Fritz Lang’s M: The Crime that Dared Not
Speak Its Name
By Gary Evans
of Ottawa, Canada
Department of Communication, University
February 11, 2009
Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, M (1931), remains a well-known fixture in the 20th
century film canon. In 1995, German critics and scholars voted it the most
important German film of all time.i While much has been written about the film
and Lang, there has been little notice that the actual evil the perpetrator
committed remained unspoken.ii Another unexplored feature is the film’s implicit
antisemitism. Current literature boasts of how this film helps us understand the
historical milieu in which the film emerged, yet nothing direct is said about the
twin evils of the crime of female child sex murderer and the film’s implicit
antisemitic stereotyping.iii
According to a 1953 interview, Lang said his film began as a planned screenplay
about “the most heinous crime of all.” It started as the story of someone writing
anonymous poison letters, but Lang had the idea of a child murderer, a man who
was forced by some perverted urge to kill.iv Lang said later his obsession was with
capital punishment, something he opposed over a lifetime. Thus did the film evade
articulating Lustmord, a high state of sexual arousal coupled with murderous acts.
Instead, it shifted the moral compass to a more comfortable debate about a serial
killer, a city’s collective hysteria, the public’s psyche, failed matriarchal supervision,
capital punishment, and the inability of the State and police to protect its citizens.
The film’s murderer, played by Peter Lorre, did not typify the real life murderers
who Lang used as his factual template, but became a somewhat sympathetic
pleading victim, possessed by an uncontrollable ‘voice’ whose defense the
audience was encouraged to accept or condemn. Yet physically he was an easily
identifiable ‘other,’ whose Jewish (i.e. ‘foreign’) characteristics would be exploited
by the Nazis in their own propaganda. The question remains: why did Lang hide
the greater evil and construct a moral centre that left the viewer to cheer or
condemn the hysterical mob of criminals that caught the killer and, vigilante style,
put him on trial?
Another ideological issue occurred a few years later. In 1933, the Nazis banned
this film. Goebbels had at first enthused over it in 1931, then after learning Lorre
was Jewish, said he never wanted to see it again.v In 1940, Fritz Hippler directed
the infamous Nazi polemic, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew). He twisted the Lorre
character’s confessional effort to exonerate himself into an antisemitic indictment
of all Jews as arch-criminals. In it, he branded the Hungarian actor as a criminalalien Jew, a source of fatal contamination that must be eliminated before infecting
the general population. The narration charged that Lorre (and thus all Jews)
reflected the characteristics of actual German serial killers, all of whom were
criminal “monsters.” It was an inconvenient truth that none of the serial killers
whom the Weimar press had documented in detail in the 1920s, was in fact a Jew.
In addition to investigating these two features of M, this paper will refer to recent
feminist work to show how useful it is to change focus from traditional male
centredness to an examination of the role the body (especially female) plays in
western culture. Looking at this element alone in this film, another irony is the fact
that at the end, the child female victims were reduced to photos, their criminal
victimization unspoken. And sadly, it is their mothers, not the perpetrator, who
stood condemned for having let their children fall prey to a monstrous killer.
The Historical Setting
Most history books on Weimar Germany concentrate on the anxiety, fear and
rising sense of doom that were associated with the chaotic economic, political and
social chaos in the wake of defeat in World War I. Major traits of the period
included alienated sons seeking out other alienated sons, a fixation on the
experience of youth itself, a love affair with unreason and death, a German
inclination to a mixture of mysticism and brutality, and a German instinct rooted in
“the blood.” As Max Beckmann commented, the effects of the war were to
“surrender our hearts and nerves to the dreadful screams of pain of the poor
disillusioned people.”vi Reactionary modernists indulged in a fascination for horror
and violence as they searched for what Herf has called energizing barbarism. The
irrationalism of the postwar era was manifested in a tendency to despise reason
and the whole idea of the Enlightenment. Instead there was a broad appeal to
choose blood, race and soul. It may be coincidental, but these and the reactionary
modernists’ attraction to horror and violencevii were evils echoed in the ordinary
public’s attention during the late teens and 1920s to the infamous crimes
committed by four notorious serial killers, who themselves may have absorbed the
zeitgeist of reactionary modernist texts without having read them. Newspapers
both catered to the morbid attraction to these crimes while also spreading panic as
the criminals remained at large, enjoying their evil transgressions by mocking the
inability of police to catch them. The perpetrators conducted seemingly random
sexual murderous rampages, two of them specifically against children. These
crimes, referred to as Lustmord, galvanized public attention. The connection
between Weimar culture and popular fascination with these crimes may be one
explanation as to why recent German scholarship has shown a keen interest in
these transgressions. But one also wonders why, in contrast, German academia
shies away from investigating more closely the German public’s seeming
indifference to rising antisemitism during this same period.viii Perhaps sexual
murder has held a special fascination because it solidifies an already nearly
universal social consensus about the taboo represented by this transgression while
antisemitism provokes social division.
Lorre’s role was allegedly modeled after the four German serial/sexual murderers,
Wilhelm Karl Grossmann, Karl Denke, Friedrich Haarmann, and Peter Kürten. The
German public of 1931 knew Kürten intimately because of sensational press
coverage of his sex crimes and trial. Fritz Lang and Thea Harbou, husband and
wife, wrote the screenplay for M, featuring a character that was a composite of
these men, but more specifically the last. They called him Beckert and he became
the iconic criminal upon whom the public, like the ‘public’ in the film, wanted
vengeance. But if we examine the comparison between the real killers and the
character Lang and Harbou created, there is a serious disjoint. The film commits
its own transgression by not defining the crime other than identifying Beckert as
“child killer,” not the sexual predator of female children. It is well known that
Weimar Germany had gained a reputation for pushing the limits of what was
morally acceptable for public consumption, yet Lang and von Harbou were very
nervous about passing the censor board and receiving the right to show the film.
That may be one reason for not articulating the lurid details the German public
already knew about the real killers as their trials had become tabloid bonanzas
that spurred revulsion matched by incomprehension. The film describes these
transgressions merely as homicides and leaves the sexual murder almost
unspoken.
It is worth noting that if Lang never articulated the crime in his film, he also did not
place the blame where it belonged, directly on the perpetrator. We shall examine
this point presently. To illustrate, let us first look at the actual transgressors and
note briefly the perpetrators’ modus operandi. The extent of Grossman’s crimes
and motives remained largely unknown. The former butcher, later called the
Bluebeard of the Silesian Railway, was charged in 1921 with the murder and
cannibalization of fourteen women, all prostitutes, whom he brought home, had
sex with, murdered, cut up, and then sold the meat on the streets. Police found
the butchered remains of four women in his apartment. He committed suicide
(1863-1921) while awaiting execution without giving a full confession. Karl Denke,
a devout churchgoer and later called the Mass Murderer of Musterberg, surprised
his neighbours who had called him “Vater Denke” for his apparent avuncular, if
seclusive, nature. He committed some 30 murders over 20 years, all associated
with cannibalistic activities and was found to have kept the pickled remains of their
bodies in his abode. He had been seen dumping buckets of blood regularly into an
open courtyard, an act that apparently aroused no neighbours. He hanged himself
after he was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, just days after Haarmann
had been convicted.
