Chapter 7

Es war einmal vor langer, langer Zeit.

Do you know what that means, Herr Dokter? It's how all the fairy tales start, the Grimm ones and the not-so-grim ones, and mine, too. That's what you want, isn't it, a fairy tale? That's why you gave me this cheap notebook and pathetic ball point pen. As if writing ever solved anything. Dr. Freud would have given me a fountain pen, something with style-he was a man of impeccable taste. His cocaine tin was exquisite, oriental, encrusted with gold like a Fabergé egg. You shuffle in here with your prescription glasses, coffee-stained frock and rubber slippers, and I want to scream.

Dokters, that's what my mother used to call the lot of you, in her thick Hessian accent. I hate you and your kind, Herr Dokter, your patronizing nods and absent eyes, always trying to remember where you read something, already thinking about the next patient. You're pathetic and deluded, ein armseliges Würstchen. You cannot save a soul.

But of course, you must think the same of me–eine arme Sau, a curiosity, a miserable one-legged has-been drunk committed into psychiatric care by his own wife. Let me assure you, Herr Dokter: I wasn't always a pathetic old doped-up cripple. Once upon a time, in another country, I was a young and hopeful cripple. I was a prodigy, the youngest filmmaker in Ufa's history, the toast of Berlin. I still dream of champagne picnics on the Pfaueninsel, the Zoo-Palast filled with an ocean of flowers, just for me. I dream of Studio B and the sets we built for Jagd zu den Sternen.

But all of that has been lost, destroyed, buried, bombed, and burnt. I lived my life for light and love, and now the bean counters and brain shrinkers want to break me. I've been held captive by men in uniforms before. My adversaries conspired with history. Men like you, they come and go. World Wars drove me out of my home and took my limbs. Hollywood chewed me up and spit me out. I have been verraten und verkauft, locked up, ruined, rejected. My own wife dumped me here like a mangy dog at the pound. The days are getting shorter and there is no way back. Gottverdammt nochmal, it's ugly here at the ass end of my life.

Fine. Abgemacht. Why the hell not? Keep the pills coming, and I'll write in your dime-store notebook. You'll get your fairy tale. Words are a poor substitute for a camera and an editing table, the might of a studio at my disposal, but words are all I have left now.

This is the simple truth: my wife, that gorgon, that lying two-faced monster, has become my worst enemy. It was she who ruined everything we had and could have had again. For decades, she has turned every triumph into a wound and every opportunity into a disaster. I have not made a movie in twenty years! She ruined my life and my career. Penny cost me everything, and you, Herr Dokter, are just another one of her pawns. Your kind is legion, following orders and taking instructions, always on the wrong side of art and truth. She knew exactly which lies to tell, what to put on the forms when she signed me over into your questionable care–a danger to myself and others and that was good enough for you, wasn't it? You are compliant, like the bastard cops who brought me here, my worthless son, and everybody who ever called himself my friend and then abandoned me when the time came.

But it's darkest before the dawn, nicht wahr, and none of you can keep me from my destiny. I have a talent and people have misunderstood me all my life. There are things that are impossible for a man with a prosthetic leg, but if you give me a cast and a crew, I have no limits. I came from nothing, I scaled the Olymp, and I can do it again. Even when the Nazis burned my movies, I clung to hope. You have marked me crazy and yet you ask me to explain myself. Art will prevail! I'll make another movie yet. Cinema cannot be detained! Nothing can stop me, for I am Kino.

Well then. Es war einmal vor langer, langer Zeit, my father owned a paint and dye factory on the Main: Koblitz & Söhne Farben AG. As soon as my brothers and I were old enough to hold a pen, we worked at the factory to learn our trade “from the bottom up.” Father was a stern son-of-a-bitch; mother was thin-lipped and distant. They had no imagination, and we were forced to spend endless days in dusty rooms, stooped over balance sheets and quarterly earnings reports. It was slavery.

When the Great War began, Heinz, Jupp, and I were too young and too rich to march off to Flanders, and so we remained sheltered behind a five-meter brick wall and the rows of gnarly oak trees my great-grandfather had planted. Once father learned that the Kriegsministerium was paying handsomely for chlorine, a byproduct of dye production, his nationalism reached new heights. He spoke of the tremendous honor of serving the Vaterland in its hour of need, and we sold them our toxic waste as a weapon for the trenches. The margins were phenomenal and he transformed the B plant in Hoechst to produce mustard gas.

My parents and the Bonzen who came for skat and mother's garden parties pretended that nothing was wrong at all. I never once went hungry while boys just a few years older got mowed down, bayoneted, bombed, gassed, and ground up by the thousands, fleissig, fleissig, feeding our prosperity with their industrious killing and dying. In the winter of nineteen-sixteen, women came begging for food and my father chased them away with his hunting rifle. In the streets of Frankfurt, people recognized our Daimler and spat when we passed by.

