Dr. Mabuse: Terror and Deception of the Image

In his classic study of Weimar cinema, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer presented an interpretation of Dr. Mabuse that has become a critical canon: the villain belongs among a "procession of tyrants" (79) of the German screen that prefigures the ascendancy of Hitler. More recently, Tom Gunning has examined Mabuse's place in Fritz Lang's oeuvre and argued that the doctor is the "grand enunciator" (87) of the impersonal forces of destiny that pervade the director's work. This essay seeks to strike a balance between Kracauer's psycho-sociological analysis and Gunning's immanent critique in order to examine Mabuse as a refraction of climates of fear throughout the 20th century. Germany, where Mabuse enjoys iconic status, provides the immediate frame of reference, but this framework has material support that extends beyond national borders and strict historical periodization. Norbert Jacques invented Dr. Mabuse in a novel originally published in serialized form, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1921-1922). Almost immediately, Fritz Lang transformed the literary material into a two-part film with the same title (1922). Both versions of Mabuse enjoyed tremendous commercial success and created a villain whose career reached new heights ten years later in another film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (on which Jacques, Lang, and Thea von Harbou collaborated). The story does not end there: Jacques wrote three more Mabuse books (Ingenieur Mars [1923], Mabuses Kolonie [a fragment] and Chemiker Null [1934]), and Lang made another Mabuse film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (1960). The doctor quickly became a German and even an international Kulturgut, the subject of numerous other books and films. In a recent study, David Kalat cites a poll finding that 95 percent of German teenagers in the mid-1980s recognized the name Mabuse (282). The doctor is not only "a bona fide pop culture phenomenon" (6); he is a modern myth.1 This essay concentrates on Lang's 1922 and 1932 films against the backdrop of Mabuse's sinister and giant profile in German culture. The first section explores the differences between the literary and film versions of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler to show how Lang's treatment exploits the properties of the cinematic medium to create an adversary of singular stature. A paradox runs throughout the film. Mabuse is a hypnotist and a master of the Evil Eye, but despite his ability to mesmerize others, his criminal ambitions flourish precisely to the extent that he avoids direct personal involvement in his schemes. The second section of the essay examines how the villain's seeming ubiquity, which the 1922 film establishes, develops in the 1932 sequel. In Testament, Mabuse does not himself appear where he intends harm. He drafts a document outlining a campaign to be executed by others, and this program can be carried out even after its author's death. Consequently, Mabuse takes on a supernatural aspect that further refines the impression that he is "everywhere and nowhere." Testament, which Kracauer's authoritative opinion deems the lesser of the two films (cf. 248-50), is in fact the more significant work because it describes a simple mechanism of terror that possesses a potentially limitless scope and extends far beyond the historical moment in which the film was conceived. A concluding section reads 1000 Augen as a logical development of the dynamics outlined in Testament and argues that "Mabuse," a name that points more toward alterity than identity,2 refers 21 "-century viewers not so much to 1930s Germany, but to opacities in their own world. The instant success of Mabuse in print and on-screen in the early 1920s owed much to the fact that the villain embodied the turbulence of the political and social situation in Germany. Jacques's novel and Lang's film took widespread fears of armed threats to the young republic's stability from the right and the left, the persistence of war-time traumas, and concerns about economic chaos and ascribed them to a single agent. …