as Bergson wonders why the principle of being exists rather than nothing, he wonders whether his question is posed correctly and if it might be “without meaning, a pseudo-problem raised about a pseudo-idea?”90 Vacillating between such difficulties, he concedes that this “problem haunts the mind with such obstinacy,” occupying him as an obsession.91 Bergson realizes that the idea of the Nothing unavoidably confronts the limits of metaphysical thinking. To think the Nothing is like the cinematographic nature of thought in general, to enshroud its meaning within the immobilized concept as a hypostasized moment, endowed with metaphysical presence. Yet life nevertheless goes on—the moment is already past and even the idea of Nothingness must, like Baron Oetsch in The Haunted Castle, take leave from consciousness. Absence in the present never simply signifies a pure void, but the absence of something, or the presence of an absence. These difficulties cannot be entirely circumvented, but they can be negotiated. Notably, Bergson adopts the language of apparitions to provide a way forward. When we conventionally think nonexistence, he continues, the mind must first think of an object and then think of its negation. The negation instigates a memorialization of the void left by the absent object, inducing the memory of its prior existence. The second act “annihilates” the content of the first, and the void is thus, as Bergson puts it, a “phantom” that “[bestrides] the positive solid reality to which it is attached.”92 Like Mann, Bergson uses the word “phantom” here to pejoratively signal an unreal, apparitional supplement to concrete reality. “I annihilate in thought an external object,” he continues, “in the place where it was, there is no longer anything.—No longer anything of that object, of course, but another object has taken its place.”93 The object remaining is the memory of a former presence, a positive image of a negation, and the remainder of the past enduring into the present. The cognition of this difference between then and now is experienced as the passing of time, marked by the mechanism of human

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consciousness. Bergson writes, “it will no longer only note the present state of the passing reality; it will represent the passing as a change, and therefore as a contrast between what has been and what is.”94 In my discussion of Freud’s essay on war and death in the previous chapter, we saw how the psychoanalyst reached a similar ontological impasse through the insight that whenever we imagine our own death we do so by perceiving ourselves “present as spectators.”95 We perceive our own possible nothingness from outside the Nothing, from a point estranged from ourselves, and from the third person, as it were. The impossibility of imagining one’s own death underpinned the triumphalist metaphysics of the militarized survivor, who disavowed the possible nothingness of his own living being for the sake of the narcissistic fantasy of immortality. Bergson goes further than Freud, however. He frames the problem of nothingness as an aporia that persists in the course of time. Because it must be formulated as an object of cogitation, ripped away from life’s flow, the idea of Nothing can never escape being understood metaphysically. The key for Bergson is to delineate a critical comportment toward the idea that puts the very aporia of thinking nothing into relief. He does this at a crucial moment of his discussion when he attempts to annihilate himself, to think of himself as “Nothing.” Proceeding in the manner of Descartes’s meditations, Bergson closes his eyes, stops his ears, and attempts to extinguish all sensation of the outside world. As he attempts to abolish his inner self, however, he notes that “its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying away.”96 This is not an impasse for Bergson as it is for Freud, but only one moment of the vacillating action of thought that paradoxically constitutes the Nothing, as the mind switches its concentration from inner to outer reality and back. He elaborates, The effort by which we strive to create this image simply ends in making us swing to and fro between the vision of an outer and that of an inner reality. In this coming and going of our mind between the without and the within, there is a point, at equal distance from both, in which it seems to us that we no longer perceive the one, and that we do not yet perceive the other: it is there that the image of “Nothing” is formed. In reality, we then perceive both, having reached the point where the two terms come together, and the image of Nothing, so defined, is an image full of things, an image that includes at once that of the subject and that of the object and, besides, a perpetual leaping from one to the other and the refusal ever to come to rest finally on either.97

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This perpetual leaping from one to the other describes the very ontology of the uncanny specter, whose haunted ontology also may be said to vacillate between past and present, inner and outer reality. As a nonthematizable materiality, both present and absent in the course of time, film differs from photography in that the movement of the former overcomes the fallacies of analytical attitude that is intrinsic to the ossification of the latter. In this regard, both films I analyzed by Murnau, The Haunted Castle and Phantom, embody what Bergson calls the “cinematographic mechanism of thought” by thinking the very conditions of their ontological possibility. Their affinity to meditation upon loss and leave-taking, intrinsic to the nature of cinema, is grounded in the traumatic experience of war. Seen within their historical context and read through accounts of the cinema articulated at the time, The Haunted Castle and Phantom bring into relief a crucial aspect of film ontology in general: the life of the image understood by modern consciousness as the vacillation between presence and absence, an unavoidable precondition that is intrinsic to the theorization of cinematic movement. If Freud and Bergson are correct in articulating the limitations of modern consciousness with respect to the representation of death and the Nothing, the ontology of film can be described only as such a vacillation, as an aporia that remains irreducible and unresolvable as long as it remains an object of philosophical thought. In order to articulate this aporia more concretely, I will take a close look at Fritz Lang’s 1921 film Destiny in the next chapter. Like Phantom, Lang’s film presents three sequences that allegorize the fundamentally temporal ontology of the cinema. These sequences are lengthier than Lorenz’s hallucinations and tell three narratives that repeat the cycle of life, love, and death. I will elaborate more precisely how the past and future coalesce in the filmic present, and in so doing, delve into the relation between the temporality of lived life and film ontology. Destiny insists upon the “nothingness” of the spectator herself as integral to its drama. Correspondingly, we shall see how and why the life of the film philosopher is inseparable from the afterlife of film.

3

The Temporality of Destiny Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921)

Destiny (1921) and the humanization of death In a short article published in September 1926 called “Ausblick auf Morgen” (“Outlook on the Future”) Fritz Lang boldly declares, In the beginning was—not the word; nor was it the deed. In the beginning was movement. Movement is the most basic testament to the existence of life, regardless of whether it deals with the dance of the stars or the mosquitoes. The old “cogito ergo sum” should be converted into “moving therefore alive.”1

At the time these words appeared in the trade journal Lichtbildbühne, Lang was a much sought-after auteur, having already directed the Mabuse and Nibelungen series in 1922 and 1924, both mega-productions whose successes bestowed the German director international acclaim. As Lang looks toward the future of cinema, he simultaneously looks backward, invoking two well-known narratives of origination, the book of Genesis and the birth of the Cartesian ego, setting them off in order to argue for a new foundational ontology. For Lang, motion supplants these grand narratives: motion usurps the sovereignty of the word, and living movement dethrones the autonomous cogito, leaving animation in and of itself as the sole criterion for the evidence of life. As the article continues, Lang explains how the cinema may be aligned with all moving entities in the world: “There are no boundaries to the possibilities of the cinema, its task is to bring all that moves and therefore lives closer to our senses—whether it deals with the procession of white clouds around a snowy mountain peak, the twitch of a mouth on the verge of laughing or crying, a distant and unseen past, or a far-off future.”2 To bring the image of life closer to the spectator remains the task

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of cinema. Later in the article, Lang formulates the ontology of cinema simply and straightforwardly: “Moving image, moving life: Film.”3 In rather stark contrast to his discussion of the life of the cinema, one year later Lang published another film-related article in the Berliner Tageblatt called “On Benevolent Death.” In this impressionistic piece, the filmmaker recounts a memory of childhood when he was ill with the flu. Bed-ridden and delirious from fever, Lang felt himself “very close to the fulfillment of the saying that whom the gods love, die young.”4 The saying referred to here is the formulation, attributed to playwright Plautus, quem di diligunt, adolescens moritur. Unsure if he was asleep or awake, he saw Death materialize before him in human form, “made of black and white, light and shade, the rib cage, the naked bones. On top of it the head, barely recognizable, shaded by the wide-brimmed hat.”5 His encounter with the dark stranger invoked feelings of uncanniness, but not terror. Coming face-to-face with Death gave him “the complete understanding of the ecstasy which martyrs and saints embrace death.”6 He then recalls the image of his body going limp as angelic figures lifted him up, presumably to the afterlife. At this moment, Death disappeared and Lang regained consciousness. “I recovered quickly. But the love of death, compounded by horror and affection, which the Gothic master depicted, stayed with me and became a part of my films: humanized in Destiny, symbolic in Die Nibelungen, living Gothic in Metropolis.”7 Of these films, none maintains the mood of somber melancholy as consistently as Lang’s Der müde Tod (Destiny), his earliest artistic success from 1921. In it Death takes on human form, continuing the traditional, iconic depiction of Death in art and literature into the afterlife of the film medium. Destiny begins with a shot of an empty, desolate road. While the trees in the background begin to rustle, a dark figure materializes from a small cloud of dust kicked up by the wind. Dressed in dark robes and carrying a long walking stick, Death bears a weary, expressive face, gaunt and weathered by tragedy. He wears a wide-brimmed hat like the one described in the filmmaker’s childhood memory. Through a simple in-camera effect, his shadowy shape is made to appear from thin air. Cinema infuses his uncanny existence with animate life, manifesting something from nothing (Figure 3.1). In the previous chapter, I looked at two films by Murnau alongside contemporaneous accounts of cinematic ghosts, phantoms, and specters. I connected the spectral film image, as it was described at the time, with the experience of absence—the absence of loved ones and the concomitant

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Figure 3.1  Destiny, 1921

experience of melancholic loss. In doing so, I was able to illuminate the basic ontological historicity of the film image and the marking of past and present. In the following discussion of Lang’s Destiny, I will describe the temporality of the spectral film image in greater detail, making direct reference to the philosophical vocabulary of life and death in early Weimar culture, categories that Lang uses in his two articles on film and were widely deployed in the contemporaneous KinoDebatte. The filmmaker associates the “moving image” with “moving life,” yet Destiny remains insistent upon Death, manifest through its allegorical figuration as well as through its narrativization throughout the film. In this instance as well as in many other writings of the period, the terms “life” and “death” are left philosophically vague and remain undertheorized. Bringing these terms into sharper theoretical focus, I will first show how Destiny may be read to illuminate questions of temporality and argue that death forms the horizon of the future. In the latter half of this chapter on Lang’s film, I will argue that this interpretation depends on the “humanization” of the cinematic moment, bound by mortality and finitude. Destiny continues as a fairy tale. A newlywed couple rides a horse-drawn carriage toward a small village. On its way, the carriage stops to pick up Death. He takes a seat across from the young couple in the cramped space, and his presence immediately distresses them. The small carriage finally arrives at the local tavern of the village, the Golden Unicorn, where the town’s luminaries have gathered around their Stammtisch. The young couple, somewhat uneasily,

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shares a table with Death. The maiden nonetheless enjoys her respite, and leaves momentarily to admire a litter of kittens in the kitchen. Upon her return, she finds that Death has left and the place where her husband was sitting is now empty. He has taken leave, like the baroness’s husband in Murnau’s Haunted Castle, and like the young male soldiers who went off to the front. Death has taken him away. The maiden becomes desperate to find her lost loved one. In a daze, she wanders out of the Golden Unicorn to the high-walled building recently purchased by Death. Suddenly, her pallid face becomes horror-struck in response to a vision behind the camera. Cutting to a reverse shot, we see ghosts slowly marching toward us. Echoing the final scene of Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919) featuring soldiers returned from the dead, these specters and phantoms remind the early Weimar viewer of the lives lost to war, while simultaneously fulfilling the wish for their resurrection made possible by the uncanny, supernatural film image (Figure 3.2).8 Among them is a man ambling with crutches and an amputated leg, another with an arm in a sling, and two in German infantry uniform. Constituted through in-camera special effects, they walk, zombie-like, into Death’s fortress. The maiden’s eyes widen in horror as the ethereal figures pass through her. She recognizes one of them as her beloved. For a moment, she comes face-to-face with him, but he seems not to recognize her. These specters not only allegorize the ghostly images brought to life by the cinema, discussed in detail in the previous chapter, but also allude

Figure 3.2  Destiny, 1921

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to the afterlives of those wounded and killed in war. Overcome with grief, the maiden collapses to the ground. The town pharmacist takes her in and nurtures her back to health. Surrounded by bottles of unknown liquid remedies, the maiden picks one up and drinks it at the exact moment the night watchman outside announces eleven o’clock at night. The film cuts to a brief shot of a clock face, and then cuts once more, entering into her potion-induced hallucination (Figure 3.3). In doing so, Destiny shifts register altogether, leaving the earthly world governed by the temporality of the clock and arriving, as an intertitle indicates, in “some place and some time” outside its cyclical linearity. When the night watchman signals eleven at night, he marks the film’s entry into a realm where the experience of time is itself humanized, where time is lived as duration, and which eludes measurement by the mechanical clock. The still image of the clock face signifies the present as a discrete moment, reiterating the “cinematographic mechanism of thought.” As I have explained previously, this intellectual fallacy misinterprets the indivisible flux that underpins the notion of time as lived, and is a misconstrual that for Bergson reflects the “analytical attitude” toward change. The now-moments through which the hands of the ticking clock move correspond to the procession of snapshots that reconstitute the “illusion” of movement in film. As historian Stephen Kern explains in The Culture of Time and Space, this spatialized notion of time is the metaphysical edifice upon which modernity may be grounded. Kern discusses

Figure 3.3  Destiny, 1921

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how the infinitesimal slice of the present links public, standardized time to technologies of contemporaneity including the telephone, high-speed rotary press, and the cinema.9 Synchronized time became increasingly important as the arrival and departure of trains needed to conform to a fixed, predictable schedule. That Lang was obsessed with the modern, mechanistic logic of the clock and its disciplinary power over human thinking and behavior may be evidenced through its conspicuous reiteration in films such as Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922), Metropolis (1927), and Spies (1928).10 Through another lap-dissolve the film delves more deeply into her dream sequence. A door materializes in the impassable wall that surrounds his abode, opening to a set of stairs. The maiden slowly climbs them. Death then appears and stands before her. Recognizing the dark figure, she desperately begs for the return of her beloved. Death takes her hand and leads her further up the stairs into his dominion. In his aphorism on “The Motif of the Door,” Ernst Bloch references this moment from Destiny explicitly, and notes that the door into Death’s realm evokes “the wall of sleep and the portal of death.”11 Both of them enter into a spacious, gothic cathedral, whose imagery is derived from settings described in the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale Der Gevatter Tod (“Godfather Death”). Countless tall, wax lights jut upward, imitating the monumental verticality of the columns and walls. Each candle corresponds to the length of a human life living somewhere in the world. The large ones belong to the children, the medium-length ones to those in the prime of their life, and the shorter ones to the elderly. In contrast to the clock and its regularized, endless cycle of time-measurement, candles correspond to the span of a human’s life, signaling a definitive beginning and end. The maiden is told that as a single candle is extinguished in Death’s domicile, so is a corresponding life somewhere in the world of the living. She asks if there is any way to revive a light that has been exhausted, evidently hoping that her deceased husband may be somehow revived. Death solemnly answers in the negative. Once a candle is burnt out and the length of the wick exhausted, resurrection is as futile as attempting to relight the deformed mass. The spent candle represents time’s irreversible finality. Death is, however, moved by the maiden’s concern and deep suffering. He offers her the opportunity to regain her beloved. “Look at these lights flickering out. I place in your hands the chance to save them! If you succeed, even with only one of them, I will give you your loved one’s life to you!” (Figure 3.4). While death remains final in the Grimm fairy tale, in Lang’s film the dead are given the

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Figure 3.4  Destiny, 1921

opportunity to be brought back to life, as if to fulfill the promise of cinematic resurrection. Through the powers of the cinema, the dream of immortality is realized once more for the survivor. On the other hand, as we shall see, cinema’s resurrective capacities cannot sustain this dream forever, for no life is possible without its corresponding death. As soon as she agrees to Death’s challenge, the film cuts to three discrete narratives: one in an Arab caliphate, the second in Renaissance Venice, and the third in magical China.12 When understood in an allegorical register, the maiden’s progress through these episodes reveals much about the ontology of film. In each narrative, a grotesque patriarch threatens a young couple. The woman’s task is to save her beloved from persecution and death. The first two episodes last about fifteen minutes and the final one a bit longer. Their plotlines follow the trajectories of genre films internationally popular at the time: the melodrama, the Shakespearean adaptation, and the adventurous travel ethnography. To underscore connections between the tales, the same actors, Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen, who star in the framing story play the couple in each narrative. Bernhard Goetzke, with his distinctive, hardened face, plays the deliverer of death in all three episodes as well. The hall of candles has been interpreted as self-reflexive of the projection room of a film theater, where stories told through moving images are controlled. Thomas Elsaesser connects Death to the role of the projectionist, tracing this role back to cinema’s early history. Many Weimar films are “full

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of proto- and pseudo-cinematic apparatuses,” he writes, “as in the sombre and eery fairy tale Der müde Tod, where death plays the magic lanternist to the hapless bride.”13 Death functions as the master narrator according to this line of argument, and by coextension as an allegory for the filmmaker himself. This authorial figure becomes the omnipotent ruler of the spectacle, controlling the film-viewing experience for the “hapless” spectator. In the chapter on Destiny from his book-length study The Films of Fritz Lang, Tom Gunning argues that beyond the self-reflexivity of Death as a kind of film auteur, the trajectory of the episodes corresponds to the forward motion of the cinema itself. Lang’s “plots trace the attempts by different characters to control or at least work in concert with a system that operates separately from their desires and according its own mechanical logic.”14 Gunning calls this mechanical logic the “Destinymachine,” which allegorically figures time’s arrow through cinema’s inexorable forward movement. Precisely because time is irreversible, the mood of Lang’s film remains melancholic, a point underscored by the impossibility of reviving lost loved ones. The maiden fails each time to save her beloved. Following the loss of her lover in the Golden Unicorn, loss is experienced—by her and by the spectator— three more times in the three episodes. As the film proceeds, the accumulation of lost loves underscores time’s implicit tragedy, as each lived moment in the present, continuously sinking into the past, is shot through with the stark poignancy of her husband’s absence. Gunning’s reading culminates with the maiden’s insight into the allegorical Destiny-machine: “All her searching, her voyage to the other world, her struggles through history, must lead back to this visionary moment at the table, to her acceptance of the mournful melancholy of the allegorical reading.”15 Gunning identifies the logic of destiny, which governs the episodes that repeat the narrative of life, love, and death, as a thematic and allegorical figure throughout Lang’s oeuvre. In films such as You Only Live Once (1937), Rancho Notorious (1952), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), the Destiny-machine runs in tension with the freewill of the characters. Their guilt and revenge, all human-centered tropes intimately linked to problems of temporality, are determined by a wholly calculative logic, incorporating the persistence of the past and the anticipation of the future. Throughout the course of the three episodes in Lang’s 1921 film, the maiden discovers that she cannot turn back time and bring her lover back to life. She must learn to continue living melancholically with his absence, and with the presence of ghostly afterlives.

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The metaphysics of lived life Most of the scenes from Destiny were shot indoors in the Decla-BioscopAtelier, a glass-roofed studio in Neubabelsberg outside of Berlin. Despite the film medium’s ostensibly intimate connection to life, the fantastic, purposefully unnatural backdrops and exotic settings of Lang’s film do not remind the viewer of situations drawn from everyday, profilmic reality as it once unfolded before the camera. And the characters that inhabit the fairy-tale world of Destiny do not reflect the psychological complexities of individuals associated with the melodramatic mode. Indeed, a review published in Film Kurier on October 7, 1921, suggests a different aim for Lang’s film: “Diverging from everyday life, it has been shaped by the hand of a poet and given form under the finest directorial touch.”16 If signs of life may be somehow identified in Destiny, they are not to be gleaned in the reality that film the documents, but in the way the filmmakerpoet has formed life through the film medium. Diverging from the idea that film records what Dziga Vertov calls “life caught unawares,” life in Destiny has more to do with its unfolding over the course of time, as expressive of the unfolding of the moving image itself.17 In the previous chapter, I showed how the analytical fallacies of cinematographic thought metaphysically obscure the interplay between presence and absence that is the necessary condition for thinking cinematic movement. If the cinema has something to do with life, its durational becoming implicitly undermines the ossifying tendencies of traditional ontology, and by coextension the spectatorial position of the sovereign ego. Nietzsche was aware of how the difficulties of theorizing life brought traditional metaphysics to its limit when he realized that the most appropriate attitude toward life’s continuous becoming is not one that is distanced and analytical, but engages with one’s own life as a constant transformation and remains affirmative of this becoming. “Affirmation of life,” he writes in Twilight of the Idols, “even in its strangest and sternest problems, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustibility through the sacrifice of its highest types …. Beyond pity and terror, to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming—that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.”18 Life affirms its own continuous transformation, creating new values through the demolition of the old. In this spirit, life also affirms that which is life-denying: the abstractive, objectifying, and scientific gaze upon life, the demand for total intelligibility and universalizing theorization—all discursive means that attempt to mummify life’s flux in the shroud of the immobile concept.19

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Affirmative life underpins all three episodes of Lang’s film. On the one hand, the episodes are presented as series of individual, short films, in mise-en-abîme, showcasing cinema’s capacity to narrate stories. They link the life of the cinema to the life span of the main male protagonist. As long as he moves and lives, so does the continuous becoming of the cinematic image. Like Cesare’s awakening in Caligari, life is allegorized in these three episodes through the resurrection of the main male character. In Destiny, this allegory is extended to the length of a lit candle and the narrative duration of three fantastic tales. Yet the relationship between life and film is also forged through the affirmative, active gaze of the cinema spectator whose own life unfolds as she follows the film’s unfolding plot. In 1922, Thea von Harbou, who co-wrote Destiny with Lang, maintains that the spectator’s experience of film is essentially different from the experience of other art forms because she lives with the life of the cinema: On the one hand, the cinema can strengthen, illustrate, and, if I were to put it pejoratively, simplify [literature], yet on the other hand the cinema is more appropriate to depicting the logic of events than in the theater, epic poetry, and the novel. It does not allow the spectator time, allowed otherwise for the reader, to understand the psychic interiority of characters using thousands of words. Events in the cinema are linked together like images on the celluloid strip. As soon as the spectator hesitates, or shakes his head, the battle is already lost.20

In other words, film spectatorship involves a living spectator who must keep up with the forward movement of the celluloid strip as it is projected for her viewing. If film has something to do with life, the question of film ontology cannot be separated from the human being who not only perceives its representations, but who also lives with its unfolding in time. In order to better understand this lived experience of the cinema, I will turn to contemporaneous writings by thinkers that have approached “life” as a philosophical concept. My aim is to link the metaphysical temporality of life, as experienced and described phenomenologically by the mortal human, to the temporality of the moving image. Moving beyond what Bergson calls “analysis” in his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” I aim to show how the mortal spectator may gain an “intuitive” attitude toward life’s duration and becoming. Drawing from the work of Nietzsche and Bergson, sociologist Georg Simmel, in his last published work from 1918, Lebensanschauung (View of Life), defines life as a continuous excess, as an affirmative concept that at every moment transcends itself and is “not only more-life, but more-than-life.”21 The text itself comprises three chapters that had already been circulated during the war years,

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and a first chapter written expressly for the book’s final publication. Throughout his theorization of life, Simmel remains vigilant of the reifying, ossifying tendencies concomitant with instrumental rationality when explicating the experience of duration. He seeks a language that will allow life to elude logocentric ossification, one that remains mindful of life’s vital flux, and which may even confound the demands of teleological reason. For despite life’s efforts, modern thinking is unrelenting in its belief that it can consolidate this flux into a Platonic Idea and crystalize its continuous change as an immobile form. At one moment in View of Life Simmel condemns the thinker’s own contemplation of life, its very consideration as an object of thought, as being already ossifying: “the Heraclitic flux of reality, in its objective temporal becoming, is ultimately dammed up by our glance.”22 And yet, affirmation of what philosophical thinking immobilizes remains key. While the formalization of the concept stands in opposition to life, Platonic form in turn also constitutes it. Simmel maintains that life’s continuous stream is “more-than” its ossified form, more than “our way of seeing [that] creates for itself effectively enduring forms.”23 Life and its corresponding philosophical codification are not at odds with each other, but are in fact mutually constituting, appearing “as the unceasing, usually unnoticed and incidental (but also often revolutionary) battle of ongoing life against the historical pattern and formal inflexibility of any given cultural content, but thereby it also becomes the innermost impulse toward cultural change.”24 Simmel does not disavow scientific metaphysics as a technique for understanding the world’s flux, and fully acknowledges how the disciplinary constraints of the human sciences have shaped the historical understanding of human experience. Objectification through concepts and predetermined mental structures, which inform thought and delineate epistemological boundaries, do not interrupt life’s flow, but are continuous with it. Life continually transcends these boundaries, reaching out toward what cannot yet be grasped by thought. Simmel thus asserts, boldly: This reaching out by life, into that which is not its actuality, but such that this reaching out nevertheless shapes its actuality—is, therefore, not something that has merely been tagged on to life but rather, as it takes place in growth, procreation, and the spiritual processes, is the very essence of life itself.25

Life moves from the certainty of reason toward the unknown. This movement is possible only by first positing immobilized form as knowledge, which is followed by its self-overcoming.

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On the one hand, life is necessarily understood as a representational concept, reified as an object of thought. On the other, life exceeds its own concept, striving beyond the already given toward new and other forms of vital existence. Life reaches beyond itself, beyond the grounding of the present toward the undetermined future. Departing from Husserl’s reduction of the temporality of the instantaneous moment in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1893–1917), Simmel contends that “the future does not lie ahead of us like some untrodden land that is separated from the present by a sharp boundary line, but rather we live continuously in a border region which belongs as much to the future as to the present.”26 Open-ended life, emerging from the conditions of the here and now and informed by the legacy of the past, continuously sheds the skin of what is in order to evolve into what is notyet. Simmel thus concludes that “Viewed overall, man is the least teleological creature,” meaning that the essence of human life-activity does not conform to a mechanistic, means-ends logic.27 Simmel’s attention to an open-ended future and the reaching out of life circumvent the paralyzing conceptualization of life, as does the existential philosophy of his contemporary, the young Martin Heidegger. In a series of lectures entitled Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, delivered in the Fall and Spring semesters of 1921 and 1922 at Freiburg University, just as Lang’s film was being screened during a particularly harsh winter in Berlin, Heidegger writes of how the category of life may be contextualized within the temporal flow of life itself. The essence of life inheres, not in some vague flux that seemingly exists everywhere in the world, but precisely in the moment this flux is named as such. The essence of life thus concerns the one who names. Heidegger reminds us that the performative articulation of “life” is integral to everyday living, even when the word is utilized as a theoretical abstraction. His critique of life will be crucial for illuminating “life” as a linguistic category that describes change in time and thus as fundamental to the animate life of film. Like Simmel, Heidegger believes the static concept of life remains inadequate to the essential “more-than-life” of life itself. This conceptualization is “a mere theoretical sanctioning of the significance of life in philosophy, [such that] the sense of the concept of distance remains determined by a wrongheaded theorizing with regard to cognition and, above all, with regard to the ‘concept’ [Begriff].”28 Heidegger critiques the analytical attitude that remains disinterested toward life, which merely observes, analyzes, and interrogates life’s eidos as an

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idealized thing that stands over against the cogitating spectator. Moreover, this “wrongheaded theorizing” casts life as a static notion that is immortal, removed from the vicissitudes of time and decay. In counterpoint to the categorical immobilization of the concept of life, Heidegger posits lived life as a formulation that confounds the effort to arrest the transient and fleeting with the eternal and immovable. Toward this goal, he initiates his critique by analyzing the usage of “life” as a signifier that has a specific illocutionary force within the flow of time, as always already involving an a priori, everyday understanding of what life is. In lieu of a systematic exegesis of a concept of “life,” he begins by looking at the word in action, by explicating common, “average” contexts where the signifier “life” carries specific meanings. Heidegger is even more uncompromising in his critique of language than Simmel. The overly ambitious question “What is life?” is thus converted in Heidegger’s lecture into, “In its everyday usage, what do we mean by the performance of this word, ‘life’?” As such, the meaning of “life” must be gleaned from its utilization in specific contexts: The intransitive sense of the verb “to live,” if presentified concretely, always takes explicit form in phrases such as to live “in” something, to live “out of ” something, to live “for” something, to live “with” something, to live “against” something, to live “following” something [“auf etwas hin leben”], to live “from” something. The “something,” whose manifold relations to “living” are indicated in these prepositional expressions, is what we call “world.”29

Heidegger connects the verb “to live” with its use in lived experience. Whether it is formulated in its transitive or intransitive sense, living is always implicitly expressed in relation to a “something.” The use of prepositions such as “for,” “with,” and “following” reveals how the concept of life is always already embedded in specific worldly situations and performed in specific contexts. Heidegger’s phenomenological description lets the form “life” unfold as a theoretical term that is put into practice. He is able to do this because, as living, thinking human beings, we presumably already know what life entails: “[W]e are determining the concept of world precisely by beginning with the phenomenon indicated in the verb, ‘to live,’ a phenomenon we can determinately intuit as our life, the living of our own life.”30 Like Bergson’s understanding of intuition as an attitude that “sympathizes” with change, life’s flux may be understood because human beings presumably have the capacity to sympathize with “life.” Heidegger’s approach presents life as “alive in life itself in an original way: alive

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in order to ‘form’ life.”31 That is, life both constitutes and is constituted by the thinking, speaking, living human being. This existential interpretation of life, as considered within a worldly context and, as such, moving toward something in the world, Heidegger calls, faktisches Leben, or “factical life.” If, according to Lang, film is intimately connected to life (“Moving image, moving life: Film”), then Heidegger’s critique of lived life helps us analyze film’s “essence” as movement. Bringing these historically contemporaneous discourses together, I posit that the moving image, like factical life, may be said to live in relation to something. From Heidegger’s list of prepositions, I am particularly interested in the use of auf and hin because they figure the ontology of cinematic life as pointing beyond the here and now of the present, and in so doing these prepositions signal an emergence or a becoming through their use of “in order to.” Put another way, it may be said that the cinema, a rapidly flickering series of discrete images projected before the spectator, at every moment of its unfolding points to a potentiality beyond itself. We often think that images mimetically represent the world “out there,” that they merely repeat the image of profilmic events that have already taken place while bringing far away happenings closer to the spectator. Yet as we have seen, the life of the cinema is “more than” what it signifies, is more than its capacity to photograph profilmic reality. This semiotic language can only reveal life’s verisimilitude, and reiterates an ontology of the cinema that rests too comfortably on a Platonic ground of immobile presence. In actuality, cinematic movement is not dammed up by the still images whose succession creates the illusion of motion. Rather, the cinema overcomes stillness twenty-four times a second in order to survive.32 With Bergson and Simmel, I believe that our task as philosophers and observers of the lebende Bilder of the cinema is to find a language appropriate to this continual overcoming. The phenomenology of factical life permits us an entryway into this language. Because life always confounds attempts at reification, the future can only be understood at the limit of the present, appearing at the very horizon of human temporality. Yet the ontological “in order to” of life’s direction constitutes this futurity itself. For Simmel this direction is realized through goal-setting, a comportment toward the future, which is at once determined and undetermined. He writes that “The somehow remote ‘goal,’ appears as a fixed point, discontinuous with the present, whereas what is decisive is the immediate carryover of present will, feeling, and through into the future.” The “will,” a key vitalist category appropriated from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, extends human experience

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beyond that of the present, beyond the here and now toward something that has not yet taken place. Its aim is not simply to realize a predestined or idealized telos. What remains crucial is the act of willing itself, caught in the threshold between present and future, and through this the establishment of “the direction in which life must move further.”33 To bring this back to Lang: we can deduce from the title of the filmmaker’s article that began this chapter, “Ausblick auf Morgen,” that the “something” toward which the cinematic image moves is the future, Morgen, toward what the moving image is to become and what it is not-yet. Heidegger’s 1921 critique of life helps us articulate its phenomenology while affirming life’s conceptual ossification as well as its self-overcoming. The moving, living image must be figured in some relationship to what will come to pass—that is to say, reformulating Lang, living-toward-tomorrow, tracing a trajectory from its a priori understandings to its a posteriori anticipations. It is these past and futural temporalities that structure the here and now understanding of the ontology of the living, and lived, film image. What does the cinematic image “live” expectantly toward? What is the aim of life, if it remains without telos and if the future cannot be fully determined beforehand? I formulate the problem in this manner in order to assert cinema’s living specificity as a potentiality, one that opens the way toward the future. This is also to say that at its ontological root, the nature of the moving image must not only be thought of as living, as understood by Lang and many others at the time, but also as Unterwegs, or on the way to becoming something else. If the cinema may be understood as a self-reflexive form of thinking, to what end does this image of thought aspire? A review of Destiny that appeared in Lichtbildbühne on October 8, 1921, provides us with a clue about the something toward which cinema lives. The review praises the film for achieving a work of art, “not simply literary or illustrative, but something truly cinematic [Lichtspiel], a purely filmic creation by a film creator.” It goes on by stating that: One idea winds its way through the film like a leitmotiv. It is however integral to an inner world, where the filmmaker’s fantasy takes flight toward colorful lands, and where dream and reality flow together like in a painting by Arnold Böcklin. And this idea …? The most primordial, that which moves every person who creates and stands before the cradle of all the arts—whether it be music, painting, poetry, or drama: the mystery of death; of the horror and redemption of death.

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Here great art addresses not life, but life winding its way through the film toward the mystery of mortality. This review, written by film critic Hans Wollenberg, seems to comment on the narrative destiny presented by the three episodes in Lang’s film. Indeed, death’s allegorization as well as its repeated depiction, a total of five times, throughout Destiny’s narrative stretch insistently beg the problem of finitude as an event that is as inevitable as the unfolding of the projected film. It is, accordingly, the motion of the image itself that confronts mortality’s “horror and redemption”; for with each encounter with death in Lang’s Destiny, the film self-reflexively raises the possibility of its own conclusive inanimacy. The humanization of death in Berhard Goetzke’s shrouded character constantly reminds us that the film could conclude at any moment, for its cinematic life is maintained by projecting the image of death, twenty-four times a second. Unlike Ottomar Anschütz’s Schnellseher, whose filmic material consists of a loop that could be endlessly cranked, the episodes in Lang’s Destiny allegorize cinema’s own finite life. In each, death represents the great leveler, reiterating its certainty in all cultures and all eras of history. Just as the length of a life is measured in the length of a candlewick, Lang’s film suggests that cinema itself persists only as long as the projector projects light, living until the film reaches the final lengths of its last reel, and ending as it began, in black leader. Film lives toward nothingness. The problem of death once more compels an aporia I worked through in Chapter 2: the problem of the Nothing, and the manner in which its nonbeing may be most properly represented by a necessarily logocentric metaphysics. Simmel, an astute reader of Bergson, directly addresses this in his View of Life, appropriating the “idea of nothing” to explain the more-than-life of living: “While remaining in its center, life stretches out toward the absolute of life, as it were, and becomes in this direction more-life; but it stretches out toward nothingness, and just as life persists and yet increases itself in one action, so also it persists and declines in one action, as a single action.”34 If life means continually evolving beyond any representation of itself as pure presence, it implicitly also means the reaching beyond this presence toward absolute absence. Life and death are intimately connected in this manner, for in life’s constant compulsion to evolve, it reaches outward toward what it is not. Heidegger addressed the “Nothing” (das Nichts) as well. In his Being and Time from 1927, he was concerned with the aporias of life and death as an ontological question whereby nothingness is figured as the utmost possibility of Dasein. But this aporia is already anticipated in his 1921 seminar, where Heidegger

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reminds us that in order to properly critique the Nothing, and explicate its phenomenology, the Nothing must be formulated in a manner that avoids an all-too-easy metaphysics of presence: Originally, the “nothingness” here in question, the “nothingness” of factical life, does not in the least share the sense of the “empty,” since that nothingness is a possibility which precisely does not give a place for something to stand, does not offer accommodation and shelter, does not break the fall of the collapse, does not bring it to an end. On the contrary, the nothingness of factical life is something that factically contributes to the maturation of the collapse; thus it is an emptiness which is precisely disastrous for the collapse itself.35

With the signifier “empty” (Leere), Heidegger refers to a metaphysical nothingness. As a concept this “emptiness” is already a “something,” as it acquiesces to the metaphysics of presence and attests to a spectatorial position with respect to the nothingness of death. Factical life “matures” toward its own end and develops through a process of Ruinanz (“Ruination”), or through the disintegration of what life has already planned and built for itself. Heidegger here in fact comes very close to Bergson’s critique of the “Idea of Nothing.” For the German philosopher the factical nothing, as contextualized in everyday life, is understood as an action that both negates the something and is paradoxically constitutive of its very being. The nothing, in other words, spans the trajectory of life itself, bringing life to its maturation. Both life and nothingness subsist alongside each other throughout this temporal stretch from present to future, as two sides of the same metaphysical coin. Seen as an event that will come to pass in the future, Destiny allegorizes how death is figured as the possibility of nonbeing, omnipresent in the living movement of the film image. Death haunts life at every moment, for as life persists, it is also defined by its future ruination. Lived life, finite and delimited, is defined by this ontological aporia, moving at every moment between present and future, like Bergson’s oscillation between the Nothing and the Something explicated in Creative Evolution. “Likewise,” Heidegger states in an especially fascinating set of formulations, “genuine questioning consists in living in the answer itself in a searching way, such that the answering maintains a constant relation to the questioning, i.e., such that the latter remains alive.”36 Living life authentically then means the constant and radical questioning of the conditions of everyday life itself. At the very moment of life’s emergence, it is at once mature enough to die: the pondering of this possibility of nonbeing in turn constitutes

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lived, factical life. If we as human beings are considered to be “alive,” then we must be open to the possibility of our own futural death. This contradiction, manifest in the radical questioning of the living human being who questions, comprises the basic ontology of life. Toward the end of Destiny, after the young maiden fails for the third time to save the death of her beloved, we are returned to the great hall, inhabited by the stranger and his candles. Death advises her to give up her efforts and “Return to the living—and live!” Sensing her disappointment and continued suffering, he gives the maiden one final chance to revive her deceased husband. Death tells her that she must find an individual in the small town who will voluntarily sacrifice their own life for her husband’s, “One with years—or days—or hours yet ahead.” She eagerly agrees, and is promptly returned to the world of the living to pursue this final aim. As soon as the young woman accedes, she suddenly finds herself at the exact place and moment where she initially swallowed the magic potion in the old pharmacist’s laboratory. Performing the cycle of loss and return described in Freud’s fort-da game, the maiden enters the realm of the dead, fails three times to save her lost love, and comes back. To underscore the precision of this return, Lang repeats the shot of the clock, whose hands point to the exact time of her departure into Death’s realm. Once more, it reads eleven o’clock. This time, however, the transition takes place through a lap-dissolve, the technique utilized in Murnau’s overlapping of Veronika and Melitta in Phantom (Figure 3.5). In The Spirit of Film (1930), Balázs writes that the dissolve implicitly signifies the passage of time, embodied not only in the duration of the fading in or out of the filmed event, but also in the mechanism of the film camera. “For two movements now become visible: the movement of the object filmed and the movement of the image. Both have their meaning: the movement of the [object] and the movement of the camera diaphragm.”37 Earlier in Destiny, the maiden’s transition into Death’s realm was conveyed through an abrupt cut, but her transition out is signaled through overlapping images fading in and out. According to the logic of the clock, no time has passed between her entrance and departure of Death’s dominion. However, the gradual materialization and dematerialization of overlapping images signals a lived duration, a short, temporal cross section of life in the process of living, and is thus qualitatively different from the instant measured by a quantifiable point on a clock face. While the cut indicates juxtaposed instants, the lap-dissolve demonstrates cinema’s evolutionary ontology and its capacity to depict gradual change, one state flowing into another. This moment from

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Figure 3.5  Destiny, 1921

Lang’s film plays out the span of duration between life and death, confounding once more the notion of spatialized time and the precision of the clock. For the living viewer, three complete stories have taken place, spanning about an hour of duration. Yet according to the clock within the diegesis, these stories took place in one moment, or in the blink of an eye. This claim may be corroborated by a passage from Lang himself, in an article called “Kitsch, Sensation–Kultur und Film,” first published in Film-Kurier in December 1924. Here he writes that: The essence of film—I would like to make this clear once more—is only convincing and urgent, when it coincides with the essence of time, out of which it is born. It is not important what I bring to the cinema, however the cinemagoer of today must be able to receive it directly, and indeed with the same speed at which the film floods the eye with images.38

Lang links the essence of cinema with the essence of time, invoking the vocabulary of natality to describe cinema’s own coming into being. This birthing comprises its founding principle: “to connect discrete elements together into a single temporal flux,” as Bernard Stiegler puts it, a contingent, ontological unit that embodies the passing moment as it flows from the future and sinks into the past.39 In his three-volume Technics and Time, Stiegler, drawing heavily from the explication of Dasein in Being and Time, explains that this phenomenological description of the lived moment is exteriorized as

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tertiary memory in the cinema. In this a conjunction between cinematic flux and the viewer’s consciousness is forged, a relation between the nonorganic life of the cinema and the faculty of human attention described above by Lang. Already, this relation constitutes a possible ethics, which I will explicate later in this book. The deaths depicted in Destiny are integral to the film’s own animate life. Heidegger’s critique helps us understand death as integral to factical life, life that constitutes and is constituted by the nothing. Its lived ontology comes into being at the very moment it is set to die. Taking this reading further, Lang’s film discloses a corresponding insight: that cinema’s essence is constituted at the very moment of its vanishing. Like an infant dying in Death’s arms, the temporality of the cinema is expressed in the collapse between life and death, between past, present, and future (Figure 3.6).40 The maiden’s encounter with destiny at this moment of Lang’s film may be summarized with a statement made in Simmel’s View of Life. In his chapter on “Death and Immortality,” he writes two profound sentences, recalling the Latin formulation nascentes morimur, which may be translated as “from the moment we are born, we begin to die.”41 Simmel, who died of liver cancer a few months after View of Life was published, correspondingly writes, In every single moment of life we are beings that will die, and each moment would be otherwise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it. Just as we are not already fully present in the instant of our birth, but

Figure 3.6  Destiny, 1921

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rather something of us is continually being born, so too we do not die only in our last instant.42

In this Heidegger, Simmel, and Lang all seem to draw inspiration from the same source: death and nothingness as the condition of all existence. Awareness of this condition cultivates a recognition of life’s fragility.