On one particularly cold night, the tanks of chlorine father had installed in the moldy overflow warehouse caught on fire and exploded in a magnificent green flame. An infernal blaze of superheated acid gas raged through both wings of the house, a blinding blast that set the curtains and furniture on fire, followed by the hissing and fizzing of the chlorine. I was in bed, and I remember the sudden smell that turned into burning pain in the throat, nose and lungs, the scalding bite of the chemical digging into the flesh of my leg, fire. My younger brother Jupp was thrown from his bed and landed face-down in a puddle of acid. Heinz led us through the window onto the lawn before our room caught fire. Flames claimed the house, the stables, the maids quarters, even great-grandfather's gnarly oak trees burned down in a hellish conflagration so bright, one could see the blaze light up the night sky from the Römer, over ten kilometers away, or so the Frankfurter Rundschau reported the next day.

My parents' charred bodies weren't recovered from the ruins until the next morning.

It was justice–not the human kind, bought and sold, but some sort of cosmic justice, God's will, what the Oriental religions call karma. Along with the poison gas, my father had let the war into our home, and we all paid the price. I came to in a hospital bed next to Jupp's, in a room filled with every available quack who wasn't at the front, a whole flock of Dokters, hovering over us, shrugging impotently.

Dokters. The smell of disinfectant, the snap of rubber gloves. Useless at best, clueless most of the time, always dangerous. When your kind runs out of answers, you call for pills and electroshock. That night after the explosion, they ordered up morphine, and nuns brought wet towels to wipe down our sweat-covered bodies. My leg was disintegrating from the acid, and the infection progressed quickly, threatening to kill me. I watched Jupp struggle in the bed next to mine, trying to draw breath with his decomposing lungs. He was the youngest and liveliest of us, and it took him hours to die. Finally, the Dokters had to capitulate before the chemical, and soon, they shrugged some more, folded their hands. They called a preacher for Jupp.

For me, the saw.

It was Dokters who pinned me down, applied ligatures to prevent hemorrhaging, pulled up my skin below the knee cap, and divided it with one quick stroke of the double-edged knife, leaving the flexor tendons intact so the stump would retain the power of motion. With the practiced ease of men who had performed hundreds of these procedures during the war, they transected the muscles. They had a special piece of linen with three tails ready that was threaded through the space between the shin and calf bones and tied together to hold the muscles and skin back. The Dokter with the oscillating saw stood between my legs and worked quickly, to keep the calf bone from splintering.

And that's it. The leg's detached, a separate thing. You can't feel it yet because everything is pain, but you can see the assistant who takes it away swiftly, to be burnt unceremoniously in the hospital's ovens. Skin and muscle flaps are folded over the stump, and before the wound is dressed, they insert studs for screwing on a peg leg.

Knock on wood.

That was nearly fifty years ago. I still remember every second of the procedure, and to this day, I feel the pain in the absent limb. But I can't for the life of me remember what it was like to have two feet.

Dokters did that to me. I doubt you ever had occasion to perform an amputation, and for that reason alone, you're even more dangerous than those who took my leg. You are worse than useless. I despise you, and I am frightened of the moment you run out of ideas.

I am the only one who sees these pages half-filled, and I am terrified. One must be fearless to plow through sentences and paragraphs to unknown conclusions. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?

Heinz and I were the only survivors. We inherited the firm, the land, the money. I didn't want any of it–it was blood money, and I had paid for father's greed with my leg. But the fire hadn't lessened the hatred of our family. Disgusted, I gave my inheritance to charity and left Koblitz & Söhne to Heinz. I kept just enough to get by and went to Berlin to live among the common people: workers, shopkeepers, butchers, tram drivers, waiters. I was free of the pretensions of the rich. Nobody knew me as the son of a Kriegsgewinnler, a war profiteer. Berlin, seething capitol of a brand-new democracy that no one wanted. The city promised all I longed for: depravity, chaos, revolution, everything my sheltered upbringing had denied me. I enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University and rented a shabby room that smelled of beer and herring in a second Hinterhaus on Rosenthaler Platz, from a family of waschechte Berliners too polite to ask about my leg. They assumed I was a veteran, like everyone else, not a one-legged shut-in apprentice accountant from the provinces who'd grown up sheltered by five-meter walls, a Landei determined to join the twentieth century.

For the first few weeks, I dutifully took the tram to Unter den Linden to attend lectures. At the gymnasium in Frankfurt, our tutors had been stern and humorless Wilhelmine men with moustaches and starched collars who taught the same way other men lay brick or shovel graves: a solemn, joyless duty. Listening to lectures about Greek literature and natural science in Berlin revealed to me that learning was a pleasure.

After classes, I headed west to the shops and restaurants of Friedrichstadt. I'd stop at my bank to furtively withdraw a few marks at a time, just enough to afford a pastry at Rumpelmeyer's or coffee and a soft-boiled egg at a Ku'damm café, where I sat for the entire afternoon. Soon, I took out more money and went for dinner, or to the Tingeltangel. I discovered the Wintergarten, just south of Friedrichstrasse station, an opulent world made for pleasure, a temple of delights, a palace of sparkling crowds and thrilling acts. I drank champagne between artificial fountains and grottoes filled with exotic plants, and no matter what happened on the stage–dancing girls in leather and fur, trapeze artists, a woman from Spandau getting hypnotized by a Mexican magician–you could always see the stars through the enormous vaulted glass roof. It was like Walt Disney's theme park–but with tits. Wonderful, classy tits!

