#weimar germany

[pwpe-the-shabuir]

,Komm süßer Tod, tanz mir den Schmerz aus meiner Seele'

Angsty Ludwig lets go! Nothing is more fun than combining drugs, PTSD and an economic crisis into one big meltdown(yay)

Inspirited by this post

[thesobsister]

George Grosz, "The Case of the Iron Club or Crime Does'nt Pay" (1932)

[thecountesstold]

On set photo of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler with Norbert Jacques (author of the Dr. Mabuse novel), lead actresses Aud Egede-Nissen and Gertrude Welcker, and director Fritz Lang.

[againstkissredskull2]

even more german newspaper articles about peter lorre (plus ads for his movies and drawings!)

warning: SUPER long post incoming this is pretty much all i got from the german archive i found, at least until the 50s.

i like her writing style its very flowery in a way. you can almost imagine yourself being there with them. i used google translate but had to do a lot of tweeking to get the right tone so it took a while 😭 but im happy with it. also that mouth and expression look amazing - no notes lmao.

"Peter Lorre, the Person and the Artist.

By Lotte Michaelis.

Many would surely have had a similar experience to mine; when I contacted Peter Lorre, I was overcome by a slight shudder, a feeling I thought long gone, reminiscent of my childhood. Is it really possible to identify an actor so strongly with his suggestively portrayed character that one feels — in this blatant case — afraid of the murderer from Fritz Lang's sound film "M"? The answer is indicative of Lorre: Behind the powerful impact of this performance lies his artistic personality, his fundamental presence and long-lastingness… Transitioning to the impression of Peter Lorre in his private life is like moving from darkness into light. One needs a moment to get one's bearings before settling into the small scene of the late morning: meeting at the café at the Kurfürstendamm. A short, stocky man, his soft hat sitting casually, a bit tilted on his head, hurries in, looks around, and greets me… Lorre, "the murderer" — Peter Lorre, a very trustworthy seeming man in private. As becomes clear at the start of our conversation, he is a profoundly intelligent person who, despite his youth — he is 28 years old — takes his profession and life seriously, like someone who has matured over decades. This, as he explains, is due to years of his life that have counted double and triple…

Let's turn on the good old "vision" of the silent film, the visual recollection of significant events. The image fades in… The son of a big landowner in the Carpathians runs away — driven by the urge to become an actor. He comes to Vienna, starves and starves for the sake of his ideals, performs improvisational theater in some studio with a friend in the evening, loses himself in fantastical experiments, sleeps in the Prater* at night, and the next day the hunger begins anew. He falls ill, has to lie still for a long, long time, quiet and alone… and this time gives him the peace and composure that others struggle for in the maelstrom of experiences, consciously and unconsciously. Recovered, he takes up the fight all the more stubbornly and tenaciously. By chance, he finds himself in the theater in Breslau and from there, three years ago, to Aufricht in Berlin. Fade out - fade in: before me sits Peter Lorre, the son of a big landowner — our established Berlin actor. Three years were enough to secure him a place in the front rank of stage artists.

His great, unique talent is permeated by a conscious economy of his means. He avoids fully revealing his "people," plucking at a single string of their character's instrument and guiding the audience's empathy toward an individual understanding of the portrayed man, his presumed motives, his past and future development. Nothing seems less artistic to him than depicting the "cliché" of a prototype. With a delicate touch, he imparts the right dose of human variations. It might have been easier to portray the hunchback in the new UFA sound film "The White Demon" as grotesque and uncanny simply because of his physical disability. Lorre plays him — the drug dealer and criminal — with the all-too-human vanity of the cripple who, under no circumstances wants to be such, who spends his money having suits tailor-made to conceal, and whose need for recognition makes him settle at best with a slightly crooked shoulder. That is remarkable in a way, something that compels reflection: where does the impetus for crime lie, where the guilt that makes this poor man guilty? Lorre's art rests on a broad psychoanalytic foundation because he is a true actor of humans**. Lorre has since appeared in a number of latest films, for example, the comically sleepy photojournalist in F.P.I.

