1
The Face of Destruction
Paul Wegener’s World War I Golem Films
Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we still live.
—Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
The soldiers who served in the trenches of World War I inhabited a world of clay. As Eric J. Leed writes, the trenches rendered the landscape seemingly empty, yet all the while it was “saturated with men”: “The earth was at once one’s home and the habitat of a hidden, ever-present threat.” Both the invisible enemy with its formidable technology and the trenches themselves, which could collapse on the soldiers hiding inside them, posed threats to the combatants of World War I. Leed quotes the reaction of an Italian soldier after he finally encounters the flesh-and-blood enemy: “Those strongly defended trenches . . . had ended up seeming to us inanimate, like desolate buildings uninhabited by men. . . . Now [the enemy soldiers] were showing themselves to us as they really were, men and soldiers like us, in uniform like us.”1 While the trenches filled with living men could appear inanimate, the dead sometimes seemed to be alive. According to Allyson Booth, the bodies of the dead, whether interred in the battlefield or left unburied, became part of the muddy surroundings and were “simultaneously understood as both animate subjects and inanimate objects.”2 Likewise, because of the soldiers’ immobility and sensory deprivation in the trenches, the bodies of the living, often covered in mud, also came to resemble those of the dead.
Presciently, it was in the summer of 1914, just prior to the outbreak of World War I, in which these trenches played such a central role, that the German theater actor Paul Wegener (1874–1948) conceived and produced his first film concerning that creature of clay, Der Golem (The Golem).3 Its first screening in January 1915 took place when its star was already serving on the muddy battlefield, and the U.T. Lichtspiele in Berlin prefaced Der Golem with newsreels depicting the “newest reports from the war.”4 It was an uncanny coincidence that the film concerned the animation of an inanimate clay sculpture, a figure that hovers between life and death. Der Golem ends, as both the screenplay and a restored segment reveal, with a quotation from the seventeenth-century German mystic and religious poet Angelus Silesius: “Nature always works profoundly, / inside as out. / And all things live in death, / and dead they are alive.” The film promoted a sense of the continuum between life and death reminiscent of the conditions in the trenches. In this way, viewers on the home front indirectly experienced the blurring of the boundaries between bodies and mud, between animate subjects and inanimate objects. Even when the golem comes to life, it retains its clay constitution, reminding viewers of its connection to earth and death.
As mentioned earlier, Wegener had experienced the clay of war firsthand. At the age of forty, in October 1914, he volunteered for the Landsturm, where he served first as a corporal and later as a lieutenant.5 He marched through the city of Diksmuide, in West Flanders, arriving at the front lines in mid-October. On December 4, his company came under heavy bombardment near the Yser River in Belgium. Out of his own squad of forty-nine, only he and three others survived. Following this harrowing experience, Wegener received the Iron Cross, first class. He remained in Ypres until February 1915, when he fell ill, returning in April to Berlin. Audiences of the period were aware of Wegener’s choice to volunteer for the war at the height of a flourishing acting career. The Berlin Börsen-Courier, for example, reported prominently in September 1915 on Wegener’s first postservice acting role, commending his Iron Cross.6
That the war was a threat to the live actor but not to his preserved cinematic double underscored the peculiarities of the new medium of film. The Swiss critic Eduard Korrodi noted in 1915 that one might see Wegener “under strange circumstances” at the movie theater while “he is sacrificing his body and soul and his human voice to his fatherland far away from us as lieutenant.”7 Korrodi here conflates the “strange” human replication in cinema—which, unlike theater, does not require the onstage presence of the flesh-and-blood actor—with the “strange circumstances” of a war, in which actors and filmmakers fought while their films were screened in their absence. In other words, even while cinema resurrected the figure of Wegener, who by his very service on the front lines literally wavered between life and death, this resurrection, for Korrodi, could only be partial and unreal. Wegener returned from the front to star in two further golem productions and so reaffirmed his physical presence precisely through a medium that could both animate the dead and portray the living as ghosts. The artificial golem whose existence and actions are controlled by others served as a reminder of the mortality of the veteran actor embodying this monster.
In 1917, after directing and acting in Rübezahl’s Wedding (1916) and The Yogi (1916), both movies also featuring larger-than-life protagonists, Wegener used the golem story to produce an uplifting, romantic comedy, Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem and the Dancer), aimed at female spectators on the home front. Friedrich Kittler and Susanne Holl write that the 1917 film “treats cinema, takes place in the cinema, and films cinema-actors and spectators and the outcomes of their adaptation into film.”8 Wegener, playing himself, attempts to seduce a variety dancer, acted by the Czech actress and dancer Lyda Salmonova, Wegener’s off-screen partner at the time. At the film’s beginning, the dancer attends a screening of the “much-discussed” film Der Golem of 1914 and subsequently requests a copy of the clay statue of the golem. Wegener pretends to be this statue, masking himself in “real life” as the golem in his film (see figure 1.5). So disguised, he manages to enter the dancer’s home, only to fake his own animation and pursue the shocked woman. If the 1915 screening coincided with Wegener’s dispatch to Flanders and underscored the disparity between the preservation of bodies on film and their vulnerability on the battlefield, the 1917 film, screened after Wegener’s return from the front, represented Wegener as “himself,” thus securing a sense of the actor’s presence and distracting the audience from any consciousness of mortality.
As Wegener’s diaries and unpublished letters indicate, he returned from the battlefield highly critical of the defeated German nation and its wartime conduct. While his 1917 film was a product of wartime escapism, in the 1920 film, Wegener gives voice to his criticism and contends, albeit indirectly, with the war and its aftermath.9 A discussion of the 1914 film sets the stage in this chapter for my interpretation of the famous Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem, How He Came into the World), the only film of the three that exists in its restored entirety.10 I show how the shifts in Wegener’s approach to the golem story and its Jewish subject matter were both a product of his wartime experiences and his attempt to forge a postwar aesthetic. In 1915, the animated clay sculpture had served unwittingly as a reminder of the deadly trenches, whereas by 1920, Wegener and his cofilmmakers consciously rendered the entire visual surface of the movie more expressive, striving to convey the animation of inanimate matter.
To contemporary critics, the film also marked the development of German cinema from a “small film industry . . . [into] a great power [Großmacht].”11 Wegener successfully harnessed the progress made by film technology between 1914 and 1920 for the sake of his expressive aesthetic, which was more tactile and physiognomic than the expressionist aesthetic most prominently exhibited in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, screened earlier that year.12 Expression or expressivity refers here to the Hungarian film critic and writer Béla Balázs’s sense of communicating psychological and spiritual content through external, visual means. Such expressivity could be achieved through artificial manipulation of the visual field, so that while in the earlier film the camera (and audiences) marveled at the ability to capture outdoor scenery, the atmosphere of the 1920 film was a product of the constructed studio sets.13 One contemporary critic noted that the film was a “milestone” in the history of cinema because it forged a new relationship to modern art, particularly to fantastic architecture and symbol-ridden sculpture (rather than expressionist painting).14 The discovery, via film, of the human “face” of all things, whether animate or inanimate, served to re-create the battlefield, the expressive “landscape of mud and object.” But it also transformed the battlefield experience into a narrative of national redemption that stressed the individual and irreplaceable “soul” of all things, human and nonhuman.
