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 Praise for Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times

and one of the year's Best Nonfiction Books by Publishers Weekly

"As definitive a Lang as we are likely to get: entertaining, appalling, persuasive."

— Steven Bach, L. A. Weekly Literary Supplement

"A beast Lang certainly was. . . McGilligan, with ferocious research and a
touch of wonder—throughout, he seems to be shaking his head in fascination-
spreads Fritz Lang's elements before us: the quasi-diabolist artist, the sadistic
perfectionist with his actors, the fervent devotee of truth, the twister of facts, the
elegant immoralist, the indefatigable amorist, the disturbing seer into the giant
maladies of his epoch. McGilligan's passion and thoroughness make his Lang
biography a permanent resource."
— Stanley Kauffmann, New York Times Book Review

"Stunning. McGilligan's research is exhaustive, his knowledge of the cinema

encyclopedic, and his narration lively. This book may well be not only the
definitive biography of Lang . . . but a longstanding model for film biographies
in general."
—Publishers Weekly

"A brilliant biography . . . McGilligan's book will stand as the definite biography
of Fritz Lang for a long time. He has given us the man, his films, and the turbu-
lent cultures and times he lived in. ... By the end, McGilligan has helped us
to understand the nature of the man and, despite his faults, which are as epic as
his early films, we come to like and admire him."
— Mamoun Hassan, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"Adroit and revealing . . . McGilligan does an extraordinarily thorough job of

separating Lang fact from Lang fable. McGilligan . . . has a great story to tell,
and he tells it with verve, originality, and insight."
—Kirkus Reviews

"McGilligan emphasizes Lang's work, illuminating his struggle to produce art

under the demands of commerce but scrutinizing the many self-aggrandizing
myths Lang nurtured. McGilligan's forthright treatment may not have pleased
his subject, who loved publicity only as long as he could control it, but its
appeal to the many cineasts who idolize Lang is certain."
— Booklist

"No detail of Lang's life has been omitted. McGilligan has returned with
another exceptional work . . . highly recommended."
—Library Journal
"By making the great artist and the impossible man seem like the same person
and not irresolvable halves, McGilligan's thoroughly researched, sharply
written book does his subject justice."
-The A. V. Club

"Well-researched and energetic."

—The Spectator

"An exemplary researcher, McGilligan has checked and cross-checked his

details, scouring archives in America and Europe. He manages to maintain
an admirable detachment—cool, sympathetic, understanding though not
indulgent, often tolerantly amused. Above all, he consistently recognizes
that what now matters most about the man is his art and that some of Lang's
seemingly destructive qualities may have come from his single-minded, even
fanatical, dedication to the pursuit of elusive perfection."
—Los Angeles Times
FRITZ LANG
FRITZ LANG

The Nature of the Beast

Patrick McGilligan

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
London
Originally published by St. Martin's Griffin Press, New York, in 1997.

First University of Minnesota Press edition, 2013

Copyright 1997 by Patrick McGilligan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGilligan, Patrick.
Fritz Lang : the nature of the beast / Patrick McGilligan. — First University of
Minnesota Press edition.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7655-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Lang, Fritz, 1890-1976. 2. Motion picture producers and directors-
United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN1998.3.L36M382013
791.43'0233092-dc23
[B]
2013026027

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
My private life has nothing to do with my films.
— FRITZ LANG
This page intentionally left blank
 C O N T E N T S

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

PROLOGUE 1
1976

VIENNA
Chapter 1: 1890-1911 5
Chapter 2: 1911-1918 27

BERLIN
Chapter 3: 1918-1921 51
Chapter 4: 1921-1922 70
Chapter 5: 1923-1924 89
Chapter 6: 1925-1927 108
Chapter 7: 1928-1929 134
Chapter 8: 1930-1931 147
Chapter 9: 1932-1933 165

PARIS
Chapter 10: 1933-1934 189

HOLLYWOOD
Chapter 11: 1934-1936 207
Chapter 12: 1936-1938 240
Chapter 13: 1939-1941 260
Chapter 14: 1941-1945 287
Chapter 15: 1945-1946 315
Chapter 16: 1946-1947 343
Chapter 17: 1948-1952 365
Chapter 18: 1952-1953 380
Chapter 19: 1953-1956 401
Chapter 20: 1957-1964 428
Chapter 21: 1965-1976 455

FILMOGRAPHY 483
NOTES AND SOURCES 505
INDEX 537
This page intentionally left blank
 A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE

TO THE FOLLOWING PUBLISHERS FOR REPRINTED MATERIAL

Bertolt Brecht Journals, 1934-1935, is quoted with permission of the publisher,

Routledge, Chapman, and Hall.

Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent, by Matthew Bernstein, is quoted

courtesy of the University of California Press.

Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, is

quoted courtesy of the University of California Press.

GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE TO THE FOLLOWING INDIVIDUALS

AND ORGANIZATIONS FOR PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL

Erich Kettelhut's Memoirs, an unpublished manuscript, is quoted courtesy of

the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Curt Siodmak's reminiscences are quoted from his unpublished Ruminations

with permission.

Marlene Dietrich's correspondence is quoted courtesy of the Marlene Dietrich

Collection at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin.

Kay Francis's diaries are quoted with permission of Wesleyan Cinema Archive,
Wesleyan University.

Oral histories from Joan Bennett, Jackie Cooper, Joan Fontaine, Gene and
Marjorie Fowler, Anna Lee, Viveca Lindfors, and Joseph Ruttenberg are quoted
courtesy of the Oral History Project, DeGolyes Library, Southern Methodist
University.

Oral histories from Martha Feuchtwanger and Albert Maltz are quoted courtesy
of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Oral history interviews from Gene and Marjorie Fowler and Hans Salter from
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are quoted with permission
of Barbara Hall, Oral History Program.
Paul Kuttner's reminiscence of Lang is quoted with his permission.

Leo Laitin's interview with Marlene Dietrich is quoted with his permission.

