Social Justice Arises from Ludwig Erhard’s Economic Policies

May 10, 1945 is sometimes called Stunde Null — “zero hour” — in German history. The war had officially ended at midnight. The German people finally had peace and were freed from the tyrannical oppression of Adolf Hitler. Yet it was the most difficult of times.

In German cities, bombs had destroyed homes and workplaces. Rubble filled and blocked streets and sidewalks. Many people had no access to electricity or running water. Subway, streetcar, bus, and railroad transportation were nearly nonexistent. Food supplies were insufficient, and people actually died of starvation.

Those who use the phrase “zero hour” to describe this moment in history see it as a moment when the German people were starting over. The past had been destroyed and they had nothing. They had to rebuild not only physical infrastructure, but the society itself, out of the emptiness.

Other historians argue against using the term Stunde Null, pointing out that the Germans were greatly burdened by the past. They were not starting with a clean slate. The past was real and was inflicting further suffering on them.

From mid-May 1945 onward, Germany was under the military governorship of the four victorious Allies — The United States, Britain, France, and the USSR. Paradoxically, these governors, having defeated the Nazis, left Nazi policies in place. These policies cruelly oppressed the Germans after the war. For twelve years, from 1933 to 1945, the National Socialist government had brutalized the German people. With the Nazis defeated and gone, the vicious policies were left in place.

The people had hoped that the war’s end would bring an end to the persecution, but the Allies continued the same practices. The abusive practices of the Nazi government grew from its name: National Socialism. The Nazis had “nationalized” various industries, confiscating people’s property, and placing businesses under the control of the government. They had introduced aspects of socialism — eliminating the freedom of the marketplace — by controlling wages and prices, by dictating the quantity of products to be manufactured, and by crushing the people with high rates of taxation.

The Nazis occasionally violated their own principles — they presented themselves as saving people from the evils of communism and socialism, while implementing socialist policies — they occasionally privatized industries when it served their purposes, violating their own broad trend of nationalizing industries. But the net effect and overall trend of Nazi policy was to eliminate personal economic freedom and to eliminate political liberty, which amounted to eliminating social justice.

Those National Socialist policies were foundational to fascism, and to be expected from the Nazi party. It was, however, unexpected that the American, British, and French would continue those policies — the same genocidal policies against which they had waged a long and painful war.

Along with the Allied military governors, one German political party, the SPD, also sought the continuation of National Socialist economic policies. These policies were driving Germany down at accelerating rates into misery. Observers inside and outside of Germany feared that the nation would be consigned permanently to a third-world status, or that it would take more than a century to rebuild the country.

The great surprise began in an area known as the Bizone. At the war’s end, most German territory was divided and occupied by four victorious Allies. The Americans and the British coordinated their governance of their respective occupational zones, and so the name Bizone arose. The French, whose occupational zone was defined somewhat later, also joined, and sometimes the area is called the Trizone.

In the Bizone, an innovative economist named Ludwig Erhard saw the problem and proposed a solution. To be anti-Nazi and anti-fascist, he argued, one must do the opposite of what the National Socialists had done, as Lawrence White explains:

Fortunately for ordinary Germans, Erhard — who became director of the economic administration for the U.K.-U.S. occupation Bizone in April 1948 — thought otherwise. A currency reform that he helped to design was slated to replace the feeble old Reichsmark with the new Deutsche mark in all three Western zones on June 20. Without approval from the Allied military command, Erhard used the occasion to issue a sweeping decree abolishing most of the price controls and rationing directives. He later told friends that the American commander, Gen. Lucius Clay, phoned him when he heard about the decree and said: “Professor Erhard, my advisers tell me that you are making a big mistake.” Erhard replied, “So my advisers also tell me.”

Erhard’s mission was to undo what the Nazis had done. His conceptual program included lowering taxes, removing wage and price controls, privatizing industry, and the end of the “command economy.” A command economy is one in which the government dictates how many of each type of product will be manufactured.