Cinematic Animation in Der Golem (1914)
Paul Wegener, a successful stage actor who transitioned to film acting and directing, rapidly became a central figure in the nascent film industry. According to Thomas Elsaesser, he made “fantastic film a mainstay of the German cinema” for at least a decade. His 1913 doppelgänger film, The Student of Prague, inaugurated a new phase in German cinema, combining “romanticism and technology,” while appealing both to the educated middle class and to the urban masses. This particular Wegener combination entailed the application of new film techniques to stories that blended a “middle-class concept of national literature with a pseudo-folk culture as the well-spring of the popular.”15 In a discussion of the first golem film’s genesis, Wegener himself claimed that “everything revolves in this film around the image, around a merging of a fantasy world of past centuries with present life.”16 Even more than the folkloric dimension of the story, the fantastic potential of fairytales and stories of mythic import was vital for Wegener’s attempt to establish aesthetic standards for film, to ground it as an independent art form even while providing entertainment for the masses.17 He relied on supernatural tales to showcase film’s capacity to create previously unimaginable effects—the animation of the golem, for example, or the appearance of doubles or ghosts through superimposition. The first golem film of 1914 involved a high degree of cinematic experimentation and privileged the work of the movie camera and its “kinetic lyricism.” Wegener’s aim—even when not fully executed with the technologies of 1914—was to do away with factual images, with realistic lines and forms, and instead to enter a “new visual fantasy world.”18
In Der Golem, Wegener enacted “the golem role interchangeably with a puppet made of plaster and papier-mâché” (see figure 1.1). The transitions between actor and puppet were so “subtly arranged” that it appeared to the critic Adolf Behne as though “the animated puppet opens its eyes, breathes, moves.”19 In addition to the presence of this puppet double in the film, viewers were made aware of the fact that the film itself created a double of the actor; the day after Der Golem was first screened, on January 14, 1915, Wegener’s essay “Acting and Film” was printed in the daily newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, with the following illuminating preface: “Paul Wegener, Lieutenant and Knight of the Iron Cross first class is at the moment importantly occupied in Flanders, although yesterday he gave a guest performance in effigy as author and actor in a Berlin film theater. . . . The short essay that he left behind with us before departing for the battlefield reveals his own thoughts about this matter.”20 Through film technology, one could exist “in effigy,” and Wegener could appear in two places at once: both serving in Flanders and giving a performance “by means of his image” on the screen in Berlin.
While Wegener stressed in his essay the differences between theater performance and acting in front of the camera, he brought to the golem role his well-known stage persona. Both Korrodi and Behne pointed out the similarity of Wegener’s cinematic role to his past stage roles. Wegener was capable, they noted, of effectively conveying both the “animalism” of the golem and his “good-naturedness and meekness.”21 Such descriptions of Wegener as golem match up with his image as an instinctive, forceful, and manly actor rather than a refined and intellectual one. When playing major roles (Richard III, Mephisto, Shylock) in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin theater, Wegener enjoyed “allowing the grimace of a barbaric primal drive [Urtrieb] to leer out from behind the mask enforced by conventions and habits,” according to Walter Turszinsky. Both his “Eastern,” or “Slavic,” facial features and his actor persona lent themselves particularly well to the role of the golem, imagined, with the help of Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrations for Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem, as a racialized Mongolian prototype. With Wegener’s “Mongol head,” “Moorish mouth,” “wide-nasal flat nose of a Hun,” and Slavic cheekbones, he had, in Turszinsky’s view, no equal “in the realm of the human beast.”22
Figure 1.1. Paul Wegener (right) next to golem statue from the 1914 film. (Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)
Already in 1934, Beate Rosenfeld claimed, in her major study on the golem in German literature, that Wegener, as a “Mongolian” type, was particularly well suited to play the “primitive” and “exotic” golem, a figure that appealed to the public’s taste at that time period. She also mentions that the aesthetics of the primitive golem requires a “prehistoric” costume, and Wegener used the term Urmensch in his description of the golem, claiming that his costume resembled outfits worn by people “1,000 years ago.”23 The cubist sculptor Rudolph Belling designed the golem as an imposing, statuesque figure—an effect achieved through the sculpted, geometric head piece, recalling the stylized hair of ancient Egyptian statues and that of cubist painting and sculpture.24 The superimposition of the uncanny automaton (an already well-established figure in German letters through the writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann, for instance) on the early twentieth-century primitive was what rendered the cinematic golem a popular and representative figure for the time, a product of both distinctly German and international trends.
Der Golem relocated the story of a clay servant come to life to a vaguely delimited present day, setting the film in the identifiable town of Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. In this semirealistic context, the animation of the golem appeared all the more uncanny and horrific. The screenplay written by Wegener and Henrik Galeen tells of the discovery of a treasure trove that includes a gigantic clay figure, which is then sold to “old Aaron,” a local Jewish Trödler, or owner of an antiquities and curiosities shop. Aaron (played by Galeen himself) accidently discovers how to animate the golem using a star-shaped metal capsule, which, when filled with a piece of parchment containing a magical phrase and placed in the statue’s chest, brings it to life. The golem initially serves as a manual laborer but is soon given the task of guarding the daughter of the Trödler (played by Lydia Salmonova) and preventing her affair with a local, non-Jewish baron. When the daughter manages to leave the house to attend the baron’s masked ball, the golem follows her. The film culminates with the golem’s arrival at the palace, where it is stabbed and shot at with no deleterious effects, much to the attackers’ horror. The daughter and baron flee to the top of a tower, and, following a physical struggle, they manage to remove the golem’s capsule and throw it off the tower, smashing the figure to pieces (figure 1.2). Father and daughter reconcile, and the baron joins their embrace at the top of the tower, with the bucolic view of Hildesheim behind them.25
Figure 1.2. Der Golem, 1914: The scene was shot from a tower on the Pfingstberg near Potsdam. (Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)
Since the golem combined features of a heroic military leader, a “Roland statue,” and an “Oriental idol,” according to one review, Wegener and Galeen appropriately transformed the rabbi figure that traditionally animates the golem into a Jewish antiques dealer, whose shop contains Buddha sculptures, weapons, Oriental lamps, and other curiosities.26 The Jewish Galeen (né Heinrich Wiesenberg) played the role of this Trödler. An assimilated Jew from a small town in eastern Galicia, Galeen had assisted Max Reinhart in Berlin and worked in Swiss theaters prior to embarking on a successful film career as screenplay writer, director, and occasional actor.27 Although Galeen dresses the part of an observant Jew, with side locks and yarmulke, the film does not include any depictions of Jewish ritual—in contrast to the inaccurate 1920 depictions of praying in the synagogue. The destruction of the golem at the end of the film clears the path for full assimilation and integration: when Aaron embraces the couple, the viewers can presume that intermarriage ensues.
Galeen’s overtly Jewish appearance in the film certainly marks him as “other,” but his otherness is not augmented or contextualized in other ways. Similarly, the golem, along with the other markedly Jewish items in the treasure trove, such as Shabbat candles, a menorah, and an altar covering, is handled as merchandise and exotic lore (see figure 1.3). According to the script, when Aaron receives these items, he “inspects the large altar cloth made out of heavy material, feeling it between his fingers.” A smile flits over his face as a title appears: “This is an item for my daughter.” The film crosscuts to the daughter in her room, secretively reading a letter from the baron, her lover. When Aaron subsequently enters the room with the altar cloth, she looks with amazement at the expensive material, wraps herself with it in front of the mirror, and coquettishly takes a few dance steps. The father shakes his finger at her “but remains cheerful” rather than earnestly disapproving.28 This scene might have provided inspiration for the second, 1917, film, which features a popular variety dancer instead of an aspiring Jewish daughter. Both films demonstrate how Jewish ritual objects—including the golem itself—are transformed into secular artifacts in the hands of Jews en route to full assimilation.
