German Film & Literature

Eric Rentschler

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136368806
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Media Studies

First Published in 1986. This collection of essays by an international team of scholars is the first sustained investigation in any language of the historical interactions between German film and literature. It is a book about adaptations and transformations, about why filmmakers adapt certain material at certain times. The major impetus at work is the desire to expand the field of adaptation study to include sociological, theoretical and historical dimensions, and to bring a livelier regard for intertextuality to the studies of German film and literature. It is concerned with the ways in which filmmakers in Germany- from Pabst and von Sternberg to Fassbinder, Herzog and Sanders-Brahms- have engaged and been engaged by, literary history.

1

HEIDE SCHLÜPMANN

The first German art film:
Rye's The Student of Prague (1913)

Hanns Heinz Ewers, best-selling author, movie-theater owner, and “avowed Herrenmensch,”¹ took pride in the continuing success of The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag, 1913), for which he wrote the filmscript:

Films have a very short life, yet this film has survived twelve years and is still being shown throughout the world. It was a huge success, not only in Germany, but abroad as well: the first real art film. It proved to critics, artists, and the public that the cinema could produce art, and to the film industry that art in the cinema could also earn substantial sums of money.²

Timely associations guided Ewers, to be sure: art, cinema, and capital. He had become famous mainly for his Gothic horror novels, especially Mandrake (Alraune), which was brought to the screen in 1928, 1930, and again in 1952. The Student of Prague was also remade twice. Ewers worked as an adviser for the second version in 1926, one directed by Henrik Galeen, but apparently he disowned Arthur Robison's 1935 remake.³

Ewers was an artist who wanted to turn a profit and yet still not be debased by business. In his 1930 preface to The Student of Prague: An Idea by Hanns Heinz Ewers, the writer attacked not only film producers without sensitivity for art, but also scriptwriters who imbued film texts with alien forms — i.e. literary contrivances taken from novels and dramas. At the same time, Ewers bemoaned the way his “idea” had been exploited. He seized the occasion as well to boast of his own accomplishments in the film medium. Ewers did not think much of transpositions from the one medium to another; he was only interested in original screen treatments. These aesthetic principles apparently did not stop him in 1933 from adapting his own novel, Horst Wessel. The resultant film, Hans Westmar (directed by Franz Wenzler), was, along with Hitler Youth Quex (Hitlerjunge Quex, directed by Hans Steinhoff) and SA-Mann Brand (Franz Seitz), one of three explicit propaganda feature films made in the year of Hitler's rise to power depicting National Socialism's revolutionary phase.

The Student of Prague opened in Berlin on 22 August 1913. A critic present ironically described the event:

It was a real première. A lot of tuxedoes. The poet sat in a private box, occasionally visible with very pretty ladies. A monocle gave its master the necessary bearing. Goethe, Chamisso, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alfred de Musset, and Oscar Wilde were also present. They were not averse to the fact that Dr H. H. Ewers, the legendary celebrator of black masses, had achieved a technical masterpiece, which was greeted by an enthusiastic audience. They succumbed to the unique magic of Prague's golden city. Later in the bar they could not forget the unbelievably slender, beautiful, frisky legs of Lyda Salmonova.⁴

The eyewitness — with tongue in cheek — pointed out the array of literary luminaries who had acted as the film's godfathers. In the pundit's opinion, Ewers had sold his literary honor and taken on the role of a buffoon. Movies were still in the process of casting off their fairground origins and gaining the respectability of a bourgeois entertainment. The writer Ewers helped in that endeavor. He belonged to a circle of artists and intellectuals who raised cinema out of its pariah status. In an article, “Der Kientopp,” Ewers, as early as 1907, asked: “Where are the poets and painters who will create for the nickelodeon?”⁵ A similar statement is to be found in Kurt Pinthus's Das Kinobuch of 1914.

The Golden Age of German cinema after World War I had its origins in the years 1912 to 1914 and took many of its impulses from established artists and writers. Not only Ewers was involved in the production of The Student of Prague, but the Max Reinhardt actor, Paul Wegener, as well. Furthermore, the crew included the Danish director, Stellan Rye, and the cameraman, Guido Seeber. Rye would die in the first year of the war. Seeber, cinematographer for many Asta Nielsen films, went on to work with G. W. Pabst in the 1920s. The cinema, however, did not only contain artistic ambitions; it also became an object of interest for capital. Art and capital: these amounted to the main forces that would bring about the cooptation of film by the middle class, a process that many intellectuals in Germany would condemn during the Weimar Republic. It may in fact be the participation of numerous other intellectuals which secured cinema a place as a functional part of bourgeois culture in this century.

The Student of Prague was hailed in the credits as “the first German art film,” analogous to and yet in contradistinction to the French Film d'art movement. The film forced audiences to reconsider the relationship between literature and film, to become aware of how widespread cooperation by artists in the established art forms affected the silent cinema in Germany. Did these artists impose traditional aesthetic values on the new medium, taking account of film's technical potential? Did they transform the medium and emancipate it from established forms?