Before Kürten’s notoriety, Friedrich Haarmann achieved his dubious fame for a
series of sex murders committed against young males. His trial in 1924 in Hanover
was unprecedented in German judicial history, where there was no term for his
horrendous acts. He was convicted of 24 homosexual murders of young teen
males, many of whom were runaways or prostitutes. Called the butcher of
Hannover, Haarmann explained the urge to kill came at the height of his sexual
desire. As he put it, he never intended to hurt the youngsters, but knew that “if I
got going something would happen and that made me cry ... I would throw myself
on top of those boys and bite through the Adam's apple, throttling them at the
same time." He claimed he often felt guilt, collapsing regularly on the dead body
and covering the face with a cloth so "it wouldn't be looking at me." It was clear
that Haarmann had a pathological personality but he had murdered freely and
bore no signs of manic insanity. Like Kürten, he had served lengthy prison terms
before becoming a serial killer. Known to police as an informer and incarcerated
frequently for other crimes, he was a used clothing peddler, often selling his
victims’ belongings. His numerous experiences in police custody only served to
stimulate more murders. The police missed all the clues pointing to his crimes until
the mother of a missing youth saw someone wearing her son’s jacket, called the
police, who then traced it back to Haarmann. When he was eventually convicted
of serial sex murder, experts found he fit the three profiles of pathological killers: a
biological killer whose crimes are triggered by a physical defect, a psychologically
predisposed killer, usually stemming from reacting to an all-female traumatic
childhood, and a sociological killer who believed that life owed him more. His
crimes were so horrible that German children often sang a ditty about Haarmann,
the monster who killed children. Lang used it as the opening sequence in “M”
substituting “Schwartzman” or The Black Man for Haarmann.
Just you wait ‘til it’s your time,
Haarmann will come after you,
With his chopper, oh so fine,
He’ll make mincemeat out of you
ix
The German public succumbed to moral panic about the killer who, because of the
nature of his crime, could not be identified by biological, psychoanalytic, or
sociological analysis. He did not display qualities that would have given the police
reason to suspect him. In spite of recognizing the impossibility of monocausal
explanations, contemporary critic Maria Tatar steers the viewer towards a
psychoanalytical explanation of both Haarmann and Lang’s creation, Beckert. One
of the key points Tatar makes is that writers, artists, and filmmakers displayed
maniacs like Haarmann between the two world wars with unsettling sympathy and
x
frequency. In M, Beckert is also a sympathetic character, but the real killer,
Haarmann, if a sympathetic perpetrator to some, never inspired the pathos for his
evil deeds that the Beckert character did. Most importantly, Haarmann never
apologized for his actions, about which he was fully cognizant.
Haarmann was a homosexual serial killer, a quality that M never alluded to, even if
the Lorre figure showed ‘effeminate’ characteristics. This was odd because
Haarmann’s sensational crimes had captured headlines in the early 1920s, so much
so, that the population of Hanover was said to be becoming a figurative deranged
double of the criminal. Public outrage was so great that Haarmann’s trial was over
in a few days and he was executed swiftly. Only one paper, the Communist daily
Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag) was opposed to the death penalty for the criminal,
stating that the beast, a blood sucker who works on his own in a primitive way,
lives in the shadow of the bloody weapons used by the capitalist state. What he
had done on a small scale, the paper proclaimed, the state practiced on a grand
scale with its murders of communist dissenters. As well, it insisted, the Haarmann
case hid the crimes of the Weimar regime which was forestalling any real social
change.xi Another brave, if totally misguided rightwing commentator, hostile to the
Weimar regime, called Haarmann part of a (homosexual) conspiracy headed by the
Jews and the Jewish press, who were unleashing a contagious plague by protecting
and promoting deviant sexuality and criminal behaviour with their ideology of
social tolerance. This kind of antisemitic outburst was not foreign to Weimar
society, but seems to reflect a real and troubling tenor of the time that should be
further exposed for its own evil. Political criticism notwithstanding, this serial killer
embodied an evil that the public universally understood for its deliberateness and
thoroughly debased nature.
It was Peter Kürten, demonized as the vampire of Düsseldorf as well as a beast,
who was the principal template Lang said he and von Harbou used to create the
murderer Beckert in M. Kürten was the product of a poverty stricken, abusive
family. He had witnessed an alcoholic father sexually abuse his mother and sisters,
a practice he too began with his sisters at a young age. He claimed that when nine
years old, he drowned two young friends while swimming. While committing
burglary in 1913 he strangled a young girl. Released from prison in 1921, in 1925
he began the series of murders that would last until his capture. In 1929, he
murdered an eight-year-old girl. Weeks later he stabbed a mechanic to death,
then six months later, stabbed victims in three separate attacks. He then murdered
two child sisters, followed by a stabbing, then a rape and murder, followed by a
variety of victims and violent methods that led police to believe there were
multiple rapists/murderers. A surviving rape victim led the police to the killer.
Kürten, who was married and a father, confessed to killing 35 people almost all
women and children. In 1931, as Lang’s film was being released, he pleaded guilty
to 79 offenses, nine murders and seven attempted murders. Kürten told an
investigating doctor that his primary motive was sexual pleasure, brought about by
stabbing, since the sight of blood was integral to his sexual stimulation. To his
legal examiners Kürten said that he had sexually molested his victims, but that his
primary motive was to "strike back at oppressive society,” and to seek revenge on
mankind, while agitating the public and creating a state of turmoil.
To others, he confided that he wanted to become more notorious than Jack the
Ripper. Judith Walkowitz investigated the sociological effect of the Ripper murders
in Britain and has concluded that while they embodied a story of class conflict and
exploitation, they were also a cautionary tale for women, a warning that the city
was dangerous, especially when women transgressed the narrow boundary of
home and hearth to enter public space. She agrees with Christopher Frayling that
the Ripper murders have had a strong resonance in contemporary popular culture.
