Fritz Lang's Metropolis

First shown in 1927, the film Metropolis has a secure place in history for several reasons. As a canonical set of images, it has influenced numerous director and producers, including Star Wars visionary George Lucas. As a science fiction plot, it intersects with Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Its quasi-socialist political subplot taps into postwar European society in the mid 1920's. And the love story woven through it never hurts.

Dealing with massive advances in technology, the movie hits the Luddite nerve. In the early parts of the film, it seems that the working class must suffer ruthless exhaustion, and the educated class suffer a parallel mental exploitation, in this futurist world in which machines become godlike.

A single vocabulary word captures this nicely: in hallucinogenic scene in which the protagonist, the son of the industrialist plutocrat who runs the mega-city, is enlightened as to the true nature of industrial exploitation, a machine is re-envisioned as the ancient Mesopotamian idol Moloch. Seeing workers fed to the machine as ancient polytheists fed live humans into the fires lit to worship the idol, the protagonist shrieks "Moloch!" and faints.

In more technically artistic ways, too, the film is a classic. Its use of lighting, shapes, and motion clearly delineates a style to which the film belongs. Film historian Lotte Eisner describes the scenes depicting large numbers of workers going to and from their factories:

To describe the mass of inhabitants in the underground town in Metropolis Lang used Expressionistic stylization to great effect: impersonal, hunched, servile, spiritless, slavish beings dressed in costumes of no known historical period. The stylization is extreme during the change of shift when the two columns meet, marching with rhythmic, jerky steps, and when the solid block of workers is heaped into the lifts, heads bowed, completely lacking individual existence.

The geometry of forms - whether of groups of people, or of buildings - is one aspect of Metropolis imagery. Another is lighting, an important element in any film.

In Metropolis, as in all his films, Lang handles lighting admirably: the futuristic city appears as a superb pyramidal accumulation of shimmering sky-scrapers. By means of trick shots and hyper-elaborate lighting, illuminated windows and stretches of dark wall stand out like the white and black squares of a chess-board; the light seems to explode, spreading a luminous mist, falling as iridescent rain. The models of the city, with its streets and jutting bridges, seem huge.

Film historian Siegfried Kracauer, who is noted for over-reading the future into the past, and the audience into the film, combines these two tendencies by seeing films as reflecting the psychology of the current audience as it leads into a grim future. For Kracauer, Metropolis is not be exempted from this, his usual method:

One film was more explicit than all others: Metropolis. In it, the paralyzed collective mind seemed to be talking with unusual clarity in its sleep. This is more than a metaphor: owing to a fortunate combination of receptivity and confusion, Lang's scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, was not only sensitive to all undercurrents of the time, but indiscriminately passed on whatever happened to haunt her imagination. Metropolis was so rich in subterranean content that, like contraband, had crossed the borders of consciousness without being questioned.

Kracauer believes, then, that audiences of 1927 contained the psychological seeds of the evil which would be unleashed in 1933, and that the scriptwriter had absorbed this Zeitgeist and exuded it again into the plot. Whether one agrees with Kracauer or not, it is true that the plot is in some respects haunting; the scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, was also Fritz Lang's wife, and had written the script in novel form. It was published separately as a novel. Despite Kracauer's possibly overly psychological interpretation of the film, his summary of the plot suffices:

Freder, son of the mammoth industrialist who controls the whole of Metropolis, is true to type: he rebels against his father and joins the workers in the lower city. There he immediately becomes a devotee of Maria, the great comforter of the oppressed. A saint rather than a socialist agitator, this young girl delivers a speech to the workers in which she declares that they can be redeemed only if the heart mediates between hand and brain. And she exhorts her listeners to be patient: soon the mediator will come. The industrialist, having secretly attended this meeting, deems the interference of the heart so dangerous that he entrusts an inventor with the creation of a robot looking exactly like Maria. This robot-Maria is to incite riots and furnish the industrialist with a pretext to crush the workers' rebellious spirit. He is not the first German screen tyrant to use such methods; Homunculus had introduced them much earlier. Stirred by the robot, the workers destroy their torturers, the machines, and release flood waters which then threaten to drown their own children. If it were not for Freder and the genuine Maria, who intervene at the last moment, all would be doomed. Of course, this elemental outburst has by far surpassed the petty little uprising for which the industrialist arranged. In the final scene, he is shown standing between Freder and Maria, and the workers approach, led by their foreman. Upon Freder's suggestion, his father shakes hands with the foreman, and Maria happily consecrates this symbolic alliance between labor and capital.

