170
PARTISAN R;·EVIEW
substantiated by a most illuminating statement
in
Joseph Freeman's
novel,
Never Call Retreat.
Its hero, a Viennese professor of history,
tells of his life in a German concentration camp where, after being
tortured, he is thrown into a cell: "Lying alone in that cell, I thought
of Dr. Caligari; then, without transition, of the Emperor Valentinian,
master of the Roman world, who took great delight in imposing the
death sentence for slight or imaginary offenses. This Caesar's favorite
expressions were: 'Strike off his head!'-'Burn him alive!'-'Let
him be beaten with clubs till he expires!' I thought what a genuine
twentieth-century ruler the emperor was, and promptly fell asleep."
This dreamlike reasoning penetrates Dr. Caligari to the core by con–
ceiving
him
as a counterpart of Valentini.an and a premonition of
Hitler. Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he
uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool-a technique
foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that manipulation of the
soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale. Even
though, at the time of
Caligari,
the motif of the masterful hypnotizer
was not unknown on the screen-it played a prominent role in the
American film
Trilb y,
shown in Berlin during the war-nothing in
their environment invited the two authors to feature it. They must
have been driven by one of those dark impulses which, stemming
from the slowly moving foundations of a people's life, sometimes en–
gender true visions.
One should expect the pole opposing that of tyranny to be the
pole of freedom; for it was doubtless their love of freedom which
made Janowitz and Mayer disclose the nature of tyranny. Now this
counterpole is the rallying-point of elements pertaining to the fair–
the fair with its rows of tents, its confused crowds besieging them,
and its diversity of thrilling amusements. Here Francis and Alan
happily join the swarm of onlookers; here, on the scene of his tri–
umphs, Dr. ·caligari is finally trapped. In their attempts to define
the character of a fair, literary sources repeatedly evoke the memory
of Babel and Babylon alike. A seventeenth-century pamphlet de-
scribes the noise typical of a fair as "such a distracted noise that you
would think Babel not comparable to it," and, almost two hundred
years later, a young English poet feels enthusiastic about "that
Babylon of booths-the Fair." The manner in which such Biblical
images insert themselves unmistakably characterizes the fair as an
enclave of anarchy in the sphere of entertainment. This accounts for
its eternal attractiveness. For adults it is a regression into childhood
days, in which games and serious affairs are identical, real and