Intermezzo To prepare an interpretation of the conclusion to Destiny, I must take a brief historical digression into the postwar situation. Up to now I have delineated, through a close reading of the framing story and the three episodes in Destiny, the temporality of film as living toward death. Here, analyzing an essay by Lang on the proverbial “happy ending” in conjunction with an essay by Freud on the nature of transience, I will explain what it means for the human spectator to affirm the futurity of her own death. Then, turning to Rilke’s postwar writing and correspondence, I shall argue that this gesture of affirmation may be characterized by the tension between concealedness and unconcealedness (what Heidegger calls Unverborgenheit in Being and Time), a tension that is key to constituting the representation of death after the war. Once more, we shall see how the experience of loss and the affirmation of mortality enable philosophical thinking on the ontology of the film medium. A number of years after the war ended, Lang left Germany and reestablished himself in Hollywood. In 1948, after World War II had concluded, he wrote a short article called “Happily Ever After,” where he expressed both remorse and nostalgia for life in the early Weimar years and described the radical changes the Great War unleashed upon the world. “The First World War brought changes to the western world,” he explains, summing up the postwar mood, “In Europe, an entire generation of intellectuals embraced despair.”43 Lang concedes that he and other artists at the time had “made a fetish of tragedy” and indulged their melancholy by vigorously rebelling against “naïve nineteenth-century sweetness and light.”44 The war confirmed for Lang the deep despair of the individual who “could hope for little beyond a sense of his own dignity as he faced the overwhelming forces of nature,” and Lang felt that his task was to express this despair through cinema.45 However, the filmmaker found that his audiences rejected the deep pessimism his films conveyed:

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In the end, our audience, even in Europe where a new life was being built out of the wreckage of the old, rejected our despair (at the box-office!) and we, with many groans, gave in to the “bad taste” of the audience while casting wistful glances back into the purple gloom in which our “artistic” spirits had thrived.46

Burdened with the memories of war, audiences apparently preferred the fantasies offered up by the escapist melodramas and Sensationsfilme pervasive at the time. Yet the happy ending of the popular cinema, while it acceded to the demands of weary audiences for distractive entertainment, nevertheless confirmed the universal rightness of human ideals and realized visions of hope in the midst of hopelessness. The experience of the war and its aftermath confirmed this for the German filmmaker.47 “Following World War I,” Lang writes, “rejecting the intellectual swing to despair, people tended more and more to the affirmative ending, in which virtue triumphs through struggle.”48 Before the war, the trope of the happy ending, which concluded many legends and fairy tales, was understood as an inevitable consequence of virtue itself—virtue imagined as universal and idealized. It was implicitly prescriptive, sanctioning good behavior through a predetermined, normative law. Yet the incendiary gestures of Lang and his modernist colleagues rebelled against such an understanding in order to pave the way toward a new definition of virtuous man, one more appropriate to the changed conditions of modernity. The radical transformation of the happy ending was inseparable from the tragic ending of the Great War. After 1918, the notion of “happily ever after” would reflect the desire for personal triumph over despair, a desire that reflected as well the public’s “bad taste” for relief from existential tragedy. Lang contends that the tastes of postwar American and European audiences in 1948 are even “more marked” in their flight from despair, in contrast to their directly confronting it. “Happily Ever After” concludes by identifying a profound tension between the brute facticity of death following the war and its strong disavowal. Freud argues that precisely such a disavowal reflects the rebellion of the ego against the fact of mortality in a short essay published in 1916 called “On Transience.” With the realization that hallowed ideals such as virtue and the “loveliness of Nature and Art” must succumb to time and eventually fade away to nothingness, the ego quickly comes to realize that she is subject to its inevitable law as well, despite all objections.49 The ego’s disavowal of death seems to inform Lang’s “happily ever after” that concludes most popular cinema and which postwar film audiences sought after. We may be reminded once more of Freud’s

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“Thoughts for the Times of War and Death” where the psychoanalyst explained that the ego takes up a distanced, “spectatorial” attitude when imagining its own death, in order to maintain the unconscious belief in its own immortality. And yet, Freud affirms mortal life in “On Transience” as crucial to the apprehension of life. The loveliness and splendor of whatever must pass away grows in direct proportion to the disavowal of its futural nothingness. Life’s beauty is contingent precisely upon its fragility, increasing in value in relation to its “scarcity value in time,” and in relation to the capacity to mourn.50 In this 1916 essay, Freud even reiterates, somewhat audaciously, his optimism for a “happy end” to the war, despite the great loss of life resulting from the military conflict.51 His optimism may be connected to the relatively peaceful settings recounted in the essay. “On Transience” recounts a summer walk that took place one year before the war broke out, “through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and a young but already famous poet.”52 The young poet has been identified as Rainer Maria Rilke, and the taciturn friend the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé.53 (That the companions in “On Transience” are not explicitly named is not unusual, considering the confidentiality Freud exercised in all of his writings.) While admiring the beauty of his surroundings, the poet expressed his melancholy at their inevitable decay, and lamented the inevitable passing away of nature’s loveliness. “He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create.”54 Recalling the moment that Freud and his companions cherished the preciousness of the world around them, the psychoanalyst also reminds us of the “transience value” of all life: “The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm. A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely.”55 Freud expresses some surprise at his companions’ resistance to the inevitable deterioration of earthly beauty, and concludes that they are “simply in a state of mourning for what is lost.”56 The lived moment as a figuration for mortal life is also the topic of an early essay by Balázs called “Todesästhetik” (“The Aesthetics of Death”), published in 1908. In this piece, he does not mention the art of film, but speaks of life’s transience and its relation to painting and sculpture. Like a flower that blossoms only for a single night, a painting embodies the “whole” (das Ganze) of life in its stillness. Discussing an unnamed work by Arnold Böcklin (perhaps

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his Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle from 1872), Balázs writes that “Life is contained in the motionlessness of the painting, in the possibility of its motionlessness. But in the frame, in the background, Death also lurks.”57 This was precisely the way in which Böcklin and death were figured in Wollenberg’s review of Lang’s Destiny, quoted above. For Balázs the “whole” expresses life and death as a single moment in time, which the great work of art is compelled to express. Before he wrote his great film theoretical texts in 1924 and 1930, Balázs had described the aesthetics of transience already in 1908. “Beginning with birth, we are continually dying and until our death we are continually being born. The shores of death are not a faraway coast, but our present moment is held tightly in death’s arms.”58 In correspondence with Simmel, Balázs understands death, not as the negation of life, but as nonbeing: great art puts the paradoxical simultaneity of being and nonbeing in motion within itself, as integral to thinking its transience. Here Freud’s appreciation for the impermanence of the human form, or a flower that blossoms for a moment, seems to find its aesthetic likeness. Freud’s “On Transience” was written for a collective volume, Das Land Goethes 1914–1916: ein vaterländisches Gedenkbuch, a book in which wellknown German intellectuals, writers, and artists, such as Albert Einstein, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Liebermann, and Hans Pfitzner, were called upon to defend German culture in the midst of war.59 Freud may have fictionalized the dialogue between himself and Rilke in order to put his psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholy in dialogue with the other essays in the volume. Rilke, on the other hand, had already become highly skeptical of the psychoanalytic science at the time of Freud’s essay and, perhaps because of his distrust, their personal relations were forced and remained cordial at best.60 Since late 1910, Rilke had been plagued by general melancholy and profound self-doubt regarding his abilities as a writer, and that he consulted Freud indicates only the poet’s desperation to overcome his writer’s block. In order to reawaken his dormant creativity, Rilke took measures including extensive traveling and dabbling in the occult, all to no avail. In a letter to Andreas-Salomé from January 1912, he describes his misery: I still get up every day with the doubt whether I shall succeed in doing it, and this distrust has become big from the actual experience that weeks, even months can go by in which I produce only with extreme effort five lines of a quite indifferent letter, which, when they are finally there, leave an aftertaste of incompetence such as a cripple might feel who can’t even shake hands any more.61

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A few weeks after writing this letter, he traveled to Trieste. Rilke began writing his last great cycle of poems, the Duino Elegies, while walking around the coastal surroundings of Duino Castle. In order not to forego this moment of serendipitous inspiration, the poet-thinker swiftly composed the first two elegies. However his muse, transient like the blossoming of a flower, disappeared as quickly as it came, and a few years later he reported the return of his depressive melancholy. Lou Andreas-Salomé suggested to Rilke that he undergo psychoanalytic treatment, so that his creativity may be released from the constraints of his self-imposed doubts. The poet’s response remained ambivalent.62 Rilke articulates some of his most eloquent, affirmative formulations on mortality in his postwar correspondence. In them, he expresses his horror at the widespread effects of the war and the decimation of European culture left in its aftermath. When Lang’s film premiered in October 1921, Rilke had already relocated to the southwest of Switzerland, and taken more or less permanent residence at the Château de Muzot sur Sierre. Among the many letters he wrote in the Château, in one, addressed to Countess Margot Sizzo and dated “Epiphany 1923” (January 6), he writes, One should not fear that our strength might not suffice to bear any experience of death, even were it the nearest and the most terrible; death is not beyond our strength; it is the measure mark at the vessel’s rim: we are full as often as we reach it—, and being full means (for us) being heavy … that is all. —I will not say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculation and selection that spontaneously one constantly includes with it and loves death too (life’s averted half),—which is in fact what happens also, irresistibly and illimitably, in all great impulses of love! Only because we exclude death in a sudden moment of reflection, has it turned more and more into something alien, and as we have kept it in the alien, something hostile.63

Rilke suggests to his correspondent that one should love life in the way that one also loves death, remaining hospitable and open to its visitation to the realm of the living. The poet asks whether it is possible to affirm death with magnanimity, along with the interests of life, and “without calculation and selection.” One cannot plan for the event of death, for its arrival will be unannounced and its singularity confounds precise scheduling. This contingency is the source of great misunderstanding and prejudice against death by the living, according to Rilke: Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from its misrepresentation. Only believe, dear, dear Countess, that it is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who is never, never, to be misled through

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our behavior and vacillation … and that, it is understood, not in the sentimentalromantic sense of denying life, of life’s opposite, but our friend just when we most passionately, most vehemently assent … to being-here, to functioning, to Nature, to love. Life always says simultaneously Yes and No. Indeed, death (I adjure you to believe!) is the true yea-sayer. It says only: Yes. Before eternity.64

Instead of interpreting death as a radical intrusion, and rejecting it in the name of a reified conception of life and of “happily ever after,” Rilke recognizes death as a dear friend. Like Lang, who came to affirm “benevolent death” in his delirious dream, Rilke befriends death and its futural certainty. Here, the affirmation of death as a possibility of life, in all its possibilities of being, finds its most poetic expression. Rilke’s language seems to confront the same existential problems articulated by Simmel and Heidegger in their philosophical explications. And to understand this is to set out on a philosophy of cinematic time, returning us to Lang’s Destiny.

Cinema and the creaturely look I cannot repeat a single moment of my life, but cinema can repeat any one of these moments indefinitely before my eyes. If it is true that for consciousness no moment is equal to any other, there is one on which this fundamental difference converges, and that is the moment of death. For every creature, death is the unique moment par excellence. André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon” (1951)65 In contrast to Teacher Johannes in Reinert’s Nerves, who allegorizes the postwar ego that rejects mortality so that the self may continue to live “happily ever after,” death is befriended at the conclusion to Destiny. This gesture recalls the affirmation of ghosts described in Chapter 2, and the confrontation with questions of film ontology that enable its afterlife. Rilke urges his correspondent to “say Yes” to life’s opposite but it is in his Duino Elegies where death is not only affirmed as integral to lived life, but also where he describes a nonmetaphysical, nonhuman manner of looking intimately connected with it. I will develop this look in conjunction with the last scene of Lang’s film, a scene that allegorizes at once the afterlife of the maiden and the mortal film spectator. Death gives the maiden one more chance, following the cycle of the three episodes, to save her lover. She returns to the world of the living and accosts

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the old and the infirm, asking them if one of them might give up their own life in exchange for her husband’s. She is met, however, with repeated, passionate refusals: “Not one day—Not one hour—Not one breath!!” Desperately, the maiden continues her search for a sacrificial surrogate, until she encounters a burning house. A crowd has gathered as a woman wails for her infant remaining inside on the second floor. The maiden rushes into the house and takes the baby in her arms. However, just as she is about to exit the burning building, Death materializes and appears before her. He extends his arms to receive the infant life. She hesitates and refuses to give the new life up, instead returning the baby to her mother. Having rejected the exchange of one life for another, even for the one she most loves, the maiden gives up her search and allows herself to be engulfed by the flames of the blazing house. Her ghostly spirit is transported back to Death’s realm. “I could not vanquish you at that price,” she remarks to Death, “now take my life also, for without my beloved it means less than nothing to me!” The maiden is taken to her beloved, lying still on a funeral bier. Death then solemnly states, “Who gives his life away shall gain it,” echoing the Christian surrender to God. Her body goes limp. Death gestures for the maiden and her husband to rise up, and through double exposure, their spectral doubles emerge from their earthly bodies, indicating that the couple has entered into the afterlife. They are accompanied by the weary figure as they walk up a small hill. Upon reaching the top, the image of Death fades out. The two lovers are then left, standing and facing each other. Lang then cuts once more to the night watchman, who announces midnight. His reappearance reiterates the logic of the clock and the world of mortals while recalling the framing device that structures the three episodes of life and death. The film finally concludes. In her death and transfiguration, the maiden comes to realize her most far-reaching possibility, eliciting the most fundamental sense of connectedness with other living beings, both rooted in what Rilke calls the “great impulse of love.” As the maiden sacrifices her life, thus “gaining it,” she fulfills a verse from the Song of Solomon, verse 8:6, invoked earlier in the film: “For love is as strong as death/Passion is cruel as the grave.”66 This is probably not the “happy ending” Lang had in mind when he wrote about the popular taste for films that reflected the triumph of survival over despair. Indeed, the moral quandary left to the maiden must have recalled matters of life and death that women on the home front pondered daily while their loved ones were fighting on the war front. For the conclusion to Destiny

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seems to illustrate the particular place Thea von Harbou assigned to women and their obligation toward wartime sacrifice in a collection of essays published in 1916 called Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg (The German Woman in the World War). In the third essay of this collection, “Die Liebestätigkeit der Frau” (“The Charitable Activity of Women”), von Harbou contends that the responsibility of women during war was not simply to heal the wounded as “white nurses” in the Red Cross, but also to provide emotional comfort and psychological calm through their “silent composure.”67 Women on the home front must patiently wait for their loved ones on the war front, and replant new life in the ravaged garden left from the war by attending to the injured. “For life, and particularly for the life of the miserable, is bitterly long. Each new day renews their despair, for they are missing something crucial to living: joy.”68 The happiness of the military wife is contingent on her husband’s well-being, and women are to sacrifice their lives for their loved ones. As the maiden herself puts it at the end of Lang’s film, “take my life also, for without my beloved it means less than nothing to me.” In other sections of The German Woman in the World War, von Harbou ascribes a nationalistic agenda to the role of women. She predicts that after claiming military victory, Germany will rebuild again and emerge, echoing the optimistic conclusion to Freud’s 1916 essay, stronger than before the start of the war. In the last essay included in the text, “Und Dann?” (“And Then?”), von Harbou idealizes war as the creator of all things, paralleling the military conflict between Germany and England to the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. She writes that it is not the place of women to engage in the masculine realm of realpolitik and political negotiation following the cessation of military conflict. They are only to continue nursing the wounded.69 Elsewhere in her essay, von Harbou idealizes the femininity of German women, “the fulfillment and incarnation of poetry,” lending her all the accumulated attributes prophetically gleaned from the lyric tradition.70 “The German woman: an essence created by poets and made eternal through the beauty of their poems.”71 In a manner reminiscent of Goethe’s “eternal-feminine,” the German woman invoked by von Harbou transcends everything transitory and short-lived, for as she writes, “the eternal-feminine pulls us upward” [das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan].72 In this vein, the ending to Destiny manifests the task of women to sacrifice themselves for their fathers, husbands, brothers, and, by coextension, for the German Fatherland. That Lang and von Harbou’s film was envisioned as a nationalist monument may be gleaned from one of its very first intertitles, which explicitly states that their film is a “German Folk Song in Six Verses.” It recalls an

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explicitly nationalist film made in 1915, Das deutsche Volkslied, that nostalgically longs for childhood and the memory of Heimat.73 Regarding the art of cinema, von Harbou writes in a 1922 article, “Only My Opinion” published in B. Z. Am Mittag, that German films must not only depict German themes, but also must be felt and experienced by international audiences as “subjective”: “This objectivity that lies in the choice of the material and the manuscript is essentially German in its depiction. I however think and believe that the German film must make the objectivity of the depictions correspond to the subjectivity of experience.”74 Consistent with von Harbou’s thoughts on women during the war, the maiden is treated mythically in Destiny, poetically idealized as those represented in fairy tales. “On August 1, 1914, the new German woman was born,” and thus awakened to her true calling: to nurse the traumatized nation back to health.75 The maiden sacrifices herself, not only for her male, Promethean heroes, but also for the mythical Heimat, giving birth to new life (apparently with healthy, new nerves). Remaining true to her fallen husband means to remain true to the Fatherland, as Germany’s national pledge for peace. In this, one life is exchanged for another, acceding to an economy of giving, taking, and giving back, and the reciprocal circulation of human beings. This economy is reflected in the exchange of lives requested by the figure of Death in the last scene of Destiny. Von Harbou’s account would have found sympathy with conservative postwar readers, particularly those frustrated with the political compromises of the Treaty of Versailles, and who sought to restore Prussian authoritarianism to Weimar Germany. This reading also coincides with the politics implicated in Kracauer’s seminal reading of Weimar film history, From Caligari to Hitler, where he interprets the ending to Destiny as symptomatic of the desire for dictatorship, and is thus the necessary conclusion that expresses the irrevocable “realizations of Fate.”76 He reads Death as the personification of tyrannical power, who demands full compliance by the traumatized spectators of Lang’s film. The Christ-like self-sacrifice played out by the maiden masks a sinister, reactionary psychological pattern, reiterating the well-known thesis of From Caligari to Hitler. Another interpretation of the conclusion to Destiny, one that conforms less to the Fatherland reading suggested by The German Woman in the World War and its military-nationalistic undercurrent, and even less to Kracauer’s psychosocial history of Weimar cinema, attends more to the problem of representing the nothingness of death cinematically. Continuing my analysis of the collapse of cinematic temporality into the lived life-toward-death allegorized by the three

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episodes in Destiny, I propose that this consideration of temporality has profound ethical implications that pivot around the incapacity of giving one’s death to another. If Lang’s film allegorizes finite life, life lived toward what it is not-yet, this fundamental precariousness seeks a response, beyond calculation and selection, from the life of the loved other. While the maiden’s self-renunciation may be read, on the one hand, as Christ-like, it is this gesture of renunciation, and of love-in-death, which constitutes as well the first appeal toward a form of reciprocity that may be more productively characterized as heterogeneous and nonconditional. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida performs a radical critique of sacrifice, working with Heidegger’s assertion that death for Dasein remains nonrelational, and in so doing appeals to an ethics through the precariousness of life and the irreplaceability of the other.77 Confounding the logic of exchangeability espoused by von Harbou, in what follows we will see how the maiden’s sacrifice remains incommensurable to the calculative logic of one life for another, of her beloved for one of the old and infirm, or herself for the nation. This profound incommensurability may be read in turn as an allegory of how the afterlife of the cinema informs the lived life of the viewer and her responsibility to “creaturely” life. Rilke’s postwar poetry is crucial for developing these claims. Of all the writers who fought for Germany during the war, Rilke is perhaps the most sympathetic with Lang’s “love of death, compounded by horror and affection” articulated in the filmmaker’s 1927 article. During the month of February 1922, in a fit of creative activity that included the composition of the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke completed his work on the Duino Elegies. In a letter to Andreas-Salomé dated February 11, he exclaims, “Think! I have been allowed to survive up to this. Through everything. Miracle. Grace.—All in a few days. It was a hurricane, as at Duino that time: all that was fiber, fabric in me, framework, cracked and bent. Eating was not to be thought of.”78 And in a letter to Marie von Thurn, written that same evening, Rilke announces his “survival … right through everything,” signaling his having lived through the war, his overcoming of creative insecurity and self-doubt, and having lived long enough to complete the Elegies.79 His survival, however, was not a victory over death and melancholy, but rather, as the elegies themselves suggest, an opening out toward mortality as an intimate friend to life. Like Lang, it seems, Rilke held “the complete understanding of the ecstasy which martyrs and saints embrace death.” In the Ninth Elegy, the poet celebrates this existential openness to life’s transience, as if to take to heart Freud’s claim that “transience value is scarcity value in time”:

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But because being here [Hiersein] means so much, and because all

that’s here, vanishing so quickly, seems to need us and strangely concerns us. Us, to the first to vanish. Once each, only once. Once and no more. And us too, once. Never again. But to have been once, even if only once, To have been on earth just once—that’s irrevocable.80

In this excerpt, Rilke repeats the word “once” (ein Mal), reiterating the impermanence of earthly life, while also remaining firmly committed to living this one life and no other. “Never again”: for there is no beyond to the life lived in the here and now, no heaven intended to bring solace to those who cannot bear the thought of life lived, yet “never again.” As if to respond to Freud’s 1916 essay, Rilke emphasizes life’s singularity, its irreplaceability and nonexchangeability. However, a number of passages in Rilke’s Eighth Elegy correspond even more closely with the reading of Lang’s film I have been advancing thus far. In the first lines of the poem, Rilke introduces a category much discussed by scholars of his work: das Offene, or “the Open.” If, as the ending to Lang’s film suggests, the maiden and her husband finally come together on the condition of their death, this consummation is made possible because of their nonliving look toward each other. They are rejoined in death, but are also “more-than-life.” For in the last scene of Destiny, they look at each other not as human beings embedded in the world of clocks and instrumental reason, but as afterlives, or undead creatures. Rilke addresses this act of looking that emerges from a zone of indeterminacy that is neither human nor nonhuman: All other creatures [Kreatur] look into the Open with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned inward, are set all around it like snares, trapping its way out to freedom.81

The Open names a nonmetaphysical space that emerges as life is lived in absolute congruity with other creatures, egoless, and in a manner most proper to its specific capacities for living. Life looks into the Open when it lives within its worldly surroundings and while affirming the cyclical time of birth and death. The Open does not simply refer to an “openness,” as an expanse of the sky or the ocean, for this remains mediated by human language and metaphysically predetermined (and are underpinned by the Open as such). The Open itself is not an entity, but has to do with the comportment of a living being toward its

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immediate environment. Thus “all other creatures,” such as plants and animals, are naively embedded within particular contexts in which the Open comes forth through a mutual collaboration, as a fluid continuity between creaturely life and its milieu. The human being has fallen away from this mutual coexistence of itself and the surrounding world. “But our eyes,” Rilke reminds us, are “turned inward.” Representational thinking has blocked off a clear path toward the Open. Instrumental rationality has set off the human being over against the world, reinforcing everyday distinctions between human and nonhuman life, hallucination and reality, and between life and death. “And we spectators [Zuschauer], always, everywhere,/looking at everything [dem allen] and never from!/It floods us. We arrange it. It decays./We arrange it again, and we decay.”82 This spectatorial position, looking “at” and not “from,” is precisely that encountered by Freud in his “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” where he described the narcissistic human being who wishes to eliminate death from life, who looks at one’s own inanimate corpse as a spectator and not from the place of one’s own possible nothingness. While the Open cannot be unconcealed by an objectifying vision, modern human life cannot relinquish this ontological destiny, for it cannot relinquish the habit of setting up the world as representation.83 Refusing the exchange of a weary life for the life of her husband, the maiden in Destiny also refuses to accede to the logic of reification in the final scene of the film, and refuses to treat life as an object of willed calculation. Her act of selfsacrifice does not acquiesce to the demand for return. I have argued that figures from Lang’s film seem to self-reflexively allegorize the not-yet, or toward-death, of factical life, and tried to affirm this futural possibility as part and parcel of its continuing evolution. In his Eighth Elegy, Rilke notes that the experience of death’s proximity brings human beings closer to the Open, looking both out and from the world with a creaturely gaze: As a child, one may lose himself in silence and be shaken out of it. Or one dies and is it. Once near death, one can’t see death anymore and stares out, maybe with the wide eyes of animals.84

The thought of mortality brings the language-wielding human to the brink of a profound ontological paradox, to speak of pure absence while standing

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precariously at the precipice between life and death. This metaphysical contradiction expresses that which lies at the heart of modernity itself, a contradiction that may be expressed by the concealing–unconcealing of metaphysics. What is unconcealed in the Open is precisely reason’s implicit tendency to obscure the essential worldhood of worldly objects. Because animals do not use language to think representation, “the animal is excluded from the essential domain of the strife between unconcealedness and concealedness,” as Heidegger wrote in his 1942 lectures on Parmenides.85 Because other creatures do not possess language, it cannot be assumed, anthropomorphically, that animals see or not see what is concealed by representational thought. Rilke idealizes animality without criticizing the metaphysical presuppositions that inform his own knowledge of what and how the animal encounters its world. In a footnote to his Parmenides lectures, Heidegger discusses Rilke’s Eighth Elegy and bluntly asks, “For Rilke, human ‘consciousness,’ reason, λόγος [logos], is precisely the limitation that makes man less potent than the animal. Are we then supposed to turn into ‘animals’?”86 The poet’s aim, however, is not for the human to become animal, but to learn how to critically navigate modern metaphysics. In this, the human being must acknowledge and “befriend” her own destiny as a mortal creature, without relying on the crutches that have propped up human-centered conceptions of the world. The strife between visibility and invisibility describes the precariousness of a mortal being standing in the midst of the Open, for it is only the instrumental gaze of the human being, armed with her logos, that paradoxically allows the concealed– unconcealed Being of the Open to appear as an object of representational thought. Concealed and thus invisible, the metaphysics of “the Nothing” is not simply juxtaposed to the visible. Nothingness pervades over the whole expanse of what we see, and enables the spectacle of being. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben summarizes Rilke’s anthropomorphic tendencies in the following manner: The lark (this symbol, in our poetic tradition, of the purest amorous impulse— one thinks, for example, of Bernart de Ventadorn’s lauzeta) does not see the Open, because even at the moment in which it rushes toward the sun with the greatest abandon, it is blind to it; the lark can never disconceal the sun as a being, nor can it comport itself in any way toward the sun’s concealedness.87

As long as it is barred from human discourse, the lark will not see the Open. For better or worse, only the human being possesses the capacity, this metaphysics for seeing, or as Rilke puts it, the capacity to observe, “maybe

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with the wide eyes of animals.” In order to apprehend the Open, the human observer must be brought outside her nature through the power of the exception, located both outside and inside the metaphysics that opposes the regimes of the human and animal. The vacillation between unconcealedness and concealedness is thematized through the two lovers coming face-to-face in the final shot of Lang’s film. Their mutual look and recognition affirms their mutual finitude, “which is in fact what happens also, irresistibly and illimitably, in all great impulses of love,” to quote Rilke’s letter from 1923 once more. Their noninstrumental, “creaturely” look toward each other as they acknowledge their shared, precarious ontology is a precondition, I argue, for an ethics toward the other. I glean this ethics from Rilke’s poetry, but will elaborate it further in the next chapter in my reading of Paul Wegener’s The Golem. Such a look, one whose sovereign power is always already deposed, describes the look that solicits the encounter of the loved other, that simultaneously sees and is seen. Its reversibility includes within it the look that originates from the place outside the self, governed by a human-centered metaphysics. To think this reversibility is to think nothingness as a consequence of the other who sees and is seen as well. And to affirm this reversibility is to give in to the “great impulse of love” that discloses the chiasmus between visibility and invisibility, the look of the other within the self. As if to describe this mutual encounter of the two lovers at the very end of Lang’s film, Rilke writes of the destiny that places them in opposition: If the other weren’t there blocking the view, lovers come close to it and are amazed … It opens up behind the other, almost an oversight … but no one gets past the other, and the world returns again. Always facing creation, all we see is the reflection of the free and open that we’ve darkened, or some mute animal raising its calm eyes and seeing through us, and through us. This is destiny [Schicksal]: to be opposites, always, and nothing else but opposites.88

In the final shot of the lovers in Destiny, the maiden and her lover come face-toface with each other, before the film cuts back to the night watchman (Figure 3.7). They are resurrected figures, made animate by the cinematic technology. As

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Figure 3.7  Destiny, 1921

specters standing at the borderline between life and death, it is this moment that the “strife between unconcealedness and concealedness” is brought forth as factical life lives toward what Heidegger calls “ruination.” Through death, human consciousness is transfigured into worldly matter, so that the Open may be seen from whence it emerges, from “everything,” and returned to the course of nature’s temporal destiny. Of all the allegorical depictions of death in Destiny, including the three episodes that portray the narrative stretch between life and death, the maiden’s self-sacrifice remains unique in its performative irreducibility, in that it poses an ethical problematic that addresses the basic contradiction that lies at the ontological heart of the cinema. Read allegorically, it might be said that she acquires a creaturely look as the couple enter the afterlife, peering into the other world of the “more-than” human life, inspiring what film theorist Akira Mizuta Lippit calls the “animetaphor.”89 The afterlife will not take place in the fantastic, imaginary realms depicted in the episodes, in a caliphate, Venice, or exotic China. Instead, the afterlife manifests itself as cinema, in synchronicity with the temporality of factical life always already embedded in the world. The conditions for its representation have been set out for us by the ontology of the cinematic image and its temporality, which I have discussed in relation to Heidegger, Simmel, and Rilke. As long as the conclusion to Destiny is read metaphysically, the spectrality of the cinematic afterlife will not be appreciated. For if we must remain spectators when thinking the absolute nothingness of death, the image

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of the Nothing must also take into account these metaphysical difficulties, and negotiate the most appropriate means for representing it. And if life perpetually evolves toward ruin, and the three cyclical episodes play out this evolution as a single moment in time, thickening the present with the temporalities of the past and future of life’s destiny, this temporally dense present may be compared to the “opposite” that resides in the lovers. This is the transient present, when, to quote Freud once more, “The beauty of the human form and face vanish forever in the course of our own lives, but their evanescence only lends them a fresh charm.”90 For the lover, it is the transience of the loved other that is perceived, a transience inextricably linked to the loved one’s mortality as well as her own. This is also the capacity to see and appreciate the transience of all living, animate beings, for if, as Destiny shows us, death remains the great equalizer, universally true in all cultures and all times, this moment of vision comes forth only as a consequence of affirming one’s own particularity, one’s own mortality, as a certain possibility of factical life. The apprehension of death, Destiny reminds us, has the capacity to lend finite life its value and preciousness.

4

The Cinematic Other Paul Wegener’s The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920)

Animation and birth in The Golem (1920) The essence of cinema is not narrative; the cinema is also not drama; above all it is a moving image. The image is the nucleus of the film, and from the basis of powerful images a strong storyline always develops. Moreover I believe The Golem is a strong film, perhaps my strongest. Paul Wegener, “A Conversation with Paul Wegener” (1920)1 Theorists of the cinematic apparatus, including Jean-Louis Comolli and JeanLouis Baudry, have characterized the “more-than-real” impression produced by the film image as a discursive effect that reiterates an infantile narcissistic experience.2 Like the prisoner in Plato’s cave, like the asleep dreamer, like the child before the mirror, the cinema inaugurates a disembodied, scopophilic spectator who remains captivated by a visual field seemingly laid out before her in Cartesian fashion. Others situated in this field are subject to the objectifying look of the transcendental viewer, and are constituted according to their ascribed type, rank, and function within a schematized whole. The viewer takes up a metaphysical position outside the space and time of the diegesis by imagining herself seeing from the place of the camera/projector. By exempting her own lived life from the vicissitudes of the diegesis, the spectator temporarily disavows the possibility of her own death through identification with the apparatus, and is granted an ideological position of mastery in relation to the space depicted in the image. In the previous chapter, we looked at Fritz Lang’s 1921 film Destiny and saw how it thinks through questions of life and death, questions also raised by Simmel, Heidegger, Freud, and Rilke. The categories “life” and “death” are selfreflexively allegorized in the film as well as deployed, in striking similar ways, in

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the contemporaneous philosophical, psychoanalytic, and poetic literature. If we accept “life” as a historical term that allows us to theorize the animative ontology of film, then we must accept the category “death” as somehow related to it as well. In contrast to the idealized, narcissistic spectator identified by theorists of the apparatus, Destiny reminds the viewer of her mortality, mournfully allegorizing death as part and parcel of her life through the afterlife of film. In this chapter, I will take Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came Into the World) as my object of focus. I move from questions of ontology (discussed in the previous chapter) to the ethics and problematics of film spectatorship. Far from bringing the viewer and apparatus in a relation of narcissistic identity, The Golem allows us to think through an ethics between the human being and the technological other in a relation of distance and openness. I shall show how Wegener’s film may be read to further problematize the ideological assumptions that underlie the spectator while proposing a new ethics of seeing, one that brings the ontology of the cinema in collaboration with that of the human along existential, rather than ideological, lines. Indeed, The Golem does not allow the easy identification of the spectator with the apparatus through the ruse of transcendental knowledge. Its selfreflexive allegories and subtle alienation techniques do not encourage a viewer who experiences herself in a position of plentitude and wholeness, at one with the cinema technology, but problematizes this narcissistic fantasy by repeatedly staging film spectatorship through the separation of the human viewer and the cinema. And yet, precisely through this separation, an appeal is made to another form of commonality, one grounded in the existential interpretation of finitude. I will thus pursue two arguments with respect to Wegener’s film: one, I show how the Golem’s birth allegorizes the animative powers of film and the narrative of the life span. Tracing its trajectory from inanimate matter to animate life, and concluding with the return to dead matter, the cinematic allegory not only anthropomorphizes the powers of the cinema, of “how it came into the world,” it also illuminates the length of this anthropomorphized life, ending with its leaving the world. My second concern builds from this allegory. I argue that the Golem is not simply a thing that exists for the objectifying look of the fetishistic spectator, but lives in a relation of reciprocity with the human subject. This aesthetic and ethical claim extends my contextualization of the conclusion to Lang’s Destiny and the allegory of precarious life discussed in the previous

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chapter. Once again, my argument turns on the comportment of the human being toward death. I begin with a scene, twenty-eight minutes into The Golem, that depicts the birth of the clay creature. In order to bring about the transformation of dead clay to animate corpus, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) consults ancient, esoteric tomes to find the precise recipe. He turns the stiff page of a musty book to reveal the procedure for creating artificial life. The film cuts to an intertitle that reads: This figure, named “The Golem,” was created in classical times by a Thessalonian Sorcerer. If the life-awakening word is placed in the amulet on his chest, he will be alive as long as he wears it. This symbol is called the “shem.”

