Kafkaesque Wake-up Calls and Trials: The Spectre of Anti-Semitism

Throughout Shadows and Fog, Max Kleinman finds himself in an absurd situation, having agreed to be part of a “plan” to capture a murderer, without knowing anything about this “plan,” not even how or why he is connected to it. During the entire film, we see him trying to determine what role he is playing but receiving no answers. Soon it appears there is no longer only “one” plan when different plans pop up with various groups of vigilantes whom Kleinman encounters on his vigil: plans which serve entirely contradictory purposes and help these groups not only to hunt the killer but also to turn individuals against (and murder) each other. All of a sudden, Kleinman finds himself wrongly accused of being the killer. As the mob turns to catch him, and Kleinman starts running – not knowing where to go or whom to trust – he comes face to face with the killer and turns around his life. Within this typically noir plot of crime and detective story, there are many echoes of Kafka. For one, critics have drawn attention to the resemblance between Kafka’s Prague and the film’s cityscape – appropriately naming it “Kafkaland” (Spignesi 1992: 227; Fox 1996: 220) – and pointed out that “Kleinman (Woody Allen) is caught up in a Kafkaesque plan to catch a brutal murderer who strikes randomly and without mercy” (Conard 2004: 20). The film begins in the middle of the night with a Kafkaesque wake-up call when “little man” Kleinman, a clerk, is rudely awakened by vigilantes and commanded to dress and come with them – a scene which resembles Josef K’s “arrest” in Kafka’s The Trial. Moreover, in Allen’s earlier play, “Death” (upon which the film is loosely based), Kleinman seems to be a businessman or salesman like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, who wakes up as “a monstrous vermin” (ungeheure[s] Ungeziefer) one morning (M: 3). Like Samsa, Kleinman who is “asleep in his bed at two A.M.,” immediately looks at the clock when he wakes up: “My God, it’s two-thirty . . . Coming, wait a minute!” (Allen 1975: 41–42; M: 4). In fact, Kleinman’s “wake-up call” contains a plethora of allusions to the trials of both protagonists in The Metamorphosis and The Trial, many of which evoke the spectre of anti-Semitism stretching from Kafka’s lifetime into the future. According to Champlin, “Anti-Semitism is an implicit theme in Allen’s film, which with all else is a parable on mob psychology and mob violence as ingredients of anti-Semitism” (1995: 20–21). Kafka, too, was concerned with “mob psychology and mob-violence as ingredients of anti-Semitism” in his personal life (Bruce 2007: 60–61, 142–143), and like Allen, his focus is on the individual little man’s dehumanization in modern society.

The vermin metaphor in The Metamorphosis is an obvious allusion to an anti-Semitic stereotype, and Joseph K.’s trial also originates in the anti-Semitic environment of the time. The immediate historical context preceding and during the conception of these texts was a time of heightened racism in Europe. In fact, several well-known anti-Semitic trials around the turn of the century left imprints on Kafka’s literature, the most famous being the Dreyfus affair.¹ Like Dreyfus, Joseph K. faces slanderous charges during his arrest, as the very first sentence of The Trial makes clear: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested” (Kafka 1998: 3; henceforth T). K. is arrested for a crime he has not committed, spends all his time trying to clear himself of the charges, and in the end dies “Like a dog!” (T: 231) – a racial slur like “vermin.” Moreover, Joseph K.’s ritualistic death in the quarry, when the “long, thin, double-edged butcher knife” is ceremonially passed back and forth over K.’s body before he is slaughtered (T: 230–231), has long been seen as an allusion “to contemporary associations of ritual murder with ritual practice” (Gilman 1995: 102–103, 154–155).²

What was typical of these anti-Semitic trials was the random choice of a victim and the blatant arbitrariness which violated the lives of ordinary, innocent people. Significantly, in real life, none of the accused in these high profile trials actually died a violent death like Joseph K.’s; they were eventually proven innocent by the “gentile” courts and freed. Yet, this outcome was far from certain and the threatening shadows of discrimination lingered. Any Jew could be charged: once arrested or accused, it really did not seem to matter whether an individual was innocent or not, and a whole trial or process of interrogation was set in motion, often for years on end. Given this historical backdrop for Kafka’s fiction, it is not surprising that his protagonists are rarely offered a “way out.” For Allen’s protagonist, on the other hand, the Kafkaesque world is only the beginning of his journey through twentieth-century cultural history, and Allen eventually makes use of his artistic freedom to allow him to escape.

Despite numerous parallels, Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis literally “becomes” what Kleinman is only “said” to be: a “stupid vermin” or “filthy vermin.” Before Samsa woke up transformed into vermin, he had been a hardworking (sales)man like Kleinman. We hear from Samsa himself that he was always travelling, “constantly seeing new faces,” and that he [had] “no relationships that last[ed] or [got] more intimate” (M: 4) According to his mother, he “ha[d] nothing on his mind but the business” (M: 8). He never went out for fun and his only “distraction” was when he was “busy with his fretsaw” carving a “little frame” (M: 8). In “Death,” the play which is the basis for his film, Allen makes the connection to Samsa quite explicit, for Kleinman is said to be “too busy with work – and [his] hobbies” (Allen 1975: 52). Like Gregor Samsa, he is unable to stand up to his boss, Mr. Paulson, whom he calls “Your Majesty” and “Your Grace” – and his landlady says this shows he is “cring[ing] in front of him like a worm.” Kleinman is obsessed with his promotion, fears he might lose his job, and in the end he does get fired. Samsa, too, is afraid of “losing his job” (M: 9), and the people he works with resemble spineless Kleinmans, “creatures of the boss” (M: 5, “eine Kreatur des Chefs”; my translation). Unlike Gregor Samsa, Kleinman is an amateur magician who seeks escape from time to time through magic and visiting the circus. The circus is a very important metaphor in Shadows and Fog, not only because it offers a means of escape for the public, but also, as we will see later, because it contains an allusion to Wiene’s Caligari film (1920). At the same time, the artists at the circus lead a very unstable existence that is reminiscent of Samsa and Kleinman. When the clown Paul (John Malkovich) complains that the company is “completely mismanaged,” his girlfriend Irmy (Mia Farrow), the sword swallower, regrets that they have to travel all the time; she wishes they could quit, settle down, and have a baby – to have, in other words, a meaningful existence “where it’s not such a grueling life.” If circus artists find it difficult to keep afloat (and, at this latest performance, hardly anyone showed up and the few that did “sat there stonefaced”), this indicates the soul-destroying experience of capitalist exploitation that leaves no space for art and spiritual/creative regeneration, and which also characterizes Gregor Samsa’s vermin existence. After his metamorphosis, the first thought that crosses his mind is “what a grueling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out – on the road” (M: 3–4). All these individuals are typical victims of capitalist society.