The Soviets criticized Erhard’s views. The SPD criticized Erhard’s views. Some American economists criticized Erhard’s views. But Ludwig Erhard had been, prior to his job as economic advisor in the postwar era, a researcher in an economic think-tank, and had been an assertive member of the anti-Hitler underground resistance movement. He was unmoved by his critics. The policy he proposed was not in error, as Lawrence White reports:

It was not a big mistake. In the following weeks Erhard removed most of the Bizone’s remaining price controls, wage controls, allocation edicts and rationing directives. The effects of decontrol were dramatic.

By every metric, the German economy — i.e., the economy in the Bizone and Trizone — began to recover, and it recovered quicker than anyone thought possible. Wages rose. The standard of living rose. Unemployment fell. German industries rebuilt and modernized.

In mid-1945, Germany was starving, had no resources, and was living in primitive squalor. Within a decade, it had the largest, healthiest, and most powerful economy in Europe, and the second most powerful economy in the world.

The free market was the path to social justice. The laissez-faire policies which Erhard introduced opened the path to true democracy: a government of freely-elected representatives.

The Economics of Ludwig Erhard: Applying Simple Principles in Complicated Situations

After May 1945, when WW2 ended, Germany was a physically and economically devastated country. Infrastructure was nonexistent in many places: electricity, running water, and telephone service were rare. Bombs had destroyed both residential and commercial structures. Railroads, highways, streets, and bridges had been wrecked.

Around the world, many economists, historians, and political leaders expressed the view that Germany might find it impossible to rebuild. Many thought that Germany would be permanently relegated to a third-world status. Some observers believed that, if Germany could rebuild, it would take more than 100 years. The country had taken such a terrible beating that recovery seemed impossible.

Yet within a single decade, Germany would be the most powerful economy in Europe, and by many metrics, the second most powerful economy in the world. Commentators from other nations were amazed, as Lawrence White writes:

Germany became a role model for recovery from a very different crisis. In the aftermath of World War II, Germany’s cities, factories and railroads lay in ruins. Severe shortages of food, fuel, water and housing posed challenges to sheer survival.

In 1945, the situation was so desperate that many Germans starved to death. Millions of young German men had died in the war, and now their families were dying from a lack of food at home.

In the immediate postwar situation, the armies of the winning countries (The United States, France, Britain, and the USSR) had political and civil control over Germany. The Germans were not allowed to have their own government until late 1949.

At first, the postwar military occupational powers enforced the economic policies which were on the books at the end of the war — the Nazi policies. The word “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist,” and the Nazis lived up to that name.

The Nazis nationalized industries — the government seizing an individual’s property. This was the case, e.g., for two major aircraft companies, Junkers and Arado, and for two railroad systems, the Lübeck-Büchener Railway and the Brunswick Landes railway. The Nazi government also created the massive Reichswerke Hermann Göring, a government-owned and -operated industrial conglomerate. State-owned companies were a central part of the fascist control of Germany.

The other part of “National Socialist” is the socialist economic programs which the Nazis implemented. Although in their propaganda, the Nazis portrayed themselves as rescuing the German people from the evils of communism and socialism, the reality was that the Nazis imposed regulations which choked the free functioning of markets. Opposing laissez-faire economic systems is a cornerstone of socialist economics.

Accordingly, the Nazis imposed wage and price regulations. Only the government could set prices for merchandise, and only the government could determine how much workers would be paid. In this way, the Nazis controlled nearly every aspect of the economy.

The Nazis also imposed significant taxes on all Germans, which amounted simply to the confiscation of the property of ordinary working-class people.

Finally, the Nazis engaged in a “command economy.” They dictated how much of each product might be manufactured — no more, and no less, was allowed.

As strange as it may be, the four powers who controlled Germany after the war initially decided to keep the genocidal Nazi economic policies in place. After fighting a war to defeat National Socialism, the victorious Allies kept Nazi economic regulations in effect, as Lawrence White reports:

Unfortunately, occupation policy makers actually perpetuated the shortages by retaining the price controls the Nazi government had imposed before and during the war. Consumers and businessmen battled against the bureaucratic regime of controls and rationing in what the German economist Ludwig Erhard described as Der Papierkrieg — the paper war. Black markets were pervasive.

