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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Theater and Cinema in the Age of "Nervousness": Der Andere by Paul Lindau (1894) and Max mack (1913)
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Cinéma & Cie
Michael Cowan
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 University of California at Berkeley
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Theater and Cinema in the Age of "Nervousness": Der Andere by Paul Lindau (1894) and Max mack (1913)
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THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”: DER ANDERE
BY PAUL LINDAU (1894) AND MAX MACK (1913)*
Michael Cowan, University of California at Berkeley




Introduction

  In the closing sequence of Max Mack’s film Der Andere (1913), we see the protagonist,
the public prosecutor Hallers, suffering what can only be described as a momentary
relapse into the insanity that the audience thought he had overcome. Hallers has just
returned from a country sanatorium, where he had hoped to cure the bouts of hysteri-
cal somnambulism that transformed him from a representative of the law into the
“Other” of the film’s title: a shady Berlin criminal (Fig. 1). But as he sets out to marry his




Fig. 1. Albert Bassermann as Hallers in Der Andere (1913)


CINEMA & Cie, no. 5, Fall 2004                                                             ­65
MICHAEL COWAN

beloved Agnes and begin his new life in the final scene of the film, it becomes clear that
Hallers has not, in fact, been cured. During their engagement party, we see an intertitle
reading “Agnes fears a relapse,”1 followed by a close-up of Hallers’ face, whose empty
gaze into the distance reveals a momentary return to the somnambulistic state that his
trip to the sanatorium was supposed to cure. “The Other” that had taken control of
Hallers, viewers can only conclude, can and will return in another film.
   With this ominous ending, Mack’s film from 1913 offers an early example of what
would become a standard closing sequence of the “not quite dead yet” variety in 20th
century horror film. It also reveals a significant departure, on Mack’s part, from his the-
atrical model: Paul Lindau’s 1894 stage play Der Andere. Lindau’s dramatic representa-
tion of a case of urban pathology had ended far more optimistically with Hallers’
departure for the sanatorium and his promise to return to Berlin a cured man and
marry Agnes.
   This discrepancy, I would suggest, points to a different reading of Mack’s film from
that often met in film historical accounts. As the first and best known example of the
German Autorenfilm genre of the 1910s – in which established stage writers such as
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gerhart Hauptmann and Max Reinhardt for the first time col-
laborated with film makers – Der Andere is generally seen as emblematic of an effort to
lift early cinema into the realm of “high culture” by reproducing the experience of the
theater on the screen for middle and upper class audiences. To this day, Mack’s film – for
which he hired not only Lindau but also the most respected theater actor of the day,
Albert Bassermann, to play the part of Hallers – continues to figure as a quintessential
historical example of an effort to tame early film in accordance with the demands of
bourgeois morality.2 And yet, that view misses much of what was at stake in the inter-
medial relation between theater and film in Germany at the beginning of the 20th cen-
tury. Precisely on account of its subject matter of urban pathologies, Der Andere offers
an excellent example with which to gain insight into this relation, as well as a fascinat-
ing test case for investigating the cultural and discursive determinations of different
media. Examining both Lindau’s play and Mack’s film in relation to the discourse on
urbanization and nervous illness, this essay suggests a reading of both works as reflec-
tions on their respective media, and specifically on the function of those media in the
modern urban environment. Far from transforming the cinema into a surrogate the-
ater, I argue, Mack’s film in fact sought to transform Lindau’s play into a form of urban
entertainment appropriate to modern nerves.


Theater and Cathartic Therapy

  Appearing at the midst of the intense urbanization that transformed Berlin in the late
19th century, Lindau’s drama of 1894 centered on the dangers of daily life in what
Lindau’s contemporaries called the new “age of nervousness” (Zeitalter der
Nervosität).3 From the opening scenes of the play, Hallers appears as the prototypical
nervous city dweller; excitable, overworked and hyperstimulated, Hallers has clearly
exhausted his nervous reserves before the play even begins. As his neurologist Dr.
Feldermann makes clear in the play’s central monologue, moreover, Hallers’ own symp-
toms form part of a veritable epidemic of nervous illness in modern times, attributable
directly to the growth of urban life:

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                                                 THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

 Only a fool would be surprised by the frightening spread of nervous illness in our times. In
 reality, one should rather wonder that we haven’t all gone absolutely insane. […] The depop-
 ulation of the countryside and relentless growth of cities is wreaking absolute havoc. It is ter-
 rifying to contemplate the extent to which we have lost touch with nature. Even today, the
 Indians can still perceive the slightest sound over great distances. But anyone who wishes to
 make himself heard in the deafening noise of our urban culture – amidst the rattling din of
 streetcars, the pumping and hammering of machines, and the whistling and churning of
 locomotives – has to bang out his message on giant drums and tam tams. […] Lighting that
 would have struck our grandparents as extremely bright hardly suffices any more for us to
 see. Our spoiled eyes can hardly make do even with electric bulbs. And let us not forget the
 extremely rapid tempo of our existence, that feverish haste. Each day, people send and
 receive thousands upon thousands of telegrams and engage in thousands of telephone con-
 versations from city to city. […] All are caught up in an endless pursuit of success, a search for
 quick profits, which exposes them to ever more intense forms of excitation. Is it any wonder
 that our generation has become nervous? Is it any surprise that new forms of nervous illness
 emerge daily to attract the attention of science?4

   I cite Feldermann’s monologue at length here to underscore the extent to which
Lindau’s play relied on a specific medical interpretation of modernity. From his descrip-
tion of the hyperstimulation occasioned by noise and bright lights to his warnings
about the excitations accompanying the new urban tempo, Feldermann’s diagnosis
could have appeared in any number of the numerous publications on neurasthenia and
industrialization around the turn of the century.5 In his study Nervosität und Kultur
(1902), to take one example, the psychologist Willy Hellpach would cite all of the same
factors as Feldermann, focusing especially on “noise,” “bright lights” and hectic tempo
of urban life.6 An 1888 caricature from the satirical journal Die fliegenden Blätter enti-
tled Nervös, also suggests the extent to which contemporary observers associated city
life with excitement and sensory overload (Fig. 2).
   Hallers, for his part, conforms precisely to Feldermann’s diagnosis of the visual and
acoustic hyperstimulation afflicting modern city-dwellers. In one exchange, when he
tells Agnes that he misses the sound of her piano coming from the apartment upstairs,
Agnes responds: “An apartment resident who complains that I don’t play enough piano
– one doesn’t see that very often!”7 Agnes’s ironic comment makes sense only when
read against the contemporary discourse on the nervous effects of noise in the city.8
Central to this debate on noise and nervous hygiene were the complaints about what
contemporaries labeled the “piano plague” (Klavierpest) afflicting urban apartment
buildings.9
   In Lindau’s play, it is precisely at the moment at which Agnes begins playing the
piano that Hallers suffers his transformation into the somnambulist “Other,” and it is
no accident that Mack would later place Hallers’ final relapse in a scene in which Agnes
again sets out to play the piano at their engagement party. And if Hallers appears to con-
form to Felderman’s fears in his apparent need for ever greater noise, he also displays a
singular inability to make due with the old gas light10 still used in his house, as he
repeatedly complains to his servant Ewald:

 HALLERS: Light the candles in the candelabra. The lanterns are malfunctioning again. I can’t
 work in this twilight.

                                                                                                  ­67
MICHAEL COWAN

  EWALD: But the lanterns have never functioned differently. There’s really no way they could
  give off any more light.
  HALLERS: (impatient) Do as I tell you!11

  In this and other similar scenes, Lindau’s hero appears blasé in the precise physiolog-
ical sense – his overstimulated nerves refusing to react with anything like their “natur-
al” capacity and thus craving ever stronger stimulations.
  If Feldermann’s diagnosis of urban hyperstimulation inscribes Hallers’ story within a
specific discourse on nervousness and industrialization, so too does his critique of the
“feverish tempo” of modern life, with its unbridled “pursuit of success.” As Andreas
Braun has shown, the sense of an increasingly hectic tempo, outrunning the capacities
of the human organism to keep up, infiltrated nearly all areas of experience in the 19th
century.12 Most directly, of course, this question of tempo was related to the impera-
tives of punctuality brought on by the spread of mass transportation and the emergence
of ergonomics and Taylorist systems for regulating factory work, which would figure
centrally in such films as Metropolis (F. Lang, 1927) and Modern Times (Ch. Chaplin,
1936). In this sense, nervousness resulted largely from the subjective toll of what recent
scholarship on urban culture – following the analyses of figures such as Georg Simmel




Fig. 2. “Nervös”: caricature from the Fliegende Blätter (1888)