To a Landei like me, the crowd at the Wintergarten was as thrilling as the stage, so different from the plump industrialists who visited in Königstein or the rough-hewn working men who ate knackwurst at the Gipsverein, where Herr Oberlin tended bar. At the Wintergarten, each person was fascinating, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, witty, and most of all, sexy. I laughed at the men's one-liners and desperately wanted to touch the women's silken dresses. I wanted to know them all, but even more than that, I wanted them to know me. After a couple of beers, I allowed myself to imagine that the applause was meant for me.

It was there at the Wintergarten I met Steffen. He approached from across the terrace with that graceful gliding gait of his, a smile so magnificent there was no way not to return it. By the time I noticed him, he'd already extended his hand, and before I could get up to take it, he'd introduced himself and taken the seat across from me. His cheeks were flushed–his cheeks were always flushed; it gave him a healthy complexion, even though I soon learned the real reasons were not of a healthy nature. His wild eyes were focused on me, and he talked quickly. He did not want to be forward, but he had a proposition.

Here was the attention I craved! Steffen's charisma made me feel blessed every moment his eyes were on me. Later, I knew movie stars like that, but unlike them, Steffen saw you when he looked. He smoked a cigarillo and talked fast, with so many clauses, interjections, and Scheunenviertel slang that was a mixture of Boxverein gangster jargon and the quasi-German the Romanian gypsies used. I learned later that he affected this accent when he wanted to impress. I didn't understand half of it, and the other half was unclear, but apparently, he was looking to play a prank on his friends–here he waved at a table across the terrace and rattled off names: Lady Miss Fear, Babsie, Kuno Kartoffel, Ute the Mole Girl, two more I didn't catch, and Anita Berber's sister Katja–and he needed my help. My help!

Why me? What kind of prank? I wanted him to slow down but I couldn't help smiling. He said he thought I had a mysterious air about me–he was talking about my leg–and he imagined that his friends would simply adore it if I robbed them. Furtively, he unbuttoned his jacket to show me the handle of a revolver. “It's not loaded.” He winked.

I looked back at his friends. One of the girls blew me a kiss. I still didn't understand.

“You want me to rob you? Do I get to keep the loot?”

Delighted, Steffen clapped his hands. “Adorable! ‘Do I get to keep the loot?’ Please, you must indulge us. Wait for us in the alley behind Dorotheenstrasse. I swear the loot will be to your liking.”

Now, I was not a complete innocent. Heinz and I both had favorite girls at a bordello in Frankfurt, and I knew how to use a prostitute. I thought of Steffen Kung as a playful dilettante, clearly drunk, looking for a way to spice up his Saturday night with a harmless prank. I wasn't entirely wrong, but I had missed the point.

So I agreed. Why not? I had a surplus of optimism and no fear. Under the table, Steffen handed me the revolver. As instructed, I laid in wait for him and his friends in the alley, held them up–”Geld oder Leben!”–but instead of offering up their money, they turned and ran. This wasn't part of the plan! Dragging my wooden leg, I chased after them across the street, and for good measure, I fired the gun into the air. Bang! It was loaded after all, and the shot echoed down the street. Roaring with laughter, Steffen and his friends disappeared into one of the apartment buildings. I followed, climbing the stairs with my leg thumping on the wood steps until I reached the apartment under the roof, a wide-open space that was hung with Indian tapestries and cluttered with divans, mirrors, pillows.

“Now I have you!” I shouted, out of breath, heart beating with excitement. I fired another shot into the ceiling. Plaster fell in a cloud of dust.

Their arms went up.

“Oh my,” said a girl with a monstrous mole on her cheek. “Please don't kill us! We'll do anything you want!” To make her point, she wiggled out of her skirt. One of Steffen's friends, his arms still in the air, produced a silver tin of cocaine. Zement, they called it.

This was the night I learned there was a real upside to my “predicament,” as my brother Heinz liked to call it. You'd be surprised how excited a certain kind of girl–or guy–can get over a missing limb. I started off with Ute the mole girl straddling me, delicious, her blouse still on, but then I felt a hand on my thigh, and somebody was removing the strap that kept the artificial leg in place. I turned and Steffen kissed me and I returned the kiss and Ute was fucking me hard while someone else was fondling my stump. When the sun came up, we were all sitting at Aschingers, spent and eating pea soup, which was, as Steffen grandly announced, based on a recipe created by a Nobel Prize winning chemist. I used part of this story in Meine wilden Wanderjahre, but of course that doesn't mean anything to you.

There's a rush when you encounter something fresh, something that floors you, a great thing you didn't know existed–a kind of opening in the world, a precipitous teetering on the edge of possibility that's thrilling beyond belief. With age, these moments become more rare, until all that's left is a distant intimation one April day when the wind is just right. By the time you're as old as me, you barely remember they existed at all, unless they come to haunt you in your dreams.

Gottverfluchte Scheisse.

