Differences Between Metropolis (1927) (the Movie) and Metropolis (1925) (the Book)
I would imagine that there are far fewer people out there who have read Metropolis the novel than have seen Metropolis the movie. The novel was written by Thea von Harbou, then-wife of director Fritz Lang, who would later go on to write the script for her husband's film. The novel is, I think, important reading material for fans of the film, because it contains a lot of extra context for characters and plot points, and expands upon the story depicted on screen.
I wanted to make a list of some interesting differences between the novel and the movie, which is in no way comprehensive. The novel is available to read for free on Project Gutenberg.
Freder is a mad scientist in his own right
In the movie, Freder Fredersen, our hero, is only ever depicted as a hapless, pampered young man. Friendly, but he doesn't do much aside from desport himself in the pleasure gardens of his father's city and run foot-races with his equally elite friends. He's basically the ultimate under-performing nepo baby.
In the book, Freder is equally hedonistic, but also demonstrates a certain amount of engineering talent in his own right. When the book opens, Freder is seen playing the pipe organ like the tear-streaked little drama llama that he is, before he approaches an unfinished robot that he's been working on.
With a painful, violent jerk, Freder turned around and walked up to his machine. Something like deliverance passed across his face as he considered this shining creation, waiting only for him, of which there was not a steel link, not a rivet, not a spring which he had not calculated and created.
The creature was not large, appearing still more fragile by reason of the huge room and flood of sunlight in which it stood. But the soft lustre of its metal and the proud swing with which the foremost body seemed to raise itself to leap, even when not in motion, gave it something of the fair godliness of a faultlessly beautiful animal, which is quite fearless, because it knows itself to be invincible.
Freder caressed his creation. He pressed his head gently against the machine. With ineffable affection he felt its cool, flexible members.
“To-night,” he said, “I shall be with you. I shall be entirely enwrapped by you, I shall pour out my life into you and shall fathom whether or not I can bring you to life. I shall, perhaps, feel your throb and the commencement of movement in your controlled body. I shall, perhaps, feel the giddiness with which you throw yourself out into your boundless element, carrying me—me, the man who made—through the huge sea of midnight. The seven stars will be above us and the sad beauty of the moon. Mount Everest will remain, a hill, below us. You shall carry me and I shall know: You carry me as high as I wish….”
He stopped, closing his eyes. The shudder which ran through him was imparted, a thrill, to the silent machine.
I think it's a horse? This robot never really becomes relevant to the plot, so it makes sense that it was cut for the film. But, I do think that in the novel, it establishes that Freder is natively intelligent and has simply been stunted by his sheltered environment, making his ultimate transition into mediator-hero a little more understandable.
2. The machine-man is more biomechanical than it is purely robotic
The image of the machine-man (or Futura, or robot-Maria, or whatever else you'd like to call it) is probably one of the most iconic images of Metropolis in popular culture. As we all know, it looks like this:
Shiny. Metallic. Gold in the posters that have color. An art deco android, massively influential on all robots that came after.
In the book, however, the robot (here, Rotwang calls it "parody") is described as being almost biomechanical in appearance, with a supple synthetic skin and a pale, cold look.
A hand grasped along, by his head, a graceful, skeleton hand. Transparent skin was stretched over the slender joints, which gleamed beneath it like dull silver. Fingers, snow-white and fleshless, closed over the plan which lay on the table, and, lifting it up, took it away with it.
Joh Fredersen swung around. He stared at the being which stood before him with eyes which grew glassy.
The being was, indubitably, a woman. In the soft garment which it wore stood a body, like the body of a young birch tree, swaying on feet set fast together. But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver. Cold streamed from the glazen skin which did not contain a drop of blood. The being held its beautiful hands pressed against its breast, which was motionless, with a gesture of determination, almost of defiance.