Special acknowledgment is made to the following individuals and organizations

for the use or loan of illustrations: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Archive Photos, Steven Bach, John Baxter, Eddie Brandt's Saturday
Matinee, British Film Institute Collector's Bookstore, Collector's Originals,
Alan Dein, Gene Fowler Jr., Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, London
Museum of Jewish Life, Photofest, John Pommer, Silvia Richards, Dr. Friedrich
Steinbach, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Kevin Thomas, USC Cinema-
Television Library and Archives of the Performing Arts, Howard Vernon, and
the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
 1976
P R O L O G U E

The end of genius is sometimes spectacular: a bomb's explosion, a madman's

gibbering, an orgasmic suicide before a sell-out audience. Sometimes—more
often, to be sure—it is lonely and poignant, as with most ordinary human
beings.
Fritz Lang, who had lived a long, colorful, and combative life, was nearing
the end. He knew it. The Last Dinosaur spent more and more time in bed as
his health waned. His weight continued to slip away, though his journal re-
corded the same persistent diet that had sustained him for most of his time
on earth—pills, martinis, eggs for breakfast, steak, or a Viennese specialty for
supper, with something rich and chocolaty for dessert.
Call girls visited, but few peers or friends. Few of his contemporaries were
left. He never had many real, close friends anyway. And no peers, he might
add with a laugh.
Irony of ironies, the man with the monocle was virtually blind. He was one
of the cinema's greatest visionaries, this director who conjured a mythic world
in Die Nibelungen and created a fantastical future in Metropolis. His Dr. Ma-
buse was the emblematic madman of Hitler's Germany. In M he explored the
depths of human depravity. After rejecting a Faustian pact with Joseph
Goebbels—if it really happened that way—he came to Hollywood, where he
found a second life exploring the depths of America, and his own inner de-
mons, in masterly films like Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the
Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat.
On good days the retired film director got up and moved about, making
his way around the house by his fingertips. Youthful acolytes who came calling,
bearing their tape recorders, might not even realize the old man could barely
see, for he met them at the door with a firm handshake and escorted them
into the invariably darkened living room. Lang maintained his pride and the-
atricality for visitors. He was "elegant" and "courtly," people said afterward-
genteel words used by many to describe the film director in his twilight years.
Elegant and courtly, though the director's behavior on the set had reminded
many who worked with him in his prime of Adolf Hitler himself. Though he
had a history—long, and well known—of sadistic behavior. Though he had
been party, perhaps, to the deaths of one or two people, years ago.
2 FRITZ LANG

Eisenstein, Bunuel, Hitchcock, and others, the new filmmaking generation

of Truffaut and Godard—all lionized him, emulated him, stole from him. The
director's career spanned fifty years, from the early silent era to the French
nouvelle vague. A handful of his titles had become acknowledged as classics,
their prints held in museum collections. But Fritz Lang guided his last motion
picture in 1960, and for the last sixteen years he had lived like a ghost in his
Summit Ridge house, on a hill high above Hollywood.
Lang liked to sit in the living room of his home in his favorite chair, an
inch or two away from the television set, holding up to the screen a enlarging
magnifying glass—a parody of the famous monocle. One eye was black-
patched at the end; the other, though almost worthless, peered through the
enlarging lens at the screen. In the early 1970s, Lang was watching the same
thing on television as everybody else in the United States. He watched Wa-
tergate unfold, cursing Nixon. He liked to pass the time watching the situation
comedies, the cornpone "Green Acres" or, later on in time, the saucier "The
Mary Tyler Moore Show." Born in Vienna, a German citizen at his professional
height, in the end Lang wanted nothing more than to be an American.
Lang always kept his journal close at hand; his beloved wooden monkey
sitting next to him. A clock ticked somewhere in the house. The only other
regular presence in the house was an enigmatic woman who might or might
not be the director's wife. Whenever Lang heard her, scraping a pan in the
kitchen, he shrieked that she was interrupting his concentration. When he felt
like it, he carried on a conversation with the monkey. He kept meticulous
notes about his daily life in his journal, though no longer did he write down
ideas, as once he had done obsessively, for his next project: Ein Film von Fritz
Lang.
Retirement had rewarded him with ample time to reflect. The director had
time to reflect on the roller-coaster ups and downs of his life and career, to
ponder his errors, to repent for his sins. Lang was, above all, a perfectionist,
ruthless toward himself as well as his films. Musing on his mistakes, he, a
lapsed Catholic, couldn't exclude the possibility that there might be a heaven
and a God after all. That for him, as for Liliom—a character in one of his
lesser-known movies—there might come a reckoning.
At rest in his favorite chair, his pencil poised, with the monkey observing
silently, Fritz Lang's mind would drift. He might doze off, then suddenly be
aroused by a tremor from the wellspring of memory: an image from long ago
that could bring an almost involuntary half-smile to features carved like a
monument. An incident of great importance—or perhaps of no importance—
might be dredged up from memory, producing an insight so unexpected and
crystal-clear that the Meister would blink momentarily in astonishment and
forget to write down what he had just remembered.
VIENNA
This page intentionally left blank
 1890
C H A P T E R 1

1911
Fritz Lang lived his life—and cultivated his legend—with the glinted eyes of
a maniac.
He was determined to carry his secrets to the grave. The true story of his
life, he believed, was nobody's business. It was irrelevant, according to his point
of view. Irrelevant to his vast audience of moviegoers, though they might be
fascinated by the bigger-than-life figure who directed with such mesmerizing
force some fifty motion pictures over the span of forty-five years. It was irrel-
evant to a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the great and near-great films, and
especially to those that were not all that great.
Though he might offer up tidbits of his life story, and enhance biographical
interviews with personal detail, it was all part of his conscious myth-making.
Understanding early that cunning publicity could nurture his career, Lang
cultivated and controlled—literally blue-penciled—his own self-mythology.
One thing the director feared was genuine reportage, or biography. It would
turn him into a hunted man—the fated victim, as in one of his suspense
stories. Biography would kill the mystique.
Journalists or acquaintances who inquired into the film director's life, into
the twists of fate that dictated the wandering path of his career, into the tales
of famous and obscure women who figured in dramatic interludes in his life,
or into the machinations of a particularly troubled production, might receive
clever fiction or convenient lies, a stony look or a brusque invitation to leave.
They might even receive a helping of truth. It depended.
Lang could be liberal with his favorite anecdotes, tirelessly repeated, pol-
ished to a glow. The story of how he fled Goebbels and Nazi Germany in 1933
is famous because the director told it so many times. It was his crowning
concoction, replete with details a novelist would relish: an office with swastika
decor, the hands of an enormous clock ticking toward a fateful hour, the
director's pockets sewn with escape money. Lang dodged the Nazi taint in
much the same way he would later evade a Communist one in America, with
a well-knit story that could not easily be dissected or disproved.
Usually, though, he was stingy with the facts of his life. It was Lang himself
who dictated and edited the brief autobiographical essay (some 2,600 words—
six pages of text, as set against more than four hundred pages of appreciative
6 FRITZ LANG