And the fact that Madame Tussaud’s refused to invent a face for the Ripper turned
him into a myth of an eternal Ripper the never-named, a killer who could be
anyone. That Kürten absorbed the Ripper story was not insignificant, because as
Walkowitz claimed, Ripper embodied the conflation of sex with power while
articulating the fears and antagonisms provoked by existing and contested gender,
class, and ethnic relations. Kürten fit that quality perfectly as he superimposed his
own idea of stories and images produced in the press to create an even greater
monstrosity. xii Unfortunately, Lang completely ignored the ‘Ripper evil’ of the real
killer who was unifying past and present terror. He and von Harbou created
instead a mentally ill character who had no control over his actions and in fact,
could not even remember them. The pity was that the killer Beckert was nothing
like Kürten, whose evil was tied directly to his craving for media celebrity. Had
Lang really reflected the spirit of the time, he would have written into his character
a reference to the rather new phenomenon of media fame related to the spread of
the popular press that had emerged in the last years of the nineteenth century.
When Kürten was on trial, the court learned that while he was at large, newspaper
accounts of his lurid crimes, both by sensational tabloids as well as by staid
journals, stimulated him to commit even more depredations. He said he hoped he
would become the most celebrated criminal of all time. Kürten’s evil was
compounded by his claim in court that he had had no conscience for having
avenged himself on society for the wrongs he had suffered in prison; Lang meant
his filmic killer to evoke both pathos and to trigger arguments about the pros and
cons of capital punishment. He was not interested in exploring the connection
between media celebrity and deadly acts other than to have his character (like
Kürten) write letters to the press taunting the police to find him.
Tried in 1931 in a near-circus atmosphere (one paper called it a colossal spectacle)
accommodating one hundred reporters and some fifty “professionals,” one paper
described ‘that enigma man’ as being innocuous in appearance as well as being
mild mannered and well spoken. Another paper called him a textbook case of the
banality of evil. His trial encouraged him to confess his crimes and in responding
to questions about his life, he made it appear that the legal establishment had
“cured” him as it prepared him for trial. A credulous press seemed to believe that
his sexual murdering aside, this man was a victim of human psychosis. One paper
fairly excused his murderous reflexes based on the fact that his crime (as well as
other serial murderers) was based on a rage toward women, especially “motherly”
woman, hence was almost justifiable homicide.xiii Such outrageous commentary
may have sold papers, but itself reflected an evil that could have helped convince a
more tradition-bound Germany that it was the Weimar regime that was rotten to
the core for allowing such a criminal remain at large for so long.
Kürten was found guilty, sentenced to death and decapitated. His case became a
cause celebre while Lang and von Harbou were conceiving M. The press fixated on
facile explanations like the world war and hard times, heredity, as well as moral
and mental defectiveness to account for both Haarmann and Kürten. But most of
all, before the killers’ apprehension, the press focused on describing the victims’
manner of dispatch, police ineffectiveness, and the psychosis of public hysteria.
Thus did the press, purposely or not, transfer the panic to a public that was
becoming demented, even transferring the criminals’ psychosis to themselves.
Lang had stated that he was interested in mass culture’s fascination with crime,xiv
hence exploited this angle in the film’s screenplay. Yet interestingly, the media
focus on the public’s moral panic, like the film too, deflected attention from the
crime itself, that of sexual murder. In addition, an element that has not been
underscored by commentators about these evil men, is the fact that the press and
radio, as opinion leaders, so exploited these crimes that it was they who were
apparently boosting the toxic effect of these killers. xv While it is not known what
other factors may have influenced the perpetrators, what seems to be lost in
theorizing about them was the fact that there was no mention of the heinous
crime for which they were guilty, child sex murder. To have stated the sexual
nature of the crime in fact would have debased the culprits further, from being
terrible, to being figures of abomination. At the time, this specific evil seemed to
be lost in the press scramble for sensationalism about ‘child killers.’
After the film appeared, a number of critics tried to avoid being exploitative; one
wrote in Die Weltühne that the film was opportunistic, silly and sentimental,
“tastelessly calculated to please instincts that favour trashy criminal fiction and
sadistic tales and for which an execution was a popular festival fifty years ago.” He
simply referred to the killer as sick and a Satan, and concluded that there were
many in the audience at the premier who, in cynical rejection of the killer’s
insanity, were quick to see themselves as experts on the ethics of murder and
wanted the murderer drawn and quartered. The article ended with a
condemnation of the film’s ‘skilled tastelessness’ that had brought Satan himself
into the business calculation and had minted little pennies of success out of the
need of mothers robbed of their children, out of the terror of an entire city. There
was no comment on the choice of Lorre for the role other than to praise his
portrayal of a degenerate species.xvi In England, the London Mercury commented
on M in October 1931 that the murders were actually no more important to the
film than the ring to a telephone bell. The subject was morbid, but Germany was
simply absorbing the American style gangster film. The New Republic in the United
States reduced the film to “a brilliant delicate study of a pathological type, a
melodrama of a man with an irresistible impulse to kill children. In Germany as
late as 1960, the Hannoversche Presse, still continuing to avoid naming the wrong,
wrote about a “child murderer who terrorizes an entire city… we are enthralled by
the expert portrayal of evil.” xvii
Lang’s Evil Character, Beckert
If we now look at Lang and von Harbou’s evil character Beckert, a number of
salient issues emerge. First, in his choice of actor, Lang ignored the physiognomy
of the actual perpetrators. Both Haarman and Kurten were ordinary looking
Germans (see photos); that is, they could have passed on the street as one’s nextdoor neighbor. While it was true that Bertoldt Brecht had recommended Peter
Lorre to Lang, the director chose an actor who was not as ordinary looking a
German as Kürten and Haarman, and who, as Hungarian-born Laszlo Loewenstein,
was pudgy, effeminate, and visibly non-German. Antisemitic tropes of the time
always concentrated on the Jew as “foreign” looking, and so Lang either
consciously or unconsciously avoided what should have been a ‘normal’ looking
German for the role. Was Lang trying to prove himself so patriotically German that
he could not conceive of any number of ordinary looking Germans to play the role
that he assigned to a foreigner? Why choose a little Jew? Lang maintained that
Lorre’s performance revealed the danger and hysteria lurking behind the indolent
bourgeois façade…he embodied a society in the grip of self-destructive urges.xviii
The character was not a convicted criminal like Haarmann and Kürten had been.
Nevertheless, the choice of this Jewish foreigner to play a devil later proved
convenient to the Nazis’ own antisemitic propaganda. In the literature on Lang, no
one ever asked him why he made his perpetrator as foreign as his accent; the
question is tantalizing but unanswerable. Lang wrote in May, 1931 shortly after
the film appeared, that this was a film based on factual reports about homicide
cases; its ultimate purpose was to educate and sound a warning from real events.
He claimed that he was ‘typifying’ the killer; this allowed him to escape the more
critical observation that the real killers were ordinary looking Germans. What also
escaped critical attention then and later, was that they were deliberate and
unrepentant about their foul deeds. Beckert, in contrast, was a tragic and pathetic
repentant figure. xix
To pursue this line of visual foreignness that equated Jews with evil, consider F.W.