I get flowery when I'm sad.

Do you see what you're putting me through?

The stars above the Wintergarten are still there, but the building was ruined in a bombing raid in forty-four. I saw photos of it, in the newspaper. They made me wish I could have been there for the last show. It must have been tremendous when the roof burst.

Steffen and his friends roamed the cafés, lounges, cabarets, bars, dance halls, and back alleys of Berlin every night of the week. He was always flushed, all hugs and love and drive, his restless eyes darting while his mouth chattered on, fueled by the company and the cocaine. He knew everyone: dancers, musicians, retired Dadaists, free thinkers, anarchist lesbians, drunken Russian émigrés, actors, nudists. He was reckless and infectious and he became my teacher in depravity. As long as there was one Tingeltangel or revue, just one jazz orchestra playing anywhere in Berlin, Steffen would be there, up front, hollering and doing his own inimitable dance, throwing his limbs every which way and waving a bottle of champagne.

He had picked me out of the crowd at the Wintergarten as a kind of mascot, a handsome, crippled freak with a Rheinland accent and a fabulous peg leg. I was young and I learned quick. Drugs let my mind, liberated from my lurching body, soar. Under the Japanese-themed ballroom ceiling of the Residenz-Casino, where the tables had telephones and pneumatic tubes, the kaleidoscopic lights of the whirling mirrored globes and colored water displays sent me on dizzying flights of fancy while go-go dancers shook their tits and stretched their boot-clad legs, whipping the wild and drunken crowd into a frenzy.

And there was sex. There were always girls who didn't mind trying it with a guy like me. Something about the leg's absence made fucking more immediate; at least that's my theory. You probably have a name for this, Herr Dokter, but I assure you, reading about it in a book is nothing. A thing like that has to be experienced. Berlin was a school in bodies, desires, horrors, lust, jealousy, fantasy, and pain. I don't mind telling you that I've tried it all: girls, boys, three, five, ten, every which hole. Does that shock you?

It didn't take me long to understand that Steffen provided cocaine and girls for the countless friends he seemed to have in every section of Berlin. Most nights, our rounds–from the Vaterland to Café Braun, from the Stork's Nest to the Cosy-Corner–were on a schedule. The outrageous crowd that followed Steffen knew they wouldn't have to pay cover fees or champagne tabs. There was always enough Zement for everyone. In return or perhaps for fun, they might go to bed with people Steffen introduced them to. It was Steffen's particular genius to mix business and pleasure in a way that made everyone happy. From Steffen I learned to seek pleasure in everything I do. If it's not fun, why bother? That was his motto, and I came to see the wisdom of it. In those days, Steffen meant everything to me.

Steffen had a new prosthesis handcrafted for me by the capital's best manufacturer, with real hair and a flexible ankle, and my limp practically disappeared. He took me shopping for smart clothes, and when I began to dabble in writing, he bought me notebooks, leather-bound beauties from Italy, much better than this Ramschladenscheissdreck you have me write in.

As a joke, Steffen introduced me as whomever occurred to him at the moment. I was an orphaned painter, an undercover Spartakist, a science protégé on scholarship. Steffen introduced me, and then I had to keep up the lies–that was the game. I was a saxophone player in Bix Beiderbecke's band. I was a Swedish mesmerist. When I was asked about the leg, I talked about dogfights high above the Somme; when they wanted to hear my award-winning poetry, I said the poems were so Futuristic they hadn't been written yet. All it took was a straight face.

There was one lie that made me seem more interesting than all the others. Everyone wanted to drink with me, get high with me, and sleep with me when we told them I was a movie director. It was the lie that turned me into the center of attention and opened the tightest twat. One night over dinner, Joachim Ringelnatz–the whimsical poet who wore a sailor's uniform wherever he went–eyed me funny and asked if I wasn't a bit young to be working for the cinema, “für's Kino.”

I had my mouth full of lamb stew, so Steffen came to my defense. “Don't you read the papers? Klaus is a prodigy! The youngest director in Neubabelsberg!”

I put down my fork, swallowed, and pointed a finger. “Joachim,” I said. “I don't work für's Kino. I am Kino!”

And that's how I gave myself my own nickname. At the time I didn't have the faintest idea about the true potential of cinema. To be honest–and I know this will sound incredible to someone of your generation–I had, in the summer of nineteen twenty-four, never seen a feature film.

Of course, I'd been to the Kino in Frankfurt, but father always made us leave the Film-Palast after the Pathé newsreel, before the movie proper. All I ever saw was the Kaiser giving speeches, columns of soldiers leaving for the front, generals being decorated. Afterwards, father tortured us with questions about what we had learned, and Heinz always knew all the answers. I begged my father to let me stay, but he said there was no point, that movies were a waste of time.

I was twenty-two and I had never seen a movie. When Steffen found out, he laughed his red-faced out-of-control-laugh and announced, still out of breath, that we would remedy the situation immediately–after a quick stop at Ronja's basement in the Scheunenviertel, where an ancient Russian woman with long white hair kept hammocks and served pipes of sweet opium. We arrived at Ufa-Palast am Zoo in a dreamy state to see Murnau's vampire movie.

