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Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang
Movie Director and Intermittent Collector of Oceanic Art

Rainer F. Buschmann

Fritz Lang (1890-1976) is best remembered for directing movies for nearly fifty years. His best remembered films are Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). On occasion, he also collected Indigenous art, in particular artifacts from Oceania. While much has been written on Lang’s illustrious movie career, this essay will focus primarily on his passion for Oceanic art.

Fritz Lang on a film set in 1945, sporting his typical monocle, IMDb Friedrich (Fritz) Christian Anton Lang was born in Vienna in 1890. He attended school in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a teenager, he watched the Buffalo Bill Wild West show, which sparked his love for adventure and later inspired his dreams of a career in the film industry. He also became a passionate reader of German classical literature and philosophy. He began studying engineering but dropped out to pursue his passion for art. He briefly enrolled in art schools in Munich and Paris. Just before the war, Lang followed his wanderlust and traveled to North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The extent of his travels is uncertain, as he carefully crafted his own biographical story, which was heavily embellished. The outbreak of the Great War found Lang in Paris, and he quickly returned to his hometown. A hernia prevented him from enlisting in the Austrian Army until January 1915. Fritz served with distinction on the Eastern Front, mainly fighting in Russia and Romania. Injured several times, Fritz lost sight in his right eye due to shrapnel. It was during this period that he wrote his first scripts. He gained the attention of German filmmakers and moved to that country after the conflict. It was in Germany during the post-war Weimar Republic that Fritz directed some of his most memorable movies. For background props in his early films, Harakiri (1919) and The Spiders (Die Spinnen, 1919-1920), the director enlisted the help of Heinrich Umlauff (see provenance biography), who led a trade house specializing in indigenous artifacts. Fritz’s relationship with the Umlauff Company continued into the late 1920s, and their artifacts were featured on the sets of Destiny (1921) and Nibelungen (1924). Heinrich Umlauff, for example, was a frequent visitor to Fritz’s sets until he died in 1924.

Movie Still from the Spinnen (1919)

Fritz Lang’s Sepik artifact purchases from Umlauff. This use of artifacts in his films also inspired Fritz Lang’s collection, which included artifacts from Oceanic, African, and Asian cultures. Living with his second wife, the well-known author and screenwriter Thea von Harbou, in an apartment in Berlin, Lang agreed to write a short article with pictures for the German magazine Interior Decoration (Innendekoration). Proud owner of what he called a “collector’s apartment,” Lang shares insight into what motivated him to acquire and display all his treasures. “I was never able to bring myself to store my beloved objects in boxes and crates, while waiting for the day when I find a perfect place to keep them in the house — with a large and old garden that I dream of — and so I accept the fact that my library is home to the South Seas, Africa, and Mexico, all arranged in more or less unusual ways… The immediate contact with the things you love, which you are greeted by when you come home, seems to me personally to create a different connection between the collection and the collector than the care that goes into wrapping each piece in cotton wool.” Yet Lang wanted more than just crowded shelves; he wanted to be different from your common tenant, and he yearned for a reaction from frequent visitors to his apartment. The movie director believed that the evolution of interior decorating reflected the culture of “living” had experienced both elevation and decline. The mass production of furniture enabled the acquisition of comfortable and “hygienic” fixtures. At the same time, such developments triggered the emergence of a banal and everyday interior, which Lang abhorred. His career as a director demanded a more spectacular décor, which he first found in the art of East Asia and then in the realm of African and Oceanic objects: “Because as soon as I immersed myself in the world of these masks, I discovered a new planet of mysticism, an Atlantis of Art—an artistic expression that emerged from a religion that feared the unknown.” It was this transformation that Lang wanted to communicate to visitors to his home: “Visitors who enter our apartment for the first time find themselves confronted with [human scalps and severed heads] … But once I tell them the story behind these grotesque and beautifully painted heads, they are no longer horrified but transformed… As Goethe put it [in his Faust], ‘The shudder of awe is humanity's highest faculty.’ They feel horror not at the sight of decapitated heads, but before the mystical religion of peoples, which is nothing but fear, utter lack of redemption, and precisely for that reason, a constant longing. They understand why they are led from the library with the distorted faces, the winged monsters of the South Seas, into the room in which...the head of the all-knowing Buddha greets them, the incarnation of the absence of fear, of redemption, of freedom.”