Kafka’s vermin metaphor has produced many creative adaptations and commentaries, which Stanley Corngold (1973) aptly described as The Commentators’ Despair. What makes the metaphor so adaptable is its ambiguity, for complex is the fact that Kafka plays with its literal and figurative meanings. Gregor Samsa is only at the very end of the story explicitly reduced to vermin by his family and called “it” (M: 38): otherwise, for the most part, he seems more human than the humans around him, though he is imprisoned in the body of a vermin. Corngold (1996) therefore proposes that Gregor Samsa exists “in a solitude without speech or intelligible gesture, in the solitude of an indecipherable sign” (89), which invites many possible interpretations, something which is also suggested by Walter Benjamin’s (1968) insight that Kafka creates “a subject for reflection without end” (122).

Kafka’s “trial” metaphor is equally ambiguous, because it means both a trial in the legal sense and also “a ‘process’ of whatever sort” (Corngold 1988: 222). Not only can the trial be read literally as legal proceedings against K., where no cause for the arrest is given, and no explanation, it can also be interpreted figuratively as the “process” of getting to the truth of the matter, which is a trial in itself for Joseph K., as it is for Kleinman. Sometimes, echoes of The Metamorphosis merge with echoes of The Trial, as when Kleinman is described as a “clerk” who works for a “firm” and feels himself imprisoned by the verminlike/spineless mentality of a “clerk.” Kafka’s Joseph K. is a clerk who is totally absorbed by his work for a bank. He is also afraid of losing his job and very anxious not to draw attention to himself after his “arrest”; like Gregor and Kleinman he is fearful they might want to “damage [his] public reputation, and in particular to undermine [his] position at the bank” (T: 48).

Yet, Joseph K. is not spineless but is a fighter – K. “had sought to do battle” (T: 64) because his arrest does run counter to all “common” logical expectations, since he is such a correct and hardworking, ordinary person. K., like Kleinman, does not understand what he is up against. This is no ordinary arrest for a crime, because in the original German only the narrator in the very first sentence of the novel reports that K. was “arrested.” Later on, K. is informed by the warden that he was “caught”: “Sie sind ja gefangen” (you’ve been caught, to be sure; my translation).³ In fact, throughout the novel, Kafka’s linguistic playfulness satirizes the so-called “legal” proceedings against K. With the original law, the central authority, unknown and out of reach, words take on and carry new and arbitrary meanings, and K. is continually caught in casuistry: the trial is no legal trial, the arrest no real arrest, the representatives of the law do not know the law, they are in charge and not in charge, the “Court of Inquiry” is not a “real Court of Inquiry” (T: 29, 30; my translation).

Linguistic playfulness as a means of coping with absurd situations is typical of Kafka and Allen, as all three protagonists accept their new situation and go along with it. Gregor Samsa, for instance, literally “plays” along, as if it is a game, rocking himself out of bed which was “more of a game than a struggle” (M: 7). Until the characters realize the severity of their situation, they are still able to see it as a comedy. Samsa attempts to ignore his condition, tells himself to stay calm, focuses on calming everyone down around him, and even convinces himself that he needs to get to work (as a human-size vermin?). Joseph K. is similarly inclined to see his arrest as “a joke, a crude joke” or “if this was a farce, he was going to play along” (T: 6–7). We know from Max Brod that when Kafka read out the first chapter of The Trial, all his friends laughed and he himself laughed so much that sometimes he could not read on (Brod 1954: 156). Consider the following passage, which parodies the prime commentator Josef K.’s loss of authority:

You’re no doubt greatly surprised by this morning’s events?” asked the inspector . . . “Of course,” said K. . . . “of course I’m surprised, but by no means greatly surprised.” “Not greatly surprised?” asked the inspector . . . “Perhaps you misunderstand me,” K. hastened to add. “I mean–” . . . “I’m of course greatly surprised, but when you’ve been in this world for thirty years and had to make your way on your own, as has been my lot, you get hardened to surprises and don’t take them too seriously. Particularly not today’s.” “Why particularly not today’s?” “I’m not saying I think the whole thing’s a joke, the preparations involved seem far too extensive for that . . . So I’m not saying it’s a joke.” “That’s right,” said the inspector . . . “But on the other hand,” K. continued . . . “it can’t be too important a matter. I conclude that from the fact that I’ve been accused of something but can’t think of the slightest offense of which I might be accused. But that’s also beside the point, the main question is: Who’s accusing me?” (T: 13–14).