How can I describe it to someone whose eyes have been sullied by decades of trivial images dancing by on TV screens? You'll never understand the rapture, the horror, the euphoric bliss I felt at the sheer visual surprise. With each passing moment, with every new shot on the screen, waves of pleasure rolled through me.

During my miserable childhood, I had been a relentless daydreamer, spinning tales from books into wild fantasies that helped me through endless days of drudgery. I dreamed of the heroes and villains of the books my mother called Schundromane, the adventures of Alain Quartermain, Phileas Fogg, and Hadschi Halef-Omar. After I met Steffen, I barely slept at all, and my nights were occupied with drinking and fucking and dancing. When sleep came, unconsciousness would have been a better name for it. Dreams had vanished from my life until the opium, until the movies, until Nosferatu brought it all flooding back.

I had read Bram Stoker's Dracula, and I had seen those images before–but not out in the open, outside of my head, projected against a wall for everyone to share. At once fascinating and terrifying, Count Orlok, the death bird, was a wicked apparition with a skull-like, elongated face and pale, wide, haunting eyes. Killing for blood was his nature, and he could not escape it. I loved the ghastly shadows of overgrown nails, the meat-eating plants, the sleepwalking bride, the caskets filled with plague-bearing rats. This was the opposite of father's newsreels, this was the technology of the night, modernity pressed in the service of poetry, culling images from dreams and rendering them visible as if by the light of the moon, for all to see.

It was magic.

To Steffen, it was just one more outrageous night in Berlin, but I went back again and again. I must have seen Nosferatu twenty times. “Why do you hurry, my young friend?” an old man asks at the beginning of the film. “No one can escape his destiny.” Like Count Orlok, these magical moving pictures would never let go.

Three years later, I was in charge of my own set in Neubabelsberg, the largest studio in Europe, making a movie that I had written. The producers, the stars, the cameramen and the newspapers all called me Kino, the name I had given myself over Horcher's lamb stew. I was a prodigy, the youngest director in Ufa's history. The lie had become truth.

Herr Dokter: what do you call the power to turn your imagination into reality?

Steffen's reckless exuberance had one drawback: his joy never lasted past morning light, and the comedowns could be terrible. He was prone to melancholy, bitter bouts of disappointment and suspicion, and during those moments, everything he said was critical and cruel–until day turned into night and the next thrill came along. Like him, I spent my days cranky and irritable, cursing the sun and wishing it was show time at the Eldorado.

It was on one of those mornings that I took the tram out all the way to the Ufa studios and got myself a job. I liked the girls and the parties, but I was after something else. My father had been a bare-knuckles capitalist, and I had grown up rejecting everything he stood for. Now, all these years later, I can see how much I took after him. I did not judge the world by money, I never calculated human worth by mark or dollar, but his self-reliance and ambition lived in me.

And thus began my illustrious career in the Weimar film industry. I got myself hired as an extra, at the bottom of the ladder. Historical epics were all the rage, and Ufa was desperate for people to fill the frame. It was a miserable job that paid ein Appel und ein Ei; day workers doing manual labor on the sets were making twice as much. But I wanted to be close to the camera, so I grinned and followed orders and kept my wild dreams to myself. Rags to riches! I know you Americans gobble this stuff up like chocolate pudding. I walked through two or three Lubitsch pageants, and then every available man was assigned to Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen.

While Ufa geared up for the biggest production in its history, the situation in Germany was deteriorating. In June, a gang of assassins shot the foreign minister on his way to the chancellery, and just to be sure, they lobbed a hand grenade into his car, too. All confidence in the new republic went to hell, and the mark began falling against the dollar. What little money I had left was quickly becoming worthless. Instead of waiting for bankruptcy, I decided to celebrate. I spent everything I had on one raucous night: lobster dinner, dancing, alles drum und dran, and when the sun came up, I was sitting in the Lustgarten with Steffen and Ute the Mole Girl, blissed out on opium tea, and–for the first time in my life–broke. A few hours later, my landlord's daughter, little Susi Oberlin, found me passed out on the Hinterhaus staircase. I was still wearing my tux, a shiny chapeau-claque, and a white shirt smeared with vomit. I clutched the neck of an almost-empty bottle of champagne.

“Guten Morgen,” Susi said, ponytail wagging.

In the early morning light that was falling through the building's stained glass front door, I could see a wet trickle of urine running from my leg onto the linoleum floor. The opium had worn off, and I desperately wanted to be back in my room with the covers over my head. My mouth was dry. I took a swig of champagne. Without thinking, I offered the bottle to the little girl, who sat down next to me and lifted it to her lips, drinking until it was gone. “Nice bubbly for a lowly student,” she said. She let go of a monstrous burp and handed the empty bottle back to me.

My embarrassment gave way to something else–the sense that in this city, not even the school children could be counted on to do what they were supposed to. I was broke and wasted, and I wouldn't be able to pay the rent. I'd given my inheritance away but it was just as well; by November, all of it would have been barely enough to afford a turnip, anyway.