Lang, von Harbou, and their apartment, several rooms revealing Oceanic art, Innendekoration

Lang, von Harbou, and their apartment, several rooms revealing Oceanic art, Innendekoration In his flat, much like behind the camera, Lang was a master of staging. He revealed surprisingly little ethnographic knowledge behind the New Ireland and Sepik treasures he was displaying, and carefully crafted an evolutionary narrative that would also inform his movies. The “dream team” of Lang’s direction and Harbou’s scripts produced some of his best films, such as the futuristic, almost dystopian Metropolis (1927), in which two societies struggle for supremacy. In one critical scene, the machines that exploit the subterranean society convert into the Canaanite deity Moloch, who demands human sacrifice.

Still from the movie Metropolis illustrating the transformation from machine to deity. The movie also featured one of the earliest silver screen appearances of a robot (Maschinenmensch), whose face bore a resemblance to African or Oceanic masks. M (1931), often considered Lang’s masterpiece and another collaboration with Harbou, features Peter Lorre as a serial killer of children. As one of Germany’s first “talkies,” the film highlights the killer’s dialogue as he explains the urges behind his heinous acts.

Movie poster for Metropolis featuring the Maschinenmensch, Wiki Commons While these movies cemented Lang’s career, they also exposed his relentless pursuit of perfection. Actors resented his control and the lack of improvisation on Lang’s set; movie studio executives feared his frequent reshoots and the resulting budget overruns. Metropolis again serves as a good example—originally budgeted at over one million Reichsmark, Lang’s edits and reshoots pushed the costs to nearly six million, almost bankrupting its parent company, UFA. Although considered a film classic today, contemporary critics were not taken by Metropolis. In his private life, Lang gained a reputation as a womanizer and enjoyed being seen with younger actresses in public, much to the annoyance of his partners. His first wife, actress Elizabeth Rosenthal, shot herself in a bathtub with Lang’s wartime revolver. The marriage to Thea von Harbou also suffered from his infidelities, which ended not only their marriage but also their successful film collaboration. Furthermore, while Lang did not support the rising Nazi party, Harbou became an ardent supporter of Adolf Hitler. Lang’s most famous biographical story, which he liked to embellish over the years, was about an encounter with Joseph Goebbels in the summer of 1933. Soon after the Nazis took control of Germany, the propaganda minister invited Lang and told him that his latest film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), wouldn’t be shown in Germany. Despite this, the Nazi leadership—including Goebbels—was very impressed with his directing skills. As a result, Goebbels offered Lang the position of the country's top filmmaker. While honored, the director also understood that such a role could restrict his creative freedom. Lang’s mother, Paula, had Jewish roots, which she tried to hide by converting to Catholicism before marrying the director’s father—a common practice among mixed marriages in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Lang thanked Goebbels, sold his belongings, and caught the first train to Paris. Leaving behind his extensive collection of Oceanic art, Lang eventually moved to the United States, like many other German refugees. While Lang was received warmly in Hollywood, he had to adjust to movie scripts that resisted his edits. His relationships with actors remained tense as he kept them waiting for the perfect shot. Perhaps most disappointing to him were his new housing arrangements, which offered little space for his extensive collections. For example, when he moved to the new enclave of Beverly Hills shortly after World War II ended, he had to accept the preferences of Hungarian architect Paul László, whose firm mandated simplicity and spartan décor—quite different from his crowded Berlin apartment. Most of his movies, 22 to be exact, were American productions, and Lang still managed to create some classic films that contributed to the American film noir genre, most notably "The Big Heat" (1953). However, the Academy did not nominate his American films for Oscars. In the late 1950s, Lang returned to Germany and directed some of his final films, which, although achieving limited commercial success, were generally panned by critics, who, perhaps unfairly, unfavorably compared them to his earlier masterpieces. With failing eyesight and health, Lang returned to California in the 1960s and renewed his collection of Oceanic Art, possibly driven by nostalgia for his golden years as a director. He appeared at European and American film festivals and received honors for his classic movies from the Weimar era. However, he resented that few people screened his later American films. He actively worked to shape his legacy. He was incredibly annoyed that Siegfried Kracauer described his early films as showing clear proto-fascist tendencies. Conversely, Lotte Eisner let Lang edit her biography of the legendary filmmaker, which significantly delayed its publication. Fritz Lang died in 1976—besides a New Ireland Uli figure and a Balinese mask that have sold at auction, the whereabouts of his collection is not known. Further Readings: Eisner, Lotte. 1969. The Hunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema and the Influences of Max Reinhardt. London: Thames and Hudson. __________. 1976. Fritz Lang. London: Senker & Warberg. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lang, Fritz. 1924. „Sammlerwohnungen“, Innendekoration: Mein Heim, Mein Stolz; die gesamte Wohnkunst in Wort und Bild. 35: 254-256. McGilligan, Patrick. 1997. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s Press.