gloss) in what has been widely regarded as the definitive book about the di-
rector, Lotte Eisner's Fritz Lang, first published in 1976. Lang emphatically
told his old friend Eisner, with whom he had been acquainted since the late
1920s, "My private life has nothing to do with my films." He uttered the same
sentiment in interviews more than once.
Did Herr Lang realize that mountains of contradictory records and sources
would survive him: journals, home movies, immigration papers and interro-
gation files, studio and government archives, even the memories of trustworthy
friends and acquaintances? That not all of his associates could be trusted to
disremember, or remain discreet?
Did Herr Lang realize—was it a private joke?—that his films themselves
offered a kind of autobiography, revealing perhaps more than he intended of
his own life story? That, in fact, his films had a great deal to do with his
private life?
Or was the subconscious—that inner cacophony of voices that in his best-
known films always cried out to be heard, triggering crime and entreating
punishment—working a dark magic on Fritz Lang all along?

Certainly life began auspiciously for Fritz Lang, born to favorable circum-
stances in the Golden Autumn of Vienna, Austria—the last decade before the
nineteenth century was rolled away to make way for the new.
Austria, under the benevolent and seemingly interminable reign of "der alte
Herr," Franz Josef, emperor from 1848 to 1916, was enjoying an era of un-
precedented confidence and revitalization; tolerance and liberalism in politics;
a renaissance of the arts and sciences that established the names of Klimt,
Schnitzler, Mahler, and Freud.
Vienna, the pulse and soul of the nation, grew and prospered. The capital,
in Lang's memory, was like "a confectionery city in a fairy-tale time," whose
lucky citizens lived untroubled by what was happening in the world beyond
its limits. In 1890, it was one of the world's five largest cities, with a mush-
rooming population that included not only native Austrians but immigrants
and intellectuals from all over eastern Europe and the rest of the world. No
city was more cosmopolitan. No city offered greater cultural riches, or was
more splendid to behold.
The architecture of the city towered in Lang's psychology. The director's
unique visual style, especially in his epic silent films, was nurtured by his
boyhood experience of dwelling in the shadow of gargantuan statues and mas-
sive stairwells, steepled churches and huge public buildings. The baroque of
the old Kaiserstadt, with its exaggeration of detail, insinuated itself into many
Lang films. The characteristic shots from high places, the extreme upward-
slanting low angles, the lingering emphasis on the size and structure of massive
buildings, the people dwarfed by walls or doors—these were a legacy that was
distinctly Viennese.
The dome and spire of the St. Stephansdom, the magnificent imperial pal-
ace known as the Hofburg, the imposing cluster that included the Opernhaus,
the Rathaus, the Burgtheater, the Universitat, and the Parlament—these and
other civic edifices were within walking distance of the house where the future
film director, Friedrich Christian Anton Lang, was born on December 5, 1890.
 I 890- I9 I I 7
His parents, Anton and Paula Schlesinger Lang, at that time lived on the
narrow lane of Schonlaterngasse in the Innere Stadt, or First District, inside
the Ringstrasse, the wide beltway around the inner city.
The shadow cast by Vienna's architecture is rendered all the more germane
to Fritz Lang's life story by that of his father. Anton Lang was thirty years old
when his son was born, and city records attest that he was a Baumeister and
part owner of Honus and Lang, a prominent construction enterprise located
in a three-story building along the east side of the imperial park, the Augarten.
In latter-day books and articles about his world-famous son, Anton Lang is
usually described as an architect. In fact, Baumeister, a German word often
confused and translated as "architect" in English and French, means more
precisely that Lang's father was a builder or executor of architectural plans.
He had the additional honorific, in city archives, of Stadtbaumeister, which
simply meant that he was licensed to appear as a project manager before
Vienna municipal boards.
Architects were college-educated; they were designers, not merely contrac-
tors. They moved in higher social circles. Fritz Lang always described his father
as an architect in interviews; once, drafting a press release eventually published
under his byline in the United States, he even tried "famous architect." The
fancier word put a gloss on his father's occupation, just as Lang would also
stretch the truth when it came to his own fleeting studies in architecture,
claiming, for publicity's sake, to have studied for "several years in the best
architectural schools."*
Perhaps "architect" was convenient terminology, the natural choice of a son
proud of his father's profession and innocently overstating his expertise. Or
perhaps it was better for a director to boast the genes of an architect than a
builder—even if Lang, like his father, was only occasionally, to his eternal
frustration, the supreme architect, and more often the master builder orches-
trating the plans of others.
Honus and Lang had previously been known as Endl and Honus. Adolf
Endl and Josef Honus had made a fortune during the time of optimism and
construction known as the Griinderzeit, when Vienna was expanded and re-
organized, and the Ringstrasse was inaugurated. Endl and Honus did not con-
struct any of the more renowned buildings; they were builders of lesser
distinction, and in general restricted to the lucrative trade of erecting the
offices and residences for the well-to-do that proliferated around the Ring.
These were typically four-to-six-story block dwellings, with offices and man-
agement on the first floor, residences and tenants occupying the floors above.
Their palatial faces and interior courts proclaimed their grandeur.
The bustling company had several sidelines, including, in the late 1880s,
the construction and operation of the Wiener Centralbad, or Vienna Central
Baths. The luxurious Wiener Centralbad was situated on valuable real estate
close to the St. Stephansdom and the Stadtpark, behind the baroque facade

