Chapter One 1890 1911 Fritz Lang lived his life--and cultivated his legend--with the glinted eyes of a maniac. He was determined to carry his secrets to the grave. The true story of his life, he believed, was nobody's business. It was irrelevant, according to his point of view. Irrelevant to his vast audience of moviegoers, though they might be fascinated by the bigger-than-life figure who directed with such mesmerizing force some fifty motion pictures over the span of forty-five years. It was irrelevant to a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the great and near-great films, and especially to those that were not all that great. Though he might offer up tidbits of his life story, and enhance biographical interviews with personal detail, it was all part of his conscious myth-making. Understanding early that cunning publicity could nurture his career, Lang cultivated and controlled--literally blue-penciled--his own self-mythology. One thing the director feared was genuine reportage, or biography. It would turn him into a hunted man--the fated victim, as in one of his suspense stories. Biography would kill the mystique. Journalists or acquaintances who inquired into the film director's life, into the twists of fate that dictated the wandering path of his career, into the tales of famous and obscure women who figured in dramatic interludes in his life, or into the machinations of a particularly troubled production, might receive clever fiction or convenient lies, a stony look or a brusque invitation to leave. They might even receive a helping of truth. It depended. Lang could be liberal with his favorite anecdotes, tirelessly repeated, polished to a glow. The story of how he fled Goebbels and Nazi Germany in 1933 is famous because the director told it so many times. It was his crowning concoction, replete with details a novelist would relish: an office with swastika decor, the hands of an enormous clock ticking toward a fateful hour, the director's pockets sewn with escape money. Lang dodged the Nazi taint in much the same way he would later evade a Communist one in America, with a well-knit story that could not easily be dissected or disproved. Usually, though, he was stingy with the facts of his life. It was Lang himself who dictated and edited the brief autobiographical essay (some 2,600 words--six pages of text, as set against more than four hundred pages of appreciative gloss) in what has been widely regarded as the definitive book about the director, Lotte Eisner's Fritz Lang, first published in 1976. Lang emphatically told his old friend Eisner, with whom he had been acquainted since the late 1920s, "My private life has nothing to do with my films." He uttered the same sentiment in interviews more than once. Did Herr Lang realize that mountains of contradictory records and sources would survive him: journals, home movies, immigration papers and interrogation files, studio and government archives, even the memories of trustworthy friends and acquaintances? That not all of his associates could be trusted to disremember, or remain discreet? Did Herr Lang realize--was it a private joke?--that his films themselves offered a kind of autobiography, revealing perhaps more than he intended of his own life story? That, in fact, his films had a great deal to do with his private life? Or was the subconscious--that inner cacophony of voices that in his best-known films always cried out to be heard, triggering crime and entreating punishment--working a dark magic on Fritz Lang all along? Certainly life began auspiciously for Fritz Lang, born to favorable circumstances in the Golden Autumn of Vienna, Austria--the last decade before the nineteenth century was rolled away to make way for the new. Austria, under the benevolent and seemingly interminable reign of "der alte Herr," Franz Josef, emperor from 1848 to 1916, was enjoying an era of unprecedented confidence and revitalization; tolerance and liberalism in politics; a renaissance of the arts and sciences that established the names of Klimt, Schnitzler, Mahler, and Freud. Vienna, the pulse and soul of the nation, grew and prospered. The capital, in Lang's memory, was like "a confectionery city in a fairy-tale time," whose lucky citizens lived untroubled by what was happening in the world beyond its limits. In 1890, it was one of the world's five largest cities, with a mushrooming population that included not only native Austrians but immigrants and intellectuals from all over eastern Europe and the rest of the world. No city was more cosmopolitan. No city offered greater cultural riches, or was more splendid to behold. The architecture of the city towered in Lang's psychology. The director's unique visual style, especially in his epic silent films, was nurtured by his boyhood experience of dwelling in the shadow of gargantuan statues and massive stairwells, steepled churches and huge public buildings. The baroque of the old Kaiserstadt, with its exaggeration of detail, insinuated itself into many Lang films. The characteristic shots from high places, the extreme upward-slanting low angles, the lingering emphasis on the size and structure of massive buildings, the people dwarfed by walls or doors--these were a legacy that was distinctly Viennese. The dome and spire of the St. Stephansdom, the magnificent imperial palace known as the Hofburg, the imposing cluster that included the Opernhaus, the Rathaus, the Burgtheater, the Universitat, and the Parlament--these and other civic edifices were within walking distance of the house where the future film director, Friedrich Christian Anton Lang, was born on December 5, 1890. His parents, Anton and Paula Schlesinger Lang, at that time lived on the narrow lane of Schonlaterngasse in the Innere Stadt, or First District, inside the Ringstrasse, the wide beltway around the inner city. The shadow cast by Vienna's architecture is rendered all the more germane to Fritz Lang's life story by that of his father. Anton Lang was thirty years old when his son was born, and city records attest that he was a Baumeister and part owner of Honus and Lang, a prominent construction enterprise located in a three-story building along the east side of the imperial park, the Augarten. In latter-day books and articles about his world-famous son, Anton Lang is usually described as an architect. In fact, Baumeister, a German word often confused and translated as "architect" in English and French, means more precisely that Lang's father was a builder or executor of architectural plans. He had the additional honorific, in city archives, of Stadtbaumeister, which simply meant that he was licensed to appear as a project manager before Vienna municipal boards. Architects were college-educated; they were designers, not merely contractors. They moved in higher social circles. Fritz Lang always described his father as an architect in interviews; once, drafting a press release eventually published under his byline in the United States, he even tried "famous architect." The fancier word put a gloss on his father's occupation, just as Lang would also stretch the truth when it came to his own fleeting studies in architecture, claiming, for publicity's sake, to have studied for "several years in the best architectural schools." Perhaps "architect" was convenient terminology, the natural choice of a son proud of his father's profession and innocently overstating his expertise. Or perhaps it was better for a director to boast the genes of an architect than a builder--even if Lang, like his father, was only occasionally, to his eternal frustration, the supreme architect, and more often the master builder orchestrating the plans of others. Honus and Lang had previously been known as Endl and Honus. Adolf Endl and Josef Honus had made a fortune during the time of optimism and construction known as the Grunderzeit, when Vienna was expanded and reorganized, and the Ringstrasse was inaugurated. Endl and Honus did not construct any of the more renowned buildings; they were builders of lesser distinction, and in general restricted to the lucrative trade of erecting the offices and residences for the well-to-do that proliferated around the Ring. These were typically four-to-six-story block dwellings, with offices and management on the first floor, residences and tenants occupying the floors above. Their palatial faces and interior courts proclaimed their grandeur. The bustling company had several sidelines, including, in the late 1880s, the construction and operation of the Wiener Centralbad, or Vienna Central Baths. The luxurious Wiener Centralbad was situated on valuable real estate close to the St. Stephansdom and the Stadtpark, behind the baroque facade of an everyday apartment block which Endl and Honus had constructed in 1880. The only public baths in the center of town, the Wiener Centralbad catered to