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                                                THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

and the historian Karl Lamprecht – has called “inner urbanization,” the attempt to
adapt the psyche to the new conditions of urban life, and above all the imperatives of
punctuality.13
  In non-manual, middle-class work of Hallers’ type, the new discourse on nervous
tempo referred to what Lindau’s contemporaries perceived as a frantic new work ethic
inaugurated by the liberal culture of the late-19th century and characterized by unbri-
dled competition and the struggle to get ahead at any price. In many ways, the discourse
on neurasthenia represented an attempt to come to terms with the effects of this new
work ethic upon the bourgeoisie in the late-19th century. In his study Über gesunde und
kranke Nerven (1888), for example, the psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing summed up this diag-
nosis when he offered the following portrait of the typical neurasthenic:

  Extreme exertion all day long at work – hardly any time to eat – time is money after all – a
  constant struggle with the competition, enormous responsibilities and demands on the job.
  […] The most disastrous characteristic of our time is the desire to rise above the competition
  and get ahead at any cost, even if this means sacrificing health, family life and one’s charac-
  ter to the curse of ambition.14

  Similarly, in his treatise Über die wachsende Nervosität unserer Zeit, which appeared
the same year as Lindau’s play, the neurologist Wilhelm Erb offered the following assess-
ment of the typical modern neurasthenic: “The patient keeps extending his working
hours, turning his nights into days; pressing tasks demand his attention, and thus he
races onward until his forces are exhausted.”15 Writing with hindsight in 1913 (the year
of Mack’s film), the economist Werner Sombart would later take recourse to the same
image of the overworked neurasthenic in an attempt to take stock of the transforma-
tions in work at the end of the 19th century. “Everyone is familiar with the sight of those
people who work until they go mad,” Sombart asserted in his study Der Bourgeois:

  Whether entrepreneurs or manual laborers, such people share the general characteristic of
  living constantly on the verge of collapse from overexertion. They are always excited and in
  a hurry. Tempo, tempo! That has become the catchword of our epoch. The peculiarity of
  today’s generation lies in its insistence on this frantic race forward.16

  Precisely these transformations stood at the center of Lindau’s 1893 play, where Hallers
sacrifices all other forms of happiness on the altar of his professional ambitions.
Throughout the play, Hallers’ secretary Kleinchen never tires of warning him of his
impending collapse. “It’s no wonder if you’re nervous,” Kleinchen tells him in one scene.
“You really work too much!”17 Indeed, not only is Hallers singularly unable to put down
his work as public prosecutor, but in his manic pursuit of success, he also throws him-
self into politics, attempting to make a name for himself as city council member. “If only
this accursed election were over!” Hallers cries out at one point to Kleinchen, who
answers: “But then you’ll only find something else to do. It never stops!”18
  Eventually, Hallers’ nervousness does develop into a full-blown case of insanity, when
he begins to imitate, in a somnambulist state, the very criminal behavior that he has
been observing in Berlin’s underground bars in preparation for his latest book.19 In
attributing Hallers’ outbreak of somnambulist criminality to the nervous exhaustion
occasioned by city life, Lindau’s play also took up a broad cultural anxiety about nervous

                                                                                                ­69
MICHAEL COWAN

illness and crime in the modern metropolis. The premiere of Lindau’s play in 1893 came
in the midst of an explosion of publications on pathological criminality, such as Max
Nordau’s Entartung (1892) and the German translations of Havelock Ellis’s Crime and
Criminality (1894) and Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (1890-96).20 This is not to
argue that one should see in Lindau’s protagonist a literary illustration of the “born crim-
inal;” on the contrary, precisely in showing how a figure of such authority as a public
prosecutor could succumb to criminal insanity under the strain of overwrought nerves,
Lindau underscored his critique of urban life. Rather, as Andriopoulos has suggested
with reference to Mack’s 1913 film, Hallers’ case exemplifies a discourse on the dangers
of crimes committed in a state of divided consciousness and hypnotic compulsion.21 In
particular, Lindau’s play took up a late-19th century anxiety about the phenomenon of
“crime by imitation” (Nachahmungsverbrechen), whereby the representations of crime
in an increasingly widely circulating mass press would have a suggestive effect on nerv-
ous readers, inciting them to imitate the actions they read about or saw in pictures.22
   In taking up the debates on nervous illness and crime, Lindau’s play was concerned,
above all, with the question of individual autonomy. When Agnes’ brother Arnoldy
argues for the plausibility of somnambulistic crime, Hallers insists that such medical the-
ories fly in the face of all concepts of moral justice, which rely per force on the supposi-
tion of a morally responsible individual: “For the love of God, what would we come to if
we tried to apply such hypotheses in practical cases? As long as a subject isn’t completely
crazy, then in my opinion, he still possesses a high enough degree of self-determination to
be made responsible for his actions and shortcomings.”23 Hallers will, of course, be forced
to reverse this opinion when he experiences the loss of autonomy on his own body.
   Indeed, Hallers’ process of self-dispossession will find its symbolic expression in the
very nature of his crimes. During his debate with Arnoldy, Hallers describes the theory
of split consciousness disdainfully as a sort of infraction or “break-in” into the bound-
aries of the autonomous self:

  Do you mean to tell me that some inexplicable force can break into me [bei mir einbrechen]
  and shut down my consciousness? And that this burglar [Einbrecher] can extinguish my
  moral personality and enable the evil guy perhaps cowering somewhere inside me to per-
  form deeds that my better self rejects? What nonsense!24

  In his guise as the Other, however, Hallers will act out the very process of psychic
“burglary” he mockingly describes here; returning to the criminal bar in his somnam-
bulistic state, Hallers succumbs to an irresistible compulsion to lead the master crimi-
nal Dickert on a break-in into his own house. For a member of the high bourgeoisie
such as Hallers, the home ought to represent everything that the nervous space of the
underground bar does not: specifically, the values of autonomy and self-determination
Hallers so vigorously defends.25 In this sense, Hallers’ “break-in” reproduces, on an
objective level, the very dispossession his nervous illness performs on a psychic one.
  While Hallers’ theft of his own possessions clearly has no justification in terms of per-
sonal gain,26 it does follow a certain logic of hysteria by now familiar to readers of Josef
Breuer’s and Sigmund Freud’s famous case studies in hysteria from 1895. In the preface
to their study, Breuer and Freud developed the theses of Pierre Janet to interpret hyste-
ria precisely as a rudimentary form of the kind of split-consciousness afflicting Lindau’s
protagonist:

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                                                THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

  The more we studied these phenomena, the more convinced we became that this psychic
  splitting, so conspicuous in the well-known classic cases of “double conscience,” exists in a
  rudimentary form in every case of hysteria; the tendency toward dissociation, and thereby
  toward the display of abnormal states of consciousness which we will designate as “hyp-
  noid,” is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis.27

  The specific actions carried out in such “hypnoid” states, Breuer and Freud further
argued, functioned precisely as displaced repetitions of the traumatic experience at the
root of the hysterical disorder itself. In one significant example, they told of an employ-
ee who suffered from attacks that caused him to throw himself to the ground and
writhe about: “When we succeeded in provoking the attack under hypnosis, the patient
explained that he was reliving a scene in which his superior had insulted him verbally
on the street and struck him with a cane.”28 Building on examples such as this one,
Breuer and Freud referred to hysterical attacks as “memory symbols”29 or “allegories.”30
  Clearly, Hallers’ criminal “break-in” during his bouts of somnambulism carries a sim-
ilar allegorical significance. And one can also observe this allegorical logic at work in
Hallers’ other principal somnambulist crime: the theft of Agnes’ watch. When Hallers
asks Agnes’ brother Arnoldy for Agnes’ hand in marriage, Arnoldy refuses, citing
Hallers’ complete subjection to the new regime of urban tempo and his lack of time for
anything but his career:

  ARNOLDY: […] If a man who knows no other ambition and no other passion than work, more
  work and work without end, a man whose work utterly dominates his life, allowing for no
  other activities and alienating – yes alienating! – him from his best friends... if such a man
  asks me whether he should bind the destiny of a good and faithful girl to his own, then I can
  only answer no! You don’t have any time for domestic happiness [Sie haben keine Zeit zum
  häuslichen Glück].
  HALLERS (nodding slowly in agreement): Yes, it’s true! I have no time for happiness! […] I’m
  beginning to see now that I’ve tried to take on too much! I feel exhausted and overstimulat-
  ed. […] I need to give myself more time for happiness as well!31