The sensuous rather than religious pleasure that Aaron’s daughter takes in the expensive fabric of the altar cloth as she fantasizes about the baron reveals something of the film’s aesthetics more generally. The daughter can be likened to the contemporary film viewer who savors the visual surface of the secular medium for its own sake. In an 1913 essay, “Gedanken zu einer Ästhetik des Kinos” (“Thoughts on an Aesthetic of the Cinema”), Georg Lukács focuses on the lack of human “presence” as the key characteristic of cinema. This lack is not an insufficiency but a stylistic principle, so that cinema can project the “movements and deeds of people” but not the people themselves. Film is no less alive for that reason, but its life is elsewhere: it rules over what Lukács designates as a “fantastical” aspect of life that lacks (in its very essence) the “presence,” “destiny,” “causes,” and “motives” characteristic of stage drama. This is “life without a soul,” composed of “pure surface,” and film becomes a phenomenon of the visual “surface”; it is “movement in itself,” an unbounded, vital flow of images.29 The golem in its fundamental silence embodies the form of silent cinema, which is, in Lukács’s words, an intentionally “soulless” medium, a world of “pure externality” expressed through “occurrences and gestures.”30
Figure 1.3. Der Golem, 1914: In Aaron’s antiquities shop. (Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)
The new “homogeneous and harmonious” and yet “variegated” world of cinema corresponds, for Lukács, to “the fairy tale and dream in literature and life.”31 Within the 1914 film, a kind of modern-day fairy tale, one sequence is particularly emblematic. Titled “Golems Nachtgang” (Golem’s night walk), it takes place at night and has a dream-like quality, notable for its emphasis on “the wonder of the camera.” On the golem’s way from Aaron’s home to the baron’s palace to retrieve the rebellious daughter, the surrounding nature proves distracting. The walk begins in “an old street” and proceeds through a “municipal square” and into a park, where the golem enjoys a splash in the pond. At one point, it bends over and smells a rose bush, experiencing, as the script succinctly puts it, an “awakening of emotion toward nature.” In the scene’s climax, the golem extends its arms upward to the stars, an image shot in silhouette.32 This self-willed gesture starkly contrasts with its previous heavy and “mechanical” motions, as, for instance, when Aaron orders the golem, “Raise your arm!”33
Hence, following the golem’s previous animation, this scene focuses on the creature’s humanization, or at least on its budding emotional life. The nighttime “excursion” shows the golem’s potential for escape from an enslaved, mechanized existence and stages an experience of decidedly childlike, wonder-full pleasure, especially as it follows a series of crassly erotic scenes revolving around the daughter of the antiques dealer.34 A surviving still from a close-up shot shows the golem’s facial expression as it smells a rose—softened, verging on a smile, far less of a set grimace than in the other scenes (figure 1.4). The German Jewish writer Arnold Zweig found in this “lyrical” scene a cinematic quality that could not be achieved on the theater stage: “In the mood of the dream-breathing earth, to stand as a created entity and slowly in amazement, in dull joy, in trepidation, to raise the arms—an unforgettable image.”35
Through the night-walk scene, both cinema itself and the otherwise restrained “automaton” gain a heightened “poetic” or “fantastic” life, to borrow Lukács’s terms.36 The pleasure that the golem (and audience) takes in “nature” corresponds to the imagined naïve, childlike state of cinema and its spectators. Yet this scene also conveys the tragedy of this figure and of modern human beings alike: the childlike pleasure of cinema is short-lived and constituted on a fundamental absence, as is the golem’s entire existence. Golem’s night walk depicts a kind of reveling in the mediated image of nature. “Nature,” in this sequence, becomes “art” or “artistic form,” a “maximum vivacity without an inner . . . dimension, strict nature-bound reality and utmost fantasy.”37 The golem lifts its arms as if to express the lightness that the world obtains at such a moment. Precisely because this anthropoid is earthen, connected to nature through its very physicality, Wegener could use it to explore film’s capacity to combine “nature and art, truth and setting.”38 A massive figure of clay, the golem embodies both the materiality of the medium that brings to life fantastic visions and the fleeting, magical quality of photographic animation. All of this occurs against the background of quaint Hildesheim and the outdoor town space, underscoring the dependence of cinema’s silent creation on a “strict nature-bound reality.” This early approach to cinema underwent considerable revision in the late 1910s, as the German film industry and its technologies leapt ahead and new aesthetic possibilities became available.
The Visible Golem
In the 1917 film Der Golem und die Tänzerin, Wegener could count on the audience’s familiarity with the golem’s animation in the 1914 film and did not need to resort to trick photography or to his famous “kinetic lyricism.” Der Golem und die Tänzerin reveals how, even as early as 1917, the duplicating logic of cinema has taken over, blurring the borders between life and art. The dancer’s visit to the cinema within the movie revolves around her fascination with the cinematic image and its paraphernalia (the golem statue) and her lack of interest in the actor himself (though granted, that lack of interest is a seductive ploy). When the dancer first encounters the inanimate golem in the foyer, the production-company director tells her that he has recently spoken with the “original,” that is, with Paul Wegener the actor, and that he would be happy to introduce her to him. She is more interested in seeing the film, however, especially the golem’s “partner,” the actress Lyda Salmonova, whom she is supposed to resemble. Preoccupied with her own image and its possible duplication on the screen, the actress, as a “commercial person,” in Mark Seltzer’s terms, “admires copies more than originals.” Because her identity “depends on representation,” she does not really see Wegener as his offstage self, and her gaze passes over him.39 The humor of the film resides in this preference for the ghostly screen double over the flesh-and-blood star of the film.
By creating a structure of a film within a film, Der Golem und die Tänzerin implicates viewers in the dancer’s own cinematic infatuation. The 1917 film uses the golem story to mark the strength of the film medium and its ability to simulate life, providing the illusion of access to Wegener as “himself,” unmasked. By contrast, in his 1920 film Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, Wegener strove to distance the world of the golem from the everyday lives of people, including actors. He created a fully enclosed, entirely imagined sphere that could exhibit the “uninhabited mobility of figures, the full coming to life of background, of nature and interior, of plant and animal.”40 In contrast to the 1914 and 1917 films, which combined indoor studio settings with outdoor shots on location, the 1920 film revealed a preference for an utterly artificial environment. While the flat and painted sets of Robert Wiene’s groundbreaking The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which premiered in February 1920, created an enclosed and artificial cinematic space, Der Golem of the same year fashioned a more tangible, three-dimensional illusion with its set design, a seemingly habitable (though clearly constructed) landscape.41 The animation of the inanimate goes hand in hand in this film with the attempt to evoke three-dimensional space on the two-dimensional screen. A sculptural aesthetic, rather than a pictorial one, dominates the film and conveys the presence of a deeper, hidden meaning or message underlying the visual surface. The 1920 film thereby functions both as a continuation of the 1914 film, particularly of its night-walk scene, and also as a correction to the earlier two films and their projection of a “soulless” world of fleeting images, of “pure surface.”
Figure 1.5. Der Golem und die Tänzerin, 1917: Paul Wegener is being prepared to be shipped to the dancer’s home. (Courtesy of Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek)
By this point in Wegener’s use of the golem theme, Jewish protagonists no longer enact mercantile roles; rather, they possess the key to the secrets of animation and therefore can also unlock the three-dimensionality of visual space. The golem’s formation and animation in the 1920 film requires, for instance, a singular act of artistry and artisanry performed by Rabbi Loew, whereas the first golem figure of the 1914 film is inadvertently dug up by workers, a ready-made object. The 1920 scene of molding the golem is crosscut with the arrival of an imperial messenger bearing an edict of Jewish expulsion on account of various charges such as the practice of “black magic” and the disrespect of Christian holidays.42 The rabbi then animates the golem in response to this external, political threat, in a room exclusively devoted to this purpose, a kind of artist’s (or filmmaker’s) studio, hidden and locked away. When he decides to enter this space, the rabbi must go down a hidden trapdoor, open a second, sealed door, and remove a barrier blocking the light. This progression not only enhances the suspense of the scene but also suggests that Jews possess the power to delve deeper into life and reveal the hidden recesses behind a seemingly flat surface. Unlike the antiques dealer who transforms a religious object—the altar cover—into a mundane, secular cloth that provides sensuous pleasure, Rabbi Loew of the 1920 film does the reverse: he undertakes the spiritual mission of creating a savoir for his Jewish community, transforming the clay sculpture into an animate protector who might secure the future of his people.
In the underground room, we see the shadow cast by the rabbi on the wall, beside three “blueprints” for the golem, schematic drawings of the monster’s contours surrounded by notations and letters. The film suggests that animation is both monstrous and implicitly cinematic, a product of synthesis between the play of light and shadows and a kind of script (consisting of images and text) transformed into live action and motion. The golem’s formation out of clay takes place with these drawings as background, emphasizing the stark difference between flat images, including the rabbi’s shadow, and tactile substance. The rabbi’s action of kneading the clay is extended cinematically, moreover, through the use of crosscutting: a medium shot shows him at work; the film then crosscuts to the delivery of the edict and once again back to the rabbi. A close-up on his hands, with the rest of the room cast in shadow, shows the rabbi vigorously plying the unformed matter. The film then returns to the imperial messenger, en route to the rabbi’s home. We see the rabbi complete his work on the golem and reseal the room. This prolonged process of kneading reminds the viewer that although the completed golem-product appears to have a smooth, finished exterior, this figure is formed through hard human labor out of coarse and malleable clay. The transition from a two-dimensional scheme to a three-dimensional sculpture thus epitomizes the overall thrust of the 1920 film.