But the being had no face. The beautiful curve of the neck bore a lump of carelessly shaped mass. The skull was bald, nose, lips, temples merely traced. Eyes, as though painted on closed lids, stared unseeingly, with an expression of calm madness, at the man—who did not breathe.
This corpse-like robot is somewhat more logical than a hard mechanical one in the sense that it is easier to imagine how it might be transformed into something resembling a person; I always wondered, watching Metropolis, how the heavy-looking robot could be turned into a fairly slender-looking woman convincingly. But the image of the gold machine-man is so iconic that it's hard to imagine Metropolis without it.
3. The "Seal of Solomon" (aka "Is Rotwang Jewish?")
In the movie, there is a large pentagram on the wall in Rotwang's workshop, giving him a vaguely Satanic air; part scientist, part wizard.
In the novel, the symbol on Rotwang's wall (and his doors) is consistently described as a "Seal of Solomon," a star that may have five or six points, attributed to the biblical King Solomon in the middle ages. This raises an interesting question: was Rotwang intended to be Jewish in the original story? The Seal of Solomon is used within broader western occult and alchemical contexts, but has and continued to be particularly associated with Judaism, and surely von Harbou would have been aware of that connotation.
The house, in the novel, is attributed to an earlier magician who built the house many decades before the city had sprung up around it. This magician came from the east, and supposedly spread the plague with him (a longstanding accusation leveled against European Jews).
It was said that a magician, who came from the East (and in the track of whom the plague wandered) had built the house in seven nights. But the masons and carpenters of the town did not know who had mortared the bricks, nor who had erected the roof. No foreman’s speech and no ribboned nose-gay had hallowed the Builder’s Feast after the pious custom.
Rotwang also notes that the magician was not a Christian.
As a corpse he looked peaceful and Christian-like, both of which he certainly was not in his life.
Rotwang is similarly described as a foreigner, who left the house unchanged when he moved in:
One day there came to the town a man from far away, who saw the house and said: “I want to have that.”
If Rotwang (and/or the magician with whom he is associated) is implied to be Jewish, then it makes his construction of the machine-man arguably more interesting, almost like a science-fiction play on the story of the golem.
September is the proprietor of the Yoshiwara nightclub, and is entirely absent in the movie. September is mixed-race, a fact which is given great detail in the novel:
The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man—be he never so widely travelled—was capable of guessing to what weird mixture of races he owed his face. So far he had won all such bets, and used to sweep in the money which they brought him with hands, the cruel beauty of which would not have shamed an ancestor of the Spanish Borgias, the nails of which, however, showed an inobliterable shimmer of blue; on the other hand, the politeness of his smile on such profitable occasions originated unmistakably in that graceful insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across at mighty America.
His character is another understandable omission, as there is little directly important that he does in the plot. However, it does indicate that the city-state run by Joh Fredersen does interact with other countries in this dystopian future.
5. Josaphat straight up kills a guy
In the movie, Josaphat's role is basically limited to being Freder's right-hand guy, his only ally in his battle to save Maria. In the novel, he gets an expanded plot-line that includes him being sent away from the city in a light aircraft on Joh Fredersen's orders. As the plane leaves the city, flying over large fields which ring the city-state's urban core (the only indication of what lies outside of the city itself), Josaphat freaks out and demands to go back. When the pilot refuses, he clobbers him to death with a tool and ejects from the plane, being rescued by a passing peasant girl.
Yes, he lay there now, stretched out at his length on his back, and the silk which was so strong as to have borne him tore under the grip of his fingers. And where his fingers lost hold of the silk, to find another patch which they could tear, there remained moist, red marks upon the stuff, such as are left behind by an animal that had dipped its paws into the blood of its enemy.
The girl was silenced by the sight of these marks.
An expression of horror came into her face, but, at the same time, an expression such as mother-beasts have when they scent an enemy and do not want to betray themselves nor their offspring in any way.
She clenched her teeth together so forcibly that her young mouth became quite pale and thin. She knelt down beside the young man and lifted his head into her lap.