Murnau’s hugely popular film, Nosferatu (1922). One will never know if its
vampire trope might have influenced both Haarmann and Kürten to engage in
their murderous sprees. The film shows how a vampire infected the German
community with the plague in 1838. Tatar notes that the vampire was a foreigner
from the East who very much had features that matched antisemitic images of
Jews.xx An additional fact was that in the screenplay, the Jewish innkeeper is an
ally of Nosferatu, facilitating the unsuspecting Hutter‘s visit to the Count’s castle.
For the cinema going public, Nosferatu, a serial murderer, offered a model for
thinking about Haarman and Kürten, who in real life, Germans wanted similarly to
eradicate as sources of pollution. To extend the analogy, as easy as it was to
approve of the eradication of Nosferatu in the popular film, he was a man whose
physical characteristic and blood lust coincided easily with the antisemite’s classic
Jewish stereotype. The point was that the rightwing in Germany found satisfaction
in labeling Jews too as alien perpetrators and polluters of German blood. The real
evil, of course, was to be found in those who made such vicious analogies.
Secondly, the film M never states that Beckert perpetrated the monstrous crimes
of female child molestation, rape, and murder. The public at the time knew the
real killers’ crimes, but because they remain unspoken in the film, as the years
went on, audiences probably assumed the crimes were about murder alone.xxi Of
course there is no question that Lang’s decision not to show the crime of the
murder of the child Elsie was correct and proper. He said later that it could only be
imagined, not pictured. He was forcing each member of the audience to create
gruesome details of the murder according to personal imagination.xxii This was fair
enough, as his use of a rolling ball and suspended fluttering balloon did make the
early death scene more deadly and chilling.xxiii But there is only one direct
reference in the film to Beckert’s sexual perversion when the handwriting expert
scrutinizes the hand written letter that the perpetrator sent to the newspapers. As
the graphologist dictates his report to his secretary, he claims the shape of the
letters reveal a perverse sexuality. “The form of his writing registers the
pathologically strong sexuality of this person with uncontrollable impulses and
drives. The broken style of his letters is a sign of play acting which could express
indolence or apathy. In the sample there is an elusive but conspicuous quality of
madness.” xxivThe film shows the letter in closeup, then cuts to Beckert before the
mirror, in a first full view of a middle class man obsessed with narcissism who then
turns his face into that of a monster. Lorre the predator, even if he is touching and
repulsive, as well as powerless and threatening, plays an overgrown child whose
unique voice and physical appearance mark him as belonging to a child’s world of
immediate gratification. xxv Lorre’s grotesqueness is undeniable. One theatre critic
had described his stage appearance as that of “the hysterical son of the petty
bourgeoisie whose goggle eyed, bloated head spilled forth yellowish from his
suit.”xxvi
Janet Ward has been one of the few recent observers to specifically identify
Beckert’s crime as she describes him as the psychopathic consumer of
Schaufenster (urban display window culture) and of little girls. Her thesis suggests
an intimate relationship between the display window and sex crimes as she points
to the visual codes of glass transparency and the consumer gaze that once signified
Germany’s success and solace, but in the wake of the world war, signified the
collapse of the Weimar visual culture value system from within a killer’s mind. She
reveals certain visual details beginning with the iconic scene of the murderer at the
display window of knives, transfixed by the advertising promise of gratification
that is interrupted by the reflection of a little girl in the window who stimulates his
loss of sexual control as he is consumed by the idea of gratification through
childish/sexual possession. In the next scene, the child stops before a store selling
books and prints in whose window there are two moving signs, a vertical arrow
bobbing up and down (a sexual innuendo to be sure) and disc spiraling inward,
signifying the lure of a female’s genitalia as another commodity to possess. Ward
believes Lang put Beckert in thrall to the sexual combination of male and female
geometric configurations intentionally. She perceives that all three seduction
scenes depend on ‘surface’ and consumerism in order to succeed. To illustrate, she
notes in another shot of a potential child victim before a toy store window, both
the child and Beckert share a rapturous gaze, the child for the toys, the man for
the child. These subjective shots encourage the idea of heightened sexual desire
as Ward repeats her major thesis that Weimar surface culture (i.e. display windows
enticing the public to consume) had produced an aggressive drive to consume at
any cost, the murderer of little girls, the children as unsuspecting consumers of
fantasy objects like toys.xxvii
Another factor is Beckert’s “confession” before the criminal underworld, whose
surrogate function is that of the mother who wishes revenge. The moving
outburst made Lorre famous as an actor, but in no way reflected the real evil of
the actual perpetrators, who never apologized for their deliberate and terrible
deeds. Lang and von Harbou took the easy way out as they created a character
whose sociopathy is superseded by a psychological illness that the audience is
encouraged to either forgive or reject. Here are the pathetic words that von
Harbou wrote in constituting Beckert’s “confession”: “I want to escape…to escape
from myself!...But it’s impossible. I can’t. I can’t escape. I have to obey it. I have
to run…run…streets…endless streets. I want to escape. I want to get away. And I
am pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers. And of those children…They never
leave me. They are there, there, always, always. Always…except…when I do
it…when I …Then I can’t remember anything…And afterwards I see those posters
and I read what I’ve done…I read…and…and read…Did I do that? But I can’t
remember anything about it…But who will believe me? Who knows what it feels
like to be me? How I’m forced to act…How I must…Don’t want to…must. And
then…a voice screams…I can’t bear top hear it. I can’t…I can’t go on. Can’t go
on…Can’t go on…Can’t go on… I can’t go on…xxviii
As Kaes has noted, the film attracted much attention because it echoed the
collective hysteria and mass death of World War I and the permanent crisis of daily
life in wake of the Crash of 1929. M was referred to often as a Zeitfilm because it
reflected New Objectivity and a concern with the sociological and
psychopathological roots of the criminal mind. Key discussions of the era were pro
and con arguments regarding the death penalty, treatment of mentally ill
criminals, and the safety of children. xxix Unfortunately there has never been a close
analysis of how far from the real killers Beckert, a tragic more than detestable
character, was. Instead the most sophisticated explanation deals with Lang’s
political vision that shows us a character who catches his own desire, fantasy, and
face that is reflected back to him in distorted and monstrous ways. Lang’s interest
in psychology shows us a world caught in multiplying the images of its own terror,
but it neither reflects the pathology of the real criminals nor articulates the true
horror of child sexual murder. The film is as ambiguous as the M on Beckert’s
palm, which is half a Jewish star. xxx
Antisemitism: A Not so hidden message?
To put M into the context of the times, let us examine some familiar
background that may better situate it in the overall cultural picture. If one
takes into account the effects of World War I and its ghastly death toll of
more than nine million, it is not hard to explain the emergence of the earlier
mentioned reactionary modernists whose fascination for horror and
violence was a welcome relief to bourgeois boredom and decadence. There
were other characteristics that presented themselves for uncomfortable
comparisons, such as the search for energizing barbarism. It is interesting to
note how this was not so far from what the sexual predators were doing.
The reactionary modernists despised reason, choosing instead blood, race
and soul. Such an optic in many ways translated into terrible criminal acts.
In a similar choice of blood, they too chose the celebration of the self as the
centre of their (perverted) existence.xxxi It is no exaggeration to associate
this with the cultural weltanschauung that influenced the murderers, even
if they spent the world war incarcerated in prison.
While it has been common to speak of Weimar Germany as a slack
bourgeois society, there were other negative undertones that stood in
opposition to Weimar’s humanitarian impulses at this time. Such elements
should be recognized as part of the atmospherics from which the serial
killers, as well the Nazis, emerged. Lang called his film a reflection of the
times and some of these negative elements can be identified in it. Even if
one considers M as a simple murder mystery film, there was in the post
World War I German universe and earlier, an obsession with blood as well
as antisemitism. If one assumes that the real serial killers did not read, in
few of the decades’ of work about Lang, few have tried to link the existing
atmosphere as having influenced their reality. Tatar has noted how crime,
contagion and containment need to be recognized for contributing to the
environment. She cites for example, Arthur Dinter’s 1919 novel Sin against
Blood. A quote by an admitted murderer repeats Nazi clichés about Jews as
devilish vampires who taint the race through sexual contact with Aryan women
and drain Germans of their vitality. “If the German people cannot soon manage to
rid itself completely of the Jewish vampire that it has unsuspectingly suckled with
its heart’s blood…then it will perish before long. The Jew imperils Germany’s
future more powerfully than our enemies on foreign soil, because he cannot be
conquered with sword in hand…May my death (he has murdered a Jewish officer)
become the signal for the assault against the archenemy of the German people.”
xxxii
Tatar continues to make the connection between flowing blood and
antisemitism as she quotes the renowned novel Berlin Alexanderplatz,
which boasted “Blood must flow thick, fast and strong.” There were other
elements of popular culture like the fanatic Nazi songs about sharpening
long knives to plunge into Jewish bodies. In another book, she developed
the thesis that Grimm’s Fairy Tales, well known and grotesque children’s
stories that most German children knew intimately, resonated in German
culture and tradition, emphasizing grotesque and bloody deeds, as well as
antisemitic stereotypes. The Grimms recorded German oral folk tales that
often dwelled on pain and suffering, rather than happiness. Their stories
describe murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and a hint of incest. In
short, cruel behaviour dominates and they considered admissible lurid
portrayals of child abuse, starvation and exposure, as well as the dominant
trope of victimization and retaliation. xxxiii Decades ago, Louis Snyder also
mentioned the characteristics of the Grimm tales: a respect for order,
obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,
fear of and contempt for the stranger.xxxiv It is not possible to speculate on
how much the notorious serial killers were influenced, if at all, by this
aspect of German folk culture. The fact that in these tales children with
undesirable traits come to a bad end, and that power was invested solely in
adults who used their superior strength and intelligence to teach children a
lesson by applying a transgression/punishment pattern, it is fair to ask how
much these exaggerated visions of debased realities and fantasies affected
the corrupt minds and actions of the killers who themselves used their adult
male strength to commit horrific crimes.xxxv As for their sometimes
antisemitic content, one need only to refer to the Grimm’s The Jew Among
Thorns, in which an old Jew was forced to dance among thorns to the tune
of a fiddle.xxxvi This digression is only to note the underlying tone in Weimar
Germany against which to measure M’s influence in 1931 and beyond.
Critics’ first reactions to the film’s premier on May 11, 1931 were almost
unanimously negative, perhaps because it followed just three weeks after the
Kürten trial. Without being specific, the critic for Die Weltbuhne thought it a film
in bad taste that romanticized the criminal milieu and dared to touch on the
heinous sinister wall of compulsive urges.xxxvii Yet the film did resonate strongly
with the Nazis propaganda chief, Josef Goebbels, who wrote in his
notebook on May 21, 1931, “This evening watched Fritz Lang’s M with
Magda. Fantastic! Counters all that sentimental humanitarianism. For the
death penalty! Well done. One day, Lang will be our director.” Obviously he
missed what Lang thought was the film’s ambivalent attitude to the death
penalty; so too did the Nazi paper Der Angriffe which a year later wrote that
the film served as “the best argument against the opponents of the death
penalty. The killer (Peter Lorre) has lost nothing of his gruesome
repulsiveness to this day.” xxxviii Of course, when Goebbels had found out
that Lorre was a Jew, he announced curtly that he never wanted to see him
again. And he probably did not know at this time that Lang himself was halfJewish, which under Nazi definitions, made him a Jew by blood. In 1932, his
wife, von Harbou, became an ardent Nazi and divorced him.
The evil of antisemitism had been percolating through Germany for
generations, but also throughout the Weimar era. From his cell in Landsberg
prison, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, a tract into which he breathed an icy wind of
hatred, asserting that because of the Jews’ interests in material and financial
things, they converted sex into money or money into sex. This, he insisted,
translated into sexually transmitted disease, something that would threaten to
taint the social body. These kinds of calumnies continued and by 1929, the
official Nazi newspaper, itself practicing the art of black propaganda, made
the outrageous claim that Jews were forever trying to propagandize sexual
relations between siblings, men and animals, and men and men,” a crime
deserving banishment or hanging.xxxix This became typical of their vitriol and
once in power, their own evil infection found its way to further poison the
nation. Thus did the Lorre character in M became a convenient addition to
their virulent antisemitism even if they had banned the film three years
earlier. Here is how the 1938 publication West German Observer, referred to
Lorre’s role as part of its call for genocide.
