By 1933, Fritz Lang had become the most celebrated director working in Germany. Movies such as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), while not as commercially successful as some of his other works, cemented his reputation as a cinematic genius. That same year Lang became one of a number of filmmakers who fled Germany following the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. But the story of Lang’s exile is not as simple as it sounds, and is directly tied to the fictional arch-criminal Dr Mabuse, a diabolical mastermind Lang first brought to the screen in 1922 in Dr Mabuse The Gambler. Its 1933 sequel, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, would prove to be the most controversial film of his career and earn him the ire of the Nazi Party. What happened next has become the stuff of legend, with stories of a terrifying meeting within the offices of Joseph Goebbels and a fraught escape aboard the night train to Paris. Yet all is not as it seems in the strange tale of the director who snubbed the Nazis.
THE EARLY YEARS OF A CINEMATIC GENIUS
Friedrich Christian Anton Lang was born in Vienna on 5 December 1890. As a young man, he trained as a civil engineer at the Technical University of Vienna, but his true passions lay in the visual arts. He attended art school, but his ambitions were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I and Lang served in the Austrian army, receiving several injuries including losing the sight in his right eye. Hospitalised for a year, he occupied his time by writing film scripts and in 1919 was offered the opportunity to direct his first feature. The still burgeoning art form would never be the same again.