The downward death spiral of the German economy continued to worsen. The great recovery began only when Ludwig Erhard persuaded the military governors to allow the dismantling of Nazi policies. Erhard worked systematically to undo fascism: his policies reduced regulations, reduced taxes, and reduced government ownership of industries. People could freely negotiate wages and prices, and could decide for themselves how much of any given product they wanted to manufacture.

Ludwig Erhard was simply the anti-Nazi and anti-fascist economist. Whatever the Nazis had done to the economy, Erhard would do the opposite.

Within a year, the growth of the German economy was significant. Unemployment fell, wages rose, and the standard of living rose. German companies became more innovative than their European competitors. Economists coined the word Wirtschaftswunder — “economic miracle” — to describe the turnaround.

Erhard commented that there was no miracle, but rather merely the consistent and sound application of economic policies and principles. He explained that prosperity and freedom were coextensive. The undoing of the fascist control of the economy was simultaneously the introduction of social justice and the beginning of an economic rebirth. He wrote:

Das, was sich in Deutschland in den letzten neun Jahren vollzogen hat, war alles andere als ein Wunder. Es war nur die Konsequenz der ehrlichen Anstrengung eines ganzen Volkes, das nach freiheitlichen Prinzipien die Möglichkeit eingeräumt erhalten hat, menschliche Initiative, menschliche Energien wieder anwenden zu dürfen. Wenn darum dieses deutsche Beispiel über das eigene Land hinaus einen Sinn haben soll, dann kann es nur der sein, aller Welt den Segen der menschlichen Freiheit und der ökonomischen Freizügigkeit deutlich zu machen.

The rebirth of the German economy was also the rebirth of a truly democratic society. Justice demanded the undoing of Nazi policies, which brought about personal freedom and political liberty, as well as prosperity.

Frida Kahlo: German or Mexican?

Great fame has come to the name Frida Kahlo. In the name itself is a key to the mystery of her self-concept. Around the age of thirty, she changed her name from “Frieda” to “Frida” in an act of protest: It was the 1930s, and she was not timid in saying, “Hitler’s a pig. He’s mistreating the Jews and and wants to wreak havoc across Europe!”

This incident is recorded by Marc Petitjean, whose father, Michel Petitjean, was a friend of Frida.

She changed the spelling of her name to distance herself from the brutality of the National Socialist government. Her disdain was for the Nazis. For the oppressed and suffering Germans, who were the victims of the Nazis, she felt kinship. After the war, she was enthusiastic in establishing a connection with her extended family members who lived in Germany.

Frida’s relationship to her own name is therefore already complex.

Long before changing her name, Frida’s heritage was established as a mixture of German and Mexican, as Marc Petitjean writes:

Frida’s father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was the son of a jeweler who lived in Baden-Baden in Germany and whom Frida maintained was of Hungarian descent. At twenty-one he emigrated to Mexico and Hispanicized his first name to Guillermo. He worked in the German community as a cashier in a glassware shop, as a salesman in a bookshop, and for a jeweler.

Wilhelm played important roles in Frida’s life: he transmitted her family’s German heritage to her, he taught her the German language, and he introduced her to the visual arts and encouraged her to pursue them. Wilhelm was himself an artist, working mainly in photography and graphic design.

The Kahlo home was a cultural enclave, and Wilhelm felt at home in Mexico’s small community of German immigrants. He did not, however, isolate: he learned to speak Spanish well, and more importantly, to read and write it. He developed significant business connections among Mexican business and government leaders.

Marc Petitjean describes Wilhelm’s personality, and his influence on Frida:

Guillermo was a Germanophile who read Schopenhauer and played Beethoven sonatas on the piano alone in his study. He taught Frida to speak German, to paint, and to take photographs.