We have just witnessed K. losing control over language in a humorously ironic verbal exchange. Kafka here “uses [verbal] ambiguity intentionally . . . by incorporating suggestive openings for the questioning of meaning” (Stern 1991: 15). We can see this in the play on the word “surprised,” when the inspector presumes that K. must be “greatly surprised” about his arrest. K. in his response inadvertently qualifies this individual utterance and turns it into its opposite meaning, so that “greatly surprised” (with the stress on “surprised”) suddenly becomes “by no means greatly surprised” (with emphasis on “greatly”). This leads to a complete misunderstanding, for the inspector now concludes – mischievously – that K. does not take his arrest seriously at all. The harder he attempts to clarify the situation, the more he gets trapped in his own discourse, as when he wants to show how little he is affected by the events of the morning – “particularly not today’s.” The dialogue between K. and the Inspector is marked by continual reversals, antithesis following antithesis, answers leading away from questions and creating new ones, all of which creates ambiguity – and, suddenly, K. begins to question the meaning of clichéd expressions which he used without thinking, such as whether he was “greatly surprised” or “not greatly surprised” or by considering whether the “arrest” is actually an important matter or not.

Kleinman’s response to his wake-up call is not as philosophical as Joseph K.’s, but it is equally ludicrous. Woken up from a deep sleep, Kleinman is trying hard to concentrate on what is going on around him and all of a sudden his previous worries about his job, his promotion, are not as important as he thought and channeled into an entirely different direction: towards the killer who is about to strike again tonight. Having just been told that the maniac is a strangler, the same speaker continues to tell him that the “Quilty sisters” got killed “because they didn’t lock the door, throats cut from ear to ear,” and Kleinman cannot help but point out the logical inconsistency:

K:	You said he was a strangler.
	–Does it matter how he kills?!
K:	What is he getting so angry for? OK, OK.
K:	There’s no motive?
	–So you know about it?
K:	Well, you know, I hear, now and then, a drib and drab.
	–He hears what he wants to hear. Get dressed.
. . .
	–You’re one of us, aren’t you?
K:	I’m definitely one of you.
K:	What do you want me to do?
	–We have a plan to trap him.
K:	What kind of plan?
	–It’s Hacker’s. He should tell it. You’ll find out your assignment. Get dressed.

Like Joseph K., Kleinman has fallen into the language “trap” several times, and his lack of backbone and loss of authority are parodied as well. Kleinman’s next response is equally pathetic, when he insists on “dressing up” in “a suit and a tie” to go out into the night. No one can see him, and he is not doing this just out of habit, but in case he might run into Paulsen, his boss, which is highly unlikely, as Kleinman’s landlady is quick to point out. However, irony of ironies, the unlikely encounter with the boss eventually comes about, and no tie or suit could have prevented the course of events that follow.

From the very outset, Kleinman has no control over anything. As soon as he steps into the street, we see him stumbling along alone, literally and metaphorically in a fog, in the middle of the night, trying to find someone who can explain to him what is going on. Like Joseph K., Kleinman finds himself in an absurd no-win situation. Not only has he not been informed what part he is playing in the “plan”; there is no particular place assigned to him where he might be told, nor a particular time when he could find out. In addition, no one knows where he is and he doesn’t know where anyone else is: “How are they going to find me to assign me my instructions? (Allen 1975: 64). Worse, the only one who seemed to know, Hacker, is murdered and takes the secret to the grave. Similarly, the people in charge constantly elude Kafka’s Joseph K. When he is summoned to the law courts, they forget to tell K. the time (T: 37); his appearance at court is a fiasco; and the seriousness of the entire proceeding is disrupted by a couple making love in the back rows, right in the open, and totally undermined when K. discovers that the law books of the revered judges are really sordid pornography books (T: 57). Moreover, as in Shadows and Fog, there is a “foglike haze in the room” (T: 49) when Joseph K. is facing the court, and “no direct source of light” where the law offices are located, though it is also “not completely dark” (T: 68). The air is “terribly thick and stifling” (T: 73), so stifling that Joseph K. almost faints and has to be carried out into the open to get fresh air.

Gregor Samsa, Joseph K., and Max Kleinman all try to pretend that their lives continue to be “normal” and logical, when the situations they face are clearly absurd and require radically different responses. They all believe that reason must prevail. Perhaps this is their downfall: that they cannot see or imagine an alternative response. For even Joseph K., the fighter, “is determined to read his Prozeß . . . through the common metaphor of a civil trial,” and the narrator literally “forces” this response on both K. and the reader:

the narrator erects legal thinking as the only legitimate sort of interpretation. He connects an arrest with a charge, as its condition, and defines an arrest in the absence of a charge, according to the logic of civil law, as a comedy parasitic on the norm (Corngold 1988: 222–223, 224).

One could indeed argue that Joseph K.’s faith in reason makes him ill equipped to deal with his situation, and that the same is true of Kleinman, who remains just as insistent on understanding his world through logic and reason until he is given an escape route at the end.

As the trial drags on, Joseph K. becomes increasingly desperate and even longs for a compromise. At this stage, he would be happy to bypass the trial altogether, wishing for some kind of advice “that might show him, for example, not how to influence the trial, but how to break out of it, how to get around it, how to live outside the trial. Surely that possibility existed . . .” (T: 214). Yet, Kafka did not intend this alternative for him. As the narrator puts it: “it seems as if the only trials that turned out well were those that were destined to do so from the very beginning . . .” (T: 120). Kafka’s logical consistency and lucid realism in The Metamorphosis and The Trial leave no such room for escape, and his protagonists – almost prophetically – become victims of their times. In contrast, Woody Allen’s parodic comedy of twentieth-century cultural history, with the advantage of hindsight, sends Kleinman on to face and overcome the shadows of the future.