  In his subjection to the new regime of tempo, Hallers has in fact lost his time – specif-
ically, the qualitative time necessary for a traditional mode of experience Arnoldy here
calls the “domestic” or the “homely” (häusliches Glück). As the two objects of moder-
nity’s nervous assault in Lindau’s play, time and the home come to function as signa-
tures of an imaginary autonomy lost to the inhabitants of the new industrial culture. In
stealing Agnes’s watch, then, the “hypnoid” Hallers acts out, as it were, the very theft of
qualitative time inflicted on him by modern urban tempo.
  Hallers’ compulsory acts of theft, then, offer precise allegories of the broader loss at
stake in Lindau’s critique of the nervous, urban culture. And it is this urban culture
itself that Dr. Feldermann blames for the new nervousness at the end of the play. “Above
all,” he tells Hallers, “you must get out of the big city! Solitude, calm and silence are the
medicine you require!”32 In placing Hallers’ story within the context of Dr.
Feldermann’s broader cultural critique, Lindau sought to offer an exemplary figure for
coming to terms with the cultural experience of urbanization and industrialization in
late 19th century Berlin.
  In so doing, I would suggest, Lindau also sought to use the medium of the theater in

                                                                                               ­71
MICHAEL COWAN

order to provide a kind of vicarious therapeutic experience. In their own efforts to
delineate a method for treating hysteria, Breuer and Freud adapted a central category of
theatrical experience when they argued for the efficacy of what they termed the
“cathartic” cure. The successful abreaction of the hysterical agent, they argued, could
occur only when the subject re-experienced the affective or traumatic experience at the
root of the condition through the conscious medium of the word: “We discovered that
the individual hysterical symptoms disappeared immediately and without recurrence
[…] when the patient narrated the [traumatic] events as thoroughly as possible and thus
put his affect into words.”33 As the representative of rational, discursive thought, lan-
guage was the medium, for Breuer and Freud, for the exorcism of the affects at the root
of hysteria.34 The ending of Lindau’s play offers precisely such a moment of verbal abre-
action. Coming to his senses, Hallers will put into words what he has been acting out
pathologically throughout the drama when he recognizes in himself the very
Einbrecher whose presence he had denied. Gesturing with one hand toward his fore-
head and with the other toward his heart, he exclaims: “The other is here! He has been
stealing my appearance and leading me God knows where! Yes, the burglar is here! [Da
ist der Einbrecher!]”35 Lindau’s play thus reaches its climax in a moment of “catharsis”
in both the classical, dramatic sense – like Oedipus, Hallers recognizes that he is the
criminal he has been pursuing – and in the therapeutic sense outlined by Breuer and
Freud; having expelled his psychic “burglar,” Hallers can depart for his rest-cure in a
country sanitarium with the expectation of returning to marry his beloved Agnes.
  Given the intimate connections between Breuer and Freud’s therapeutic model and
classical drama theory, it should hardly be surprising that the modern theater itself might
be envisioned as a forum for the abreaction of nervousness and hysteria. Among the read-
ers of Breuer and Freud’s study, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr recognized
the significance of their work for imagining the public role of the theater in the age of
nervousness. In his fictive “Dialogue on the Tragic” (Dialog vom Tragischen) (1904), Bahr
had his main character (the “theater director”) expound a view of ancient Greek tragedy
precisely as a ritual of collective nervous therapy: “Yes, the Greeks were insane, and it was
for this reason that their sages invented the tragedy as a form of treatment, a cure for the
nation.”36 Comparing such a collective cure to the model of “cathartic” therapy recently
expounded by Breuer and Freud, Bahr’s theater director stresses precisely the role of lan-
guage in the abreaction of suppressed memories: “The patient is healed as soon as he puts
his experience into words.”37 Such a cure, Bahr argues, was already the very purpose and
end effect of ancient tragedy itself, which sought to provide a symbolic outlet for man’s
dangerous atavistic drives in order to free spectators from their tyranny:

  Tragedy actually has no other goal than that of these two doctors. It serves to force a people
  made sick by culture to recall things they do not wish to remember: i.e., the dangerous
  affects they have hidden away and the savage human being from earlier times that still cow-
  ers and growls within the educated men they play. Tragedy tears the chains from this savage
  beast, allowing it to roam free and vent its fury so that modern man might return to his
  moral self, purified of his creeping, fuming gases and stilled by all of this excitement.38

  In his Dialog, Bahr clearly drew the consequences of the discourse on nervousness
and hysteria in modern life for a conception of the theater as a therapeutic ritual of pub-
lic exorcism.

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                                              THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

   As I have tried to show here, Lindau had already suggested a similar notion of a ther-
apeutic theater a decade earlier in Der Andere, where the theatrical representation of
Hallers’ illness and his cure was meant to function as a kind of symbolic abreaction
of the nervousness of modern life. At stake, in Lindau’s play, is the question of
whether something like the “homely happiness” and the traditional experience of
time it required were still possible in the industrialized world of nervous tempo.
Despite the alarming tone of Dr. Feldermann’s discourse, Lindau’s play finally
answered this question in the affirmative, ending with the restoration of Agnes’
watch and, along with it, the restoration of Hallers’ lost time. As Hallers regains his
calm after his cathartic abreaction and prepares to depart for the country sanatorium,
it becomes clear that he will, in fact, obtain the homely happiness that urban life had
threatened to destroy:

 HALLERS: I want to save time... time for happiness as well [Ich will Zeit gewinnen… auch zum
 Glück]. (He turns toward Agnes with an expression of intimacy and she moves toward him).
 AGNES: (Looks down at the ground).
 HALLERS (Takes her hand in gratitude and kisses it). 39

  With this ending, Lindau’s play sought to provide a therapeutic experience of the the-
ater. In telling the story of a representative modern hysteric and his cathartic cure, Der
Andere was not simply about modern nervousness but also about the curative power of
the theater itself.


Cinema, Popular Entertainment and Modern Nerves

  Coming some two decades after Lindau’s play, Mack’s 1913 film would, as we saw
above, decidedly challenge its therapeutic tendency. Mack retained the allegorical sig-
nificance of Hallers’ somnambulist crimes, visually emphasizing his theft of Agnes’s
watch (Fig. 3) and his break-in into his own house (Fig. 4). But by extending the story to
show Hallers’ relapse in the final sequence, he entirely undermined the restorative clo-
sure of Lindau’s play. This transformation from drama to film, I would suggest, had
everything to do with the transition between the two media. Where the theater could
take recourse to a model of therapeutic catharsis, by the time Mack set out to film
Lindau’s play, the cinema had come to embody the very urban nervousness that the
play sought to exorcize.
  One can see this most clearly, perhaps, in the writings of the cinema reform move-
ment that emerged in Germany in the first decades of the 20th century. For the educa-
tors, psychologists and criminologists spearheading the calls for “reform,” the increas-
ing popularity of cinemas was indelibly linked to the spread of nervous illness in the
urban environment – and this by virtue of the very aesthetic qualities of the filmic
medium as such.40 With its bright light, its flickering screen and above all its aesthet-
ics of rapidly alternating scenes and perspectives, the cinema condensed, in a particu-
larly potent way, the nervous hyperstimulation already endemic to urban experience as
such. Paradigmatic, in this respect, were the experiments carried out in 1913 – the same
year in which Der Andere appeared on the market – by the cinema reformer Nado Felke;
choosing three subjects of varying “nervous constitutions,” Felke placed them all before

                                                                                            ­73
MICHAEL COWAN




Fig. 3. Hallers displays Agnes’s stolen watch in Der Andere (1913)


non-stop cinematic presentations in order to test how long the human body and psyche
could withstand the rapid flux of images and the bright light emitted by films before
collapsing with nervous exhaustion. Publishing his results in an article for Die
Umschau, Felke argued:

  When I speak of the damage that cinema does to one’s health, I am not simply referring to
  the fact that a large number of people sit packed together in what are often truly inadequate
  and unsanitary spaces lacking sufficient air. I am referring to the damage that cinema does
  to the eyes and the nerves. The images shown there give off a significantly more intense light
  than phenomena seen in nature. In addition, the scenes alternate far more rapidly and, since
  they typically serve to portray exciting and tense situations, exert a much greater strain on
  the eyes than do events in nature.41

  According to Felke, the maximum amount of time during which a human being
could withstand film’s nervous aesthetic was five hours and fifty minutes. But he
underscored the dangers of such a prolonged exposure by describing at length the utter
delirium of the “winning” subject, who collapsed with nervous exhaustion upon leav-
ing the cinema house.42
  For Felke, as for most reformers, the significance of such experiments was clear: “As
experiments teach us, frequent and lasting trips to movie theaters will inevitably have
devastating results. This ought to demonstrate extreme damage to the eyes and the