the business community, with cold-water pools inside pillared halls for both men and women, a steam room, mud baths, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and massages. The design offered rooms and halls "as Islamic as Meister Endl could build them," according to a 1976 article in the magazine Wien Aktuell. "Pompeian" murals, a marble staircase, changing rooms decorated in the Moorish style, walls covered with Majolica tiles: The Oriental influence manifest in Fritz Lang's films was not only common in Austro-Hungarian architecture, but rooted in his family's personal history. Anton Lang appears to have begun an apprenticeship with Endl and Honus in his late teens, learning to trace architectural plans. He worked his way up in the firm and was already married, in 1887, when he visited England to select the ceramic tiles for the interior of the Wiener Centralbad. While touring British potteries and bathhouses, he learned that Adolf Endl had died suddenly at age forty; cutting his trip short, Anton Lang returned to Vienna. Endl's untimely death precipitated a dramatic change in professional status for Fritz Lang's father. The year of Fritz Lang's birth, 1890, also saw Anton Lang's ascendancy; in that year, Endl and Honus was reincorporated as Honus and Lang. How a mere employee, a one-time draftsman, came so suddenly to share equal ownership in this substantial firm, however, is a central piece of the family jigsaw puzzle. Only one person knew for sure how this came to be; only one person could have supplied the whole explanation--Anton's mother, Johanna Lang. She inherited half the business, and turned it over to her only son. How did Johanna Lang, who hailed from a humble background, come into this inheritance? Like many of the women central to a Lang film, Anton Lang's mother was a beautiful woman, mysterious, almost ruthlessly determined to accomplish her goals in life--a trait, relatives always said, Fritz Lang inherited from her. Johanna Lang was born in 1839 in Sichelbach, a village in southern Moravia, then a Habsburg province approximately ninety miles northwest of Vienna near the Austrian border. Today this area is part of the Czech Republic. Lotte Eisner wrote that Lang told her his paternal grandmother grew up in the country, came to Vienna as a young girl, and became housekeeper of a patrician Viennese family. There Johanna Lang fell in love with the son of the house, and found herself pregnant. Born and raised a Catholic (the first inkling of the Catholicism deeply ingrained in Lang's life), she had landed in a sinful, scandalous predicament. "Class barriers in those days were as rigid as castes in India," explained Eisner. But things worked out in the end: "She married an honest man who gave her child his name," Eisner wrote. This synopsized account, retold by Eisner, made a good story, and Lang himself must have relished the India touch (doubtless he suggested it). However, no records survive to prove Lang's case, none that give any indication of Johanna Lang's lineage, nor point to the identity of the patrician family--which didn't have to be very patrician really, since many middle-class households could afford the modest expense of servants. There is, in fact, no documented evidence of the true identity of Anton Lang's natural father. Only this can be substantiated from Viennese archives: the child of Johanna Lang was born August 1, 1860, in the maternity ward of a foundling's home in what was then the western suburb Alservorstadt (today located more or less downtown). Georges Sturm, a European specialist on Fritz Lang, has performed exhaustive detective work on the family tree, and his research confirms that on the day of the birth the nuns crossed the Alserstrasse and had the infant baptized by a parish priest. The godfather was the sacristan, the father's name unspecified. The birth register plainly listed Anton Lang as an "illegitimate child." Johanna Lang never named the father, and it appears that Anton himself did not know his identity--a theme repeated almost by chance in Fritz Lang's 1955 film Moonfleet, in which a wistful boy searches for his mother's long-lost "friend," while never quite realizing that the gentleman-smuggler watching over him is his wayward father. People familiar with the director's work will recognize the illicit love affair, illegitimacy, and the "doubling" of identity as recurrent plot situations that would become almost obsessional in his films. Lang liked to glamorize his own illegitimate family history right down to the happy ending in which an "honest man" comes to the rescue as father to the child. Obviously a resourceful figure, Johanna Lang did set out to marry and legitimize her child. According to Dr. Friedrich Steinbach, a cousin of Lang's who visited the family at intervals as a young boy in the early 1900s, Johanna Lang's first marriage was to a member of the Endl family associated with the building firm. He may have been the "honest man" referred to by Lang; he may even have been the young man who impregnated Johanna Lang. One thing is certain: he did not give his name to the child. Nor is there any documented proof of a Lang-Endl marriage. Yet Steinbach insisted on this point in an interview, as he equally insisted that Anton Lang did not like or respect his first "stepfather"--a pattern destined to be repeated by his own son. The first marriage ended in Endl's death when Anton Lang was still a youth, according to Steinbach, and Johanna set out to marry a second time. The second marriage, Johanna Lang's only documented marriage, was to a schoolteacher named Karl Schott, from the Alsergrund, or Ninth District, of Vienna. This occurred when Anton Lang was already sixteen, in 1876. It can be hypothesized, from these tangled circumstances, that when Johanna Lang's first husband, an Endl, died, she inherited a partnership in Endl and Honus. Perhaps she withheld her claim during the lifetime of Adolf Endl; or, necessarily, until Anton came of age. Upon Adolf Endl's death, the mother of Anton Lang signed that inheritance over to her only child, in exchange for which Anton Lang agreed to pay her a periodic stipend for living expenses. Anton never became an Endl or Schott in any case, and Johanna Lang conferred her own surname on the child. The "Lang," therefore, comes directly from Fritz Lang's paternal grandmother--her name and Catholicism being the first strong, lasting imprints on his identity. Mothers are evanescent in Fritz Lang films; fathers, on the other hand, command an inordinate presence. Metropolis, early in the director's career, depicted a dictatorial overlord who fostered rebellion in his workers and alienation in his own son; a wise and courageous professor is a heroic father in Hangmen Also Die; later comes the anti-heroic swashbuckler of Moonfleet. When it came to father figures in his oeuvre, Lang swung from pitiless characterization to idealized sentiment, reflecting his own inability on some subconscious level to come to satisfactory terms with his own father, the "architect" Anton Lang. In real life, Lang's father was commercially astute and fantastically hardworking, and under his aegis the construction business flourished. A tall man, the elder Lang was always impeccably dressed, usually sporting a mustache or goatee. He was aloof and strict with his children, however, and showed little interest in anything other than his work--certainly not in art or politics. Growing up, the more aesthetically minded son grew to disapprove of his father, for whom money was all-important. The disapproval grew into rebellion, settled into a cold-hearted dislike. Fritz Lang's mind was made up on the subject of his father for a long time. It is ironic that his father's elusive connection to Honus and Endl provided the son with a solid footing in the world, considering that, later in life, the director made a point of discouraging anyone with family ties from trying to use him to get on the inside track in motion pictures. It is especially interesting considering the scorn the director heaped on the producers with powerful relatives whom he encountered in both Berlin and Hollywood. Lang, owing in large part to his hostility to Anton Lang, was left without much feeling for family. And because of his father's apparent illegitimacy, he could easily discount Anton's influence while emphasizing, in loving tones, the roles of his mother and grandmother. These were the only two family members whom Lang professed to adore. Toward the close of his richly eventful life, however, when Lang's brooding grew morose, he had to admit that there must have been something good, strong, and capable in Anton Lang, for things to have turned out so well for his son. Children, education, and religion were a mother's business. Lang's mother, Paula Schlesinger Lang, was the woman who nurtured and shaped the