"Both exaggerations are quoted from versions of publicity releases on deposit among Lang's papers
at the University of Southern California-Los Angeles. In the final published draft of the article
in question ("Famed Director Fritz Lang Poses the Question: Ambitious to Direct?"), "famous"
was changed to "well-known," and the "several years in the best architectural schools" became
"a year in the best architectural school." That was less of a gloss, if still a convenient exaggeration.
8 FRITZ LANG

of an everyday apartment block which Endl and Honus had constructed in

1880. The only public baths in the center of town, the Wiener Centralbad
catered to the business community, with cold-water pools inside pillared halls
for both men and women, a steam room, mud baths, hydrotherapy, electro-
therapy, and massages.
The design offered rooms and halls "as Islamic as Meister Endl could build
them," according to a 1976 article in the magazine Wien Aktuell. "Pompeian"
murals, a marble staircase, changing rooms decorated in the Moorish style,
walls covered with Majolica tiles: The Oriental influence manifest in Fritz
Lang's films was not only common in Austro-Hungarian architecture, but
rooted in his family's personal history.
Anton Lang appears to have begun an apprenticeship with Endl and
Honus in his late teens, learning to trace architectural plans. He worked his
way up in the firm and was already married, in 1887, when he visited En-
gland to select the ceramic tiles for the interior of the Wiener Centralbad.
While touring British potteries and bathhouses, he learned that Adolf Endl
had died suddenly at age forty; cutting his trip short, Anton Lang returned
to Vienna.
Endl's untimely death precipitated a dramatic change in professional status
for Fritz Lang's father. The year of Fritz Lang's birth, 1890, also saw Anton
Lang's ascendancy; in that year, Endl and Honus was reincorporated as Honus
and Lang. How a mere employee, a one-time draftsman, came so suddenly to
share equal ownership in this substantial firm, however, is a central piece of
the family jigsaw puzzle. Only one person knew for sure how this came to be;
only one person could have supplied the whole explanation—Anton's mother,
Johanna Lang. She inherited half the business, and turned it over to her only
son.

How did Johanna Lang, who hailed from a humble background, come into
this inheritance? Like many of the women central to a Lang film, Anton Lang's
mother was a beautiful woman, mysterious, almost ruthlessly determined to
accomplish her goals in life—a trait, relatives always said, Fritz Lang inherited
from her.
Johanna Lang was born in 1839 in Sichelbach, a village in southern Moravia,
then a Habsburg province approximately ninety miles northwest of Vienna
near the Austrian border. Today this area is part of the Czech Republic.
Lotte Eisner wrote that Lang told her his paternal grandmother grew up in
the country, came to Vienna as a young girl, and became housekeeper of a
patrician Viennese family. There Johanna Lang fell in love with the son of the
house, and found herself pregnant. Born and raised a Catholic (the first inkling
of the Catholicism deeply ingrained in Lang's life), she had landed in a sinful,
scandalous predicament. "Class barriers in those days were as rigid as castes
in India," explained Eisner. But things worked out in the end: "She married
an honest man who gave her child his name," Eisner wrote.
This synopsized account, retold by Eisner, made a good story, and Lang
himself must have relished the India touch (doubtless he suggested it). How-
ever, no records survive to prove Lang's case, none that give any indication of
Johanna Lang's lineage, nor point to the identity of the patrician family—
 1890-1911 9

which didn't have to be very patrician really, since many middle-class house-
holds could afford the modest expense of servants.
There is, in fact, no documented evidence of the true identity of Anton
Lang's natural father. Only this can be substantiated from Viennese archives:
the child of Johanna Lang was born August 1, 1860, in the maternity ward of
a foundling's home in what was then the western suburb Alservorstadt (today
located more or less downtown). Georges Sturm, a European specialist on Fritz
Lang, has performed exhaustive detective work on the family tree, and his
research confirms that on the day of the birth the nuns crossed the Alserstrasse
and had the infant baptized by a parish priest. The godfather was the sacristan,
the father's name unspecified. The birth register plainly listed Anton Lang as
an "illegitimate child."
Johanna Lang never named the father, and it appears that Anton himself
did not know his identity—a theme repeated almost by chance in Fritz Lang's
1955 film Moonfleet, in which a wistful boy searches for his mother's long-lost
"friend," while never quite realizing that the gentleman-smuggler watching
over him is his wayward father. People familiar with the director's work will
recognize the illicit love affair, illegitimacy, and the "doubling" of identity as
recurrent plot situations that would become almost obsessional in his films.
Lang liked to glamorize his own illegitimate family history right down to the
happy ending in which an "honest man" comes to the rescue as father to the
child.
Obviously a resourceful figure, Johanna Lang did set out to marry and le-
gitimize her child. According to Dr. Friedrich Steinbach, a cousin of Lang's
who visited the family at intervals as a young boy in the early 1900s, Johanna
Lang's first marriage was to a member of the Endl family associated with the
building firm. He may have been the "honest man" referred to by Lang; he
may even have been the young man who impregnated Johanna Lang. One
thing is certain: he did not give his name to the child.
Nor is there any documented proof of a Lang-Endl marriage. Yet Steinbach
insisted on this point in an interview, as he equally insisted that Anton Lang
did not like or respect his first "stepfather"—a pattern destined to be repeated
by his own son. The first marriage ended in Endl's death when Anton Lang
was still a youth, according to Steinbach, and Johanna set out to marry a
second time. The second marriage, Johanna Lang's only documented marriage,
was to a schoolteacher named Karl Schott, from the Alsergrund, or Ninth
District, of Vienna. This occurred when Anton Lang was already sixteen, in
1876.
It can be hypothesized, from these tangled circumstances, that when Jo-
hanna Lang's first husband, an Endl, died, she inherited a partnership in Endl
and Honus. Perhaps she withheld her claim during the lifetime of Adolf Endl;
or, necessarily, until Anton came of age. Upon Adolf Endl's death, the mother
of Anton Lang signed that inheritance over to her only child, in exchange for
which Anton Lang agreed to pay her a periodic stipend for living expenses.
Anton never became an Endl or Schott in any case, and Johanna Lang
conferred her own surname on the child. The "Lang," therefore, comes directly
from Fritz Lang's paternal grandmother—her name and Catholicism being
the first strong, lasting imprints on his identity.
10 FRITZ LANG

Mothers are evanescent in Fritz Lang films; fathers, on the other hand,
command an inordinate presence. Metropolis, early in the director's career,
depicted a dictatorial overlord who fostered rebellion in his workers and alien-
ation in his own son; a wise and courageous professor is a heroic father in
Hangmen Also Die; later comes the anti-heroic swashbuckler of Moonfleet.
When it came to father figures in his oeuvre, Lang swung from pitiless char-
acterization to idealized sentiment, reflecting his own inability on some sub-
conscious level to come to satisfactory terms with his own father, the
"architect" Anton Lang.
In real life, Lang's father was commercially astute and fantastically hard-
working, and under his aegis the construction business flourished. A tall man,
the elder Lang was always impeccably dressed, usually sporting a mustache or
goatee. He was aloof and strict with his children, however, and showed little
interest in anything other than his work—certainly not in art or politics. Grow-
ing up, the more aesthetically minded son grew to disapprove of his father,
for whom money was all-important. The disapproval grew into rebellion, set-
tled into a cold-hearted dislike.
Fritz Lang's mind was made up on the subject of his father for a long time.
It is ironic that his father's elusive connection to Honus and Endl provided
the son with a solid footing in the world, considering that, later in life, the
director made a point of discouraging anyone with family ties from trying to
use him to get on the inside track in motion pictures. It is especially interesting
considering the scorn the director heaped on the producers with powerful
relatives whom he encountered in both Berlin and Hollywood.
Lang, owing in large part to his hostility to Anton Lang, was left without
much feeling for family. And because of his father's apparent illegitimacy, he
could easily discount Anton's influence while emphasizing, in loving tones, the
roles of his mother and grandmother. These were the only two family members
whom Lang professed to adore.
Toward the close of his richly eventful life, however, when Lang's brooding
grew morose, he had to admit that there must have been something good,
strong, and capable in Anton Lang, for things to have turned out so well for
his son.

Children, education, and religion were a mother's business. Lang's mother,

Paula Schlesinger Lang, was the woman who nurtured and shaped the boy.
Conversing with friends, Lang always placed his mother on a pedestal. The
undying reverence he felt for her colored his attitude toward the women in
his private life—they could never mother him enough—as well as toward the
actresses and female characters who populated his films.
Paula was born Pauline Schlesinger on July 26, 1864, on the outskirts of
Brno, the provincial capital of Moravia, a grim industrial city near where Na-
poleon had won the battle of Austerlitz. Brno was known for its textiles, met-
allurgical industries, and close commercial ties to Vienna. Part of the Habsburg
Empire, the city was directly linked by rail to Vienna. Today it is in the Czech
Republic.
Visiting Paris for the premiere of Die Nibelungen in 1925, Lang gave an
interview in which he referred to himself as the grandson of a modest land-
 1890-1911 11

owner "who worked the land himself" in a valley along the river Kamp. This
appears to be more romanticization, salt-of-the-earth variety. In fact, Paula's
father was a Fabrikant, or factory owner, most likely of a mill for spinning and
weaving wool. Her family was Jewish.
Pauline, by early 1883, was residing in Vienna in the Leopoldstadt, or Sec-
ond District, a section of Vienna overwhelmingly comprised of Jewish immi-
grants and families, especially those with connections to the thriving garment
and textile industry. Attracted, like generations before her, by the excitement
and opportunity of the city, Pauline was part of an influx of Jews during the
latter half of the nineteenth century that changed the balance of Vienna's
population and played a key role in the rise of the middle class. Persecuted in
previous generations, cyclically ostracized, Vienna's Jews had proved stubborn
adherents of the city, and had recently prospered under an era of emancipation
and reform.
Pauline lived in an apartment building that was listed in municipal files as
the property of her father, Jakob Schlesinger, and she worked at a clothing
store in the Mariahilf, or Sixth District, which her father owned and operated
as well. It seems likely that Pauline's father had real estate dealings with Endl
and Honus that brought her into contact with Anton Lang. From 1880 on,
Anton lived near Pauline Schlesinger at Obere Augartenstrasse 64, on the
southern edge of the Augarten in the Leopoldstadt. Josef Honus, Anton Lang's
employer, lived in the same building.
Pauline Schlesinger, not quite nineteen and Anton Lang, her senior by
nearly five years, were married in Vienna on May 22, 1883. Indications are
that Pauline received a substantial dowry, and was not only financially inde-
pendent, but perhaps wealthier than her new husband. After Anton Lang was
accepted into the firm as a partner in 1890, Paula Lang—changed from Pau-
line, part of her social integration—acquired greater-than-equal status. She
was actually listed as "Owner," with Anton Lang as "Manager," once Josef
Honus had retired in 1900. The concern was renamed A. Lang & Co.
Curiously, the Lang-Schlesinger marriage was formalized by a civil cere-
mony. Although "mixed" marriages between Catholics and Jews were forbid-
den by law, the common custom was for Vienna's Jews to convert to
Catholicism, or for non-Jews to declare themselves without religious faith. Yet
Anton Lang, though himself baptized and raised a Catholic, declared himself
without religious denomination, while Paula Schlesinger was listed in the rec-
ords—meticulous city records the Nazis would later peruse—as mosaisch, or
Jewish.
Anti-Semitism was on the rise in Vienna. Assimilation was important, and
it may be that Paula Schlesinger felt socially obliged to convert. Vienna's long-
standing preoccupation with Catholicism as well as "Germanness" would dra-
matically mark the Lang family.
This was a family that displayed obvious equivocation about religion. Before
their marriage, Pauline Schlesinger and Anton Lang made a special request
for dispensation for the religious ceremony, a request rejected by authorities.
Seventeen years elapsed before Lang's parents arranged a "double conversion"
to Catholicism and a second, religious ceremony in August of 1900, embracing
Catholic precepts. This occasion, which necessitated a special license, was or-
12 FRITZ LA NG