Frida’s mother was a widow named Maria. Her first husband had also been a German. Wilhelm Kahlo was a widower; Maria was his second wife and the mother of Frida. Marc Petitjean records that Maria was “illiterate.” Maria died a decade before Wilhelm died. In sum, Wilhelm had more time and more intellectual resources to shape Frida’s thinking about art and culture.

Two cultures lived inside Frida: the Mexican which surrounded her, and the German which shaped her home life. Marc Petitjean recounts his father’s analysis of Frida:

My father was particularly aware of the two cultures within Frida: “a degree of rationalism, due to her German heritage, grew more complex when it was combined with Mexican exuberance, Mexican generosity, and Mexico’s colorful religious fervor. Frida was all this rolled into one.” She was completely Mexican and German. It fascinated him.

“In order to” express her contempt for Hitler and the National Socialists and to “distance herself from Nazi” politics, “she even claims that her father’s family is Jewish,” according to Petitjean. Sometimes she added Hungarian to her heritage. Frida’s view of historical reality was rather fluid and fanciful. There is no evidence that the Kahlo family had Jewish or Hungarian roots. The family seems to have been long established in western and southwestern Germany.

Frida often rewrote history to make a symbolic point: she changed her date of birth to reflect events in Mexican history, sometimes citing it as 1910 instead of 1907.

There are distinctly Mexican features combined with distinctly German features in Frida’s thought and work. Her father’s artistic contributions and affectionate support of Frida’s work are integral to her achievements.

Frida Kahlo’s Father: How Wilhelm Became Guillermo

The fact that Frida Kahlo spelled her name “Frieda” for the first part of her life is symbolic of her heritage. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was a significant artist in his own right.

Wilhelm’s main medium was photography, although he also worked in graphic design, as reported in Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko, a monumental biographical study of Wilhelm’s life and career, published in 2005.

In 1890, he emigrated, leaving Germany and settling in Mexico. He brought with him a good middle-class education, the ability to play the piano well, and a love for authors like Goether, Schiller, and Schopenhauer. His collection of German books was a prominent feature in the home in which Frida was raised.

He learned Spanish and became proficient in the language, but continued to use German professionally and at home. He began to call himself Guillermo, the Spanish equivalent of Wilhelm, in social and business situations.

With his first wife, Maria, Wilhelm had three children, two of whom lived to adulthood. Maria died young, and Wilhelm remarried. His second wife was Matilde, who bore five children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Frida was born in 1907.

Some details of Frida’s life, and her father’s life, cannot be precisely clarified. Wilhelm’s education in Germany was clearly a thorough one, allowing him to navigate complicated accounting procedures in the business world, while reading Schopenhauer in his freetime. He could play the piano well, and artistic training, but historians have been unable to determine which schools or universities he attended.

Other details about the family are known, but contradict the fanciful versions which Frida liked to tell. The Kahlos were a well-established German family, and not descendants of Hungarian immigrants into Germany. Frida also liked to vary her date of birth, adjusting it to link it symbolically with the history of Mexico.

While it is routinely reported that Frida studied at the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a German language school in Mexico, no documents have survived to prove this. It is known that at least one of Frida’s sisters studied there.

In any case, Frida spoke German at home with her father, who called her liebe Frieda (“dear Frieda”). In the 1930s, she changed the spelling of her name as a protest against the suffering which the National Socialist (“Nazi”) government was inflicting upon the Germans.

Frida’s mother died in 1932, and her father lived almost another decade afterward. It was her father who introduced Frida to painting. Whether she inherited some of his artistic ability, or whether he taught it to her, is an open question.

During Wilhelm’s last decade, Frida apparently absorbed an appreciation for her family’s history. Wilhelm died in 1941, during WW2. When the war was over, Frida was enthusiastic about making contact with distant relatives in Germany — people she’d never met. When she wrote to them, she was able to give a wealth of details about individuals in the Kahlo family, going back several generations. She and her father must have conversed in depth about the family history.