A single word shem, Hebrew for “name,” has the power to bestow life. Insofar as the text lists the steps necessary for creating the Golem, it also invokes the authority of the book over against the mass medium of the cinema.3 Loew’s search for the secret to animation in an old tome implies that film still relies on the written word, like a movie on its screenplay, for building its narrative. The word seems to have a durability, a lasting reliability, that eludes a medium that exists in time. Looking up from the book, Loew asks, “Who can reveal the word?” Who will speak the name that will give birth to the living gestures of the Golem? The answer is found in another arcane text that the conjurer promptly opens. It is called The Book of Necromancy, and rather conspicuously subtitled, The Art of Bringing Dead Beings to Life.4 The tome is evidently a spell-book, containing directions for summoning the dark prince of hell, Astaroth. As the rabbi pores over this musty text, another intertitle presents the words contained within it: Astaroth is the guardian of a life-giving word that will awaken any and everything, whether corpse or man’s creation. Whoever possesses the key of Salomonis and knows the “great spell” can compel Astaroth to reveal the word, insofar as he awaits an auspicious constellation of planets.

Loew’s assistant, Famulus (Ernst Deutsch), leans and reads over his shoulder. The directions are straightforward enough: first, the demon Astaroth is to be summoned to the earthly world. Then, the life-giving word must be quickly wrested from him, and utilized to awaken the inanimate Golem. “The word” has the power not only to animate the Golem, but like the film apparatus, to “awaken any and everything, whether corpse or man’s creation”. The book pages are presented as still photographs, like freeze-frames. Yet because these photographs appear as part of a filmic sequence, the magic,

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animative power of the word is reiterated nevertheless. The pages are imbued with the time that they spend projected before the viewer: as the eye reads the large page on the screen, it has only a finite duration before the film cuts back to Loew and Famulus. The rabbi’s book becomes an intertitle, bridging the still frame and the film diegesis, yet the moving image, here repeating identical frames to constitute stillness, reminds us that even the inert word is experienced temporally, encompassing the time of looking and reading. The finite duration of the projected text implies the finitude of the film, as well as the viewers’ living in duration while reading the written word (Figure 4.1). Rising from the tome and looking toward the heavens, Loew boldly announces, “The hour has come!” He walks swiftly to the back of the laboratory and motions for Famulus to come closer. Against the wall the solid, immobile Golem stands silently. As the rabbi approaches and gestures around the lifeless creature, his meek assistant cowers behind him, full of anticipation. Curiously, the bodily contours of the clay figure blend, like camouflage, with the earthen walls that enclose Loew’s strange laboratory. The walls themselves seem to be on the verge of coming to life, and their unpredictable lines create dark shadows where strange, unconscious spirits might find refuge. Designed by architect Hans Poelzig, the stylized sets of The Golem eschew the clean, functional lines associated with contemporaneous Bauhaus design. Rather, they exhibit structural indeterminacy and emphasize the play of light and dark, confusing the viewer as to where the Golem’s body ends and the walls begin. Film scholar Claudia Dillmann argues that this juxtaposition, the materiality

Figure 4.1  The Golem, 1920

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of the Golem’s body and the Expressionist architecture of Loew’s laboratory, characterizes a kind of Deleuzian “non-organic life of things” that stands at the center of Wegener’s art: “This intentional, magical relationship between the inorganic and the organic (through the figure of the Golem as simultaneously the central motive of the film), between the forms of nature and forms of art, makes possible the metamorphosis of [Poelzig’s] sketches of the ghetto walls and the architecture of the tower door.”5 Dillmann treats the architect’s sketches for the film’s mise-en-scène like Loew’s tomes, as blueprints that will inspire the art of bringing dead beings to life. Her description and Poelzig’s designs coincide with the monist philosophy espoused in a text called Kristallseelen (The Souls of Crystals), published in 1917 by biologist Ernst Haeckel. In this book, his last and in some ways his most farreaching, Haeckel asserts that nature, organic and nonorganic, eludes everyday conceptual binaries, such as those constituted through the opposition “between life and death, between natural science and human science [Geisteswissenschaft].” Animals, rocks, all worldly entities have a soul, a force that unifies all forms of being. “All substances have life,” he continues, “non-organic as well as organic; all things have souls, crystals as well as organisms. An old, firm belief in the inner, unified interdependence of all things arises anew, the unbounded authority of generally valid laws of nature: ‘In accordance with mighty iron laws we must complete our cycles of existence!’ ”6 Haeckel quotes Goethe’s poem “On the Divine,” written in 1783, lending it modern scientific legitimacy. Like Murnau’s Phantom, a film that self-reflexively exploits the confusion between reality and imagination, merging the two in the film image, Wegener’s Golem merges inorganic matter with the organic life of the film’s characters. Correspondingly, the earthen mise-en-scène and the figure of the Golem seem to express Haeckel’s belief in a living soul that resides in all of nature, regardless of whether it is composed of clay, crystal, or organic material. Astaroth’s summoning is executed through a series of fantastic special effects that still enchant and astonish audiences today. As the scene continues, the magic of the cinema and its visual thrills are depicted in an increasingly dazzling manner. The film cuts to a medium shot of the rabbi. He raises his arms like an orchestra conductor. With his magic wand in his right hand, he methodically and mysteriously gestures toward several spots offscreen. The light, originating from somewhere above and to the left of the frame, accentuates the chiaroscuro of his deliberate movements and highlights the seriousness of his aged face. Loew bends down slightly and traces a counterclockwise circle on the ground.

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As he does this, the film cuts to a long shot of his movement, while his body spins a full 360 degrees. Loew’s careful gestures are on display here. Like an action painter, the line he draws on the floor constitutes as much the artistic creation as the final product, showcasing how gesture is implicated in the mythical art of creation. He then stops, wand in hand, and gazes solemnly at the floor. Suddenly the circle he just traced on the ground rises in a ring of flames, emitting smoke and illuminating the scene in a brilliant play of light and dark. These animated flames add a new element of primal excitement, for they seem to move of their own accord and threaten to escape human control. As the sorcerer stands in the middle of his magic circle, he raises his arms further to amplify the mounting chaos. Behind the flames, the sorcerer’s apprentice hesitatingly emerges from the shadows and Loew abruptly pulls him in. He waves his star-studded wand about and, cutting quickly between a close-up of their distressed faces and a long shot of their bodies encircled by the ring of flames, three balls of fire magically materialize, dancing animatedly around their heads. The blaze rises higher like a crescendo growing to a great symphonic climax. The mounting chaos seems almost to overwhelm the two. Famulus throws himself into Loew’s heavy robe and nearly collapses, while the conjurer leans back, struggling to stand firm in the face of the sublime. Skirting with disaster, the scene elicits cinematic pleasures aligned with the modern taste for thrills and spectacle. It stages the viewer’s encounter with the fascination of the cinema technology, while demonstrating special effects akin to “primitive,” dark magic. “Astaroth! Astaroth appear! Appear! Name the word!” he commands, tenaciously reasserting his stance against the visual pandemonium. Cutting back to a medium shot, a strange, sad face slowly emerges from the darkness behind Loew and moves into the billowing smoke. Astaroth appears, taking the form of a death mask, seemingly devoid of expression. Lotte Eisner describes its entrance: “The demon’s phosphorescent head, with its sad empty eyes, is suddenly transformed into a huge Chinese mask looming up in profile at the edge of the screen with a kind of prodigious ferocity.”7 The demon’s uncanny movement, floating in the air in a mechanical, circular motion, radiates a weird, nonhuman vitality. A cut to an extreme close-up shows the viewer what she desires to examine and scrutinize: the face of the prince of hell, alien and without passion, lit from below to deepen the crevices that cut through Astaroth’s jagged physiognomy. More smoke emerges from its mouth, demonstrating that the thing breathes and has the capacity to speak (Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.2  The Golem, 1920

Loew implores once more: “In the name of the Lord of the Spirits, name the word!” Finally, in a long, drawn-out breath, the dark guardian acquiesces to his demand. Amid the fumes, a single word emerges written in smoke: Aemaet. In this gaseous form, the letters do not have the timelessness associated with Loew’s old tomes, but are manifest in a much more transient medium—through smoke, the play of shadows, and the evanescence of the lived moment. As quickly as the demon appeared before Loew, Astaroth disappears amid lightning and more fanfare after having completed its summoned task. Flashes of light repeatedly strike the sacred circle, making it explode into a cloud of fumes. Both the rabbi and his assistant finally crumple to the floor, drained physically by what they have just done and by the visual spectacle they have just witnessed. This is how the Golem’s shem is wrested from the dark spirits. The Hebrew Aemaet carries a number of meanings, ranging from “fidelity,” “sincerity,” “confidence,” and even “God,” but is more often translated as “truth.”8 Significantly, the life-giving word contains the root maet, which may be translated as the condition of death. It is as if the life-giving name contains within it the truth of animate life itself, as if to assert that life always already includes its own fateful end, and as such, aims toward mortality and the return to an inanimate state of things. Beginning with the invocation that animates and gives birth to the clay creature, the inscription of death will haunt the Golem’s uncanny, nonorganic life on earth. After the smoke clears, Loew picks himself and his helper off the floor. The light has returned to the room, which now streams in through the jagged

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windows above. He wearily remarks to Famulus, “The word, the terrible lifegiving word, I have snatched it from the dark powers. Now I shall call the Golem to life.” In Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud explains that in primitive societies, knowing the name of the other is tantamount to possessing him. “If one knows the name of a man or of a spirit,” the psychoanalyst writes, “one has obtained a certain amount of power over the owner of the name.”9 In this important text, primitive man obtains the name of the other in order to assert mastery over a person foreign to one’s totem group. In Wegener’s film, Loew obtains the Golem’s shem to assert his mastery over the clay spirit. With renewed energy, Loew walks over to a desk and reaches for a strip of paper. The film cuts to a close-up of his hand while he carefully inscribes the letters of the Golem’s name. Loew then takes the strip and approaches the lifeless beast behind him. It remains standing upright, left alone in the shadows throughout the ordeal of Astaroth’s summoning. Loew and Famulus lift the Golem up and carry it to the center of the room. Like the sleeping Cesare in Robert Wiene’s Caligari, its eyes remain shut and its limbs stiff, as if constituted of rigid material. Loew then approaches the camera until his round abdomen covers the whole frame, eclipsing the figure behind him. With his hands once more in extreme close-up, Loew folds the strip of paper into a small square, as if to disclose a secret between himself and the viewer, and places it inside a starshaped amulet (It is at this moment that the “fake” Golem is exchanged for the “real” one, played by Wegener himself. This “special effect” transforms the dead prop into the living actor.).

Figure 4.3  The Golem, 1920

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Figure 4.4  The Golem, 1920

The hard-earned shem, secured in the amulet, is then placed on the Golem’s chest, immediately making its eyes glow, bringing the supernatural thing to life (Figures 4.3–4.5). Famulus and Loew stop in wonder as the Golem perceives its surrounding world for the very first time. Its head turns slowly, scanning the world in which it finds itself thrown, observing its creators while they observe it, astonished. A close-up on Loew’s face expresses a corresponding curiosity: his head slowly turns, mimicking the Golem’s own mechanical movement. This “match-on-gesture” underscores how the human and the nonhuman take part in a cinematic language of animation and expression, bringing the inorganic

Figure 4.5  The Golem, 1920

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creature and its organic interlocutors into phenomenological correspondence. Moreover, this correspondence underscores their shared participation in a world of visuality, motion, and embodiment. The film then cuts back to a long shot showing Loew with his creation, the latter gazing with glowing eyes, activated by newly consolidated life. The rabbi gestures for his creation to step forward, and it does, faltering at first, almost collapsing backward. Finally, the Golem manages to approach its master, and like Cesare after his call to awaken by Caligari, it takes a few heavy footsteps in a kind of mechanical stupor.

Asymmetrical and antagonistic relations If the Golem allegorizes the animative life of film, this scene depicting its birth also recalls the astonishment experienced by the earliest audiences of the cinema. Recalling the sense of amazement reported by viewers of Lumière’s cinematograph, Loew and Famulus express a sense of wonder and fascination when the Golem is brought into the world for the first time. The allegory of animate life takes on a humanoid form, as in other films of the period, acquiring a face with expressive power. Organic life and artificial life are thus brought together in Wegener’s film and made to interact through silent gesture. As such, Loew and Famulus’s response to the uncanny creature compels a question I want to pursue throughout the rest of this chapter: How might the relationship of the human characters to the Golem be described philosophically? The summoning scene described earlier shows us how the artificial life-form self-reflexively allegorizes the cinematic “art of bringing dead beings to life,” but as the story continues, Wegener’s film also shows how the Golem continues its life on earth, as it confronts a strange world and even stranger human others. How does The Golem manifest and thematize these confrontations and what does it reveal with regard to the problem of intersubjectivity more generally? At first, it seems the Golem’s life on earth may be characterized by its highly antagonistic relationship to its various human interlocutors. Loew and Famulus seem confused as to the intentions of the clay creature—whether it will be their obedient servant or a menace to others. And they clearly exhibit an intense anxiety with respect to this new, unknown technology. In order to overcome this fear, the Golem’s creators must claim control of their creation, and much of the rest of Wegener’s film is spent depicting how this control may be accomplished. In his essay “Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial

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Bodies,” Tom Gunning traces the legacy of this claim, figuring the Golem within the history of automata, inspired by the human desire to create and control life. Tracing the genealogy of desire from Julien Offroy de La Mettrie’s 1748 text, L’Homme machine, through to the depraved hobbit Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001–2003), Gunning sees the creation of artificial life as inseparable from the legacy of man’s desire to achieve worldly mastery and omnipotence. While anxieties around mortality are raised by the uncanny double, elaborated in my reading of Cesare, they are quickly surmounted through the creation of artificial life and through the assertion of control over the created life. Gunning reminds us that in “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Bazin explains that the creation of moving images appeals to the ego’s desire to recreate “the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.”10 Through the recreation of the world as image, as with the creation of artificial life, the ego expresses its desire to conquer the passing of time and the progress of decay, while reasserting the narcissistic fantasy of its own eternal life. In mastering the life reproduced by film, the mortal human being achieves mastery over death and its inevitability. Yet in doing so, this being is also brought into dangerous proximity with the omnipotence of God, as “a potentially blasphemous rival to God the creator.”11 In the film, the Golem is made to serve its masters Loew and Famulus, and to perform the labor human beings cannot or will not. The words Diener and Knecht, utilized to refer to their creation, make explicit the understanding of the Golem as a subservient machine, one whose task is to chop wood and run errands for its masters. When Famulus takes the Golem to the market, he explains to the proprietor that “This is the Rabbi’s new servant [Knecht]. It cannot speak [Er ist stumm].” As Famulus introduces the uncanny figure, he also seems to be describing the Stummfilm, the “silent cinema,” unable to “speak” verbally but only through mute bodily gestures. If the Golem functions as an allegory of the cinema, it also functions in Wegener’s film as a slave to its mortal creators. As subservient, the allegory of cinema is made to be mastered, allowing death to be disavowed once more through the recreation of the world in its own image. And through this disavowal, the human being suppresses the uncanniness evoked by the artificial life-form. The Golem may manifest a strange undecidability between life and death, but this troubling undecidability is quickly overcome by reconfiguring the creature in terms of master and slave. It becomes a tool, instrumentalized as a means to a predetermined end. In other words, the human being elides the basic inscrutability of the Golem, and commits an act

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of misrecognition, precisely when the clay creature is thought of as merely a servant. Not understood as a teleological end in itself, the Golem is understood metaphysically, serving as a stepping stone so that the human ego may prop itself up and transcend its own mortality. Thus the Golem cannot be trusted, for as a manipulable tool, it remains a nonorganic form of life whose intentions are unclear. Upending expectations of the melodramatic mode, which depends, as film scholar Linda Williams writes, on “characters who embody primary psychic roles organized in Manichean conflicts between good and evil,” the morality of the Golem remains illegible.12 When dealing with the strange, artificial being, seemingly amoral, the human characters remain guarded and cautious. Famulus and Loew thus resist any show of vulnerability before the seemingly invulnerable monster. The allegory of cinema aspires to think for itself, and for this its creators must reassert their supremacy over the Golem in order to maintain, at all costs, jurisdiction over its existence and to establish protection against its potential threat. This very assertion, this sovereign claim, maintains the dialectic of master and slave. Another way the artificial creature enables the ego’s mastery over death is illustrated in Loew and Famulus’s utilization of the Golem as an instrument that enables mastery over others. In their essay “Ablösen des Streifens vom Buche,” Susanne Holl and Friedrich Kittler write that the Golem in Wegener’s 1920 film is a “weapon” that allegorizes the technologies utilized for annihilating the other in war.13 The creature’s body materializes a subjectivity that may be likened to an armored tank, for the Golem is a “new type of soldier,” an invincible, mechanical warrior whose thick shell functions as a protective crust, shielding the vulnerable, organic life within from constant shelling launched from unknown locations by unknown enemies.14 “Its hair becomes a steel helmet,” Holl and Kittler write, “and clay body a ‘soiled uniform.’ ”15 For Loew and Famulus, as we know, the capacity to control their clay creature, utilized as a weapon, means their continued survival and the preservation of the ghetto. The Golem becomes a crucial tool for fighting other human beings that intend to do the Jews harm. These antagonistic relationships can be extrapolated further, as all the human characters in The Golem seem to experience a profound sense of threat before the Golem’s inhuman existence. All the human characters throughout Wegener’s film are depicted as essentially mistrustful of the artificial creature, playing to the audience’s anxieties of human annihilation by what has been deemed inhuman. As my analysis continues, I will show how these asymmetrical and

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antagonistic ethics may be read throughout The Golem as intrinsic to its politics of representation. A key scene in the emperor’s court allegorizes the conditions of viewing in the cinema, while reiterating distinctions between the human and the inhuman along the lines of race and ethnicity. Loew and his clay creation have been invited to the emperor’s court. Upon their arrival, the rabbi, in a show of deference, bends down to kiss the sovereign’s hand. The appearance of the Golem elicits shock among the members of the emperor’s subordinates. Some of the women gaze at it with desire, however, harkening The Golem back to a similar plot point in Wegener’s comedic and self-referential film from 1917, Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancing Girl). “What manner of marvel is this,” the emperor asks, “that you display for us today, you strange illusionist? Let us see more of your art.” Loew is eager to display his talents: “Let me show you our patriarchs, mighty Emperor, so that you may better know our people. But I do have one condition. No one may speak or laugh, lest some terrible disaster occur”. Loew stands at one end of the exhibition room while the emperor and his court take their places in the audience, waiting in anticipation. The illusionist raises his arms and conjures up images from the Exodus on the back wall. Here the analogy to the theater space is made explicit, as a group of spectators sits before a large image projected onto a screen (Figure 4.6). Loew is positioned as the master of ceremonies who prepares the cinematic spectacle, like a film lecturer or perhaps like the carnival showman Caligari. This self-reflexive moment in

Figure 4.6  The Golem, 1920

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Wegener’s seems to have been imitated in Eugen d’Albert’s opera from 1926, Der Golem, in a moment from its first act that highlights non-narrative spectacle.16 Cutting between the allegorical film screen and the audience, these images in Wegener’s film enrapture the viewers. A bearded figure emerges on the screen and addresses the audience directly, looking into the camera. “Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew,” an intertitle states. Cutting to a reaction shot, the court jester whispers a joke to a person seated next to him. However, the emperor is the first to break out in laughter, and he sets off a chain reaction of cruel glee among those congregated in the audience. This glee literally brings the house down, as the ceiling crumbles and the castle supports bend above them. Loew promptly commands the Golem to hold up the falling beams and prevent the total collapse of the emperor’s palace. Behind the emperor’s laughter lurks a morbid joy in the suffering of those who have been exiled from their land. Literary and film scholar Noah Isenberg explains that this scene exploits long-standing racist stereotypes of the Jewish people, underscored by their depiction in The Golem as a de-individualized, mass threat: The court audience, led by the jester, ridicules the figures onscreen, affirming their odd appearance and the stark difference between Rabbi Löw’s wandering Jews and the gentile viewers. As the Nazi myth-machine would later propagate, the Jews here become mere caricatures, types devoid of any human individuality.17

Their ridicule recalls the long persecution of Jews in Europe, and compels us to consider the implicit social hierarchies that structure Wegener’s film as a whole. For it is clear: a racist unconscious heavily informs the relations between the Jews and the dictatorial emperor, who seeks to persecute and shut down the ghetto. Earlier the “Decree Against the Jews,” delivered by the emperor’s messenger, Florian (Lothar Müthel), presents the central conflict, invoking anti-Semitic, exclusionary stereotypes and discourses circulating at the time of the film: “The many serious charges against the Jews can no longer be disregarded, being that they crucified our Lord, wrongfully ignore the holy Christian holidays, thirst after the goods and lives of their fellow men, and practice the black arts. Hence we decree that all Jews must evacuate their quarter, known as the ghetto, before the new moon.” This decree to obliterate the ghetto resonates with contemporaneous stigmatizations of “the Jew” as a practitioner of irrational magic. For this reason they should be exiled from the ostensibly enlightened, Christian empire.

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Wegener’s film premiered in Berlin on October 29, 1920, but earlier that year, the newly formed National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) announced their “Twenty-Five Points,” a list of programmatic, chauvinistic ideas that makes essentialist distinctions between Jew and German. As if to anticipate the decree in Wegener’s film, point four declares that “None but members of the nation may be citizens of the state. None but those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. No Jew may therefore be a member of the nation.”18 The representation of the Jews in Wegener’s film reflects imaginary notions of irrational, non-Gentile, non-German otherness circulating in Weimar culture at the time. Isenberg also notes that stereotypes of Jewishness throughout The Golem cannot be separated from the aesthetics of Wegener’s film, for these stereotypes suffuse its story, imagery, and mise-en-scène. The walls of Loew’s laboratory, the material from which the Golem emerges, beget life but are also coded as Jewish. Isenberg analyzes a 1920 article by The New York Times critic Herman G. Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” that links the self-reflexive, animate magic of The Golem with what its author calls the “jargon” of Jewishness. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem, Scheffauer maintains, highlight the way in which the cinema comes into its own by granting inert reality the capacity for expression. Continuing, he writes, “Space—hitherto considered and treated as something dead and static, a mere inert screen or frame, often of no more significance than the painted balustrade-background at the village photographer’s—has been smitten into life, into movement and conscious expression.”19 He touts Hans Poelzig’s designs in this regard: Poelzig seeks to give an eerie and grotesque suggestiveness to the flights of houses and streets that are to furnish the external setting of this film-play. The will of this master-architect animating facades into faces, insists that these houses are to speak in jargon—and gesticulate!20

Scheffauer later interprets the cavernous spaces designed by Poelzig as “Jewish Gothic—a blending of the flame-like letters of the Jewish alphabet with the leaflike flame of Gothic tracery.”21 The craggy houses of the ghetto, according to the New York Times critic, even if they gesticulate and speak in jargon, nevertheless speak in an essentialist, “Jewish manner.” Scheffauer’s imagery draws from contemporaneous, racialized discourses that associate dark magic, irrationality, and the Jewish body, while marking them as distinct from the civilized world of the Christians. Poelzig’s designs

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correspondingly “foster a clear division between the dark mysterious ghetto and the enlightened empire, between Jewish sorcery and German culture, between the perceived threat of Jewish power and the vulnerable German state.”22 Taking recourse to contemporaneous reviews and writings on Wegener’s film, Isenberg claims that the dark, distorted passageways and craggy structures are coextensive with stereotypes of Jewish physiognomy and with anti-Semitic imagery of the threatening Jewish masses. The Golem reinforces racial distinctions through mise-en-scène, presenting the ominous interiority of the city-ghetto over against the sunny exterior of the emperor’s court. The final scene of the film reiterates this distinction through its depiction of a group of blonde, presumably Gentile children that play outside the ghetto gates. They are never shown going inside. Though Isenberg does not argue that The Golem seeks to actively perpetuate anti-Semitic racism, it unavoidably dips into the repertoire of largely racist assumptions and images circulating at the time—images that, judging by contemporaneous responses to the film, were not considered in this critical light. The clay architecture of the ghetto is coextensive of the clay body of the Golem, and both may be understood within anti-Semitic discourses circulating in 1920. Wegener’s film moreover repeatedly delineates that which separates the inhuman from its human counterpart, made legible through racial and ontological dichotomies. Such delineations compel further philosophical inquiry into the relation between self and other, and into the reasons as to why they remain so enduring in modernity. I delve further into the logic of this exclusionary discourse in order, not only to add greater philosophical and historical rigor to Isenberg’s argument, but also to set the terms by which another form of ethics, one that confounds the reification of the other, may be delineated. The hierarchical relations depicted between the emperor and the Jews recall a key idea from philosopher Martin Buber’s short but powerful text, I and Thou, published in 1923. Buber elucidates what he calls the “I-It” relationship, which underpins the relation of masters to their slaves as well as the sovereign self to its surrounding world. This relationship also describes the asymmetrical relations depicted in The Golem. In the I-It relation, the I takes up a distanced, objectifying position in relation to others, and perceives qualitative beings as quantifiable things. In its appropriation as an It, the otherness of the other is elided, and folded into a world already constituted by the self, a world narcissistically constituted “in its own image.” Echoing Bazin and the myth of total cinema, Buber writes, “What has become an It is then taken as an It, experienced and used as an It, employed along with other things for the project of finding one’s

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way in the world, and eventually for the project of ‘conquering’ the world.”23 The I in the I-It relationship takes up a position of mastery over the other, forcing it into preconceived cognitive structures, so that it may be controlled and made to serve the egotistical self. For the emperor in The Golem, the Jews remain the eternal foreigner, existing outside the world of the Gentiles. The sovereign is, recalling Carl Schmitt’s well-known formulation from 1922, “he who decides on the exception” to the discursive law that delineates German and Jew.24 The walls of the ghetto visually manifest this separation, isolating the abject other from the rest of the empire, while distinguishing the Jewish type through its caricatured objectification. According to Buber, the I takes the other as “something that is to be experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it, and instead of receiving it utilizes it.”25 The It becomes a mere means and not an end-in-itself. The ethics of the It has the effect of dissolving the other into a series of empirical properties and expressions of law, of number and of measure—all this is contrived in order to provide a means to ascertain the value of oneself in distinction to another. The objectifying look upon the It that is the “eternal Jew,” from the perspective of the laughing emperor, makes this reified category available to him as an object of scorn, ridicule, and therefore vulnerable to annihilation. It betrays a hierarchical, exclusionary logic between masters and their Diener, between creators and the things they create, and between the I and the It. This logic includes the exclusion through the reification of self and other, manifesting in turn the absolute power of the sovereign. Arnold Zweig, whose 1920 essay on the “theoretical foundations of film” I discussed in my analysis of Caligari, experienced himself becoming an object of exclusion while fighting for the German Fatherland. He had enthusiastically gone off to war in 1914 with the hope that the participation of Jews in the Great War would integrate them into a larger German-Jewish Gemeinschaft, a hope that was sustained in the belief of an enemy shared by both Germans and Jews. However, in August 1916, while stationed on the Western front, the Judenzählung, or the Jewish census, shattered his patriotism. Carried out by the Prussian War Ministry, the census responded to mounting, racist suspicions on the home front that Jews, as non-Germans, were obviating their obligation to serve. According to the results of the study, over 12,000 Jewish lives were lost on the battlefield fighting for the Fatherland. This statistic, however, was never made public, and its withholding exacerbated the paranoia that enemies lurked

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within the German army, and inflamed anti-Semitic imaginations on the home and war fronts even further.26 Jewish soldiers found themselves scrutinized by the very community they were fighting for, exiled once more from their Prussian comrades. In February 1917, Zweig wrote to Buber: “The ‘Jewish census’ was a reflex reaction to the egregious grief felt over Germany’s shame and our agony. If there were no anti-Semitism in the army, the unbearable ‘duty to service’ would be quite easy. But to be subordinated to contemptible and miserable creatures! I think of myself as a civilian prisoner and a stateless foreigner.”27 Zweig vehemently rejected this instrumentalized use of racial categorization that arbitrarily separated his contributions to the war from those of his Aryan colleagues. Feeling himself becoming an It, excluded from the German Empire like Loew and the Jews in Wegener’s film, he experienced the devaluation of life as a subject of sovereign biopower, becoming what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer.28 Zweig’s profound disappointment was given expression in a sardonic short story published later that year, called Judenzählung vor Verdun (“Jewish Census in Verdun”). In it, the angel Azrael blows the shofar and awakens the war dead. They rise from their graves to return and confront the living with their uncanny presences, but soon find out that they were exhumed only to be counted. “To the census, deceased Jews of the German army!”29 As they are brought back to life, the narrator recognizes Jews patriotically serving at all levels of the military: as captains, surgeons, sergeants, police, junior officers, and privates. The corpses then turn to stone and form the walls of a tower in an area, presumably Zion, where they will await the coming of the Messiah. “Jewish Census in Verdun” is an allegory about the objectifying, dehumanizing tendency that underpins the anti-Semitic discourses circulating in Weimar culture and in Wegener’s film, as living humans become inanimate things and become It. The final sentences of the story describe the dead sinking back into the earth to constitute the Temple Mount, under palm trees and the light of the jubilant sun.

Cinema’s death drive We can also think of this coming into being and then dying away as though it took place cinematographically; then we participate in the rhythm, and so get the right impression of the species as a rhythmical sequence of acts. Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology (1920)30

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When the emperor announces his decree to obliterate the ghetto, he reiterates the figuration of the Jew as inhuman, foreign to the Christian humanity of the sovereign. But Wegener’s film offers another ethical possibility, one pointing to a more reciprocal, dialogical relationship between the human being and the technological other. In a moment I will return to Buber’s I and Thou in order to show how The Golem may be read as an allegory of this more open relationality. However, in order to construct this argument I must first show how the artificial life of the Golem should be thought in relation to its ontological precariousness. Mortality characterizes the shared ontology of the cinema and the human spectator, as I argued in my reading of Lang’s Destiny in the previous chapter. This reading of Wegener’s Golem will show that, in contrast to the drive toward immortal life that is oblivious to the life or death of the other, the precariousness of lived life gives way to responsibility and openness in relation to the afterlife of the cinema. The Film-Kurier published a laudatory review of Wegener’s film a day after it premiered in the Ufa-Palast am Zoo.31 The unidentified writer praises Wegener’s Meisterwerk along lines familiar to us: “A pictorial, visionary, and soft-moving figure is achieved in these scenes: the essence of film is image and figure, and here is the future of cinema.” However, the review also contains a number of formulations that lead us toward a slightly different reading of the Golem’s awakening scene and the antagonism between it and the humans we have been discussing up to now. The correspondent anthropomorphizes the clay Golem, noting that “This lump of clay [Tonkloß] is produced from the most primitive elements of the human body.” The connection between clay and the human body becomes particularly significant for the writer’s description of the Golem’s awakening: It opens its eyes: its first glimpse at the world. If clay could see, it must see in this way: quizzical, autonomous, empty … It is not the look of a human being, nor that of a child: but the look of hesitation as inanimate nature becomes animate … Then it takes a few steps, stiff, ungraceful.

The suggestion of technological perception, “if clay could see,” allows the reviewer the opportunity to reflect upon the emergence of movement coupled with nonhuman perception. It is contingent upon the allegory of lifeless material becoming animate, and seems to recall Haeckel’s contemporaneous theory of soulful, inert matter. The review then continues: What a wonderful poetic subject: Nature, hovering between soulful and soullessness, and body, between clay and living organism. “You should return

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to earth, for from earth are you created”: that is the human being. The Golem is earth as well, yet does not stop being earth: for its creator is not God, but only a man. And like the earth and the sea the Golem is related mysteriously to the constellation of the stars, whose power constitutes it at once savage and meek: ebb and flow.

Here a fundamental ambivalence, an “ebb and flow,” lies at the root of the Golem’s existence: between soullessness and soul, dead clay and living corpus. The reviewer quotes Loew’s command to the Golem that it return to clay, while suggesting that the human being is constituted similarly. In contrast to Bazin, who notes that the creation of animate life fulfills the maker’s dream of immortality, here the creator is “only a man”: a life, mortal, and finite. This cyclical movement from the nonorganic into the organic and back to inorganicity recalls Freud’s explanation of the repetition compulsion, delineated in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published the year The Golem was released. I have already discussed the famous fort-da game in my analysis of Murnau’s Haunted Castle in Chapter 2. We saw how little Ernst, Freud’s nephew, acquired a defiant attitude toward his father’s leaving for the war front, in order to protect himself against the anxiety induced by his father’s absence. However, another look at Freud’s extremely rich text will allow us to see, beyond the figuration of the Golem as a weapon, how this “new type of soldier” may be related to the cinema in a radically different way. In contrast to the interpretation of the Golem as an invention whose aim is to destroy the other, and which perpetuates the fantasy of triumphal survival, the Golem becomes a technology that teaches its human viewers how their own ontology is dependent on the life of the other, and how otherness may be possible at all. Freud was thinking of the brutality of military conflict and the experience of trench warfare when he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920: “The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.”32 The psychoanalyst recollects how traumatized soldiers repeatedly dreamt of horrific, extremely unpleasurable scenes from the battlefield, and in their waking life became excessively preoccupied with their ongoing resentments and perceived inadequacies. If dreams, according to psychoanalysis, express an unconscious wish for pleasure, why would soldiers dream of events that are highly unpleasurable? What compelled their psyches to defy the pleasure principle?

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His observations of shell-shocked veterans compelled him to recast formulations of pleasure held by psychoanalysis before the war. The highly distressing but uncontrollable compulsion to recollect memories of lost comrades or their own horrifying brushes with death, according to Freud, expresses a drive “that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it over-rides.”33 After the war, the psychoanalyst calls this drive that supersedes the pleasure principle the “death drive.” A key formulation from Beyond the Pleasure Principle articulates this primordial impulse, which will be uncannily relevant for thinking the allegorical life and death of the moving image in general: If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.”34

There are at least two important aspects to this statement that should be underscored: first, the living being seeks in the course of time to return to its primordial state, moving forward and backward at the same time. The temporality of this movement is especially significant, for it reveals the present moment as inextricably intertwined with the past and future, echoing Heidegger’s description of the future temporality as being not-yet from the perspective of the present. This double movement reiterates the fact that living beings are born into a world that both precedes them and continues to exist after their demise. Second, the assertion “everything living dies for internal reasons” remains crucial, for with the word “internal” Freud makes clear that the death drive must be allowed to seek its own path toward mortality. The instincts of self-preservation ensure that this path is followed to this end: these are the “component instincts whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself.”35 This immanent path to death precludes, in principle, those ways of dying resultant from external antagonisms, such as murder carried out by the hands of the other, and is thus not identical to the process of organic decay. The death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle has implications for understanding the ontology of death, figured as the futural certainty of factical life that the living being is compelled to pursue. Somehow, the living being is compelled to seek its own death, and one that is most proper to it: “What we

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are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.”36 What this might mean more specifically, and how an organism is compelled to die in its own fashion, is left vague here. Freud’s discussion of the death drive grounds the oscillation I have been trying to theorize between animacy and inanimacy, key to the metaphysics of factical life as well as the ontology of the moving image. Indeed, if “inanimate things existed before living ones,” and if “the aim of all life is death,” then implicitly each of us, and not only fallen soldiers, are caught up in this perpetual, existential journey from nothingness to something, and the return to nothing. As Freud puts it, life is ultimately “conservative” in nature, seeking not only to survive, but also to die, desiring to return to the inanimate state that preceded it. “They are the true life instincts,” Freud writes: They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death; and this fact indicates that there is an opposition whose importance was long ago recognized by the theory of the neuroses. It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.37

This life moves with a vacillating rhythm. Like the alternating here and there of little Ernst’s fort-da game, life’s aim alternates between animacy and inanimacy. These ontological oscillations, echoing Bergson’s critique of the Nothing from Chapter 2, constitute its fundamental precariousness and fragility. The ambitions of life are accompanied by the compulsion to return to its beginnings, to a primordial state that persists within the unconscious of the living organism. This vacillating rhythm describes the life span of the Golem in Wegener’s film, and as the film continues, we become increasingly aware of its ontological precariousness. Far from realizing the dream of eternal life, the Golem’s existence, according to the Film-Kurier review, is characterized by an “ebb and flow,” limited and finite, and “is related mysteriously to the constellation of the stars.” Back in Loew’s laboratory, after the Golem has saved the ghetto from elimination by the emperor, the rabbi consults The Book of Necromancy once more. It warns of adverse effects if the Golem were allowed to live past a deadline determined by the position of the planets: If you have brought an inanimate being to life through magic, beware of your creation. When Uranus enters the house of the planets, Astaroth will reclaim

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his instrument. Then the lifeless clay will turn against its master intent on deceit and destruction.

