“Whatever some derisive historians have said, if the end of the [Weimar] Republic was implied in its beginning, that end was not inevitable . . . I might add that it is precisely this easy pessimism, which then saw (and still sees) the Republic as doomed from the start, that helped to fulfill the prophecies it made.”
—Peter Gay, from Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968)1
“How close people often are to death, without a premonition. They believe eternity is theirs—and don’t even survive the roses they play with.”
—Girolamo, from Der müde Tod2
Fritz Lang was born in Vienna in 1890. Thirty-one years later when his film Der müde Tod was released, a lot had changed. Lang had witnessed much of that change first hand. In 1910 he left Austria to see more of the world, landing in Paris in 1913 where he studied art until the war broke out. Lang returned home and volunteered for the Austrian army—like many other German and Austrian artists of the time, he supported the war. His record was impressive; he earned numerous honors, but also suffered injury. By 1918, he was hoping for permanent leave, and filmmaking had taken the place of painting as his primary interest. In August of that year, he met Erich Pommer—a producer and the owner of his own film company, Decla—a fortuitous meeting for Lang which set him on a path. Pommer offered him a job working on scripts, and he left for Berlin in September.
Lang was in Berlin when Philipp Scheidemann declared a German Republic on November 9. He was there for the armistice signed on November 11, and the abdication of the throne. He was there for the events that followed: the treaty of Versailles; the passage into law of the Weimar Constitution; and the hectic early years of the Republic, marked by extreme inflation and political turmoil. In these early years, Fritz Lang turned out scripts and directed his first films.
A number of Germany’s classic silents came out of the unsteady beginnings of Weimar: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (produced by Pommer and directed by Robert Wiene, but originally assigned to Lang) was released by Decla (now merged with Bioscop) in early 1920, and F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was released in 1922. Between them, in October of 1921, was Der müde Tod.
Der müde Tod doesn’t have quite the reputation of Caligari or Nosferatu, but it’s an impressive and striking film that deserves to be watched alongside them. Like D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, it is an omnibus film that tells multiple stories, each set in a distinct time and place. Der müde Tod’s stories are nestled within a fourth framing story that takes place in “a little town of the past,” a quiet, quaint, and idealized German village. A young couple, engaged to be married, have arrived in the village and settled into the local watering hole (‘The Golden Unicorn Inn’), when Death—personified by a pale older gentleman, played wonderfully by the Lang regular Bernhard Goetzke—steals the groom-to-be away from his fiancée. After searching the town over for her beloved, the woman (portrayed by Caligari’s Lil Dagover) comes to an impenetrable wall and watches as her fiancé’s specter disappears through to the other side. The woman faints from shock, and is soon discovered by an elderly apothecary who brings her to his home.
Sitting in the apothecary’s home, the woman reads a section from the ‘Song of Songs’ (“love is strong as death”) in an open Bible on the apothecary’s table, and spying a poisonous concoction she decides to drink it and take her own life. When she finally comes face to face with Death in a room of flickering candles—each one representing a life yet to be snuffed out—she pleads to get her fiancé back. Death allows her three opportunities: save any one of three lives which are about to expire, and she and her betrothed can both return to the living. These chances become the film’s interior tales: the first set in Baghdad, the second in Renaissance Venice, and the third in ancient China. In each story the three primary actors (the woman, the man, and Death) appear, playing out the same dynamic as in our framing story. He is threatened; she does everything she can to save him; she fails.
We return to our framing story where the woman is given one more chance: bring Death another life not yet expired and he’ll return her fiancé. After unsuccessful attempts to coax the elderly, indigent, and ill into giving up their lives for her love’s, a raging fire catches in the hospital. The building is evacuated, but a new born babe is left behind. Our heroine rushes into the collapsing building with the intention of finding the baby and handing it over to Death. But once she has it in her arms she wavers. Instead, she ties the child in cloth and lowers it out the window to the crowd below. Death finds her alone, her hands empty in the burning building, and he accepts her life. The couple is reunited as spirits, presumably headed someplace better.
Like the early 1920s work of Otto Dix, Der müde Tod is clearly a product of the incredible violence witnessed by its author during the First World War. But it is also tempting to look ahead—to consider the films of Weimar in light of what was to come. Siegfried Kracauer’s classic study From Caligari to Hitler (1947) did just that. Lang’s films are particularly interesting to consider. As related in relatively recent books—like Patrick McGilligan’s Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (1997), and Tom Gunning’s The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000)3—Lang was promoting his anti-Nazi film Hangmen Also Die! in 1943 when he first told a story which he would tell many times to come, and which was even memorialized in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt: the year was 1933, Hitler was Chancellor of Germany, and Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, summoned Lang to his office to make him an offer. Goebbels wanted Lang to be the official party filmmaker. He told Lang that Hitler himself had singled Lang out as a man capable of making “great Nazi films.” In Lang’s telling, he watched uneasily as a clock ticked away, and mentally made preparations for his escape. Later that night he was on a train to Paris, never to return.