Kleinman’s Expressionist Nightmare

“There is something frightful in our midst . . . when the shadows lay darkest . . . Help! Help! It’s he, the killer.” With these exclamations from Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, we arrive in the expressionist nightmarish world of Shadows and Fog. The frightful maniac is a focal point not only in Allen’s film, but also in Lang’s M, Wiene’s Dr. Caligari, and Lang’s Mabuse films. In an interview, Woody Allen states how his film is a response to the film noir of the first half of the twentieth century:

Magic is the key factor in Shadows and Fog, because what I wanted to make was a kind of German expressionist movie, where this homicidal figure was wreaking havoc and causing various reactions to him–the scientific reaction, the intellectual reaction, the overreaction by mobs of vigilantes, the religious fanatic reaction–all, all reactions that we use to cope with death and evil and violence, none of which really work out very well (Schickel 2003: 143).

Magic is the key factor in the end, because none of the various reactions to the maniac will eventually prove to be successful in controlling or trapping him. The magician Irmstedt calls him the “evil one,” thereby turning him into a shadowy allegorical figure. Allen parodies in particular the various elusive “plans” to trap him, or the strategies people invent to deal with evil and violence in society. The “plan” is also an important theme in M, Dr. Caligari, the Mabuse films, and the Threepenny Opera. Just as Kafka’s “vermin” metaphor invites many associations, so the “plan” in Shadows and Fog takes on further meanings. Initially designed to catch the killer, it evolves into the vigilantes’ plans for gaining power, which, in turn, echo previous plans in the expressionist movies. Here we see various elaborate plans concocted by the police and the criminal underworld in order to catch the child murderer in M, or the (in)famous plans for power, control, and world domination forged by the masterminds of Drs. Caligari and Mabuse. Moreover, Allen invokes G.W. Pabst’s film of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (1930/31), with its corrupt underworld of crime and prostitution, presided over by gangster, rapist, murderer, Mac the Knife. The plans and strategies of Mac the Knife and Peachum, the King of the Beggars, only serve these criminals’ own selfish pleasures, power games, and opportunistic gains, while the police look on, since the police chief is corrupt and friends with Mac the Knife. Pitted against each other, all of these ineffectual plans are parodied in the Threepenny Opera song, “The Song about the Insufficiency of Human Striving,” sung by Peachum, the corrupt beggar king who exploits the poor and swindles his way into riches:

So make your little plan

Yes, be a shining light

Then make yourself a second plan

None will turn out right

You see, for this existence

There’s no man who’s bad enough

Still it’s nice to watch them

Trying to be tough

Sure, chase your bit of luck

But no need to run fast

Though men always race after it

Luck always runs last

You see, for this existence

Man’s demands are just too tough

All this noisy striving

Is self-deluding guff

Quite fittingly, the melody of this song becomes a musical leitmotif in Shadows and Fog, parodying the corrupt, decadent Weimar world. Seemingly playful on the surface, yet with every repetition increasingly serious and verging on the hysterical, this song is a warning of the impending doom, similar to the haunting Peer Gynt whistle by Grieg, which announces every appearance of the murderer in Lang’s M before the audience even sees him.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s first sound film, M – A City is Searching for a Murderer (1931) is about a famous child murderer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), and set in Berlin in the late 1920s. When the murderer in Shadows and Fog first appears as his shadow, the entrance of Beckert comes to mind, because we also initially see him as a shadow (falling on a poster announcing a search for the killer after the latest murder). Beckert, too, is on the loose and hunted by the police as well as by the vigilantes – the criminal underground, which is taking justice into its own hands, since they consider the police incompetent. Repeatedly, the film makes fun of the elaborate “plans” and drawings of the police which lead nowhere. It takes a criminal mind to recognize the murderer, and the vigilantes in M are also better organized than in Shadows and Fog and faster at catching the murderer than the police. Ironically, the unfortunate blind beggar who lives in the dark “sees” the killer, while the police cannot see or interpret the clues that are right in front of them – a sign that the justice system is failing the population by missing the obvious clues.

M depicts the paranoia which develops during the Weimar Republic, as well as the population’s need to project fears, uncertainties, and frustrations on a scapegoat before the Nazi rise to power. The film also appears hauntingly prophetic of events to come when we consider the real life story of the main actor, Peter Lorre (pseudonym for Ladislav Löwenstein, 1904–1964), and the subsequent distortion of his famous final monologue by Nazi propaganda. When we first “see” Lorre in the film (and not just his shadow or his reflection in the mirror), he is hunted and running from his persecutors. Someone uses chalk to paint the letter M on his coat so that he cannot escape. For a post-Holocaust reading, the analogy to later Nazi Germany and the star of David as a marker of difference and sign of persecution would be evident. Like Fritz Lang, Lorre was a Jew who emigrated after the Nazis came to power, and continued his career in Hollywood. Ironically, he played along with Lang’s plan to critique the rise of fascism in M, only to witness it being hijacked later by the opposite “plan” and appropriated for anti-Semitic propaganda: the Nazi propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (The Wandering Jew) (1940), by Fritz Hippler, used “Lorre’s final monologue from M . . . as an admission by the Jews that they were incapable of controlling their desires and were therefore unfit to live in a ‘moral society’ ” (Younkin, Bigwood, and Cabana ¹⁹⁸²).⁴ In this final, powerful scene, we see Beckert put on trial by the vigilantes, who catch him before the police do. Not denying that he is the murderer, even feeling very sorry for his victims, Beckert makes a passionate plea to the criminal court, pleading not guilty because he could never help himself, describing the torment and terrible emotional suffering he experienced when his inner voice drove him to kill. As Beckert is about to be lynched by the outraged criminals, their hypocritical “justice” system is exposed as well because their leader (Gustav Gründgens), has committed murders and has gotten away with them. At this point the police raid the building, rescue Beckert, and take him to be judged in front of a real court, which pronounces him guilty.