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Fig. 4. Hallers breaks into his own house with the master criminal Dickert in Der Andere (1913)



nerves, and for reasons of health, we ought to applaud any and all limitations imposed
on the cinema industry.”43
   While this discourse on hyperstimulation itself recalls Hallers’ story, as
Andriopoulos has shown, the reform movement also took frequent recourse, in their
campaign against the cinema, to the very debates on hypnosis and crime at the center
of Lindau’s play.44 Taking up the 19th century discourse on crime by imitation, the
reformers sounded an especially dire warning about the influence of crime films, argu-
ing that spectators’ nervous exhaustion before cinematic representations would leave
them susceptible to the suggestive effects of the images they saw on the screen. A
criminologist by trade, Hellwig was particularly virulent in his warnings about the
cinema’s suggestive power: “That popular crime films constitute a great danger,” he
wrote in one article from 1911, “is a fact that no one familiar with the drive to imita-
tion (Nachahmungstrieb) and the role it plays in criminality would deny.”45 Mack –
who had already used the trope of psychic automatism a year earlier in his film
Zweimal gelebt to tell the story of a housewife who leaves her husband for a second
life in a state of hysterical somnambulism – was clearly aware of the reformers’ argu-
ments. As Andriopoulos rightly argues, it is no accident, given this connection
between film, hypnosis and crime, that so many silent films in Germany – from
Mack’s Der Andere to Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (R. Wiene, 1919) to Dr. Mabuse, der
Spieler (F. Lang, 1922) – dwelt on themes of somnambulism and hypnosis; and he
rightly reads the representations of suggestion and hypnosis in these films as, at least
                                                                                                  ­75
MICHAEL COWAN

in part, allusions to the uncanny power of the cinema itself as understood in the first
decades of the 20th century.46
  To be sure, not everyone shared the reformers’ dire prognoses of film’s ability to
unleash an epidemic of hysterical criminality. Still, even for its proponents, the cinema
seemed to embody, more than any other medium, the nervousness of modern life. In
particular, the rapid alternations characterizing cinema shows – both of shots within
individual films and between the short films themselves – offered an aesthetic objecti-
fication of the nervous tempo of modern life.
  As Egon Friedell described it in an introductory lecture to a film screening in Berlin in
1912, the cinema was the appropriate medium for an age that had lost all time for “idyl-
lic repose:”

  [T]he cinema is short and rapid, almost as if its presentations were written in code; and it
  stops for nothing. […] These characteristics correspond very well to our epoch, which is one
  of extracts. For nothing, today, do we have less of a feel than for idyllic repose, for an epic lin-
  gering over precisely those objects that once counted as poetic. We are no longer able to relax
  cozily among such things. Our entire civilization embodies the principle: le minimum d’ef-
  fort et le maximum d’effet. Already in school we begin our training in the art of the extract.
  We absorb extracts of philology, extracts of the natural sciences, extracts of world history –
  never the science itself, only the extract. We no longer travel in coaches, but in speeding
  trains, capturing only hurried snatches of the landscape as we pass.47

  As the art of the extract par excellence, film thus appeared as a medium ready-made
for people who had lost their time. Utterly opposed to any notion of idyllic contempla-
tion, film shows offered, as Strobl pointed out in an article from 1911, one of the “most
perfect expressions” of the nervousness of modern life:

  The cinema is one of the most perfect expressions of our time. Its quick, distracted tempo
  corresponds to the nervousness of our lives; the restless flickering of the scenes flitting by
  lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the confident persistence of a regular stride.
  Before these wild images it becomes apparent that the present has no room for the idyllic.
  The camera man’s technical requirements tolerate no lingering; they condense all events
  under the strongest imperative. […] The cinema preserves only extracts of events, sketches of
  life, realities dressed up and trimmed. The cinema’s principle is captured in the American
  principle that Peter Altenberg proclaimed for the theater: “Reduce the whole fox to a pot of
  beef extract.”48

  More akin to the condensed impressionist sketches of the Viennese writer Peter
Altenberg (or Charles Baudelaire’s prose-poems that inspired them) than to any extend-
ed dramatic or narrative mode, the cinema’s aesthetics of tempo seemed to capture the
experience of an age definitively separated from the sort of qualitative time Hallers so
desperately wished to regain in Lindau’s play.49 “Like vaudeville,” wrote another
anonymous writer in 1912, “the cinema accommodates our nervous impatience. We
desire rapid developments: extracts, concentrations, three-minute novels (Heinrich
Mann wrote one).”50
  It was precisely the status of film as a nervous medium, moreover, that opposed the
cinema to the theater in the eyes of Mack’s contemporaries. In Germany, the transition

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                                                THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

from the “cinema of attractions” to narrative cinema in the years leading up to WWI
coincided with the rise of a new filmic genre, the Kinodrama, of which Mack was one
of the undisputed masters.51 Certainly in comparison with the cinema of attractions
that preceded it, the development of the Kinodrama borrowed much from the realm of
theater. But it would be a mistake to see this process as a one-way imitation. On the con-
trary, when one examines the discourse on the theatrical and filmic dramas from the
time, one has the impression that at no time were observers more concerned to high-
light the differences between the two media and than precisely during this transition
in the years leading up to WWI. In the eyes of Mack’s contemporaries, those differences
revolved around the question of nervousness and tempo. As the theater critic Hermann
Kienzl described it in an article entitled “Theater und Kinematograph” from 1911, the
new film drama catered – unlike the more long-winded representations of the live the-
ater – to the demands of over-exerted and over-stimulated city-dwellers, audiences in
need of a jolt to the nerves but unable to spare large quantities of time and energy:

 The psychology behind the cinema’s triumph is urban psychology. […] City-dwellers gener-
 ally lack the requisite stamina and concentration for affective and intellectual absorption,
 not to mention the necessary time – especially in Berlin, this metropolis gripped with work-
 fever. […] And since city-dwellers have grown just as accustomed to nervous stimuli as the
 drug addict to his poison, they are especially grateful for films involving crimes or some
 other exciting story told à la minute. The film drama is a drama after the city-dweller’s heart.
 Here, he can experience Othello or Richard III in less than 10 minutes. What a savings in
 time! All “superfluous” (that is, poetic) elements have been eliminated. There remain only
 the exciting situations, the spine-chilling deeds. This is the path from plays to films, from
 the theater to the cinema.52

  With its continuous procurement of nervous stimulations, its extraction of all
“superfluous” poetic elements and its adaptation of classical literature to the modern
dictates of tempo, the cinema would thus conform to a new “urban psychology” of pre-
cisely the Hallers type.
  Max Mack shared this view of the cinema as a medium appropriate to the new urban
psychology, as he would explain in his books Die zappelnde Leinwand (The Jittery
Screen, 1916) and Wie komme ich zum Film? (The Path to Cinema, 1918). In a critique
aimed specifically at the cinema reformers – who sought largely to limit the use of film
for educational purposes – Mack argued that the main social function of film was pre-
cisely to provide a dose of nervous energy for exhausted and overworked city-dwellers:

 Audiences go to the movie theater to be entertained. […] What they expect from the cinema
 are films that stroke the nerves as lightly as possible; these films should arouse a state of
 excitement, but one that does not go too deep; and they should make no demands on all of
 the spectator’s mental energies that have been expended and exhausted during the day’s
 work. The cinema reformers cannot accept this simple insight. In their lack of familiarity
 with worldly matters, they are completely convinced that man is always ready to learn
 something.53

 If Mack agreed with most contemporaries in viewing on the cinema as a source of
nervous stimulation rather than a forum for intellectual or artistic contemplation, he

                                                                                                ­77
MICHAEL COWAN

also agreed that the essence of film’s nervous aesthetic lays in its tempo. Like Friedell
and Strobl, Mack saw the rapid alternation of scenes and perspectives as the sine qua
non of effective entertainment film, a view that led him to a very different sort of exper-
iment in spectatorship than those of Nado Felke:

  Theoretically, it is very difficult to define tempo. But anyone who has ever seen a film has
  experienced it. […] The secret of tempo lies in the rapid alternation of shots and scenes. I have
  an unfailing method for determining whether or not a film has tempo. If I close my eyes for
  a few seconds during the film’s projection, a noticeable transformation should have taken
  place on the screen by the time I open them again. If the image has remained by and large
  the same, then I can be sure that the film has not maintained its tempo.54

  The importance that Mack ascribed to rapid alternations, moreover, helps to explain
why he saw the activity of cutting as the key component of filmmaking. As Prümm has
shown, later film theorists of the 1920s such as Béla Balázs would avoid metaphors of
cutting altogether in their effort to lend film an organic and quasi-mystical status.55 But
Mack celebrated the scissors as the film director’s primary tool. As he explained in a sec-
tion of Die zappelnde Leinwand entitled “The Director’s Scissors” (Die Regieschere):
“Experienced directors claim that cutting is the most difficult task of filmmaking. […]
Bad directors cut too little. This destroys the film’s tempo, the rush of events and inner
suspense; it makes of film an empty drama.”56 No doubt, Mack understood this aes-
thetics of the cut as one corresponding to the nervousness of the times. For the effort to
lend a film tempo, he pointed out, was precisely an effort to hold the attention of a pub-
lic increasingly distracted and unable to linger:

