at the center of the city, the insane asylum

 The city, like the labyrinth, hides its center through a multitude of false routes to the center. And once in the center, the city hides its exits by imposing its one way streets, while the  art of the labyrinth is all in dead ends. The homology between the city and the labyrinth doesn’t stop there – for at the center of the labyrinth, to get the narrative going, to motivate its structure, there is a monster – and at the center of the city, there is a crime,

At least, this is the city as viewed by German expressionists. I’ve just watched Fritz Lang’s last film from the Weimar German period, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, made after M. The film was made, I’ve read, in Hungary. It was written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou. They split up conjugally and artistically after the film came out – or rather, was repressed by the Nazis in 1933. Lang went to Hollywood, Harbou, apparently with a new lover in tow, made a couple of films under the Nazis. The compromises one makes.

To return to my phantom theme, the Testament of Dr. Mabuse is an eerily appropriate close of the period of German filmmaking that begins with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In both films, the center of the city – or labyrinth – is an asylum for the criminally insane. German Gothic, as we all know, was a much more serious matter than French or English Gothic. English Gothic begins with the building of grottoes on the estate of Horace Walpole, whereas German gothic comes from the dark heart of the people – the Grimm brother’s tales (and never mind that one of their main informants was the daughter of refugee French Huguenots). The German Gothic was always conscious of itself as the shadow of a larger politics. The infinitely mercurial Hoffman was a refugee in 1813, uprooted by both Napoleon’s troops and the Russian troops moving across Germany in pursuit. That period put its own spectres in his work. The expressionists, the Prague group around Meyrink, all of this fed into the two great expressions of gothic angst in Germany – Kafka’s work and the expressionist German cinema. M. and The Trial have ties to each other that have nothing to do with Lang’s knowledge of Kafka’s novel – I imagine he didn’t know it. Although Thea might have.

Of course, it is impossible to view Dr. Mabuse without thinking of the history of Germany that came after it. Or without thinking of the extreme political violence of the Weimar era itself – all the assassinations. The hypnotic master-mind – both an excuse and a nightmare, conjured up from the Juniper Tree, or Hansel and Gretel.

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt /der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete…