Caligari*
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER
T
HE CzECH
Hans Janowitz, one of the two authors of the film
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari),
was
brought up
in
Prague-that city where reality fuses with dreams, and
dreams tum into visions of horror.** One evening in October 1913
this young poet was strolling through a fair at Hamburg, trying to
find a girl whose beauty and manner had attracted him. The tents of
the fair covered the Reeperbahn, known tu any sailor as one of the
world's chief pleasure spots. Nearby, on the Holstenwall, Lederer's
gigantic Bismarck monument stood sentinel over the ships in the
harbor. In search of the girl, Janowitz followed the fragile trail of
a laugh which he thought hers into a dim park bordering the Hol–
stenwall. The laugh, which apparently served to lure a young man,
vanished somewhere in the shrubbery. When, a short time later, the
young man departed, another shadow, hidden until then in the
bushes, suddenly emerged and moved along-as if on the scent of
that laugh. Passing this uncanny shadow, Janowitz caught a glimpse
of him: he looked like an average bourgeois. Darkness reabsorbed
the man, and made further pursuit impossible. The following day big
headlines in the local press announced: "Horrible sex crime on the
Holstenwall! Young Gertrude -- Murdered." An obscure feeling
that Gertrude might have been the girl of the fair induced Janowitz to
attend the victim's funeral. During the ceremony he suddenly had
the sensation of discovering the murderer, who had not yet been
captured. The man he suspected seemed to recognize him, too. It was
the bourgeois-the shadow in bushes.
*
EDITOR's NoTE: This is a chapter from a forthcoming book,
From Caligari
to Hitler: a Psychological History of the German Film,
to be published this
month by the Princeton University Press.
**
The following episode, along with other data appearing in my pages on
Caligari,
is drawn from an interesting manuscript Mr. Hans Janowitz has written
about the genesis of this film. I feel greatly indebted to him for having put his
material at my disposal. I am thus in a position to base my interpretation of
Caligari
on the true inside story, up to now unknown.