  The process involves a constant change of scenery or, to put it in film-technical terms, of suc-
  cessive shots. Within such a configuration, the use of sophisticated close-ups can obtain an
  effect of surprise, and this includes close-up shots of supporting characters – an old servant,
  for example, silently laying down a cigar. Or the director chooses some seemingly insignifi-
  cant detail and has it performed by an extremely important film actor. Then we see a shot of
  a giant hand removing a ring from its finger or some other significant situation, which cap-
  tures the viewer’s attention for a second by means of bold shots. It is a constant struggle to
  maintain the audience’s attention.57

  Where the reformers condemned this flood of images as an etiology in the spread of
modern nervousness, Mack celebrated it as the aesthetic expression of a distracted age.
  Mack, too, saw this question of tempo as the key to understanding the difference
between the cinema and the theater. Unlike stage acting, in which the actor has the
time to develop an individual character with all of her or his psychological nuances, the
tempo of film allows only for the most basic urban types. “The film role lacks every-
thing that makes a characters on the stage so charming and life-like,” he wrote in Die
zappelnde Leinwand:

  The man in a film has no character; he is a single-celled type lacking all complexity. Thus the
  meticulous construction and the psychological unfolding of a role is superfluous. […] My
  God, we simply have no time in film. On the stage, actors can take minutes to act out a com-
  plete psychological transition. […] Film demands absolute concentration, the extraction of

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                                                      THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

 the essential and the shedding of all the rest. Actors who do not relearn their trade will only
 transform the film role into a traditional drama and fill their audience with boredom! […]
 Film has nothing in common with the stage. If I may be permitted the expression, a sequence
 that would take three minutes on the stage must be reduced to two seconds on film.58

  Long before Ernst Jünger described the transition from theater to film as sympto-
matic of the social transformation from bourgeois individuals to mass types in Der
Arbeiter (1932),59 Mack – himself giving voice to a much broader discourse on film –
already saw the rise of the new medium as implicating the replacement of complex
individuals by types in the 1910s.
  Hallers’ pathology, of course, can be read precisely as the story of a transition from a
responsible bourgeois individual to an automated urban type. In this sense, it is surely
not by chance that no scene in Mack’s film more fascinated and horrified the critics
than that of Albert Bassermann’s on-screen transformation, which Mack was able to
highlight with close-ups in a way that theater never could (Fig. 5). The theater critic
Ulrich Rauscher, for example, who in every other respect condemned Mack’s film, con-
ceded that he had been mesmerized watching Bassermann change his personality in
close-up on the screen: “This ability to transform from one person to another amidst
painful twitches and convulsions like a chrysalis who struggles to shed his cocoon
while transforming into a butterfly, is more terrifying than anything I have seen among




Fig. 5. Hallers transforming into “The Other” in Der Andere (1913)



                                                                                                 ­79
MICHAEL COWAN

humans.”60 Or as a reporter for the Berlin daily Der Tag described it, “In [Bassermann’s]
eyes, we could see health and sickness, we could clearly observe the transition from a
condition of consciousness to one of unconsciousness and vice versa.”61 No doubt, the
critics’ overwhelming attention to Bassermann’s facial play was driven in part by
Bassermann’s reputation as one of the greatest physiognomical actors of his day. But as
many observers recognized, Bassermann’s performance was also particularly informed
by the well-known iconography of criminal types familiar from Lombroso’s L’uomo
delinquente (Der Verbrecher). As a reporter for the Göttinger Anzeiger described it,
much of the horror came from Bassermann’s ability to transform his features into those
of a criminal type: “The gradual transformation of the prosecutor into a typical crimi-
nal [typischen Verbrecher] was truly overwhelming.”62 Similarly, a reviewer for the
Köllner Zeitung explained:

  The transformation from a noble man of society into a distinct criminal type [ausgeprägten
  Verbrechertypus] was quite an experience; when this aristocratic face takes on the half bes-
  tial, half idiotic expression, when these terribly strange eyes stare emptily out into nothing-
  ness […], then even the strongest man is overcome with terror and shudders internally before
  the dark and secret powers cowering in the originary depths of the human psyche – powers
  which, when awoken by some chance occurrence, turn the body into their willless slave.63

   Writing for the Vossische Zeitung, the theater critic Alfred Klaar was even more spe-
cific in his description of the transformation scene, concentrating in particular on “the
way in which his whole body stiffened and the tight, drawn-out facial wrinkles, the
widening mouth, the protruding, hard chin and the white eyes transformed this head
of a playboy into a criminal physiognomy (Verbrecherphysiognomie).”64 All of the
traits mentioned by Klaar – the prominent wrinkles, the hard, protruding chin, the
white eyes and the wide mouth – can all be found in Lombroso’s study as typical char-
acteristics of criminal physiognomies (Fig. 6).65
   As a number of Mack’s reviewers pointed out, moreover, it was precisely in this
pathological moment of deindividualization that Lindau’s play proved most appropri-
ate to filmic representation. In the words of Klaar, “Lindau’s play does not move along
the normal dramatic tracks, but rather rests entirely on criminal and pathological sen-
sation. It consists of a series of scenes from which individual responsibility, the soul of
all dramatic action, is completely excluded.”66 Of course, as we saw above, Lindau’s play
from 1893 was in fact all about the effort to regain the sort of individuality and respon-
sibility Klaar here claims it eliminated. But if we take Klaar’s words as a description of
Mack’s adaptation, his comments nonetheless go straight to the point. In underscoring
the pathology of Lindau’s play but placing its therapeutic gesture into question, Mack
transformed the story of the overcoming of modern nervousness into that of an urban
psychology that was decidedly incurable by 1913. Where the self-reflexive moment in
Lindau’s play resided in Hallers’ cathartic cure, in Mack’s film, Hallers embodies the
filmic medium precisely in his nervous illness. Hallers’ on-screen transformation, that
is, not only played on the anxieties of the cinema reformers but also functioned, against
the background of the cinema debates in the years leading up to WWI, as an allegory
for the very media transformation Mack undertook in filming Lindau’s stage play. In
Mack’s film, Hallers’ psychic split represents at once the split between two media,
between that associated with autonomous individuality and that of the nervous, auto-

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mated type of modern city-dweller.
  Such an understanding of Mack’s adaptation of Lindau sheds new light on the emer-
gence of the Autorenfilm in 1913. What particularly bothered the defenders of tradi-
tional theatrical drama about the new Kinodrama was precisely the cinema’s appeal to
the nerves through images, which they opposed to what they saw as the theater’s use of
the word to appeal to the spectator’s intellect. As one angry critic described it:

 The dramatist who foregoes the tool of words is like a painter without hands. […] The cine-
 ma can only offer a series of images with no mediating transitions between them. In order to
 retain the spectator’s attention, it must cultivate shocking effects and frightening scenes
 that play with his nerves.67

  The anxiety of the theater world over the increasing popularity of cinema dramas
reached something of a critical mass in 1912 when, in an annual meeting of the various
German theater associations on March 18th, the Theater Union (Bühnenverein), the
League of German Playwrights (Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller) and the
Society of German Theatrical Workers (Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühnenan-
gehöriger) all agreed to a proposal forbidding their members from any professional col-
laboration with the cinema industry (a gesture repeated shortly afterward by the




Fig. 6. “Criminal Types” from Lombroso, Der Verbrecher (1890-1896)



                                                                                                ­81
MICHAEL COWAN

Goethebund in Weimar).68 Before the proposal could be ratified, however, the League
of German Stage Writers would perform a complete about-face, forming a partnership
of interest on November 11, 1912 with the largest society of cinemas, Die Union. Der
Andere represented, as it were, one of the first works to come from this new collabora-
tion between certain stage writers and film directors. As such, it represented less of an
effort to lift the cinema up into the sphere of “high art” than a public staging of the film
drama’s “triumph” over traditional theater.
  If Mack were seeking to anger traditional theater critics with this collaboration, he
could hardly have found a more effective way of doing so than by choosing Albert
Bassermann to play the role of Hallers. In the eyes of Mack’s contemporaries,
Bassermann – who had been awarded the prestigious Iffland ring for best stage acting
in 1912 – represented the quintessential subtle theatrical actor, embodying everything
that the cinema did not. In no small part, the aura of genius surrounding Bassermann
was largely the result of his own self-fashioning. Unlike most actors, Bassermann
absolutely avoided the public sphere, rigorously forbidding the press from taking or
printing his photograph and even suing those papers that tried.69 He also invented a
unique, quasi-phonetic orthography in which he meticulously wrote all of his corre-
spondence. For Bassermann’s admirers such as the theater critic Julius Bab, his aversion
to cameras and his insistence on a private orthography were symptomatic of a deep-
seated desire to maintain his individual genius in the face of Berlin’s mass culture.70
  Whatever Bassermann’s real reasons for refusing to be photographed and for his
about-face decision to act in Mack’s film, they are less important for my purposes here
than is the legend surrounding Bassermann and the way in which Mack exploited it to
create a filmic event. As Helmut Diederichs correctly points out, the real sensation for
the press and the public at the premiere of Der Andere on January 21 in Berlin was none
other than Bassermann.71 This is largely because, in the public eye of the 1910s,
Bassermann was the last stage actor that anyone expected to defect to the cinema. As
one writer for Die Woche put it in a prelude to the premiere, Bassermann had been
“conquered” by moving pictures:

