Kino (15 page)

“In fact, no,” Mina said. “I need a flight to Los Angeles.”

Chapter 11

Adolf Hitler became
Reichskanzler
on January thirtieth, nineteen thirty-three. The Weimar Republic had run out of time,
und das Land der Dichter und Denker
was about to sink into barbarism. I barely paid attention when those criminals took over. I was busy making movies.

The waning years of the republic had been difficult. I followed my “auspiciously poetic debut” (
Rheinischer Merkur
) with
Land der Gnade
, the story of an expedition to a tribal kingdom in the heart of Africa. Once again, I let pleasure and whim lead me, but this time, nothing came easy. When the stock market crashed, my budgets plummeted as well. Tastes were changing, and
Land der Gnade
didn't do as well as it should have.
Jagd zu den Sternen
was delayed by a ridiculous plagiarism suit, and Pommer ordered endless unnecessary reshoots for
Meine wilden Wanderjahre
.

You could be excused for assuming that history did me in: the war, the Nazis, the next war, the witch hunt that awaited me in America–but I know that I would have persevered if it hadn't been for Penelope. The deaths we witnessed in the basilica had a devastating effect on her. To me, it was just a coincidence that proved that my movies resonated with the world. As tragic as it had been to see the professor die, I couldn't say I was surprised to come face to face with a scene from my movie. Why would that seem any stranger than seeing these images in the first place? It was like a wink from the universe, cruel and horrifying but also reassuring. Penelope, however, couldn't understand it, couldn't fit what had happened into her physicist's brain, and she convinced herself that I was to blame for the professor's death. It poisoned her relationship with my movies, and she began to undermine me.

Starting with
Land der Gnade,
she tried to wrest control from me, improvising new scenes and demanding co-writing credit. She began drinking in earnest and got used to a bump or two of
Zement
before her scenes. Who was I to argue? She gave the other actors notes and made impossible demands on set. When I was out of earshot, she abused the crew. She earned a reputation as a diva who was difficult to work with.

Penelope claimed she kept seeing scenes from my movies out in the world–striking workers on Wittenbergplatz facing off with the police as if reenacting the climactic confrontation from
Land der Gnade
, the exact framing of the establishing shot of Saturn from
Jagd zu den Sternen
on a weekend trip to the Baltic Sea. I saw it, too, but it never made any difference to me. It seemed only fitting that these images would appear everywhere, on screen, off screen, in my dreams–and I didn't particularly care about the distinction. But Penelope seemed personally offended, and each time she got angrier, more confused, more shaken. On our way to the premiere of
Der Blaue Engel
, we happened upon the wedding scene from
Meine wilden Wanderjahre
, in front of the Dom, and she begged me to stop making movies.

Can you believe it? I laughed in her face. Because she was upset about a coincidence or two? My art is fueled by bliss, by instinct, and I refused to let fear of the unknown stop me. I was shocked by her lack of faith. The unknown was exactly what I was after. To make the most powerful images possible, I had to give the mystery free reign. If you try to understand it, it disappears.

She would not listen. I swore that I would never stop making movies.

After that, the fighting never ceased. Penelope was still beautiful and witty, and I was too loyal to her to see what was happening. I mistook her for my muse while she systematically undermined me. It was Penny who advised me to turn down the deal with Nebenzal that could have landed me
Pandora's Box
. It was Penny who embarrassed me so miserably at the Adlon during Chaplin's visit. It was Penny who threw my first draft of
Jagd zu den Sternen
out of the window of a speeding train, the pages trailing in the slipstream as if they'd never have to touch the ground. It was Penny who refused to work with the young Rühmann.

Our life at home got much more difficult as well. I had never wanted children–cinema would accept no distraction–and Penelope had agreed. But after her mother died, she asked her father to live with us. I relented, aware right away that it was a mistake. The old man brought a sour smell into the house, shuffling around in his
Filzpantoffeln
and spiking his coffee with Asbach Uralt. When he wasn't bent over his books or the
Morgenpost
crossword puzzle, he held court in the salon. Former students came and went at all hours, discussing politics, art, science, and metaphysics.

Penelope joined these debates with an ever-rotating group of disciples. Talk was heated, there was the occasional slammed door, and more than a few visitors were banished because of unwelcome political alliances. They had theories about everything.
Schnickschnack
! What good are theories? There is nothing to understand.

When subatomic particles and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle failed to enlighten, they turned to the occult. I don't know who first brought the tarot readers and turban-wearing spiritualists to the house, but soon Penny and Leo engaged in séances and other kinds of mystical hocus-pocus. The talk was all about Aleister Crowley and Hanussen, Madame Blavatsky, black holes, morphic resonance, and the Copenhagen Interpretation. Penny ran her coked-up mouth all night, shoring up her hatred of me and my work.

Meanwhile, my new script was stalled.
Die Piraten von Mulberry Island
, the thrilling and romantic story of daring Captain Darius Silko and his trusty crew, my most ambitious project yet, would be my return to form–if I could only finish it.

Working with Penelope had become a nightmare, but we had signed a five-film deal with Pommer, and the public expected her in my movies. She would play Bonnie, the young bride who is abducted by the pirates and falls in love with Captain Silko. Penelope took up fencing and agreed to take acting lessons in the new style required by sound. Jonas Krugel was cast as the dashing pirate captain. We began shooting on the day of the Reichstag fire: I was so busy it barely registered. Politics didn't concern me, not until a month later, when the NSDAP announced the formation of the
Reichs-Film-Kammer
and invited the elite of Germany's film industry to a meeting at Hotel Kaiserhof. This was March twenty-eight, nineteen thirty-three. You can look it up in a history book.