The scene in which the rabbi molds the golem is just one example of Wegener’s postwar emphasis on cinema’s expressive capacity, its ability to translate the spiritual dimension of human life into a visual, bodily form. Such ideas were most prominently developed in a 1924 theoretical book, Der sichtbare Mensch (The Visible Man) by the Hungarian critic and poet Béla Balázs. Through the new art of cinema, Balázs thought it possible to revive the “long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions,” lost to an abstracted world of print culture.43 He argues in The Visible Man for cinema’s autonomous position as a modern art form that utilizes artificial means for exposing the visible “face” of both people and things. Like Wegener, Balázs believed in the moral significance of the opportunity afforded by cinema to rediscover the expressivity and, by extension, the freedom and autonomy of its inhabitants.44
According to Balázs, modern philology confirmed that the primordial “mother tongue” of all humanity was spontaneous bodily gestures or expressive movements.45 Such bodily expressivity could be accessed anew through film technology, since “cinema revives a pre-logical, pre-modern mode of perception that has been obscured by the conditions of modernity.”46 At once past and future oriented, naturalizing and denaturalizing, cinema functions for Balázs as an international language that appropriates and synthesizes distinct nationalities, localities, and peoples through expressive movement.47 Cinema is the “visual corollary of human souls immediately made flesh,” directly transforming the “spirit into body.”48 This transposition takes place, in turn, through “the physiognomic impression” that all things, animate and inanimate, make on the viewer. In this respect, Balázs’s theory of film differs from Lukács’s, developed a decade earlier, as Lukács believed that in cinema “man has lost his soul; in return, however, he gains his body.”49
“Physiognomy” is a key term in Balázs’s film theory of this period: it registers the centrality of the visual surface and, simultaneously, conveys the spiritual-symbolic expressivity of this surface.50 In film, he famously asserted, “objects . . . share with human beings a quality of silence that makes the two almost homogeneous, and hence enhances the mute object’s vitality and significance. Since it does not speak less than human beings, it says just as much.”51 Cinema can bring out this “latent physiognomy of things,” for it captures movement and gestural expression.52 Expressionist cinema, in turn, reshapes outer appearances through distortion, resensitizing us to the face of things so that we cease to see them as mere tools, as means to an end, or as items of practical utility. The artist, like the child, is in a privileged position to see “each thing as an autonomous living being with a soul and face of its own.”53
Positioned between the human and the object, the living and the dead, Wegener’s golem emblematizes cinema’s ability to animate the inanimate world, to reveal the physiognomy of the visual surface. The golem is, furthermore, both a machine/automaton and a primitive, so that it mediates both primordial and modern forms of bodily expressivity. The animation of this modern Urmensch enacts Balázs’s notion of cinema as a kind of paradise regained by returning through modern technology to the lost, primal forms of expressivity. In the 1920 film particularly but also in the earlier golem films, Wegener strives to show the humanity of the golem. This sentient machine mirrors the broad attempt to regain—through everything from cinema and painting to literature—a spiritual dimension that seemed to have been lost in the modern age of abstracted knowledge and industrialized wars.
The inherent stiffness of the golem, covered in padded clothing, its head encompassed in an unmoving clay mask, paradoxically enables it to come to life, as its overall lack of flexibility makes us aware of the slightest gestures and facial expressions, whenever they do occur.54 For example, the shot from the 1920 film in which the golem is first animated shows Wegener with a fixed grimace on his face, his lips turned down like a mask, evoking the dead sculpture awakened by the rabbi.55 When the actor’s facial expressions finally soften, which occurs when the golem leaves the ghetto, the effect is that much more powerful. Certainly, this unwieldy figure does not have the expressive range or versatility of a Charlie Chaplin or an Asta Nielsen. Still, in the 1920 film, Wegener brings the mise-en-scène as well as the golem to life, creating a fantasy of postwar reanimation that fills the entire expanse of the screen. He builds on the expressive potential of the whole cinematic ghetto to counterbalance war’s cynical use of human beings as mere tools (or golems).
“An Architectural Paraphrase on the Theme ‘Golem’”
“Spent the entire day seething in the clay,” Wegener jotted down in his 1914 soldier’s identification and pay book (Soldbuch). In a letter to Ernst Pietsch, he also describes enduring “day and night in clay trenches in close proximity to the enemy, without food, with death always nearby.”56 Wegener not only fought but also worked in the trenches, spending long days digging, shoveling, and maintaining them, a constant struggle as they quickly refilled with muddy water.57 In his memoir of the war, published in 1933 but purportedly written in close proximity to the events, he candidly describes surviving a particularly fierce battle on December 4, 1914, in which most of his comrades died or suffered injuries. He returned “dead tired” from this battle, wearing his “clayed uniform,” a golem-like figure. Entering a farmer’s warm home, he felt as though he were stepping into “a new life.” After this, his nerves were shot, and at night, he “always saw the hideous black smoke of the exploding grenades and heard the screams of the wounded.” His dead comrades constantly reappeared in his dreams. Alongside his guilt and trauma, Wegener acknowledges his “disgusting joy at being alive.”58
Figure 1.6. Paul Wegener (left) in the trenches of World War I. (Courtesy of Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main / Sammlung Kai Möller)
In Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, Wegener transformed the clay of his survivor’s uniform and of the trenches in which his comrades were buried into the substance of the golem, itself a kind of “new life.” The 1920 film opens with the expulsion edict delivered to the Jewish community by the messenger of the Emperor. As we saw earlier, Rabbi Loew (Albert Steinrück) staves off this threat; after creating and animating the golem, the rabbi then brings it to the court. There, the courtiers jeer at the images of Jewish ancestors projected by the rabbi, and as a punishment for their reaction, an explosion occurs, collapsing the court ceiling. The rabbi orders the golem to save the courtiers from certain death in exchange for the edict’s annulment. This main plotline is interwoven with the story of a love affair between Miriam, the rabbi’s daughter (Lydia Salmonova), and Florian, the imperial messenger (Lother Müthel), provoking the violent jealousy of Rabbi Loew’s Famulus, or assistant (Ernst Deutsch). Although the rabbi had deanimated the dreaded golem after it accomplished the rabbi’s mission, Famulus deviously reanimates it, and the golem’s rebellious and destructive side reveals itself. After killing Florian, the golem sets the rabbi’s home on fire, and threatens to destroy the entire ghetto. The golem’s rage is ultimately spent, however, when it breaks out of the ghetto, where a Christian child removes the star-shaped capsule from its chest. The Jewish masses find the now-inanimate clay figure outside the gates of the ghetto and carry it back inside on their shoulders as though it were a hero.
Der Golem of 1914 was filmed primarily in the Neubabelsberg studio of the Bioskop company, but for certain scenes, Wegener walked the streets of Hildesheim dressed in the golem’s costume. The spectacle caused such crowds to gather that he was fined by the city for being a “public nuisance.”59 By 1920, Wegener and his cofilmmakers avoided any such overlap between the world of the film and that of the street by creating a sealed-off, artificial environment in which the golem could “come into the world” as a creature purely of cinema. In an interview, Wegener proposed that “these alleys and squares should not remind one of anything in reality; they should create the atmosphere in which the golem breathes.”60 Instead of attempting to re-create the Prague of the sixteenth century or the Jewish ways of life at that time period, he created his vision of a fantastic ghetto and an equally fanciful court of an all-powerful Emperor.61 “Nobody ever lived in a ghetto like the one pictured in ‘The Golem,’” a New York Tribune critic recognized at the outset of a 1921 review that situated this cinematic ghetto at the center of the film’s “action.”62 While the Jewish space of the ghetto is reminiscent of the World War I battlefields and their complex network of clay trenches, within it, Rabbi Loew creates an animated giant that saves the Jews from expulsion, even when it ultimately runs amok.
