Tag Archives: Germany

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

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If you enjoy a good crime movie, you might consider watching The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. It’s in German and was directed by Fritz Lang, who made Metropolis and M and later emigrated to the U.S. It’s old-fashioned in some ways, which is understandable, since it was completed in 1933. 

But there are many aspects of it that feel current. A criminal mastermind, Dr. Mabuse (in German, that’s pronounced “Mah-boo-zeh”) has lost his mind and is locked up in an insane aslyum. He spends his days and nights writing perfectly conceived plans for various crimes.

Unfortunately, Dr. Mabuse is being cared for by a physician, Professor Baum, who is almost as crazy as he is. Professor Baum collects the plans Dr. Mabuse tosses on the floor and uses them to build a criminal empire.

Professor Baum eventually directs his criminal minions to launch a crime wave like no other. He orders them to blow up a chemical plant, destroy food supplies, poison the water, create epidemics and debase the currency, all with the intention of terrorizing the population:

When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.

There is a quirky but clever police inspector leading the investigation and a disgraced detective who tries to redeem himself. A suspect is interrogated. Ballistic evidence is considered. A strange message is decoded. An early version of a SWAT team is summoned to deal with barricaded criminals. A couple is locked in a room and told they only have three hours to live. There are explosions and a car chase. There are jokes and special effects.

Aside from the crisp black and white photography, the dated decor and the subtitles, this movie could be playing at a multiplex near you!

On top of that, the movie has political overtones. Fritz Lang was seriously concerned about the Nazis taking power. When the crazy Professor Baum issues his commands, he sounds like a dictator giving threatening orders to his subordinates. It’s said that Lang used actual quotations from the Nazis in the movie’s script.

Before The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was released, the German minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, ordered it banned. He claimed that it would incite public disorder and decrease the public’s confidence in the government. He may have had a point, considering that the film is about an extraordinary criminal organization and the government in question was run by Adolph Hitler.

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Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

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The author Timothy Snyder calculates that Stalin and Hitler were responsible for the murder of 14 million people between 1933 and 1945, mainly in Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. This didn’t include those who died from combat. The 14 million were civilians or prisoners of war intentionally killed by starvation, gunshot or gas, including the roughly 5.4 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

It is almost unbelievable that so many innocent people could have been killed. Stalin mostly killed citizens of his own country. Hitler mostly killed citizens of other countries. Stalin began by collectivizing Soviet agriculture and then tried to eliminate anyone who might conceivably pose a threat. Hitler wanted to colonize Eastern Europe and, while doing so, eliminate as many Jews and Slavs as possible. If Germany had conquered the Soviet Union, Hitler intended to kill as many as 30 million. 

I didn’t know that Stalin invaded Poland soon after Hitler in September 1939, while Stalin and Hitler were still allies. Or that relatively few German Jews were killed. The concentration camps that were liberated by the Americans and British weren’t the main site of the Holocaust, which occurred farther east and mostly targeted non-Germans. 

Snyder ends his book with a chapter that tries to explain how this all happened. Part of his explanation is that both Hitler and Stalin had utopian ideas. Stalin wanted to quickly turn the Soviet Union into a socialist paradise. Hitler wanted to quickly defeat the Soviet Union and create a vast empire that would serve Germany alone. In Snyder’s words:

“Hitler and Stalin thus shared a certain politics of tyranny: they brought about catastrophes, blamed the enemy of their choice, and then used the death of millions to make the case that their policies were necessary or desirable. Each of them had a transformative utopia, a group to be blamed when its realization proved impossible, and then a policy of mass murder that could be proclaimed as a kind of ersatz victory”.  (1/10/13)

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse

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Reading The Emigrants is a strange experience. It is fiction that reads like non-fiction. The novel tells the story of four unrelated people who emigrated from Germany during the 20th century, but it is written in the first person, as if the narrator is recounting these people’s experiences based on his own research. In addition, there are photographs scattered throughout the book that seem to represent the characters and settings that Sebald describes in an apparently realistic way.  

The paperback edition of the book indicates that many early reviewers considered the novel to be a masterpiece. I enjoyed Sebald’s later novel The Rings of Saturn more. I didn’t find the characters in The Emigrants especially interesting. Perhaps the reviewers were influenced by the newness of Sebald’s technique. They must have been impressed by his prose. The English translation is spare and often matter-of-fact but always beautiful. (6/30/12)