Karl May

Karl May (1974) is the second picture in a trilogy of ambitious and challenging films directed by Hans-Juergen Syberberg that explore the esthetic and spiritual origins of Hitler's Third Reich.  The first film is Ludwig, Requiem for a Virgin King, (1972) a picture that uses experimental techniques, many derived from Andy Warhol's films of the same era, to consider the cultural effects of the Bavarian King Ludwig's obsession with Wagner's music -- Syberberg's argument is that the conjunction of Prussian militarism with south German romanticism led to Hitler's ideology.  The third film in the sequence, and certainly the central panel of the triptych, is Syberberg's vast surrealist fever-dream, Our Hitler, a Film from Germany (1978).  This picture, more than seven hours long, completes the trilogy's design and establishes that Syberberg locates the origins of Hitler's National Socialism in Wagner's romanticism (German music) and Karl May's novels, another variant on the late Romantic -- in the director's view, these elements were whipped into a Devil's brew by the German film industry:  Hitler was the protagonist of a wild expressionist film from Germany:  the war and the panoply of the Third Reich were the set decorations adorning this vast and deadly production, war and extermination staged as a fantasia for the camera.  Although the structure of the trilogy was not clear until its final part was completed, the gargantuan and maze-like Our Hitler, it is now evident that the avant-garde bio-pic about Ludwig and the more conventional film chronicling Karl May's last years focus on music, opera in the case of the first film, and literary (as well as legal) texts in Karl May as fundamental to Hitler's Nazism, viewed by Syberberg as the last great, and horrible, efflorescence of German romanticism.  Ludwig is film designed as an opera; Karl May, with wipes between scenes simulating the turning of pages, is film imagined as a big, capacious Victorian-era novel. 

Karl May is a monument to my youth, a cenotaph, as it were, for a part of myself that exists only indistinctly today, and I will identify at the end of this note the film's personal significance for me.  By comparison with the much more flamboyantly experimental Ludwig and Our Hitler, both of which contain remarkable imagery and are essentially essays -- that is, non-narrative in form -- Karl May looks like a conventional bio-pic.  The movie is shot like a Hollywood production, for the most part, with realistic sets and costumes -- there are extended carriage rides through the open country, palatial manor houses, and the chambers and court rooms of the German judiciary around 1904, the year in which the film's action begins.  Syberberg uses a conventional film grammar of shot and reverse-shot, interspersing close-ups with two-shots or other group images.  Scenes are established by a conventional long shot -- at least, in many instances, and the film has a lush late-Romantic score.  (The curious effect is that when Syberberg wants to simulate a novel, he uses the conventions of Hollywood, including movie music.)  Syberberg began his career in the theater as an acolyte of Bertolt Brecht and much of Karl May shows a Brechtian influence -- the scenes involve much citation of text from real court records, letters, and newspaper articles and the narration is brusquely edited:  each scene involves a small ensemble of actors who make their points in heightened, slightly stylized language and, then, the sequence ends.  (There's another Brechtian distancing device in the first scene -- one of the figures in the shot is bathed in a deep shadow that has no obvious motivation; it seems to be a shadow cast by light stand or some other studio equipment.  Another director would edit this out or correct the shot -- Syberberg does not.  This is akin to a moment in Ludwig where a light falls over on-screen and the director keeps the shot in the film intact.) The movie's structure reminds me of a series of box-cars, each containing one plot point or ideological argument, efficiently presented and, then rolled off-screen so that the next sequence can begin.  The acting is realistic and distinguished.  Syberberg has amassed a group of actors who were famous movie stars during the Hitlerzeit -- these actors include the director Helmut Kautner, very effective as the beleaguered Karl May, Kristina Soederbaum as Emma, May's long-suffering wife, and Lil Dagover; the women are all blondes including the younger actress playing the alarming dominatrix-like Frau Munchmeyer, one of May's foes.  When I saw the film in 1976 at the University of Minnesota Film Society, older Germans in the audience remarked that the movie is replete with sound-cues that reference music played incessantly by the Nazis during World War II, most notably Franz Liszt's Les Preludes, the soundtrack, as it were, to lists of casualties incurred at Stalingrad. 