Susi said, “You should probably go to bed now,” and I was grateful for her small gesture of kindness. For the first time in my life, I felt that the travails of the time were also mine. I was a true Berliner.

“They call me Kino,” I said, and Susi Oberlin burped again.

The government ordered the newspaper presses to print more money in ever higher denominations. Workers got paid at noon and ran out to spend it before it became worthless. Though I had nothing left, I never went hungry–I was Steffen's friend, and Steffen knew people with dollars, first among them his latest benefactor, Ray, an American art dealer who hosted a never-ending party at the Belvedere, a fantasy castle on the western shore of the Grosse Wannsee looking out across the sailboat-studded bay to the Lido. Ray proclaimed that he'd fallen madly in love with Steffen. Magnus Hirschfeld and some of his students were hanging out naked by the pier, there was dancing on the terrace, and in the west wing, somebody read aloud from a dirty novel they had smuggled in from France, “the most modern book ever written!” There was always enough to eat and drink and snort at the Belvedere.

Demand for drugs was on the rise, and there was more pussy to be had than ever. Can you blame me, Herr Dokter, for helping to move a little bit of both? A few deliveries here and there, the exchange of a package at Zoo station, selecting a few Tauentziengirls and boys to join us out at the Belvedere? Jawoll, I did my share of drug dealing and whore mongering, but I had dollars, and if you had dollars, you could live like a king. When the French invaded the Ruhr, prices went up further, but the parties at the Belvedere never slowed down: there was an insane edge to everything, absurd desperation in the air. When winter came, the Oberlins, my landlords, began heating the building with buckets of last week's money like everybody else. Germany's undernourished children died of tuberculosis and war veterans dragged themselves through the streets begging for a bite of stale bread or a ladle of cabbage soup. You could have an entire Kneipe dancing naked for a few coins but a billion marks bought you a cigarette. People were sniping from the rooftops out of hunger and desperation. Misery stared us in the face but we danced at the Kleist Casino.

In my sheltered, privileged life in Königstein, we had profited from pain. My new family just happened to survive very well.

In Neubabelsberg, the studio was stockpiling food for the cast and crew. Inside the Grosse Halle, there was only one law, one rule, one thing that had to be done: whatever Fritz Lang wanted.

Fritz Lang. Even before I ever met the miserable son of a bitch, with his monocle and superior airs, I hated him. Hot off Dr. Mabuse, Lang had been all over the papers with his marriage to his screenwriter bride, Thea von Harbou. In bad times, a little bit of celebrity goes a long way, and the public was eating up every idiotic rumor about the master and his muse. I had heard things, too: that the suicide of Lang's first wife had been anything but, that he couldn't climax unless he had the taste of blood on his tongue. On set, Fritz and Thea were aloof and unapproachable, like King Gunther and his Queen in the German legend we were filming, a turgid saga without hope or love.

I detested Lang's histrionic style, the ghastly overacting and oppressive angles. In person, he was an insufferable asshole. He bellowed orders and treated people like puppets. He made his actors repeat scenes for twenty, thirty, fifty takes and directed by assigning numbers to gestures and facial expressions. Then he'd count them off while the camera rolled: one, two, turn your head, smile, six, seven, faint, nine, ten. He had nothing but disdain for actors; he was a bully and a bore. And yet I watched him closely, learning as much as I could.

On the day Lang shot Siegfried's arrival in Worms, I was coming down from a three-day bender, having trouble standing up straight in the knight's heavy chain mail and helmet. Holding the shield before me, I stood shaking where Lang had placed us on a tiled floor, lined up symmetrically. By the time we redid the scene for the twentieth time, I was itchy in the ill-fitting costume. I had loosened the strap that held my leg in place. Just when Kriemhild was descending the staircase again, I could feel my leg slip until, with a slight thud, it fell flat on the ground before me.

“Cut!” Lang barked through his bullhorn, his monocle dropping out of his eye. I had ruined the take. “We are hiring cripples now? All I needed was somebody to stand there, and you get me a guy who's missing a leg? The warriors of Worms don't suffer from runaway limbs!”

Out of the darkness behind him, Thea von Harbou appeared, cradling her lap dog like a baby. She was always on set, wearing the same green outfit every day. She knitted sweaters and dictated novels to an assistant.

“Fritz,” she said, putting a calming hand on his arm. I had witnessed this before, Thea smoothing over Lang's rough edges, calming his fearsome tantrums for the sake of the production. “Everyone's good for something.”

With my leg in my hand, I went blank. She was buying me time, giving me an opportunity to speak up for myself, but I didn't know what to say. What was I good for? The only job I wanted was Lang's, but if I'd told him that, he would have pulled out his Browning and shot me on the spot. My career would have been over before it started–if Gerhard Gruber, the set designer, hadn't explained that he was having trouble setting up Siegfried's epic battle with the dragon. Gruber had constructed a huge beast, a monster of twenty-five meters that was operated from the inside, but the man who worked the tail complained there wasn't enough room for his legs.

Lang lifted the eyebrow that didn't hold the monocle and grinned.