Interestingly enough, in the original lost ending of the film, the last words of accusation – uttered by a victim’s mother – were not directed at the killer Beckert but against the audience: “You, You,” were the last words hanging in the air, with the mother looking into the camera at the viewer (Lang 1931). Blaming society fits with the title of Fritz Lang’s original filmscript, “Mörder unter Uns” (Murderers are amongst Us), and is also suggested by the repeated refrain in the film that, “Any man in the street could be the murderer.” A similar paranoia exists in Woody Allen’s film, and there is a direct echo of M when one of the vigilantes remarks: “My theory is, it’s someone that we all know . . . Someone we work next to or go to church with. He lurks in the shadows, waiting to pounce.” Or, as we read in “Death”: “The killer might be any of us” (Allen 1975: 61). Unlike Lang, Allen does not seek to highlight the complex psychology of the killer but rather the suspicions and fears which set in among the population when there is no plan in place to deal with the situation and no solution in sight.

The nightmarish atmosphere, political instability, restlessness, and anxiety in the Caligari and Mabuse noir films is also channeled into Shadows and Fog. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) tells the nightmarish story of Caligari, hypnotist and man of science, and his research “plan” to gain ultimate control over other human beings. At the circus, Caligari displays his power over Cesare, a somnambulist who can foresee the future. Cesare is Caligari’s scientific experiment: he is living proof of the success of Caligari’s research on how far he can control someone who is sleepwalking. In his state of trance, Cesare will do what he would never do when awake, such as kill another human being. In Shadows and Fog, another somnambulist, Spiro, is put on Kleinman’s trail and wrongly sniffs him out as the killer, convinced he has a particular smell, which makes the mob turn on Kleinman, who has to run for his life. Siegfried Kracauer contended that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari film weakened the revolutionary political message of the original script, in which the doctor represented “an unlimited authority that idolizes power as such, and, to satisfy its lust for domination, ruthlessly violates all human rights or values” (1947: 65). The script’s social critique exposed the “doctor” and not the “patient” as mad. The doctor was responsible for the murders, an authoritarian figure whose plan was to exercise absolute control over individuals and by extension over a whole society that was sent into the trenches during World War I and told to kill. Instead, the adapted filmscript introduced a narrative frame, which begins in the insane asylum, with the fantasies of a mad patient, who is the narrator of the Caligari story. At the end of his story, we return to the original frame with the madman in the asylum finishing his narrative. As a result, Dr. Caligari’s sanity and authority are never questioned by the film; to the contrary, they are strongly reaffirmed: confident that he has now understood the origin of his patient’s delusions, the doctor is optimistic about curing his psychosis (Regel 1989: 154). Nonetheless, despite the framed narrative, the boundaries between what is real and what is illusion are blurred for most of the film, and the equally blurred boundaries in Shadows and Fog suggest that the ominous uncertainties about the unfolding of future political events are important for Woody Allen. It really makes no difference if the story of the mad Dr. Caligari is the product of a deranged mind or not, when the whole Western world is about to become an insane asylum, 13 years later, with Hitler’s rise to power.

In Lang’s Dr. Mabuse films, the impending political nightmare is even more explicit. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. Part I. An Image of the Times and Inferno, Part II. People of the Times (1922) introduces Dr. Mabuse as another hypnotist like Caligari. Amazingly prophetic for its time, the film depicts a Dr. Mabuse who can literally control the masses. At the end of Part II, in the disguise of Sandor Weltmann (a magician and master hypnotist at a show where “the probable is the most likely to happen”), Mabuse represents more than a “Weltmann” or “man of the world.” He gambles with the world and has plans to become the world controller. The similarity of the two names Weltmann and Kleinman also immediately signals their difference –one “man” representing or desiring to conquer the world, while the name of the other “man,” Kleinman, suggests the very opposite, the smallness and insignificance of human existence. Allen’s Kleinman is a little man who is not mad, has no illusions of grandeur, and believes in reason and logic. Yet, the fact that Weltmann is said to have powers which make him recruit especially those who resist him most, suggests a parallel with Kleinman in the sense that “little” men like him during the Third Reich were made, of their own volition, to join the plan to conquer the world. In Allen’s Shadows and Fog, Kleinman does not put up great resistance, either, when pressured to join the vigilantes’ plan, which quickly turns destructive and violent. Though Kracauer has been criticized for seeing these noir films as too much of an allegory of the rise of fascism, they obviously contain the elements that later make up the nightmare of the Third Reich: emotional and social instability in the population, the need for escape into excitement or entertainment, the urge to take matters into one’s own hands because the established authorities and institutions fail, the persecution of Others and undesirables. Moreover, in Part II, Mabuse, the murderer, is a mastermind at work trying to subdue the population and himself ending up in complete madness. By reading Allen through the Mabuse films, as we are moving increasingly closer towards National Socialism and the Holocaust, we begin to see the significance of the title Shadows and Fog, with its clear allusion to the Auschwitz documentary, Night and Fog.