chestrated not in Vienna, but over one hundred miles to the west, at Ort am
Traunsee, near Salzburg, where the Langs had a vacation villa. Church records
show that Lang's mother was baptized, while Anton Lang was formally read-
mitted "to the breast of the Holy Catholic Church."
Fritz Lang was almost ten years old by 1900, and up to that time had been
diligently raised a Catholic by his Jewish mother. He himself had been bap-
tized on a Sunday less than a month after birth, in the baptismal font of the
parish Schottenkirche, or the Scots Monastery, in the Innere Stadt. The Langs
had set up house around the corner from the Schottenkirche on Schenken-
strasse, the road that leads to the Burgtheater.
The two witnesses were Christian Cabos, Fritz Lang's godfather, a KuK
Hoflieferant,* or purveyor to the royal court, associated with a biscuit company
that supplied the imperial household; and Johanna Lang's then-husband Karl
Schott. While it was unusual that the parents of the baptized child were not
Catholics in good standing, this irregularity was addressed by a clause added
to the baptismal affidavit to the effect that the non-Catholic mother and
father pledged to raise the boy in the Catholic faith. So they did—"Catholic
and very puritanical," in Lang's words.
Ironically, according to Friedrich Steinbach, it was Lang's mother, the con-
vert, who took responsibility for indoctrinating her son in the catechism and
rituals, while Lang's father, busy with work and more ambivalent about reli-
gion, skipped Mass on Sundays and acted almost heretically upon occasion.
Steinbach told this anecdote: As a young boy, Steinbach was standing on the
balcony of the Lang summer home in Gars am Kamp with Anton Lang, who
was his godfather as well as his uncle. A storm was brewing. Thunder rang
out, lightning flashed across the sky. Suddenly, Anton Lang opened his arms
to the heavens, and, to his horror, cried out, "Hit me! Hit me now! Send a
bolt for me!" Then, turning to the boy, who cowered before such blasphemy,
Anton Lang asked with a malicious grin, "Do you really believe everything
they tell you?"
Young Fritz Lang was probably present at the "double conversion" in 1900,
and likely blocked it out of his memory. Georges Sturm made an interesting
comparison between that family incident and a scene in Secret Beyond the
Door, a film Lang directed in America in 1947. In the film, an heiress recollects
her marriage to an architect. A flashback shows the wedding taking place amid
the twinkling gloom of a Mexican cathedral, four centuries old. The occasion
is photographed from extreme low-to-trie-ground angles, "which isn't justified
in the continuity of the other shots in the sequence, unless it is seen, for
example, by a child," in Sturm's words.
Fritz Lang's older brother, more intriguingly, would have been present for
the occasion—the brother Lang never acknowledged in public. Adolf Lang
(named in honor of Adolf Endl?) was born on March 19, 1884, less than a
year after the marriage of Paula and Anton Lang. A full six years older than
Fritz, Dolf (as he was called) was a few inches shorter than his brother, who
grew to five feet eleven. With his dark-blond hair, Dolf resembled his father,

*KuK, meaning kaiserlich und koniglich (imperial and royal), referred to the dual monarchy of
Austro-Hungary.
 I 890 - I 9 I I 13
while Fritz Lang, with his deep-brown hair, gray eyes, long face, straight nose
and pointed chin, took after Paula. Dolf's character and personality were more
like his father's, too. He took no interest in artistic pursuits, and in time
became a staid businessman like his father—a bank manager; in fact, utterly
middle class.
Dolf, the oldest boy carrying the family surname, ought to have been the
favored son, but the opposite was true. Dolf was disadvantaged within the
family, treated almost as a leper. The reason, as Steinbach remembered—
and Austrian military records confirm—must have carried with it a devastat-
ing personal humiliation. Adolf Lang had a rampant psoriasis that resulted
in scabs and rashes all over his body. When guests came to call, Dolf was
actually hidden away in the Lang household, like the boy whose father can-
not abide him, who is closeted in one of the mansion's many rooms in Se-
cret Beyond the Door. The ugly, embarrassing Dolf was hidden away, while
the handsome Fritz—with his intelligent face, his shock of tawny hair, his
creamy complexion—was paraded in front of visitors, his ego petted and
pampered.
The brothers, as a result, had a terrible relationship, a lifelong violent an-
tipathy to each other. It wounded their mother, Paula Lang, even though she
helped spur their lopsided rivalry. Fritz Lang learned superiority and domi-
nation, even over his older brother, from adolescence. Throughout adulthood
the brothers communicated with each other only when absolutely necessary.
Not once, when expounding on his past in the dozens upon dozens of pub-
lished interviews he gave, did the film director ever mention his older brother.
Even Lotte Eisner, in her authorized book about Lang, presents the man she
knew as well as anyone as an "only child."
There is a surprising number of brothers represented in Lang's films. To
name but a few, the outlaw brothers James in The Return of Frank James; the
dichotomous brothers of Western Union (their blood bond a secret until the
end); the mildly sparring upper-crust brothers of Man Hunt; the hateful and
complicit brothers of House by the River; the cutthroat siblings of Der Tiger
von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal.
The brother-characters were sometimes Lang's contribution to a scenario,
more often not. But he could seize on such characters in a film's story line
and make them vivid. In life as in imagination, he understood weak and both-
ersome brothers.

