Du mußt Caligari werden

The Internet Source Book for Early German Film

Final update: 11.11.1999 — Editors: Olaf Brill & Thomas Schultke
We shut down. All good things must have an end. - But we'll be back. January 1, 2000. www.filmgeschichte.de


Thomas and Olaf

 About the editors





Olaf Brill, Thomas Schultke: Creating The Book

 In summer 1996, we had a great idea: "We must go to the internet!" "Okay, let's go..." We had virtually no idea, what the internet was and how to go to it. But it seemed a cool new medium to reflect our film research and look out for collaborators.

At that time, we were busy researching the career of a young actress who played some part in the genesis of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, starred in Fritz Lang's first two films and died in 1920, Gilda Langer. We were passionately interested in early fantastic films like Alraune, Der Golem, and Nosferatu; adventure films with fascinating titles like Die Spinnen, Die Herrin der Welt, and Die Jagd nach dem Tode; everything around the genesis of Caligari; and Fritz Lang's early films.

Five months after the initial idea, we went online (with a little help from a friend, who taught us the secrets of HTML). A few days later, we went to a film conference in Weimar and even gave a talk about the internet. It turned out to be the opening talk of the conference. We presented a rudimentary version of this website and talked about " the use of the computer in the humane discipline and the internet as a medium for film-scientists". Looking back, we can see that surely half of the audience knew more about the internet than we did - after all, they were media experts! - but the other half came to us afterwards and told us they found our ideas new and interesting.

From the begin, we established a few essentials which we kept until now: dig up archival sources where no film scientist had gone before, and then don't hide it: publish it! - give concrete and useful information - and make it easy to download (that's why in case of our exhaustive coverage of Caligari reviews, we didn't scatter them into hundreds of files, but put them on just three pages, each packed with 32 KB of information).

The Source Book is far from being complete. "It reflects the editor's own interest" or so, we said in the editorial text. Of course: We are just two people; we don't get paid for this work; and we cannot be expected to offering source material about all aspects of Early German Film. But we want to share what we find out (and hope, others will share their research results with us, too).

Since The Book went online, we got loads and loads of e-mails, most of them with requests we cannot fulfill, like "Can you send me a copy of the film you-know-which with Rudolf Platte". For these requests, we opened the Classified section.

Thomas' living room. Where They created The Book Others woke our interest in aspects we hadn't paid too much attention before, but which turned out to be hot stuff. For example, Robert Singer who was teaching a film/literature course at the City University of New York with a segment on Stevenson's "Jekyll/Hyde" novella, asked us if we knew anything about Der Januskopf (1920) with Conrad Veidt (an adaption of Stevenson's story). We researched, found some contemporary reviews, and lots of parallels to our main interests: Der Januskopf was another horror story written by Hans Janowitz, perhaps his first script after Caligari. Veidt starred in the leading - double - role, and according to the contemporary reviews, he was brilliant. Murnau was the director, two years before Nosferatu, his other unauthorized adaption of a classic horror tale. And the film even marked the first appearance of Béla Lugosi in a horror film (he was in Germany for only a short time) ... Wow!

Forrest J. Ackerman from Hollywood wished us luck and sent us a pack of file-cards with his late wife's notes on early German fantastic films, and a Metropolis souvenir programme he edited, in Japanese! We exchanged material with John Akre from Minneapolis, who got copies of our video recordings of some of Murnau's films. Although he could see our German Nosferatu copy only with the German-English dictionary and the pause button as his viewing companions, he was enthusiastic about the version we sent him because it contained many shots he had never seen before, and he told us that they make a huge difference in the pacing of the film. And we had lots of other contacts, conversation, and fruitful exchange - with students, professors, film fans, musicians, descendants of people who were working in German silent film, and people who just dropped in to say hello and that they liked our work. In 1998, we counted an average of 200 hits per month.

So, working on The Book for two years was fun, increased our knowledge and hopefully that of others. We learned a lot, and, by the way, we got some idea of what the internet actually is. Isn't it phantastic, that people who want to know something about Gilda Langer, Lang's early films or Murnau's Der Januskopf can now go online and find out about it? They can even unearth aspects that we were not thinking of when we were putting together our site! We're looking forward for more entertaining work on the fascinating aspects of early German fantastic film. Be seeing you!

Olaf Brill & Thomas Schultke
2 October 1998 (2nd Anniversary of The Book)




e-mail to the Source 			Book
Back to main page
  © 1998 Brill & Schultke