“Let us look, if we can actually do it, into the soulless eyes of this child murderer
Peter Lorre—and one can without a doubt identify the actor’s role with the animal
that he depicts: His screaming, “I cannot help it. I have in fact this damned thing in
me! It is not my fault,” reaches beyond the direction of Franz Werfel’s “The
Murdered, and not the Murderer is guilty” [title of a novel, 1890]. This scream is at
the same time a Jewish confession, a self-revelation, which in fact begs for
eradication. This Jewish begging must be answered.” xl
The Nazi’s fascination with blood found another outlet in 1938 when a
children’s song appeared in print: “They slaughter animals, slaughter people. Their
bloodthirstiness knows no bounds! The world will return to health if we save it
from the Jews. xli If these were not sufficiently typical examples of violent
intentions, the most virulent of the Nazi’s antisemitic film propaganda was a 1940
piece called Der Ewige Jude that remains the most egregious example of Nazi evil
propaganda. It referred to Jews as the source of a plague, an illness that threatens
the health of the Aryan peoples. Not only is its pernicious imagery equating Jews
with rats and pestilence unforgettable, but also it replayed the confessional scene
of Beckert in M with a voice over that identified him as ‘The Jew Lorre’ in the roll of
a child murderer. The narrator asserts, “According to the expression, ‘not the
murderer, but the murdered is guilty,’ an attempt is made to reverse the normal
sense of the law and to minimalize and excuse the crime through the sympathetic
portrayal of the criminal.”xlii
The film clip had the Beckert character groveling before the vigilante underworld
that was trying him for murder while the voice over narrator again referred to Jews
as a foreign body, a parasite carrying plague and leprosy. As Lorre played out his
climactic scene, the narration insisted that Jews were a deserving victim who
validated the deeds of the killer. This vitriol continued as the film represented Jews
as corrupt, dirty, diseased and nomadic. It extended charges of criminal violence to
Jews as murderers who it claimed operated surreptitiously with the same
bloodthirsty brutality as sexual killers. The film’s outrageous conclusion, again
conflating blood with evil, asserted that Jewish ritual slaughter was connected to
homicide, especially sexual murder.xliii Accompanying the confessional scene, the
narrator stated, “In line with the saying ‘The victim, not the murderer, is guilty,’ an
attempt is made to twist our normal sense of justice to put a good face on a crime,
and to excuse it with a performance designed to arouse compassion.” Of course,
by this time the castigated Lorre, like Lang, was long gone from Nazi Germany.
He had emigrated to France in 1933, to Great Britain, and then to the US,
Hollywood, and fame in 1935.
Tatar’s research demonstrates how the twin evils of criminality and antisemitism
need closer investigation. This is worth mentioning because in a contemporary
German study like Bose Lust by Hania Siebenpfeiffer, the exploration of gender
oriented notions of the violent criminal mentions nothing about connecting
antisemitism with sexual murder in this era. Her interest is sexual murder as the
male form of violent criminality par excellence; she extends her thesis to a belief
that World War I was responsible for damaging a generation’s psyche beyond
repair.xliv The thesis may have some validity, but it also reflects a contemporary
German academic proclivity to ignore antisemitism in the Weimar era, a notable
feature of another recent book by Kerstin Brückweh that focuses on four serial
murderers in four historical periods, providing different medical and psychological
explanations for sexual murder but mentioning nothing about the twenties’
connection to blood and antisemitism.xlv
One of the most interesting contemporary studies of Weimar Germany is the
earlier referred to Weimar Surfaces by Janet Ward. It too sustains the observation
that antisemitism as a prominent feature of German life before Hitler seems to be
a no-go zone. While Ward’s thesis depends heavily on applying the theoretical
work of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard, she has nothing more to say about the
other element we have stressed, that the Jew stood accused as the perpetrator of
these monstrous deeds.
What Did Lang Want to Prove?
This leads us back to the initial question of how could a film about Lustmord fail to
articulate the specific crime and go unchallenged for so many years? Is it that
everyone understood the crime without it being mentioned? And if so, why did the
film ultimately turn against the victims and their mothers? Perhaps a brief recap of
Siegfried Kracauer’s pioneering work on film, From Caligari to Hitler, sets the stage
for a better understanding of Lang’s intentions in M. Certainly Lang himself was no
help in his many ‘explanations’ that were unsatisfactory. If on the one hand Lang
could state it doesn’t matter why this man kills since he has killed. Ask instead why
this sort of man exists. Notions of guilt and innocence gradually dissolve, overtaken
by a mind that excites basic feelings but does not even touch on what feelings that
we see in M.xlvi Or in another (contradictory) explanation to Peter Bogdanovich, he
discussed the aesthetics of violence and his desire to have each viewer to imagine
for himself the most horrible thing the man could have done to the female child
victim. For each viewer the imagined act will be different. xlvii From an entirely
different angle, in an article in 2000, Michael Mack reminds us that Dr. Caligari was
a Lustmorder or sex murderer. Kracauer’s was probably one of the first examples
of applying this label to a film personage, though its meaning, different from M,
was that Doctor Caligari’s perverted sexual impulses combined with a will to
absolute social or political authority supplemented each other in the context of the
total erasure of ethical limits.xlviii Caligari’s ethical bankruptcy may have not been
far from Lang’s own invention of the child sex killer Beckert. So perhaps there are
other films of the era that make similar points, as for example Kracauer did with
Lang’s earlier film Dr. Mabuse .
Mack believed that when Kracauer referred to Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, in which
Mabuse develops a relationship between pleasure and sex and the perpetuation of
violence, that this was a cultural critique of Germany’s middle classes and
proletariat who were susceptible to the commands of an authoritarian superego
and were essentially in a state of indifference. Lang’s Mabuse had no critique of
the fact that the world had fallen prey to lawlessness and depravity. As Kracauer
used Mabuse as his template, Mack insists that Kracauer’s thesis was that Weimar
films manifested a neutrality toward human values and in the last period of the
Weimar Republic there was an absence of any distinction between legal and
illegal.xlix This explanation of Kracauer could certainly apply to Lang’s M and
Mack’s reading of Todd Herzog’s work on the same period comes up with the
related argument that the true subject of critique in this film is not that the killer is
victim (a post World War II reading of the film), nor that the German public was
suffering some sort of ‘Angstpsychose’. Herzog argued that Lang’s promotion of
this ‘Angstpsychose’ was an effective response to the crisis of faith in the ability to
see criminals and to see the cornerstone of an alternative model of social
defense.” l
Tatar’s work is a unique example of a thesis that overlaps the boundaries between
femininity, Jewishness, disease, and criminality in the 1920s. She found that it was
almost impossible to talk about one without implicating the others.li Stephen
Jenkins looked at a number of sources on Lang as he tried to develop a feminist
critique. He quoted Robin Wood’s claim that ‘sexual difference, desire, the
‘problem’ of the female’ can be of vital importance in rethinking the Lang text, but
Jenkins went no further than that. He also quoted Claire Johnston, who found that
for Lang, who made many femme fatale films, “Women…embody the destructive
forces of the environment into which the hero is thrust…Lang’s conception of
character is archetypal; these women personify destructive and violent erotic
drives, but they are never explored in any depth.” Unfortunately there was no
further application of these generalizations to M, other than to conclude with
Noel Burch’s comments that M assumes unity but tends towards diversity, since
the structures of the film can be read in the abstract, while being in ‘symbiosis with
the plot, of which they are at once the support and the denunciator.’ lii None of
these assertions help to identify Tatar’s insistence that one must combine
femininity, Jewishness, disease and criminality to understand the 1920s.