The Lang family lived a "thoroughly bourgeois" existence, according to the

director, whose childhood (if not his brother Dolf's) was blessed by comfort
and indulgence. Vienna might be a cold and drab, not to mention inhospitable,
place to some, but Fritz Lang led a boyhood of modest privilege, and his
earliest memories of the place would be almost paradisical.
The Langs moved several times before settling down, in November of 1900,
in a stone fortress at Zeltgasse 1, in the Josefstadt, or Eighth District. The
family occupied the first floor of a massive five-story, U-shaped building, which
was surrounded on three sides by narrow streets and opened onto a cramped
square. It was situated near the Piaristen Church, short blocks from the Jo-
sefstadt-Theater and a place that must have loomed in the psyche of a boy
14 FRITZ LANG

destined to make his mark as a crime-story filmmaker—the Landesgericht, or

Criminal Court Building.
Lang remembered this as a period of "great, decisive change" in Vienna.
Miraculous twentieth-century technology, beginning to transform daily life,
exerted a profound effect on the future director. The fantastical was made
real before his very eyes. The marvels Lang would predict in his career—the
television devices, criminal, police, and spy gadgets, rocket-ship flight—were
a logical outgrowth of the fact that his boyhood was a time of unprecedented
scientific and technical revolution.
The Fiaker were typically Viennese, and Lang fondly remembered these
two-horse open carriages on springs, their wheels covered with India rubber.
The name applied to the drivers too, famous for their facility with whip and
tongue, as well as the vehicle. The Fiaker were drawn by two well-fed horses
trotting in harness. Only the "very rich," in Lang's words, could afford to ride
in the luxurious carriages, yet he was able to ride the Fiaker often enough to
learn to recite the Fiakerlieder, the rollicking folk songs sung by the coachmen
and popularized by Alexander Girardi, an irreverent Viennese actor of the turn
of the century.
The Fiaker gave way to electric rails and horseless vehicles. Lang remem-
bered, from his boyhood, the city streetcars pulled by two horses. When he
was old enough to go to Volksschule on Josefstadterstrasse, several blocks away,
he had to ride the city transport up a hill, and a third horse had to be harnessed
to the streetcar in front of the other two. The little boy was sometimes per-
mitted to sit up front on the coach box.
Lang remembered how the lantern igniters disappeared as the gas lanterns
were replaced by electric ones. He remembered his father's phonograph "as
his most modern acquisition," and a time when all the music was recorded
and played on metal cylinders. He remembered when his father took him out
to the suburb of Breitenfurt to see a wagon that moved without horses—the
first automobile; and how the proud Fiaker were forced gradually to defer to
automobiles on the chestnut-tree-lined boulevards of the city.
The family enjoyed distinctly Viennese activities, such as the promenade
past elegant shop windows in the late afternoon. Lang remembered the men
in their frock coats and toppers, the military clicking of heels, the corseted
women with furs and boatlike hats. Idly gazing into shop windows—kicking
one in, in Rancho Notorious—became ritual behavior in Lang's films. Two of
his finest Hollywood dramas, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street,
begin, with deceptive innocence, with window-shopping.
There were annual parades and pageants tied to the changing calendar, and
regular trips to the scenic parks and formal gardens; best of all were the family
outings to the Prater, the huge amusement park on the east fringe of the city.
Naturally the Prater was the boy's favorite haunt, his adventure through the
looking glass. The park boasted the famous giant Prater wheel, a carousel,
amusement booths, a penny arcade, a shooting gallery, test-your-strength ma-
chines, a freak show, the Wiener Watschenmann ("a big leather mannequin"
that looked "like a cross between a gorilla and an antediluvian Cro-Magnon
man," according to Lang's sometimes uncanny memory, "dolled up in silken
 I 890 - I 9 1 I 15

knee breeches and a green hunting jacket"); and simple open-air restaurants
with female orchestras.
Unlike many of the places the boy visited with his family, the Prater was a
democratic crossroads, egalitarian in its appeal. The gentry mixed with servants
and factory workers, the privates of the Viennese house regiment, swells, hus-
tlers, and peasant girls. ("Their faces are fresh and radiant and their breasts
full and inviting under embroidered blouses," Lang wrote of the peasant girls
in one of his unproduced scripts. "They all carry the indispensable fat umbrella
and wear gaudy-colored, wide-skirted native costumes, hair tucked in under
big fringed kerchiefs.") When Ferenc Molnar's Liliom was translated from
Hungarian into German, the setting was shifted from Budapest's amusement
park to Vienna's Prater. Later on, when Lang fled to Paris and was handed
the screen adaptation of Liliom, some people thought it was a case of "director
miscasting," yet he was quite at home commemorating the Prater.
Viennese theater was at a historical peak of creativity. The Hofburgtheater
was probably the leading playhouse in the German-speaking world, while the
Theater in der josefstadt, near Lang's home, was run by a gifted impresario
from Budapest, Josef Jarno, who alternated French farces, for audience appeal,
with productions of two forerunners of modern expressionism, Strindberg and
Wedekind. (In the 1920s, this theater would be taken over by Max Reinhardt
and his celebrated ensemble.)
It must have been Paula Lang who prompted regular excursions to these
and other legitimate theaters. "My parents went twice a month to see a play,
and then they discussed it with friends," Lang once recalled. "It was an event."
Sometimes the boy was permitted to accompany his parents; later in time,
Lang attended many plays on his own and with school friends. He remembered
frequenting the Volkstheater, where the plays of Anzengruber and Grillparzer
were performed, and especially the Raimund-Theater, which specialized in
fairy tales by leading dramatists.
He would never forget Girardi in Ferdinand Raimund's Der Bauer ah Mil-
liondr (The Farmer As Millionaire), in a scene where Youth takes its leave of
him. The character of Youth was played by a "full-breasted soubrette," in
Lang's words, and Girardi, without benefit of makeup or special effects, made
a magical metamorphosis into an old man in full view of the audience. The
persistent refrain of many typically Viennese plays was death and destiny. From
his earliest films, notably in 1921's Der miide Tod, with Bernhard Goetzke
impersonating a somber, weary Death, the director explored kindred terrain.
Perhaps the theater that gave him the most pleasure also exerted the
greatest influence—the fantastical Kratky-Baschik Zaubertheater in the Prater.
Hardly Vienna's most eminent, it was Lang's favorite as a boy. Ghosts, goblins,
witches, gnomes, and fairies pranced across the stage of this little theater in
the park, which specialized in pyrotechnics, optical illusions, smoke, and mir-
rors. Lang made sure that Lotte Eisner took note of the Zaubertheater, and
that she mentioned it in her book about him.
Although the Lang family patronized Vienna's theaters, they may have vis-
ited museums and attended classical concerts less religiously. Lang admitted,
in one interview, an obliviousness to the Sezession, the artists' movement that
16 FRITZ LA NG