Just recently, he appeared in the UFA sound film "Schuß im Morgengrauen," this time alongside Karl Ludwig Diehl, Ery Bos, and Theodor Loos, in a major new role. This new crime film was directed by Alfred Zeisler, one of our best crime film directors. The film depicts, in a gripping plot, the fight against jewel smuggling. In this smuggling gang, Peter Lorre plays the role of Kloz, a good-natured but notoriously alcoholic "jewelry expert". Even the preparations for Lorre's new role gave rise to various incidents. So, during rehearsals, Lorre claims to his director that in "his young years" he hasn't yet developed enough experience to know what it's like to live life in a completely "drowsy" state. This observation amused Lorre, not least because his director's anti-alcohol stance before and during filming is proverbial. He loves the barracks-like atmosphere of the studios in Neubabelsberg, the absolute seclusion of the studios there, and speaks enthusiastically of the solidarity during filming, the shared commitment of everyone to the project. He recounts their cheerful, congenial little travel group on the UFA sound film "The White Demon," the fantastic days on the ship at the pier, the trip to Portugal, the picturesque impressions, and the most colorfully vibrant harbor atmosphere captured in the film. However, he did have a heated argument with Hans Albers during the voyage (according to the script, of course!). But why does he dare approach the blond Hans's sister with morphine, anyway? You wouldn't think him capable of it, looking so harmless and with an almost gullible expression on his face – on a late summer morning in the café…"

*amusement park in vienna

**is that grammatically correct? Does that make sense? 🤷‍♀️

and now i REALLY want to watch schuß im morgengrauen

movie that lorre wrote himself but never got made, he wanted to play kaspar hauser. honestly i see the resemblance.

napoleon news and yet another film that never came to be: lorre as the good soldier svejk. they wanted to get charlie chaplin as director, too!

speaking of chaplin

lorre and him were very close friends and would greet each other enthusiastically . he would use his friendship with chaplin to impress others by staging "surprise" meetings with him when taking walks.

according to a poll done by england's "film weekly" the top 10 best actors included three germans (who fled berlin) conrad veidt, oscar homolka and peter lorre.

some more ads and a really cute drawing of peter

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In September 1933, Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin, two of the most prominent and politically-engaged intellectuals of the Weimar Republic, met in Paris to begin work on a collaborative project. Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany eight months earlier, driving both Brecht and Benjamin into exile. The two writers devoted almost an entire week from the end of September to the beginning of October to this project. What was the urgent project that occupied them at this important historical moment? It was not, as one might expect, a political manifesto or a critical analysis of recent developments in Germany. Rather, Brecht and Benjamin met in the fall of 1933 to map out a series of crime novels that they planned to coauthor. Unfortunately none of the proposed novels was ever completed; only some working notes survive that hint that it would have been an anti-detective novel, a genre that would become popular after World War II.

To plan such a project at such a crucial period in European history and these authors’ personal histories points to the importance of the crime genre for Benja- min and Brecht. Both men shared a lifelong devotion to crime fiction and devoted numerous essays to discussions of the genre and reflections on their fascination with it.

…

What, Brecht asks, does the modern detective novel offer the modern reader that might account for its incredible popularity? Brecht follows Benjamin closely in his first answer to this question, arguing that among the chief pleasures of the detective novel is its depiction of people as actors, whose actions have definite and identifiable consequences (34). People in modernity pass through life without leaving traces of their existence and their movements. The subjects of detective novels, on the other hand, leave behind concrete traces.

...

According to Brecht, the popularity of the analytic detective novel can be attributed largely to the fact that it enables the reader to practice a certain intellectual operation: piecing together a causal chain of events that leads directly from the crime to the criminal. By limiting the field of possible outcomes of this causal chain, the detective novel presents us with the ability to fix causality to human actions. The crime has a motivation and that motivation is attributable to an individual. Actions beget other actions and lead toward a crime. A penetrating intelligence can piece together these actions to lead from a crime back to an individual criminal. … The detective novel presents us with the “inside story” (Brecht employs the English term) that is otherwise denied to us in our everyday experiences. We are suddenly confronted with a dramatic event (a murder, a war, a loss of employment). Something must have happened to produce this event. Someone must have done something. But who? The detective novel allows us to answer this question. It provides the “inside story,” the secret history that Lang insisted he presented in Dr. Mabuse and that Benjamin sought in the wanderings of the flâneur and behind the windows of the metropolis. Unlike in life, in the detective novel all actions have logical consequences and all actions have actors.