Lang’s 1933 film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, pushes the looming cloud further and makes the political danger obvious by showing how Mabuse lives on. The narrative continuity is underlined by the fact that the actor from the 1922 film (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is playing Mabuse again. Though caught and confined to an insane asylum in a state of sheer madness, Mabuse’s plans are all of a sudden beginning to develop a life of their own. Mabuse’s mind is waking up again: he has recently begun to scribble with his hands in the air and, when he is given paper, he becomes increasingly coherent and writes out plans for crimes which are carried out not only by criminals but also by ordinary people who are hired for pay and do not question anything. This “wake-up call” also produces no anxiety or concern: not even the doctor recognizes the danger to the public and becomes fascinated with Mabuse himself. Mabuse, then, has been gathering followers who, despite his madness, think he is a genius and have been waiting for this moment to come. He seems to be waking up at exactly the right political moment. Again, it is a medical doctor who is enthralled with Mabuse and protects him.

Those who follow Mabuse blindly never see him, never meet him – he is always a shadowy figure, a figment of their imaginations in his lifetime and therefore no one even notices his death. Nor does anyone ever try to find out if it is indeed Mabuse’s own voice that speaks to them, and even if people knew, it would make no difference that the voice is really the voice of his doctor, the psychiatrist who carries on his legacy (the “Testament” – his “will”) after Mabuse’s death because he believes in his brilliant mind. Thus, those who are part of the “plan” never doubt who is in charge and blindly follow instructions until one average young man in love redeems his humanity through the love of a woman by questioning Mabuse’s orders, in the process of which the two almost get killed. Their personal trial ends when, with the help of the same police officer as in Lang’s M (Inspector Lohmann), they foil Mabuse’s plans, conquer the killer mind, and reestablish order.

Shadows of the Holocaust and Beyond

Allen’s echoes of European cultural history ultimately point to the Holocaust. This is obvious not only in the film’s title with its allusion to Alain Resnais’ Auschwitz documentary, but also through the prophetic foreshadowing of the expressionist noir films. Their nightmarish world, with bouts of reason and insanity alternating and merging, was replicated in European societies on a large scale. Albert Camus’ phrase in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that it “all started out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns” (1955: 23), aptly describes the world leading up to the Holocaust.

In contrast to Kafka’s often humorously absurd world is the paranoia which sets in amongst the population in Woody Allen’s film. Kleinman’s initial suspicion, when told about the vigilantes taking matters into their own hands, ultimately turns out to be correct, but he did not heed the “wake-up call” then. His remark at the time, “This is police business” was countered by “They’ve had their chance. We’re taking it into our own hands,” to which Kleinman replies “That’s scary.” Nonetheless, he goes along with the “plan.” Moreover, once these citizens have taken the law into their own hands to trap the killer, very soon there is not only a killer on the loose but different groups of vigilantes are seeking to assert their power. Fox rightly argues: “As in Lang’s film [M], the motif of the Citizens’ Committee as an alternative to the orthodox legal process, demonstrates how anti-Semitism, vigilantism and hysteria may provide the seeds for extreme political acts” (1996: 222). The Weimar Republic saw not only different factions going after each other, but political groups like the communists and social democrats were internally divided amongst themselves and formed splinter parties rather than united fronts. In the film as in real life, we see different groups and factions fighting each other and losing sight of their goals. Thus Hacker is killed not by the murderer but by “someone from the other faction.” “So quickly it becomes violent?” Kleinman asks. He is told that “Hacker asked for it. He was stubborn and hot-headed, despite the fact that his plan wasn’t working.” The reason that these groups are developing different plans, even killing one another, is because “there’s disagreement on how to handle things.” In the midst of all this unrest (echoing the 1933 Mabuse film), this is the perfect timing for the mastermind/murderer to appear and thrive, as was the case during the 1930s: Hitler and his consorts had been lurking in the shadows all along, waiting for their opportunity to pounce.

A first sign for Kleinman that things seem to be getting out of hand is when the news spreads that the Mintz family has been arrested. Here “the parallel to the Nazi terror is inescapable” (Blake 2005: 107). They are clearly Jewish, because the father is said to be a mohel who performs circumcisions and they are called “social undesirables” and accused of being involved with the killings. This is the only time Kleinman speaks up, because he knows them to be “lovely people.” When Kleinman goes to the chief of police to discuss the Mintz family, he is told “there may be a connection between all these killings and certain well-poisoning incidents.” These charges are old anti-Semitic imputations that all of a sudden conveniently resurface. The chief of police knows very well they are not true, but he admits “there’s pressure on [him]” to act, and his remark, “It’ll probably never go any deeper than the more orthodox element,” reveals that he considers directed/channeled racism a necessary political measure to satisfy the mob. His reassurance to Kleinman that he and others like him will not be affected sounds hollow: “No one lumps you in with the Mintzes. You’re fine.” These are empty words, because the police have no control over the crowds and the vigilante mob mentality. Allen here distinguishes and links the insane racism of the mob and opportunistic, politically driven forms of “controlled” anti-Semitism.

Soon Kleinman himself is accused of being the killer and hunted by the crowd and the authorities alike. Like Joseph K., Kleinmann is put on trial by an equally dubious court which has no legal basis, because the vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands. There had been isolated evidence of paranoia before, which Kleinman dismissed, when someone early on took one “suspicious” black hair from his body and wanted it tested in a lab. Kleinman responded with: “Look, let’s not get crazy . . . The trick is to remain logical” (Allen 1975: 47). Only when the mob sicks “Spiro, the great clairvoyant” on Kleinman to sniff him out does he realize the danger. Here we have the racial anti-Semitism about the particular smell of the Jew (Gilman 1995: 150), which Allen turns into a funny scene, as Kleinman falls into the “trap” of the pseudoscience of Caligari or Mabuse. He who is “always so damn logical” and wants to believe that “we’re all reasonable, normal, rational people” is nearly lynched by the mob. The fact that Allen is exploiting this scene for its comic potential again points to the ultimate difference between Allen, Kafka, and the Mabuse films: the difference lies in the “nearly,” for Allen’s protagonist is allowed to escape. At this point in Kleinman’s life, though, Woody Allen also draws on Kafka’s vermin metaphor again, reading the vermin through the lens of the Holocaust. After Kleinman has been fired from his job, his fellow worker, Simon Carr, who receives the promotion instead of Kleinman, reveals to him that his boss called Kleinman a “kind of cringing slimy vermin, more suited to extermination than to life on this planet.” Allen is not alone in ascribing this prophetic reading to Kafka; as George Steiner (1970) argued in Language and Silence, Kafka was “possessed of a fearful premonition” and