Loew turns to the Golem and tells it that “Your task is done. Become lifeless clay once again, lest the dark powers seek vengeance.” He takes it upon himself to carry out the death of his creation. The Golem is not allowed immortality, for the rhythm of nature and the cosmos delimits its time on earth. If we understand the Golem’s existence as a self-reflexive allegory of the life of film, we could also say that this duration is limited by its death drive. At this moment, the Golem begins to learn of its own mortality and becomes increasingly sensitive to the fragility of its own life. Despite having an armored body and being seemingly invulnerable, the artificial life begins to recognize its own precariousness. And despite having saved the ghetto and fulfilled the tasks assigned to the Golem by its creators, the uncanny life vehemently resists being shut off by lunging away from Loew as its creator reaches for the shem. The Golem recognizes its own defenselessness and places its thick hand over this spot of vulnerability as an act of self-preservation (Figure 4.7). In effect, in the face of imminent annihilation dictated by the position of the planets, at the moment the inevitability of death presents itself most acutely, the Golem chooses to live. It chooses to live according to a time that is nonteleological and confounds predetermination, living the time it takes for its life to come to an end. In other words, the Golem begins to pursue its own immanent death drive at the moment it demonstrates this instinct for self-preservation. According to

Figure 4.7  The Golem, 1920

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Freud, everything living dies for “internal reasons,” meaning that animate life seeks its own path toward inanimacy and that this path must not be forcefully interrupted by a hostile other—life must be allowed to flourish and pass away of its own accord.38 At two separate moments, others attempt to snatch the Golem’s life-enabling shem away, but the Golem adamantly refuses both times. The first I have already discussed, in the scene immediately following the completion of the Golem’s task. The second involves Famulus, in a scene that takes place toward the end of Wegener’s film. He commands the Golem to pursue and eliminate Florian (Lothar Müthel), the emperor’s knight who has been wooing Miriam (Lyda Salmonova), Rabbi Loew’s daughter. Famulus acts out of jealousy, for he loves Miriam as well. As Famulus reaches for the shem, the Golem is again angered, placing its hand over this defenseless body part. As the Golem vehemently resists its death in the hands of the aggressive other, it begins the search for its own path toward mortality, effectively continuing its life. In doing so, the Golem’s survival recasts chronological time as lived, existential time—the spectator’s experience of The Golem from beginning to end. Laura Mulvey’s Death 24x a Second explicates how the figure of death is part and parcel of the moving image, allowing us to draw further correspondences between the fragile life of the Golem and the existential contingencies of the cinema. Mulvey reminds us that the spectator must disavow the discrete, still images whose succession constitutes film’s movement. In the case of narrative film, she identifies a correspondence between the cinema’s unfolding and the spectator’s imputation of causality that narrativizes this unfolding. Cinema and narrative, Mulvey explains, press forward and culminate in the trope of death: Narrative needs a motor force to start up, out of an inertia to which it returns at the end. The cinematic image can find visual equivalents for these different phases: an initial stillness, then the movement of camera and character carry forward and energize the story, from shots to sequences through the linking process of editing. But at the end, the aesthetics of stillness returns to both narrative and the cinema. Death as a trope that embodies the narrative’s stillness, its return to inanimate form, extends to the cinema, as though the still frame’s association with death fuses into the death of the story, as though the beautiful automaton was to wind down into its inanimate, uncanny, form.39

Drawing from Peter Brooks’s essay “Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative,” Mulvey explains that the death drive underpins the movement “brought to life by the filmstrip’s forward movement on the projector’s reel.”40 In this, narrative finds its double in the “beautiful automaton” that is the cinema. If

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every narrative contains within it a drive toward death, every narrative film also contains a corresponding drive toward the image of death—that is a desire to return to stillness. The Golem chooses its own uninterrupted path to this inanimate state, just as the moving image seeks the end of the final film reel, without the interruptions of a burnt projector lamp, a power outage, or other mechanical failure. Indeed, there is some overlap here with my reading of Fritz Lang’s Destiny. In the previous chapter, I tried to show how the temporalities of life and death are folded into the singular moment, and to explicate how its three episodes, set in an Islamic caliphate, Renaissance Venice, and mystical China, allegorize the ebb and flow of the life and death drives. As narrative film finds its conclusion, it vacillates between “savage and meek,” becoming increasingly self-reflexive of its own ontological tenuousness. In the next section of my discussion of The Golem, I will continue to build on the precariousness of the Golem’s life, in order to show how the shared precariousness of the human spectator and the cinematic allegory overcomes their mutual antagonism in the last scene of the film.

In the beginning was the relation In an essay written in 1929 called “Dialogue,” Buber reflects on an incident that took place sometime during World War I. A young man approached him, then in his late thirties and experiencing a time of great strife, to seek out the older man’s guidance. They engaged in conversation but Buber recounts that he did not connect with him in spirit. “I certainly did not fail to let the meeting be friendly, I did not treat him any more remissly than all his contemporaries who were in the habit of seeking me out about this time of day as an oracle that is ready to listen to reason.”41 Later he was dismayed to learn that the young man had killed himself, and that the true reason for seeking out Buber was to decide whether the young man should choose life or death. This was a watershed moment for the philosopher, for he began to see that the religious, which before the war he had aligned with extraordinary moments “that were taken out of the course of things,” was not separate from everyday life, but part and parcel of it.42 Buber had “failed” to allow himself to be present before the young man in his hour of despair, and to properly respond to his call for relief.43 He realized that the religious is not located in some lofty realm removed from existential reality, but is realized through a relation of openness

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to the other: “If that is religion, then it is just everything, simply all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue. Here is the space also for religion’s highest forms.”44 The realm of the religious is grounded in the dialogical encounter, latent to the potentiality of every lived moment and immanent to all mundane human experience.45 When the final scene from The Golem is read through Buber’s dialogical encounter with the religious, with “all that is lived in its possibility of dialogue,” Wegener’s film no longer evokes the anxiety of technology, but instead delineates how a relation of openness to the technological other may be made possible.46 The vulnerability of the Golem’s life, described earlier through the ebb and flow of the life and death drives, remains crucial in distinguishing the relation of the I-It to the ethics of what Buber calls the “I-You” relationship. Ultimately, The Golem provides a model of spectatorship, of a relation between the human viewer and the cinematic technology, that is radically different from that described by theorists of the apparatus. This semiotic/ideological model of looking depends on a transcendental subject who disavows her own death. The Golem, on the other hand, allows this spectatorial subject to realize, through the allegory of the death of cinema, her own fragility and relation to the other, beyond that associated with the fetishizing, objectifying gaze. In the last scene of Wegener’s film, the Golem definitively returns to its original, inanimate state. This scene is dramatized through a dialogical exchange between the artificial creature and a blonde, Gentile girl. Following the fire that burned Loew’s laboratory to the ground, the Golem breaks open the doors of the ghetto. It looks around in wonder, while a group of children scream in terror. They run away, yet one young girl remains, looking at the clay creature with naïve curiosity. The Golem sees the girl and picks her up in its arms. She then offers the Golem an apple (Figure 4.8). The mechanical beast looks at her and conspicuously smiles, obviously enjoying her playful presence. Historian Omer Bartov notes how the Golem transforms into a “gentle ogre” before the little girl in this scene, writing, “The shift is from symbols of physical weakness and satanic rites into the epitome of physical prowess and the most intimate proximity to nature: the clay monster in search of sunlight and beauty.”47 Though Bartov clearly sees strains of medieval and modern European anti-Semitism circulating in Wegener’s work, he nevertheless believes that “The Golem is not an overly antisemitic film.”48 The girl traces the contours of the Golem’s clay body with her hand, and touches the shem on its chest. She then removes it and the creature drops her. The

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Figure 4.8  The Golem, 1920

Golem falls back lifelessly. A number of young girls gather around and sit on the inanimate lump of clay, as if to pose for a photograph. Suddenly the Jews emerge from the ghetto and the girls once again scatter. Loew looks at the inanimate Golem and remarks, “Give thanks to Jehovah. For the third time today he has saved his people.” The Jews then pick up the clay creature and bring it back into the ghetto, back within the clay walls to which the Golem is presumably to return. The Star of David appears superimposed on the façade and the film promptly ends. It should be noted that this scene was wholly invented by the filmmaker himself, and is not a part of the accounts recorded in the Talmudic texts, or in the traditional folklore surrounding the Golem-legend. According to Wegener, “The story of the Golem I have known since childhood. My first encounter with it was somewhere in Heine.”49 And so, this is how the Golem leaves the world, after having entered and dwelled in it, and after having fulfilled its task. Death, this final scene from Wegener’s film suggests, is an event that is carried out in collaboration with another. The Golem exposes its life-enabling shem to the child, who is uniquely and singularly able to take it away. As in the final scene in Fritz Lang’s Destiny, where the maiden and her beloved are reunited through death, two precarious beings, here between artificial life and innocent life, gaze at each other in an act of mutual recognition. In order to theorize how this moment culminates in an allegory of film spectatorship, argued through a philosophy of dialogue and humility before the other, I return to Buber’s I and Thou. I have already discussed how the I-It relation may be read in the interaction between the emperor and the Jews, as well as between the human being and the

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inhuman Golem. However, the majority of Buber’s I and Thou addresses the dialogical “I-You” word pair. Buber hyphenates this term to designate how “I” and “You” are bound together, indicating that the pairing should be treated as a single word. Moreover, the hyphen emphasizes the primordiality of the between (Zwischen) that constitutes the pairing. The between of the I-You exists prior to, and as a condition of, the distinction-making that characterizes the I-It: this relation exists before the I and the You are individually categorized and codified as such. It names the basic comportment of openness before the other. If the Golem serves as an allegory for cinema, this final scene also teaches us the first lessons in the ethics of cinematic spectatorship, and the ethics that mediate the relationship between looker and looked-at. Near the beginning of the text, Buber characterizes the naiveté of the child as it reaches out toward others in the world, a naiveté that grounds the openness of the I-You relation. Before birth, the possibility for relation is integral to lived life, ontologically and historically, as he explains, “The prenatal life of the child is a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity.”50 Resembling the undifferentiated self that pre-dates what Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” the infant, born into its world, does not yet recognize itself as a discrete ego, as an atomized self separate from the world in which it inhabits.51 For Buber the longing for concrete relation is innate, and the child will use its entire means to make this contact possible. He notes that this longing for contact also includes relations with nonliving objects: It is not as if a child first saw an object and then entered into some relationship with that. Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles; and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying You, comes second. But the genesis of the thing is a late product that develops out of the split of the primal encounters, out of the separation of the associated partners—as does the genesis of the I. In the beginning is the relation—as the category of being, as readiness, as a form that reaches out to be filled, as a model of the soul; the a priori relation; the innate You.52

The wordless I-You encounter results from the primordial desire for encounter with the other. Like the little girl in Wegener’s film, the child for Buber seeks relation with the Golem and presumably with other entities in the world, beyond all ideological and ontological distinctions that delineate Gentile from Jew. Buber insists that this desire is originary, that it exists prior to language. It pre-dates the apprehension of external objects and precedes the narcissistic aggressivity

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that typifies, to cite a previous example, the defiance of the son against the father (i.e. little Ernst and the desire for Cartesian mastery in the fort-da game). Before knowing ontology, the child is compelled to long for communion with its surroundings, suspended as in an oceanic field of being. That children seek relation with worldly things is further illustrated by Béla Balázs in his chapter “The Face of Things,” in The Visible Man from 1924. Balázs explains that the close-up in cinema allows the spectator to realize and sense the expressivity, the physiognomy, of everyday objects such as tables, cupboards, and sofas. Children have a particular affinity for the face of things: Children have no difficulty understanding these physiognomies. This is because they do not yet judge things purely as tools, means to an end, useful objects not to be dwelt on. They regard each thing as an autonomous living being with a soul and face of its own. Indeed, children are like artists, who likewise want to depict objects, not make use of them.53

Children are sensitive to the faces of inanimate things because they do not perceive everyday objects merely as tools to be utilized, as things that will benefit themselves. The logic of means-ends, which is at the essence of the I-It relationship, eludes the child, for it desires a coalition with things based on affinity, not identity. For children, Balázs might argue, have an innate ability to say “You” to everyday objects, to understand things beyond their vulgar usevalue in capitalist modernity. The close-up in film makes possible this childlike attraction to objects, for when objects are seen as surfaces imbued with expressive potential, “every wrinkle becomes a crucial element of character and every twitch of a muscle testifies to a pathos that signals great inner events.”54 In these interactions between the child, the Golem, and the close-up on the clay creature’s face, the spectator is invited to take up a child-like relation to the allegory of film. More broadly, the I-You relation between children and things illuminates the mutual reaching-out of life to life. Throughout I and Thou, Buber carefully preserves the delicate openness toward the other that is innate to lived life, while holding representational thinking at bay. Analysis and categorization quickly foreclose the possibility of an authentic encounter, including the very use of the signifier “You” to designate the other person. “Even as a melody is not composed of tones,” Buber writes, not a verse of words, nor a statue of lines—one must pull and tear to turn a unity into a multiplicity—so it is with the human being to whom I say You. I

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can abstract from him the color of his hair of the color of his speech or the color of his graciousness; I have to do this again and again; but immediately he is no longer You.55

Buber calls for a new humility, to remain vigilant to one’s own metaphysical prejudices and preformed perceptual categories that inadvertently divert progress along the path toward a relation with the You. Thus mere, everyday conversation with the other does not guarantee the relationality of the I-You. Buber makes a distinction between experiencing (Erfahren) the other as an objective form and being present (Gegenwart) before the other. He remains highly suspicious of linguistic signification in general, for the sign, if left unchecked, merely mediates alterity, and cannot provide immediate access to it. Once words are made to represent the other person, there no longer exists an I-You relation, but the perception of another as an object of consciousness: “The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination.”56 This is why he repeatedly privileges the wordless encounter, for its silence enables an anticipatory comportment toward the other. Awaiting discourse, such an encounter facilitates the capacity to listen to the other’s voice. Life lived cooperatively, according to Buber, desires the reciprocity of the authentic relation, beyond the mere transmission of data through the instrumental use of language. It is significant that Buber develops these ideas around relation and dialogue at a historical moment when international politics were becoming increasingly entrenched and brutalized. In his essay on “Dialogue,” Buber recounts an intraEuropean meeting of thinkers and peacemakers he organized in Potsdam in 1914. Included were Frederik van Eeden, Gustav Landauer, Henri Borel, and Florens Christian Rang. Romain Rolland was invited but was unable to attend. They met for three days during Easter 1914 to discuss the possibility of intercultural contact in an increasingly internationalizing world, one in which they could sense growing hostilities between nations. Their discussions, while initiated by the spirit of coming together, were nevertheless not without tension. When the group met again in August, Rang raised the objection that too many Jews were represented among them. Buber recounts that this tension at first seemed unfair, but he quickly realized that it offered the opportunity for reconciliation: “Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest.”57 He spoke out against the ontological boundaries reinforced by racial and ethnic categories, refusing to acquiesce to the quantifying logic of the I-It. Buber recounts speaking about

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Jesus and remembers reassuring Rang that the Jews understood Christians “from within,” in a way that complements their own understanding of themselves. “He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. ‘It is gone,’ he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.”58 In this silent encounter, the tension between them disappeared and from that moment on, they established a bond that grew deeper until Rang’s death in 1926. Buber then recalls that “The discussion of the situation between Jews and Christians had been transformed into a bond between the Christian and the Jew. In this transformation dialogue was fulfilled.”59 This meeting from 1914 is a key anecdote that Buber would retell in subsequent correspondence with colleagues, essays on his dialogical philosophy, and throughout I and Thou. Like the concluding scene in The Golem, the anecdote suggests that as the strife between I and It grows, so does the possibility for dialogue. The I-You is opposed to the I-It, but this does not mean that the objectification of the latter forecloses the possibility of the former. Buber recognized that radical epistemological and social changes concomitant with the modern age increasingly figure human subjects as instrumentalized data. He, like many Weimar thinkers, saw industrialization as an essentially alienating process, trapping human life within the cage of rationality: “The unlimited sway of causality in the It-world, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the man who is not confined to the It-world but free to step out of it again and again into the world of relation.”60 Confined to the It-world, the self, in dealing with others, exists in relation to itself only as an instrumentalized object of capitalist modernity. Buber sees that in modern life “egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.”61 In order to step out of the logic of total reification and into the world of relation, rigorous and profound critique, a continual “protest against the protest” of the bounded self is required. However, Buber does not call for a total relinquishing of the self: he wishes for the self to remain open to the possibility of a “return.”62 This return is not a reversion to a nostalgic, primitive past, nor to a nationalistic ideology, but a return to the possibility of being-with-others that has always been present since birth. By turning to critique, one sifts through the panoply of empty dogma to discover dialogue once again. Buber references the Romantic poet Hölderlin to illustrate this ethical return, in the midst of dark times following the war: It is a descent through the spirals of the spiritual underworld but could be called an ascent to the innermost, subtlest, most intricate turn that knows no Beyond

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and even less any Backward but only the unheard of return—the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? But where there is danger what saves grows, too.63

Startlingly, this 1923 passage from Buber quotes the same key line from Hölderlin that Heidegger references in his essay on technology from 1955.64 In this postwar moment, Buber was thinking of the deleterious effects of technological modernity on human ethics, and particularly of the tendency toward metaphysical reification that remains integral to all modern social relations. Yet overcoming the thingliness of It-world is contingent, not upon the wholesale refusal of its reifying effects, but paradoxically upon the affirmation of its own means as a possibility of human thought, being at once a critique and confirmation of its own epistemological grounds. Only by taking up such a critical-affirmative position may a more freeing attitude toward the other be realized. Earlier I pointed to the Golem’s demonstration of self-preservation at several moments in the film. Each time, when Loew attempted to remove the shem from its breast, the Golem immediately protected it with its hand, preventing its human master from turning off its source of vitality. These stand-offs are staged as battles to the death between man and his artificial creation. The final scene of the film functions differently: the Golem allows the child to remove the shem from its chest, relinquishing its drive toward self-preservation (Figure 4.9). It is

Figure 4.9  The Golem, 1920

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as if, recognizing the child’s desire for relation with it, the Golem recognizes its own finitude as a living being. At the moment when the Golem achieves a kind of basic relationality with the little girl, the ego-centered I that underpins the drive for self-preservation is overcome, while the part of the Golem that is fabricated paradoxically allows the little girl (and by coextension the viewer) to recognize its finite destiny. By staging this relationship, The Golem also stages a manner of looking and being with the other that confounds the tendency of the gaze to objectify, performing what film theorist Vivian Sobchack calls the “humane gaze.” In her important essay, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” Sobchack writes that this ethical manner of looking “resembles a ‘stare’—a fixed look that tends to objectify that at which it gazes—except for the fact that it visibly and significantly encodes in the image its own subjective responsiveness to what it sees.”65 Overcoming the notion of a spectator that is disembodied and sutured to the apparatus in an imaginary relationship, The Golem manifests sympathy with the mortal, allegorical life of the cinema, while the allegory itself sympathizes with the young life that makes its own death possible. Through this, the film non-melodramatically elicits the sympathy of the mortal viewer as well. Buber speaks directly to the confluence of the conscious and unconscious human self, making a sharp distinction between the I that self-preserves and a kind of egoless, corporeal drive that seeks to survive.66 He suggests that the corpus possesses a kind of fundamental intelligence distinct from conscious intelligence. The body, not the I, not the abstracted self, desires to relate to the world. Could it not also be said that in this conclusive scene from Wegener’s film, the Golem and the little girl, silently encountering each other in an egoless manner delineated in Buber’s I and Thou, dramatize how any person may approach another in a profoundly humble manner? For it is in such a meeting of two precarious, mortal living bodies, in a mutual opening of vulnerabilities, face-to-face with each other, that the finitude of the ostensibly invulnerable Golem is realized. The face of the other defies the desire for mastery such that, as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, “the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.”67 In order for this invitation to otherness to be manifest, it is necessary that the viewer acknowledge the “physiognomy of things” that is integral to what the moving image can show. In many ways, Levinas’s thinking of ethics remains closely aligned with Buber’s; however, the French thinker remained skeptical of the formulation

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of the I-You word pair as an ontological “substance,” and has claimed that it appeals ultimately to a metaphysical position occupied by a third person, to an observer standing outside the I and You.68 Constituted through film images, The Golem no doubt accedes to this critique, for the cinema places the spectator in such a position at its conclusion. Yet, in the attempt to aspire toward Levinas’s rigor, I argue that the I-You relation between the Golem and the girl allegorizes a possibility of a relation between the film spectator and film apparatus because the Golem must be read self-reflexively. This possibility makes sense when the viewer is asked to experience the cinema itself in a relation of proximity and humility.69 Buber did not elaborate on the theme of death in I and Thou from 1923, but he did provide extended commentary on the topic in a fictional work published in 1913, the novel Daniel. Composed as a series of dialogues, Daniel reveals Buber’s evolving thinking between his earlier mystical orientation and the dialogical philosophy of I and Thou.70 I conclude my analysis of The Golem with this text in order to summarize my interpretation of its last scene and to reiterate the ethics between the human child and the technological creature. Each of the five dialogues in Buber’s Daniel revolves around an existential theme, such as destiny, the nature of reality, meaning, and the problem of otherness. In the last of the five chapters, “Dialogue By the Sea,” the character Lukas speaks of the death of someone whom he hardly knew and the great impact it had on him afterward. Above all, it reminded Lukas of his own mortality and the role of death as the ripening of life. A passage from this chapter seems to anticipate what Freud identified as the life and death drives: There was not only in me a force that moved from the point of birth to the point of death of beyond; there was also a counterforce from birth to death, and each moment that I experienced as a living man had grown out of the mixture of the two—they mixed with each other like man and wife and created my being, and I never stood in the stream, but all the time in stream and opposing stream at once. What I knew was the stream coursing downward alone, but what I was comprehended the stream coursing downward and the stream coursing upward in one.71

This notion of existence reminds Lukas of the transience of all worldly beings, and his own primordial affinity to the sea and its tidal motion. Correspondingly, the Golem, made from the earth, comes to understand the implications of its impermanent ontology in the final scene of Wegener’s film. For Lukas, the death of his distant friend and his own survival reminded him of his responsibility:

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“He is dead for me; how do I begin to live for him?”72 Lukas begins to think of himself as a separate I, distinct from worldly others yet intimately connected to them. He seems himself as responsible somehow for their flourishing. Continuing the dialogue, Daniel responds that “whoever experiences the world experiences it as duality.”73 He explains that our task as mortal beings is to recognize the ontological tensions that underpin the otherness of worldly entities, and to overcome them. To this end, Daniel tells his interlocutor of an experience he once had with a piece of glittering mica. Like the relation of the child to the Golem’s earthen clay staged in the last scene of The Golem, the following anecdote tells of Daniel’s encounter with the mineral shard: On a gloomy morning I walked upon the highway, saw a piece of mica lying, lifted it up and looked at it for a long time; the day was no longer gloomy, so much light was caught in the stone. And suddenly as I raised my eyes from it, I realized that while I looked I had not been conscious of “object” and “subject”; in my looking the mica and “I” had been one; in my looking I had tasted unity. I looked at it again, the unity did not return. But there it burned in me as though to create. I closed my eyes, I gathered in my strength, I bound myself with my object, I raised the mica into the kingdom of the existing. And there, Lukas, I first felt: I, there I first was I. The one who looked had not yet been I; only this man here, this unified man, bore the name like a crown. Now I perceived that first unity as the marble statue may perceive the block out of which it was chiseled; it was the undifferentiated, I was the unification. Still I did not understand myself; but then there flashed through me the memory: thus had my body fifteen human years before done the simple deed and, the fingers entwined, united life and death to “I.”74

Buber’s revelation here revolves around the notion that the I can be extended outward toward mundane, worldly objects. Unity is not a mystical experience, a feeling of identity or oneness with the world.75 It is a lived phenomenon that synchronizes transience, the rhythm of life and death, with the living observer, retaining the separation of the I and You while recognizing their shared drive toward mortality. This synchronization is not theoretical: it achieves a mode of coexistence that is unified, not simply with the You, but with the temporal evolution of the I as it lives in time. Buber reiterates this incident with the mica in I and Thou to emphasize the precariousness of the I-You relation, reminding us once more that all living things, even artificially fashioned creatures, are always at risk of becoming It and of becoming reified, immobile objects. “O fragment of mica,” he writes

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in 1923, “it was while contemplating you that I first understood that I is not something ‘in me’—yet I was associated with you only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it happened at that time.”76 The danger of thingliness always remains, for every You can quickly become an It—and one must remain vigilant to this transformation. A direct relation between I and You cannot sustain itself in modernity, but must alternate between actuality and latency, enduring in its irreducibility and abiding in the undecidability between thingliness and otherness.77 Once again, here lies the precariousness of modern existence in relation to a society of others, and yet it is also here where the saving power grows.

An ethics of vision In my analysis of Cesare’s awakening scene from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I discussed a 1922 article by Zweig called “Theses on the Theoretical Foundation of Film.” In this piece, he rehearses familiar arguments surrounding the artistic legitimacy of the cinema and described “the essence of film” as having principally to do with the animation of the inanimate and the free development of life in its surroundings. Six years after his humiliating experience with the Jewish census, Zweig celebrated the art of cinema in this article. Elsewhere in this piece, however, Zweig moves beyond the image of corporeality set against the backdrop of nature, and identifies cinema’s ability to express a “feeling of the world” (Weltgefühl), compelled by a well-conceived plot: However the film’s most essential means of sublimation is a meaningfully invented plot; a plot invented for this particular film that expresses a feeling of the world; i.e., a way of giving form to the concept of fate, by which a life or sequence of actions is arranged into wordless, visible scenes so that, through the contact between moving people and animate nature, a symbol emerges of solitude or dignity, for how humans are being guided or left on their own on this earth. The best film I remember in this regard is Wegener’s Golem.78

Zweig does not delimit cinema’s potential to the narrow realm of entertainment and escapist storytelling. Rather, he seems to suggest that the cinema can express itself by telling a narrative of solitude or dignity. Along these lines, Zweig identifies The Golem as emblematic of how the film medium can engage the humanity of its spectators. Through the contact between “moving people and

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animate nature,” film shows us “how humans are being guided or left on their own on this earth.” In other words, if film allegorizes life and its vital impetus, then Zweig seems to suggest that film also allegorizes how its human spectators relate to this uncanny form of life.79 In contrast to the objectifying look delineated by theorists of the apparatus, the ending to Wegener’s Golem presents a spectatorial possibility that emphasizes the encounter of being and looking in relation to the technological other. At the beginning of its existence, the Golem’s coming to life is filled with wonder, and with a fascination in a fundamental capacity of the film medium: the art of bringing dead things to life. At the end, another kind of fascination is staged, one no less astonishing, yet perhaps more profound in its meditation on transience. One realizes that the Golem is not an invincible, monolithic machine, a weapon tasked with killing the other, but a vulnerable being. In the narrative trajectory of Wegener’s film, it emerges from mere objecthood, or an “It” as in Buber’s I-It relation, to become a precarious form of life. These final moments of the cinematic allegory do not allow for easy appropriation by a narcissistic spectator, for it asks that the Golem’s uncanny status be apprehended as standing at the threshold between familiarity and unfamiliarity, between life and death. As we begin to sympathize with the fragile inorganic life of the Golem, the creature asks that its ontological strangeness be recognized and for the spectator to humbly suspend its habituated desire to appropriate and exploit. By recognizing how the Golem is connected to animate, finite life, Wegener’s film is, recalling Zweig’s “Theses” once more, “a way of giving form to the concept of fate, by which a life or sequence of actions is arranged into wordless, visible scenes so that, through the contact between moving people and animate nature, a symbol emerges of solitude or dignity, for how humans are being guided or left on their own on this earth.” The Golem is not merely a Diener, who exists only to serve the narcissistic needs of the human spectator, and who disappears in the image it provides of the world.80 The cinematic allegory is an inorganic, organized being that lives among us, who collaborates with the human spectator to constitute the world. The ethical relationship between human and technology is to be distinguished from the interpellation of the transcendental spectator because both the cinema and the human spectator are bound by the phenomenal experience of time as fleeting and transient. Such a coexistence approaches what film curator and theorist Paolo Cherchi Usai calls the “Moral Image,” in the culmination of his book on the ethics of film preservation called The Death of Cinema.81 Read in the way

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Zweig suggests, The Golem shows us that a theory of film spectatorship does not consist solely of a viewer fetishistically sutured to a representation of the world as an extension of her own narcissistic ego, but begins with a relation of the viewer to the material world itself—a relation that finds its allegorical counterparts in mica, animate clay, and in precarious life. This is a critical lesson, I think, that we may learn with respect to the presence of all moral, moving images in our lifetimes. If, as we read in the Film-Kurier, “like the earth and the sea the Golem is related mysteriously to the constellation of the stars,” this living lump of clay reminds its human interlocutors of the mysterious synchronization of the cinema to its surrounding world. The Golem emerges from the earth and will return to it via the cycle of life, embodiment, mortality, and time. In this regard, the cinematic image is not simply a representation of the world, but is intrinsically a part of the natural cycle that constitutes it. Furthermore, the correspondence of cinema to its others reminds the mortal spectator once more of the relation to her others. The relationality illuminated in the final scene from Wegener’s film provides an alternative to the notion of the duped, disembodied viewer, held captive—and captivated—by the ideological effects of a monolithic cinematic apparatus. Rather, one animate being becomes vulnerable before the other, in a relation between screen and spectator modeled in the last scene of The Golem. Wegener’s film teaches its spectators how to say “You” to the cinema.

5

Technologies of Revenge Fritz Lang’s The Nibelungen (1924) and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923)

“Death is no conclusion,” remarks Fritz Lang, in a line he wrote for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Le Mépris (Contempt). In this highly self-reflexive film about love and the cinema, Lang plays a character called “Fritz Lang,” a film director who is adapting Homer’s Odyssey. In the scene where he speaks this line, Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), the scriptwriter for the lavish production, tells Lang about Odysseus’s wife Penelope, who kept her many suitors at bay while Odysseus was fighting in the Trojan War. Engaged in battle for ten years, the hero was believed to have died on the battlefield. Penelope remained faithful during Odysseus’s absence, but eventually became restless and offered her hand in marriage to whoever could conquer her contest of the bow. Meanwhile, Odysseus returned to Ithaca and, in disguise, took part in the competition and won. Penelope, however, had already fallen out of love with him. “The only way to regain it,” Javal explains, “was by killing the suitors.” Odysseus was forced to slaughter the men who tried to take his place. In response, Lang remarks, La mort n’est pas une conclusion. In a 1965 interview with journalist Gretchen Berg, Lang refers to this phrase as one “in which I believe deeply.”1 He then goes on to explain its significance, offering an anecdote about revenge, similar to the story told by Homer: “Suppose I am in love with a woman. She betrays me. I kill her. What’s left of me? I’ve lost my love because she is obviously dead. If, instead of killing her, I had killed her lover, she would hate me and I would have still lost her love. No, children, death is not a solution.”2 Lang, the septuagenarian at the end of his filmmaking career and speaking as a grandfather to the generation of the Nouvelle Vague, warns the youth of the futility of vengeance and alerts them of the murderous desires that inevitably follow betrayal.3

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In what follows, I will analyze two films, The Nibelungen by Lang and Warning Shadows by Arthur Robison. My aim is to problematize revenge in a manner espoused by Lang in 1963 and 1965, bringing the calculative logic of vengeance to the breaking point of its justification. I will first show how revenge is complicit with the totalizing logic of instrumental reason in order to expose how it implicates an ethics between self and other that resembles what Buber calls the I-It relation. We shall see that much of what underpinned the triumphalism of the postwar survivor, manifest through Teacher Johannes in Reinert’s Nerves, will underpin the psycho-philosophy of the vengeful self. Lang’s film is set in the world of medieval heroes, dragons, and magic helms, but the vengeance demanded by Kriemhild in The Nibelungen conforms to the world of modern capitalist exchange and, as I will show, the abstraction of morality as a consequence of Nietzschean ressentiment. Modern revenge, carried out violently and precisely, disavows factical life by attempting to master it, and in so doing, calculative vengeance forecloses the possibility of forgiveness. One life is exchanged for another, acceding to the economy that was adamantly refused by the maiden in the conclusion to Lang’s Destiny. The logic of revenge also subtends the aesthetics and narrativity of The Nibelungen, suffusing the visual compositions of the shots as well as motivating linkages between them. The following discussion will take this logic to the limit, in order to show how Lang’s film simultaneously incites the vengeful, resentful tendencies of the film spectator while allowing her the opportunity to critically recognize her own complicity with it. This critique of vengeance will be bolstered through my treatment of Warning Shadows, where its futility is presented in a much more explicit manner. The film’s mode of critical self-reflection is unambiguous, for it features a shadow play that depicts a self-reflexive allegory of the film medium. Despite its instrumentalized rendering of revenge, similar in this regard to Lang’s work, Warning Shadows nevertheless opens up a new kind of relationality to the other by taking recourse to the fictional, “as if ” character of the future temporality inherent to the basic temporality of the moving image. Thinking film as a medium for doing philosophy allows us to think ontology, not metaphysically, but as a potentiality, as what may come to pass. In Chapter 3, I have already shown how death may be understood as a certain possibility of life, allegorical of the intrinsic not-yet of the moving image. Warning Shadows thematizes this potentiality through a shadow play that unfolds in mise-en-abîme, making a spectacle of revenge so that it may undergo critique by the spectator. We shall see that this critique

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belongs uniquely to the cinema, and is decisive in formulating the ethics of that which cannot be subsumed to instrumental reason, thus instigating a different relationship to technology along the lines delineated in the previous chapter. Taking my cue from Lang, I will argue that both The Nibelungen and Warning Shadows allow the spectator the opportunity to think and to recognize that indeed “death is no conclusion,” bringing the ontological interrogations of the cinema performed throughout this book to bear on an ethics of lived practice.

The Nibelungen (1924) and the politics of blame Hitler, Hitlerism, fascism is the ecstasy of bourgeois youth: this contradiction between strength and bourgeoisie, between ecstasy and the most lifeless nationalism makes the movement into a specter. It does not become any more real through the feudal ghosts it carries with it, through the alliance of powerfully present enthusiasm with long-sunken chivalric dreams or Old Germanic folk royalty from the tenth century. Ernst Bloch, “Hitler’s Force” (1924)4 Lang’s Nibelungen reveals a deep historical basis for its depiction of revenge. This two-part mega-production, which first screened to German audiences in 1924, draws from proto-fascist myth and imagery circulating in the Weimar Republic. As writer W. G. Sebald, allegorist of modern Germany, describes in a 1999 essay, The most precise paradigm of that myth is Fritz Lang’s 1924 film Kriemhilds Rache (“Kriemhild’s Revenge”), in which a nation’s entire armed forces moved forward almost deliberately into the jaws of destruction, finally going up in flames in a stupendous pyromaniacal spectacle. It clearly anticipates the Fascist rhetoric of the “final battle.”5

Sebald rehearses an argument whose historiographical origin may be traced back to Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, a text that also treats Lang’s film as “clearly anticipating” fascist rhetoric. In the last, pyromaniacal scene of Kriemhild’s Revenge, the titular character watches impassively as the ones who wronged her are cut down and their kingdom goes up in flames. I want to argue that The Nibelungen goes beyond Sebald’s characterization of it, however. Moving from character identification to alienated criticality, Lang’s film offers the contemporary spectator the opportunity to reflect on the telos of this final battle and consider the ethics of vengeance.

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However, the conclusion of The Nibelungen cannot be fully appreciated without a sense of the plot that leads to up it. Freely adapted from what has been called Germany’s Ur-saga, the Nibelungenlied, Lang’s five-hour long Monumentalfilm takes the spectator through the life and death of the blonde hero Siegfried (Paul Richter) and depicts the subsequent actions of his scorned wife Kriemhild (Margarete Schön). Part one, Siegfried, begins with the title character forging his powerful sword under the supervision of his teacher, the dwarf blacksmith Mime (Georg John). Mime tells the hero of Kriemhild, the noble Burgundy princess. Inspired by his tale, Siegfried immediately departs for Worms on the Rhine to win her hand in marriage (Figure 5.1). On the way he confronts the mighty dragon Fafner (brought to life by art director Erich Kettelhut and operated by sixteen unseen human operators) and slays him in a thrilling melee. As blood pours out of the beast’s wounds, a bird sings that bathing in the dragon’s blood will render one’s body “forever safe against sword and spear.” Siegfried washes himself with the liquid, except for a spot on his back covered by a fallen leaf, marking a point of vulnerability that will prepare his future death. When Siegfried enters Worms, King Gunther (Theodor Loos) and his advisor emerge to meet Hagen (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Kriemhild also appears in ceremonial fashion. Noting Siegfried’s fascinated gaze toward his princesssister, King Gunther promises her hand in marriage if Siegfried agrees to help him win the tenacious Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), Queen of Iceland, as his own wife. Siegfried agrees and they travel to Brunhild’s kingdom together. In order to test his mettle, Gunther is put through three heroic challenges, which

Figure 5.1  The Nibelungen, 1924

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include throwing a spear, heaving a huge boulder, and leaping a great distance. Facilitated by Alberich’s Tarnhelm, a magic helmet that allows its wearer to become invisible, Siegfried helps Gunther conquer Brunhild’s tests of athleticism, amazing all his onlookers. Gunther forces Brunhild’s hand and the two couples are married in the Burgundy kingdom. The Icelandic queen, however, remains skeptical of Gunther’s physical achievements and later learns of his trickery. In order to recuperate her damaged pride, she orders Hagen to kill Siegfried. While on a hunt, Hagen challenges Siegfried to a running race to a nearby brook. The blonde hero reaches the stream first and stoops down to drink the clear water. As he does so, Hagen hurls his spear, precisely striking Siegfried’s vulnerable spot. Part one ends gravely, with an image of Kriemhild mourning the loss of her husband, and vowing vengeance. Part two of Lang’s film, Kriemhild’s Revenge, as its title suggests, centers on the scorned princess seeking retribution. The story picks up from the first part, as Kriemhild sends Ruediger the Margrave to Etzel (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), King of the Huns, who evidently “knows how to avenge” the scorned widow. With the Huns by her side, Kriemhild believes she will become powerful enough to destroy the Burgundians and win justice for Siegfried’s death. Indeed, she is no longer the noble and dedicated woman depicted in part one of The Nibelungen. Kriemhild has since become much more shrewd and suspicious, while implicating herself in the Realpolitik of strategic pacts and sacred oaths. Hagen senses her growing resentment and steals the Nibelung treasure, hiding it so that it may not be forged into weapons. Kriemhild takes leave of her homeland and travels into the Hun hinterland. Its inhabitants are depicted as primitive savages, dirty and disorganized, wearing jewelry bones and animal skins.6 Etzel receives Kriemhild with gratitude and they are soon married. Eventually she bears him a child. Kriemhild repeatedly reminds him of her continued suffering and urges Etzel to attack the Nibelungs, who have come into proximity of their kingdom. She incites the Huns to engage in conflict and a lengthy, mass battle ensues. In the last act of the film, Hagen and Gunther find themselves trapped in the Huns’ palace. Kriemhild insists that the Burgundy king and his advisor be brought to her personally. Her demands are rebuffed, however. Full of rage, she orders the palace to be burned down by arrows tipped with fire. Gunther and Hagen stumble out of the flaming building and are made to confront Kriemhild so that she may face her enemies and finally have her vengeance. Gunther is beheaded and Hagen is cut down with his own blade.

