‘The Great Unknown’: Thea von Harbou’s script for Dr Mabuse, der Spieler

Abstract

When Fritz Lang first met Thea von Harbou at Joe May’s film production company in Berlin, she was already a successful and popular author in her own right. Under contract with Ullstein & Co. publishing house, von Harbou was making the successful transition from writing serialized novels for the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung to writing manuscripts for the burgeoning mass medium of film. Her debut film script Die Legende von der Heiligen Simplicia/The Legend of Saint Simplicia (1920) – directed by Joe May and based on the story of the same title in her Legenden/Legends collection of stories about Saints – had been published by Ullstein in the previous year. The titles of von Harbou’s early film scripts for May, as well as for Robert Dinesen, such as Die Frauen vom Gnadenstein/The Women of Gnadenstein and Der Leidensweg der Inge Kraft/The Ordeal of Inge Kraft (both 1921), hint at the genre of Frauenroman (women’s novel), in which she specialized. Male critics of the calibre of Rudolf Arnheim, Herbert Ihering, Kurt Pinthus and Hans Sahl either professed not to read such books themselves, or dismissed them as Gartenlauben (shady bower) novels, shorthand for the kind of outmoded sentimental kitsch published by Ullstein or Scherl.