….

German crime fiction of 1920s tells a different story. Rather than build on nineteenth-century detective literature traditions as English-language and French-language authors did, it abandons the centrality of the figure of detective and focuses instead on the criminal. These are not detective novels, but crime novels. This crossover from the detective novel to the crime novel is intricately related to the critical theories of detective fiction that I outlined above: if international detective fiction allowed readers to explore a fantasy world in which reason and causality function, individuals are connected to each other and their societies, and the law is clearly distinguishable from the violation of the law, then the German modernist crime novel represented an attempt to understand modernity by exploring a space in which such distinctions are not possible and reason no longer obtains. This accounts for the particular German inflection of the early twentieth-century crime novel, which unlike the English, French, and American versions, dispenses with the figure of the detective—the incarnation of reason—and crosses over to a focus on the figure of the criminal—the incarnation of illogic. These works are more interested in exploring the relationship between criminals and legitimate society than in identifying criminals and resurrecting boundaries between law and outlaw.

This blurring of boundaries between the legal order and the extra-legal order is nicely demonstrated in Brecht’s crime novels. Brecht did, indeed, apply his theories of detective fiction to his own writings, and crime maintained a central role in Brecht’s fictional works throughout his career. But the criminals and detectives in his crime novels function very differently from their counterparts in the classical detective fiction that Brecht discusses in his essay on the genre. As Benjamin notes in his astute reading of Der Dreigroschenroman (The Threepenny Novel, 1934), Brecht departs dramatically from the traditional conventions of detective fiction:

Bourgeois legality and crime—these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel, but dispensing with its rules. In this crime novel the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime is presented. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former.   

This was also the case in Brecht’s earlier crime drama, Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), in which the corrupt police chief Tiger Brown and the gangster Macheath are shown to be closely related on both a personal and a professional level. In the play, the happy end in which Macheath is rescued from execution satirizes and undermines the customary closure of the detective novel, which involves the removal of the criminal from bourgeois society and the subsequent restoration of bourgeois order and the rule of law.

When he reworked his original material six years later in The Threepenny Novel, Brecht intensified his comparison of crime and bourgeois legality, completely eliding the distinction between the representatives of the legal order and those who would seek to challenge this order. The struggle between Macheath and Peachum is, as Benjamin notes, “the struggle between two gangs, and the happy end a gentleman’s agreement that gives legal sanction to the distribution of the spoils” (201). As Peachum himself eventually realizes, he and Macheath only seemed to be in combat, but the whole time “we were only doing business with each other” (201). There is in The Threepenny Novel no compelling representative of the legal order, as in the classical detective novel, because there is no place for such a figure in this reworking of the crime novel that suspends the conflict between crime and the law.

Detectives are seldom found in Brecht’s crime stories, appearing in only a few short stories and some abandoned fragments. When detectives do make an appearance in Brecht’s fiction, they are unlike their more traditional counterparts. Indeed, they are parodies of the methodical and rational literary detectives such as Dupin and Holmes, the classical detective figure …. For example, Samuel Kascher, the detective in Brecht’s short story “Der Javameier” (1921), has no interest in involving himself directly with witnesses and others who have a close connection to the crime, nor is he interested in inspecting the crime scene. His refusal to examine the crime scene and follow traditional clues, he claims, arises from his fear that such unmediated exposure might detract from his ability to analyze the case objectively. Kascher instead gets his information only from mediated sources that buffer him from a direct involvement with the crime: newspaper reports and distant witnesses. His sources of clues are thus those that are just as available to the general public as to him. This interestingly places Kascher in the same position as the reader of detective stories, whom you will recall Brecht described in his essay “On the Popularity of Detective Novels” as reading reports of catastrophes and suspecting that there is an “inside story” that will remain forever hidden from him. Kascher, a fishmonger by trade, is quite explicitly cast as a representative of the public, an outsider in his own story and, as Lorenz Jäger argues, “a distant, cool … observer.” There is no opportunity for the reader to experience the “inside story” vicariously through the literary detective. Brecht thus refuses his readers the very pleasures that he identifies as central to the popularity of the detective genre: the vicarious experience of connection with a detective and a criminal involved in leaving and following traces and the clear, causal chain leading from the catastrophe to the inside story.