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In his reading of The Nibelungen, Anton Kaes contextualizes the representation of Siegfried within the culture of war memorialization and hero worship following Germany’s loss in the Great War. Kaes forges a link between this imagery and the nationalist undertones circulating in early Weimar culture: “In 1924, the well-toned body of the actor who played Siegfried carried connotations of a strong and youthful national body. Lang’s film anchored national identity in the body of Siegfried.”7 Paul Richter’s blonde hair, sharp facial features, and half naked-torso conveyed idealized qualities of healthy German masculinity, one that would have resonated with recuperative fantasies of virility imagined by a psychologically damaged populace.8 In contrast to the mutilated bodies of soldiers photographically represented in Ernst Friedrich’s pacifist manifesto Krieg dem Kriege (War Against War), a text published in the year of Lang’s film, the image of a strapping Siegfried provided a bulwark against the notion that Germany’s loss may be attributed to the physical weaknesses of her young men fighting on the front.9 Kaes connects this image of health to the wider context of Weimar body culture, whose biopolitics were perpetuated in imagery deployed in UFA’s Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925) as well as in Leni Riefenstahl’s films, The Holy Mountain (1925) and Olympia (1938). The image of Siegfried’s body partakes in a contemporaneous discourse of defiance in the face of military defeat, where “patriotism could be openly displayed at a time when the nation was no longer allowed to express itself in military form.”10 In the aftermath of the war, fallen soldiers were memorialized through medieval iconography that preserved a sense of national continuity by linking the war-scarred present to Germany’s preindustrial, premodern past. Resurrecting tales of chivalry, legends of male camaraderie, and stories of glory on the battlefield, acts of postwar commemoration attempted to make sense of the Great War’s legacy through the vocabulary of nation, nationality, and myth. When in 1926 the mayor of Koblenz, Karl Russell, urged the Reich Chancellor to build a war memorial on the River Rhine, he explicitly evoked this legendary resting place of the Nibelung treasure: Our ethos shall be like a new Nibelungen hoard of purest gold. When the memorial rises on the River Rhine, we want to come to honor our dead. A feeling of deep gratitude shall overcome us: gratitude for their loyalty, patriotism and devotion to the nation and the state. It shall prompt us to emulate them. The memorial shall be a substitute for the pilgrimage to the grace of the dead, not only for their relatives, but for all their fellow countrymen.11

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With these comments, Russell was also implicitly invoking the eternal struggle for the Rhine against Germany’s invaders. When France occupied areas of the Ruhr, Saar, and Rhine regions, and annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 1919, these measures were understood in light of the Reich’s historical claim on these areas since 1871, as well as in light of the mythical thousand-year struggle for the River Rhine. The Nazis would not overlook France’s imperialist occupation of German soil, and Hitler would campaign on the notion of recovering Germany’s brethren in 1938. Two years later, citing the “right” to vengeance, the Nazis would force France to give up these western territories. In 1916, sculptor Josef Müllner proposed a memorial commemorating fallen students at the University of Vienna. It took the form of a gigantic bust of Siegfried, eyes closed in eternal sleep, lying on a black marble plinth.12 When young men throughout the Reich were called to mobilize for battle, it was this memory of young Siegfried that was repeatedly called to mind through the motto, “Siegfried has awakened!” The blonde hero stood for values that presumably were more authentic, more archaic than those concomitant to modern European Zivilisation. “Lang’s Nibelungen,” Kaes writes, “recast the war in the terms of a medieval honor code, and argued that Germans lost the fight precisely because they upheld archaic notions of loyalty not shared by others.”13 Linked to the discourse of the German Sonderweg, such notions reiterated the “special path” many before the war felt to be Germany’s particular political destiny between democracy and autocracy. Perhaps no other trope embodied this discourse of a Germany standing defiantly alone in the midst of untrustworthy adversaries than the notorious Dolchstoßlegende, or the “stab-in-the-back legend.” On November 1919, General Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg publicly claimed that the civilian population did not properly support soldiers fighting on the war front, thus precipitating Germany’s defeat. He explicitly stated that “The German army was stabbed in the back,” and in doing so displaced the responsibility for military loss onto imagined enemies lurking within Germany’s borders.14 The Dolchstoßlegende served to obscure von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff ’s failure to achieve victory in war, and it quickly gained legitimacy as it incorporated racist and xenophobic beliefs circulating at the time. The legend perpetuated cynical rightwing notions that socialists, Jews, and unfaithful women were to blame for Germany’s loss. While expressive of a desperate desire to relinquish guilt onto those crudely deemed to be other to themselves, these delusional “stab-in-the-back”

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Figure 5.2  The Nibelungen, 1924

discourses correspond closely to the images of Siegfried’s death in part one of The Nibelungen (Figure 5.2). Kriemhild herself divulges the location of Siegfried’s spot of vulnerability by sewing a cross on his tunic, appearing as a small target on his back. When Hagen kills him, he decisively breaks her trust. Siegfried’s death is understood as a dishonorable murder, one driven by political proxy and the individual desire for power, and resonated with the notion that Germany’s loss may be blamed on the alleged “November criminals” and other “traitors” to the Fatherland. The still image of the blonde soldier with a long spear lodged in his back was even reproduced and disseminated as a post card in the Republic, duplicating racist propaganda that depicted German soldiers literally being stabbed in the back by so-called “Jewish Bolsheviks.” In the first part of The Nibelungen, this betrayal is depicted as necessary and justified, whose logic substantiates what Walter Benjamin calls “mythic violence.” In his essay “The Critique of Violence,” published three years before Lang’s film premiered, Benjamin calls violence “mythic” when it is utilized as a means toward a predetermined end, which alone justifies its utilization. Mythic violence “brings at once guilt and retribution,” is “bloody,” and oscillates between its juridical capacity to posit law as well as to preserve it, in order to relentlessly realize its inevitable telos.15 From the perspective of mythic violence, revenge is warranted when the vengeful believes it to be an act of moral righteousness. Violence is deemed necessary by a sovereign subject when it is deployed toward a predetermined end; violence exchanged from one to the other. Characterizing the oscillation between the positing of law and its preservation as a state of legal

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exception, Giorgio Agamben notes that Carl Schmitt’s 1922 definition of the sovereign, as he who decides, emerges precisely from the anomic space occupied by the indistinction between violence and law. Sovereign power finds root both inside and outside law’s binding jurisdiction. In turn, the sovereign subject embodies the exercise of power that calls for and exacts vengeance.16 Analogous with Benjamin’s elucidation of mythic violence, Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler, identifies a similar kind of means-ends justification in a pointed reading of Lang’s film. “Fate’s pace-maker is Hagen, whose sinister presence suffices to prevent any good luck from slipping in and altering the inevitable.”17 He draws attention to the compulsory, cause-effect logic that governs the film’s revenge narrative with the use of the word “Fate,” an organizing principle that relentlessly threads its way through The Nibelungen. If the pursuit of revenge may be said to provide an overarching structure to Lang’s film, then according to this strict logic, an eye must be necessarily compensated with an eye, a tooth must be given for a tooth, and betrayal must be followed by revenge. From one to the other, all these connections are rendered seemingly self-evident by appealing to a transcendent logic of mythic violence. For Kracauer, this linkage of means to a predetermined end is overseen by the power-hungry Hagen, whose adherence to the principle of necessity foreshadows “a well-known type of Nazi leader.”18 He sees this causal rigidity echoed in the mise-en-scène of the film. The austere, highly ritualized acting, the larger-than-life, monumental architecture, and the rigor of the perspectival framework organizing each shot—all this aesthetically mirrors Fate’s uncompromising compulsion. This compulsion is perhaps most explicitly metaphorized at various moments in The Nibelungen when living beings become inert things, as if to illustrate the rigidity of Fate’s inevitability. Instead of inanimate things becoming animated by the film technology, these moments illustrate a reverse transformation. The animative powers of cinema succumb to the uncompromising demands of linear narrative, as the afterlife of film becomes reified, or mummified. When Brunhild disembarks from a boat, numerous calcified human bodies slavishly support the landing-stage on which she walks ashore. There are also the enslaved dwarves that hold up Alberich’s treasure, whose living bodies are transformed into inanimate, stone figures. They acquire, as Wilhelm Worringer puts it in Abstraction and Empathy, a “geometric-crystalline regularity.”19 Notably, in this text first published in 1908 and reprinted several times throughout the war and following it, Worringer writes that this tendency toward crystalization is a response to “the bewildering and disquieting mutations of the phenomena of

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the outer world,” thus reflecting a subject formation that is believed to be under siege by outside forces.20 In both moments from Lang’s film, these docile bodies are portrayed as instruments, thingified and exploited in the manner of Buber’s I-It relation—and not to be sympathized with. For Kracauer, their physical reification anticipates a key element of fascism’s totalizing ideology: It is the complete triumph of the ornamental over the human. Absolute authority asserts itself by arranging people under its domination in pleasing designs. This can also be seen in the Nazi regime, which manifested strong ornamental inclinations in organizing masses. Whenever Hitler harangued the people, he surveyed not so much hundreds of thousands of listeners as an enormous ornament consisting of hundreds of thousands of particles.21

Writing in 1947, Kracauer sees the ornaments in The Nibelungen as anticipating the ideology of German fascism, from Hagen to Hitler, from one to the other. Lang himself echoes this use of the word “ornament” in an essay called “Disbanded Masses,” published in 1924. The filmmaker notes that one of the most difficult problems in the cinema is that of depicting individual human beings, each possessing an individual intellect and will, existing within a mass. The human extras in Siegfried may be characterized as “becoming ornament,” for in Lang’s film, “the mass is not a supporting actor. It has barely the status of an object.”22 Fitting his reading into a broader sociological argument about cinema in the Weimar Republic, Kracauer writes that Lang’s “whole statement somewhat anticipated the Goebbels propaganda,” making the ideological trajectory from The Nibelungen films to Hitler explicit.23 During a Bierabend that took place in Hotel Kaiserhof nine years later, on March 28, 1933, Joseph Goebbels is claimed to have expressed his admiration for Lang’s Nibelungen. According to sources, it is very likely that Lang himself had attended this party.24 In this year, Siegfried (and not Kriemhild’s Revenge) was reedited and rereleased by UFA, with a Wagnerian soundtrack and voice-over narration delivered by Theodor Loos. Whether he knew it or not, Lang’s adaptation of Germany’s founding myth resonated with proto-fascist sentiments in Weimar culture, not only in content, but also in form. While Lang was working in Babelsburg, writing and filming The Nibelungen, another figure was working through the thematics of revenge: Hitler was in prison writing Mein Kampf. Published in 1925, part one of his book is entitled Abrechnung, a word that carries two meanings, “reckoning” and “billing statement.” Throughout his book, Hitler viciously accuses “Jewish Bolshevism”

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of not only stabbing the German military in the back during the war, but also poisoning the Reich. Citing a plethora of reactionary explanations full of ressentiment—the degeneracy associated with Jews, urbanization, Europe’s growing secularism, and the implementation of democracy after the war— Hitler perversely claims that Germany’s defeat was the “deserved chastisement of eternal retribution.”25 Throughout the text, the figure of Siegfried and the Dolchstoßlegende are explicitly invoked to garner nationalistic sympathy for his cause. When Hitler calls for the extermination of everyone who stands in the way of mass nationalization, he evokes the eternal, obstinate demand for the total compensation of moral debts from all his enemies. Read as a picture of its times, Lang’s film may be understood as a reflection of history: from film to the cultural context in which it was produced and received, from one to the other, The Nibelungen to Hitler.

The queen of the night At the very end of part one, Kriemhild stoops down to look at Siegfried’s lifeless corpse lying on a funeral bier. She places her hand on his heart, where Hagen’s spear had pierced his body. As she closes her eyes in sorrow, the film cuts to a short sequence depicting Kriemhild’s internal anguish. In it, a long shot shows Siegfried holding his arms out wide, in elation, before a blossoming tree. Here, not long ago in the film’s narrative, the young hero had informed his beloved of his invisible role in Gunther’s athletic victories over Brunhild. This image of Siegfried standing triumphantly in front of a tree recalls the Heldenhaine, the “heroes’ groves,” found in almost every small German town after the war that memorialized fallen soldiers with oak trees. According to George Mosse, the Heldenhaine functioned as surrogate military cemeteries, consisting of rows of trees symbolizing rows of graves. “Nature herself was to serve as a living memorial: the German wood was a fitting setting for the cult of the fallen.”26 In the midst of these oak trees, a linden tree was often placed to symbolize the Kaiser. Siegfried’s pose imitates the flowering tree standing behind him, as if to anticipate his own symbolic memorialization. He stands and looks self-satisfied, and then the scene suddenly darkens, evoking the presence of death in the midst of life. The woody plant blooms, rapid and unnatural, in time-lapse photography. The ball of leaves finally transforms into a hoary death’s head, a Totenkopf.27

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Siegfried then disappears into the blackening background, while his absence is signaled by the lingering memento mori (Figures 5.3 and 5.4). Lang takes us back to Kriemhild as she mourns her fallen warrior. Hagen and others have ceremoniously entered the small room. She returns from her vision and demands that her betrayer be brought to justice. Gunther and his men surround Hagen, seemingly to obey Kriemhild’s wishes. Then her brother remarks, “Loyalty for loyalty, Kriemhild. His deed is ours. His fate is ours. Our breast is his shield.” Expressing solidarity with his fellow male comrades and recalling the exclusivity of the Kameradschaft, the male bonding of front soldiers, Gunther will not side with her. At first deeply disappointed and then truculent,

Figure 5.3  The Nibelungen, 1924

Figure 5.4  The Nibelungen, 1924

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Kriemhild grimly addresses her nemesis: “You might try to hide among my clan, behind the altars of God, or at the end of the world: You cannot escape my vengeance, Hagen Tronje!” Her ritualistic gestures throughout part one of the Nibelungen, expressive of an inner dignity, seem to express an inflexible tenacity in part two. In Siegfried Kriemhild wears virginal white, while in Kriemhild’s Revenge, she dons black costume, the color of bereavement born from scorn. In her essay on Lang’s film, film scholar Sabine Hake identifies contrasts such as these that appear throughout The Nibelungen and argues that they underpin the film’s totalitarian aesthetics: “Oppositions manifest themselves primarily through form (round/upright); shade (light/dark); surface (smooth/rough); movement (immobile/mobile); and states of matter (firm/fluid).”28 Echoing Kracauer’s argument concerning the film’s fascist, rigid mise-en-scène, Hake argues that such visual juxtapositions allegorize the dramatic struggles that drive the narrative forward, and more specifically the interlocking of shot-toshot achieved through the process of cinematic suture. Like the narcissistic, scopophilic desire for narrative continuity, the desire for narcissistic vengeance drives the plot of the film through its continuous overcoming of the film’s dramatic oppositions. Indeed, like the movement of the dialectic, vengeance in Nibelungen connects plot points with a precision that is concomitant with the systematic disciplining of life in modernity. Obeying the dictates of Fate, Kriemhild’s desire for revenge not only preordains the future, but also reinforces notions of quantified, universal time in the present, with the aim of legitimizing her cause. Moreover, if vengeance underpins the narrative of Lang’s film, and this narrative parallels the fascist desire for vengeance against those who stabbed the German army in the back, then the stakes for elucidating this ethics, circumscribed by the strict logic of means and ends, are not only cinematic, but also historical and political. Lang’s film reflects the desire for vengeance sought by defiant Weimar survivors, and in turn, The Nibelungen may incite some postwar spectators into justifying their right to vindication against all of Germany’s enemies. In order to explicate the logic that underlies vengeance, I need to describe some of its necessary preconditions. In a time of political strife, revenge was a particularly urgent topic of philosophical scrutiny in modern German culture. A notable example may be found in Ressentiment, the first mature work by Berlin philosopher Max Scheler published in 1912. As its title indicates, Ressentiment is a reading of Nietzsche’s elaboration of a special type of resentment discussed in The Genealogy of Morals, a text that would have been familiar to both Lang

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and von Harbou. Scheler’s book analyzes accumulated feelings of hatred and envy that cannot be expressed against those who are perceived to be superior in rank. These essentially reactive feelings remain unexpressed, or are not acted upon, because they are dominated by an intense counterfeeling of impotence. Over time, ressentiment compels the revaluation of weakness felt by the envious along moralistic lines. They revalue those others who are perceived to be stronger than themselves, calling them “evil” through a gesture of vehement revisionism; they are described as immoral and without compassion. The weak ones in turn legitimate and reappraise themselves as morally “good,” casting themselves as full of humility and kindheartedness. This revaluation is bolstered through a righteous herd mentality that collectively mobilizes against the moral exception. Scheler calls the desire for revenge “the most important source of ressentiment,” in that by remaining an essentially reactive impulse, a desire born from an injury inflicted by another, the thirst for revenge gives way to the revaluation of values discussed by Nietzsche.29 Scheler identifies two “essential characteristics” of revenge, both of which reify the separation of self and other, again like that of the I-It relation, according to a fundamentally instrumental logic.30 “First of all, the immediate reactive impulse, with the accompanying emotions of anger and rage, is temporarily or at least momentarily postponed to a later time and to a more suitable occasion (‘just wait till next time’).”31 Because the subject of ressentiment perceives herself to be impotent in relation to her transgressor, the satisfaction of revenge is deferred to the future. Yet through this deferral, the memory of the past transgression is retained and awaits realization through an anticipated act of retribution. The temporal span of this waiting period may be identified as the experience of ressentiment. The one who awaits their revenge remains reluctant to express their hostility, and accepts the repression of their own seething anger in exchange for the promise that it will be unleashed in the future. This promise guarantees that one’s suffering will not be for naught and ensures that the resentful, envious one will eventually have their day. “Furthermore,” Scheler continues, “it is of the essence of revenge that it always contains the consciousness of ‘tit for tat,’ so that it is never a mere emotional reaction.”32 The state of ressentiment brings about an abstracted consciousness of a moral order of rank, so that differences between friend and enemy are made clear. It transforms an injured feeling into a reified thought by casting the other as a quantifiable entity over against the sovereign self. Revenge

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concocts such a ranking so that the moral content of the transgressor may be made measurable, to justify the righteousness of the vengeful, and to grant the sovereign right of death and power over the life of the evildoer. Scheler notes that revenge is not simply an impulsive, “animalistic” reprisal. Rather, it concocts an intelligence of justice that applies to both sinner and sinned. Through this, the vengeful one adopts a morality that she believes is crystal clear, is legible on the bodies of individuals, in order that her ressentiment may be justified via a “primitive law” of exchange, one for another. Its genealogy may be traced back to mythic Roman law, lax talionis, the law of retaliation, or “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”—this logic gains legitimacy as it implicates every modern subject, both weak and strong.33 Scheler is careful to distinguish the state or condition of ressentiment from the act of revenge that exculpates the resentful condition. For the desire for revenge disappears as soon as the transgressor has been punished for his or her transgression. Until such a moment, the vengeful one remains contemptuous, burning with rage. “It likes to disparage and to smash pedestals,” Scheler writes, “to dwell on the negative aspects of excellent men and things, exulting in the fact that such faults are more perceptible through their contrast with the strongly positive qualities.”34 In the midst of ressentiment, revenge sees only those characteristics of the hated other that will prolong its eternal fire. Its cynicism is inextricably linked to its entrenched narcissism, in that the vengeful derives a kind of masochistic pleasure from dwelling in its own injured, weakened state. Indeed, the dynamics of possession and moral exchange points to a highly pessimistic ethics, a crude, Hobbesian “war of all against all.” This ethics may be explicated further by turning to some key passages from Nietzsche’s text. In the Second Essay of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche illuminates the relationship between the transgressor and the vengeful other by the double meaning of the word Schuld, which means both “guilt” and “debt.” He identifies a primeval, contractual relationship that gives rise to these two words, “between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.”35 In a fragmentary text written in 1921, Benjamin observes how capitalism gives way to religion through the “demonic ambiguity [Zweideutigkeit]” of the word Schuld, elaborating on Nietzsche’s observation.36 Based on this primitive ethics, a mythic law beyond juridical law, the violent punishment dealt to the transgressor becomes justified via the law of compensation and through the measurement of the guilt/debt of one in relation to another. The aim is to neutralize the Schuld

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between two parties. In English, one calls this “payback.” Revenge constitutes and is constituted by this dynamic by transferring debt from one person to the next, through the payment of one human life for another. Yet seen from a broader perspective, vengeance, in the unrelenting desire to “get even,” merely instigates and perpetuates a continuous circle of anger and resentment. For the egoist who cannot abide any outstanding debts, their mounting rage compels them toward acts of revenge, to demand total reimbursement from the other— Abrechnung indeed. Nietzsche notes that moral payback gives rise to the sadistic pleasure of momentarily becoming master over the one who has committed the transgression: At last, he, too, may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as “beneath him”—or at least, if the actual power and administration of punishment has already passed to the “authorities,” to see him despised and mistreated. The compensation, then, consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty.37

In contrast to the lesson conveyed through Lang’s statement that began this chapter—“death is no conclusion”—death is the end point of the dynamics of ressentiment. Revenge is not satisfied with mere payback, but also demands the sadistic pleasure of seeing the hated other suffer. Through this, the violence of retribution takes on a mythic, almost festive quality, grounded in the metaphysics of Schuld and justified via a predetermined end. “Blood cries for blood,” Kriemhild gravely remarks to Ruediger in part two of The Nibelungen. Recalling the old idea of buying and selling, this logic of “tit for tat” clearly determines Kriemhild’s revenge. She repeatedly demands that her husband’s death be recompensed with the death of Hagen. While distributing alms to the poor who beg outside her castle, she remarks, “In the name of Siegfried who was murdered and whose murderer lives!” Kriemhild then asks them to remember and “bear in mind how Siegfried died!” In parallel action, the film cuts to a shot of Hagen’s hawkish figure pacing in the room where the Nibelung treasure is stored (Figure 5.5). He briefly picks up a pearl necklace and throws it back into the pile. Hagen opens a trapdoor in the middle of the room, loads a shield with precious gold and jewelry, and takes it below into an underground cave. He dumps the treasure into the subterranean water, letting the spoils sink into its cavernous depths. Kriemhild is later notified that the treasure won by Siegfried had been stolen by Hagen. She accosts him and asks

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Figure 5.5  The Nibelungen, 1924

where he hid the gold. Hagen’s response infuriates her: “The loyal Hagen speaks: At a place, my lady, where no one can use the gold to forge weapons against the kings of Burgundy!” His theft of the Nibelung gold reiterates the logic of exchange that governs the law of morality between himself and Kriemhild, while deepening his debt to her and further justifying her impending scorn. A historical connection may be drawn here, specifically to the passions that dictated the conclusion of the war. In the proceedings of the Paris Peace Conference in early 1919, the so-called “Big Three”—Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau—insisted that the peace treaty they were drafting include Germany’s full recognition of its war guilt, and that this guilt should be paid back through considerable reparations. This astronomical payment, 226 billion Reichsmark, was closely connected with the “War Guilt Clause” in the Versailles Treaty and would cause massive resentment among Germans after the war. Intertwining guilt, debt, and money, the cultural logic of Schuld, applicable to the politics of both the Allied and Central Powers, made it possible to quantify Germany’s moral liability. British economist John Maynard Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), wrote that this “Carthaginian peace is not practically right or possible.”38 He warned that the demanded reparations, “whether in gold, commodities, ships, securities or otherwise,” would make it almost impossible for Germany to return to the community of nations, unless Germans were to drastically and immediately accept severe reductions in their standard of living. While a sum that is within Germany’s capacity to pay would “leave her with

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some slight incentive for enterprise, energy, and hope,” the payments demanded by the Peace Conference “skins her alive year by year in perpetuity” and would come to be judged as “one of the most outrageous acts of a cruel victor in civilized history.”39 In Keynes’s view, the members of the Conference were being vindictive and he opined that: The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety. Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandizements, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge, and to the shifting by the victors of their unbearable financial burdens on to the shoulders of the defeated.40

Keynes’s assessment would prove correct, and the demanded reparations would sow the desire for eventual payback. In this, Lang’s film would have resonated with Weimar’s culture of ressentiment, widespread throughout postwar Germany, and with the perception, particularly on the political right, that the overreach of the Versailles Treaty should be responded to in kind. Revenge only begets further revenge, Keynes seems to suggest through his untimely critique, in perpetuity. Above all, it is Kriemhild who allegorically carries out this exchange-based, calculative logic. Before embarking on the journey to Etzel’s kingdom, Kriemhild travels to the place where Siegfried was killed. She dismounts from her horse, takes a handful of dirt stained by her husband’s blood, and raises it ceremonially. She remarks, “Earth, you were once soaked in Siegfried’s blood. One day I shall come and drench you with the blood of Hagen Tronje!” Kriemhild makes a contractual promise with the earth itself. She then takes the sacred soil into her possession and mounts her horse. Her memory, bound with the earth, ordains the future and her title to cruelty. Her ceremonial gesture grounds her agency while enabling her own resentful hostility toward her hated malefactor. Indeed, the discourse of Blut und Boden is implanted at this moment of the narrative so that it may be narratively redeemed at the very end of the film.41 At the end of part two of The Nibelungen, as the Hun palace goes up in flames and the Nibelungs’ numbers dwindle, Gunther and Hagen are brought out before Kriemhild. Finally face-to-face with her transgressor, she decrees that she cannot return to her Siegfried “until every wrong has been atoned.” Kriemhild once more demands that Hagen tell her of the location of the treasure won by Siegfried (Figure 5.6). Hagen responds that his loyalty to

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Figure 5.6  The Nibelungen, 1924

his king will not be broken, still refusing to reveal the location of the stolen riches. “I swore not to betray the location of the treasure as long as one of my kings is alive!” She gestures offscreen as the film cuts to a grim image showing the already decapitated head of King Gunther. Hagen laughs and responds, “Now, Kriemhild, nobody knows about the treasure but God and me and God is no more discreet than I!” Done with discoursing and with the intensity of ressentiment at its height, she cuts him down. Closing her eyes in deep satisfaction, Kriemhild holds out the earth gathered at the beginning of part two of the film and remarks, “Now, Earth, drink your fill.” So ends Lang’s five-hour long film and so ends her resentful bloodlust. Power speaks through blood, symbolic of Kriemhild’s honor and her triumph over death. Like Johannes in Robert Reinert’s Nerves, she rejoices in her continued life, having defeated those who betrayed her, while disavowing time and its transience by becoming master over it. Blood cries for blood, just as vengeance follows the inexorable logic of tit for tat. The earth here functions as a kind of memory bank, where the blood of the fallen is deposited and memorialized, awaiting redemption through retaliation. When the treacherous Hagen falls, he is returned to the earth while Siegfried’s death is returned to Kriemhild. Her vendetta concluded, the film concludes as well, with debts no longer outstanding as the film’s narrative tension is assuaged. Suffering is answered by its equivalent, accompanied by the sadistic pleasure in venting pent-up aggression and seeing another suffer. At the end Kriemhild feels, as Nietzsche writes, the “exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath [her].’ ”

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Yet as her cruel vengeance takes on a passionate intensity, she becomes increasingly rigid in her ethics, increasingly incapable of forgiving Hagen and Gunther. And by the end of five-hour long narrative, the viewer may be repelled by Kriemhild’s unyielding, cruel righteousness, and frustrated by her severe quid pro quo. Despite her initial justification for Hagen’s blood rooted in the murder of her beloved, she may push the spectator’s sympathy to the limit, seeing that she becomes as cruel as the one who wronged her. So it is with this apocalyptic final scene, both tragic and horrific as Kriemhild impassively watches the Huns’ castle go up in flames, that the film viewer is left with an ethical dilemma: identification with or alienation from the vengeful.42

Cinema and the politics of time The essence of mechanical explanation, in fact, is to regard the future and the past as calculable functions of the present, and thus to claim that all is given. On this hypothesis, past, present and future would be open at a glance to a superhuman intellect capable of making the calculation. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)43 In an article published in 1924 called “Stilwille im Film” (“Determination of Style in Film”), Lang elucidates the “ethical task” of his Nibelungen films. Appealing to Germany’s national specificity, he maintains that they are to teach people of the world the depth of German myth and fairy tale. Lang sees this as an opportunity to bring German legend to the masses, which have already been acclimatized to the sensationalism of the American melodrama. Above all, the cinematic adaptation of the Nibelungenlied is an opportunity to showcase aesthetic possibilities specific to the film medium. Notably, these possibilities have something to do with the experience of cinematic duration: For the film provides the spectator with a living image. He sees events taking place, but does not hear them. And in the widest sense the cinema bases itself on the image of an incredible sense of inexorability [unerhörte Unerbittlichkeit] that gradually builds from the first guilt [Schuld] to the last atonement.44

The spirit of vengeance motivates each of the highly composed shots of Lang’s films, through the highly ritualized acting style and the long takes of the lengthy Nibelungen, through scenes that simmer with ressentiment. In contrast to the speed of Lang’s Mabuse films from 1922, the pacing of these 1924 films is

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slower and more deliberate. In the following, I would like to elaborate on the “incredible sense of inexorability” dramatized by Kriemhild’s vengefulness, which Lang aligns with the spectator’s durational experience of The Nibelungen itself, by elucidating a fundamental relation between vengeance and temporality. Although revenge is, as I have quoted from Nietzsche, as “old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic,” in Lang’s film revenge also obeys the logic of modern, mechanical time. Through this, The Nibelungen, as a form of thinking, embodies the ethics of politics in general in modernity. The duration it takes for the film to unfold from beginning to end, from stillness to movement and back to stillness, is the duration that the vengeful await their final reckoning. Paralleling the narrative trajectory from tension to resolution, they seek a suitable conclusion to their suffering and an end to their ressentiment. And driven by the principle of moral retaliation, they rationalize a linear sequence of events, folding them into a narrative of justice, while imputing to the world of the diegesis a causal necessity. By schematizing duration according to the narrative logic of plot and dénouement, the film is compelled to narrate a plot that must conclude with the promise of Kriemhild’s vengeance and thus satisfy the viewer’s desire to see the promise fulfilled. In this, the long duration of Lang’s Nibelungen is subjected to what Bergson in his 1903 essay on metaphysics, discussed in the introduction of this book, calls “analysis.” The inexorable unfolding of the film is made to serve Kriemhild’s bloodlust, and disciplined to obey the demands of cinematic narrativity. Tom Gunning, in his reading of The Nibelungen, describes the unfolding of the film in terms of what he calls the “Destiny-machine,” which I briefly mentioned in Chapter 3 but is central to his reading of Lang’s 1924 film. Gunning’s term describes the mechanical nature of the world in which Lang’s characters are situated, a world that manifests an inhuman logic unfolding according to the dictates of Kracauerian Fate. Fate is not a metaphysical concept, but a “material” one. It allegorically binds film to the structuring logic of the modern world dictated by causal, linear necessity. In this sense, the Destiny-machine, as a rational logic, is allegorized in the final images of each chapter of the film. According to Gunning, each presents a tableau that encapsulates the narrative conflict of the section that precedes it: Each of these images anticipates a future which will undo the apparent moments of control, harmony or invulnerability. These potential reversals are not witnessed by the characters, who remain ignorant of the plots into which they

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are pulled. It is the structure of the film which asks us to read them as the fate of the characters and the workings of the Destiny-machine. Thus the narrative structure of Gesänge plays a similar role to the set design in creating an enclosed world of fatality.45

While Gunning emphasizes the dialectical aspect of the images that conclude each Gesang, each chapter of the film, I propose that the entirety of the Nibelungen may be seen in this manner, such that every image in the film seems to allegorize how the mechanical unfolding of a narrative film constructs “an enclosed world of fatality.” All the images seem anticipate a future that is predetermined, subject to a master logic of narrative totality, and are thus unable to transcend the material Fate of the film medium. The characters, however, remain ignorant of the Destiny-machine that underpins their revenge, and are compelled forward through the plot, even as they believe to be acting out their individual wills. Thus the world reflected in The Nibelungen is not simply that of myth and legend. It is also an allegory for the early Weimar Republic inhabited by Lang and von Harbou: the world of instrumental reason, of narrative cinema, and a world in which individuals are reified and quantified. In the postwar period, when many Germans cynically believed the Republic to be devoid of moral and political legitimacy, when prewar notions of national honor waned in an increasingly urban, increasingly internationalizing culture, Lang’s film provides a vision of mythical law and justice by appealing to nationalist imaginations of undying medieval legend. In doing so, this appropriation reflects less the archaic German codes of pragmatic honor, and much more the political strategems operative in rational modernity, and their adherence to the closed, linear ethics of means and ends. This dialectic of myth and rationality, Adorno and Horkheimer would famously explain in their 1947 essay on the dialectic of enlightenment, is precisely constitutive of instrumental reason. Far from definitively conquering the superstitions of the past, these nostalgic fantasies of myth and legend are perpetuated in modernity as ideological mass deception. In this, The Nibelungen is materially rooted in the world of capitalist exchange, and not in the legendary world of dragons and magic helmets. For Kriemhild, for whom blood cries for blood, this exchange allegorizes the logic of capitalist exchange-value and the reification of her hated enemy. Her memory stubbornly persists into the present as a function of her pursuit of justice, in full accordance with the logic of debt and anticipated payback. In order for the vengeful one to think this ethics, it must posit itself as existing

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outside of time, and take up a distanced, analytical view with respect to its own lived, existential temporality. Ressentiment, as Scheler notes in this regard, is an attitude that proliferates in a capitalistic, republican society, particularly as a consequence to the belief in the political equity of human being, while real class differences are maintained in civic society. Feelings of ressentiment are produced by the tension felt between the consciousness of instrumentalized valuation and the ideals of democracy, for “when we feel unable to attain certain values, value blindness or value delusion may set in.”46 A social system that allows winners and losers through the antagonism of egos enables the belief in the right to ressentiment and eventually the right to mastery over the despised one. At the beginning of the second essay from the Genealogy, Nietzsche explains that the promise of futural payback is dependent on the notion of the human being as a calculable entity, as embodying moral characteristics that are graspable by modern consciousness. Calculation inaugurates a normative morality by eliminating risk and the experience of anticipated trauma brought about by the other, while regimenting notions of justice and ordaining the other’s moral knowability. In order that a debt may be compensated through vengeance, the moral being must be invented, and made the object of the spectatorial look, such that the content of one’s character may be made available for comparison, and so that the relative inferiority or superiority of the other can be made legible. From the standpoint of a mechanized ethics, the promise of retribution retains a futural act of will that will, that must, be discharged on one’s transgressor. Nietzsche explicates this plainly: To ordain the future in advance in this way, man must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from chance ones, to think causally, to see and anticipate distant eventualities as if they belonged to the present, to decide with certainty what is the goal and what the means to it, and in general be able to calculate and compute. Man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is to be able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!47

The promise of futural punishment within the realm of ethics necessitates a knowable other, whose sins, intentions, desires, and hopes are transparent to the one who vows revenge. Reification thus responds to risk, in order to safeguard the scorned ego against unforeseen threats and potentially hostile others. Ordaining the future in advance, the vengeful ground their rage in the metaphysics of quantified time and in their moral certitude.

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Already this logic is a contractual one that inextricably binds the future to the past. To have certainty about the past legitimates the assertion of power over another in the future. Not only does the one who promises vengeance project a future “as if they belong to the present,” the past is also folded into the consciousness of the here and now. Thus in the parlance of vengeance, “holding a grudge” means: to hold onto an image of one’s nemesis, and to not let go of the memory of a past transgression. As Kriemhild showed us in part two of The Nibelungen, it means never to forget one’s own suffering and rage in relation to the quantified other, sustained as a memory in the present. I should note that this understanding of temporality stands in contrast to the critique of modern temporality I laid out in my reading of Lang’s Destiny from 1921 in Chapter 3. With regard to his Nibelungen from 1924, I want to be clear: temporality is rigidly cast, conforming to the vulgar time of modernity. Its orientation eliminates that which cannot be subsumed to instrumental reason, reflecting an inability to think in a nonteleological manner. I perform a critique of this mode of thinking in order to lay bare its political implications, concomitant with a wholly rationalized, totalizing, and ultimately resentful use of modern time. The tendency to make comparisons between moral actors is the key source of ressentiment, which finds root in an already reified consciousness. Schuld in modernity quickly passes into the world of commodity fetishism, further cementing the modern conceptualization of the thingified other. In his 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Georg Lukács notes that under capitalism time takes on an essentially mechanistic character, subordinating the proletariat to the vulgar logic of the clock. “Thus time,” he writes, sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality); in short, it becomes space.48

The time of capitalism tears the human subject from the experience of qualitative duration. Lukács explains that the bourgeois subject in particular demands clear distinctions between reality and illusion, inside and outside, in order to maintain a worldview that disavows consciousness of class. Time is evaluated in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness, turning factical life into a means and not an end-in-itself.