Frida could speak German comfortably with her father, but her ability to write German at an academic level was never strong. After her father’s death, she didn’t use her German much, and so in a 1949 letter to her German relatives, she apologizes for writing in English.

Wilhelm and Frida had an affectionate relationship. He influenced her approach to images, cared deeply and unconditionally for her, and imparted family history to her, so that long after his death, she was enthusiastic to correspond with the Kahlo family members in Germany. A substantial part of Frida’s self-concept was German.

Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle co-edited Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo von Pforzheim bis Mexiko. The book was published in 2005 and includes essays by Juan Coronel Rivera, Cristina Kahlo Alcala, Helga Prignitz-Poda, and Raquel Tibol.

Poet as Prophet: Trakl’s Redeeming Truth, Ready to Resurrect the Collapse He Predicts

Trakl is a prophet. To which extent did he see himself as such? The prophetic tradition is defined by the three activities of a prophet: To be a spokesman for God; to be a social critic; to predict the future. Within the larger category of prophet are at least two subtypes: the condemning prophet and the weeping prophet.

Trakl saw the world — or saw its essence, its future, its fate — as something which is passing away. Sometimes it is passing away slowly, in a process of decay. Sometimes it is passing away quickly, in a violent destruction. Sometimes Trakl’s lyric imagery pictures the world after its demise, the viewpoint of one walking among the ruins.

But this destruction is not meaningless. It takes places within a conceptual framework, as Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes:

The experience of the shattering of the world, however, exhibits in Trakl two aspects that qualify its destructiveness by providing it with a religious context. The speechless and unutterable pain (sprachloser Schmerz) experienced is described in terms of an event (ereignet) that has irrupted from outside the sphere of its occurrence (hereingebrochen), and that Trakl names a judgment or sentence (Gericht).

There is a moral and spiritual logic in Trakl’s vision of the world’s decline. The routine chain of cause and effect operates within the sensible physical world. Trakl opens the door to the possibility of metaphysical causes producing tangible events.

Trakl is not a philosopher: certainly not one in the tradition of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, or Schopenhauer. Yet he is indirectly encountering some of the metaphysical topics which are known to philosophers.

It is not mere abstract principles of metaphysics which interest Trakl. The events he describes or envisions are loaded with value, whether good or evil:

It is a feature of the figural imagination to think of the world, not as an encapsulated realm in which cause and effect succeed each other with relentless horizontality, but rather to conceive of existence in time as an open-ended situation that may at any moment (and does, indeed, at all moments, although not always perceptibly) undergo a sudden incursion of God’s free action.

Trakl sees destruction coming to his society — slowly or quickly — and anticipates wreckage which will be left afterwards. Yet his tone is not one of fear or panic. Nor does he condemn: he is not a prophet of wrath, he takes no joy in the world’s downfall.

Is the coming collapse a punishment? If so, is it just? Is it God’s vengeance? Trakl doesn’t answer directly. His focus is on finding some way to retain meaning in the midst of the disintegration, and in so doing, offer some hint of renewal after the unraveling of civilization.

He views the apocalypse not sensationalistically in the manner of a tabloid newspaper — die Boulevardzeitungen were already well-known in Trakl’s day — but rather seeks for himself, and hopes to explain to others, a cosmic context which shattering of culture makes sense, even if it is a painful sense.

Trakl’s description of his painful experience is, then, in keeping with his figural view of the world as embodied in his poems. The devastating event, furthermore, leads the poet to formulate a desire for persevering in the “doing of the truth,” an expression pregnant with scriptural associations concerning those who are doers and not mere hearers of the Word.

The power of Trakl’s lyric style is that it universally evokes within the reader a sense of darkness — dunkel, finster, düster — in a literal optical sense of those words, words which occur frequently in his texts. Even in passages which don’t use those words, the sensation of darkness is inevitably and involuntarily called forth in the mind of the reader.