Siegfried's fight with the Lindwurm was a marvel. The contraption was heavy as a tank and took ten men to move. For endless, claustrophobic days, I had to kick my stump, which was attached to the lever that manipulated the dragon's crocodile tail. We moved the creature's eyes, mouth, legs, and tail, we made it breathe fire and smoke, we pumped the blood that gushed from the wound where Paul Richter, the foppish son-of-a-bitch who played Siegfried, pierced the rubber skin with his sword. We damn near suffocated on the fumes. It was the most grueling work I have done in my life. The only way to bear this wretched work was to stay perpetually high, and every morning, I doled out a generous allotment of cocaine for every man inside the monster.

Word got out. One person introduced me to three others, and soon I was providing Zement to the entire production. The cinematographer, the camera and lighting crews, and the costume designers bought huge quantities for their departments, and Steffen started coming to the set to make deliveries. I became the best friend of crew and cast. Thea von Harbou sniffed lines and dictated with such speed that white foam formed in the corners of her mouth. She was full of ideas, she was efficient. Thea was the one with talent.

As the shooting of the dragon scene dragged on, a peculiar bond formed between the ten of us who made it come alive from within. We were the bones of the beast, it was our blood that circulated through its veins, our breath that fanned the flames from its nostrils. We made the creature move and fight. Through the alchemy of Kino, we became the dragon. The dragon taught me the power of the crew, coming together to make a film like the craftsmen who built cathedrals in the middle ages. Everyone's contribution, every single detail, was essential. Inside the dragon, Herr Dokter, we all understood that.

But Fritz Lang didn't know how to marshal the talent at his disposal. In my version of Die Nibelungen, the dragon would have killed that Arschloch Siegfried and eaten his entrails, but Lang was too stupid and too proud of his silly script to see. He didn't know how to let an idea flourish. Under his rigid dictatorship everything turned into a grotesque, lifeless pageant. Can you understand why the dragon's preordained fate did not sit well with us? It seemed unfair to stage this tremendous battle and not give the creature a chance. Paul Richter, prancing about in his sexy loincloth–it was a lie the monster we had created could not abide. There wasn't a word spoken, but somehow, we reached a decision nonetheless.

Lang's counting method should have left no room for mistakes–one, two, the dragon's eyes roll while Siegfried jumps left, three, a blast of fire as he strikes, four, five, a whip of the tail, and six, he impales the Lindwurm on his sword. It was during what seemed like the hundredth take of Siegfried jumping from rock to rock and striking at our vulcanized rubber skin that I flung the tail into Paul Richter's leg, a move he wasn't expecting till four or five count higher, and delivered a mighty whack that sent him flying backwards into the pond.

All ten of us inside the dragon cheered!

Curses from Lang, laughter from the crew.

A Dokter, so old he must have served under Bismarck, came along swiftly. Richter had suffered a contusion and would be unable to work for a week. The shoot was now delayed, the production bleeding money, and Lang was raging with anger. Gruber, who had saved me the last time Lang wanted my head, fingered me as the one responsible. I swear I saw him reach for the gun he kept inside his vest. But Thea was back at Lang's side, reminding him that I provided the Zement. In the throes of hyperinflation, I was the one who kept the production going, and he knew it. Even Paul Richter, that oaf, couldn't hold a grudge when we sent Ute the Mole Girl to visit him in his hospital room. Siegfried recovered quickly.

I had learned something crucial: the dragon beat Siegfried, but that's not what Die Nibelungen showed. Lang's movies didn't allow room for the incidental; he imposed his will on every element on the set. He was a liar and a fraud. But I had felt the power of the dragon, had tasted the unfettered potential of cinema to create something true and beautiful and dangerous, and I had to have more.

Die Nibelungen kept shooting into the New Year. To celebrate the end of production–in Hollywood, they call it a wrap party–Ufa turned Grosse Halle into a beer garden, serving up Bretzel and Schultheiss to the legions of extras who had all dutifully died for Lang's horrid epic. Later that night, Thea and Fritz hosted a more exclusive affair at their notorious Hohenzollernstrasse apartment. Thea asked me to make sure that cast, studio bigwigs, and investors were properly entertained. Together with Steffen, I supplied bowls of Zement, a samovar of opium tea, a hookah packed with Turkish kif, and a dozen Friedrichstadt dancers.

Thea and Fritz had turned their apartment into an exotic museum, stuffed with paintings and art objects, Chinese carpets, Japanese temple flags, sacred vases, Buddhas, shrunken heads, and cabinets filled with trinkets so Lang could brag about his travels. He was a bore, but no matter: we had made it into the inner sanctum, a place I'd only seen in the photo spreads of glossy movie magazines. In the purple library, filled with grimacing South Sea sculptures, I spotted Erich Pommer, the most successful producer in Europe, responsible for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and all of Lang's successes. Here was the man I needed to impress! Next to a cage with a large blue-and-red parrot, Thea von Harbou, who listened to an animated Rudolf Klein-Rogge, waved me over. Her black Schnauzer shook his tail at me.

“See?” Thea said. “I knew you'd be useful.”