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Like the dwarf workers that go from living being to inanimate stone in Lang’s film, which for Kracauer allegorize the becoming-ornament of the living entity, the human worker is reified as a consequence of capitalist ideology: the triumph of the ornamental over the human. This concept of reified time is allegorized by the linear narrativity of Nibelungen, for its construction, through cause-effect montage, is believed to correspond to the “natural” order of things, an order that itself is the product of reification and reinforced through the moral certitude of the vengeful subject. Benjamin understood this when he wrote, in his 1921 fragment, “Capitalism as Religion,” about the ubiquity of capitalist thinking in modernity and the way it governs morality: “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt [verschuldenden Kultus], not atonement.”49 Mechanized and spatialized, capitalist time forms key tropes of many of Lang’s films, including his very next production Metropolis (1927), as well as M (1931), Ministry of Fear (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), and all three Mabuse films. Not coincidentally, the mechanics of revenge appears as a key narrative feature of all of these films as well. To summarize: if in capitalism time quantifies the “mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker,” it is this reification that also characterizes the measurability of the other, as a being with a moral power that is predictable and can be rationally predetermined. In The Nibelungen, this mechanical objectification is reflected not only in the ornamental human beings who hold up Brunhild’s landing stage, but also through the precise, deliberate actions carried out by the main protagonists of the films. Lang’s film brings exchange-value, which underpins the fetishism of the commodity, into the realm of ethics, of debt and payback, translated into the language of honor, reputation and shame as they circulate between social actors. Subjectivity takes on a metaphysical, political character, enabling concepts of revenge and the demand for equal reciprocity—both corresponding to the normal course of historical temporality. In this manner, revenge marches in step, like clockwork, with the rhythm of modern, mechanical time.

The critique of the ethical self in Warning Shadows (1923) Schatten—Eine nächtliche Halluzination (Warning Shadows: A Nocturnal Hallucination) tells the story of an aristocratic count (Fritz Kortner) and his

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beautiful wife (Ruth Weyher). They are hosting a dinner party in their grand nineteenth-century mansion. Four male guests of varying ages arrive and begin immediately to lavish attention on the wife. She leads them to the spacious dining room. All the while she smiles and enjoys the company of her admirers, particularly of the young lad in the group (Gustav von Wangenheim).50 Frequent close-ups of her husband’s face clearly show his disapproval, and as the evening progresses his displeasure grows to jealousy. Explicitly allegorizing the flatness of the film image, Warning Shadows repeatedly plays with the two-dimensional representation of bodies gesturing in three-dimensional reality. In one scene, while the woman prepares for dinner in her dressing room, she admires herself in a mirror. Her shadow appears on her curtained door. Behind her, the young suitors act as if to caress her body. The woman and the men do not actually touch, yet their conjoined shadows seem to suggest otherwise (Figure 5.7). In Cinema 1, Deleuze comments that this illusory conjunction, while independent of the actual state of things, nevertheless gives rise to actual affects: In Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows, two hands only intertwine by the extension of their shadows, a woman is only caressed by the shadow of the hands of her admirers on the shadow of her body. This film freely develops the virtual conjunctions, by showing what would happen if roles, characters and the state of things did not finally melt away at the actualization of the jealousy-affect: it makes the affect all the more independent of the state of things.51

Figure 5.7  Warning Shadows, 1923

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On the other side of the curtains, the jealous husband watches in anguish, believing that his wife is actually being caressed. However, the play of shadows depicts only “what would happen” as a provisional condition, occupying a zone of indifference between the real and the possible. In my analysis of The Nibelungen, I looked closely at the relationship between the logic of revenge and mechanized time, and showed how the vengeful subject preordains the future by demanding retribution for past transgressions. A similar narrative unfolds in Warning Shadows concerning the jealousies aroused by the possession of the woman. Robison’s film, however, offers the spectator the opportunity to reflect critically on the rigor of revenge by depicting its logic, not as necessary to the state of things, but as merely possible. If Nibelungen elucidates the unforgiving, mechanized drive toward vengeance, Warning Shadows highlights a self-reflexive criticality, and a spectatorial ethics, that is concomitant with this elucidation. By alienating the spectator from screen (it is “only” a possible image, projected on the fourth wall), Robison’s film may be read as a cautionary tale, warning its viewers of the unethical consequences associated with revenge and its conception of linear time. I advance this argument through a close reading of the cinematic allegory, showing how the film image does not simply reproduce the past, but seeks to redeem it in order to secure hope, toward the not-yet and toward utopia. As the guests sit down for the dinner, a traveling shadow player (Alexander Granach) appears at the door.52 He gleefully shows off his repertoire of hand shadows to the house servants: a rabbit, a dog, two finger puppets dialoguing with each other and, when the count comes to the door, a grotesque face dialoguing with him (Figure 5.8). Seeing that his tricks of light and shadows have elicited delight, the butler allows the shadow player to perform a more elaborate, seemingly Chinese, magic lantern show for the dinner guests. Utilizing silhouette puppets, he tells a tale of desire and jealousy between an emperor, empress, and a prince, told through shadows projected onto the back wall of the dining room. Taking the self-reflexivity of the film further, the shadow player serves as a surrogate for the film director or perhaps the projectionist in the film theater. Film scholar Frances Guerin, in her analysis of Warning Shadows, notes how diegetic bodies and objects become increasingly disconnected from their concomitant shadows as the film’s narrative progresses. Referring to the hand puppet sequence, she writes that “the shadows have not only become independent from the bodies that cast them, they are also privileged over the characters’

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Figure 5.8  Warning Shadows, 1923

bodies as narrative agents.”53 Warning Shadows gradually dispenses with actual bodies in favor of their projected shadows, further confusing the difference between reality and image. By the time the shadow player is introduced into the diegesis, Warning Shadows enters decisively into the realm of simulacra, of the play of shadowy signifiers minus their corresponding, real signifieds. In the middle of the magic lantern show, the shadow player initiates a key sequence that decisively propels the film toward the realm of pure image, for the guests within the diegesis as well as for the spectator of Warning Shadows (Figures 5.9 and 5.10). At a pause in the show, the entertainer approaches the

Figure 5.9  Warning Shadows, 1923

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Figure 5.10  Warning Shadows, 1923

long dinner table and begins to gesture with his hands. As if by magic, the guests’ shadows suddenly begin to obey his movements. They slowly move toward the back wall where the silhouetted shadow puppets had performed just moments ago. Utilizing double exposure, the dinner spectators themselves are transferred to the other side of the table, and become the shadows that were manipulated by the player. They become the travelling entertainer’s shadow play and perform for us, the film spectators, who become like the chained prisoners in Plato’s cave. Or, they become possessed by the shadow player’s ghostly images and continue the story for themselves. Either way, this transition signals the film’s arrival into a parallel diegesis, a mise-en-abîme within the narrative we have been following until now. This parallel diegesis continues to play out the latent desires and ressentiment of the men who seek the admiration of a single woman. What remained repressed in the film’s framing story, the illicit desire between the wife and the young suitor, is expressed and made manifest in the shadow play. This mise-en-abîme recalls a similar, well-known sequence in act three of Hamlet, where the titular character stages a silent play between a king, queen, and the king’s nephew. In the play the murderous nephew pours poison into the sleeping king’s ear, which compels Claudius, situated as a spectator, to stand up and cry out, betraying his role as the murderer of Hamlet’s father. Externalizing the inhibited wishes and anxieties of the dinner guests in the second half of Warning Shadows, the film image showcases its capacity to distance the viewer from herself, by projecting these internal anxieties onto the screen while making them available for critical

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evaluation. The shadow play plays out a story of betrayal and subsequent acting out, as self-reflexive allegory. In a particularly harrowing scene, the jealous husband forces the young suitors at knifepoint to murder the object of their affection. Depicted through shadows, the suitors pierce the woman’s body with their swords. As she falls limp, her husband falls into madness. He wanders weakly through the mansion and shatters a mirror reflecting his image. Deeply regretting his heinous act and the uncontrollable desire for retribution that fueled it, he brings flowers to her dead body. The suitors surround the husband and, in a reciprocal gesture of indignation and revenge, mercilessly push him out the second-story window, killing him instantly. As the husband lies dead on the cobblestones, his body begins to disappear. The film cuts back to the horrified suitors looking out the window at the inert corpse. While holding on this shot, the camera dollies back, as the edges of the image contract, as in an iris-in, to frame the four men. The film transitions back to the dinner party, with the rectangular iris becoming the projected screen viewed by the dinner guests. The magic lantern show then resumes, concluding the story of jealousy and revenge between the emperor, his wife, and the handsome prince. It reaches its climax as the silhouetted prince is split into two by the spurned husband. Following the conclusion to the show, the camera is turned back onto the guests. They have become grave and solemn. The husband rises for a standing ovation. Their silence underscores the depth of their feeling and the psychological power of the drama depicted through the shadow play. Even though what they saw were only shadows, unreal phantoms, it is clear that the projected images have had a profound effect on all the seated spectators. Filled with silent remorse for harboring such violent and destructive thoughts, all are nevertheless grateful that they did not end up destroying each other in reality. At its conclusion, Warning Shadows ends with the uneasy resumption of relations that began the film, while the shadow player, laughing madly and playing the part of the irrational fool, rides away on the back of a squealing pig. In a contemporaneous review published in Film-Kurier, a correspondent touts Robison’s film for staging its plot without the use of intertitles and for exploiting the cinema’s capacity to blur fiction and reality, calling it “a courageous l’art pour l’art experiment in the genre of film.”54 The reviewer draws attention to the scene where the illusionist shifts the bodies of the diegetic characters to their selfreflexive shadows: “What the scriptwriters and the director have achieved above

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all is a blurring of the boundary between reality and unreality.”55 The story plays out a possible, and as of yet unreal, future. It has the status of an “as if.” Through this, the shadow play works through a philosophical form of perception, and of time, constituted through the specific capacities of the cinema. “It is only ‘as if,’ ” Deleuze writes of Warning Shadows, “for natural perception introduces halts, moorings, fixed points or separated points of view, moving bodies or even distinct vehicles, whilst cinematographic perception works continuously, in a single movement whose very halts are an integral part of it and are only a vibration on to itself.”56 Through its expression of movement, the images of Robison’s film bear a subjunctive mood, revealing what would happen if the characters’ desires, both amorous and fatal, were to be given free rein. With the transition of the characters into the shadow play, Warning Shadows enters into the realm of speculative fiction, highlighting the hypothetical ontology of the film image in general. The “nocturnal hallucination” presented by Robison’s film warns its spectators of what may come to pass. In order to understand how the blurring of the boundary between fiction and reality constitutes warnings about the future, I turn briefly to the work of Hans Vaihinger, a neo-Kantian philosopher who informed a wide range of thinkers on ethics in Weimar Germany, including Max Scheler. Vaihinger’s most influential text, The Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911), argues for the discursive power of fiction in the scholarly pursuits of science, politics, and religion. In it he maintains that because human beings cannot have access to the fundamental reality of the world, they are compelled to construct systems of thought and illusory realms of metaphysical knowledge. We must think “as if ” these unreal, theoretical systems accurately describe empirical reality: In this light many thought-processes and thought-constructs appear to be consciously false assumptions, which either contradict reality or are even contradictory in themselves, but which are intentionally thus formed in order to overcome difficulties of thought by the artificial deviation and reach the goals of thought by roundabout ways and by-paths. These artificial thought-constructs are called Scientific Fictions, and distinguished as conscious creations by their ‘As if ’ character.57

Vaihinger does not entirely invalidate the “artificial thought-constructs” of metaphysics, for these constructs remain necessary and practical for lived life. These “Scientific Fictions” are no more real than shadows cast on the wall of

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Plato’s cave, yet they should be utilized as if they accurately represent the world outside. Knowing that these shadows express “consciously false assumptions,” the dinner party guests in Warning Shadows understand the shadow play to consist of phantoms, yet these unreal phantoms nevertheless possess an actual, affective power that move their spectators. The shadow play sheds light on the fetishistic nature of the film image, the “imaginary signifier” as Christian Metz called it: I know, but all the same….58 Vaihinger makes explicit that the philosophy of the “as if ” not only has profound implications for the representation of the real, it also has special relevance for the problems of ethics and aesthetics. In the following passage, he uses the vocabulary of the real and unreal to distinguish this binary from what he calls the “world of becoming”: The “As if ” world, which is formed in this manner, the world of the “unreal” is just as important as the world of the so-called real or actual (in the ordinary sense of the word); indeed, it is far more important for ethics and aesthetics. This aesthetic and ethical world of “As if,” the world of the unreal, becomes finally for us a world of values which, particularly in the form of religion, must be sharply distinguished in our mind from the world of becoming.59

Reality and unreality, opposed to each other in a binary relation, remain metaphysical, ossified concepts, distinct from the constant change and flux that are constitutive of lived life and the realm of becoming. For Vaihinger, the provisional character of human knowledge has particular importance for the world of ethics because this knowledge grounds the determination of the will. Warning Shadows ends with warnings as to what the vengeful may become, opening up scrutiny into the “world of values” that nevertheless has the status of “as if.” The shadow play enacts a possible, self-reflexive scenario of jealous revenge, and after having seen it, the husband comes to regret the anger reflected in the scenario, and is humbled by the power of the film image. In contrast to the inevitability of revenge figured in Lang’s Nibelungen, the provisional “as if ” character of the allegorical shadow play in Robison’s film is more open-ended and compels critique followed by ethical transformation. In Warning Shadows, the fury of the vengeful husband is tempered with remorse, interrupting the inexorable sense of Fate that drives Nibelungen. This contrast can be better understood, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, by returning to From Caligari to Hitler. In a particularly fascinating passage, Kracauer writes that Warning Shadows exempts itself from the historical telos toward fascism by

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allowing the dinner party guests to experience freedom from captivation by false illusions. They experience a profound metamorphosis: They are cured. White magic has enabled them to grasp the hidden springs and terrible issue of their present existence. Owing to this magical therapy—it recalls model cases of psychoanalytical treatment—the count changes from a puerile berserk into a composed adult, his coquettish wife becomes his loving wife, and the Lover takes silent leave. Their metamorphosis at the very end of the film coincides with the beginning of a new day whose sober natural lighting splendidly symbolizes the light of reason.60

Far from sending all of Weimar cinema marching toward Hitler, Kracauer reads in Warning Shadows the image of possibility toward historical change, and a hope that breaks the cycle of necessary revenge. “In a state of trance,” he continues, “they anticipate a future by doing exactly what they would do if their passions continued to determine their actions. The drama develops into a ‘nocturnal hallucination.’ ”61 The shadow player depicts the murderous consequences of what will come to pass if ressentiment, possessiveness, and jealousy were to hold sway. The cinema reveals to the husband his own stubborn vengeful logic. And because the images of the cinema present reality “as if ” it were actual, enabling a critical distance from the reality of their passions, the dinner party guests are given a second chance. As if to escape the cave and discover the light of the sun, Warning Shadows illuminates an ethical, redemptive potential relevant to the basic ontology of film in general.

The inconstruable question But although the past prefigures the present, it does not predetermine it. It shows us not who we are, or who we will be, but rather who we are in the process of becoming. It does so in the hope that we will prevent this particular analogy from being realized. Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (2009)62 I want to elaborate on this reading of Warning Shadows and the way its characters are warned of the future through the “as if ” of the film image. In contrast to the way in which Kriemhild ordains the future through her desire for vengeance in The Nibelungen, Robison’s film shows us what the vengeful subject is in the process of becoming, toward a more open-ended future. This moment of self-

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reflection makes possible the opportunity to interrupt the means-ends logic that underpins revenge, and to break away from its inexorable telos. In this section, I will offer a description of the future temporality, and its concomitant critical consciousness, that is inspired by the ending to Warning Shadows. The anticipatory “as if ” that concludes Warning Shadows posits a future that remains indeterminate and inconstruable from the perspective of the present. The film image seems to think this possibility as constitutive of its ontology, heeding its spectators to think similarly. A structural analogy between the shadow play and key sections from Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, written in the midst of the war and published in 1918, draws out this futural orientation. In contrast to the predeterminations of “mythic” payback ordained by the vengeful, Bloch’s Utopia reveals the ethical and political dimensions of understanding the future in a much more hospitable manner. For Bloch, the orientation toward utopia, one that is to come and is also secretly intertwined with the present, governs all human experience, from purchasing new clothing, attending a festival, and going to the cinema (experiences such as these catalogued and analyzed in his encyclopedic, three-volume work The Principle of Hope, published between 1938 and 1947). Although Bloch, immediately after World War I, had not yet fleshed out his theory of nonsimultaneity—this would be articulated in 1934 in his Heritage of Our Times—his view that temporality is fundamentally open and unfinished, so important for understanding all of his writings, remains the guiding principle of The Spirit of Utopia. In the following, I shall show how Bloch delineates the conditions of anticipatory consciousness that characterizes this principle, and then connect it to the potentiality of the film medium. Bloch begins The Spirit of Utopia with an introduction simply called, “Objective.” The first words of the text are equally as pithy, asserting its aim straightforwardly yet enigmatically: “I am. We are.” The objective of his analysis will be to delineate a subject that is capable of meaningfully performing these speech acts. Bloch seeks a project of renewal following the destruction resultant from the war, inspiring philosophical questions that seem to return us to Descartes’s ontological meditations. For the Weimar thinker, the Great War effectively ruined the aspirations of the prewar “I,” and broke any organic links the self may have had to peacetime traditions. In the preface to Utopia, Bloch explains that Germany’s call toward militarism turned out to be a colossal disaster for the modern self: “There has never been a more dismal military objective than Imperial Germany’s: a suffocating coercion imposed by

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mediocrities and tolerated by mediocrities; a triumph of stupidity, guarded by the gendarme, acclaimed by the intellectuals who did not have enough brains to provide slogans.”63 Such “stupidity” revealed the delusional fantasies of the ego-centered self and its misguided aspirations toward absolute sovereignty, in itself and for itself. Already Bloch warned against the reactionary tendencies present in these years, for as long as Prussian militarism persisted in the Weimar Republic, such tendencies would inhibit the realization of a true democratic state. Bloch’s task will thus be to reconstruct and reinterpret the categories “I” and “we” for the modern age. The Spirit of Utopia relinquishes the prewar dreams of the nineteenth century, and looks toward the future to seek novel formulations of the subject—formulations that will provide the means to cope with the dismal times in early Weimar Germany: The existing world is the world of the past, and the despiritualized object of science, but human longing in both forms—as impatience and as waking dream—is the mainsail into the other world. This intending toward a star, a joy, a truth to set against the empirical, beyond its satanic night and especially beyond its night of incognito, is the only way still to find truth; the question about us is the only problem, the resultant of every world-problem, and to formulate this Self- and We-Problem in everything, the opening, reverberating through the world, of the gates of the homecoming, is the ultimate basic principle of utopian philosophy.64

It is Bloch’s contention in Utopia that every artistic creation harbors latent possibilities for imagining new social realities, new means of living and ways of surviving the catastrophes of the past. Incipit vita nova, he writes: now the new life.65 A chapter entitled “The Shape of the Inconstruable Question” (“Die Gestalt der unkonstruierbaren Frage”) explicitly pursues the problem of the self in modernity. Bloch seeks the proper means of posing the question of selfhood, in a manner that respects the temporal constraints that make the “I” precarious as it endures in time. He treats the problem as an open question that awaits an answer. Its very precariousness implicitly problematizes an immobile concept of the self that is thought to be complete, that stands outside the evolution of time, as well as critiques a philosophy of the moving image that observes it as an object separate from its metaphysics. In contrast to the vengeful one who believes herself to be unbeholden to time, the precarious “I” constantly encounters difference produced by time’s unfolding. For Bloch, the self is not

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an object of consciousness that is eternal and immortal, but is formulated as a lived question that will be answered in the future. Towards this, Bloch first articulates what he calls the “shape” of the present moment, bringing the experience of the present back to the problem of life and living. Like the experience of the animate image, movement and its ontological reflection are not coeval: “Precisely: we live [leben] ourselves, but we do not ‘experience’ [erleben] ourselves; what meanwhile never became conscious can also not become unconscious. Insofar as we have never and nowhere become present through ourselves, neither within the just lived moment nor immediately afterward, we cannot appear as ‘such’ in any area of any memory.”66 Leben and Erleben are the poles that constitute the irreducible gap between the lived moment and the cogitation of that moment. The latter necessarily follows the former when describing the present: “Only immediately afterward can I easily hold it, turn it before me, so to speak. So only my immediate past is present to me, agrees with what we experience as apparently existent. So this is what it means to live?”67 Bergson, we may remember from the introduction to this book, delineated an identical problem through the categories of intuition and analysis. A necessary lag time between thinking and meaning-making is simply a condition of modern consciousness, a consequence of the analytical “I” that is consolidated following the moment of its cogitation. Yet because of this gap, all philosophies of life necessarily remain in a state of aporia and thus must account for the noncoincidental relationship to the lived life it attempts to describe. “When does one really live,” Bloch asks, “when is one consciously present oneself in the vicinity of one’s moments? As urgently as this can be felt, however, it always slips away again, the fluidity, darkness of the respective moment, just like this other thing that it means.”68 Because the thinking self cannot conceive life as she lives it, the present moment constantly slips away, the categorical “I” is always one step behind life’s continuous flow. Thus the claims “I am. We are” remain mere assertions, spectral traces of what “I” or “we” may be, may have been, in the lived moment. For “we do not even really know what absolutely just ‘is’ or even who we ‘are’; if anything is ghostly, it is someone who wants to present to himself the one who presents.”69 The ontology of the specter allegorizes the noncoincidence of the Leben and Erleben, coalescing in a single signifier that ostensibly endures in time. This is why for Bloch the problem of ontology must be formulated as a question, and not as an assertion, for the structure of the question rhetorically accounts for the enigma that is perpetually produced by the lived moment. The thinking,

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speaking self is self-defined through the “I am” posed as a question, as a semiotic absence that endlessly vacates itself in the passage of time. This emptying out may be understood as related to the path toward nothingness that we saw characterized Heidegger’s 1921 lectures on Aristotle in Chapter 3. Because the cognition of ourselves and the sensation of ourselves can never inhabit the same lived moment, the representation of the self is most appropriately signaled by the ghost, who embodies this noncoincidence by signaling the deferred action of the lived subject. We arrive at the enigma of presence, where hope and futurity find their grounding. This temporality finds its allegorical parallel in the form of the question, whose posing actually posits the expectation of its formulation, and the opening up of “new life.”70 Utopian hope may thus be found precisely within the darkness of the lived moment, whose content constantly slips away from consciousness. The future finds its form in the articulation of the question, delineating the limits of what can be known while producing the very possibility of the other. Hope is articulated through the contingent ability for a response, of a futural self who will be able to respond to the “inconstruable question.”71 “Yet,” Bloch continues, —and this is of decisive importance—the future, the topos of the unknown within the future, where alone we occur, where alone, novel and profound, the function of hope also flashes, without the bleak reprise of some anamnesis—is itself nothing but our own expanded darkness, than our darkness in the issue of its own womb, in the expansion of its latency.72

In short, the unknowable darkness of the lived present overlaps with the inconstruability of what is not-yet. Because we cannot know ourselves now, the finite human subject must also acknowledge the impossibility of mastering the future, and its impenetrable night, from the place of the present.73 Such a stance contradicts the predetermination of what will be, as well as the moral legibility of the other, as I elucidated in relation to Lang’s Nibelungen films, and is inseparable from a philosophy of reified time. Authentic questioning finds its allegorical counterpart in a comportment of openness toward otherness, and the anticipation of difference, which cannot be separated from Leben, or the lived experience of the moving image. Withholding finality, this questioning must be diligently respected as a question. The rhetorics of the assertion or the declaration cannot do justice to the contingency of the future, because they relinquish the contingency ushered

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in through questioning’s open-ended temporality. Moving from the legacies of the past toward an unknowable future, questioning comports lived life toward the otherness of the other by affirming risk and profound unknowability. This affirmation of open-endedness in turn grounds Bloch’s ethics. He continues by writing: For this reason only one thing is ultimately left for precise, ontic discussion: to grasp the question about us, purely as question and not as the construed indication of an available solution, the stated but unconstrued question existing in itself, in order to grasp its pure statement in itself as the first answer to oneself, as the most faithful, undiverted fixation of the We-problem.74

In this key formulation, Bloch lays out the stakes for the ethics and politics of the self. The descriptive elusiveness of the “I” in the lived moment must be allowed to remain elusive because it occupies a zone of indiscernibility between the past and present. In turn, this allowance leads us to what he calls the “Weproblem,” or the problem of living with others. The utopia of the “We,” the coming community, must also be allowed its own mystery, derived from the radical questioning of the “I.” Such questioning, to put it another way, points to a notion of otherness beyond the epistemological limits of the cogitating subject, when the other is recognized as such, beyond the limits of the I-It relation. This allowance is crucial for the finite, mortal subject, her relationship to the future temporality, as well as her ability to say, “We are.” The relationship between the We-problem and cinematic time has been elucidated by philosopher Bernard Stiegler in a similar manner, a relationship that he articulates through the experience of the moving image. Stiegler writes that the phenomenological description of the temporality of duration, the retention of the past and the anticipation of the future, is exteriorized through the flux of the moving image, which models the lived experience of duration for the viewer. He also writes that the interweaving of the spectator and cinema through the shared experience of time is already an ethics of the other. When watching the flow of images, he notes that he encounters a “synthetic other.”75 Stiegler thus anticipates, the other whom I expect will come into my film, my cinematic medium, by appearing on the screen—as co-producer, screenwriter, character, atmosphere, accessories, etc. I have more recently referred to this phenomenon [in Technics and Time 2] as the pre-textuality of the I, or the I that is already a We.76

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Although this “time of the other” will be squandered to the demands of the culture industry for Stiegler, it is striking here that he figures the problem of the “We” is intimately connected to the experience of the moving image. In Warning Shadows, by attesting to what will come to pass if the guests’ inner turmoil were allowed to become manifest, the shadows play out a possible future taken to its tragic end. And by letting such pent-up frustration dictate relations with others, the play of shadows poses what Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia calls the “We-problem.” In Robison’s film, the force of the film image, and of the “as if,” coalesces around its capacity for critique—its capacity to manifest the ethical problems that human actors confront in their relations with others in modernity. These warning shadows are not simply debased illusion, complicit with bourgeois ideology and mass culture. They have specific effects that open the way toward an imagined future by expressing precisely the way this future should not unfold. At the outset, Warning Shadows seems to illustrate what will come to pass if actors are allowed their most ego-centered and selfish desires to inform their perceptions of others, others who are taken to be simply extensions of themselves or as objects to be dominated. Yet because the images remain unreal and as such cannot be assumed to correspond in a mimetic relationship to a reality outside the film theater, they also cannot signify and prescribe the means for how relations with the other are to be conducted. For this reason, what Robison’s film presents is not utopia, but its “spirit,” allegorizing the heterotopic space of the cinema described by Michel Foucault.77 Structured similarly to the noncoincidence of Leben and Erleben elucidated by Bloch, the deferred-action of the self-reflexive shadow play allows for critique on the part of the spectator, of what the vengeful dinner guests are in the process of becoming (Figure 5.11). The allegory of cinema does not straightforwardly and pedantically teach its spectators good behavior (as in the contemporaneous Aufklärungsfilme that warned viewers of the dangers of immoralities such as sex and alcohol). Rather, the strange, unreal ontology of the living, moving image allegorized in Warning Shadows highlights how the moving image in general is linked to its presentation of the We-problem as an open question, one that allows for the contingency of the future and the possibility, by coextension, of novel ways of conceiving otherness without calculation and selection, beyond the means already known, already reified and fetishized by capitalist culture. This is why Robison’s film finally ends with remorse expressed by the main players. Things did not have to turn out this way; things could have been different. Warning Shadows shows that

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Figure 5.11  Warning Shadows, 1923

the future must always be guided by a self-reflexive, critical vigilance, and offers an ethical vision that precisely corresponds to the ontology of the film image. The future cannot be represented in a construable manner, as narcissistic desires must not be allowed to predetermine what will be. Robison’s film teaches the human spectator the necessity of living in the present moment while allowing for a new humility, inspired by the experience of radical difference, produced endlessly by time. The future temporality is to remain inconstruable and yet anticipated by the empathetic spectator, in a relation of openness and critical self-reflexivity.

Death is no conclusion This reading of Robison’s Warning Shadows enables us to see Lang’s Nibelungen in a different light. If a metamorphosis takes place in the characters at the end of Warning Shadows, this metamorphosis occurs because of the power of the shadow play and the projected images that express the passions of the characters in mise-en-abîme. It may seem that this potential is foreclosed in the conclusion to Nibelungen, yet another look at the historical material surrounding Lang’s film provides evidence for another possible reading. In an interview conducted in 1975, Lang states that his Nibelungen films sought inspiration from Germany’s past in order to counteract the misery that dominated the postwar times.

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By making Die Nibelungen I wanted to show that Germany was searching for an ideal in her past, even during the horrible time after World War I in which the film was made. At that time in Berlin I remember seeing a poster on the street which pictured a woman dancing with a skeleton. The caption read: “Berlin, you are dancing with Death.” To counteract this pessimistic spirit I wanted to film the epic legend of Siegfried so that Germany could draw inspiration from her past, and not, as Mr. Kracauer suggests, as a looking forward to the rise of a political figure like Hitler or some such stupid thing as that.78

Lang intended The Nibelungen to be understood as a resurrection of the Nibelungenlied, a reanimation of the past, and not as forecasting the future, as Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler argues.79 Looking backward in this manner, one might say that Lang performs a historico-allegorical gesture seemingly aware of his own historicity, as he connects past and present in a kind of Benjaminian constellation. If we return to his “Determination of Style in Film” from 1924, we see that Lang was not only aware of his own attempts to make the Nibelungenlied relevant for postwar audiences, he also believed that he was appealing to feelings basic to both then and now: “love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, friendship and revenge are the same today as they are for all time, and man reacts to these feelings in exactly the same manner as he did before.”80 And yet, his Nibelungen was not intended to predict Hitler’s rise to political power—this is, according to Lang, “some such stupid thing.”81 The impossibility of a nonteleological, contingent history that Lang sees in Kracauer’s Caligari to Hitler stands in tension with the messianic possibility of critical reason that the Weimar critic expressed in some of his more allegorical writings throughout the 1920s. While Kracauer excoriates the utilization of human beings as ornaments in his 1947 text, three years after Lang showed his Nibelungen films Kracauer analyzed the rational and empty form of the “mass ornament,” in an essay bearing this title, to articulate an eschatologically tinged hope immanent to instrumental reason. He discusses the ambivalent logic that underpins spectacles of synchronized bodies of the Tiller Girls, a popular turnof-the-century dance troupe, whose synchronized dance patterns conform to Euclidean geometry as well as to the aesthetics of total rationalization concomitant with capitalist modernity. Such spectacles attest the extent to which the “murky reason” of ratio, and its abstract, calculative logic, has come to replace traditional aesthetics.82 And yet, it is precisely this replacement that provides the conditions for Kracauer’s historico-theological stance expressed in this and other essays. As he later writes, the “provisional status” of the instrumentalized

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patterns presented by the mass ornament also awaken “an inkling of the right order of the inventory of nature.”83 Kracauer’s relationship to the aspirations toward a totality concomitant with Hegelian history would have been ambivalent at best.84 This is where Kracauer and Bloch find common ground, in the utopian hope that remains latent in the fragmentary materials of the past. Moreover, Benjamin’s messianic historiography, which I discussed in detail in Chapter 2, may find resonance here as well. The film image repeats the past in order to restore possibility, futural open-endedness, to what was. When Kracauer speaks of the inventory of nature, he speaks of the given elements, historical and contemporaneous as well as natural and technological, that make up the world of the The Nibelungen films. While visiting the UFA city in Neubabelsburg, Kracauer was struck by the vast array of props, costumes, and other material leftovers from films produced in the UFA studios. The ruins of the universe are stored in warehouses for sets, representative samples of all periods, peoples, and styles. Near Japanese cherry trees, which shine through the corridors of dark scenery, arches the monstrous dragon from the Nibelungen, devoid of the diluvial terror it exudes on the screen.85

Drained of his fierce terror, the dragon Fafner becomes an inert relic, recalling Benjamin’s allegorical ruin, waiting to be brought back to life by the animate magic of the cinema. In The Nibelungen, the monstrous dragon plays a key role in establishing Siegfried’s heroism, heightening the tragedy of his death as well as Kriemhild’s tempest and her drive toward vengeance. However, resting quietly in the UFA warehouse, Fafner becomes like “a child’s toy that is put into a cardboard box,” awaiting a future that is yet inconstruable.86 In contrast to the reified time of stubborn vengeance and payback, this future remains open, awaiting redemption by the philosopher of cinema.

Conclusion Afterlives of the twentieth century On September 28, 2010, The Daily Telegraph printed an article with the headline: “First World War Officially Ends.”1 Its first sentence announces that “The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.” Germany’s final reparations payment amounted to £59.5 million, which went to private individuals, pension funds, and corporations stipulated in the Versailles Treaty. With their financial debts paid in full, this final payment will relinquish all claims made by the Entente Powers on Germany’s war guilt, almost 100 years ago. While the war may be concluded, the historical legacy of Weimar and its cinema persists. This legacy was taken up in 1988, when Jean-Luc Godard began his eight-part, sprawling video work, Histoire(s) du cinéma—his farewell to the history of film and the century that produced it. In part 1A, “Toutes les histoires,” Godard brings together the two films I discussed in the last chapter: he inscribes the words Le Montreur d’Ombres, the French title of Robison’s Warning Shadows, onto the image of Siegfried from Lang’s Nibelungen. Footage of World War II soldiers is layered on this image, allowing the two early Weimar films to resonate with history. The blonde hero of The Nibelungen, towering over the others, appears as a military commander to soldiers of the future (Figure 6.1). To bolster the link between Siegfried and the sovereign Führer, Godard juxtaposes images of a tank, making connections between the armored vehicle and Siegfried’s horse, both technologies of transportation implicated in the espousal of an intransigent, nationalist ideology. The words Siegfried et le Limousin are presented on the images, quoting the title of a 1922 novel by dramatist Jean Giraudoux (Figures 6.2 and 6.3). These shots are then followed by a sequence that references the conclusion to The Testament of Dr. Mabuse from 1932. Godard remarks in voice-over, “Because from Siegfried and M to The Dictator and Lubitsch, films were made, weren’t they?” In these final shots,

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Figure 6.1  Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988

Mabuse’s ghostly form commands Professor Baum to drive furiously to an asylum where he will meet his fate. Over this image, Godard superimposes the title to Wolfgang Staudte’s film from 1946: Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Among Us). Godard’s references to German film history seem to confirm Kracauer’s teleological argument about cinema and the rise of fascism elaborated in From Caligari to Hitler. Lang’s Nibelungen seems to directly foreshadow the rise of German fascism and its aestheticized politics. And yet, if the promise of the film medium was to have accurately documented reality in order to constitute

Figure 6.2  Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988

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Figure 6.3  Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988

a cinematic archive of history, Godard’s argument in the first part of his Histoire(s) revolves around how this promise was never realized. Cinema failed to fulfill its documentary purpose and record the horrors that took place in the concentration camps. Thus in his video work he claims “to tell the stories of all the films never made, rather than those that were.” All the warning shadows were present in the Weimar films leading up to the rise of Hitler, but they, like Siegfried’s warning shadows, or the remorse conveyed in Robison’s film (or even Forestier’s premonitions from Giraudoux’s Siegfried et le Limousin)—all these possibilities remained unexplored, unheeded. In his chapter on Histoire(s) in The Future of the Image, philosopher Jacques Rancière remarks that this particular sequence comments on “the ability of literature and cinema to foresee the disasters of their times and their inability to prevent them.”2 As I have tried to illustrate throughout this book, these are abilities intrinsic to the potentiality of the film medium. Rancière notes that images in Godard’s work generally function in two ways, corresponding to the two translations of the word histoire: story and history. On the one hand, images have a liberating power, allowing the possibility of fictionalization, of the creation of new stories to come. On the other, images, because they signify what once was, have the capacity to ground a communal history.3 For Rancière, Histoire(s) brings together incommensurable combinations of fictional and historical signifiers through the work’s virtuosity with montage. The combinations are dizzying as they bring together the history of the twentieth century with the history of the movies through the logic of images. Elsewhere in Histoire(s), Godard juxtaposes,

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through superimposition, the fictional professor Albert Warren who murders a mute woman in Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (1946) with an image of a small child from the ghetto. In the film, the professor takes it upon himself to eliminate those he deems infirm, echoing the historical Nazi ideology of “life unfit for life.” This juxtaposition of story and history resonates once more with a subsequent shot, of little Edmund in Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero from 1948. For Godard, “big history is that of cinema”—meaning that cinema does not simply represent history, but, in a grand appropriation of Benjamin’s approach toward allegorical images, is the place where history happens. Rancière explains that cinema “failed its century” because it failed to witness the horrors that took place in the Nazi concentration camps, and because it made a Faustian pact with the Hollywood dream factory.4 Cinema’s possibilities were foreclosed when it allowed itself to be aligned with propaganda and fantasy. Though this, its allegorical, redemptive potentiality was foreclosed as well. Cinema not only failed to realize its historical destiny because it did not see and show images from Auschwitz, it also sold its soul to the demands of the commodity fetish, of narrativity and escapist fantasy. If Nibelungen and Warning Shadows may be understood as critical waypoints along the telos of Weimar history as it marched toward fascism, these films utterly failed in this regard to divert this course. These linkages, on the other hand, reiterate the condition of art in late modernity, namely the rejection of avant-gardist purity and the constant crossing of aesthetic boundaries between the arts. In the age of informatics and digital encoding, analog media such as painting, music, literature, and film are reconfigured and reduced to a mélange of electronic sound and image. For Rancière, these aesthetic crossings do not signal the twilight of art, but appeal to a fundamental, heterogeneous mystery that underpins the copresence of all world entities constituted as an infinite series of signs. Godard’s montages, of an image from a film with the dialogue of another, with quotations of paintings, of a line of poetry, the title of a contemporaneous novel, or a passage from philosophy, are made possible because any image, any sound, has the capacity to relate to another through allegory. In another essay on Godard’s Histoire(s), Rancière calls this realm of copresent images an “originary sensorium,” a world of images and sounds that corresponds to the phenomenological forms that express life itself. “This interiority,” the philosopher writes, “links artistic forms to shared forms of life, it allows all these forms to be associated and inter-expressed in an indefinite number of combinations, and it also ensures that every one of

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these combinations can express the collective life that threads together every fact, ordinary object, elementary gesture, speech, and image, whether banal or extraordinary.”5 In this book, I have tried to show the link between the time and temporality of life with that of the cinema, linking the technological medium to such an “originary” realm. This realm of sight and sound also goes by another name: history. The copresence of worldly phenomena, connected to each other through the logic of allegory, is precisely that of history’s communalization, the bringing together of seemingly disparate elements, and the ordering of things that is the principal task of historiography. Rancière continues: “It’s over two centuries now since history has designated not the narrative of things past, but a mode of copresence, a way of thinking and experiencing the cobelonging of experiences and the interexpressivity of the forms and signs that give them shape.”6 Godard appropriates sound and visual elements from films by Lang, Murnau, Robison, and many others, not to deprive them of their Benjaminian aura through video, but to return to them the associative possibilities inherent to their basic ontology. This means channeling their narrative content into the trajectory of the “big history,” this reassemblage of moving images, so that the sounds and images of film history come into conversation with the originary sensorium, the ontological archive, from which history is to be drawn. Their possibility of linking one sign to another demonstrates once more the capacity of the cinema to illuminate and expound experiences in common. Film allows us to be where we were not, to experience what was and what could have been. Throughout this book, I have also tried to show how this experience is fundamental to mortal humanity, and the capacity to live, to write, and to respond to one’s own finitude through the logic of images. Like Godard’s juxtapositions in Histoire(s), I have tried to place moments from early Weimar films together with contemporaneous philosophical and poetic discourses produced after the war. As media theorist Paul Virilio has so insistently argued in our time, the cinema technology cannot be separated from a “logistics of military perception,” because imaging technologies are inextricably bound up with the history of militarization and the development of technologies for annihilating the other.7 This logistics impassively observes death as an event separate from the spectator through an ideology of vision that bolsters the viewer’s own fantasy of survival and immortality. In this book, I tried to redeem another possibility, a missed opportunity that lay dormant in the historiography of film in early Weimar Germany. This opportunity is absolutely

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crucial for grasping the ontology of film, and for the film philosopher, who necessarily contends with the metaphysics of language to theorize the nature of the medium. I placed the legacy of the war and the experience of loss in allegorical conjunction with contemporaneous understandings of the film image in early Weimar Germany, and I showed that this understanding provided an opportunity for spectators to reflect upon themselves as finite and, by extension, upon film as a medium that is always taking place in the future. If the cinema can be redeemed, it is because the thinker herself is intrinsically part of what Rancière calls the “originary sensorium,” and thus experiences history, not from a transcendental view standing outside time, but as part and parcel of the duration that spans her own lived life. Beyond the traditional ways of thinking ontology, wedded to metaphysical questions that foreclose the possibility of a response, cinema shows us how to think the historicity of the ontological question, as integral to the time lived by the questioner. For this reason, cinema is the most important medium of the twentieth century for thinking ontology because in it lived time is exteriorized and made integral to its essence. In this regard, the films I addressed throughout this book mirror the ontological questions that have been posed by modern philosophy. They think themselves, thinking cinematic concerns as ontological, both framed by the metaphysics that followed the trauma of war. I have tried to show that the philosophical writings that appeared, contemporaneous with the films I analyzed, allegorically correspond with the art and aesthetics of the moving image. Both are bound by history, and both point to essential problems wedded to the thinking of movement and time. Cinema not only shows us how questions of ontology may be posed through images, but also that this very questioning grounds an ethics. More fundamental than those questions that attempt to discover “the essence of cinema,” authentic questioning problematizes the metaphysical legacies derived from the past while opening up the future temporality itself. If the living image engages with our humanity, it does so in order to encourage a greater awareness of the other, as a figure that will come to be. This interpretation stands in direct contrast to the closed metaphysics of the cinema that retreats into a shell, which merely reiterates assumptions about the human being that we already know are impossible: omniscient narcissistic fantasy, and a life lived without the possibility of death. Reading the film image is a process that continually moves us from present to past. Its movement helps us look forward, not only to the future of cinema, but also to futurity as an allegorical figure of openness to the other.