saw, to the point of exact detail, the horror gathering . . . Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis . . . was to be the literal fate of millions of human beings. The very word for vermin, Ungeziefer, is a stroke of tragic clairvoyance; so the Nazis were to designate the gassed” (121).

Allen also underscores the inevitability of fascism and World War II through the playful use of Kurt Weill’s “Cannon Song” – another Brechtian alienation device and foreshadowing of the future:

John was there and Jim was too

And Georgie made sergeant in short order

The army doesn’t give a fig who you are

And they marched us North to the border

Soldiers live under the cannon’s thunder

From the Cape to Cooch Behar

If it should rain one night

And they should chance to sight

An unfamiliar race

Dark or fair of face

They might just chop them up

To make their steak tartar

. . .

John is buried and Jimmie’s dead

And they shot poor George for looting

But blood is still blood red

And the army is still recruiting

Soldiers live under

The cannon’s thunder . . . [refrain].

Though the Brechtian lyrics to Weill’s music do not appear in Allen’s film, the educated viewer will remember that the army’s indifference to racism, looting, and killing is parodied by the song, as well as the inevitability of future wars. Allen also makes the Mabuse threat reach well into our present contemporary world. At the beginning of Shadows and Fog, lost in the fog, Kleinman is already wondering if this, perhaps, may be intentional: “Unless . . . this is part of the plan. Maybe they have me under surveillance.” Here we have an allusion to Lang’s last Mabuse film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which the shadows return: we are told our “future lies in the shadow” and “the dark cloud is all powerful . . . No, it’s no cloud. It’s a face. The face of a dead man – no, he’s alive. Dr. Mabuse.” This last reincarnation of Mabuse shows a new mastermind at work – another doctor, Professor Jordan, who has hypnotic control over his victims. Drawing on the legacy of the Nazis, Jordan is using old Gestapo plans for an elaborate system of surveillance whose thousand eyes no one can escape. Professor Jordan is the post-Holocaust Mabuse, whose drive for power “knows no limits.” The latest plan is nuclear annihilation – he feels the temptation, he says, with the push of a button to “throw this rotten world into chaos and rule.” “Where’s the boundary?” is the question asked in the film. If what we are seeing is the temptation for a mad mind, with a push of a button to destroy the world, where indeed is the line between madness and sanity? How do we recognize and trap the “evil one”? When Mabuse starts, in the 1933 film, writing in the insane asylum, his thoughts are said to travel in the “same criminal channels” as before. The doctor admires the fact that his writing “is based on logic and worked out to the minutest detail” and exclaims: “What a genius this fellow was!” In Allen’s film, his doctor repeats the worn-out cliché that “Sometimes the very impulses that cause a maniac to murder inspire him to highly creative ends,” while the play highlights his scientific obsession with the killer – he wants to have “a one hundred percent understanding of precisely what he is in every aspect” (Allen 1975: 66). The serious man of science is satirized here for believing in a biological, scientific cause of evil. He plans to show that science can get to the bottom of what makes the killer tick. And, convinced that an autopsy will reveal “chaos” inside the killer’s brain, he is determined to find out “where insanity stops and evil begins.” To this, the killer simply replies: “So many questions,” putting an end to them by killing the doctor, and therefore, symbolically, annihilating the scientific optimism which the doctor represents. The ironic moral is that “real” science gets annihilated, while pseudoscience triumphs.

It further stands to “reason” that Kleinman responding with logic to the “evil one” is obviously not very effective, either, which is parodied throughout the film and also in the play: “I’m a man who likes to know which way is up and which way is down and where’s the bathroom” (Allen 1975: 72). Political solutions are equally unsuccessful when mobs of vigilantes get out of hand and become involved in infighting and killing each other instead of finding the killer. A spiritual/religious solution is also denied in the film: religion as an institution is represented as corrupt, and Kleinman’s repeated denials that he believes in God echo a modernist position best formulated by Eugene Ionesco in a 1957 essay on Kafka: “This theme of man lost in a labyrinth, without a guiding thread, is basic . . . Yet if man no longer has a guiding thread, it is because he no longer wants to have one. Hence his feeling of guilt, of anxiety, of the absurdity of history” (qtd. in Esslin 1961: 345).