If Balázs appears at times to view film as an extension of nature, so that the “profilmic event” (the “reality” in front of the camera that is being recorded) takes precedence over the camera work, he also promotes a notion of cinema as an autonomous representational realm that enables a new kind of seeing to emerge.63 He argues that the trajectory of film as an art form leads “further and further from nature in its original state.” The “stylization of nature” is the precondition, in Balázs’s radical concept, for film’s new status as a work of art: “Landscape is a physiognomy, a face . . . that gazes out at us.” Thus, while “location shots of a town can be very beautiful and have the added charm of credible reality,” they do not expose the “soul” or “eyes” of the landscape, nor do they convey its mood.64 The 1920 film stylizes nature in more than one respect: the artificial studio setting of the film had a life-like quality with its organic shapes and twisted forms, enhancing the animation of the clay golem as it awakens to life and its emotional forces. Korrodi even complained that in the 1920 film, “nature receives such blows in the ribs that it realizes the unreal.”65 For Herbert Ihering, these same attributes heralded a new epoch for cinema: “Wegener and Poelzig proved that only the tightly structured, rhythmically concentrated image, one that eliminates all the accidental qualities of nature, opens the future for film.”66 In other words, in contrast to the mimetic indoor spaces of the earlier films—especially the antiques shop (1914) and dancer’s boudoir (1917)—and the outdoor settings of Hildesheim, the 1920 mise-en-scène does not imitate our own world but rather realizes the unreal by projecting an enclosed fantasy world.
As reviewers at the time noted, Der Golem of 1920 was a product not only of cinematographic developments but also of successful cooperation between architects and actors, a novel thing at the time.67 The Ufa film company (Universum Film AG), founded in 1917 with German government support, following the direct encouragement of General Erich Ludendorff, had the resources necessary to construct an entire model ghetto at its Tempelhof studios.68 Setting the tale in a fantastical medieval past, Wegener worked with the renowned architect Hans Poelzig to build an entire “city” of clay, a site that could house both the golem and the Jewish community. All fifty-four buildings of the “golem-city” were designed by Poelzig (renowned for the interior of the Great Theater in Berlin), modeled by the sculptor Marlene Moeschke, and constructed by Kurt Richter.69 The buildings were made of clay, brick, and straw, and so their materiality corresponded to the clay matter of the golem itself—a shared physiognomy of structures and monster. These constructions had, as the art historian Paul Westheim wrote in 1920, “their own life, a life that a master-builder’s spirit has projected into them: under the hands of the modeler, the clay objects have become expressive, they have been given momentum, a gesture, a face.”70
Poelzig’s set designs were futuristic and fantastic, even as they drew on past architectural elements.71 The narrowness of the ghetto streets and the crookedness or asymmetry of the homes both contributed to the magical atmosphere in which an artificial creation might be brought to life and revealed how the cities of the future could be threatening, dwarfing their human inhabitants. Concomitantly, the organic curves and stalactite forms in the interiors of these settings echoed the shapes of the human body, suggesting a continuum between the human subjects and their living environments.72 Unlike the classical, ornamental design of the court, in which frivolous ceremonies take place, Jewish space is imagined in this film as creative and consequential, a space in which a golem can be animated through spiritual and magical ritual. A contemporaneous New York Times review of the film expressly instructed its spectators to view the “massive” and “unearthly” settings as an “active a part of the story as any of the characters, . . . the most expressive settings yet seen in this country, . . . not because they are weird, but because they vivify the action of the story.”73 These “cinematographic works of art” serve as architectural golems, brought to life with the help of the camera.
The thick, dark texture of the ghetto, including its walls, bridges, and towers, counterbalanced by the vertically striving arches of the inner and outer constructs, indeed revealed the gothic dimension of Poelzig’s design.74 Andrew Webber writes that “physiognomy . . . has a key function in the representational regime of the gothic” and that this function extends beyond “the effects of facial features” to other elements of representation.75 Critics of the film have also linked the physiognomy of the cinematic ghetto space to its Jewish inhabitants. A 1920 review pronounced that these settings exhibit “a kind of Jewish Gothic” that blends the “flame-like letters of the Jewish alphabet with the leaf-like flames of Gothic tracery.”76 Like the golem story itself, the fantastic “city” envisioned by Poelzig is cast here, significantly, as a product of the cultural interaction between Jews and Christians, between gothic and scriptural influences. The “face” of the ghetto space, however, has often been interpreted as solely Jewish; the buildings are even said to huddle together and converse in Yiddish or else in a Yiddish-inflected German.77
Figure 1.7. Hans Poelzig’s sets for Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920. (Courtesy of Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main / Sammlung Kai Möller)
Gustav Meyrink’s description of the Prague ghetto’s “uncanny and depraved” houses that appear to engage in “ghostly communings” has also influenced such readings.78 Hence, while the expressive stylization of Der Golem’s 1920 sets has been received enthusiastically, past and present critics have created a metonymic correlation of the ghetto space with its Jewish inhabitants, usually through stereotyped notions of Jewish letters, speech, and bodies. For Noah Isenberg, “the physiognomy of the Jew . . . emerges in Wegener’s film in the architectural construction of Jewishness,” so that the Jewish space is defined through its “distorted shapes, dark cavities, and hunchbacked structures.”79 When we examine the imaginary ghetto setting within the context of the film’s overall mise-en-scène, however, we see that Poelzig and Wegener forged novel configurations of atavistic and utopic elements. The clay golem and the ghetto are constantly linked, for instance, with the elements of sky and stars that both propel the plot forward and enhance the film’s symbolic dimension.
Heavenly and Cinematic Constellations
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam achieved its visual animation not only through set designs but also with the help of evolving cinematic techniques such as close-ups and superimpositions. While the ghetto structures seem to tower over the Jewish inhabitants, the structures themselves are put into perspective by the larger horizon of sky and stars. In the first shots of the film, Claudia Dillmann writes, “a few unprotected, deformed and broken towers strain over the ghetto wall, appearing small, cowering, and lost under the wide expanse of the nightly sky.”80 These first shots establish the correlation between the clay and wood constructions of the ghetto and the ethereal elements, a link that carries over to the figure of the clay golem itself. As the 1920 Film-Kurier critic eloquently wrote, “like the earth and sea, the golem is mysteriously connected to the constellation of the stars, that make him at times wild and at times meek: ebb and flow.”81 If the rabbi initially decides to create the golem after reading the stars and determining that a disaster is impending, he also attempts to summon up the “terrible Astaroth” that can deliver the animating “magic word” only when “Venus enters the constellation.” Similarly, after the golem has fulfilled its mission at the court, the rabbi discovers that “when Uranus enters the house of the planets,” the golem can become destructive, ruled by the vengeful Astaroth again.82
Rabbi Loew’s astrological techniques are enhanced through the film’s cinematography, executed by the Jewish cameraman Karl Freund. In the opening shot, our gaze is pulled above the tallest tower toward a group of stars that are particularly large and luminous, forming a “readable” shape. The next low-angle shot is a close-up of this tower, revealing Rabbi Loew atop the roof of his home, peering into a telescope that cuts through the frame. This is followed by an iris shot—taken as if through the eye of the telescope—showing a magnification of the same radiant stars. The rabbi puts the instrument aside and reads in a large manuscript (figure 1.8); a medium close-up shows his distraught face as he looks up again at the sky, and so we are given to understand that he has grasped the ominous portent of the image just seen. The telescope connecting the iris shot to the close-up of the rabbi’s face forms the link between heaven and earth (literally); between technology and magic; and between the past, as knowledge accumulated in books, and the future threat of expulsion. The scene also progresses from a very long shot—the establishing shot of the film—to a medium shot of the tower, to closer shots of the rabbi and the stars, drawing us further and further into the characters and their lives.