Karl May's plot is peculiar only in its extreme attention to the intricacies of German judicial process at the turn of the 20th century -- the film, in effect, documents a byzantine series of lawsuits, comprised of claims and counterclaims, against the German novelist.  Karl May, of course, is a liar -- indeed as a novelist, he is a liar by profession.  But he has imprudently claimed that his series of Westerns featuring his heroes Old Surehand and Old Shatterhand and their loyal Indian sidekick, Winnetou, an Apache brave, are, in fact, documentary accounts of real events experienced by the novelist.  Early in the film, we are shown Karl May in full western regalia exhibiting Winnetou's rifle, adorned with 204 silver nails for each man killed the Apache warrior.  A journalist asks him how he has come to possess the weapon since in one of his novels he portrays the death of Winnetou and claims to have buried the rifle beside his faithful Indian friend's body.  Without skipping a beat, Karl May claims that he came upon a war party of Sioux who had apparently desecrated Winnetou's sepulcher and that, after killing them, he retrieved the weapon.  Another journalist asks where the great adventurer was during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 - 1871; embarrassed May says that he was exploring the deserts in Arizona.  (In fact, he may have been in jail or the work-house at that time.)  May has asserted that his adventures all around the world are all true -- but, in fact, it seems that he may never have traveled beyond his native Silesia in Germany.  At one point, we see May apparently traveling in Ceylon and the far East -- these scenes violate Syberberg's general principle of verisimilitude:  we see a toy steamer on a toy ocean and, then, misty palaces with tall towers and jungles full of exotic birds and howling monkeys, all as a kind of hashish dream, a fantasia of Orientalism comprised of faded opera sets.  The use of these backdrops call into question whether May has really traveled to the exotic places from which he purports to send postcards (as evidence of his adventures) or whether his trip to Ceylon, for instance, is purely imaginary.  I have Hans Wollschlager's biography of Karl May and, upon consulting it, realize that May did, in fact, travel around the world around 1900; in general, most of what we are shown in the film is documentary -- these things actually happened.) 

In some ways, Karl May is a lavish variation on King Lear -- a great man in his old age is beset by enemies.  As Germany's most famous and best-selling novelist, May is surrounded by envious and resentful foes, people who are mounting savage attacks on his integrity and truthfulness.  All of this seems to stem from May's refusal to allow the sinister Frau Munchmeyer to publish five volumes of the writer's earliest works, apparently quasi-pornographic romance novels.  At first, Munchmeyer and her henchmen try to blackmail May -- he must pay them if he wants the embarrassing novels suppressed.  But May fights back, initiating lawsuits alleging extortion and slander.  This litigation triggers additional suits and countersuits:  May's enemies contend that his doctoral title is false, that he was a jailbird when he was a young man, that he is pornographer and plagiarist, and that he wrote Catholic devotional literature although an avowed Protestant -- at the center of these allegations is the claim that May is a fraud:  he has not done the heroic things that he claims in his books.  The litigation against May is masterminded by his nemesis, the lawyer Gerlach, a one-eyed man who stalks about a miniature battlefield moving platoons of tin soldiers across a toy landscape with a steel rake.  May defends himself in terms of the purity of his intentions, using the German word Reinheit in a way that foreshadows the use of that term by Hitler.  Throughout the first half of the film, May argues for the primacy of the imagination, claiming that books are imprisoned souls who "have written themselves free" and that the writer must present to his readers a portrait of a lost paradise, a kind of Voelkisch utopia that is purely imaginary, yet also somehow accessible. In the course of the first half of the film, May abandons his wife of 22 years and marries his secretary, Klara Ploehn.  Syberberg presents all this with a cool eye, mostly citing to documents and legal pleadings -- the scenes are anti-dramatic, mostly one person or a group of persons discussing strategy and tactics in the interminable lawsuits.  When May leaves his wife, we don't see the romance stirring between the novelist and Klara -- rather there is a cold discussion about spousal maintenance; again, the film's inclination is always to revert to legal analysis of the situation.   