There is an internal tension within Trakl’s texts between, on the one hand the attempt to explain a framework within which the world’s destruction has some meaning, and on the other hand, the pain and darkness of that destruction. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis explains:

We must conclude that, in some manner, Trakl regards his frightful experience as occurring within a context that determines, but is not to be equated with, the immediate phenomena of namelessness, painfulness, and unremitting darkness (steinernes Dunkel).

There are dozens of occurrences of words like Schatten, dunkel, finster, and düster in Trakl’s poems. Yet references to Wahrheit are also significant.

In a poem titled Heiterer Frühling Trakl makes this melancholy observation:

Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank!

Yet only a few lines later use some form of wahr twice, followed immediately by a reference to Matthew 28:20, the last sentence of the last chapter of Matthew’s text: an ending, but an ending with a forward-looking promise.

So schmerzlich gut und wahrhaft ist, was lebt;
Und leise rührt dich an ein alter Stein:
Wahrlich! Ich werde immer bei euch sein.
O Mund! der durch die Silberweide bebt.

In a poem titled Romanze zur Nacht Trakl describes a way of seeing which is truthful. This could even be a programmatic statement for his lyricism.

Sehr friedlich schaut zur Nacht das Kind
Mit Augen, die ganz wahrhaft sind.

The truth of Trakl’s texts is his gift to the dying world: a gift which will give meaning to this death, and which lays the foundation, however ambiguous, for a life after this death. Trakl predicts a cataclysmic downfall, but does so with sympathy, empathy, and compassion. His prediction is true, and because it is, it can point the way to rebirth after the disintegration.

The Moloch Imagery in Early Twentieth Century German Expressionism

During the first third of the twentieth century, as during the preceding four millennia, the word ‘Moloch’ was understood to refer to an idol common among the Canaanites and other peoples of the Ancient Near East (ANE). Since then, some philologists have proposed that the word refers rather to the act of sacrificing to this idol, rather than to the idol itself. In either case, it is significant that, not only is Moloch cited by two Expressionists, Gerrit Engelke and Fritz Lang, but rather that also cited in the same way in the same context.

Gerrit Engleke is a poet who is often assigned to the category of Expressionism. Naturally, delegating various authors to various literary movements is always a debatable activity, because such genres are constructs and not concrete realities. Engelke’s texts are, however, specific data points, and in particular, his poem “Die Fabrik” from the first two decades of the twentieth century.

More precisely, this poem must have been written before his death in 1918, but most probably before 1915, and likely after 1910. The dating of this poem will require more research and it’s possible that the question about the exact date of its composition will never be answered.

In any case, Engelke writes about a factory — the factory as a concept — and its treatment of, and impact on, its workers:

Tag und Nacht: Lärm und Dampf,
Immer Arbeit, immer Kampf:
Unerbittlich schröpft das Moloch-Haus
Stahl und Mensch um Menschen aus.

The noteworthy aspect of Moloch worship is that it routinely and regularly included human sacrifice. Human sacrifice was not a rare thing in the ANE, or in the ancient world around the globe. It was a nearly universal practice. But Moloch worship distinguished itself by the quantity of its victims and the age of its victims. Perhaps only the Inca, Maya, and Aztec surpassed the Moloch worshippers in the mass quantities of human lives which were harshly ended. Moloch worship also distinguished itself by the painful manner of execution — being burned to death — of its victims, and by the age of its victims — many were infants.

Moloch worship combined, among other, these two factors: large quantities of death, and death of the young.

What moved both Fritz Lang and Gerrit Engelke to allude to Moloch was this: the concept of “assembly line” killing — a way of manslaughter which was routine, largescale, and indifferent to the plight of its victims.

Factory work of the early twentieth century was — or more importantly, appeared to Lang and Engelke to be — a ruthless consumption of young lives. It is no coincidence that both artists were associated with “worker” movements.

Engelke is often classified as a Arbeiterdichter and his work as Arbeiterdichtung. One of the few publications which he made during his lifetime was in an anthology under the title Schulter an Schulter: Gedichte von Drei Arbeitern. Other words used to describe him include Arbeiterschriftsteller, and to describe his work include Arbeiterliteratur.