boy. Conversing with friends, Lang always placed his mother on a pedestal. The undying reverence he felt for her colored his attitude toward the women in his private life--they could never mother him enough--as well as toward the actresses and female characters who populated his films. Paula was born Pauline Schlesinger on July 26, 1864, on the outskirts of Brno, the provincial capital of Moravia, a grim industrial city near where Napoleon had won the battle of Austerlitz. Brno was known for its textiles, metallurgical industries, and close commercial ties to Vienna. Part of the Habsburg Empire, the city was directly linked by rail to Vienna. Today it is in the Czech Republic. Visiting Paris for the premiere of Die Nibelungen in 1925, Lang gave an interview in which he referred to himself as the grandson of a modest landowner "who worked the land himself" in a valley along the river Kamp. This appears to be more romanticization, salt-of-the-earth variety. In fact, Paula's father was a Fabrikant, or factory owner, most likely of a mill for spinning and weaving wool. Her family was Jewish. Pauline, by early 1883, was residing in Vienna in the Leopoldstadt, or Second District, a section of Vienna overwhelmingly comprised of Jewish immigrants and families, especially those with connections to the thriving garment and textile industry. Attracted, like generations before her, by the excitement and opportunity of the city, Pauline was part of an influx of Jews during the latter half of the nineteenth century that changed the balance of Vienna's population and played a key role in the rise of the middle class. Persecuted in previous generations, cyclically ostracized, Vienna's Jews had proved stubborn adherents of the city, and had recently prospered under an era of emancipation and reform. Pauline lived in an apartment building that was listed in municipal files as the property of her father, Jakob Schlesinger, and she worked at a clothing store in the Mariahilf, or Sixth District, which her father owned and operated as well. It seems likely that Pauline's father had real estate dealings with Endl and Honus that brought her into contact with Anton Lang. From 1880 on, Anton lived near Pauline Schlesinger at Obere Augartenstrasse 64, on the southern edge of the Augarten in the Leopoldstadt. Josef Honus, Anton Lang's employer, lived in the same building. Pauline Schlesinger, not quite nineteen and Anton Lang, her senior by nearly five years, were married in Vienna on May 22, 1883. Indications are that Pauline received a substantial dowry, and was not only financially independent, but perhaps wealthier than her new husband. After Anton Lang was accepted into the firm as a partner in 1890, Paula Lang--changed from Pauline, part of her social integration--acquired greater-than-equal status. She was actually listed as "Owner," with Anton Lang as "Manager," once Josef Honus had retired in 1900. The concern was renamed A. Lang & Co. Curiously, the Lang-Schlesinger marriage was formalized by a civil ceremony. Although "mixed" marriages between Catholics and Jews were forbidden by law, the common custom was for Vienna's Jews to convert to Catholicism, or for non-Jews to declare themselves without religious faith. Yet Anton Lang, though himself baptized and raised a Catholic, declared himself without religious denomination, while Paula Schlesinger was listed in the records--meticulous city records the Nazis would later peruse--as mosaisch, or Jewish. Anti-Semitism was on the rise in Vienna. Assimilation was important, and it may be that Paula Schlesinger felt socially obliged to convert. Vienna's longstanding preoccupation with Catholicism as well as "Germanness" would dramatically mark the Lang family. This was a family that displayed obvious equivocation about religion. Before their marriage, Pauline Schlesinger and Anton Lang made a special request for dispensation for the religious ceremony, a request rejected by authorities. Seventeen years elapsed before Lang's parents arranged a "double conversion" to Catholicism and a second, religious ceremony in August of 1900, embracing Catholic precepts. This occasion, which necessitated a special license, was orchestrated not in Vienna, but over one hundred miles to the west, at Ort am Traunsee, near Salzburg, where the Langs had a vacation villa. Church records show that Lang's mother was baptized, while Anton Lang was formally readmitted "to the breast of the Holy Catholic Church." Fritz Lang was almost ten years old by 1900, and up to that time had been diligently raised a Catholic by his Jewish mother. He himself had been baptized on a Sunday less than a month after birth, in the baptismal font of the parish Schottenkirche, or the Scots Monastery, in the Innere Stadt. The Langs had set up house around the corner from the Schottenkirche on Schenkenstrasse, the road that leads to the Burgtheater. The two witnesses were Christian Cabos, Fritz Lang's godfather, a KuK Hoflieferant, or purveyor to the royal court, associated with a biscuit company that supplied the imperial household; and Johanna Lang's then-husband Karl Schott. While it was unusual that the parents of the baptized child were not Catholics in good standing, this irregularity was addressed by a clause added to the baptismal affidavit to the effect that the non-Catholic mother and father pledged to raise the boy in the Catholic faith. So they did--"Catholic and very puritanical," in Lang's words. Ironically, according to Friedrich Steinbach, it was Lang's mother, the convert, who took responsibility for indoctrinating her son in the catechism and rituals, while Lang's father, busy with work and more ambivalent about religion, skipped Mass on Sundays and acted almost heretically upon occasion. Steinbach told this anecdote: As a young boy, Steinbach was standing on the balcony of the Lang summer home in Gars am Kamp with Anton Lang, who was his godfather as well as his uncle. A storm was brewing. Thunder rang out, lightning flashed across the sky. Suddenly, Anton Lang opened his arms to the heavens, and, to his horror, cried out, "Hit me! Hit me now! Send a bolt for me!" Then, turning to the boy, who cowered before such blasphemy, Anton Lang asked with a malicious grin, "Do you really believe everything they tell you?" Young Fritz Lang was probably present at the "double conversion" in 1900, and likely blocked it out of his memory. Georges Sturm made an interesting comparison between that family incident and a scene in Secret Beyond the Door, a film Lang directed in America in 1947. In the film, an heiress recollects her marriage to an architect. A flashback shows the wedding taking place amid the twinkling gloom of a Mexican cathedral, four centuries old. The occasion is photographed from extreme low-to-the-ground angles, "which isn't justified in the continuity of the other shots in the sequence, unless it is seen, for example, by a child," in Sturm's words. Fritz Lang's older brother, more intriguingly, would have been present for the occasion--the brother Lang never acknowledged in public. Adolf Lang (named in honor of Adolf Endl?) was born on March 19, 1884, less than a year after the marriage of Paula and Anton Lang. A full six years older than Fritz, Dolf (as he was called) was a few inches shorter than his brother, who grew to five feet eleven. With his dark-blond hair, Dolf resembled his father, while Fritz Lang, with his deep-brown hair, gray eyes, long face, straight nose and pointed chin, took after Paula. Dolf's character and personality were more like his father's, too. He took no interest in artistic pursuits, and in time became a staid businessman like his father--a bank manager; in fact, utterly middle class. Dolf, the oldest boy carrying the family surname, ought to have been the favored son, but the opposite was true. Dolf was disadvantaged within the family, treated almost as a leper. The reason, as Steinbach remembered--and Austrian military records confirm--must have carried with it a devastating personal humiliation. Adolf Lang had a rampant psoriasis that resulted in scabs and rashes all over his body. When guests came to call, Dolf was actually hidden away in the Lang household, like the boy whose father cannot abide him, who is closeted in one of the mansion's many rooms in Secret Beyond the Door. The ugly, embarrassing Dolf was hidden away, while the handsome Fritz--with his intelligent face, his shock of tawny hair, his creamy complexion--was paraded in front of visitors, his ego petted and pampered. The brothers, as a result, had a terrible relationship, a lifelong violent antipathy to each other. It wounded their mother, Paula Lang, even though she helped spur their lopsided rivalry. Fritz Lang learned superiority and domination, even over his older brother, from adolescence. Throughout adulthood the brothers communicated with each other only