In synopsizing the story, Kracauer alludes to Homunculus, a 1916 film which influenced Lang's style. Although Metropolis has a seemingly happy ending, Kracauer sees a more foreboding moral to the story:

On the surface its seems that Freder has converted his father; in reality, the industrialist has outwitted his son. The concession he makes amounts to a policy of appeasement that not only prevents the workers from winning their cause, but enables him to tighten his grip on them. His robot stratagem was a blunder inasmuch as it rested upon insufficient knowledge of the mentality of the masses. By yielding to Freder, the industrialist achieves intimate contact with the workers, and thus is in a position to influence their mentality. He allows the heart to speak - a heart accessible to his insinuations.

In Kracauer's interpretation, every film made prior to 1933 somehow foreshadows the grim usurpation of power by the National Socialists, and every film in that era also somehow manifests society's psychoses or character flaws which enable or even cause that seizure of power. But despite Kracauer's over-reading, it is true that after assuming control of the nation in 1933, the party did offer Lang the opportunity to work in its propaganda agencies. The power of Lang's work had been recognized and understood. Lang knew that refusing such an offer would endanger him, so he simply fled from Germany and settled in the United States.

The history of Metropolis, and in some cases the history of the history of Metropolis, has taken various turns in the almost 100 years since it was released. It premiered in Berlin with a running time of 153 minutes. Over the next several years, as it was released and rereleased in various countries around the world, it was abridged in various ways. Many versions had a run time of around 90 minutes, meaning that over 40% of the movie was lost.

In recent decades, as film historians began to understand that this film is a priceless historical treasure, the efforts to restore the film to its original state began. Three tasks faced the restorers: first, to gather all the footage which could be found; second, to ascertain the correct order of the various scenes in the film; third, to digitally sharpen the images, treating each frame as a digital image. At 24 frames per second, the restorers faced the job of analyzing and manipulating approximately 220,000 separate photographs! After years of work, a restored version of Metropolis was released in 2001 at a length of 124 minutes. The restorers had gathered every bit of footage they could find, sharpened the images digitally, and made educated guesses as to the order of some scenes. This was the best that could be done, and historians and the viewing public would have to content themselves with it.

To the great surprise and joy of cinema fans everywhere, a museum in Buenos Aires discovered, in 2008, a nearly-uncut version of Metropolis. After several more years of restoration work, it was released with a run time of 148 minutes. The Argentine footage not only restored missing sections of the film, but also served as a guide to the exact order of the scenes. Today, there are perhaps only five minutes of material missing, and a viewers can have nearly the same experience as that original audience in 1927.

Yummy Things for Christmas!

The German baking tradition includes a number of seasonal products. Yet it is also true that they can be enjoyed at any time of year. For example, Lebkuchen are widely associated with Christmas, yet are popular year-round, especially in Nürnberg, where the most famous and popular Lebkuchen bakers are. Sometimes called Pfefferkuchen, it has been a favorite baked good in southern Germany for centuries. The northern part of modern Bavaria, called Franconia or Frankenland, seems to be the historical home of Lebkuchen. The earliest reliable written record of it dates to the 1290's, but it certainly existed earlier. In fact, the Egyptians seem to have had a similar honey-based cake. The use of various spices from distant lands is testimony of the extent of medieval trade.

The Springerle cookie has its home in southwestern Germany, in the region of Baden-Württemberg. Likewise dating to the middle ages, some recipes called for ground antlers instead of baking powder or baking soda. The ground antlers were an early leavening agent, used before refined powder and soda were available. Springerle are known for their designs: carved wooden blocks are used to press the cookies, which are then left to sit for a day or more before they are baked. Their anise flavor is distinctive. They are also known as Anisbrötli; the linguistic structure of this name indicates an extremely southern origin for the word, possible near or in Switzerland. Springerle are very light in color, white or ivory, having no brown sugar, molasses, or dark spices.

Pfeffernüsse also have a variety of names. Although some variants have a darker color from molasses or brown sugar, most versions of the recipe come out white. A very stiff dough, with lots of flour and little liquid, is left in a cool place overnight. Not as sweat as Lebkuchen, but mildly spicy, it is an ideal cookie for dipping into hot coffee. It is usually lightly dusted with confectioner's powdered sugar.

One Less Year of School

For most of the last century, German high school students graduated after their thirteenth year of school. They had, on average, one more year of school than their American counterparts.

(Quick review: after fourth grade, students head to one of three types of school - the Hauptschule with grades five through nine, after which an apprenticeship probably awaits; a Realschule with grades five through ten, leading probably to a technical college (Fachhochschule); or the Gymnasium, grades five through thirteen, perhaps leading to a university.)

A transformation has taken place in Germany over the last decade however; now the majority of students are finished after grade twelve. They take their Abitur - a massive battery of tests - a year earlier.