These opening shots of Der Golem 1920 self-consciously foreground the centrality of magnifying vision to this film and to cinema more generally. While the cinematic camera differs from the telescope or microscope, instruments that merely expand “the range of the visual,” according to Balázs,83 the telescope in this scene stands in for the close-up of the camera. It not only brings objects into closer view but also enables the “deeper gaze” that provides a new and different “reading” of these objects.84 The close-up exposes the physiognomy and living gestures of all things. Furthermore, by fragmenting the totality of space and time into expressive parts or moments, the apparent objectivity of the camera is made subjective, and the director can thus create an anthropomorphized image of the world colored by human emotions.85 In this scene, we are invited to decipher the wrinkles of the rabbi’s forehead just as he himself reads the deeper meaning of the constellations. As Francis Guerin writes in A Culture of Light, the overlapping points of view between the telescope and the camera, the continuity between these two instruments, also “extends to the relationship between Jewish mysticism and cinematic representation.”86 They are, respectively, past and present means for deciphering visual messages as well as for animating dead matter. Because the first shot of the sky and jagged tower silhouettes already contained a “magnified” constellation of brightly lit stars, we can even argue that the camera’s eye in general, and not only the close-up, exposes visual details that we would otherwise not pay attention to but that constitute the very “soul” or “intimate face” of existence.87
Figure 1.8. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920: Albert Steinrück as Rabbi Loew. (Courtesy of Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main / Sammlung Kai Möller)
While the opening sequence of the 1920 film is thematically connected to “Golem’s night walk” of 1914, with its shots of the golem as a silhouette against the backdrop of a night sky, the aesthetics of the two scenes are worlds apart. In the earlier film, the golem and its surroundings embody a sense of lightness and freedom, inviting the viewer to take pleasure in these outdoor images. The night sequence in the 1920 film is more instructive and immersive, forging a connection between the image on the screen and the destiny of the Jewish people and inviting us to identify with the endangered community. The night skies no longer offer a means of escape into a reproduced image of nature for the working golem and spectators alike but rather call attention by their artificiality to the symbolic significance of the visual surface and the embodiment of spirit in film. The makers of the 1920 film thus also use facial close-ups along with dissolve techniques to convey the “deeper” and “poetic” gaze necessary for deciphering external signs and acting on them.88
In the first act of the film, the rabbi comprehends the impending calamity and preemptively shapes the clay entity into the form of the golem. In the opening sequence of the second act, prior to the golem’s animation, when the clay puppet is replaced by the live actor, the audience catches a glimpse of Wegener as golem. This sequence consists of three shallow shots that dissolve into one another: first, the starry night sky from the very beginning of the film reappears, though no longer framed by the ghetto towers from below, and then dissolves into an image of a Star of David, which then finally dissolves into a close-up of Wegener’s face as the golem, his eyes closed, unmoving. The result is a brief superimposition of the face, with its sculptured, geometrically shaped head mask, over the star (figure 1.9).89 In this nonnarrative and relatively static sequence, the threat of expulsion, which first appeared as a message written in the stars, becomes visually linked to the fate of the Jewish community and the future animation of the golem through the dissolve that blends together two shots. The sequence equates the creature’s life with its mission to protect the Jews. The subsequent shot brings the spectator back to the golem, by now a complete (though still inanimate) sculpture, and to the rabbi’s efforts to lift the statue out of his underground “studio.” This sequence of images—night stars, Star of David, soon-to-be-animate golem—not only foreshadows the transformation of inanimate object into live actor but also prefigures the Jewish community’s ultimate redemption and the film’s closing shot: the Star of David superimposed on the shut gate of the triumphant ghetto. The dissolve of three distinct shots further creates a kind of triptych in motion, a Christian aesthetic format visually suited to this scene that foretells the impending “birth” of the golem-savior through the appearance of a star.
The close-up of Wegener with his eyes shut evokes a state of inner reflection and expectation that contrasts with the image of the inanimate clay sculpture in the subsequent scene. This close-up is framed, furthermore, by the visual process of isolating and abstracting a particular star, the Star of David, from the multiple stars in the heavens. In this manner, the stars that previously augured the approaching threat to the Jewish community now come to symbolize future, hope, and continuity. The facial close-up functions as the expressive counterpart to the more abstract Star of David. At the same time, the Star of David itself displays multiple dimensions in this scene: it shifts from a thick, tactile object made of clay to an abstract, two-dimensional image and then reverts back to clay as it dissolves over Wegener’s face. The enhancement of the “pulsating” star is indicative of a dimension that exists within and beyond the flat surface of abstract symbols. In this manner, the hexagram mediates between the earthbound golem in the Jewish ghetto and the sphere of the heavens with its symbolic stars and messages. The golem too first appeared in the film as a two-dimensional geometric diagram in the rabbi’s magic book and as a sketch or “blueprint” on the wall.
Through dissolve, close-up, and superimposition, Wegener suggests that cinema itself can effect the magical transition from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, from the flat surface to the tactile object. The inanimate golem is not the only thing that can be animated. But such transitions also carry political import in a film concerning Jewish-Christian relations. The hexagram is not an innocent choice on the part of the 1920 filmmakers, especially considering that the character of Rabbi Loew uses a pentagram as protection from the Astaroth idol and installs a five-pointed star capsule in the golem’s chest. Gershom Scholem reminds us in his history of the symbol that the hexagram, unlike the Menorah, was never an exclusively “Jewish symbol” and was shared in the past by many peoples. Jews initially used it as an ornamental, rather than religious, feature on tombstones and synagogues and as a magical symbol placed on amulets, including mezuzot, to protect against harmful spirits and demons.90 Interestingly, “the ‘official’ use of the hexagram as the insignia of a Jewish community had its origins in Prague,” the so-called birthplace of the modern golem, and spread from there to other Jewish communities in Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia during the seventeenth century.91
At the end of the film, when superimposed on a shot of the closed ghetto gate, the hexagram represents the Jewish community in its regained security and independence. It is a kind of seal on the gate, marking Prague Jewry’s segregation from the surrounding Christian world. In previous shots of the ghetto, building facades display various broken triangular forms. The Star of David symbolically brings these triangles together, complete. In the triptych sequence, the Star of David enhances the golem’s role as protector of the Jewish community, a kind of shield animated through the parchment placed in a star-shaped capsule on his breast. The hexagram thus represents the magical protection provided by the golem as well as the redemptive hopes invested in him.92
As an extradiegetic symbol superimposed on the film images, the Star of David conveyed its message to contemporary viewers alone and not to the characters within the film. Even while the filmmakers reverted the Star of David back to its earlier functions (amulet, shield, ornament, communal insignia), audiences of the period who came to view a film concerning Jewish persecution could not have avoided the modern association of the star with Zionism and its secular hopes for the political “redemption” of the Jews of Europe. Starting with the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, the Star of David was “applied to nearly every visual representation of Zionism.”93 As a symbol of Jewish nationalism and of the potential future geographic separation between Jews and other nations, the Star of David invited its viewers to superimpose the hermetic world projected in this film onto present times, in which secular German-Jewish citizens formed an inseparable part of society and were neither secluded nor externally recognizable. The fantastic ghetto of the film, in which the Jews foster a tight-knit community, can also be read, accordingly, as a utopian homeland, a yet-unrealized dream, rather than an imagined ghetto of the past. Ensuring the continued presence of Jews in the diaspora as a distinct minority, Wegener’s golem also represents the ambivalent Jewish fantasy of maintaining an autonomous and self-sufficient community, one that can protect itself from the European-Christian world and ultimately lock its gates. At the same time, the makers of the 1920 film implicitly represent the Zionist movement as a throwback to medieval times, implying that it rests on the shaky foundations of Jewish “black magic” and erratic golems. The golem itself expresses a greater affinity toward the Christian world, constantly crossing over to the other side. A creation of a Jewish rabbi, the golem develops its own volition, submitting itself only to a Christian child within the film, as well as to a non-Jewish film director. The monster of clay thus challenges any attempt to maintain distinct communities and identities under the banner of the Star of David.
Techniques of the Survivor
In bringing to life a golem as a (Zionist) savior, the 1920 film also reflects on the recent war and the scars it had left on the German nation at large. The golem figure, mediating as it does the architectural and human physiognomies of the film, also represents the transition from a violent wartime existence to the unique political unrests of the postwar period. This figure and its story constitute Wegener’s response to the militarization of German society, a response articulated from the perspective of a traumatized survivor. Kittler and Holl are among the few critics to insist on the relevance of Wegener’s war experiences to the reading of his golem films. They argue that the golem undergoes a kind of militarization, developing from a “tool” and bondsman in the earlier films to an unmovable, unfeeling, machine-like weapon or, in their words, a “new automatic weapon system.” Kittler and Holl also compare the 1920 golem to the new type of “engineer-soldier” who, according to Wegener’s own diary account, was an infantry soldier transformed into a “true leader of this ‘folk-trench warfare,’ . . . a canal worker with a weapon and fearlessness at catastrophic explosions.”94 The conflation of the golem’s duties of servitude and protection partially justifies such an interpretation. Just as the golem in the 1920 film chops wood, draws water, and carries medicinal herbs, so he also follows the rabbi’s orders and helps to save the Jewish community. However, whereas the golem is a singular weapon created to fulfill a mission and endowed with heroic qualities, Wegener’s “engineer-soldier” never dreams of gallant battles or of honors. The modern combatant is a “canal worker” toiling dutifully through endless, unheroic drudgery. From the first scenes of the golem’s awakening, its exaggerated strength poses a threat to the surroundings; unpredictable from the start, it is ultimately uncontrollable and destructive, an engineer-soldier gone haywire.