Notes Introduction 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8

Illustrierter Film-Kurier, 6/1920, 5. Quoted in Jürgen Kasten, “Filmstil als Markenartikel,” in Die Perfektionierung des Scheins, Hrsg. Harro Segeberg (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 50. Kasten notes that Röhrig’s statement is often misquoted as “Das Filmbild muß Graphik werden.” Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 167. See, for example, Anton Kaes, “Das bewegte Gesicht: Zur Großaufnahme im Film,” in Gesichter der Weimarer Republik: Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte, Hrsg. Claudia Schmölders and Sandar Gilman (Köln: DuMont, 2000), 156; “Die statische Kamera, die unsere Zuschauerposition einnimmt, zeigt einen aufgestellten Sarg in einer Halbtotalen.” Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, trans. Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 11. Speaking of Rilke, Christoph Asendorf connects the German poet’s penchant for animism to silent film, writing that “To perceive animistically is the final prerogative of the lyric poet,” referring to Rilke’s poeticization of living things in the Dinggedichte. See Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 187–200. For film scholar Stefan Andriopoulos, Cesare’s somnambulant state manifests contemporary theories of hypnotism and suggestion, particularly those associated with the nineteenth-century physician Hippolyte Bernheim and the Nancy School. The image of hypnosis is in turn doubled by the image of the mesmerized film spectator. See Stefan Andriopoulos, Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema, trans. Peter Jansen and Stefan Andriopoulos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 103. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the AvantGarde,” Wide Angle 8:3 & 4 Fall (1986): 63–70. I use the word “astonishment” here in the manner utilized by Gunning. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams

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(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–133. The “Kingdom of Shadows” refers to Maxim Gorky’s famous review of a Lumière program in 1896. It can be found in Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 407–409. 9 Arnold Zweig, “Theoretische Grundlegung des Films in Thesen,” Das Tagebuch, March 11, 1922, 372. 10 Anton Kaes writes that the self-reflexivity of Caligari is linked to the ontological uncertainties that underpin the representation of Caligari and his somnambulant attraction. “It is precisely these principle ambiguities and doublings,” he writes,



11 12 13

14

that separate this film from others of the period and serve as an exemplar of self-reflexive filmic modernity. Because cinema leaves open the question of what is hallucination and what is reality, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari mirrors the properties of a medium that are based on the greatest possible proximity to the appearance of nature, a nature in turn constituted by illusion and the suspension of disbelief. Caligari’s spectator sits in his tent like the spectator of the cinema. The cabinet is nothing other than the cinema itself. In identifying the diegetic spectator in Caligari’s tent with the spectator of the cinema, Kaes also substantiates the interpretation of Cesare’s gestures as intimately linked to the animative powers of the cinematic technology. If the cabinet is the cinema, then the somnambulist’s awakening allegorically corresponds to the movement of the projected image before the seated film spectator. See Anton Kaes, “Film in der Weimarer Republik: Motor der Moderne,” in Geschichte des Deutschen Films, Hrsg. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2004), 47–48. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 205. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 263. In his reading of Metropolis, Michael Cowen shows how Lang’s film exploits the animating powers of the cinema to mediate the schism between man and machine. The allegories of life that thread their way through Metropolis implicitly bridge the gap between objective, vulgar clock time and subjective, internal duration. See Michael Cowen, “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,” Modernism/Modernity 14: 2 (2007): 225–248. See Chapter 3, “The Return of the Undead,” in Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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15 Hans Janowitz, one of the scriptwriters of Caligari, supplied its script. 16 Erwin Magnus, Lichtspiel und Leben: Filmplaudereien (Berlin: Dürr & Weber, 1924), 40. 17 Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage 10 (1981): 21. 18 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 46. 19 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 46. 20 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 47. 21 For a useful overview of this literature, see Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 22 Erica Carter, “Introduction” to Balázs, Early Film Theory, xxxiii. 23 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 101. 24 See Chapter 2 of Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006). 25 The German translation appeared in 1909. 26 Henri Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Totowa: Helix, 1983), 183. 27 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998). See especially Chapter 4. I will address this topic in greater detail in Chapter 2 of this book. 28 Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” 161. 29 Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” 161. 30 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 34. 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 59. 32 Sabine Hake, The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907–1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). See in particular Chapter 8. 33 For an excellent exegesis of shell shock in the British context, see Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), particularly Chapter 2. 34 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). 35 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 84. 36 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10. 37 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 15.

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38 See Chapters 1 and 5 in Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Winter takes recourse to the history of bereavement after 1918. 39 A number of studies serve as precedents. In Mary Anne Doane’s The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, a wide variety of discourses, including theories of evolution, thermodynamics, and semiotics, as well as psychoanalysis and philosophy, are invoked to contextualize films, such as Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), What Happened in the Tunnel (1903), and Marey’s chronophotography. Contemporaneous with each other, film and thoughtful writing contribute to Doane’s thesis regarding conceptions of modern time, its irreversibility, determinability, and the tension between mobility and immobility. Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film performs an extended reading of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), weaves together Vachel Lindsay’s film theory and contemporaneous understandings of universal hieroglyphics to the use of cross-cuts across time and place in the film. I aim to practice a similar hermeneutics, one that treats questions of ontology, too often thought of as separate from the vicissitudes of historical change, as deeply informed by the phenomena of change and duration. See Mary Anne Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 40 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 4. 41 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 61. 42 Kracauer, “Photography,” 62. 43 Kracauer, “Photography,” 62. 44 Kracauer, “Photography,” 62–63. 45 These historical materials form assemblages of thought. On the very last page of Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze explains that cinema after 1945, like philosophical theory, aspires to become a complementary mode of thinking.

A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others.



While for Deleuze the disaster of World War II is inextricably linked to a cinema construed as thought, Kracauer in his essay on photography suggests that

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an equally radical epistemological break took place after World War I. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 280. 46 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 31–32. 47 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 305. 48 Kracauer, Theory of Film, 305. 49 Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” 164. 50 The notion of time as space undergoes rigorous critique throughout all of Bergson’s work, but it is addressed specifically in Chapter 2 of Time and Free Will. 51 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17. 52 Stiegler, Technics and Time 1, 17. 53 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 31. 54 Curt Morek, Sittengeschichte des Kinos (Dresden: Aretz, 1926), 264–265. Quoted in Sabine Hake, Cinema’s Third Machine 180. 55 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 32. 56 To this point, I am obviously drawing from Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonse Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003). 57 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77. 58 Joseph Roth, “The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace,” in What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Norton, 2003), 169. Originally published in Frankfurter Zeitung, November 19, 1925. The Harold Lloyd film referred to is The Freshman (1925). 59 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” trans. Alix Strachey (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 223. 60 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 224. 61 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 212. 62 Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 211. 63 Here, the uncanny reenacts the tension between the superstitious Queen of the Night and the ostensibly more progressive, enlightened Sarastro from The Magic Flute. 64 Recall the famous duet between Zurga and Nahir in Bizet’s opera, Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers). 65 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 52.

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66 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 52. 67 The analytical attitude is a necessary limit of human intuition and perception. Bergson observes that while intuition often leads to analysis of great insight, the reverse direction, from immobile analysis to intuition, is not possible, for the analytical symbols concocted by thought can never recompose the original, fleeting movement of reality. In the last part of “Introduction to Metaphysics,” however, he adds that this impossibility does not simply render analytic thinking reductive or useless, for analysis will invariably encounter objects that will resist its systematizing, mathematical scrutiny. And at the moment rational analysis encounters such objects of pure vitality and life,

It will have looked at itself in a mirror which send back an image of itself no doubt very reduced, but also very luminous. It will have seen with a superior clarity what mathematical procedures borrow from concrete reality, and it will continue in the direction of concrete reality, not of mathematical methods. (182)



In short, Bergson speaks of the responsibility of rigorous, critical thinking to preserve the possibility of the singular and the contingent within the realm of modern thought. Analysis has the capacity to delineate its own limits and signal modes of conceptual thought that uncritically ossify reality’s concrete vitality. Despite the necessity of analysis for making reality legible, and despite the associated dangers of reducing this reality to a set of representations, Bergson believes that a thoughtful, analytical life will nevertheless “continue in the direction of concrete reality, not of mathematical methods.” 68 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9. 69 Noël Burch formulates it thus: “the great Frankensteinian dream of the nineteenth century: the recreation of life, the symbolic triumph over death.” Noël Burch, Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (London: BFI, 1990), 12.

Chapter 1 1 2

Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914– 1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 38–40. Ernst Troeltsch, Spektator-Briefe: Aufsätze über die Deutsche Revolution und die Weltpolitik 1918/22 (Tubingen: F. C. B. Mohr, 1924), 69. Quoted from Manfred Franz Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Gläser, The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 205.

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Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), 197. 4 See the last chapter to Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 5 Boemeke, Feldman, and Gläser, The Treaty of Versailles, 205. 6 First published in The Treaty of Peace Between the Allied and Associated Power and Germany (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1919). Quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 8. 7 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 159. 8 This was the view held by many returned soldiers. In the conclusion to his war years memoirs, Erich Ludendorff writes of the state of things in 1919: “Fearless thinking, manly action from each one of us, the subordination of self and the submission of the individual to national discipline—these are what we require. They alone can restore our national self-respect, the recovery of which is a condition precedent to the renaissance of Germany. That is the first commandment!” See Erich Ludendorff, My War Memories 1914–1918, Vol. 2 (London: Hutchinson, 1920), 770. 9 Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 160. 10 The classic study of the brutalization of postwar politics remains Klaus Theweleit’s two-volume work, Male Fantasies, published in 1977 and 1978. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Flood, Bodies, History, trans. Erica Carter, Stephen Conway, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Volume 2: Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Erica Carter, Stephen Conway, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 11 With this utilization of the word “cool” I refer to Helmut Lethen’s study, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 12 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 290. 13 Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict (New York: Macmillan Company, 1915), 38–39. 14 Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 43. 15 For more on the interlinked phenomena of hysteria and malingering, see Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 2003. 3

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16 Barbara Hales, “Unsettling Nerves: Investigating War Trauma in Robert Reinert’s Nerven (1919),” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, ed. Christian Rogowski (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 35. 17 See Greg A. Eghigian, “The German Welfare State as a Discourse of Trauma,” in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930, ed. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 140–171. 18 Hales, “Unsettling Nerves,” 44. 19 Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 2. 20 Ludimar Hermann, Handbuch der Physiologie: Erster Theil, Allgemeine Nervenphysiologie (Leipzig: F. C. W. Fogel, 1879), 135. For a brief history of the relationship between the body and nerves impulses, see “Nerves and Electricity” in Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 153–177. Hermann would utilize Edison’s phonograph to conduct research in the human voice and phonetics. 21 Michael Cowan, Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2008), 8. 22 Heinrich Obersteiner, Functionelle und Organische Nerven-Krankheiten (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1900), 80. 23 Alois Alzheimer, Der Krieg und die Nerven (Breslau: Preuss & Jünger, 1915), 3. 24 Alzheimer, Der Krieg und die Nerven, 3. 25 Alzheimer, Der Krieg und die Nerven, 17. 26 Alzheimer, Der Krieg und die Nerven, 4. 27 Alzheimer’s eighteen-year-old son, Hans, had volunteered to go to the front, a gesture that had greatly pleased the father. After he died of heart failure in December 1915, shortly after Der Krieg und die Nerven was published, one wonders if he would have perhaps rethought his militancy at the Great War’s beginning. See Konrad Maurer and Ulrike Maurer, Alzheimer: The Life of a Physician and the Career of a Disease, trans. Neil Levi and Alistair Burns (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), particularly the section “Psychiatry in a Time of War” in Chapter 6. 28 Alzheimer, Der Krieg und die Nerven, 3. 29 Philipp Stiasny, Das Kino und der Krieg: Deutschland 1914–1929 (Munich: edition text+kritik, 2009), 202. 30 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 29, trans. George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), 325–326. 31 One of these movements would manifest itself in Hitler’s failed beer hall putsch in 1923.

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32 The article also indicates that Reinert experienced some difficulty securing police permission to film the crowd scenes. See Der Kinematograph 659, 1919. 33 Sigmund Freud, “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 14. 34 Freud, “ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness,” 14. 35 In Before Freud, Francis Gosling makes a much stronger argument with regard to the epistemological break from earlier discourses around neurasthenia initiated by Freud’s theory of the psyche. See Francis Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). 36 In a letter to Freud dated April 26, 1915, Abraham relates how his daughter and son had responded to his leaving. He notes that while his daughter was delighted with his uniform, the boy had taken the matter “in a very different way in accordance with his sex and age.” While Abraham had paced around the house with heavy boots, the boy began to imitate the “length, rhythm, and heaviness” of every step he took. See Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, eds., A Psychoanalytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham (New York: Basic Books, 1965), 219–220. 37 Abraham and Freud, A Psychoanalytic Dialogue, 210. 38 In a letter dated September 9, 1914, Freud wrote to Karl Abraham that he had all but given up hope for a rapid end to the war, yet was nevertheless encouraged by Germany’s recent progress. On that day the Septemberprogramm, which detailed Germany’s aims for the war and declared its desire to secure space for the Reich on both Eastern and Western fronts, was signed by the chancellor. “The chief virtue,” Freud writes, “will be endurance.” He jokes that Ernest Jones, their British counterpart, is now “of course our ‘enemy,’ ” seemingly incredulous at the changed geopolitical situation since war broke out in July 1914. He ends the letter by pointing to a recently published paper that reiterates his awareness of the status of psychoanalysis within the scientific community: “A paper from the Flechsig clinic in Alzheimer’s journal shows the beginning of a changed attitude to psychoanalysis even in Germany.” Paul Emil Flechsig, the Leipzig-based psychiatrist, was the Flechsig featured in Danial Paul Schreber’s memoirs detailing his paranoiac delusions. “Alzheimer’s journal” was most certainly the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, which published important papers on psychiatry and physiology between 1910 and 1945. The paper to which Freud refers in this statement is unfortunately not identified. 39 Karl Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis (Vienna: The International Psycho-Analytical Press, 1921), 28.

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40 Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, 23. 41 Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, 26. 42 Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, 26. 43 Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, 27. 44 Abraham, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neurosis, 25. 45 Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45. 46 Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, 46. 47 Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, 49. 48 This understanding may be traced back to Schreber’s first therapist Paul Emil Flechsig, whose research on the brain and phrenology, drawing extensively on nerve theory, localized mental functions such as the signaling of hunger and the perception of external objects in the cerebral cortex. In his 1896 lecture, “Gehirn und Seele,” Flechsig specifies their role in connecting the body to the soul:

The nerves, which allow the representation of sensuous impulses in consciousness, enter into the brain cortex and the centers of sensation—and probably the sphere of bodily feeling—and run along nerve passages which present the judgments and excitations of the outside world together with the body’s needs in the form of longings to consciousness. Both alike stimulate, from the activity of these sensitive points, on one side the apparatuses for physical movement and on the other the mental centers—this touches also on the problem of the expressivity of the eyes, in which countless nuances of feeling reflect themselves.



Flechsig’s explanation connects brain with Geist, and the expressivity of the eyes as organs dense with nerves and nerve activity. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1996), 116. This emotional ambivalence constitutes moreover the figure of the uncanny, the harbinger of death who is the spokesperson for the return of the repressed. See, for example, Freud’s account of the “Rat Man,” from 1909, a case that attests to the bisexuality of human subjects with respect to a single desired object. Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes,” 116. Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes,” 142. Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes,” 147. When Abraham spoke of the delusions of war neurotics in 1918, he was certainly thinking of Freud’s analysis of the psychotic Dr. Schreber, but he had already articulated the basic etiology of paranoia in his 1908 essay, “The Psycho-sexual

49

50 51 52 53 54

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Differences Between Hysteria and Dementia Praecox.” Describing how the libido has turned away from external objects and toward the ego, he writes,



The mental patient transfers on to himself alone as his only sexual object the whole of the libido which the healthy person turns upon all living and inanimate objects in his environment, and accordingly his sexual over-estimation is directed towards himself alone and assumes enormous dimensions. For he is his whole world. The origin of megalomania in dementia praecox is thus a reflected or auto-erotic sexual over-estimation—an overestimation which is turned back on to the ego. Delusions of persecution and megalomania are therefore closely connected with each other.

Abraham’s formulations may be read as anticipating Freud’s: “I do not love at all—I do not love any one.” Karl Abraham, “The Psycho-sexual Differences Between Hysteria and Dementia Praecox,” in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (New York: Basic Books: 1960), 75. In a letter from March 1911, Freud acknowledges that Abraham’s essay “contains almost all the essential view put forward in the present study of the case of Schreber.” 55 Wilhelm Stapel, “Der homo cinematicus,” Deutsches Volkstum (1919), 319. 56 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 175. 57 Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger Nr. 41, January 23, 1920. 58 Sergei Eisenstein, “The Montage of Film Attractions,” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1998), 35. 59 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle, 8:3 & 4 Fall, 1986, 63–70. 60 Carlamaria Heim, Josefa Halbinger, Jahrgang 1900: Lebensgeschichte eines Münchner Arbeitkindes, nach Todbandaufzeichnungen zusammengestellt und niedergeschrieben (München: Obalski & Astor, 1982), 46. 61 Carlamaria Heim, Josefa Halbinger, Jahrgang 1900, 46. 62 Lerner, Hysterical Men. 63 Eric Santner, in his study My Own Private Germany, argues that the crises experienced by Schreber “were largely the same crises of modernity for which the Nazis would elaborate their own series of radical and ostensibly ‘final’ solutions.” Santner notes that his project is not to show how Schreber’s crises prefigured Nazi delusions about the other, but that the sick judge resisted the temptations of totalitarianism. See Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 64 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 314.

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65 Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes,” 154. 66 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), 227. 67 Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1920). 68 We are never told the name of her character. However, she functions like a German Lillian Gish, pre-dating the blind sister in D. W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm by two years. 69 Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890– 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2. 70 Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, 2. 71 Felix Hollaender, “Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit,” UFA advertising flyer, 1925. Quoted in Laurence Kardash, Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 110. 72 See Theodore F. Rippey, “The Body in Time: Wilhelm Prager’s Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit (1925),” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian. Rogowski. 73 Fielding Hudson Garrison, “The Gesolei at Düsseldorf,” The New York Academy of Medicine 3:1 (January 1927): 5. 74 Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 414. 75 For more on the cultural context that surrounds Ruttmann’s advertising shorts, see Michael Cowan, “Absolute Advertising: Walter Ruttmann and the Weimar Advertising Film,” Cinema Journal 52:4 (Summer 2013): 49–73. 76 Ballet Mécanique shared its premiere with Ruttmann’s Opus 2, 3, and 4 at the Absolute Film program in May 1925 and would have been familiar to Ruttmann in 1926. 77 Thanks to Paul Morton for his observational insights on Ruttmann’s film. 78 The essay contains two parts: “The Disillusionment of the War” and “Our Attitude Toward Death.” 79 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth), 289. 80 The ontological overlap between language and thought concerned another traumatized veteran of the war, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, he famously sums up the relationship between language and absence, writing, “what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” (3) The traumatized soldier may be said to pass over in silence when speaking of loss. Here, Freud and Wittgenstein converge on their sensitivity to what remains exceptional, what can be clearly said, and what can be made recognizable to the rational observer. 81 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 59.

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82 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 30. 83 Ernst Jünger, On Pain, trans. David Durst (Candor: Telos Press, 2008), 38. For more on Jünger, see the Special Issue on Ernst Jünger, New German Critique, No. 59, Spring–Summer 1993, 3–23. 84 Jünger, On Pain, 39. 85 Jünger, On Pain, 39. 86 Jünger, On Pain, 40. 87 Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Storyteller,” writes of the invisibility of the dying in modernity. When previously “there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died,” the dead are today not allowed to appear in the world of the living. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 94. 88 Freud, Standard Edition Vol. 14, 289. 89 Characteristic of the Weimar gaze, for cultural historian Helmut Lethen, is that ontological detachment from the other fends off shame. See Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 18. 90 Canetti, Crowds and Power, 462. 91 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2000), 10. 92 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Perspectives of World-History, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 419. 93 Horak, “Robert Reinert: Film as Metaphor,” 185. 94 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 430. 95 For more on the genealogy of Caesarism, see George Mosse, “Caesarism, Circuses, and Monuments,” in Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980). 96 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 431. 97 Spengler, The Decline of the West, 432.

Chapter 2 1 2

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 263. F. W. Murnau, “The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles: By Its Very Nature the Art of the Screen Should Tell a Complete Story Pictorially,” in German Essays on Film, ed. Richard W. McCormick and Alison Guenther-Pal (New York: Continuum, 2004), 67.

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Adapted from Rudolf Stratz’s serial published concurrently in the Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung, The Haunted Castle was filmed over a three-week period in Neubabelsberg in February 1921. 4 Eberhard Spiess, Hrsg., “Wenn ihr Affen nur öfter schreiben wolltet!”: Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Lothar Müthel (Bielefeld: AJZ, 1991), 18. Müthel would act in a number of important Weimar films, including Lang’s Der müde Tod, Wegener’s Golem, and Murnau’s Faust. 5 Quoted from Stadt Bielefeld, Hrsg., Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: 1888–1988 (Bielefeld: Bielefelder Verlaganstalt KG, 1989), 102. 6 See Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1917). 7 Quoted from Stadt Bielefeld, Hrsg., Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 102. 8 Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Reihe Film 43 (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1990), 117–118. 9 Film-Kurier, April 8, 1921. Quoted from Hans Helmut Prinzler, Hrsg., Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: Ein Melancholiker des Films (Berlin: Bertz, 2003), 122. 10 Frieda Grafe, “Der Mann Murnau,” in Licht aus Berlin, Hrsg. Enno Patalis (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose: 2003), 89. 11 Murnau, “The Ideal Picture Needs No Titles,” 67. 12 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 731. 13 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 14. 14 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 15. 15 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 15. 16 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 16. 17 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 16. 18 Ernst L. Freud, ed., The Letters of Sigmund Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 328. 19 Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud, 328. 20 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Standard Edition Vol. 14, eds. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth, 1957), 247. 21 Freud, The Letters of Sigmund Freud, 328. 22 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 249. 23 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 257. 24 Karl Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders,” in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 436. 25 Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido,” 436. 26 Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido,” 436. 3

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27 Jo Leslie Collier, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988), 111. 28 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 56. 29 Kracauer, “Photography,” 56. 30 Kracauer, “Photography,” 56. 31 Kracauer, “Photography,” 56. 32 See Agamben’s reading of the film medium in precisely this manner in Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 33 Quoted from Eisner, Murnau, 106. 34 Quoted from Eisner, Murnau, 106. 35 Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 36 See Naldo Felke, “Die Gesundsheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos,” Die Umschau 17: 1 (1913), 254–255. 37 Albert Hellwig, “Illusionen und Halluzinationen bei kinematographischen Vorführungen,” Zeitschrift für pädagogische Pszchologie und experimentelle Pädagogik 15: 1 (1914), 37–40. 38 Thomas Mann, Kino: Romanfragment (Gera: Friedrich Blau, 1926). Excerpted for this publication were only the pages dealing with cinema in The Magic Mountain. I will be drawing from the latter in my reading. 39 Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1996), 310–311. 40 Mann, Magic Mountain, 310. 41 Mann, Magic Mountain, 311. 42 Mann, Magic Mountain, 311. 43 Thomas Mann, “Über den Film,” in Kino-Debatte: Literatur und Film 1909–1929, Hrsg. Anton Kaes (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978), 165. Criticizing the “crude sensationalism” of the cinema, Mann wonders why the cinemagoer “at every moment cries or screams like a handmaiden.” (164) 44 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 37. 45 Friedrich Sieburg, “Die Transzendenz des Filmbildes,” Die neue Schaubühne 6 (June 1920): 144. 46 Sieburg, “Die Transzendenz des Filmbildes,” 144. 47 Carlo Mierendorff, Hätte ich das Kino! (Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag, 1920), 34. 48 Sieburg, “Die Transzendenz des Filmbildes,” 145. 49 Sieburg, “Die Transzendenz des Filmbildes,” 146.

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Quoted from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Berlin: edition text+kritik, 1995), 150. Quoted from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 150. Quoted from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 151. Quoted from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 151. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 193. 55 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166. 56 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 178. 57 Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 182. 58 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (Spring 1980), 69. 59 Owens calls photography an “allegorical art” that “represents our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.” See Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 71. 60 This formulation is prefigured in another letter to Rang, dated December 9, 1923. There Benjamin writes, “Allow me to define it: criticism is the mortification of works of art. Not that consciousness is enhanced in them (romantic!), but that knowledge takes up residence in them.” Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 224. 61 Walter Benjamin, “Theses of the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 258. 62 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, trans. Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 57. 63 Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 129. 64 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 129. 65 Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 37. Widdig tracks the collective memory of Weimar hyperinflation in his study, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, drawing from diverse sources, such as images published in the satirical journal Simplicissimus, Thomas Mann’s short story Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925), and Fritz Lang’s two-part film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), to describe the cultural effects of economic chaos. 66 Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany, 36. 67 Murnau Collection, Berlin Filmmuseum. Quoted from Janet Bergstrom, “Murnau at the Crossroads,” DVD Notes to Phantom and Die Finanzen des Großherzogs, Eureka! 2009. 68 On the day of the film’s premiere at the Ufa-Palast in Berlin, the trade journal Lichtbildbühne published a piece called “Gerhart Hauptmann 60 Jahre.” In it 50 51 52 53 54

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the writer emphasizes the production of Phantom as fulfilling cinema’s futural aesthetic promise. It provides further proof that the film medium had the means to create valued, autonomous art, despite the worsening economic conditions in 1922 and 1923. 69 See “Cultural Capital in Decline: Inflation and the Distress of Intellectuals,” in Widdig’s Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany. 70 Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 201. 71 Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 201. 72 Scholem and Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 203. 73 While The Haunted Castle seems, in certain ways, to anticipate Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Phantom may remind some contemporary viewers of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In Vertigo, the melancholy associated with the lost love object is ameliorated by a fetishized surrogate, who is gradually forced to become identical to the previous object. This attempt is really a demand made by the heterosexual, narcissistic male, stubbornly positioning the other within discursive coordinates inscribed by the original love. This pathology is manifest when Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) forces Judy Barton (Kim Novak) to look and dress exactly like Madeline Elster (also Kim Novak). A similar demand is operative in Murnau’s Phantom between Veronika and her substitute Melitta, both mediated by their relationship to the damaged Lorenz. Hitchcock seems even to reenact the scene where Lorenz first sees Melitta in the “best tavern in town,” in a scene where Scottie first spots Madeline in Ernie’s Restaurant. When Melitta asks who Lorenz thinks of while kissing her, it is evidently the lost love that he imagines, the woman who ran him over with her horse-drawn carriage. 74 Mann, Magic Mountain, 310–312. 75 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 51. 76 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 51. 77 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 44–45. 78 Balázs, Visible Man, 45. Somewhat confusingly Balázs uses the word “impressionism” here and in other passages. In each instance, nevertheless, he illustrates how interior, subjective impressions are exteriorized onto the film screen. 79 Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 306. 80 Film scholar Peter Riedel echoes all this, arguing in his essay on Phantom, “Diese Tendenz, Imagination und Realität zu verwerben, ist charakteristisch

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für Murnaus Arbeiten.” Peter Riedel, “Das Imaginäre im Realen find. Strategien visueller epoch in Friedrich W. Murnau’s ‘Phantom’ (1922)” in Gerhart Hauptmann und der Film: Stationen einer (un-)gewöhnlichen Beziehung, Hrsg. Michael. Grisko (Siegen: Carl Böschen Verlag, 2007), 66. 81 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 59. 82 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 156. 83 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 41. 84 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68–78. 85 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 264. 86 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998), 273. 87 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 313. 88 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 310. 89 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 275. 90 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 296. 91 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 296. 92 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 296. 93 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 281. 94 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 294. 95 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition Vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 289. 96 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 279. 97 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 279.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten, eds., Die Stimme von Metropolis (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1990), 240. Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 241–242. Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 242. Quoted from Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 55. Quoted from Eisner, Fritz Lang, 55–56. Quoted from Eisner, Fritz Lang, 56. Quoted from Eisner, Fritz Lang, 56. In his reading of Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919), historian Jay Winter connects the imagery from the last sequence of the film to its contemporaneous historical reality. A poet named Jean Diaz hallucinates resurrected, ghost-like soldiers rising from their graves. As the wounded veterans, wrapped in bandages and walking in splints, limp back to their homes, the townspeople are horrified by their visitation.

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“Representation and reality had become one,” Winter writes, noting that many of the resurrected soldiers in J’accuse were played by actual veterans from the war. See Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15. 9 See Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). 10 In its virtuosic opening scene, Mabuse exploits the exactitude offered by modern clock-time to coordinate not only train schedules but also the transmission of information. Using a telephone and synchronized pocket watches, Mabuse artificially induces the boom and bust of the stock market in order to reap enormous financial profits—this at a time of already skyrocketing inflation. See Tom Gunning, “Mabuse, Grand Enunciator: Control and Co-ordination,” in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000). 11 Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 116. 12 This structure not only recalls the framed narratives in Caligari, D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1915), and Carl Dreyer’s Leaves From the Book of Satan (1921), but also seems to anticipate Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and Lang’s own The Woman in the Window (1944), a noir whose narrative is the content of Edward G. Robinson’s dream. 13 Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 149. 14 Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, 16. 15 Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang, 27. 16 Quoted from Frederick W. Ott, The Films of Fritz Lang (New Jersey: The Citadel Press, 1979), 89. 17 Dziga Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 41. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 121. 19 The discrepancy between flux, registered as embodied sensation, and the metaphysics of the signifier is at the center of Leo Charney’s “In the Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity,” in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 281. 20 Thea von Harbou, “Vom Phantom-Roman zum Phantom-Film,” Film-Kurier, November 15, 1922. Quoted from Barbara Fuchs, “Von der Kunst, mit Worten Bilder zu malen,” in Schreiben und Übersetzen, Hrsg. Wilhelm Gössmann und Christoph Hollander (Tübingen: Narr, 1994), 76–77.

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21 Georg Simmel, View of Life, trans. John A. Y. Andrews and Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15. 22 Simmel, View of Life, 40. 23 Simmel, View of Life, 40. 24 Simmel, View of Life, 12. 25 Simmel, View of Life, 8. 26 Simmel, View of Life, 7–8. 27 Simmel, View of Life, 29. 28 Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 63. 29 Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 65. 30 Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 65. 31 Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 66. 32 See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). 33 Simmel, View of Life, 8. 34 Georg Simmel, “The Transcendent Character of Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, trans. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 369. 35 Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 109. 36 Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 114. 37 Béla Balázs, Visible Man or the Culture of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 133. 38 Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 204. 39 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 15. 40 This recalls the fourth stanza from Rilke’s Duino Elegies. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (New York: First Mariner Books, 2005), 31. 41 The medieval humanist Johannes von Tepl, in his festival play Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, writes that “If you did not know it, know it now: as soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.” 42 Simmel, View of Life, 65. 43 Fritz Lang, “Happily Ever After,” The Penguin Film Review 5 (1948), 24. 44 Lang, “Happily Ever After,” 24. 45 Lang, “Happily Ever After,” 29. 46 Lang, “Happily Ever After,” 24. 47 For Lang, as for many others, the war left an indelible mark in his memory. On January 12, 1915, the twenty five-year-old Lang volunteered for the Austrian military. After undergoing basic training and preparation, he advanced in rank

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relatively quickly, becoming a second lieutenant by the end of the year. While Lang was assigned the task of reconnaissance on the Eastern front, he put his drawing skills to good use by emerging from the trenches and quickly sketching tactical maps of unknown enemy positions. In 1916, Lang was recognized twice for bravery, having risked his life under heavy fire while producing surveillance diagrams of enemy locations. On June 25, Lang was seriously wounded by shrapnel while fighting in the trenches near Zatourcy. The exact nature of his wounds remains unclear, but it has been surmised that this was the incident that injured his left eye, rendering him partially blind and requiring him to wear a monocle. His wounds were serious enough to warrant hospitalization until June 1918, when he requested a four-week leave for St. Petersburg. One week later, he was dismissed because of his “nervous ailments,” and elevated to the rank of first lieutenant. 48 Lang, “Happily Ever After,” 29. 49 Sigmund Freud, “On Transience,” in Writings on Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 176. 50 Freud, “On Transience,” 177. 51 Freud, “On Transience,” 179. 52 Freud, “On Transience,” 176. 53 This claim is put forth by Herbert Lehmann, who unequivocally writes that “I believe it has become possible to identify the young poet as Rainer Maria Rilke,” basing this statement on a letter composed by Andreas-Salomé in September 1913, describing her introducing Rilke to Freud. See Herbert Lehmann, “A Conversation Between Freud and Rilke,” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 35:3 (1966). See also Matthew von Unwerth, Freud’s Requiem: Mourning, Memory and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005). 54 Freud, “On Transience,” 176. 55 Freud, “On Transience,” 176. 56 Freud, “On Transience,” 179. 57 Béla Balázs, Todesästhetik, trans. Anna Bak-Gara and Marina Gschmeidler in Mitteilungen des Filmarchiv Austria 2 (2004): 69. 58 Balázs, Todesästhetik, 70. This quote refers to Rembrandt in particular, foreshadowing Simmel’s argument in his study of the Dutch painter in 1916. 59 Freud’s essay is followed by a drawing by Friedrich August von Kaulbach called Friede, which depicts death in uniform playing the fife in a military cemetery. 60 The two had first met at a Munich hotel preceding the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress in September 1913 and another time in Christmas of 1915, but Rilke could not be persuaded to visit Freud again. 61 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters, 1910–1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1969), 37.