when absolutely necessary. Not once, when expounding on his past in the dozens upon dozens of published interviews he gave, did the film director ever mention his older brother. Even Lotte Eisner, in her authorized book about Lang, presents the man she knew as well as anyone as an "only child." There is a surprising number of brothers represented in Lang's films. To name but a few, the outlaw brothers James in The Return of Frank James the dichotomous brothers of Western Union (their blood bond a secret until the end); the mildly sparring upper-crust brothers of Man Hunt; the hateful and complicit brothers of House by the River; the cutthroat siblings of Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal. The brother-characters were sometimes Lang's contribution to a scenario, more often not. But he could seize on such characters in a film's story line and make them vivid. In life as in imagination, he understood weak and bothersome brothers. The Lang family lived a "thoroughly bourgeois" existence, according to the director, whose childhood (if not his brother Dolf's) was blessed by comfort and indulgence. Vienna might be a cold and drab, not to mention inhospitable, place to some, but Fritz Lang led a boyhood of modest privilege, and his earliest memories of the place would be almost paradisical. The Langs moved several times before settling down, in November of 1900, in a stone fortress at Zeltgasse 1, in the Josefstadt, or Eighth District. The family occupied the first floor of a massive five-story, U-shaped building, which was surrounded on three sides by narrow streets and opened onto a cramped square. It was situated near the Piaristen Church, short blocks from the Josefstadt-Theater and a place that must have loomed in the psyche of a boy destined to make his mark as a crime-story filmmaker--the Landesgericht, or Criminal Court Building. Lang remembered this as a period of "great, decisive change" in Vienna. Miraculous twentieth-century technology, beginning to transform daily life, exerted a profound effect on the future director. The fantastical was made real before his very eyes. The marvels Lang would predict in his career--the television devices, criminal, police, and spy gadgets, rocket-ship flight--were a logical outgrowth of the fact that his boyhood was a time of unprecedented scientific and technical revolution. The Fiaker were typically Viennese, and Lang fondly remembered these two-horse open carriages on springs, their wheels covered with India rubber. The name applied to the drivers too, famous for their facility with whip and tongue, as well as the vehicle. The Fiaker were drawn by two well-fed horses trotting in harness. Only the "very rich," in Lang's words, could afford to ride in the luxurious carriages, yet he was able to ride the Fiaker often enough to learn to recite the Fiakerlieder, the rollicking folk songs sung by the coachmen and popularized by Alexander Girardi, an irreverent Viennese actor of the turn of the century. The Fiaker gave way to electric rails and horseless vehicles. Lang remembered, from his boyhood, the city streetcars pulled by two horses. When he was old enough to go to Volksschule on Josefstadterstrasse, several blocks away, he had to ride the city transport up a hill, and a third horse had to be harnessed to the streetcar in front of the other two. The little boy was sometimes permitted to sit up front on the coach box. Lang remembered how the lantern igniters disappeared as the gas lanterns were replaced by electric ones. He remembered his father's phonograph "as his most modern acquisition," and a time when all the music was recorded and played on metal cylinders. He remembered when his father took him out to the suburb of Breitenfurt to see a wagon that moved without horses--the first automobile; and how the proud Fiaker were forced gradually to defer to automobiles on the chestnut-tree-lined boulevards of the city. The family enjoyed distinctly Viennese activities, such as the promenade past elegant shop windows in the late afternoon. Lang remembered the men in their frock coats and toppers, the military clicking of heels, the corseted women with furs and boatlike hats. Idly gazing into shop windows--kicking one in, in Rancho Notorious--became ritual behavior in Lang's films. Two of his finest Hollywood dramas, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, begin, with deceptive innocence, with window-shopping. There were annual parades and pageants tied to the changing calendar, and regular trips to the scenic parks and formal gardens; best of all were the family outings to the Prater, the huge amusement park on the east fringe of the city. Naturally the Prater was the boy's favorite haunt, his adventure through the looking glass. The park boasted the famous giant Prater wheel, a carousel, amusement booths, a penny arcade, a shooting gallery, test-your-strength machines, a freak show, the Wiener Watschenmann ("a big leather mannequin" that looked "like a cross between a gorilla and an antediluvian Cro-Magnon man," according to Lang's sometimes uncanny memory, "dolled up in silken knee breeches and a green hunting jacket"); and simple open-air restaurants with female orchestras. Unlike many of the places the boy visited with his family, the Prater was a democratic crossroads, egalitarian in its appeal. The gentry mixed with servants and factory workers, the privates of the Viennese house regiment, swells, hustlers, and peasant girls. ("Their faces are fresh and radiant and their breasts full and inviting under embroidered blouses," Lang wrote of the peasant girls in one of his unproduced scripts. "They all carry the indispensable fat umbrella and wear gaudy-colored, wide-skirted native costumes, hair tucked in under big fringed kerchiefs.") When Ferenc Molnar's Liliom was translated from Hungarian into German, the setting was shifted from Budapest's amusement park to Vienna's Prater. Later on, when Lang fled to Paris and was handed the screen adaptation of Liliom, some people thought it was a case of "director miscasting," yet he was quite at home commemorating the Prater. Viennese theater was at a historical peak of creativity. The Hofburgtheater was probably the leading playhouse in the German-speaking world, while the Theater in der Josefstadt, near Lang's home, was run by a gifted impresario from Budapest, Josef Jarno, who alternated French farces, for audience appeal, with productions of two forerunners of modern expressionism, Strindberg and Wedekind. (In the 1920s, this theater would be taken over by Max Reinhardt and his celebrated ensemble.) It must have been Paula Lang who prompted regular excursions to these and other legitimate theaters. "My parents went twice a month to see a play, and then they discussed it with friends," Lang once recalled. "It was an event." Sometimes the boy was permitted to accompany his parents; later in time, Lang attended many plays on his own and with school friends. He remembered frequenting the Volkstheater, where the plays of Anzengruber and Grillparzer were performed, and especially the Raimund-Theater, which specialized in fairy tales by leading dramatists. He would never forget Girardi in Ferdinand Raimund's Der Bauer als Millionar (The Farmer As Millionaire), in a scene where Youth takes its leave of him. The character of Youth was played by a "full-breasted soubrette," in Lang's words, and Girardi, without benefit of makeup or special effects, made a magical metamorphosis into an old man in full view of the audience. The persistent refrain of many typically Viennese plays was death and destiny. From his earliest films, notably in 1921's Der mude Tod, with Bernhard Goetzke impersonating a somber, weary Death, the director explored kindred terrain. Perhaps the theater that gave him the most pleasure also exerted the greatest influence--the fantastical Kratky-Baschik Zaubertheater in the Prater. Hardly Vienna's most eminent, it was Lang's favorite as a boy. Ghosts, goblins, witches, gnomes, and fairies pranced across the stage of this little theater in the park, which specialized in pyrotechnics, optical illusions, smoke, and mirrors. Lang made sure that Lotte Eisner took note of the Zaubertheater, and that she mentioned it in her book about him. Although the Lang family patronized Vienna's theaters, they may have visited museums and attended classical concerts less religiously. Lang admitted, in one interview, an obliviousness to the Sezession, the artists' movement that broke with tradition and swept Vienna in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Although he visited museums elsewhere in Europe during his Wanderjahre, he rarely mentioned Vienna's galleries in his reminiscences, and as a youth appears to have spent little time exploring them. He was not infatuated with still art. Although he amassed a modest private gallery in