If another traditional reading of Lang’s film shows that organized justice is the
longer, less efficient and better method than the vengeful violent mob (proving
that the ongoing struggle was one between democracy and fascism), and that the
audience is forced to observe the helplessly trapped victim,liii there is little doubt
that when guilt is assigned in this film, it is the mothers of the victims who are
guilty of not having taken sufficient care to watch over their children. The
unforgettable last seconds of the film show that after the rule of law has brought
‘justice’ (which remains undefined, since the audience does not know if Beckert
the killer is given the death sentence or sent to an institution), three grieving
mothers in black are shown. One of them warns dolefully, “This will not bring the
children back…We too should keep a closer watch on our children.” While one
author concludes that from this point on, an obscurity and blindness enter Lang’s
cinema,liv he neglects to note that the tragic women are morally guilty for crimes
they never committed and their poor lost children were last seen as photos in an
earlier scene, their living faces no longer even in the audience’s memory, and the
crime of sexual murder still never articulated. With good reason would a feminist
reading of the film condemn Lang for his very reduction of these victims to objects
to satisfy mass culture’s fascination with crime while ignoring the monstrousness
of a sex killer of female children.lv
Perhaps Janet Ward is correct to remind us of rightwing author Gertrud Baumer’s
belief in 1926 that the public in the Weimar era loved the crisis ridden as a kind of
stimulation for the soul, as a way of commenting on antipathies to Weimar surface
culture. We have tried to extend this further, to agree with Walter Benjamin’s
comment on the need for retrospective retrieval but to note that the blind
devotion to Lang’s M has more often forgotten that his choice of an actor and
story went against the real serial rapist/killers of the era. Further, M served to
confirm a public’s satisfaction with a large perspective of crime and violence
endemic to the Weimar Republic while missing both the misogyny and entrenched
antisemitism that were also endemic to Weimar, a blindness and evil that we have
tried to demonstrate needs deeper investigation as does the need for a fresh
analysis of a film that has been worshipped for decades, but perhaps for more
facile, than serious sociopolitical and feminist optics.
Similarly
So let us digress a moment to one may examine the At the same time,
If one tries to trace the arc of the influence of popular culture,
. and were likely known by, and perhaps even stimulants to these killers. Millions of other German
children reveled at hearing Grimm fairy tales about decapitation or mutilation; they grew up to be
relatively well balanced adults. Yet we would be remiss if certain themes were not mentioned, if
only because of coincidence of folk tale and cruel actuality.
but considered taboo the inclusion of pregnancy, premarital sex, incest and incestual desire.
.
if society countenanced eradicating these bestial perpetrators
The Bible calls such things a toevah, "an abomination". It means an act so alien to our values and our
natures that it cannot be understood or explained.
If one looks at this element in combination with Weimar Germany’s representational practices, it is not
surprising that the victims of sexual murder outnumbered victims of racial or political murder.
Recent Book Review: German Studies Review 31/2 /2008
Kerstin Brückweh Mordlust: Serienmorde, Gewalt und Emotionen im 20 Jahrhundert Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2006
Theme received sig. attention in recent scholarship.[Why no similar work on anti-Semitism? GE] Tatar’s book
offers comparative study of sexual murder during Weimar. This new book by Brükweh focuses on four serial
murderers, Friedrich Haarmann, Adolf Seefeld, Jurgen Bartsch and Erwin Hagedorn in 4 regimes, starting with
Weimar… Thesis: public outrage solidifies social consensus defining the bounds that the perpetrator
transgresses. She analyzes how the four were seen in their respective time periods. She divides focus upon
perception of violence by scientific community, the public and popular media and then the perpetrators,
victims and victims’ families. Each period provides different medical and psychological explanations for
sexual murder.
For Haarman, the theory was biological determination by examining his brain after execution. Weimar’s
criminological theory supported the notion of the born criminal.
By contrast the 1971 trial of Bartsch stressed environmental factors relying of psychology and
psychoanalysis.
She explores the historical characteristic of perpetrator, (homosexual in all four periods), the untrustworthy
Russian (DDR) and the Jewish ritual murderer in National Socialism. 406-7
………….
Why does Beckert’s crime remain ‘child murderer’ while the evil of child sexual molestation and murder, go
unspoken?
a high state of anxiety/sexual arousal coupled with murderous acts, was Kürten’s crime.
Lang, who with Thea Harbou, wrote the screenplay, modeled the character Beckert after Peter Kürten, the
infamous Vampire of Dusseldorf (1929), whose crimes (primarily as a child sex murderer) the German press
had covered in lurid detail.
not as one who was responding to sexual desire. this statement. was
retaliatory pleasure
Film leads viewers to believe that M murdered both boys and girls, when the actual perpetrator Kürten
stabbed, raped and murdered nine female children.
Kürten: 9 murders 7 attempted murders, 79 offenses, total
M does echo the in the Kürten case, a hysterical mob calling for the execution of the perpetrator while
weighing the debate on capital punishment.
resembling
articulates this sexual theme, but even he could not state what the sexual perversion was. Late in the film
there is a (misleading) reference to Beckert murdering children, i.e. boys and girls, even though the pictures
of the victims are of three female children.
That single reference to Franz Beckert’s sexual perversion., Thus for decades, M stood for the crime of “child
murderer” which, while evil enough, did not touch on what, wanted to but were themselves afraid to state
plainly.
The crime they defined was murder, although moviegoers at that time were likely familiar with the
Lang admitted later he and Harbou modeled. But
The film’s refusal to speak of the sexual evil stands in contrast to Weimar Germany’s press reports of the
monster who committed the twin evil of This paper then will
129
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/history/kurten/trial_5.html
Representations of Evil
- art, art history, visual culture
- cinema, tv, theatre, radio
i
Kaes, Anton. M London: BFI Publishing 2001, 7
ii
Tatar, Maria, Lustmord. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany, Princeton, 1995
iii
Kaes, M Kaes’ analysis of the film is thorough, yet he seems to have ignored these dual themes almost entirely.
iv
Ott, Frederick The Films of Fritz Lang Secaucus, NJ:Citadel Press, 1979, 155
v
Youngkin, Stephen D. The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre Lexington KY:University of Kentucky, 2005
vi
Gay, Peter Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider New York: Harper and Row, 1968 78,82,86,96, 109
vii
Herf, Jeffrey Reactionary Modernism: Technology Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich Cambrdige:
Cambridge University Press, 1984 2-3, 12-15, 21
viii
Tatar, Lustmord, Tatar’s book remains the key work on this subject. Recent scholarship by Kerstin Brückweh
Mordlust: Serienmorde, Gewalt und Emotionen im 20 Jahrhundert Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006 continues this
th
investigation of four serial killers from four periods of the 20 century.