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62 Rilke recognizes the insight afforded by Freud’s discourse, but nevertheless remains unconvinced that psychoanalysis could help him. For example, see Rilke, Letters, 1910–1926, 44. 63 Rilke, Letters, 1910–1926, 316. 64 Rilke, Letters, 1910–1926, 317. 65 André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 30. 66 The gift of death that concludes Destiny recalls another famous self-immolation sequence, one that Lang would certainly have been familiar with: the destruction of Valhalla in the last scene of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. In the final opera of the Ring cycle, the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, in love with the mortal Siegfried, orders the fire god Loge to light a funeral pyre. She then snatches the ring of power from Wotan, mounts her horse, and dives into the flames, sacrificing her life for love like the maiden at the end of Destiny. Loge’s fire, symbol of redemption, grows in intensity and dramatically destroys the Hall of the Gods, concluding Wagner’s tetralogy. In this connection, Frieda Grafe comments that Lang’s film plays out the naïve joy of all fairy tales, like Alberich as he places the magic helmet on his head in Scene Three of Das Rheingold. Destiny is “ein typisches Produkt des frühen deutschen Kunst-Kinos, mit Elementen, wie bei Wegener, Galeen und Murnau, aus der romantischen Tradition, auf populäre Erzählweisen sich stützend, Märchen, Zaubereien, in denen ganz naiv noch die Freude sich ausdrückt, dass der Zuschauer wie Alberich eine Tarnkappe auf dem Kopf hat und sich ins Geschehen stürzen kann, ohne lädiert oder belangt zu werden.” See Frieda Grafe, Licht aus Berlin, Hrsg. Enno Patalis (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose: 2003), 18. 67 Thea von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg (Leipzig: Hesse & Becker, 1916), 55. 68 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 59. 69 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 143. 70 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 141. 71 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 10. 72 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 141. 73 For a description of this wartime film, see an account written by Julius Urgiß in Hätte ich das Kino! Die Schriftsteller und der Stummfilm, Hrsg. Bernhard Zeller (München: Kösel Verlag, 1976), 76–77. 74 Thea von Harbou, “Nur so meine Meinung,” B. Z. Am Mittag, April 30, 1922. Quoted from Reinhold Keiner, Thea von Harbou und der deutsche Film bis 1933 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1984), 76. Keiner goes so far as to call Destiny practically a “Propagandastück deutschen Films.” 75 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 25.

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76 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 90. 77 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 78 Rilke, Letters, 1910–1926, 291. 79 von Harbou, Die deutsche Frau im Weltkrieg, 25. 80 Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 61. 81 Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 55. 82 Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 59. 83 In his well-known reading of the Open in his essay “What Are Poets For?,” Heidegger concurs with the spectatorial position critiqued by Rilke. By asserting his ostensibly rational and scientific will, man inadvertently posits the world as a series of objects, ready for exchange and exploitation. “Man interposes something between himself and things that distract him from his purpose…. The Open becomes an object, and is thus twisted around toward the human being. Over against the world as an object, man stations himself and sets himself up as the one who deliberately pushes through all this producing.” (110) By standing over against, man turns the Open into an abstract concept, thus “turning inward,” and away from its lived worldly life. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 84 Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 55. 85 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 159–160. 86 Heidegger, Parmenides, 154n. 87 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59. “Not even the lark sees the open.” This reference is the epigram to the chapter “The Open,” from Agamben’s text. 88 Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, 55–57. 89 Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 192–197. 90 Freud, “On Transience,” 176.

Chapter 4 1 2

Paul Wegener, “Ein Gespräch mit Paul Wegener: Ein führendes zum Golem,” Film-Kurier 244, October 29, 1920. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression

246

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5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

18

Notes of Reality in the Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Anton Kaes, Kino-Debatte. Texte zum Verhältnis von Literatur und Film 1909–1929 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978). One of the last intertitles of the 1914 version of The Golem, derived from the mystic Angelus Silesius, corresponds to this subtitle. It reads: “Natur wirkt immer tief, so innen wie auswendig, Und alles lebt im Tod, und tot ist es lebendig.” Quoted from Claudia Dillmann, “Die Wirkung der Architektur ist eine magische,” in Hans Poelzig: Bauten für den Film, Hrsg. Hans Peter Reichmann (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1997), 26. Dillmann, “Die Wirkung der Architektur ist eine magische,” 40. Goethe’s original German reads: “Nach ewigen, ehrnen, großen Gesetzen müssen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden.” This is a quote that Haeckel repeatedly refers throughout his writings. Ernst Haeckel, Kristallseelen: Studien über das Anorganische Leben (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner Verlag, 1917), 10. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 56. Compare with the word “truth” in Psalm 25:10, “All the paths of the LORD are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies.” Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 102. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 21. Tom Gunning, “Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies,” in From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 326. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Susanne Holl and Friedrich Kittler, “Ablösen des Streifens vom Buche: Eine Allegorese von Wegeners drei Golemfilmen,” Cinema 41 (1996): 107. Holl and Kittler, “Ablösen des Streifens vom Buche,” 109. Holl and Kittler, “Ablösen des Streifens vom Buche,” 109. See Benjamin Goose, “The Opera of the Film? Eugen d’Albert’s Der Golem,” Cambridge Opera Journal 19:2 (2007). Noah Isenberg, “Of Monsters and Magicians,” in An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era: Weimar Cinema, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 44. “German Worker’s Party (DAP): The Twenty-Five Points,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 125.

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19 Herman G. Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” in Introduction to the Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 77. 20 Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” 84. 21 Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” 84. 22 Isenberg, “Of Monsters and Magicians,” 45. 23 Buber, I and Thou, 91. 24 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 25 Buber, I and Thou, 90. 26 See the entry, “1916 The German Army Orders a Census of Jewish Soldiers, and Jews Defend German Culture,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096–1996, ed. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 27 Arnold Zweig 1887–1968: Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, Hrsg. Georg Wenzel (Berlin: Aufbau, 1978), 74. 28 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1998). 29 Arnold Zweig, “Judenzählung vor Verdun,” in Arnold Zweig 1887–1968: Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, Georg Wenzel, Hrsg. (Berlin: Aufbau, 1978), 555. 30 Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, trans. D. L. Mackinnon (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926), 245. 31 The following quotations are from Film-Kurier 245, October 30, 1920. 32 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 10. 33 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 25. 34 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 45–46. 35 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 47. 36 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 47. 37 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 48–49. 38 Judith Butler reminds us that to enable the flourishing of another life means to apprehend the other in a manner that recognizes their otherness while acknowledging that knowledge of the other still remains incomplete. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 13. This crucial difference between what Butler calls apprehension and recognition is the central tension around which Buber’s I and Thou revolves. 39 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 70. 40 Mulvey, Death 24x a Second, 74. Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot: A Model for Narrative,” in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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41 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 13–14. 42 Buber, Between Man and Man, 13 43 Buber, Between Man and Man, 13. According to Aubrey Hodes, Buber stated plainly that he had “failed to see through to the man behind the questions.” See Aubrey Hodes, Martin Buber: An Intimate Portrait (New York: Viking, 1971), 10. 44 Buber, Between Man and Man, 14. 45 In his intellectual history of the early Buber, From Mysticism to Dialogue, Paul Mendes-Flohr argues that “during the initial ‘euphoric’ period of the First World War Buber’s mysticism allowed him to overlook the moral dimension of war, whereas his later philosophy of dialogue would require that he remain for ever alert to the interpersonal, and ergo, moral dimension of reality.” See Paul MandesFlohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). Buber called the anecdote with the distressed young man a “conversion,” and it was evidently the guilt incurred from the man’s suicide that Buber began to take up the dialogical in his thinking. Although it is not clear, the young man perhaps had some connection to the war effort. 46 Buber, Between Man and Man, 14. 47 Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 6. 48 Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema, 3. 49 See Wegener, “Ein Gespräch mit Paul Wegener.” 50 Buber, I and Thou, 76. 51 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006). 52 Buber, I and Thou, 78. 53 Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, trans. Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 46. 54 Balázs, Early Film Theory, 37. 55 Buber, I and Thou, 59. 56 Buber, I and Thou, 62. 57 Buber, Between Man and Man, 5. 58 Buber, Between Man and Man, 6. 59 Buber, Between Man and Man, 6. 60 Buber, I and Thou, 100. 61 Buber, I and Thou, 112. 62 Buber, I and Thou, 106. 63 Buber, I and Thou, 104–105.

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64 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 34–35. 65 Vivian Sobchack, “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 252. Italics in the original. 66 Buber, I and Thou, 73. 67 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009), 198. 68 For an illuminating reading of Levinas’s vascillating relationship to Buber, see Robert Bernasconi, “ ‘Failure of Communication’ as a Surplus: Dialogue and Lack of Dialogue between Buber and Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988). For more on this communication breakdown, suggested by Bernasconi, see the “interrogations” conducted with Buber, including exchanges with Levinas, in Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds., Philosophical Interrogations (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). 69 For an illuminating account of Levinas and cinema spectatorship along these lines, see Sarah Cooper, Selfless Cinema?: Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford: Legenda, 2006). 70 In the translator’s Preface to Daniel, Maurice Friedman notes that Buber had for many years refused to permit an English translation of his early 1913 work. Friedman writes, quoting correspondence between himself and Buber, that

Finally, under the urging of Arthur A. Cohen and myself, he consented, provided, he stipulated, that I “write an introduction explaining, even at some length, that this is an early book in which there is already expressed the great duality of human life, but only in its cognitive and not yet in its communicative and existential character. This book is obviously a book of transition to a new kind of thinking and must be characterized as such.”

See Martin Buber, Daniel, trans. Martin Friedman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), ix. 71 Buber, Daniel, 130. 72 Buber, Daniel, 130. 73 Buber, Daniel, 136. 74 Buber, Daniel, 140–141. 75 Israel Koren, in his essay “Between Buber’s Daniel and his I and Thou: A New Examination,” argues that critics have all too often opposed Daniel and I and Thou,

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the former ostensibly representing Buber’s early “mystical unity” phase, and the latter his “dialogical” philosophy proper. Koren convincingly shows that “the main difference between the two books—and between the two periods in Buber’s work generally—is restricted to the fact that in Daniel the dialogical principle had not yet been sufficiently articulated.” See Israel Koren, “Between Buber’s Daniel and his I and Thou: A New Examination,” Modern Judaism 22:2 (May 2002): 169–198. 76 Buber, I and Thou, 146–147. 77 Buber, I and Thou, 147. 78 Zweig, “Theoretische Grundlegung des Films in Thesen,” 375. 79 Zweig commented on Wegener’s first cinematic rendering of the Golem myth in 1915. He writes that the “surrounding-world of humans is mirrored” in the Golem’s soul. See Bernhard Zeller, Hrsg., Hätte ich das Kino! Die Schriftsteller und der Stummfilm, München: Kösel Verlag, 1976, 110. 80 That is, when the medium disappears in what is represented. I am thinking here of Agamben’s writings on film and his critique of the media. 81 Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001).

Chapter 5 1

2 3

Lotte Eisner reminds us that these interviews with Berg “turned out to be a skillful confection of statements from Lang’s article ‘Happily Ever After’ and other interviews, articles and remarks made by Lang to Gretchen Berg and her father Hermann G. Weinberg in informal meetings.” See Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 397. Barry Keith Grant, ed., Fritz Lang Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003), 73. This interview was published in Cahiers du cinema. Joe McElhaney, in his The Death of Classical Cinema, performs a close reading of Lang’s The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), linking this film, his last, with Godard’s Contempt. The passing of generations is emblemized in the passing of cinema history itself, from classical to modernist. For McElhaney, references to Ray, Hawks, and Minnelli in Godard’s film “function as acts of mourning, an acknowledgement that a way of filming and looking at the world is passing out of existence.” (2) See Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 2. In Lang’s noir Scarlet Street (1945), a newspaper reporter tells Edward G. Robinson’s character on a train that no wrong can go unpunished, even when it seems justified. He says, “But no one escapes punishment. I figure we have a little courtroom right

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in here—judge, jury, and executioner. Well, murder never solves anything…. The problem just moves in here where it can never get out. Right here in solitary. So what? So you go right on punishing yourself. You can’t get away with it. Never.” Robinson’s character murders Kitty (Joan Bennett) and blames her death on Johnny (Dan Duryea). 4 Ernst Bloch, “Hitler’s Force,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 149. Originally published as “Hitlers Gewalt,” Das Tagebuch 5, April 12, 1924. 5 W. G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 97. In this essay, Sebald raises the question, itself highly problematic, of whether the Allied air raids on Dresden and other German cities were morally justified. 6 According to Lotte Eisner, Lang consulted with Heinrich Umlauff of the Hamburg Ethnographical Museum for these props: see Eisner, Fritz Lang, 79. 7 Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 140. 8 Kaes makes a more direct equation between Siegfried’s body and the national body in an earlier essay. “In popular memory from the romantic period to the First World War, Germany was identified with Siegfried. Siegfried was Germany. Germany was Siegfried.” See Anton Kaes, “Siegfried—A German Film Star. Performing the Nation in Lang’s Nibelungen Film,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 65. 9 For an excellent, short history of Friedrich’s important text and its antecedents, see Dora Apel, “Cultural Battlegrounds: Weimar Photographic Narratives of War,” New German Critique 76 (Winter 1999): 49–84. 10 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 140. 11 Quoted from Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 276. 12 See Karl v. Seeger, Das Denkmal des Weltkriegs (Stuttgart: Huge Matthaes, 1930), 158–159. Below a photo of the memorial, sculptor Georg Kolbe is quoted emphasizing the ostensible calm provided by death: “Wie das viel farbige Licht in den Sonnenstrahlen gesammelt ist, so leuchtet erst im Tode das weiße Licht der Seele in Wahrheit von dem endlich beruhigten Antlitz auf.” 13 Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 155. 14 Paul von Hindenburg, “The Stab in the Back,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 15–16.

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15 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 249. 16 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1998), 63–67. 17 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 93. 18 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 93. 19 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1997), 42. 20 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, 34. 21 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 94–95. 22 Fred Gehler and Ullrich Kasten, eds., Die Stimme von Metropolis (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1990), 174. 23 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 94–95. 24 Gösta Werner, “Fritz Lang and Goebbels: Myth and Facts,” Film Quarterly 43:2 (Winter 1989–1990): 26. 25 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 229. 26 George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 87. 27 One of the symbols of the extreme right-wing Freikorps. 28 Sabine Hake, “Architectural Hi/stories: Fritz Lang and The Nibelungs,” Wide Angle 12:3 (July 1990): 51. 29 Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. William W. Holdheim (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 46. 30 Scheler, Ressentiment, 46. 31 Scheler, Ressentiment, 46. 32 Scheler, Ressentiment, 46. 33 Such a consciousness makes possible what William James in 1910 called “moral equivalence,” the notion that every moral individual may be thought of as good or evil as any other. See William James, “The Moral Equivalent of War” in The Moral Equivalent of War and Other Essays, ed. John Roth (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1971). 34 Scheler, Ressentiment, 47. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 63. 36 Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings: 1913–1926, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 289.

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37 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo, 65. 38 John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Penguin, 1995), 36. 39 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 168. 40 Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 56. 41 The myth of “blood and soil” gained currency in conjunction with the rise of German modernity, but this racist discourse was particularly marked during the Nazi period. Its rise may be linked to texts such as Hans F. K. Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes and Richard Walther Darré’s Neuadel aus Blut und Boden. See Kiernan, particularly 416–454. 42 At the end of his 2001 essay on the Nibelungen, Anton Kaes seems to articulate this tension in the critique of revenge:



Wie der Titel des zweiten Teils, Kriemhilds Rache, verkündet, inszeniert Lang den fatalen Weg von Haß, Rache und Vergeltung, dekonstruiert und kritisiert ihn aber dann: Zu der fast zu Stein erstarrten Kriemhild sagt am Ende jemand: »Ihr seid kein Mensch«. Lang zeigt, daß der Weg der Rache nur zur Selbstvernichtung führen kann—und spricht damit das Motiv des sich selbst perpetuierenden Teufelskreises von Gewalt and Rache an, der in direkter Linie zu den 50 Millionen Toten des Zweiten Weltkrieg geführt hat. (342)

The ethical demands that underlie the tension between affirmation and critique animate my reading of Lang’s film. See Anton Kaes, “Der Mythos des Deutschen in Fritz Langs Nibelungen-Film” in Deutsche Meister, böse Geister? Nationale Selbstfindung in der Musik, Hrsg. Hermann Danauser and Herfried Münkler (Schliengen: Argus, 2001). 43 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola: Dover, 1998), 37. The text was translated into German in 1912. 44 Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 163. 45 Tom Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: BFI, 2000), 43. 46 Scheler, Ressentiment, 59. 47 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo, 58. 48 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 90. 49 Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” 288. 50 He played Jonathan Starker in Murnau’s Nosferatu. 51 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 112.

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52 He played the real estate agent Knock in Murnau’s Nosferatu. 53 Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 97. 54 Film-Kurier 173, July 27, 1923. 55 Film-Kurier 173, July 27, 1923. 56 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 22. 57 Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1924), xlvi–xlvii. 58 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982). 59 Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As If, xlvii. 60 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 114. 61 Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 113–114. 62 Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 179. 63 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1. 64 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 206. 65 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 3. 66 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 191. 67 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 187–188. 68 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 188. 69 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 199. 70 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 191. 71 Mystery and the temporality of the future are intimately linked for Bloch: “So it seems, indeed it becomes certain, that this precisely is hope, where the darkness brightens. Hope is in the darkness itself, partakes of its imperceptibility, just as darkness and mystery are always related; it threatens to disappear if it looms up too nearly, too abruptly in this darkness.” The key toward this hopeful darkness is a proper, open determination of this futural temporality. See Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 201. 72 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 201. 73 Bloch discusses this in a 1919 essay, “Über das noch nicht bewusste Wissen” (“On Knowledge, Not Yet Conscious”). Echoing Utopia, he writes, “Wir leben uns, aber erleben uns nicht, und es ist derart sicher, daß wir uns an uns selber weder in der scheinbaren Gegenwart noch vor allem in irgendeinem Abschnitt der Erinnerung besitzen. Anders aber steht es mit dem Hoffen, vor allem mit dem, was in uns als stillste,” “tiefste” “Sehnsucht, als der uns fast unablässing begleitende” Wachtraum

Notes

255

“irgendeiner Entzauberung, irgendeiner namenlosen, uns einzig adäquaten Erfüllung lebt.” Ernst Bloch, “Über das noch nicht bewusste Wissen,” Die Weißen Blätter 8 (August 1919), 358–359. Historian Anson Rabinbach, speaking of Bloch’s later Heritage of Our Times, puts it thus: “Actuality and utopia do not constitute antinomies because the latter is always a potential within existence, an already present desire which, in attempting to transcend the given order of things, recurrently manifests itself.” Anson Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique 11 (Spring 1977): 18 74 Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, 197–198. 75 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 2011), 32. 76 Stiegler, Technics and Time 3, 32. 77 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986), 22–27. 78 Grant, Fritz Lang Interviews, 179. 79 In his essay “Worauf es beim Nibelungen-Film ankam,” published in the 1924 program for the film, Lang writes that “Vor allem aber hoffte ich, im NibelungenFilm die Welt des Mythos für das 20.Jahrhundert wieder lebendig werden zu lassen,—lebendig und glaubhaft zugleich.” See Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 171. 80 Gehler and Kasten, Die Stimme von Metropolis, 163. 81 For a recent and concise treatment of Weimar history that corresponds closely to Kracauer’s approach, see Volker Berghahn, Europa im Zeitalter der Weltkriege: Die Entfesselung und Entgrenzung der Gewalt (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 2002). 82 Siegfried Kracauer, “Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 81. 83 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 62. 84 Kracauer eschewed the theory of total reification elaborated by Lukács in his 1923 essay and, as Martin Jay notes, “his distrust of totality, concern for the integrity of the individual personality, and adherence to the Enlightenment view of materialism informed all of his later work as well.” See Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration From Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press), 1985. Jay quotes a letter from June 1926 where Kracauer calls the “empty totality” of Lukács a “regression behind Marx” (163). 85 Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico-World,” in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 282. 86 Kracauer, “Calico-World,” 281.

256

Notes

Conclusion “First World War Officially Ends,” The Daily Telegraph, September 28, 2010. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2007), 33–34. 3 Rancière, The Future of the Image, 34. 4 Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 180. 5 Rancière, Film Fables, 177. 6 Rancière, Film Fables, 177. 7 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 1. 1 2

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Filmography Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt & Melodie der Welt, directed by Walter Ruttmann, 1920–1931, Munich: Filmmuseum München, 2008, DVD. Destiny, directed by Fritz Lang, 1920, Chatsworth: Image Entertainment, 2001, DVD. Die Nibelungen, directed by Fritz Lang, 1924, New York: Kino Lorber, 2004, DVD. Nerven, directed by Robert Reinert, 1919, Munich: Filmmuseum München, 2008, DVD. Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau, 1922, New York: Kino Lorber, 2007, DVD. Phantom, directed by F. W. Murnau, 1922, London: Eureka Entertainment, 2009, DVD. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene, 1919, New York: Kino Lorber, 2002, DVD. The Golem: How He Came Into the World, directed by Paul Wegener, 1920, New York: Kino Lorber, 2004, DVD. The Haunted Castle, directed by F. W. Murnau, 1921, New York: Kino Lorber, 2009, DVD. Warning Shadows—A Nocturnal Hallucination, directed by Arthur Robison, 1923, New York: Kino Lorber, 2006, DVD.

Index Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes Abraham, Karl 9, 17, 48, 81, 231n. 36, 231n. 38, 232n. 54 on introjection 69–70 on war trauma 37–40 absence 13, 56, 60, 61, 77, 83, 87, 89, 92, 96–100, 102, 108, 109, 116, 132, 156, 175, 186, 211, 234n. 80 and taking leave 62–74; see also nothing aesthetics 8, 12, 45, 46, 48, 94, 151, 160, 176, 187, 206, 215, 222 “Todesästhetik” 123–4 afterlife 11, 13, 41, 58, 61, 70, 72, 100, 102, 105, 108, 126, 127, 130, 131, 135, 138, 155, 183 and death 80–2 Agamben, Giorgio 154, 182, 237n. 32, 245n. 87, 250n. 80 on “The Open” 133–4 Alzheimer, Alois 31–2, 37–9, 230n. 27, 231n. 38 Andriopoulos, Stefan 223n. 6 animate/animation 11, 13–14, 15, 19, 21–2, 25, 55–6, 61, 78, 101, 102, 112, 120, 134–6, 151, 155–6, 173–4, 183, 210, 215, 216, 224n. 10, 224n. 13 and Golem, The 138–46 and melancholy 70–2 and the nonorganic life of things 90–6 and Weimar culture 4–6 anti-Semitism 150–4 apparatus theory 16, 17, 137–8, 162, 169, 170, 173, 174 Ascent, The 51, 53–6 auteur 101, 108 Balázs, Béla 2, 6, 7, 16, 82, 94, 118, 239n. 78 on children 165 “Todesästhetik” 123–4

Baudry, Jean-Louis 26, 48, 137 Bazin, André 11, 22, 56, 126, 147, 152, 156 Benjamin, Walter 9, 10, 17, 45, 189, 199, 215–16, 220, 221, 235n. 87, 238n. 60 on allegory 79–83, 214, 216 “Critique of Violence” 182–3 “Experience and Poverty” 66–7, 182–3 life during Weimar hyperinflation 85–6 Bergson, Henri 6, 26, 17, 26, 105, 113, 114, 116–17, 158, 194, 227n. 50, 228n. 67 on the “Idea of Nothing” 96–100 “Introduction to Metaphysics” 7–8, 15–16, 22, 97, 195, 210 Berlin 29, 37, 62–4, 85, 109, 112, 151, 215 Binding, Karl and Alfred Hoche 49 Bloch, Ernst 8, 17, 106, 177, 216, 254n. 71, 254n. 73 Spirit of Utopia, The 208–14 Böcklin, Arnold 115, 123–24 Brooks, Peter 160 Buber, Martin 9, 17, 173, 176, 184, 247n. 38, 248n. 43, 248n. 45, 249n. 68, 249n. 70, 249n. 75 Daniel 170–1 on the “I-It” 152–5 on the “I-You” 161–70 Burch, Noël 228n. 69 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The 1–8, 12, 14, 18–22, 25, 29, 62, 65, 110, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153, 172, 224n. 10, 241n. 12 Canetti, Elias 48, 58 clocks 15, 52, 86, 105–6, 118–19, 127, 131, 198, 224n. 13, 241n. 10 Cooper, Sarah 249n. 69 Cowan, Michael 30, 234n. 75 crisis 24, 50, 89

Index debt 50, 58, 185, 189–91, 193, 196, 197, 199, 217 Deleuze, Gilles 4, 95–6, 200, 226n. 45 on German Expressionism 90–1 on Warning Shadows 205 delusion 16, 17, 27, 32, 35–6, 39–48, 50, 59, 75, 87, 91–6, 181, 197, 209, 231n. 38, 232n. 54, 233n. 63 Derrida, Jacques 74, 130 Destiny 11, 12, 17, 100, 102, 137–8, 155, 161, 163, 176, 198, 244n. 66, 244n. 74 Destiny-machine 108, 195–6 Dillmann, Claudia 140–1 Doane, Mary Anne 226n. 39 Dolchstoßlegende (“stab-in-the-back legend”) 181–5, 187 double 5, 11, 16, 19–20, 46, 56, 57, 82, 88, 127, 147, 160, 223n. 6 Eisenstein, Sergei 45–6 Eisner, Lotte 73, 142, 250n. 1, 251n. 6 Elsaesser, Thomas 12, 107–8 Epstein, Jean 5–6, 9 ethics 6, 8–10, 15–18, 37, 58, 80, 120, 130, 134, 135, 138–9, 149, 152–5, 161–74, 176, 177, 187, 189, 193–214, 222 Felke, Naldo 75 fetish 89, 121, 138, 162, 174, 198, 199, 206, 213, 220, 239n. 73 Foucault, Michel 213 Freud, Sigmund 9, 10, 17, 37–48, 70, 74, 77, 99, 100, 118, 128, 137, 144, 170, 231n. 36, 231n. 38, 232n. 54, 234n. 80 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 67–8, 156–60 “Mourning and Melancholia” 68–9 on Schreber 40–3 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” 55–7, 132 “On Transience” 121–4, 130, 131, 136 “The Uncanny” 19–22, 23 future/futurity 7, 9, 12, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 32, 34, 53, 55, 57, 79, 80–3, 84, 100, 101, 103, 108, 123, 126, 132, 136, 155, 157, 176, 178, 187, 188, 192,

271 194, 196, 197, 198, 201, 205, 215, 216, 217, 222, 238n. 68, 254n. 71 and Destiny 112–21 and the “inconstruable question” 207–14

Garrison, Fielding Hudson 52 ghosts 11, 13, 33, 46, 61–2, 68, 70, 71–6, 78–83, 87, 91, 93, 95, 96, 102, 104, 108, 126, 127, 177, 203, 210, 211, 218, 240n. 8 Godard, Jean-Luc 175, 250n. 3 Histoire(s) du cinema 217–21 Golem: How He Came into the World, The 11, 17, 134, 138, 172, 236n. 4, 246n. 4, 250n. 79 Guerin, Frances 201–2 guilt 36, 44, 47, 49, 58, 71, 93, 108, 181, 182, 189, 191, 194, 199, 217, 248n. 45 Gunning, Tom 45, 108, 146–7, 195–6, 223n. 8, 241n. 10 Haeckel, Ernst 141, 155, 246n. 6 Hake, Sabine 9, 187 Hansen, Miriam 226n. 39 Haunted Castle, The 11, 17, 62, 74, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 98, 100, 104, 156, 236n. 3, 239n. 73 Heidegger, Martin 1, 8, 12, 17, 126, 130, 133, 135, 137, 157, 168, 245n. 83 Being and Time 116, 119, 121 Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle 112–21, 211 Heim, Carlamaria 46 Hellwig, Albert 75 Hermann, Ludimar 29–30, 230n. 20 heroes/heroism 24, 49, 53, 94, 129, 175, 176, 178–81, 185, 216, 217 historicity 17, 62, 73, 74–83, 87, 103, 215, 222 Hitchcock, Alfred 239n. 73 home front 9, 21, 23, 27, 28, 32, 127–8, 153 Husserl, Edmund 57, 112 immortality 19, 20, 25, 39, 52, 56–9, 80, 99, 107, 113, 123, 155, 156, 159, 210, 221 inanimate 4, 5, 13–15, 18, 19, 55, 61, 116, 132, 138, 139, 143, 154–8, 160–3, 165, 172, 183, 199, 232n. 54

272

Index

inflation 84, 238n. 65, 241n. 10 intuition 7–8, 22, 110, 113, 210, 228n. 67 Isenberg, Noah 11, 150–2 Jünger, Ernst 31, 57 Kaes, Anton 12, 223n. 3, 224n. 10, 251n. 8, 253n. 42 on Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The 21 on Nerves 26–7 on Nibelungen 180–1 on Nosferatu 83 Kern, Stephen 105–6 Keynes, John Maynard 191–2 Killen, Andreas 29 Kino-Debatte 78, 103 Kittler, Friedrich 148 Kracauer, Siegfried 8, 187, 195, 199, 226n. 45, 255n. 84 From Caligari to Hitler 129, 177, 183–4, 187, 206–7, 215–16, 218 “Mass Ornament” 215 “Photography” 13, 56–7, 72–3, 74, 81 Theory of Film 14 Lacan, Jacques 164 Lang, Fritz 10, 14, 101–2, 106, 108, 110, 114, 115, 119–21, 126, 127, 130, 175, 177, 184, 214–15, 221, 224n. 13, 242n. 47, 244n. 66, 251n. 6, 255n. 79 “Determination of Style in Film” 194–5 “Happily Ever After” 121–2; see also Destiny; Metropolis; Nibelungen, The Lethen, Helmut 229n. 11, 235n. 89 Levinas, Emmanuel 169–70, 249n. 68, 249n. 69 Lim, Bliss Cua 74 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 135 Ludendorff, Erich 181, 229n. 8 Lukács, Georg 198, 255n. 84 Magnus, Erwin 5 Mann, Thomas 94, 98 “Danse Macabre” 75–7, 89 Marcus, Laura 77 masculinity 26, 50, 59, 66, 180

McElhaney, Joe 250n. 3 melancholy 12, 17, 37, 58, 69–73, 80–3, 87, 88, 90, 93, 102, 103, 108, 121, 123–5, 130, 239n. 73 melodrama 34, 107, 109, 122, 148, 169, 194 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 9 Metropolis 5, 12, 85, 102, 106, 199, 224n. 13 Metz, Christian 206 Mitry, Jean 94–5 modernity 6, 10, 13, 14, 27, 30, 37, 44, 51, 56, 62, 79, 105, 122, 133, 152, 165, 167, 168, 172, 187, 195, 196, 198, 199, 209, 213, 215, 220, 224n. 10, 233n. 63, 235n. 87, 253n. 41 Morek, Curt 16 mortality 10–11, 13–15, 18, 19–20, 25, 26, 52, 55–7, 60, 61, 72, 103, 110, 116, 121–6, 130, 132, 136, 138, 143, 147, 148, 155–7, 159–60, 170–4, 212, 221 Mosse, George 25, 185, 235n. 95 Mulvey, Laura 13–14, 160 Murnau, F. W. 10, 61–4, 66 see also Haunted Castle, The; Nosferatu; Phantom narcissism 15–17, 19, 20, 25, 38–44, 47, 58, 59, 67–70, 80, 99, 132, 137–8, 147, 152, 164, 173–4, 187, 189, 214, 222, 239n. 73 nationalism 23, 25, 35, 36, 50, 52, 128–9, 151, 167, 177, 180, 185, 192, 194, 196, 217, 229n. 8, 251n. 8 nerves 25, 27, 29–37, 38, 40–1, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50–1, 56–7, 75, 230n. 20, 232n. 48 Nibelungen, The 11, 17, 101, 102, 176, 177, 214, 216, 217–20, 253n. 42, 255n. 79 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31, 109–10, 114, 176 Genealogy of Morals, The 187–90, 193, 195, 197 Nonorganic 91, 95–6, 120, 141, 143, 148, 156 Nosferatu 5, 12, 28, 79, 82–3, 200, 201

Index nothing 14, 61, 102, 120–1, 122, 123, 129, 132–6, 158, 211 thinking the Nothing (Bergson) 96–100 thinking the Nothing (Heridegger) 116–17 not-yet 115, 130, 132, 157, 176, 201, 211 Obersteiner, Heinrich 30–1, 37 ornament 184, 199, 215–16 otherness 15–17, 19, 25, 27, 36, 54, 57–8, 68–9, 79, 127, 130–6, 138, 144, 146, 148, 176, 181, 188–93, 197–9, 211–14, 221–2, 233n. 63, 235n. 89, 239n. 73, 247n. 38 and Golem, The 151–74 overlap dissolve 88, 106, 118–19 Owens, Craig 81, 238n. 59 Paranoia 40–8, 153, 231n. 38, 232n. 54 past/pastness 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 17, 19, 22, 25, 32, 40, 48, 50, 55–8, 59, 62–3, 66, 72, 74–83, 87–96, 98–100, 101, 103, 108, 112, 115, 119–20, 136, 157, 167, 180, 188, 194, 196–8, 201, 207, 209–12, 214, 215–16, 222 Phantom 11, 17, 61, 82, 118, 141, 238n. 68, 239n. 73, 239n. 80 phantoms 61–2, 74–7, 82, 88–90, 93–6, 98, 102, 104, 204–6 phenomenology 4, 57, 110, 114–20, 146, 212, 220 photography 13, 56–7, 72, 100, 238n. 59 precariousness 16, 58, 83, 130–4, 138, 155, 158–61, 163, 169, 172–4, 209 presence 56, 61, 67, 70–2, 74, 77, 80, 83, 87–9, 96, 98–100, 109, 114, 116–17, 211 Rabinbach, Anson 254n. 73 Rancière, Jacques 219–22 repetition 36, 40, 80, 87, 156 ressentiment 176, 185, 188–90, 192–8, 203, 207 revenge/vengeance 17, 33, 36, 68, 108, 158, 175–99, 200, 201, 204, 206–7, 215–16, 253n. 42

273

Rilke, Rainer Maria 3, 9, 10, 17, 121, 123–6, 127, 137, 223n. 5, 242n. 40, 243n. 53, 243n. 60, 244n. 62, 245n. 83 and correspondence on death 125–6 Duino Elegies 130–6 Roth, Joseph 18 ruins 80–3, 216 Ruttmann, Walter 5, 51–6 see also Ascent, The Santner, Eric 233n. 63 Scheffauer, Herman G. 151 Scheler, Max 9, 10, 17, 205 Ressentiment 187–9, 196–197 Schmitt, Carl 153, 183 Schreber, Daniel Paul 41–3, 47–8, 231n. 38, 232n. 48, 232n. 54, 233n. 63 Sebald, W. G. 177, 251n. 5 self-reflexivity 4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 21, 26, 45, 46, 61, 67, 71, 74, 83, 89–91, 96, 107–8, 115–16, 132, 137, 141, 146, 149, 151, 159, 161, 170, 175–6, 201–4, 206, 213–14, 224n. 10 shadows 4, 21, 28, 61, 65, 66, 69, 72, 76–7, 79, 88–90, 93, 95, 140–4, 176, 200–5, 212–13, 219 shock 9, 23, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38–9, 45, 46, 49, 53, 58, 66, 157, 225n. 33 Silverman, Kaja 207 Simmel, Georg 8, 116, 124, 126, 136–7, 243n. 58 View of Life 110–14, 120–21 Sloterdijk, Peter 229n. 4 Sobchack, Vivian 4, 169 soldiers 10, 21, 23, 26–8, 31, 33, 35, 37–40, 47, 55, 67, 79, 104, 148, 154, 156, 158, 180–2, 185–6, 217, 229n. 8, 234n. 80, 240n. 8 something 97–102, 113–15, 117, 158 somnambulism 1–4, 18–21, 30, 223n. 6, 224n. 10 Spengler, Oswald 58–60 Stapel, Wilhelm 45 Stiasny, Philip 11, 34 Stiegler, Bernard 15, 119–20, 212–13

274 technology 6, 15–17, 46, 77–9, 134, 138, 142, 146, 156, 162, 168, 173, 177, 183, 221, 224n. 10 Theweleit, Klaus 229n. 10 transience 8, 14–15, 52, 60, 61, 113, 121, 122–5, 130, 136, 143, 170–3, 193 trauma 9–12, 15, 17, 21–2, 25–32, 33, 36–40, 44, 46–50, 53, 56–9, 61, 63–6, 75, 82, 87, 89–93, 95, 96, 100, 129, 156, 197, 222, 234n. 80 trenches 10, 21, 33, 40, 64, 156, 242n. 47 Troeltsch, Ernst 24, 55, 124 Uexküll, Jakob von 154 uncanny 2, 5, 13, 16, 18, 19–22, 23, 25, 38, 56, 57, 59, 62, 72, 74, 79, 81–2, 88, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104, 142–3, 146–7, 154, 157, 159, 160, 172, 173, 227n. 63, 232n. 49 Usai, Paolo Cherchi 173

Index Vaihinger, Hans, Philosophy of As If, The 205–6 Vertov, Dziga 5, 109 Virilio, Paul 221 Warning Shadows 11, 17, 65, 176, 217, 220 Wegener, Paul 137, 163 see also Golem: How He Came into the World, The Weindling, Paul 52 Widdig, Bernd 84, 238n. 65 Wiene, Robert 78–9, 82, 94, 96 see also Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Williams, Linda 148 Winter, Jay 240n. 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 58, 60, 234n. 80 women 39, 88, 127–9, 181 Worringer, Wilhelm 183–4 Zivilisation 45, 181 Zweig, Arnold 4, 5, 9, 153–4, 172–4