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The Internet Source Book for Early German Film

Final update: 11.11.1999 — Editors: Olaf Brill & Thomas Schultke
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Fritz Lang

 Fritz Lang

Writer, Director (1890 - 1976)







 F I L M O G R A P H Y





 T E X T S   B Y   F R I T Z   L A N G


Fritz Lang: Autobiography

I was born on 5 December 1890, in Vienna, Austria. My father, Anton Lang, was an architect and Stadtbaumeister (municipal architect); my mother's name was Paula, née Schlesinger.

My father wanted me to become an architect too. Yet I had heard too many of his complaints about the disadvantages of his profession to feel much enthusiasm at the prospect of a career as Stadtbaumeister, which would have forced me to spend my whole life in Vienna. I had different plans, yet in order to keep the peace, I agreed to attend lectures in engineering at the Technische Hochschule. In spite of all my good resolutions I only lasted a term there, because I wanted to become a painter.

To begin with I should say that I am a visual person.

I experience with my eyes and never, or only rarely, with my ears - to my constant regret. I love folk songs, but nothing would ever induce me to go to a concert or an opera.

The most important of my childhood memories is the Christkindlmarkt (Christmas Fair). This market is something very special. On a low wooden platform only a step or two higher than the cobbled pavement, there were simple wooden stalls filled with cheap Christmas stuff. As the passage ways between the stalls were roofed over also, it was possible even during a snow storm to walk about the stalls amidst the light of many colourful candles and oil-lamps. There were wonderful things to buy: gay Christmas tree decorations, glass balls and stars and garlands of silvery tinsel and red-cheeked apples and golden oranges and dates; fantastic toys, rocking horses and puppets and Punch and Judy and tin soldiers; toy theatres with characters and scenes for many different plays. With these theatres one could stage real fairy-tale shows, with changing sets. Then there was the Wurstlprater with a ferris wheel, shooting ranges, side-shows and merry-go-rounds.

I have always been an enthusiastic theatre goer - tickets for the fourth gallery or for standing room were cheap. In those days it never occurred to me that I might one day become a film maker. I wanted to be a painter.

During my school years I read a lot and indiscriminately - good literature and popular stuff alike. But gradually I became more discerning in my reading. I still continued to read whatever I could lay my hands on - theosophy, history, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, the German and Austrian classics; Shakespeare, Hans Sachs, books on occultism, Karl May and Jules Verne, Mayrink's Golem...

And then I got interested in women. I was precocious and started having affairs very early. Viennese women were the most beautiful and the most generous women in the world. It was the custom to meet secretly in a Viennese café during the interval of the theatres or accidentally after in a cabaret or night club. Women have always been my best friends, right down to the present day.

In spite of my interest in women I have always been a very shy person, even today, though now less so. I found it difficult to make new friends, was always something of a loner, and was considered arrogant as a result. In reality I was probably trying to find myself; and even making films, which later became my over-riding passion, was at first perhaps only an adventure.

At the time I definitely decided to become a painter, and my models were Egon Schiele, who unfortunately died all too early, and Gustav Klimt.

There was trouble when my father learned that I had already worked in two Viennese cabarets - 'Femina' and 'Hölle' - and since I could not convince him that I would make neither a good architect or a successful engineer, I ran away from home - something every decent young man should do. First I went to Belgium, and from there my wanderings took me over half the world, to North Africa, Turkey, Asia Minor and even as far as Bali. Eventually I ended up in Paris. I earned my living by selling hand-painted postcards, my own pictures, and occasionally cartoons to newspapers.

In Paris I went to Maurice Denis's painting school, and in the evening to the Academie Julien to study drawing the nude.

When I had money I went in my spare time to the cinema, because I was already very interested in films from a professional point of view. When I painted or sketched, my subjects were, so to speak, un-animated. We sat, for example, in front of a model and it did not move; but the cinema was really pictures in motion. There I already subconsciously felt that a new art - later I called it the art of our century - was about to be born.

I lived in Paris until August 1914. I remember that in those days nobody really believed in a war between France and Germany. I was sitting in a small café on Montmartre with some friends, when somebody stormed in: 'Jaures assassiné par un camelot du roi'. This was the prelude to the end.

On 5 August I arrived back in Vienna as a refugee from Paris, rented a studio, but did not manage to do much work before I was called up, as a one-year volunteer. At the front, I was promoted to officer rank, was wounded several times, and received some medals. In 1918 I was declared unfit for further front-line service.