When I was a child, my mother hosted an annual Christmas dinner for the local
Bonzen
. In the last year of the Great War, while the masses went hungry, we ate goose. After dessert, the children were excused from the table, and when I got up, Alexandre Dumas's
The Three Musketeers
slipped out from under my holiday suit. The book fell to the carpet between my mother and Friedensreich Thyssen, the steel magnate. Thyssen–a grotesquely obese man–leaned over with a huff and picked it up. When he saw the title, he frowned, and that was enough: my mother grabbed the book from her guest's hand, slapped me across the face, and tossed it into the fireplace.

“Alexandre Dumas?” she shouted. “
Strengstens verboten
!”

She was right. After Verdun, father had proclaimed all English, French, and Russian books off-limits, the reason
The Three Musketeers
had been hidden under my jacket in the first place. To save face in front of his powerful guests, father ordered all “enemy literature” burned in the morning. I didn't sleep that night.

We were ushered into the courtyard after breakfast. The servants had built a fire. Father made us watch as the
Hofmeister
threw our books into the fire one by one: Dumas, Verne, Ryder-Haggard, Conan Doyle. These stories had meant everything to me.

Herr Dokter, I'm telling you about my parents' bonfire because it's easy, afterwards, for everybody to agree that we didn't know and we didn't understand and we didn't see it coming. Don't believe a word of it. It was obvious that the bastards were up to no good, with their boots and their national revolution. I hated their certitude, their pathological lack of doubt, their complete absence of humor. Even in the early days, when they marched in the streets and sang songs, they looked like Death to me, goose-stepping and staring straight ahead toward some frightful destiny. I hated their torchlight parades, barking speakers, and hero's funerals. Their symmetrical spectacles were
Metropolis
made flesh. My poetic utopias lost out to Lang's nightmare futures.
Die Nibelungen
, dedicated, after all, to the German people, was a tale of blind loyalty that ended in an epic cataclysm. Sound familiar? And who was Adolf Hitler but a real-life Dr. Mabuse?

Yes, we saw them for what they were, but politics always disgusted me. I was bored by the speechifying and the grandstanding. Simple-minded, authoritarian, repressive
Scheissdreck
–that's all politics ever was, from the Kaiser to Hitler to your Mr. McCarthy. They were all the same to me, the Communists and the Nazis, the old Nationalists who wanted the Emperor back, the stiff-necked Republicans, the Social Democrats–all of them corrupt and evil. The mission of my movies was to imagine a life beyond politics.

I was wrong, of course. But it's not
Vergangenheits-bewältigung
you're after, is it? I've been called many things–hack, pimp, wastrel, genius, traitor, sell-out–and most were well-deserved. But I was never a Communist, and I was never a Nazi. Did Penny tell you that, too? I never joined the NSDAP. I never made propaganda. All of this was established during my immigration hearings, where I made my case with overwhelming evidence, all of which is, along with transcripts, on file with the INS. My politics are not what's at stake here. I always hated them, even before the ovens. They burned people, and they burned my movies.

Everyone who was anyone was there that night at the Kaiserhof: Albers, Fritsch, Veidt, Jannings, Lorre, Dietrich. The walls were lined with goons in uniforms, and many of the assembled actors, directors, and producers arrived in party uniforms. Lang was wearing one, and he'd pinned on some sort of medal he'd won in World War I. He was in bad shape, pale and haggard. He'd gotten divorced from Thea von Harbou after he found her in bed with an Indian prince by the name of Ayi Tendulkar. The entire city had laughed about it for weeks. His new movie,
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
, had been held up by the censors for months, its future uncertain.

Penelope had not received an invitation to the meeting; like Lang, I came alone.
Reichspropagandaminister
Goebbels, the limping lying crippled sack of shit, came in flanked by stormtroopers, Prince Wilhelm August of Prussia, and Count Wolf Heinrich Helldorf. Some
Arschloch
from the
Reichsverband der Lichtspieltheaterbesitzer
gave a speech. I didn't listen until Goebbels got up to speak. He moved like one of Lang's actors, with brisk, controlled gestures that might as well have been counted off by a metronome. It was chilling. He called himself “an impassioned devotee of cinematic art” and assured us that he did not want to put boundaries on anyone. I might have sneered if it hadn't been for the SA men. “Tendentious art can also be great art,” he said, and then he singled out five movies for praise: Edmund Goulding's
Love
,
Battleship Potemkin
, Trenker's
Rebel
,
Die Nibelungen
, and
Tulpendiebe
. It was incredible: three of these movies were directed by Jews,
Potemkin
glorified the Bolshevik revolution–and
Tulpendiebe
? Goebbels liked my film? How was this possible? How dare he!

But I admit–I was also intrigued. Did Goebbells's taste trump his ideology, or was this just one more blatant attempt at manipulation? But to what end? I needed to know what this meant, for my movies and for my future.

After the speeches, I was introduced. The newly appointed Minister of Culture and Propaganda was hunched over, with a piercing gaze and gaunt cheeks. He regarded my prosthetic leg, barely noticeable to the general public, with a connoisseur's eye. Goebbels knew movies and he knew cripples.

“It's Kino himself,” he said to me. I held out my hand, but he flapped his. “
Heil Hitler
!”

I took my hand back.

“Your movies contain the seeds,” he said. “They are deeply flawed and yet point the way to a pure, perfect German film art.”

“Deeply flawed?”

I must have raised my voice, because the circle of uniformed bootlickers around us tightened instantly.

Goebbels waved them off. “As groundbreaking as your films are, they are marred by imperfections and absurd ideas. Your flawed utopias only hint at the glorious destiny that awaits the German
Volk
. Once you outgrow your ambiguities, I am certain you will become a valuable asset to National Socialist film. One day, your work will live up to the power and ingenuity of the German spirit!”