The eyes opened in the white face which she was holding. They stared into the eyes which were bending over them. They glanced sideways and searched across the sky.
A rushing black point in the scarlet of the westerly sky, from which the sun had sunk….
The aeroplane….
Now it had indeed carried out its will and was flying towards the sun, further and further westward. At its wheel sat the man who would not turn back, as dead as could be. The airman’s cap hung down in shreds from the gaping skull, on to the bull-like shoulders. But the fists had not lost hold of the wheel. They still held it fast….
In the movie, the flood is just a flood. It's not personified, it just exists as an obstacle for the protagonists to escape.
In the novel, the flood actually starts talking to Maria (probably as a hallucination), and seems to represent a manifestation of her fears. It tants her inability to save the children she had nurtured, and seems to lust after her in a way not unlike how Rotwang evidently lusts for her.
The water quoth: “Do you know, beautiful Maria, that I am fleeter than the fleetest foot? I am stroking your sweet ankles. I shall soon clutch at your knees. No one has ever embraced your tender hips. But I shall do so, and before your steps number a thousand more. And I do not know, beautiful Maria, if you will reach your destination, before you can refuse me your breast....
“Beautiful Maria, Doomsday has come! It is bringing the thousand-year-old dead to life. Know, that I have flooded them out of their niches and that the dead are floating along behind you! Do not look round, Maria, do not look round! For two skeletons are quarrelling about the skull which floats between them—swirling around and grinning. And a third, to whom the skull really belongs, is rearing up within me and falling upon them both....
“Beautiful Maria, how sweet are your hips.... Is the man whom you love never to find that out? Beautiful Maria, listen to what I say to you: only a little to one side of this way, a flight of stairs leads steeply upward, leading to freedom.... Your knees are trembling ... how sweet that is! Do you think to overcome your weakness by clasping your hands? You call upon God, but believe me: God does not hear you! Since I came upon the earth as the great flood, to destroy all in existence but Noah’s ark, God has been deaf to the scream of His creatures. Or did you think I had forgotten how the mothers screamed then? Have you more responsibility on your conscience than God on His? Turn back, beautiful Maria, turn back!
“Now you are making me angry, Maria—now I shall kill you! Why are you letting those hot, salty drops fall down into me? I am clasping you around your breast, but it no longer stirs me. I want your throat and your gasping mouth! I want your hair and your weeping eyes!
“Do you believe you have escaped me? No, beautiful Maria! No—now I shall fetch you with a thousand others—with all the thousand which you wanted to save....”
7. Joh Fredersen's mother
Finally, Joh Fredersen's elderly mother is present in the novel, while in the movie, the character does not appear. This is actually a significant change, I think, because Mrs. Fredersen is the only character in the book who does not treat Joh Fredersen as a superior; she talks to him honestly, criticizes him, and he is emotionally open around her. The most notable example of this is how the novel ends.
While in the movie, it ends with Freder making Fredersen and Grok shake hands, an ending that has sometimes been criticized for its simplistic outlook on labor relations, in the book, Fredersen goes to his mother's house. She gives him a letter from Fredersen's dead wife, Hel, that she tells him that she has been keeping for many years. Fredersen reads the letter, which says,
“I am going to God, and do not know when you will read these lines, Joh. But I know you will read them one day, and, until you come, I shall exhaust the eternal blissfulness in praying God to forgive me for making use of two Sayings from His Holy Book, in order to give you my heart, Joh.
“One is: ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love.’ The other: ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!'
Fredersen contemplates this for a moment, looking out the window at the sky. The novel ends,
His heart, utterly redeemed, spoke stilly within him:
“Unto the end of the world.... Unto the end of the world.”
This, I would argue, is somehow both more ambiguous and more satisfying, because it does not present a neat resolution of the city's problems, but it does explore Fredersen's personal redemption arc. It's optimistic without being trite.
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