Why this change? In part, to standardize the German system to the other nations; in part, to get young people onto the job market quicker. Economists hope that this will result in a larger number of wage earners relative to the number of retirees. Germany faces, as do all developed nations, a shortage of young people; the simple fact is that married couples are not having enough children.

Potential problems include a higher percentage of students who will need to repeat a grade - the total amount of material to be learned has not been reduced, and with more content being covered each year, it is more likely that a student will flunk. The Abitur, occurring a year earlier, still covers the same amount of material.

Another difficulty is that more students may choose to simply take a year off before going to the university. This would negate the hoped-for gain of having them on the job market a year earlier.

Some Germans wondered if this new system would necessitate a return to classes on Saturdays, which was a practice in some German areas during the mid-twentieth century; so far, however, this has not occurred.

Although the transition to twelve years of schooling was done in part to synchronize the German system with the rest of Europe, German schools had traditionally fewer hours of class per day than schools in other countries. Nudging the schools toward day-long instruction is a massive shift, changing physical needs in terms of buildings (most German schools had no cafeterias, because children went home for lunch), and changing societal and cultural patterns.

Of Germany's sixteen states (Bundesländer), only Rheinland-Pfalz has not completed the transition to twelves grades. The other territories had completed the transition by the 2012/2013 academic year (some earlier). Although the transition seems to be irrevocable, some critics are demanding a return to the thirteen-year system.

German Music in Hollywood

Composer Klaus Badelt was born in 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany. A decade younger than one of Hollywood's other leading composers, Hans Zimmer, Badelt got his start working for Zimmer. Both Badelt and Zimmer have been, and continue to be, creative engines, turning out one success after another for the movie industry.

Among the movies for which Klaus Badelt has composed music are K-19: the Widowmaker and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He also composed the music for the closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Outside of Hollywood, Badelt has composed music for many German movies and television shows. He also worked in China, creating the score for the 2005 movie The Promise; many critics have written that his work on The Promise is his best.

Why is the German Economy So Strong?

As the debt crisis - started in Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Ireland - shakes most of the Euro economies, it becomes ever more clear that Germany is a source of economic stability for the Euro zone. When other countries created massive debt to finance the follies of their governments - lunacies like free public health care - Germany's government decided to avoid borrowing massive amounts of money. Economists Vern Terpstra and Kenneth David write:

Wealth, of course, is obtained by two processes: (1) acquiring it and (2) by forgoing current consumption, holding on to it. Cultures differ in their values toward both of these processes. For example, the United States is more consumption-oriented than Western European countries. Americans more often take advantage of present opportunities to earn income by moonlighting or by having dual-career households. A higher percentage of American wives hold jobs than to European wives. Germans are more critical of wives' employment than people in any other large Western country. On the other hand, Americans are not so strongly oriented as are the Germans to holding on to what they have earned. Americans use installment debt freely, whereas its use in Germany is very low. The German word for debt, Schuld, is the same as the word for guilt.

Not only are the Germans more debt-adverse than other countries, but they also have managed to retain a higher quality of life for females: while German women are more likely than women in other countries to have a university education, they are less likely to hold jobs, leaving them free to enrich family life, pursue the arts and sports, and engage in politics. As a consequence, German children have a higher literacy rate, having spent more time during the first five years of life in the presence of their mothers.

Culture: a Moving Target

When one tries to describe or compare cultures, the risks arise mainly from generalizations. Generalizations almost always have exceptions, and even when general statements are nearly correct, time often changes that.

For example, one might say that Germans usually have their main meal - their dinner - at noon, and smaller lighter meal in the evening. That generalization was once nearly true - maybe a century ago, but even then there were exceptions. Now, a growing segment of the population has its main meal in the evening, but a significant percentage still has a noon dinner, so generalizations about this topic are impossible.

The generalization that most German buildings don't have circular doorknobs - having instead lever-like door handles - still holds true, but the operative word there is 'most' inasmuch as a small handful of German architects use knobs.

So cultural generalization - whether about how Germans hold knives and forks in their hand, or which types of water they drink - are ever subject to change over time, and to exceptions at any one time. Beware!

Spaghetti Eis!

Every year, people visiting Germany fall in love with Spaghetti Eis - spaghetti ice cream. What is it?

No, it doesn't taste like spaghetti, and it's not made of spaghetti. Vanilla ice cream is put through a press, an extruder, and comes out looking like spaghetti. Strawberry sauce takes the place of tomato-based marinara sauce, lumps of chocolate substitute for meatballs, and some grated white chocolate for the parmesan cheese. Yum!

Creative chefs have invented numerous variations on the theme - vanilla sauce can substitute for Alfredo sauce, bits of candy can be shaped like mushrooms, and various flavors and colors of ice cream can imitate the colors of the various types of pasta. Try it!