Wegener admits in his wartime memoir to the difficulty of maintaining a level-headed attitude and expresses amazement that the war did not cause him severe emotional injury. His letters from the front addressed to Pietsch reveal that the actor suffered in late December 1914 from “an acute nervous heart weakness” or else a “nervous fatigue of the heart muscle,” causing spells of dizziness.95 The golem of 1920, by contrast, exhibits both physical courage and apathy. In its not-altogether-human state, the golem stoically endures the chaos around it, particularly when it is brought to the court and prevents the ceiling from collapsing on the hysterical courtiers.96 But the golem attempts to emerge from this nerveless state. In the novel Wegener published in 1921 based on the film, he describes the golem, after receiving a flower from a maiden at the court, as a “poor creature yearning for life with its joys and its pain.” This “unsaved object, beyond life and death, came from other, dark circles,” rather than from a mother’s womb, but it could still express a “silent mournfulness.”97 As the golem’s consciousness of and appreciation for life grows, so does its comprehension of death and of the consequences of removing its animating device. When the rabbi decides to end the golem’s existence after the decree against the Jews has been annulled, the golem attempts to prevent him from doing so by covering the star-shaped capsule with its hand.
The automaton’s growing desire to remain “alive” is made more meaningful by Wegener’s own brushes with death. Anton Kaes contends that the major German films produced in the 1920s can be considered “shell shock cinema” because they often “restage the shock of war and defeat without ever showing military combat.”98 These films focus on experiences of loss and grief as a constant, if invisible, presence, translating the shock and violence of war into aesthetic devices and particular genres (horror, crime, myth). The architecture of Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, with its underground, trench-like spaces, its claustrophobic alleys, and its mud-caked abodes, invites interpretation along these lines. Specifically, it asks us to consider the rabbi’s creation of the golem as part of a battle against the forces determined to destroy his community. Spectators also encounter Rabbi Loew as a model of extreme “moral courage”; his helper, or Famulus, on the other hand, exhibits weak nerves, even fainting as he participates in the supernatural rite performed to extract the animating formula.99 This spectrum of male responses to threat and danger suggests that in order to see the film as an indirect response to the events of World War I, we need to look beyond the golem to the larger societal portrait in the film.
Wegener’s diaries and letters also delineate an ongoing frustration with how the war was carried out and with its unnecessary loss of life. In a letter to Pietsch, he refers to the war as “the most monstrous, dumbest, and atrocious thing.” In another letter, written only a few days after surviving his most lethal battle, Wegener, the lauded war hero, characterizes the “modern defense war” as “senseless murder” and “boredom, . . . positively absurd,” with no end in sight.100 In the memoir, he notes the lack of empathy exhibited by commanders toward the death of individuals, a consequence of the massive death toll.101 After a senseless attack that took place in mid-October 1914, Wegener writes about the beginning of a sentiment of “mistrust” among the soldiers toward their leadership. He calls the wounded and deceased soldiers “the poor victims of these days” who “paid with their lives and are irreplaceable.”102 In the dramatic court collapse that is the climax of the 1920 film, the Emperor and his courtiers bring disaster on themselves, we recall, through their lack of empathy toward the image of the suffering Jews. The violence and havoc of this scene brings to mind the recent events of the war and invites an interpretation in light of Wegener’s critique of the German wartime leadership.
When Rabbi Loew is summoned to appear at the festival and asked to entertain his Christian ruler, he creates a kind of magical cinematic event, projecting on one of the walls a scene of ancient Israelites wandering in the desert. In the foreground, the Jewish “forefathers” appear “larger than life.”103 The rabbi acts here as a modern film director, enlisting newfound technologies to project historical images to the public. But the contents of these images tell of Jewish exile and suffering, and the goal of entertainment stands in tension with the seriousness of the subject matter. The textual source for this scene is the mid-nineteenth-century story of Rabbi Loew collected in the Bohemian Jewish volume Sippurim, in which the Emperor bids the rabbi to raise his ancestors from the dead. The rabbi agrees to conjure them up on the condition that the Emperor does not laugh, no matter what he sees. To the “greatness and strength of the men of antiquity,” raised from the dead in the nineteenth-century tale, Wegener adds the masses of Israelites, exiled and wandering in the desert.104
The cinematic rabbi, as we have seen, warns the court not to speak or laugh (in other words, to be somewhat golem-like) when viewing the spectacle, “or else a dreadful disaster might take place.” As a distraught, long-bearded figure comes stumbling to the forefront, the court jester makes a remark that causes a ripple of callous laughter to pass through the audience. As if responding to this display, the man in the image walks rapidly toward them, looming larger and larger, appearing to walk into the hall. The “film-within-a-film” ends in an explosion of light, and the ceiling of the smoke-filled hall plummets to the ground. Since the golem blocks the only exit, courtiers are seen risking their lives, jumping out of the windows. In the context of the recent war and its explosions, which caused trenches to collapse and bury their occupants, the court scene hints at the destructive effects of a lack of empathy toward others, specifically the imagined Jews on Rabbi Loew’s projected screen and their Prague counterparts, the Jews in the ghetto.
The fearless and stoic golem executes the rabbi’s orders, bearing the weight of the ceiling’s beams, and thus prevents the deaths of those enemies who had only recently ordered the expulsion of the Jews. This wondrous physical act of rescue follows its emotional awakening earlier in the same scene, when one of the women attending the festival hands it a rose, rather than merely gaping at it in horror like the others. The camera shows the supposedly unfeeling automaton in profile, at close range. The rigid mouth begins to form a smile, revealing a softened longing, as in “Golem’s night walk” of the 1914 film.105 Here Wegener suggests that the golem’s subsequent heroic behavior does not stem from a nerveless lack of ability to feel. Quite the contrary: it complements this monster’s newfound desire and underscores the courtiers’ lack of empathy and their inability to see “others” as equally human.
As Cathy Gelbin points out, it is not only actions that elicit our empathy but also cinematic techniques. Certain angles used in the court scene allow the director to manipulate the audience’s emotions, enlisting us through eye-level shots to favor the Jews and to side against the courtiers, who are filmed from a high angle in a manner that casts their ridicule as “blinded laughter.” Even while displaying the stereotypical figure of the Jew as a spectacle for the court, the scene disrupts the courtiers’ gaze, showing it to be destructive, potentially life threatening.106 The courtiers’ jeering of the Jews on-screen echoes the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment during and after the war, when Germany’s victory no longer appeared secure. Jews were deliberately positioned as a suspect group within the German nation, and a census was undertaken to prove that they were shirking military duty—although they actually served loyally alongside other citizens and suffered equal losses.107
After belittling Jewish suffering in this scene, the courtiers must contend with the wrath of the Jewish figure, an anti-Semitic image of their own making. Wegener designates the distraught Jew who walks toward the spectators as Ahasverus, the eternal wanderer, the legendary cobbler from Jerusalem cursed, according to a 1602 German chapbook, because he “refused to allow Jesus to rest on the wall of his house when he went by bearing his cross.”108 A figment of anti-Jewish propaganda (adapted by modern Jews for their own allegories), the wandering Jew functions as a distorting mirror held up to his ridiculing audience, exposing the venality of the courtiers who laugh at their self-created stereotypes. The golem, a savior, contrasts with the ancient Ahasverus, a harbinger of destruction. Nevertheless, Ahasverus also resembles the “newborn” golem in certain respects: he looks around in amazement and bewilderment, just as the golem peers around wide-eyed when first animated. Both the wandering Jew and the golem are living-dead, condemned to exist with little control over their own lives or the end of their afflictions. When the spectators refuse to recognize the misfortunes of these living-dead exiles, as preserved by the haunting visual medium of film, their own lives are also endangered.
