Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

xviii Steffen Hantke
and began to make a name for himself, first with studio fare like Son of Dracula
(1943), and then with noir masterpieces on the boundaries between horror,
thriller, and mystery, like Phantom Lady (1944), The Spiral Staircase (1946),
The Killers (1946), and The Dark Mirror (1946). 19 The trajectory of Siodmak’s
career—from prewar Germany to Hollywood, and back again to Germany after
the war—is something he shares with Lang and Lorre. As returning exiles, all
three provide case studies in historical discontinuity, raising questions about the
transfer of expressionist style from one context to another. Each essay devotes
itself to a film made after Lang, Lorre, and Siodmak had returned from the U.S.
to postwar Germany. Blair Davis deals with Lang’s film Die Tausend Augen des
Dr. Mabuse (1960), in which Lang resurrected his prewar villain for the postwar
audience, while Tony Williams takes on Lorre’s sole directorial work in Der
Verlorene (1951), in which Lorre created an opportunity for himself to insert his
own American-made persona into a traumatic postwar Germany unwilling to
confront its immediate past. My own piece, finally, focuses on Siodmak’s film
Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957), in which Siodmak deploys a variety of
styles he had continued to refine during his career as a versatile studio director
in an attempt to outwit a recalcitrant postwar German audience.
The second section of the anthology, entitled “German Autorenkino and
Horror Film: Influences, Dialogues, Exchanges,” focuses on the fruitful, though
conflicted relationship that exists between the German Autorenfilm, which frequently
bears the burden of having to represent all of German cinema abroad,
and the tropes and motifs of the horror film as a representative of genre cinema.
As Vergangenheitsbewältigung serves as a leitmotif for the previous section, the
boundary between auteurist filmmaking and horror film as a form of popular
entertainment provides the theme that holds this section together. It is the purpose
of this section to challenge the assumption that the two areas are mutually
exclusive, and to suggest that a disdain toward the horror film on the part of influential
German filmmakers would produce a critical misrepresentation of
postwar German cinema. The section opens with Linda Badley’s examination of
the tumultuous relationship between one of the premiere filmmakers of the New
German cinema, Werner Herzog, and his notorious star Klaus Kinski, entitled
“The Shadow and the Auteur: Herzog’s Kinski, Kinski’s Nosferatu, and the
Myths of Authorship.” Badley’s exclusive interest is not Herzog’s remaking of
Murnau’s classic Nosferatu; this subject has been sufficiently discussed by other
critics interested in horror film. Instead, Badley focuses on the trope of monstrosity
that haunts notions of auteurist filmmaking and “inspired” acting, serving
as an organizing metaphor for numerous recent meta-horror films. Richard
Hand’s essay “History, Homage and Horror: Fassbinder, Raab, Lommel and The
Tenderness of Wolves (1973)” takes on, albeit obliquely, another figure central
to the pantheon of German Autorenfilm, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, by way of
Fassbinder’s association with Uli Lommel and Kurt Raab, a director and an actor
whose careers he helped to set in motion. Lommel’s film about, and Raab’s
portrayal of, serial murderer Fritz Haarmann are, similar to Herzog taking re-