The Student of Prague reworks the Doppelgänger motif, one of the major preoccupations of German romantic literature from Ludwig Tieck to Heinrich Heine. Subsequent variations on the theme throughout the nineteenth century are found in the works of Guy de Maupassant, Feodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Oscar Wilde. Ewers's script borrows particularly from E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Story of the Lost Reflection (Die Geschichte vom verlorenen Spiegelbilde), Poe's William Wilson, and Goethe's Faust, especially in the hero's pact with the devil. The film's opening titles explicitly quote a poem by Alfred de Musset, “La Nuit de Décembre.” Despite these obvious influences, The Student of Prague is not determined by literary sources per se, but rather concentrates on a central motif of nineteenth-century literature: the Doppelgänger. This sets the film apart from customary patterns of literary adaptation.

In The Haunted Screen, Lotte H. Eisner discusses the classical period of German cinema, taking recourse to art history for her formal and stylistic insights. She perceives the German films of the epoch as being highly evocative of German romanticism. For Eisner the relationship between romantic literature and German film is not a simple question of dominance or dependence. She sees similarities in style and the recurrence of certain motifs ontologically, as being grounded in identical world views, as emanations of a distinctly German Geist. Eisner does not discuss whether these recurring romantic elements served to reflect contemporary reality or whether they merely served as ideological emanations of bourgeous culture.

This distinction becomes necessary, particularly when one compares the 1913 and the 1926 versions of The Student of Prague. Siegfried Kracauer (in From Caligari to Hitler, 1947) is — in contrast to Eisner — only concerned with the first version. The strength of Eisner's study lies in its descriptions, in the parallels it draws between art and literary history and film. Her stress is on the role of romantic chiaroscuro and her attention given to the reappearance of the “hybrid, half-real world” of E. T. A. Hoffmann in Rye's film.⁶ She also goes on to compare the character and dress of Scapinelli (in the second version) with the archivist Lindhorst in Hoffmann's The Golden Pot (Der goldene Topf). She juxtaposes a landscape scene in the 1926 film with a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Yet, while tracing variations on the Doppelgänger theme from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, 1920) to Fritz Lang's M (1931), Eisner loses sight of its importance for The Student of Prague.

Kracauer, on the other hand, concentrates on the ideological permutations of this motif and what it means for the cinema of 1913 to appropriate and rework it. To be sure, Kracauer mentions the film's literary origins, but then goes on to analyze The Student of Prague as the expression of a socio-historical situation. For him a “people's mentality” is not a fixed national characteristic (Eisner's German Geist), but rather a variable disposition bound in socio-psychological determinants. The Student of Prague is of fundamental importance for the development of German cinema after World War I, especially for the period between 1919 and 1924:

The Student of Prague introduced to the screen a theme that was to become an obsession of the German cinema: a deep and fearful concern with the foundations of the self. By separating Baldwin [Balduin] from his reflection and making both face each other, Wegener's film symbolizes a specific kind of split personality. Instead of being unaware of his own duality, the panic-stricken Baldwin realizes that he is in the grip of an antagonist who is nobody but himself. This was an old motif surrounded by a halo of meanings, but was it not also a dreamlike transcription of what the German middle class actually experienced in its relation to the feudal caste running Germany?⁷

The Student of Prague, read in this way, implies that the bourgeoisie's opposition to the imperial government was only nominal; in reality it identified with the Kaiser. This revelation is garbed in fantastic forms, because the middle class insisted on withdrawing into the interiority of autonomous individuals, instead of establishing the solidarity with the working class necessitated by strained economic conditions. An external dualism — an ambiguous social identity — thus appears as an inner schism.

As Kracauer continues, this withdrawal into inwardness not only means escape, but a sort of confrontation with historically generated psychic dispositions. The recourse to romantic motifs thus is bound in parallel historical constellations. German romanticism coincides with a period of political reaction during which bourgeois individuals accommodated themselves to feudalism by turning inward. In 1913, the collapse of the German Empire was at hand, yet the emancipation of the individual could only come about if one eradicated those structures which had been created in the place of an unsuccessful bourgeois revolution. In speaking about The Student of Prague, Kracauer dwells on the story. But the political importance of the film only becomes clear if one reflects on its form and the filmic articulation of the literary figure of the double.

Upon its première in 1913, The Student of Prague appealed to a large audience, and also stimulated the special interests of scientific research, specifically the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis. An extensive study by Otto Rank, “The Double” (“Der Doppelgänger”), published in 1914 in Sigmund Freud's journal, Imago, opens with a description of “shadowy, fleeting, impressive images in Hanns Heinz Ewers's film drama.”⁸ Rank deals with literary configurations of this motif, going on to reveal volks-psychological elements by using ethnographic, mythological, and folkloristic materials. As a psychoanalyst, Rank is concerned with the “original problem (Urproblem) of the self … which modern adaptors support or which has been obtrusively pushed to the fore by new techniques of representation.”⁹ Rank in this way addresses the question of new modes of signification made possible by the filmic medium:

Perhaps it follows that filmic form, which reminds us of dream techniques in more ways than one, expresses certain psychological facts and relationships — which the poet cannot clearly articulate in words — in a distinct and manifest imagistic language and thus makes their meaning more accessible.¹⁰

Rank demonstrates crucial correspondences between various literary renderings of the double. They all can be rediscovered in the film, reinforcing the fact that the film reflects not a single literary work, but rather the continuity of a certain motif. The correspondences are seen in the way the Doppelgänger appears as a complete likeness, as if “stolen from a mirror” (E. T. A. Hoffmann) — which is in fact the case in the film. This li...