The Star on C. A. Rotwang's Door: Turning Kracauer on Its Head

Abstract

Just after the Nazi takeover of Germany, the new minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, invited Fritz Lang to his office. Lang had every reason to fear Goebbels's summons. Not only was the director half-Jewish, but he had just turned his thriller The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse into a thinly disguised attack on the Nazi movement, interpolating party slogans into the dialogue of his villainous title character (Eisner 129). His actual reception, then, came as a shock to Lang. Rather than viewing Mabuse or its protagonist as anti-Nazi, Goebbels believed, as John Russell Taylor would eventually put it, that the film “only … needed a Führer to defeat Dr. Mabuse in the end and save the world order from those who would destroy it by perverting its true ideas” (45).1 And far from being angry or threatening, Goebbels offered Lang a key position in the newly Nazified German film industry. “This man,” he quoted Hitler as saying, “will make the Nazi film.”2