Berlin, he would leave collecting--and museum-going--behind in Hollywood. In his spare moments, according to friends and associates, it was more the director's wont to head to the Los Angeles planetarium or to Sea World. "He was an intelligent and artistic man, but he didn't collect art," said Sam Jaffe, Lang's longtime agent in Hollywood and a noted art patron of the screen colony. "I didn't see [much] art in his house, unlike [the director Josef] von Sternberg, for example, who collected pictures and paintings. I never got the idea Lang went to concerts. I never got the feeling he went to a museum." Lang said on more than one occasion that he was also left uninspired by classical music, growing up in this city that had succored Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and her native Schubert. The director made a point of telling friends that he was a musical ignoramus; Lang liked to boast that as a boy he was thrown out of Realschule music class because he couldn't carry a melody and always hit the wrong notes. One day, many years after Realschule, the director and his friend, actor Howard Vernon, were visiting London together. Lang rang for Vernon in his hotel room, but the actor did not answer right away because he was listening to a Mozart composition on the radio. Later, Vernon apologized to Lang, explaining that he was held spellbound by the music. The director reacted surprisingly, confessing, somewhat shamefacedly, that he envied Vernon's love of Mozart's music, which left him cold. "I like folk songs, but ten horses couldn't bring me to a concert or an opera," he liked to say. Lang did love traditional folk music, the colorful, sometimes bawdy, often sentimental songs of Vienna's streets and cabarets. This was an affection he transferred to the United States, where he fervently embraced American folk songs and cowboy tunes. He couldn't recognize many pieces by Mozart, but with tremendous zest he could and would sing, at the drop of a hat, the Fiakerlieder, Heurigenlieder (wine songs), or American cowboy verses--wordperfect, even in advanced old age. "Music is the same to me as it was to Goethe--a pleasant noise," Lang said in one interview. "I am an eye man, not an ear man." His films had to take this deficiency into account. Where the sound track, or musical accompaniment, was concerned, Lang was forced--more than was characteristic--to rely on the ideas of others. Perhaps as a consequence the director preferred sparseness, the absence of music. "Having a musical background for a love scene, for example, has always seemed like cheating to me," Lang said in one interview. This element of his sensibility added an unusual quality to his work; of his weakness, he made a strength. The "eye man" was certainly a wide-ranging reader from early boyhood. The family owned the collected works of Jules Verne, whose books became well-thumbed--natural nourishment for the future director of Metropolis and Die Frau im Mond. Lang admitted once that he preferred the Germans who emulated Verne: Willi Gail, Kurd Lasswitz (pseudonym: Velatus), and especially Hans Dominik, whose cliche-laden works employed the Langian strategy of impressing readers with scientific know-how within imaginary settings. As he grew, Lang graduated to occult books and a species of literature known as Schundliteratur, or "trash literature," one branch of which dealt with the love life of the insane King Ludwig II of Bavaria; another of which related lurid tales of robbers and criminals. Lang had discovered the existence of this titillating genre one day when he furtively visited the maid's quarters in his parent's apartment ("probably driven by some youthful sex urge"). That visit resulted in two disappointments: "...that this very good-looking girl wasn't in and the heap of installments of The Phantom Robber, which I found on her nightstand, was a miserable substitute for what I had hoped to find... and, secondly, when my father found me reading the penny dreadfuls, he not only took them away, but slapped my face with them several times, forehand and backhand." This particular weekly magazine carried a regular cover illustration, often a crude depiction of a murder or rape. Minor and major characters in Lang's films, from Fury to While the City Sleeps, are similarly held in thrall by lowbrow crime magazines. More than once, in his American interviews, the director boasted that he kept up with "ze pulp." "I find much of it very dull, yes," Lang told a columnist in 1945, "but I find much of it interesting too." American Westerns also captivated him. Many he read were dime novels in crude translation, including one, Lang recalled years later, that chronicled the exploits of the outlaw James brothers. (When Lang filmed The Return of Frank James, he reportedly told Henry Fonda, "I thought the James boys were the greatest heroes since Robin Hood--I used to cry over Jesse's death.") Others were homegrown, from the fertile imagination of the German novelist Karl May, author of over sixty published works. Beloved among a generation of Germans, May did not leave his provincial hometown in Germany to visit the faraway places he wrote about until he'd finished some thirty novels, but his descriptive sagas of the Middle East, the American frontier, and other distant lands made those places seem authentic and inviting. Lang's enthusiasm for Karl May was something he claimed in common with his wife and scenarist Thea von Harbou. Regardless of their intellectual orientation, German-speaking people, from Adolf Hitler to Albert Einstein, found in the author a shared touchstone. Even Einstein declared, "My whole adolescence stood under his sign." Karl May was Lang's ticket to the Wild West--in a sense his first escape from Vienna. A love of the American frontier was deeply rooted in his boyhood, and never lost its purity, or naivete. Later on, in Hollywood, the director's Western films would prove labors of love, even tainted as they were by the simplistic perspective of dime novels and Karl May. The boy's infatuation with American frontier mythology must have reached euphoria when Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show arrived in Vienna, during the troupe's farewell European tour, in 1905. It was a high point, and an end point, of Lang's childhood. Though he was nearly fifteen, he always remembered his brief glimpse of Buffalo Bill, one of his towering Western heroes, with the awed eyes of youth. Lang would write only two screenplays about Vienna, one being the 1951 unproduced "Scandal in Vienna," which featured a recreation of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. Mixing vivid recall and fancy, Lang depicted the opening of the show: the tall rider in uniform heading the colorful parade, carrying a streaming American flag, the cavalry, the Indian scouts and bareback braves, the chiefs in regalia, the trumpeter, the cowboys and cowgirls in picturesque costumes, the dancing and prancing horses, which evoked "mythical centaurs," the procession of covered wagons and prairie schooners, the remuda of horses, the settlers driving cattle. Lang brought two of his heroes together in this 1951 scenario. Der alte Herr himself sits in the stands, keenly observing the show. (Perhaps Lang, as a boy, saw him there from afar.) The emperor observes the cavalcade rounding the arena. The American national anthem is struck up. Buffalo Bill enters the arena, riding a hero's white horse, "with his long white hair falling to his shoulders," wearing buckskin attire and embroidered gauntlets, carrying his Kentucky long rifle. He gallops to the center of the arena, his horse rears on hind legs, then Buffalo Bill gallantly raises his hat to greet the grandstand. The company sings out: Buffalo Bill, Buffalo Bill, Never missed and never will; Always aims and shoots to kill, And the comp'ny pays his buffalo bill. Another boyhood folk song Lang could recite, word for word. There were times of his life that Lang felt wistful about, among them his boyhood years, before entering secondary school. There were seasons of the year when Lang felt the pangs of the past most strongly, the times of his favorite holidays in Vienna--especially Christmas, which in his youth was a prolonged event. The Christmas season would coincide with his birthday, with Advent usually falling around the fifth or sixth of December. Just as his birthday celebrations concluded, the good man Nikolaus would appear with his long white beard, trailed by Grampus, the horned devil who carried a sack in which he put the bad children and carried them off to hell if they hadn't said their prayers. They were costumed friends of his father's, rewarding good behavior with bonbons, or sweets. Christmas in Vienna, above all, meant Christkindlmarkt--literally, the Market of Little Jesus, a seasonal market Lang always missed in his Hollywood years