  Illuminating the development of a human destiny like photographic flashes, all of these
  mosaic-like moments pass before our eyes in hundreds of thousands of images. […] In addi-
  tion to their artistic importance, the interest of these images also lies in another factor: they
  are the first public photographs of an artist whose peculiarities – alongside a self-made
  orthography for his private use – have to date included the aversion to any photographic
  apparatus. Even Bassermann, one of our greatest actors, has now been conquered [erobert] by
  the cinema.72

  Indeed, no reporter attending the premier of Mack’s film in 1913 failed to mention the
significance of the fact that the one actor who had refused to be photographed had now
submitted to the technical reproducibility of cinematography. As an anonymous writer
described in an article for the Berlin Tägliche Rundschau significantly entitled “Der
andere Albert Bassermann” (“The other Albert Bassermann”): “Bassermann had, for
some time, resisted any photographic reproduction or other representation of his per-
son. But one day this aversion to publicity disappeared and he decided to go before the
cinema camera.”73
  In recruiting Bassermann for the role of Hallers, Mack had clearly speculated on the

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sensational effect of winning the greatest and most reserved stage actor for the cinema.
Indeed, in an almost symbolic staging of Bassermann’s “conquering” for the visual
realm, Mack handed out stills from the film to every viewer at the film’s premiere.74
According to a later memoir by Mack’s colleague, Rudolf Kurtz, the choice of
Bassermann was hardly fortuitous:

  Bassermann himself in film – that would be the sensation of all sensations. Mack told me: “As
  I came back to Berlin, I had sworn an other not shave until I had Bassermann before the cam-
  era. […] I had no illusions. Bassermann, who never allowed himself to be photographed under
  any circumstances, who separated himself from his fellow men by means of an extremely per-
  sonalized orthography, would certainly not jump into my arms. I needed a strategic plan.”75

  Nor, according to Mack’s own account from Wie komme ich zum Film?, did he sim-
ply use film, as has sometimes been suggested, to highlight Bassermann’s stage talents.
On the contrary, as Mack would have it, far from simply filming Bassermann as a stage
actor, he had to teach Bassermann how to act filmically, and this meant above all acting
with tempo:

  The first time Bassermann tried his hand at acting in the studio, the entire film industry
  came to watch him. Since he was playing Othello in the Deutsches Theater that season, we
  told him to prepare a scene from this role. He performed the scene in six minutes. Then I
  showed him how to play the same scene in two.76

  For Mack’s critics from the theater, Bassermann’s entry into the nervous medium of
the cinema represented an affront precisely to his aura of originality. Numerous were
the complaints such as those of Julius Bab himself, who – after seeing Mack’s film –
argued that film actors could never represent individuals without “the irreproducible
breath of living human nature.”77 In the absence of the living voice, Bab argued, a film
such as Der Andere could be “no intellectually richer than ‘European Slaves,’ ‘The
Terror of the Black Hand, ‘Lost in the Big City’ and all the rest of them.”78 Other reviews
were more virulent. Recounting his first trip to the cinema to see Bassermann in Der
Andere for the Berliner Tageblatt, the art critic Max Lehrs complained:

  My God! I can think of nothing more devoid of style and contrary to art than this incessant
  jumping from image to image, this utterly unjustified change of scale and perspective, to
  which the eye is forced to adjust in all haste. In his role as public prosecutor, Bassermann can
  be seen taking tea in the salon of his colleague Arnoldy. Suddenly, his isolated head appears
  cut out from the scene and six times larger than life. Why? So that the spectator can observe
  the artist’s facial play once again as if under the microscope. And then, this head is trans-
  formed into that of a Moor by shadows which in no way conform to the lighting of the room
  – only to appear shortly afterwards as a brightly lit grimace. This constant change of scale,
  perspective, lighting and tempo gradually places the spectator into a state of nervous hyper-
  stimulation [einen Zustand nervöser Überreizung]; he has the same sensation one experi-
  ences when reading trashy novels: that of being excited by scenes which might satisfy some
  lewd desire for sensation, but which extinguish any of the more subtle feelings necessary for
  the appreciation of a dramatic work of art.79
  As Lehrs describes his inability to adapt his theatrical eyes to the rapid alternation of

                                                                                                 ­83
MICHAEL COWAN

images and perspectives on the screen, he not only points to the formal transformations
Mack made to Lindau’s play with the insertion of close-ups, perspective changes and all
sorts of scene changes impossible to perform on the stage. He also signals precisely
what was at stake in this intermedial transformation. Where Lehrs saw all of this nerv-
ous aesthetic as “utterly unjustified,” I am suggesting that the aesthetic of nervousness
was itself, in large part, the point. At the same time, reading Lehr’s review, one can won-
der whether he himself did not understand the reflection upon the media implicit in
Mack’s adaptation of Lindau – even as he criticized it. As he continues, Lehrs describes
his impression of Bassermann on film as that of an “other:”

  Only eight days earlier, I had just admired Basserman’s talents on the stage. But in the cine-
  ma, he appeared strangely… nervous, and this nervousness lasted throughout the five acts of
  the drama that followed. Was this a result of the flickering light or the acting or both? I still
  don’t know. Suffice it to say that this wonderful artist […] suddenly appeared to me as an
  other [erschien mir plötzlich als ein anderer]. […] Distracted from the real drama, all I could
  think about was this horrible transformation that had taken place between the stage theater
  and the cinema theater.80

  Distracted from the “content” of the play by Bassermann’s nervous, flickering move-
ments on the screen, Lehrs focused, wittingly or not, on the transformation that mat-
tered most in Mack’s collaboration with Lindau: that between two media bound up in
very different ways with the age of nervousness.



* I would like to thank Ms. Dagmar Walach from the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the
    Freie Universität in Berlin for providing me with stills and reviews from Der Andere, as well
    as the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek for allowing me to consult the censor card. I am also
    grateful to Hélène Sicard-Cowan for her help correcting this article.
1 All translations from the German are mine unless otherwise stated.
2 In one reading of Mack’s film, for example, Jung and Schatzberg describe Hallers’ engage-
    ment to Agnes at the end of the film as an ideological “happy ending,” in which Mack, bend-
    ing to the pressure of the censors, suppressed Hallers’ libidinal outbreak and restored the
    “conservative-bourgeois ideal of marriage and family” at the last minute. See Uli Jung, Walter
    Schatzberg, “Zur Genese eines Filmstoffs. Der Andere von Max Mack (1912) and Robert
    Wiene (1930),” Filmwärts, no. 28 (1993), p. 39. This reading, however, fails to mention that the
    ideological resolution of Hallers’ conflict in the bourgeois ideal of domesticity was (as I
    explore below) already central to Lindau’s drama; more importantly, Jung and Schatzberg’s
    account leaves unmentioned the most important shot in the final sequence – and the one
    that ambiguously places all of the hope for domestic happiness in question. Many of Mack’s
    contemporaries certainly understood the significance of this shot. Klaar, for example,
    described the “closing moment, in which the hero has to struggle against a similar transfor-
    mation threatening to overcome him” as one of the most memorable in the film. See Alfred
    Klaar, “Paul Lindau als Filmdramatiker,” Vossische Zeitung, no. 22 (January 1913), p. 2.
3 For a history of modern nervousness, see Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität.
    Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (München: Propyläen, 2000).
4 Paul Lindau, Der Andere (Stuttgart: Reclam, [n.d.]), pp. 24-25.