The second half of Karl May, entitled "The Soul is a vast country into which we flee," multiplies themes and makes texts of subtexts.  We meet George Grosz and a young Adolf Hitler, both obsessed with May's books.  The writer becomes entangled in politics, although in a manner that I don't understand.  His last books, to the dismay of his fans, abandon the turbulent violence of his so-called Reisebuecher ("travel books" that are, of course, really novels).  May has written a pacifist tract called Peace on Earth, a book denouncing German imperialism in China, and this has earned him additional detractors.  He imagines himself Tolstoy and obsesses about his posthumous reputation.  His books are issued in a series with handsome arte nouveau covers and illustrations and these pictures, featuring idealized naked youths, proliferate through the film.  A question is raised as to May's sexuality -- one of his persecutors asks if he had a sexual relationship with Winnetou.  Increasingly, the film is occupied by long internal monologues, descriptions of the past recollected like a dream, soliloquies, the recitation of poems and high-flown rhetoric -- the landscape is spiritual:  May is prophetic -- in a posh Dresden coffee-house, he announces the utter destruction of the city.  An icy wind is blowing out of the future -- like Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History", Karl May is propelled backward into the future, an vast expanse of imaginary ruins heaped up behind him. 

At the outset of the second half of the film, we learn that May has won his lawsuit, prevailing after a trial involving many experts and sixty lay-witnesses.  But the forces arrayed against him, which taken on a ever more metaphysical tint, are undeterred.  They conduct research on May's criminal history, interview his cell-mate, and gathering more witnesses, prosecute a perjury case against him.  May's manor is searched and evidence of his questionable past is once more amassed.  Like King Lear, May lashes out against his enemies -- he sees his ex-wife behind all of these attacks and accuses her of "abdominal vampirism" among other things:  it is apparent that in his frenzy of rage, May is becoming unhinged.  Gerlach, who commands the forces battling May, now takes on the role of Faust's Mephisto -- he proclaims that he embodies the force that "stets verneint" (always contradicts) and that his role is to drive the writer into the light, to force him to do good by creating a paradise from the "artificial hells" of the litigation.  We learn that May was wholly blind until he was four and that, as a result, he imagined all around him to be "spirits" or souls -- this experience in his early childhood now authorizes him to speak for the German soul, the soul of the Volk.  The trial has now morphed into some kind of guardianship proceeding in which Gerlach's creature, the loathsome Lebius, purports to act as a legal guardian for Emma, May's ex-wife.  In Berlin, a bizarre trial is conducted -- a Mohawk Indian employed in a circus is called to testify as to whether he knows of another Native American named  Winnetou (needless to say he does not).  In the end, May is vindicated -- the Judge declares him the greatest writer in Germany, saying "you have written the heroic epics of the Wilhelmine era" -- and dismisses Lebius' last vindictive suit.  May goes to Vienna where he delivers a lecture to thousands of people -- Hitler, Heinrich Mann, and Trakl among them.  Then, he visits the Kaisergruft, the crypt containing the caskets of the Holy Roman Emperors, a sort of pilgrimage to the underworld where he kneels before the image of Death triumphant.  At his estate. May dies on a bier resting in front of his wife, dark-clad and expressionless like one of the Norns -- the bier and woman are outdoors, in front of a teepee, and there are rose petals strewn over May's chest and snow is falling.  Dittrich, May's old friend, announces that the novelist turned the savage, thieving and murdering Apaches into something like Greek  gods.  We see Gerlach brooding alone over the empire of tiny houses and villages and marching tin soldiers that he has made -- he reiterates that he has made Karl May into a great man by casting him into Hell.  In the last shot of the film, we see a splendid lion standing in a snow storm atop a hyena or wolf that the beast has vanquished.  The soundtrack during this visionary apotheosis thunders with Mahler and Liszt's Les Preludes.  It's an astonishing ending.