as much as he missed snow. The Christkindlmarkt, in those days, took place around a beautiful square called Am Hof. Lang could rhapsodize about the rows of wooden huts featuring Christmas articles. Between the huts were passages, canopied and lit by candle and oil, "even in the worst snowstorm." There you could find all the basic Christmas provisions and household goods, unique presents, rare delicacies and precious ornaments. Lang wrote about his Christkindlmarkt memories, upon request once, for publication: "There were the most lovely things there: many colored ornaments, balls and stars and silver festoons and baked apples and yellow-gold oranges and dates and dried Malaga grapes and gingerbread, toys and play horses and Punch and Judy shows. Tin soldiers and dragons and the Vienna military band and the candy house from Hansel and Gretel, with the witch of course flying out of the chimney in all her ugliness. "There were thousands of things to see there, and it was worth the box on the ears I'd get (when instead of coming home at seven, as told, I'd get in at ten)." Christmas at home was always celebrated before Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve a custom Lang adhered to in America. There was always a candlelit tree that stretched to the ceiling, with presents piled underneath. Lang recalled once that the presents of his boyhood became more and more practical over the years, especially those from his father, while his mother gave him the beribboned treasures a boy wished for, such as ice skates and picture books. Lang felt a deep ambivalence about Vienna, the place he left behind in 1918, but could not leave behind in his emotions. The Golden Autumn of Vienna was over too soon. He existed half in a dream-state, too young to understand and appreciate the experience; the director lived with memories too rich for the boy to have absorbed. Fritz Lang was displaced twice; he lived through the Golden Decade of Berlin and the Golden Age of Hollywood. He thought of himself, at different times, as a Berliner and an American. Sometimes he didn't mind being identified with Vienna and things "typically Viennese": personality traits, ideas and influences, ingrained experiences, favorite foods. More often, Lang hated the association, resisted being yoked to Vienna and experiences in the remote past. He resisted any sort of categorization. It was a double blow when he was grouped in people's minds with other figures in cinema who also happened to be born in Vienna. He recoiled at the fact that Otto Preminger, another director from Vienna who had an American career, shared his birthday (though Preminger was sixteen years his junior). Lang's lifelong disregard for colleague Josef von Sternberg was exacerbated by the fact that von Sternberg, too, was Viennese. ("He always thought he was greater than he was, don't you think?" Lang would ask.) Sentimental in his heart, Lang resisted sentimentality in others. He disliked conversations that began, "Do you still remember...?" Although it was not quite true, as he liked to aver, that almost forty years passed between his departure for Germany and his eventual return to Austria, he did not hurry back to Vienna after emigrating to the United States. Warily, he evaded goldstar invitations on his seventieth and seventy-fifth birthdays. He admitted to friends in Hollywood a worry that his "dream-Vienna, the Vienna of my youth," probably no longer existed. "I have lost a long list of things in my life that I held dear," Lang would say, "and I don't want to add the Vienna of my youth to them." The director had the habit of professing a longing for Vienna out of one side of his mouth, while from the other side he found fault with his roots. Only in retrospect did certain criticisms of his boyhood there occur to him. Only in retrospect did Lang become, for example, socially conscious--analyzing, with 20-20 hindsight, the political currents that had swirled around him and his family during the Golden Autumn. It was true, Lang conceded years later, that when he was in fourth or fifth grade, there occurred a sharp rise in anti-Semitism in Vienna, signaled by a series of public anti-Semitic remarks by Vienna mayor Karl Lueger. Indeed, there was a student club at Lang's Realschule that accepted no Jews as members, and whose members loudly proclaimed Germany as their fatherland. "I went about my business in those days without paying much attention to nor understanding these things," he said in an interview. When the crown prince committed suicide under mysterious circumstances in 1889--he and his mistress found dead at the prince's hunting lodge at Mayerling--Lang was not yet born. But the film director remembered growing up aware of the suicide as part of the national folklore, and feeling sympathy with his countrymen for the crown prince's grief-stricken father. The crown prince's death was the first, and perhaps most psychologically significant, of the suicides in Lang's lifetime. Otto Weininger, the influential Austrian philosopher, killed himself in 1903. The Viennese painter Richard Gerstl, a stark visionary, committed suicide in 1908, shooting himself after an unhappy affair with Arnold Schoenberg's wife. These were widely reported events. Suicide would become as customary as moonrise in the director's films, often, as in the case of the crown prince, involving an unhappy love affair. One of the most sensational episodes in Fritz Lang's own love life would also involve a woman's apparent suicide ... under unclear circumstances. The emperor was a popular symbol of lost Danubian unity, considered a charitable, almost democratic "old gentleman," though he believed in the divine right of the monarchy. Only with the passage of time did Lang learn about the reactionary court tendencies and intrigues of Franz Josef's reign. Though in many ways Lang always seemed one step ahead of history, in others he was doomed to lag behind. When Lang wrote the emperor and Buffalo Bill into his never-produced "Scandal in Vienna," he made a political manifesto of the past. Franz Drexler, the Viennese rival to the American cowboy, is described as "by no means a stiff person... Being of middle-class origin and having an eye for the needs of the people, he has become liberal and is strongly opposed to regimentation and the reactionary suppression of the working class in the absolute monarchy of Austria in 1890." The director usually had at least one character in his films who was his stand-in, or alter ego; in this case, it was Franz Drexler. When in the story Buffalo Bill encounters the emperor at a reception, they have a preposterous discussion about free will and democratic principles. The script happened to be written by Lang after the harsh lessons of the Third Reich, and during the anti-Communist crusade of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. The director was flaunting political lessons learned. Nonetheless, even in looking back, he was no political braveheart; an equivocal note appended to his script warned that the "political material in the story [is] to be treated lightly, more tongue-in-cheek than it now sounds." Only with the advantage of hindsight did unhappy incidents intrude upon Lang's rose-colored memories. Only thinking back would Lang remember that his father complained all the time, at the supper table, about the pressures of business. Only as an adult would Lang decide that his mother and father had a bad marriage; that he was born perhaps because they had "a good hour" one day. "I loved my mother very much and that is the only nice memory of my youth," the director wrote to one friend. Growing older, as Lang himself would admit, he preferred to remember "the bad things better." His first real disaffection set in at K. und K. Staatsrealschule, the secondary school Lang attended in the Neubau, or Seventh District. The Realschule entailed a seven-year course of study and focused on technical and scientific subjects, mainly physics, chemistry, mathematics, and the natural sciences, as a preparation for more specialized technical studies. A humanistisches Gymnasium education, alternatively, took eight or nine years, and focused more on humanistic studies--philosophy, Greek and Latin, classic literature--as a preparation for a university education. Realschule trained middle-class boys for high-level jobs in civil service, the trades, or technical professions. This course of study would advance Lang pragmatically toward a career as a Baumeister, a dismayingly mundane prospect for a youth whose spare time was by now eagerly given over to drawing and painting. The K. und K. Staatsrealschule, which had just celebrated its fiftieth anniversary when Lang entered, was one of Vienna's best, dating from the period of Austrian educational reform in the mid-1800s. Students had to take an entrance exam to qualify to