broke with tradition and swept Vienna in the late 1890s and early 1900s.
Although he visited museums elsewhere in Europe during his Wanderjahre,
he rarely mentioned Vienna's galleries in his reminiscences, and as a youth
appears to have spent little time exploring them.
He was not infatuated with still art. Although he amassed a modest private
gallery in Berlin, he would leave collecting—and museum-going—behind in
Hollywood. In his spare moments, according to friends and associates, it was
more the director's wont to head to the Los Angeles planetarium or to Sea
World. "He was an intelligent and artistic man, but he didn't collect art," said
Sam Jaffe, Lang's longtime agent in Hollywood and a noted art patron of the
screen colony. "I didn't see [much] art in his house, unlike [the director Josef]
von Sternberg, for example, who collected pictures and paintings. I never got
the idea Lang went to concerts. I never got the feeling he went to a museum."
Lang said on more than one occasion that he was also left uninspired by
classical music, growing up in this city that had succored Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, and her native Schubert. The director made a point of telling
friends that he was a musical ignoramus; Lang liked to boast that as a boy he
was thrown out of Realschule music class because he couldn't carry a melody
and always hit the wrong notes.
One day, many years after Realschule, the director and his friend, actor
Howard Vernon, were visiting London together. Lang rang for Vernon in his
hotel room, but the actor did not answer right away because he was listening
to a Mozart composition on the radio. Later, Vernon apologized to Lang,
explaining that he was held spellbound by the music. The director reacted
surprisingly, confessing, somewhat shamefacedly, that he envied Vernon's love
of Mozart's music, which left him cold. "I like folk songs, but ten horses
couldn't bring me to a concert or an opera," he liked to say.
Lang did love traditional folk music, the colorful, sometimes bawdy, often
sentimental songs of Vienna's streets and cabarets. This was an affection he
transferred to the United States, where he fervently embraced American folk
songs and cowboy tunes. He couldn't recognize many pieces by Mozart, but
with tremendous zest he could and would sing, at the drop of a hat, the
Fiakerlieder, Heurigenlieder (wine songs), or American cowboy verses—word-
perfect, even in advanced old age.
"Music is the same to me as it was to Goethe—a pleasant noise," Lang
said in one interview. "I am an eye man, not an ear man." His films had to
take this deficiency into account. Where the sound track, or musical accom-
paniment, was concerned, Lang was forced—more than was characteristic—
to rely on the ideas of others. Perhaps as a consequence the director preferred
sparseness, the absence of music. "Having a musical background for a love
scene, for example, has always seemed like cheating to me," Lang said in one
interview. This element of his sensibility added an unusual quality to his work;
of his weakness, he made a strength.
The "eye man" was certainly a wide-ranging reader from early boyhood.
The family owned the collected works of Jules Verne, whose books became
well-thumbed—natural nourishment for the future director of Metropolis and
Die Frau im Mond. Lang admitted once that he preferred the Germans who
emulated Verne: Willi Gail, Kurd Lasswitz (pseudonym: Velatus), and espe-
 J 890 - I 9 J I 17
cially Hans Dominik, whose cliche-laden works employed the Langian strategy
of impressing readers with scientific know-how within imaginary settings. As
he grew, Lang graduated to occult books and a species of literature known as
Schundliteratur, or "trash literature," one branch of which dealt with the love
life of the insane King Ludwig II of Bavaria; another of which related lurid
tales of robbers and criminals.
Lang had discovered the existence of this titillating genre one day when he
furtively visited the maid's quarters in his parent's apartment ("probably
driven by some youthful sex urge"). That visit resulted in two disappoint-
ments: ". . . that this very good-looking girl wasn't in and the heap of install-
ments of The Phantom Robber, which I found on her nightstand, was a
miserable substitute for what I had hoped to find . . . and, secondly, when my
father found me reading the penny dreadfuls, he not only took them away,
but slapped my face with them several times, forehand and backhand."
This particular weekly magazine carried a regular cover illustration, often a
crude depiction of a murder or rape. Minor and major characters in Lang's
films, from Fury to While the City Sleeps, are similarly held in thrall by lowbrow
crime magazines. More than once, in his American interviews, the director
boasted that he kept up with "ze pulp." "I find much of it very dull, yes,"
Lang told a columnist in 1945, "but I find much of it interesting too."
American Westerns also captivated him. Many he read were dime novels
in crude translation, including one, Lang recalled years later, that chronicled
the exploits of the outlaw James brothers. (When Lang filmed The Return of
Frank James, he reportedly told Henry Fonda, "I thought the James boys were
the greatest heroes since Robin Hood—I used to cry over Jesse's death.")
Others were homegrown, from the fertile imagination of the German novelist
Karl May, author of over sixty published works.
Beloved among a generation of Germans, May did not leave his provincial
hometown in Germany to visit the faraway places he wrote about until he'd
finished some thirty novels, but his descriptive sagas of the Middle East, the
American frontier, and other distant lands made those places seem authentic
and inviting. Lang's enthusiasm for Karl May was something he claimed in
common with his wife and scenarist Thea von Harbou. Regardless of their
intellectual orientation, German-speaking people, from Adolf Hitler to Albert
Einstein, found in the author a shared touchstone. Even Einstein declared,
"My whole adolescence stood under his sign."
Karl May was Lang's ticket to the Wild West—in a sense his first escape
from Vienna. A love of the American frontier was deeply rooted in his boyhood,
and never lost its purity, or naivete. Later on, in Hollywood, the director's
Western films would prove labors of love, even tainted as they were by the
simplistic perspective of dime novels and Karl May.
The boy's infatuation with American frontier mythology must have reached
euphoria when Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show arrived in Vienna, during
the troupe's farewell European tour, in 1905. It was a high point, and an end
point, of Lang's childhood. Though he was nearly fifteen, he always remem-
bered his brief glimpse of Buffalo Bill, one of his towering Western heroes,
with the awed eyes of youth.
Lang would write only two screenplays about Vienna, one being the 1951
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