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.