enter. The student body was drawn overwhelmingly from well-to-do families; contributions were pooled for the fifty Kronen annual tuition dispersed to a handful of needy students admitted each year. When Lang started his first class, at the age of ten in September of 1901, he was one of the precocious youngest in a class that included students as old as thirteen. At K. und K., Lang was mandatorily drilled in English (as well as in French), with Italian an elective. Seven hours of classes per week were divided among the sciences and natural history; four hours went to geometry; three hours to geography and history; six hours to drawing and sketching; two hours to handwriting. School opened with a church service, at which attendance was obligatory for Catholic students. Two hours a week were devoted to religious classes. The school strove for an atmosphere of tolerance, however, and rabbis and Protestant ministers visited the school at intervals. There was a minority of Jewish students, and partly as a consequence classes were usually divided into "a" and "b" groups. It was an implicit circumstance that the "a" groups were all Catholic, while up to half of the members of the "b" groups were Protestant and Jewish. Interestingly, Lang was placed in the "a" group for the first four years; then, at the time when anti-Semitism flared up in Viennese society (especially 1905-1906), he was switched to the mixed "b" group. A student for the Matura, or final exam, had to write essays on topics ranging from ethical issues ("Law and Order") to the meaning of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's "Hamburg Dramaturgy," to similarities and differences between industry and agriculture. The exam called for three hours of literary translation from German into French (from Ploetz, Exercises on Syntax), and another three hours from English into German (from Seeliger's English Reader). Five hours were allotted to three questions on geometry. Lang liked to grumble that he was informed in advance by a certain professor what the essay topics for his Matura were going to be. But the topics were switched on him, with the result that he failed "miserably." This was the first of many real or imagined treacheries he would experience in his life, attributed by Lang to the fact that it was considered good policy to fail a certain percentage of students. The youth went out and got drunk for "the first time in my life," his first overt act of rebellion. It was early summer of 1907, with Vienna in the grip of a punishing heat wave, and Lang was just seventeen. Realschule failure did not augur well for a career as a businessman; indeed, Lang would always be a failure as a businessman. But the teenager did not really care. Lang was already budding as an artist, and determined--as rigorously determined as Johanna Lang, his grandmother--to pursue his own high-minded aspirations. Lang's love of beauty and artistry, his penchant for aesthetics, was certainly a trait inherited from his mother. The Lang family owned not only a spacious home in Vienna, but villas in the Salzkammergut and the valley of the river Kamp in Lower Austria--a vacation retreat, northwest of Vienna, for the affluent merchant and industrialist class--where the family could hike and ride horses. (The latter residence was affectionately referred to, inside the family, as the "Villa Lang.") It was Paula Lang who supervised the decoration of these various Lang dwellings with furniture, art, wall hangings, and elegant appointments--all that money could buy. There were chandeliers, Persian rugs, wood carvings, and porcelain vases everywhere. There were, at one point (as documented in Paula Lang's will), some twenty-one paintings in the parlor, another twenty-four watercolors in the study (which also contained a billiard table), and twenty-three oils in the living room, as well as numerous ivory and Japanese statuettes. Lang's mother also organized the family social life and hosted a salon in their Vienna home, as was the custom among the new bourgeois (particularly the Jewish bourgeois). The at-homes were attended by musicians, artists, and writers of modest stature. Here Lang as a boy caught his first glimpse of the artistic life, and his insistence on pursuing similar goals was at once a glorification of his mother and a condemnation of his thrifty, practical-minded father. Starting in Realschule, Lang was reading more adventurously--Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine, and Hans Sachs (not so well known outside Germany, but a serious Meister-singer who wrote poems on moral and religious subjects, medieval dramatic tragedies, and moral comedies). The Lang family owned deluxe editions of these authors as well as all the classic plays and books. Then Lang discovered, at the Richard Liany Bookstore on Kartnerstrasse, vulgar works--"a secret selection of censored books," in his words, including the works of the Marquis de Sade, which Lang said he "devoured but somewhat without appetite." One series he enjoyed were the comically erotic tales sometimes referred to as Mutzenbacher, after the candid memoirs of a prostitute named Josephine Mutzenbacher--so widely read when originally published in Vienna in 1906 that the author's name entered the vernacular. Outside influences began taking over. Cafes and cabarets became Lang's, as well as many other young people's, home away from home. Anton Lang had invested in a cafe at one point; Lang's father's regular spot was the Landtmann, a landmark even then, where stuffy types and government officials collected. His son's was the Cafe Dobner, on a busy corner where the Getreidemarkt cuts the Linke Wienzeile. With its billiard tables and cabaret performances, the Dobner was well-known as a meeting place for theater artists, opera stars, journalists, and beautiful prostitutes. Every Viennese had two or three such favorite cafes. Lang liked to say he knew a man who had his business hours printed on stationery in the following fashion: From 2 to 4 o'clock--Cafe Landtmann From 4 to 5 o'clock--Cafe Rebhuhn From 5 to 6 o'clock--Cafe Herrenhof Cafes were for loneliness, commiseration, misanthropy, deep thought, loud argument, and creativity. Cabarets supplied cheap entertainment, but, more than that, they were the underground of nonconformity. The cabarets in Vienna, as well as elsewhere in Europe, provided food and drink accompanied by satirical and topically charged songs and sketches. Some of the foremost writers, artists, and musicians of the day--such as the playwright Frank Wedekind, Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka, and the writer Peter Altenberg--enlivened Vienna's cabaret scene with presentations of their work. One of the most lustrous cabarets was Die Fledermaus (The Bat), which was run by Egon Friedell, "a strange mixture of journalist, humorist, scholar, and actor," in Egon Erwin Kisch's words. There, amid Jugendstil decor, Kokoschka mounted his Indian fairy tale "Des getupfte Ei" ("The Dotted Egg") on slides, writer Alfred Polgar--the future translator of Liliom--read his short prose and caustic commentary, and Friedell and other authors of rising repute presented their sketches and short plays. (After Lang directed Der mude Tod in 1921, Friedell would perform a sketch entitled "Mudes Obst," or "Weary Fruit," satirizing the film's portentousness, and remembered by all who saw it as a high point of his parodic skills.) These and other cabarets hosted the godsends and gadflies of Vienna. Lang claimed that Friedell personally taught him the art of drinking Pommard, a fine Burgundy wine. The future director became friends with cabarettist Dr. Fritz Beda-Lohner, who was writing under the name Beda Chanson. Beda-Lohner, an early pacifist and Zionist, was a sometime librettist for Franz Lehar, and he also wrote the Wienerlieder (including "Ausgerechnet Bananen," or "Yes, We Have No Bananas") that Lang liked so much. Lang also met and admired the mustachioed Peter Altenberg, one of the most brilliant of the Feuilletonisten--writers of biting prose vignettes. A self-proclaimed pauper, bohemian, and apostle of nature, Altenberg gave the Cafe Central as his address in one literary handbook, though he actually lived in a tiny hotel on a side street next to a graveyard. His relationships with women were as controversial as his prose. An avowed worshiper of prostitutes, Altenberg also had a proclivity for underage girls. The writer's "exalting of women," in Lang's words--for Lang saw things Altenberg's way--must have exerted an effect on the future film director. It became a philosophy Lang was to espouse in his own private life. Foremost among the teenager's icons was Karl Kraus, dubbed "the Pied Piper of Vienna" by author Gina Kaus, for the spell he cast over Vienna's youth and cognoscenti. This satirist, polemicist, social critic, master dramatist, and