It remains to be investigated, to which extent Engelke’s knowledge of factory life was first hand, and to which extent it was secondhand. It seems that he was not employed as a factory worker for any extended period of time.

In any case, he expressed sympathy or empathy or compassion for blue collar workers. One of the ways in which he expressed this was by means of the Moloch allusion in his poem “Die Fabrik.”

The ceaseless and mechanistic killing of Moloch victims in the ANE, and ongoing weariness of factory workers in early twentieth-century industrialized nations, are expressed in the Tag und Nacht and immer of factory work, which schröpft steel and humans aus.

Engelke perceives a connection between Moloch and modern industrialization. Certainly, the connection is debatable. The Industrial revolution is usually thought to be in the 1700s, and possibly in the early 1800s in parts of Europe and North America. It would have been in its very latest phase by the early 1900s. Some historians write of a “second industrial revolution” during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

In any case, it is true that workers experienced misery during the transition from pre-industrial to industrial economies. Engelke and Fritz Lang both depict such misery. Whether the misery of the factory is comparable to the misery of the Moloch victims would be a question of how one quantifies and compares sufferings. That question will be left as an exercise for the reader.

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the protagonist, after both witnessing the exhausting labor of the factory workers and witnessing the injuries and deaths of an industrial accident, exclaims: “Moloch!” — and visually, the machines of the factory morph into a scene of human sacrifice in the ANE.

Gerrit Engelke and Fritz Lang have come to the same conclusions, and express those conclusions with the same metaphor.

Fritz Lang began filming Metropolis in 1925. The script is based on a novel written by his wife. His wife’s name was Thea von Harbou. The novel was published in 1925, so one may reasonably assume that Lang was aware of the story from early on: precise evidence is not possible, but perhaps 1924 would be a reasonable guess.

Several questions present themselves: Were Fritz Lang and his wife aware of Engelke’s poem Die Fabrik? Did they get the Moloch metaphor from Engelke? Did they arrive at it independently? Or did they get it from another source?

One may further ask whether Engelke invented the Moloch metaphor, or whether it found it in another source.

In an article published in 2007, Michael Cowen discusses Metropolis and cites the Moloch reference in the film. He even quotes a passage from Engelke, but not the Moloch metaphor. He instead cites a passage in which Engelke talks about the rhythm of life, and relates this to Lang’s use of rhythm in the film.

Likewise, author Stefanie Eck discusses the connections between Lang and Engelke in a 2012 essay, but does not cite the Moloch metaphor as an Anknupfüngspunkt.

In a 2010 dissertation, Michael Wallo cites a play written in 1919 by Ernst Toller and titled Masse Mensch. In this play, the Moloch metaphor appears. Toller’s use of the metaphor is broader than the concrete realities of factory work. He seems to use it to describe societal patterns.

Was Ernst Toller a source for Fritz Lang’s — and Thea von Harbou’s — use of the Moloch metaphor?

It seems that the time was ripe for a comparison between Moloch and the mature phase of industrialization which had been achieved during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The Moloch metaphor also could be used to express the horrors of mechanized warfare in WW1 — Moloch was perhaps even more appropriate to WW1 than to factory work, but in the traumatized minds of those who’d lived through, or died in, WW1, the miseries of factory life and the gruesomeness of trench warfare may have merged. Fritz Lang had been wounded in the war, and Gerrit Engelke had died in it.

Through the works of Engelke, Ernst Toller, and Fritz Lang, the Moloch metaphor perhaps achieved some circulation. In what may be considered a post-Expressionist work, Ernst Jünger used the Moloch metaphor in Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, a 1932 academic treatise.

The use of this metaphor reveals something about the audience: The German reading public could be expected to understand this allusion. A century later and an ocean away, no author can automatically expect that the American reading public would have any knowledge of who or what Moloch is.

There are probably many more instances of Moloch metaphor among German Expressionists during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Which author used it first, which authors obtained it from other authors, and how a large catalog detailing such occurrences might be compiled, are left as exercises for the reader.