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.A N Rl EV I EW
to satisfy its lust for domination, ruthlessly violates all human rights
and values. Functioning as a mere instrument, Cesare is not so
much a guilty murderer as Caligari's innocent victim. This is how
the authors themselves understood him. According to the pacifist–
minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dim design of
portraying the common man who, under the pressure of compul–
sory military service, is drilled to kill and to be killed. The revolu- -
tionary meaning of the story reveals itself unmistakably at the end,
with the disclosure of the psychiatrist as Caligari : reason over–
powers unreasonable power, insane authority is symbolically abol–
ished. Similar ideas were also being expressed on the contemporary
stage, but the authors of
Caligari
transferred them to the screen
without including any of those eulogies of the authority-freed "New
Man" in which many expressionist plays indulged.
A miracle occurred: Erich Pommer, chief executive of Decla–
Bioscop, accepted this unusual, if not subversive, script. Was it a
miracle? Since in those early postwar days the conviction prevailed
that foreign markets could only be conquered by artistic achieve–
ments, the German film industry was of course anxious to experiment
in the field of aesthetically qualified entertainment. Art assured ex–
port, and export meant salvation. An ardent partisan of this doc–
trine, Pommer had moreover an incomparable flair for cinematic
values and popular demands. Regardless of whether he grasped the
significance of the strange story Mayer and Janowitz submitted to
him, he certainly sensed its timely atmosphere and interesting scenic
potentialities. He was a born promoter who handled screen and
business affairs with equal facility, and, above all, excelled in stimu–
lating the creative energies of directors and players.
Pommer assigned Fritz Lang to direct
Caligari,
but in the middle
of the preliminary discussions Lang was ordered to finish his serial
The Spiders;
the distributors of this film urged its completion. Lang's
successor was Dr. Robert Wiene. Since his father, a once-famous
Dresden actor, had undergone a spell of insanity toward the end of
his life, Wiene was not entirely unprepared to tackle the case of
Dr. Caligari. He suggested, in complete harmony with what Lang
had planned, an essential change of the original story-a change
against which the two authors violently protested. But no one heeded
them.
The original story was an account of real horrors; Wiene's ver–
sion transforms that account into a chimera concocted and narrated
by the mentally deranged Francis. To effect this transformation