all-around diatribist ("the scourge of the Viennese conscience," in Kokoschka's words) not only made cabaret appearances but gave public lectures which Lang enthusiastically attended. And for a long time Lang collected the paperback editions of Kraus's scarlet-bound Die Fackel, containing his discourses, of which there were some 922 numbers over thirty-seven years. Six months after failing his Matura, Lang wound up taking the Realschule exam a second time. Then, in October of 1909, compromising with his father, he registered for the 1909-1910 academic year at the technische Hochschule--not a university, but a technical college for advanced studies in the sciences. Although Lang often claimed this stint of higher education on his resume, he did not in fact attend enough classes to merit any marks. The charade he later carried on with his publicity he first carried on with his parents. Unbeknownst to them, while he continued to live at home, he began working in two cabarets, the Femina Revue Buhne (Femina Music Hall) and Theaterkabarett Holle (Cabaret Hell). Accordingly, as he once explained to the Viennese periodical Mein Film, Lang learned to carry on a double life. He created some posters for these cabarets, and occasionally took the stage himself for impromptu performances, according to Mein Film. "While his parents thought he was asleep," the Viennese publication reported, "he was appearing at a cabaret where he gave `modern' poetry readings." Since he made little money, legitimate theater was now an expense to be weighed, and so Lang found himself more often in standing-room or gallery seats. He began to spend time watching movies in the many theaters clustered in the Innere Stadt, showing predominantly German productions. There were also cheap circuses, magic shows, and all-dog vaudeville. He might have taken in the oddity known as "Peter the Human Ape," opening at the Ronacher in December of 1908. This Peter, very much like the monkey named Peter who would figure as a curious sidelight to Lang's life years later, was advertised as a sensation. He acted "just like a human being, has better table manners than most people, and behaves so well that even more highly evolved creatures would do well to model themselves on him." Peter smoked, drank, ate on stage, pedaled a bicycle, rode a horse. When, eventually, it became clear that Lang was neglecting his studies at the technische Hochschule, he had to drop out of the program. Nor did he reenroll for the 1910-1911 academic year. He bickered with his father, then tried to mollify Anton by telling him he was earnest about his goals and intended to become more diligent about pursuing the study of painting. It is unclear how much studying he did--even how much painting--or whether this was simply a pose. Friedrich Steinbach told this anecdote: Lang, in his teens, made a big show of presenting one of his oil paintings to his mother for her birthday. Paula Lang cooed over the painting, while the youth gloated over Anton's stern-faced reaction. Only a few days passed before a shop owner came by to reclaim the work of art. It turned out that Lang had not painted it himself but had bought it on consignment, then found himself unable to pay up. Lang's artwork consisted mostly of cabaret posters, sketches, even postcards, for which there was a long Viennese tradition. The young man's first sale may well have been a line drawing of Karl Kraus which he sold to the bookstore on Kartnerstrasse where they hawked Kraus's Fackels. It was duly reproduced as a postcard. "Karl Kraus never forgave me for that," recollected the director on one occasion. Oblivious though he may have been to the Sezession, the youth's artistic paragons were polar opposites spawned by that artistic revolt: Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Klimt, with a glittering, ornamental style, portrayed alluring models and bourgeois society ladies, emphasizing their sensuality as well as arrogance and vanity. Schiele, with more of a proletarian bent, depicted ordinary people contorted by hatred, hunger, tragedy. His reverence for Klimt, Lang liked to say, might have influenced the excessive stylization of Die Nibelungen. But Schiele, who died very young (a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic) was his true idol, "whom I never surpassed." He was the only artist the director ever really collected. A youthful self-portrait by Lang, which has been reproduced in several books, self-consciously emulated Schiele's tortured approach. Cabarets and cafes were also for romantic assignations and conversations a deux. "Viennese women were the most beautiful and generous in the world," Lang said on one occasion. "They were wonderfully dressed, and you met secretly in a cafe. You set up an evening rendezvous during the intermission of a play, or met `coincidentally' after eleven o'clock." Lang had learned about love and sex from Catholicism, and his outlook remained intrinsically Catholic throughout his life. There were Madonnas, like his own mother, pure and saintly (Kriemhild before the vengeful transformation; one-half of Brigitte Helm/Maria in Metropolis). And there were whores, who possessed the tempting inducements of sin. Sins could always be forgiven, and like Mary Magdalene, prostitutes could be uplifted. Prostitutes in the end were for Lang, as for Peter Altenberg, a shrine at which to prostrate himself and worship. The religion teacher at the Realschule had been a priest who also heard the pupils' confessions. Lang always remembered that this particular clergyman would force one student, who had been held back in his matriculation, to recite the Ten Commandments, then, after the Sixth Commandment, interrupt him each time with "Thou shalt not be unchaste! Not true, my dear boy?" This student was the most sexually mature of them all and one time invited "the boldest of us," including Lang, to visit three of the most notorious spots on Spittelberg, regarded as an immoral part of town. "Spittelberg," as Lang put it, "was not a Berg [mountain] at all, it's just that one of the streets was called that. This was where girls with exposed breasts lay in street-level windows and invited passersby to a visit with the most obvious gestures." This was Lang's first "Scarlet Street." The film director claimed that even before he left high school he already had notched "a few affairs," that he was an "early bloomer" sexually. "Women have always been my best friends," he liked to add with equal measures of disingenuousness and truth. Some of these early affairs were no doubt platonic. Even as an old man Lang was bothered by the memory of a cabaret performer named Trude whom he could never quite succeed in seducing. No doubt there were also encounters with prostitutes, the first of many such experiences. The call girls in the director's life may not have been among his best friends exactly, yet some of the regulars in Hollywood were known to stay in touch--phone him, after many years, to hit him for money or just to say hello. The youthful Lang spent too much time in the cabarets, from his father's point of view, and not always for the entertainment. "He pretended to be studying painting," the ex-Berlin newspaperman Curt Riess reported in one of his books. "When his father found out they had a fight, mostly about a young lady--who wasn't really a lady--an actress at a cabaret called Fledermaus." Lang resented the fact that he was financially dependent on his father's goodwill. "About halfway through every month there was a fight at home," the director said in a interview later on. "My source of money dried up and I had to try to find thirty Kreuzer, which was the subsistence level per day in Vienna back then. One had little success walking head down, hoping to find money in the street. That was usually a bad bet. It was better to stride proudly into a cafe house and mention casually that you were getting money the next day and oh, by the way, could I borrow thirty Kreuzer till then?" The squabbling escalated until Lang decided to leave home--in fact, to leave Vienna. His Meldezettel, or police registration, shows that he officially lived at home as late as January 15, 1909. The technische Hochschule registration came in October of that year. The young man appears to have attended some art classes and launched his cafe life in earnest in 1910. Lang likely departed either late in 1910 or early the following year. Saying his good-byes, he tucked away the "splendid fortune" of forty Kronen in his pack--in those days about the price of a winter overcoat and a pair of shoes. The film director, in his interviews, liked to urge young people to prove their mettle by running away from home, "something every decent human being should do." But Fritz Lang himself--gently cushioned in his youth--waited until he was on the precipice of his twenty-first year.