If the gigantic Ahasverus who threatens to emerge from the image reaches the “beams of the ceiling,” the immense golem upholds those same beams, which then break in half, forming a triangular shape around everyone present (see figure I.1. in the introduction).109 This transforms the seemingly static architecture of the court into a kind of tent reminiscent of the makeshift abodes of the Jews wandering in the desert.110 It also resembles the angular homes in the ghetto, thereby undoing the sharp dichotomy between the wholeness and symmetry of the court and the asymmetrical, broken forms of the ghetto. The scene draws a visual correlation between the realms of court and ghetto. And just as the home front and battlefield were deeply interconnected during World War I, so the edict of exile and destruction impinging on the Jews transforms the court itself into an unsafe space that can collapse on its inhabitants. But the courtiers are awakened to the brutality of their edict only when their own lives are threatened. Wegener turns the court into a battlefield—we see wounded people and dead bodies on the floor—in order to position the Jews as capable of redeeming the immoral nation, as heroes rather than backstabbers. In this and other ways, Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam instructs its viewers in the process of rehumanizing others, both Jews and golems.
How the Golem Left the World (Temporarily)
Wegener’s 1920 film is a film about film. Rabbi Loew uses cinema in the court scene to save the lives of his people, reappropriating an anti-Semitic image for his own purposes. He educates the hedonistic courtiers, showing them that the borders between myth and reality, between image and human, are not stable and can be manipulated. He enlists the golem—fundamentally cinematic in its muteness and artificial doubling of human life—to teach the court and, by extension, the viewers of the film a lesson in empathy.
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam does not merely re-create the ruptures wrought by World War I or its shell-shock logic; it also suggests the potential for reinvesting life with meaning after the mass carnage of the war. In addition to the animated architecture and the starry constellations, the final scenes of the film exhibit this potential. Only after being reanimated by Rabbi Loew’s Famulus (assistant) for a vengeful purpose does the golem become dangerous and enraged, resembling Ahasverus in the court scene. The golem is ordered to kill the “foreign man,” the Christian courtier, Florian, who has sneaked into Rabbi Loew’s home and spent the night in his daughter’s bed. After the golem throws Florian off the tower of the rabbi’s home, its destructive capacities continue to grow. It sets the ghetto on fire and drags the unconscious Miriam out of her father’s house and through the streets. Ultimately sparing her life, the golem breaks out of the ghetto walls, startling the Christian children playing in the grass. The expressions of the children initially resemble the horrified, open-mouthed gazes of the courtiers when they first encounter the golem. But the mise-en-scène changes the overall atmosphere and affect of the moment. At court, the golem appeared immense and foreboding, but in relation to the gigantic ghetto walls, its stature is reduced. A long shot shows it standing in the middle of the field, forlorn. This open field also creates a counterpoint to the physiognomic aesthetic of ghetto architecture and the stylized setting of the court. Instead, this in-between space mitigates the extremes of ghetto and court, enabling a different kind of encounter between the golem, as a Jewish creation, and the Christian world.
Just as the landscape is more open and “natural” outside the ghetto walls—even though this scene, like the rest of the film, was actually shot in the studio—so the golem appears to enjoy the spontaneity of play, a departure from its usual role of obeying commands. In this final scene, the golem is not so much the living-dead automaton but emerges from what I have called the contradictory golem condition into a new life, which is also an end. One naïve child, a girl, dares to approach the golem with an apple in her hand, symbolically tempting it into the human realm.111 The golem lifts her in its arms to better enjoy her proximity, and the child fingers the golem’s capsule, her unwitting curiosity thus bringing its short-lived existence to a conclusion (figure 1.10). By staging the golem’s last few moments as gentle and playful—even tender, in contrast to the previous bout of destructive rage—Wegener suggests that the creature’s “life” was not lived in vain. Importantly, the child perceives the clay monster as a playmate rather than as a utilitarian object. Through the child’s gaze, the golem attains an independent life. For a brief moment, it is transformed into an “autonomous living being with a soul and face of its own.”112 From the creature’s perspective, the child also appears as a wondrous phenomenon: the golem lifts her in its arms in an all-too-human gesture that, as in the night-walk scene, reminds the viewer of the golem’s fundamental inhumanity. Sitting in its arms, the child, like the viewer, is now at eye level with the golem, almost equal to it.
In this final moment, the golem’s uncanny monstrousness seems to vanish and give way to a more familiar side. The secret life of the silent machine is no longer so threatening; it can even be enjoyed. As the girl plays with the golem, we see her hand in close-up, fingers on the capsule; previously, we are shown the hands of the rabbi in a similar close-up shot just before he first inserts the capsule. When her fingers begin to withdraw the animating device, the golem does not stop her, however, as it attempted to do with the rabbi in a prior scene. It drops the girl and collapses to the ground, becoming an inanimate sculpture once again. A moment later, the children gather and sit on this piece of clay, tossing the all-important capsule into the air as though it were a toy. While Rabbi Loew attempted to end the golem’s life after the monster had completed its mission and served the communal needs of the Jews, here the child deanimates the golem inadvertently. This “death” is affirmed in the film as a more fitting and harmonious one. “It is as if,” writes Steve Choe, “the golem recognizes its own finitude as a living being,” and the viewer understands that this monster is “not an invincible, monolithic machine, a weapon tasked with killing the other, but a vulnerable being.”113 Significantly, this recognition takes place vis-à-vis the Christian child, similar to the golem’s encounter with the Christian woman in the court. Unlike the eternally wandering Jew, forever denied a resting place, the golem, a product of Jewish society, can be embraced by the Christian child and, implicitly, the Christian viewer. As a result, with the golem’s deanimation, it is “converted” to humanity.
Figure 1.10. Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, 1920: The Golem outside the ghetto walls, playfully lifting a Christian child. (Courtesy of Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt am Main / Sammlung Kai Möller)
At the end of the 1914 film, the golem is cast from the tower, and its form shatters to pieces, paving the way for Jewish integration. In the finale of the 1920 film, by contrast, the golem figure remains intact, and it is carried back into the ghetto, perhaps to be reanimated again at a future moment of great necessity.114 In this ending, the golem’s short-lived existence is treated as valuable and worthwhile, unlike the numerous young soldiers who died anonymous and, at times, futile deaths on the battlefields of World War I. But the significance of the golem’s animation also derives from its ability to cross the threshold to the Christian world, embracing both its callousness and its innocence. Awaking from the “haunting visions” of the film into “mundane existence,” Hans Wollenberg, the Jewish editor of the widely distributed film magazine Lichtbild-Bühne, writes that after the film, a “triumphant knowledge” rejoiced in the hearts of “every well-known person in art- and film-Berlin.” “In the competition of peoples over the art of film,” he contends, “the blue ribbon is this time ours.”115 Wollenberg translates the golem’s worthwhile mission on the screen into a sense of national victory shared, implicitly, by Jews and non-Jews alike: the final Golem film, and not merely the golem figure, was received as the hero of the day. Implicitly, Germany could achieve this postwar victory through the uptake of Jewish motifs and the involvement of Jewish artists—Henrik Galeen as coscriptwriter and Karl Freund behind the camera. As a clay monster that is molded and animated, the golem aptly served Wegener and his audiences as a mythic benchmark for the development of film under the unified banner of German cinema’s technological magic. With the release of this third film, the golem had fulfilled Wegener’s ethical and aesthetic aspirations.
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The actor-filmmaker never returned to the golem story or embodied this figure again. But his incarnation of the golem left an indelible mark on twentieth-century culture, both through film screenings in the United States, as we shall see in chapter 2, and through the creation of a long-lasting visual legacy for film, comics, and theater. Not only did the 1920 film continue to impress audiences in other continents, but in time, it entered the pantheon of Weimar artistic cinema, spawning numerous adaptations and homages and providing a source of inspiration for both horror-monster films (Frankenstein, dir. James Whale, 1931) and avant-garde experimental cinema (Birth of a Golem, dir. Amos Gitai, 1990). While Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam showed early twentieth-century audiences how to read the moving image and its mise-en-scène symbolically and how to observe “others” empathetically, today the wartime context of these lessons has been all but forgotten. This chapter has resituated Wegener’s three golem films in the brutal clay world of World War I and in the filmmaker’s experiences as a combatant in the trenches. Seen thus, the golem comes into relief as a creation molded and remolded in response to devastating battles and their traumatic aftermath. The clay monster, in alignment with the third film’s clay architecture, evoked an anthropomorphized form of the trenches—both sheltering and threatening. But the singular golem also served as a symbolic counterweight to the mass destruction and trivialization of human life on the battlefield. In returning to this profound figure, Wegener eventually harnessed the new technologies of cinema to forge an alternative German “victory”: the audience’s empathy and its humanizing recognition of the suffering other.