Klein-Rogge excused himself to follow Ute the Mole Girl down a corridor.

“Making a movie is like constructing a creature,” I told Thea. “The cast is the face, the director the brain, the cinematographer the eyes and the crew the hands. You, meine sehr geehrte Frau, provide the heart.”

Thea smiled. “It appears that your domain is the nose.”

I proffered the tin of cocaine. Two Tauentziengirls in flapper dresses had talked Lang into taking down wooden African masks from their showcases on the library wall, Carl Meyer had procured some bongo drums, and together, they began an obscene tribal dance. A small crowd gathered to watch them. Lang, Pommer, and Richter sucked on cigars and clapped along to the jungle beat. Margarete Schön, who had played Kriemhild, joined the dancers.

I had another sniff and took the risk. “Can I ask you something, Frau von Harbou? Something that has been bothering me about Die Nibelungen. If you're going to make a movie in two parts, shouldn't one of them have a happy ending?”

“Don't be a Dummkopf,” Thea said. “Die Nibelungen is a story about inexorable tragedy. The first sin entails the last atonement. There can be no happy ending.”

“Sounds gloomy!” Steffen, drawn by the syncopated bongo beat, had come dancing into the room. “You and your tragedy. I can't believe that's what people want. Look around! They want beautiful women and a good time! Why are you trying to depress them with tragedy?”

“My, my.” Thea smiled, gesturing for another bump. “Your friend can dance and insult the highest paid movie writer in Europe at the same time. I suppose you have better ideas, my red-faced dervish?”

“I don't,” Steffen said. He pointed his thumb in my direction. “But he does. That's why they call him Kino.”

“They do?”

I gave Steffen a look–this wasn't how I would have approached it. “Well yes,” I admitted. “They do. If anyone gave me the chance, I could do great things. I am full of ideas.”

“He has ideas!” A familiar voice barked over the drums, loud enough to make them hesitate and stumble. Lang had noticed me talking to his wife and turned away from the jungle dance. The drumming stopped. Every head turned. “Extras, drug dealers, and pimps have ideas now?” Lang said. He projected as if he were making a toast. “What is this business coming to?”

Erich Pommer let out a belly laugh. He was bleary-eyed and in a jolly mood. “Now, now Fritz! Isn't this the young man who kept your production on schedule? Let him talk. You know I'm always looking for talent in unlikely places. Lubitsch is gone; we need to think quick if we're going to stay ahead of the Americans! This Schelm here calls himself Kino and says he has ideas? I want to hear them!” He folded his hands over his belly. “Talk.”

Suddenly I was the center of attention, my mind raging from the cocaine. Pommer was calling my bluff. Here was a room full of Ufa-Bonzen, producers, actors, directors, Thea, Lang, Richter, Klein-Rogge, even Steffen, waiting for me to deliver on the name I'd given myself. I had nothing, but I knew that there was nothing worse than saying nothing, that I had to say anything at all, and say it with confidence. Everything else would follow if I just took that first step into the void. I looked around the room, my eyes came to rest on a picturesque oil painting of a windmill, and–

“The Tulip Thief,” I said.

As simple as that.

“The what?”

It was a title and a promise: Tulpendiebe. That word was all I had, but it contained everything that followed. It arrived complete; I just had to unpack it. And that's what I did, right there, start to finish, on the spot, in front of the most powerful people in the Weimar film industry: fields and fields of flowers, the sailor, the Duke, Lilly, the stolen tulip bulb, the burning windmill, the entire story right up to the final shot.

When I was done, there was a moment of uncertain silence before Thea clapped her hands. “Bravo,” she said, and her approval gave the rest of the guests permission to show theirs. Lang turned his face into a blank mask, Steffen winked at me, and Pommer nodded, as if to say that Tulpendiebe was a movie he wouldn't mind watching–perhaps even producing.

“Very American,” he said, slurring the second word. From his mouth, it was a compliment. “Come see me in my office on Monday.” Then he dropped his glass of beer and fell backwards into a wooden sculpture with a gigantic erection that Lang claimed he'd traded for a smoked ham with a tribe of cannibals in Papua New Guinea.

There you have it, Herr Dokter: proof. If you have enough faith in the imagination, nothing is impossible. I invented myself as director, and that's what I became. From the moment I stepped into that void and said the word Tulpendiebe, everything aligned just right. My wildest dreams were becoming reality, and there were no limits.

Over the course of one golden year, I made my movie, cast a beautiful actress, fell in love, and made her my wife. How could I have known that Penelope was my salvation and my undoing at once, the spark that ignited Tulpendiebe and a miserable mistake that would ruin my career?

Oh my Lilly, my Penny! I'd give anything to see her again the way she looked in twenty-seven, when I first laid eyes on her, four beer steins balanced in each arm. Impossible to conceive now, isn't it, Herr Dokter, that the appalling, hysterical Dreckfotze who delivered me here was once the Duke's luminous daughter, the most exquisite face on German screens? I wanted to make her immortal, to burn the image of her face overlooking a sea of flowers straight into history, but I can't make Penny into Lilly again anymore than I can grow another leg.