ix
Tatar, Lustmord, 3
x
Tatar, Lustmord, 35
xi
Tatar, Lustmord, 50
xii
Walkowitz, Judith City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London Chicago: U Chicago
Press 1992 3-4; 13; 22. Walkowitz noted how in Britain the popular press so inflated the infamous Lipski case, in which a
Jewish lodger murdered his landlady, that many believed he was Jack the Ripper. (127) This was but one example of
th
how the popular media in the late 19 century orchestrated the rising tide of nationalism and racism. For example, she
refers to Charles Booth’s 1889 book Life and Labour of the People of London, which emphasized biological racism
toward the laboring poor; he singled out the Jews as bearers of racial Otherness because of their facial features, skin
pigmentation, posture and bearing. Charges of ritual murder led to anti Jewish riots in London’s East End, including a
fear of “Leather Apron” a fictitious Jewish slipper maker, whom many believed was Jack the Ripper. (203-4)
xiii
Tatar, Lustmord, 52-3
xiv
Kaes, M, 29
xv
Tatar, Lustmord, 45; 47. The notoriety of Peter Kurten’s crime was such that some 200 people claimed credit for the
murders and 160 letters from the “killer” arrived at police stations and newspapers. Perhaps ashamed of the publicity
frenzy and the lurid reporting about the sexual murders,, the Frankfurter Zeitung devoted a page to the effect of crime
reporting on youth. 48
xvi
Tergil, Gabriel “Der Fritz Lang Film: Der Film des Sadismus” Die Weltühne 27, (no.23, June 9, 1931) Republished in
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimendberg, editors, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook Berkeley:University of California
Press, 1994.
xvii
Ott, The Films of Fritz Lang 159;162
xviii
Kaes, M 25
xix
Lang, Fritz ”My Film M: A Factual Report“ Die Filmwoche (no.21, May 20, 1931)
xx
Tatar, Lustmord 61-2
xxi
In films from M until the present, the specifics of this evil crime are often never articulated. A 2008 Hollywood film,
The Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood, is a melodrama based on the notorious Wineville California Chicken Coop
murders of the late twenties, in which a homosexual pedophile kidnapped and killed his numerous child victims. The
recent film also leaves the specific crimes unspoken while dealing with the victims and the fate of one child, whose
distraught mother (Angelina Jolie) propels the plot searching for her child.
xxii
Eisner, Lotte Fritz Lang London:Seker and Warburg 1976 123
xxiii
Gunning, Tom The Films of Fritz Lang London:BFI Publishing, 2000 171
xxiv
Kaes, M 55-56
xxv
Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang 178-9
xxvi
Kaes, M 25
xxvii
Ward, Janet Weimar Surfaces:Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany Berkeley:University of California Press, 2001
235-239
xxviii
Lang, Fritz M (screenplay) 104-105
xxix
Kaes, M 20;23
xxx
Gunning The Films of Fritz Lang 199; 198
xxxi
Herf, Jeffrey Reactionary Modernism: Technology Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984 12, 13, 15, 21
xxxii
xxxiii
Tatar, Lustmord, 61
Tatar, Maria The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 xx-xxi; 3-10;
185;192. Interesting is the fact that postwar, the Allies banned the Grimm tales in some German cities, citing them as
cruel, fostering a perverse national mentality.
xxxiv
Snyder, Louis Roots of German Nationalism Bloomington IN:Indiana University Press, 1978 44
xxxv
Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales 182; 185 comments on the tale of Bluebeard (originally French) in
which serial murders committed by one bestial man are turned into a cautionary tale warning females of the dangers of
idle curiosity. She also notes in the “Tale of Two Children Who Played Butcher With Each Other,” both end up dead as
did their mother, baby sibling, and father. It is not surprising that the Allies, after World War II, banned the Grimm Fairy
Tales in some German cities, citing them as part of a cruel perverse national mentality.
xxxvi
Snyder, Louis Roots of German Nationalism, 48 It was not surprising then that the study of folklore was raised to a
special place of honour in the Third Reich.
xxxvii
Aurich, Rolf et al, eds. Fritz Lang His Life and Work : Photographs and Documents Berlin :Filmmuseum Berlin 2001
149
xxxviii
Aurich, Fritz Lang His Life and Work 162;166
xxxix
Tatar, Lustmord, 56-7
xl
(West German Observer, 1938? p. 138)
xli
Tatar, Lustmord, 63
xlii
Hippler, Fritz Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) 1940 Deutsche Filmherstellungs- und -Verwertungs- GmbH, Berlin
(DFG)”Der Jude Lorre in der Rolle eines Kindermörders. Nach dem Schlagwort: "Nicht der Mörder, sondern der Ermordete
ist schuldig", wird versucht, das normale Rechtsempfinden zu verdrehen und durch mitleiderregende Darstellung des
Verbrechers das Verbrechen zu beschönigen und zu entschuldigen.“ (English translation above by Dr. Karin Doerr) The
late Stig Hornshoj Moller’s work on The Eternal Jew remains the most extensive investigation of this film to date. See his
website http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude for full elaboration of this classic anti-Semitic work of evil.
xliii
Hippler, Fritz Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew)
xliv
Review of Siebenpfeiffer, Hania. “Böse Lust” Gewaltverbrechen in Diskursen der Weimarer Republik Cologne: Böhlau
2005 in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies XLIV, 3, Sept 2008 389-90
xlv
Review of Brückweh, Kerstin Mordlust: Serienmorde, Gewalt und Emotionen im 20 Jahrhundert Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2006 in German Studies Review 31 February, 2008
xlvi
Demonsablon, Philippe “The Imperious Dialectic of Fritz Lang” Cahiers du Cinéma article in Jenkins, Stephen Fritz
Lang the Image and the Look London: British Film Institute 1981 19
xlvii
Armour Robert A.Fritz Lang Boston:Twayne Publishing Co., 1977 Chapter 6
xlviii
Mack, Michael K. “ Film as Memory: Siegfried Kracauer’s psychological history of German ‘National Culture’”
European Studies xxx (2000), 157-181 n102, 174. This article defends Kracauer’s classic text as an intellectual and
sociological enterprise. Mack explains Kracauer’s thesis that Caligari’s purpose was to examine the possibility of making
the audience aware of its own reasonless nature.(n71) One could argue just as strongly that this was one of the
linchpins of Lang’s M.
xlix
Mack, “Film as Memory” 175
l
Mack “Film as Memory” 178. See another essay on Lang by Herzog in the recent book Weimar CInema by Noah
Eisenberg, ed. New York:Columbia University Press, 2008.
li
Tatar, Lustmord, 64
lii
Jenkins, Stephen Fritz Lang The Image and the Look London : BFI 1981 154
liii
Jensen, Paul M. The Cinema of Fritz Lang New York: Barnes and Company 1969 103
liv
Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang 199
lv
Kaes, M 29
Photos:
Haarman
Kürten
Lorre as Beckert