Primitive miasmas and the iconography of the future in Fritz Lang’s Frau Im Mond (1929)

Abstract

There is much to support the notion that Weimar cinema is ‘haunted’ by Germany’s recent past (see Eisner, 1969, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, London: Thames & Hudson). Similarly, Elsaesser argues convincingly that Weimar cinema is preoccupied by what he determines to be an ‘historical imaginary’ (2000a, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary, London and New York: Routledge). This focus, however, rather neglects Germany’s attraction to Modernism in a range of cultural forms, even if it must be conceded that the particular genre of science fiction plays only a small role in Weimar film. In an unofficial trilogy of films completed during the second half of the 1920s, Fritz Lang examines specific aspects of identity and national myths in past, present and future: first in Die Nibelungen (1924), then Metropolis (1927) and finally in his homage to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Frau im Mond/Woman in the Moon (1929). In this article, I consider how Frau im Mond has been largely overlooked in serious studies of Lang’s work, but I contend that his foray into ‘serious’ science fiction is worthy of greater scrutiny, not least because in its miasmic symbolism and its preoccupation with atavistic rivalries and petty jealousies it fits rather more neatly into the Langian canon than has hitherto been assumed.