The central figure of what was to be Brecht’s series of novels in collaboration with Benjamin, the retired judge Lexer, is a similar representative of pure ratio in a world in which reason and causal chains no longer have a place. Brecht’s sketch of the first novel of this series provides a textbook example of the appropriation of the genre of detective fiction for the service of what is ultimately an anti-detective novel. Brecht’s notes for the story ... sketch the story of Karl Seifert, a corrupt salesman who uses a loophole in the law to extract money from corporations. When he meets a secretary whose company’s existence he is threatening, he offers to save her job in exchange for sexual favors. They meet in a hotel, where she pushes him down an elevator shaft to his death. While the police search focuses on the most likely suspects, such as Seifert’s jealous wife, Lexer undertakes his own unconventional investigation, armed with a camera and a mania for documenting the smallest and seemingly unimportant details. He uncovers the secretary’s guilt, but does not deliver her to the police. He recognizes, as does the reader, that while she committed the crime, true guilt lies more directly with the victim and the corrupt system of economic and social relations that enables Seifert’s crimes and threatens the secretary’s livelihood. ... Brecht departs from the traditional crime novel in that crime is not localized in one place and attributable to one person, and thus cannot be solved or contained. Pure reason does, indeed, lead Lexer to uncover the offender, but it does not help him to solve the crime because the “inside story” is not the narrative of a guilty individual who is responsible for the crimes and misfortunes that occur; rather, it is the narrative of a flawed economic and moral system with no clear agents directing it. We are a long way from Agatha Christie here."

- Todd Herzog, Crime Stories: Criminalistic Fantasy and the Culture of Crisis in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009, p. 22-23, 26-29.

[literary-twink]

Goodbye to Berlin

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Christopher Isherwood

[transsolidarity]

In 2015, Lili Elbe returned to mainstream conversation and discourse after Eddie Redmayne starred in The Danish Girl. Lili is one of the first individuals to undergo gender-affirmation surgery and serves as an important intersection of transgender history and women’s history. March is Women’s History Month, and this post will explore Lili’s life and legacy.

⬇️ Read the full article and support the blog ⬇️

Lili Elbe: A Transgender Pioneer of Women’s History

Who was Lili Elbe? Discover the life, surgeries, and legacy of one of the first transgender women in modern medical history.

[nosferatu-roberteggers]

“[F.W.] Murnau was alleged to be a homosexual himself, and [Nosferatu] seems to aestheticize his inner struggles of being homosexual in a country where homosexuality is criminalized and pathologized. At this time sex acts between two males were outlawed by paragraph 175 of the German penal code. In addition, during this time period there was an explosion of discourses surrounding the connection between sexuality and psychology. For example, the German psychologist Richard von Kraft-Ebing published the book “Psychopathia Sexualis” which catalogued a range of “perversions” including homosexuality. The themes of queer sexuality in his films are often subtly revealed, yet repressed.

Nosferatu's transgression of gender and sexual norms is presented as something to fear with his utilization of the fear of the uncanny. By looking at Nosferatu as the double of Hutter, we can understand how Nosferatu comes to represent the homosexual desires that Hutter seeks to repress. The homoerotism between Hutter and Nosferatu is rather explicit and obvious. […] “As soon as the sun rose, Hutter too was freed from the shadows of the night”. The “shadows” seem to imply shared homosexual exchanges of desire that the narrator and Hutter feel should be repressed, and indeed, he does repress it. […] Perhaps by focusing on the psychology of Hutter and his queer desire in Nosferatu, one could argue that film participates in a discourse that seeks to posit Hutter's desire as natural.”

— Caitlyn Zimmer; “The Portrayal of Queer Subjectivity in German Vampire Film” (2006)

“Nothing you can say will shake me – for there is a devil in this world, and I have met him. And he... I cannot speak it.” // “"He told me about you. […] How you fell into his arms as a swooning lily of a woman. […] Our love was supposed to be sacred!”