In McGilligan’s book, the author concludes that this story is almost certainly a semi or complete fabrication. Goebbels left no record of meeting with Lang that day. Lang did not leave Germany when he claimed he did, and after he did first leave, he made return trips. McGilligan suggests that perhaps Lang’s story belies more complex feelings towards the Nazis that by 1943 he would have been glad to bury. This is impossible to say for sure, but whether or not Lang had some small sympathy for the Nazis, it is safe to say that he and his then-wife Thea von Harbou made films that the Nazis could sympathize with.4 Goebbels—who was an admirer of the art—publicly praised Lang’s Die Nibelungen films as two of the greatest motion pictures of all time, and it’s easy to read some of Lang’s other films as reactionary. Der müde Tod possesses that “mixture of mysticism and brutality” that the German theologian Ernst Troeltsch lamented in the early 1920s.5 In Weimar Culture Peter Gay identifies an impulse that came from “a great regression born from a great fear: the fear of modernity.” He continues, “the hunger for wholeness was awash with hate; the political, and sometimes the private, world of its chief spokesmen was a paranoid world, filled with enemies: the dehumanizing machine, capitalist materialism, godless rationalism, rootless society, cosmopolitan Jews, and that great all-devouring monster, the city.” This almost reads like a gloss of Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, with its robotic anti-Christ, 
threatening shots of clockwork and machinery, and its lame ending which suggests that a charismatic leader—a ‘mediator’—might save society by joining together the classes in a firm handshake. It’s not surprising that Gay called Lang “greatly overrated” and Metropolis a “tasteless extravaganza.” In fact, McGilligan even writes that it was Lang’s idea to add a framing story to Caligari (against the script-writers’ wishes)—a framing story which essentially turned an anti-authority nightmare inside out, restoring authority to its venerated place. That’s no small change in a post-revolutionary Germany where serious attempts to restore the monarchy were being plotted at that very moment.6
Going back to Der müde Tod—in the Italian story the villain Girolamo gives voice to the brutal philosophy of the film (see the quotation in the epigraph above): death is inevitable, but people will do everything in their power to avoid it just the same. In each of the interior tales, the woman strives desperately to keep her love alive. But as objective viewers, we can see which way the wind is blowing. Death is always a step ahead—the woman’s failure seems as predictable as the movements of a clock. Death is “weary of seeing the sufferings of man and of earning hatred for obeying god,” but he knows (and the viewer knows) that in the world of Lang’s film, there’s nothing to be done.
In the quotation from Weimar Culture up top, on the other hand, Peter Gay argues that the death of Weimar was not definite, but that an outlook of pessimistic inevitability had a hand in bringing it about. I don’t mean to imply that the philosophy of Der müde Tod helped to ensure Hitler’s rise, or that the film works as an allegory of the battle for Weimar, but rather that it is a document of some of the sickness of that place and time.
Paul Hindemith – String Quartet No. 4, Op. 22, third movement
The composer Paul Hindemith was born in Hanau, Germany in 1895. “During the Great War, [he] banged the bass drum in a military band, racing back and forth a mile or so behind the front lines, playing marches and dances for soldiers who were recovering from their spell in the trenches. He also performed in an all-soldier string quartet . . .” (Alex Ross, from The Rest is Noise). This is a recording of the third movement of his fourth string quartet, opus 22, composed in 1921 and performed here by the Prague City Quartet. Its somber melody and cold repetition has a hint of the same “mixture of mysticism and brutality” as Der müde Tod.
1. Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture is available in paperback from W. W. Norton & Company.
2. Der müde Tod is available on dvd from Image Entertainment, as Destiny.
3. From Caligari to Hitler is available in paperback from Princeton University Press. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast is available in paperback. And The Films of Fritz Lang is available in paperback from the British Film Institute.
4. It should be noted that von Harbou collaborated with Lang on all of his films between 1921 and 1931, and that they had a falling out in the early 30s, at least partially because of her joining the Nazi Party.
5. The Troeltsch quotation is in Gay’s Weimar Culture. He quoted it from Klemens von Klemperer’s Germany’s New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (1957).
6. The Kapp Putsch was launched about two weeks after Caligari’s German release.