Syberberg's theme can probably be distilled to a simple statement:  the man of genius creates a world from his imagination:  May, born in the most wrenching poverty, created a world of noble explorers and their native followers -- he dignified the world by imagining it as a place of adventure, loyalty, and courage.  Gerlach's imaginary world is one that is always at war -- a place of perpetual strife that has the result of purifying the heroes who survive in that conflict.  The German soul yearns for a paradise that is not in this world -- an idealized utopia.  A general tells the camera:  "With Hoelderlin in their pockets and Karl May in their backpacks, our soldiers can win any war."  The chief beneficiary of this flight away from reality into an artificial, imaginary paradise will be Hitler.  He will harness these spiritual forces and make them into a paradise that will be indistinguishable from the lowest circles of Hell. 

In keeping with his vast theme, Syberberg's picture (and his other films as well) are titanic enterprises that create their own standards.  Judged against other, more conventional films, Karl May is fantastically tedious, repetitious, and obscure.  It's Brechtian elements, chiefly an endless citation of actual court records and transcripts, add to its authority and power, but is a daunting device that makes much of the film nearly unwatchable -- we don't see action, we see people reading texts.  Toward the end of the film, Syberberg seems to abandon the notion of showing us anything and just has people speak to the camera to tell us the meaning of the spectacle unfolding in the film.  But, I would argue, that some movies have sufficient moral and esthetic authority to create their own standards -- we can't really condemn Wagner because his operas are so long; the length and tedium is part of the experience.  And, I think this is true of Syberberg's trilogy -- it's difficult, metaphysical in the extreme, and not grounded in anything like a conventional narrative or conventional politics, but the film has the capacity to inspire awe. 

When I saw the picture, probably in the Spring of 1976, I was intensively studying German literature.  I invited a girl from my graduate seminar in German lyric poetry to attend the film with me.  People who study a foreign language can be divided into two camps -- there are those who wish to live in the foreign country, speak with the people, make friends with them, and perfect their accents; then, there are those whose interest in the language is philological and academic -- an interest in the literature and its history.  You can imagine to which camp I belonged.  (Although I have always greatly regretted not devoting more effort to the other aspect of language study.)  The girl who accompanied me to the film was someone who had lived in Germany, probably had German lovers, and, I suppose, ended up teaching German in some High School or Community College.  Needless to say, the film was meaningless to her, an arduous trial that she escaped by simply falling asleep and slumbering peacefully for the last two hours of the movie.  Obviously, this was our one and only date.

Hans-Juergen Syberberg was present and, I suppose, had to watch the Bell Auditorium, where such pictures were screened, empty out as the forty or so German professors and graduate students seated at the outset one by one left the theater to escape the film's tedium.  At the end, only a handful remained -- perhaps, 10 or 12 people in the audience.  Syberberg said a few words about the film and everyone got to shake his hand.  Syberberg was, then, probably about 35 or forty, a slender man with pale skin and perfectly Aryan features -- he might have been an extra playing a stormtrooper or Gestapo officer in a Hollywood war movie.  He sported a flamboyant scarf wrapped around his shoulders and throat. I asked him a long and tendentious question.  I had figured out that the subject of Ludwig was opera and that the medium governing Karl May was the 19th century, Wilhelmine novel.  This lead me to speculate that the medium that would control the presentation of Hitler would be film -- and, of course, I was spectacularly right in this surmise, although at the time, no one but Syberberg knew what Our Hitler was like.  (We get a glimmer of the Hitler film in the penultimate scene -- Gerlach seated among his toys lecturing a puppet of Karl May.)  I asked:  "Was the opening scene, utilizing the obviously stylized opera sets to show the palaces and jungles of the East, a transition from Ludwig?  And do the wipes between scenes signify pages being turned in Karl May?  Aren't we moving through a trilogy of films that begins with opera, progresses to a novel, and, then, must end with film?"  Syberberg professed to be confused by my question, which, of course, really wasn't a question at all.  He said:  "No, no, no.  My budget didn't let me go to Ceylon to film there -- otherwise, I would have done this.  I had to use the artificial sets because of money limitations."  I felt foolish then and I feel foolish now.