This mad, decadent world – “a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, [in which] man feels an alien, a stranger” (Camus 1955: 6) – is appropriately represented through the metaphors of the whorehouse and the circus. The brothel is the place which renders Kleinman completely impotent, without any agency. It is the “home” of doctors Caligari and Mabuse, the place where they forge their mad scientific plans which “foreshadow” Dr. Mengele types of experiments: in Shadows and Fog, Mengele’s fascination with identical twins is parodied in the whorehouse through a customer’s fetishism with “identical whores.” The brothel is also the place where, as one of the prostitutes remarks, “they all look so innocent and dignified when they walk in” and “then you hear the things they want you to do!” Ironically, the individuals frequenting the brothel are similar to the dignified judges in Kafka’s Trial whose law books turn out to be sordid pornography books (T: 57). The best customers are the university students who are paying the whores’ rent, and, ironically, they represent the future intellectual elite of a civilized culture. They readily admit that they find the whorehouse atmosphere “a lot more stimulating than university,” where they learn “facts. Nothing but facts. Logic . . . and mathematics and how to become depressed.” But the whorehouse as an outlet for their intellectual and personal needs denigrates their “stimulating” existential discussions and turns the place into a circus, a perverse comedy which allows the students to escape by indulging in stimulating “metaphors of perversion,” as student Jack puts it. There are no boundaries here, no limits to anyone’s fantasies of perversion. The highest educational institution is failing the next generation to prepare them for the shadows of the future; the brothel is doing far more to help them see through the fog.

In the end, Allen comes to Kleinman’s defense by allowing him to escape from this mad, absurd world. Kleinman is like Kafka’s Karl Rossman, one of the rare exceptions in Kafka’s work, who, after many trials, is allowed to enter a theater which welcomes everyone, the Theater of Oklahoma at the end of the Amerika novel. For his part, Kleinman is invited to join the circus. Typically, though, for Kafka’s protagonist the seemingly happy ending soon looks suspicious when Karl’s train is riding through an absolutely forlorn landscape with wild, crushing waterfalls and dark, threatening, jagged mountains and cliffs whose tips cannot be seen because they are covered by ominous clouds. Allen, on the other hand, uses his artistic power to influence the course of events for his protagonist in the opposite direction: there are no such ominous signs in the sky for Kleinman. The circus, for the amateur magician-artist Kleinman, signifies a world of art where different laws apply, where the world can be turned upside down without becoming perverse and menacing, and magic can still happen. As Woody Allen puts it:

And finally, in the end, the only thing that really saves him is a magician with a magic trick, because short of a magical solution there does not seem to be any way out of this terrible existence that we live in . . . all the other solutions I see around me – religious solutions, scientific solutions, intellectual solutions – you know, everything is too little too late and not good enough . . . (Schickel 2003: 143–144).

The pay at the circus is “very low” and life will be “grueling,” but it will be meaningful because Kleinman is choosing a real circus where he can perfect his art, to play his own part finally to contain and combat the unpredictable, irrational, absurd, deviant, or decadent whorehouse of life. Kleinman does not get to this stage without deserving it, without performing at least a few small heroic acts. First, he faces the killer and saves Irmy, who would have been the next victim. Then, with the help of the great Irmstedt, the circus magician, he catches the maniac once, not for long, but long enough for Irmstedt to ask Kleinman, the “amateur magician,” to become his assistant, because “Nothing good’s gonna happen until we catch him.” “Your tricks didn’t stop the killer,” one of the circus hands objects, to which Irmstedt counters, “But we checked his reins for a moment. Perhaps we even frightened him.” Kleinman knows there really is no better alternative for him to becoming the magician’s assistant via joining the circus; still, he struggles hard with himself because he feels so deeply that “at heart [he is] a clerk,” conditioned by the rules and codes of social behavior that society imposes on its citizens, with logic and reason telling him that he should really “go back to town and join real life.” Yet, this same Kleinman, who was so adamant before that he could not “make the leap of faith necessary to believe in [his] own existence,” has just, after all, for the first time in his life, decided to leap. Granted, this was no leap of faith but a leap into a magic mirror, and, true again, the killer shattered the fairy tale mirror almost immediately. Still, Kleinman stood his ground and performed his first act of resistance, standing up to the maniac and stopping him in his tracks, if ever so briefly. With his decision to join the circus, Kleinman shows real agency and turns his life around. Leaving behind the world of Kafka, the expressionist films, and the Holocaust, Kleinman chooses to embrace the world of illusion, fairy tale, and dreams for the much needed freedom that art can offer. “Everybody loves his illusions,” are Irmstedt’s words of farewell. “Loves them? They need them. Like they need the air.”

1 The major trials were the Tisza Eszlar trial in Hungary (1882–1883), the Dreyfus affair in France (1895), the Hilsner case in Bohemia (1899–1917), and the Beilis trial (1911–1913) in Russia. In 1895 Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), an officer in the French army, was wrongly accused and convicted of spying for the Germans. His case dragged on for years, with another trial in 1899 and Dreyfus’ final exoneration in 1906. Just a few months before The Metamorphosis was written, a Prague newspaper reported on the backlash of the Mendel Beilis blood libel trial on the Jewish population: “Yet again the spectre of ritual murder is traversing the lands, spreading rumours and whispering into the ears of the people: the Jews are draining our blood. With giant steps the bloody fairy tale crosses borders, speaks all languages and knows all the hidden paths” (Selbstwehr, Mar. 22, 1912: 1). See Bruce 2007: 18–20, 57–64.

2 Cf. also Band (1980: 179–181); Robertson (1985: 12); Bruce (2007: 57–65). Ritual murder or blood libel refers to accusations which evoked the old medieval anti-Semitic charge that Jews needed Christian blood for their Passover rituals and slaughtered Christian children to obtain it. Because of this popular racist myth, frequently in Eastern Europe murders were committed around Easter/Passover time, so that the Jews would be blamed for the crime.

3 See Franz Kafka, Der Proceß (1994). The editor, Max Brod, had replaced “caught” with “arrested” in previous German editions, perhaps because it seemed more logical since there was no need to catch K. But by imposing this kind of logic on the text, Brod also eliminated the associative links and the play on the word “caught,” which allows the warder to clarify further that “catching” K. does not mean they had to search for him.

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