All this time I was preoccupied with the new medium of film. In military hospital I wrote some film scenarios - a were-wolf film I did not manage to sell and eventually two scripts, Wedding in the Eccentric Club and Hilde Warren and Death, both of which I sold to Joe May, then a very well-known producer and director in Berlin.

A few months later, back in Vienna on leave, I saw a newspaper announcement of Wedding in the Eccentric Club. I was very proud of my success and invited a number of friends and my girl-friend, too, of course, to come to the opening night. There I received the first shock from the profession that was going to be my life. When the film began I did not find my name credited as the author - though the script had been filmed scene by scene as I had written it. Instead, Joe May figured as author as well as director.

I did not like the direction of the film, and had imagined things differently. I think I must have decided then, subconsciously, to become a film director. This decision that was to determine my whole life was hence not taken after a lengthy weighing of the pros and cons, but emerged with the same curious, almost somnambulant certainty which I later felt with all my films right to the present day.

This curious instinct that made me feel that I was right in choosing the cinema has never left me. I was completely immune to any criticism of my films, whether good or bad. This is not arrogance or megalomania on my part, and requires explanation: films are, or rather were, until the end of the Second World War, made by a group of people to whom cinema was not only the art of our century, but also the sole purpose of their lives. Among these film-obsessed mortals I count both myself and the members of my crew - whether lighting engineers, studio workers, property men; whoever worked on my films always considered them their films. When my crew - author, architect, cameramen and the rest - had worked with me on the preparation of a film, completely giving up their private lives, and then on the shooting and again on the cutting, for months more; and finally at the first showing of the film a critic sat down, after having seen it, to write a review in a hurry because it had to be in next morning's paper; when he condemned the work it had taken a group of men months to do, then I just could not accept his criticisms.

And if I cannot accept a bad review, then, equally, I must not accept a good review.

Early in 1918 I was invalided home to Vienna from the Italian front, to spend two months in hospital. After that I was allowed to leave the hospital during the day, reporting back at eight o'clock in the evening.

One day I found myself in a Viennese café, when a gentleman came up to me and asked if I would take the part of a lieutenant in a play called Der Hias. I demanded 1,000 kronen instead of the 800 offered.

At one of the performances I was noticed by Erich Pommer, who offered me a contract with Decla in Berlin. That was in August 1918.

In Berlin I first worked as a script reader, and wrote scenarios. Erich Pommer was more of a friend than a boss to me. I earned little, but I was happy to be able to make films. In order to earn a few extra marks, I played three parts in a film for which I had written the scenario, under the direction of Otto Rippert: a German courier, an old priest and Death. When the Spartacus rebellion began in Berlin I was directing my first film, Halbblut (The Half Caste). On the first day of shooting my car was repeatedly stopped on the way to the studio by armed rebels, but it would have taken more than a revolution to stop me directing for the first time.

Two years later I married the German writer Thea von Harbou, and from then on all my German scripts were written in collaboration with her. Since I now made films in Germany, I acquired German citizenship, of which I was deprived in 1933 by the Hitler regime.

After the Nazis had come to power, my anti-Nazi film, The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, in which I put Nazi slogans into the mouth of a pathological criminal, was banned of course. I was called to see Goebbels, not, as I had feared, in order to be called to account for the film but to be told by the Reichspropaganda minister to my surprise, that Hitler had instructed him to offer me the leading post in the German film industry. 'The Führer saw your film Metropolis and announced, 'That's the man to make national socialist film ..! '

I left Germany the same evening. The 'interview' with Goebbels had lasted from noon to 2.30 p.m., by which time the banks had already closed and I could not withdraw any money. I had just enough at home to buy a ticket to Paris, and arrived practically penniless at the Gare du Nord. In Paris I met Erich Pommer who had left Germany some weeks before. Friends succeeded in getting me a carte de travail and for Pommer, who represented the French branch of Fox, I made the film Liliom, based on the play by Ferenc Molnar.

After this film I was offered a contract to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, so I left France.

Fritz Lang: Autobiography. From: Lotte H. Eisner: Fritz Lang. London: Secker & Warburg 1976, p. 9-15.





 T E X T S   A B O U T   F R I T Z   L A N G





  O B I T U A R I E S





  L I N K S


to our pages of Lang's films:

Halbblut
Halbblut (1919)
Harakiri
Harakiri (1919)
Der Herr der 	Liebe
Herr der Liebe, Der (1919)
Metropolis
Metropolis (1927)
 Die 	Spinnen
Spinnen, Die (1919 / 20)


to other sources in the internet:




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