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                                                   THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

5    See J. Radkau, op. cit., pp. 203-230.
6    Willy Hellpach, Nervosität und Kultur (Berlin: Johannes Räde, 1902), p. 29.
7    P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 14
8    The key text here was Theodor Lessing, Der Lärm. Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche
     unseres Lebens (Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1908). However, the debates on noise began much
     earlier. For an excellent overview of the discourse on noise pollution and its nervous effects,
     see Klaus Saul, “Wider die ‘Lärmpest.’ Lärmkritik und Lärmbekämpfung im Deutschen
     Kaiserreich,” in Dittmar Machule, Olaf Mischer, Arnold Sywottek (eds.), Macht Stadt Krank?
     Vom Umgang mit Gesundheit und Krankheit (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1996), pp. 151-
     192.
9    See Th. Lessing, op. cit., pp. 66-72.
10   Electric lighting was first introduced in Berlin in 1879. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch reports,
     the first reactions to the new type of bright light involved precisely the fear that the eyes
     would no longer be able to see in the old natural light emitted by gas. See Wolfgang
     Schivelbusch, Lichtblicke. Zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert
     (München: Carl Hanser, 1983), p. 116. In Lindau’s play, this effect proves detrimental to
     Agnes, who describes how, when a stranger stole her watch on the street (the mysterious fig-
     ure will later turn out to have been Hallers himself), she couldn’t identify her assailant “in the
     bad lighting of our desolate street” (P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 15).
11   Ibid., p. 9.
12   See Andreas Braun, Tempo, Tempo! Eine Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte der Geschwindigkeit
     im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M: Anabas, 2001).
13   See Gottfried Korff, “Mentalität und Kommunikation in der Großstadt: Berliner Notizen zur
     ‘inneren’ Urbanisierung,” Schriften des Museums für deutsche Volkskunde Berlin, no. 13,
     Theodor Kohlmann, Hermann Bausinger (eds.), Großstadt: Aspekte empirischer
     Kulturforschung (1985), pp. 343-362; Michael Bienert, Die eingebildete Metropole. Berlin im
     Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992), pp. 72-78; Lothar Müller,
     “Modernität, Nervosität und Sachlichkeit. Das Berlin der Jahrhundertwende als Hauptstadt
     der ‘neuen Zeit,’” in Knut Hickethier (ed.), Mythos Berlin: zur Wahrnehmungsgeschichte
     einer industriellen Metropole (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1987), pp. 79-92; Peter
     Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
14   Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, Über gesunde und kranke Nerven, 5th ed. (Tübingen:
     Laupp, 1903), p. 10. See also p. 13.
15   Wilhelm Erb, Über die wachsende Nervosität unserer Zeit (Heidelberg: Gustav Koester, 1894),
     p. 17.
16   Cited in A. Braun, op. cit., p. 28. Other important studies here were Hellpach’s Nervosität und
     Kultur and the last volume of Lamprecht’s Deutsche Geschichte (1903), in which Lamprecht
     interpreted the increase in nervousness specifically as a product of late-19th century eco-
     nomic liberalism and the “entrepreneurial” ethos it fostered. See Karl Lamprecht, Zur jüng-
     sten deutschen Vergangenheit. Zweiter Band: Wirtschaftsleben - soziale Entwicklung, 5th ed.
     (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1922).
17   P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 9.
18   Ibid., p. 10.
19   That Hallers’ observations are the source of his own criminal behavior is suggested in numer-
     ous comments in the play. Even before suspecting anything about his own somnambulist
     adventures, Hallers hints at this source when he complains to Dr. Feldermann: “In den let-
     zten Monaten habe ich mein Buch über gemeinsame und Einzelhaft abgeschlossen; ich habe

                                                                                                    ­85
MICHAEL COWAN

      zu dem Behufe Verbrecherkreise und Verbrecherlokale aufsuchen müssen. Das hat mich
      wohl auch nervös gemacht” (ibid., p. 20). Similarly, in a later scene, Agnes’s former maid
      Amalie (who had gone to work at the criminal bar after being discharged), tells Hallers: “Es
      wird wohl zu Ihrem Geschäfte gehören, die Leute aufzusuchen, aber nicht jeder kann’s ver-
      tragen. Mich hat die Gesellschaft da zuerst auch ganz krank gemacht, ich habe nicht
      schlafen, nicht essen können, [...] und es hat lange gedauert, bis ich mich daran gewöhnt
      habe” (ibid., p. 82). Reviewers of Mack’s filmic version of the story tended to interpret the eti-
      ology of Hallers’ criminal compulsions in similar terms, as one reviewer for Die Woche
      described it: “Als dieser ‘Andere’, im Traumzustand seiner kranken Psyche, sucht er die
      Verbrecherkreise in jenen Spelunken auf, in denen er einige Zeit vorher zu Studienzwecken
      weilte, um dort Eindrücke für ein Buch zu sammeln, an dem er schrieb. Als dieser ‘Andere’
      wird er zum Gefährten und Helfershelfer des Einbrechers, der bei ihm – dem Staatsanwalt –
      nächtlicherweise einen Raubzug unternimmt und mit ihm die Beute teilt.” See Hyeronimus
      Lorm, “Das Theater der Illusionen,” Die Woche, Vol. 14, no. 52 (1912), pp. 2206-2208.
20    See Max Nordau, Entartung (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1893); Havelock Ellis, Verbrecher und
      Verbrechen, trans. Hans Kurella (Leipzig: Georg H. Wigand, 1895); Cesare Lombroso, Der
      Verbrecher (Homo delinquens) in anthropologischer, ärztlicher und juristischer Beziehung,
      trans. Hans Kurella (Hamburg: 1890-96).
21    See Stefan Andriopoulos, Besessene Körper: Hypnose, Körperschaften und die Erfindung des
      Kinos (München: Fink, 2000), pp. 102, 104.
22    See for example H. Ellis, op. cit., p. 190: “Es liegen zahlreiche, unanfechtbare Beweise dafür
      vor, dass eine besondere, den Verbrecher verherrlichende niedrige Art von Literatur, soweit
      die durch Zeitungen verbreitete eingehende Kenntnisse des Verbrecherhandwerks sehr oft
      dazu beiträgt, junge Verbrecher heranzubilden. [...] [N]ach jedem berühmten oder ganz beson-
      ders wilden Verbrechen kommt es vor, dass schwachsinnige, suggestible junge Personen ein
      ganz ähnliches begehen, oder dass sie sich der Polizei stellen, in der festen Meinung, sie hät-
      ten das Verbrechen verübt.” In France, one finds this notion in the writings of the eminent
      criminologist and assistant to Jean-Martin Charcot, Charles Féré, who explained the potential
      dangers of idées fixes as follows in his 1887 study Sensation et mouvement, 2nd ed. (Paris:
      Félix Alcan, 1900), p. 16: “La nécessité de l’action, quand l’idée est suffisamment intense, rend
      compte physiologiquement du rôle nocif de la presse par la narration des crimes, des procès
      scandaleux, etc.”
23    P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 27.
24    Ibid., pp. 27-28.
25    A characteristic assessment can be found in an article by Noack published in Die Aktion
      (1912): “Die Wohnung – der engste Rahmen der individuellen Lebensführung. Das häusliche
      Heim – die von fremder Kontrolle freieste soziale Lebenssphäre. Denken, man sei zu Hause,
      gleichbedeutend mit Abstreifen jeglichen sozialen (gesellschaftlichen) Zwanges. Das
      Individuum daheim zeigt sein wahres Gesicht.” See Victor Noack, “Wohnung und
      Sittlichkeit,” now in Jürgen Schutte, Peter Sprengel (eds.), Die Berliner Moderne 1885-1914
      (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1987), pp. 141-2. Noack, incidentally, was also a committed adherent of the
      cinema reform movement (see below), and published one of the most vitriolic attacks on the
      cinema the same year in the same journal. See Victor Noack, “Der Kientopp,” Die Aktion, Vol.
      2, no. 29 (1912), pp. 905-909. For more on the importance of the home in the turn-of-the-cen-
      tury bourgeois imagination, see Aelheid von Saldern, “‘Daheim an meinem Herd…’ Die
      Kultur des Wohnens,” in August Nitschke, Gerhard Ritter, Detlev J.K. Peukert, Rüdiger vom
      Bruch (eds.), Jahrhundertwende. Der Aufbruch in die Moderne, Vol. 2 (Reinbeck bei

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                                                 THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

   Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990), pp. 35-60.
26 As Hallers explains to Amalie when the latter attempts to prevent him from accompanying
   Dickert to the break-in, his crime carries no personal benefit whatsoever, but rather follows
   the logic of an irrational compulsion: “Es muß geschehen! Weshalb bin ich hergekommen?
   Meinst du, daß ich mich mit den Leuten wohlfühle? Ich muß kommen! Ich brauche sie. Was
   liegt mir an dem Kram, den ich beim Staatsanwalt jetzt holen werde? Nichts! Aber ich muß
   es haben!” (P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 52).
27 Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Studien über Hysterie (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1991), p. 35.
28 Ibid., p. 38.
29 Ibid., p. 314
30 Ibid., p. 294.
31 P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 18.
32 Ibid., p. 86.
33 J. Breuer, S. Freud, op. cit., p. 30.
34 “[I]n der Sprache findet der Mensch ein Surrogat für die Tat, mit dessen Hilfe der Affekt
   nahezu ebenso ‘abreagiert’ werden kann” (ibid., p. 32). See also p. 297, where Freud sees lan-
   guage as a remedy to unconscious images: “Ist einmal ein Bild aus der Erinnerung aufge-
   taucht, so kann man den Kranken sagen hören, daß es in dem Maße zerbröckle und undeut-
   lich werde, wie er in seiner Schilderung desselben fortschreite. Der Kranke trägt es gleichsam
   ab, indem er es in Worte umsetzt.”
35 P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 84.
36 Hermann Bahr, Dialog vom Tragischen (Berlin: Fischer, 1904), p. 14.
37 Ibid., p. 18.
38 Ibid., pp. 23-24.
39 P. Lindau, op. cit., p. 83.
40 In this context, see also Ben Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus and Popular Sensationalism,”
   in Leo Charney, Vanessa Schwartz (eds.), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley:
   University of California Press, 1995), p. 72.
41 Nado Felke, “Die Gesundheitsschädlichkeit des Kinos,” Die Umschau, Vol. 17, no. 13 (1913), p.
   254.
42 Ibid., p. 255.
43 Ibid.
44 See S. Andriopoulos, op. cit., pp. 99-128. This essay is greatly indebted to Andriopoulos’s argu-
   ments about hypnosis in early cinema, even as I attempt to go beyond Andriopoulos to exam-
   ine the connection between that debate and the discourse on film and tempo.
45 Albert Hellwig, “Schundfilms und Filmzensur,” Concordia, Vol. 18, no. 9 (1911), p. 19.
   Hellwig’s belief in the suggestive power of film to elicit crimes by imitation was shared by the
   majority of cinema reformers – as one can see, for example, in the pages of one of the central
   journals of the cinema reform movement, Die Hochwacht (1910-1921). Writing for the jour-
   nal in 1913, for example, one reformer reported: “Zunächst ist an mehreren Schulen
   beobachtet worden, daß Kinder in Nachahmung der Indianer- und Räuberdramen sich
   Waffen – Revolver, Beile und dgl. – verschaffen hatten und mit diesen Waffen ein recht
   gefährliches Spiel trieben, dem die Schule unausgesetzt und ernstlich entgegenarbeiten
   mußte.” See Schmitz, “Kino und Großstadtjugend,” Die Hochwacht, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1913), p. 29.
   This discourse on cinema and the suggestive power of violent images also stood at the heart
   of Serner’s famous notion of “Schaulust” (the “pleasure of looking”), which he formulated in
   an article also published in 1913. The real “pleasure” of seeing violent crimes on the screen,

                                                                                                 ­87
MICHAEL COWAN

      Serner argued, stemmed from the reactivation of the spectator’s atavistic, savage drives. See
      Walter Serner, “Kino und Schaulust,” Die Schaubühne, Vol. 9, no. 34-35 (1913), pp. 807-811.
      On the hypnotic effects of the cinema, see also Robert Gaupp, “Die gesundheitlichen
      Gefahren des Kinematographen für die Jugend,” Die Hochwacht, Vol. 2, no. 11 (1912), p. 267.
46    Mack’s film itself elicited worries like those of Hellwig among the Berlin censors, who – as
      one can read on the film’s censor card – required cinemas to apply for a special permission to
      show the film: “Die öffentliche Vorführung des Films wird nicht allgemein zugelassen. Es ist
      vielmehr für jedes Kinotheater eine besondere Erlaubnis einzuholen, da der Film nur in
      besseren Kinotheatern mit einem gewählten Publikum, das sich aus besseren und urteils-
      fähigen Kreisen zusammensetzt, vorgeführt werden darf.” See: Der Andere, Zensurkarte
      (February 13, 1913), Schriftgutarchiv der Stiftung deutsche Kinemathek.
      Concretely, the censor’s ruling meant that Der Andere could be shown only in the more
      upscale Berlin cinema houses such as the Lichtspieltheater on Nollendorfplatz where it had
      its premiere, and not – as one reporter explained – “in the small movie theaters [Kientöppen]
      in the city outskirts.” See “Der Andere,” Die Welt am Montag (January 27, 1913) [n.p.].
47    Egon Friedell, “Prolog vor dem Film,” Blätter des deutschen Theaters, Vol. 2, no. 32 (1912), pp.
      508-512.
48    Karl Hans Strobl, “Der Kinematograph,” Die Hilfe, Vol. 17, no. 9 (1911), pp. 137-138. The
      English translations of the Friedell’s and Strobl’s essays will be published in the forthcoming:
      Anton Kaes (ed.), The Cinematic Turn: Film and Modern Life in Germany 1907-1933
      (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
49    Although less well known today apart from scholars of Viennese modernism, Altenberg
      (1859-1919) was most famous for his claim to have developed, in his condensed literary
      sketches, a style corresponding to the age of the telegram. As he explained in the introduction
      to his collection Was der Tag mir zuträgt: “Es sind Extracte! Extracte des Lebens. Das Leben
      der Seele und des zufälligen Tages, in 2-3 Seiten eingedampft, vom Überflüssigen befreit wie
      das Rind im Liebig-Tiegel! [...] Ja, ich liebe das ‘abgekürzte Verfahren’, den Telegramm-Stil der
      Seele!” See Peter Altenberg, Was der Tag mir zuträgt, 9th ed. (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), p. 6.
      Like Strobl, Friedell would also later associate Altenberg’s literary “telegram style” with the
      rapid, concentrated aesthetic of early cinema in his Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (1931): “Es
      ist der ‘Telegrammstil’, der dem Zeitalter der Blitzzüge, Automobile und Bioskope entspricht.
      Bezeichnend für Altenbergs leidenschaftliches Streben nch Kürze sind zum Beispiel seine
      ‘Fünfminutenszenen’, die aber gar nicht fünf, sonder höchstens zwei oder drei Minuten
      dauern.” See Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (München: Deutscher
      Taschenbuch, 2000), pp. 1456-7.
50    “Die Karriere des Kinematographen,” Lichtbild-Bühne, Vol. 3 (1912).
51    On the cinema of attractions, see Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its
      Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame,
      Narrative (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56-62.
52    Hermann Kienzl, “Theater und Kinematograph,” Der Strom, Vol. 1, no. 7 (1911), pp. 219-220.
53    Max Mack, Wie komme ich zum Film?, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Reinhard Kühn, 1919), p. 30.
54    M. Mack, Wie komme ich zum Film?, cited in Michael Wedel (ed.), Max Mack: Showman im
      Glashaus, Kinemathek 88 (Berlin: Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek, 1996), pp. 80-81.
55    See Karl Prümm, “Die beseelte Maschine. Das Organische und das Anorganische in der ‘Kino-
      Debatte’ und in der frühen Filmtheorie,” in Hatmut Eggert, Erhard Schütz, Peter Sprengel
      (eds.), Faszination des Organischen. Konjunkturen einer Kategorie der Moderne (München:
      Iudicium, 1995), p. 168: “In Balázs’ fürsorglicher Verlebendigung büßt der Film schließlich

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                                                  THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

     seinen Character ein. Das techniche Element verschwindet im organischen Kontinuum und
     sinkt in den Lebensströmen. Balázs’ Umgang mit Montage und Schnitt ist dafür paradigma-
     tisch. Der Begriff ‘Montage’ taucht im ganzen Buch [Der sichtbare Mensch] nicht auf,
     ‘Bilderführung’ nennt Balázs diesen handwerklich-konkreten Vorgang und führt hier die
     Transformation des Technisch-Operationalen ins Anthropomorphe beispielhaft um: ‘Die
     Bilderführung ist der lebendige Atem des Films, und alles hängt von ihr ab.’”
56   Max Mack, Die zappelnde Leinwand, cited in M. Wedel (ed.), op. cit., p. 71. The centrality of
     cutting also marks another similarity between filmic aesthetics of tempo and the kleine
     Form as it was practiced around the turn of the century. In an essay on the kleine Form in lit-
     erature and feuilleton, Polgar devised the following formula for writing in the age of tempo:
     “Aus hundert Zeilen zehn […] machen.” See Alfred Polgar, Orchester von Oben (Berlin:
     Rowohlt, 1927), p. 10.
57   M. Mack, Wie komme ich zum Film?, cited in M. Wedel (ed.), op. cit., pp. 81-82.
58   M. Mack, Die zappelnde Leinwand, cited in ibid., p. 59.
59   See Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1981), pp. 134:
     “Man [sucht] beim Schauspieler die Individualität, die Auffassung zu spüren, während diese
     Individualität beim Filmschauspieler gar nicht zu den Voraussetzungen gehört. [...] Der
     Filmschauspieler untersteht einem anderen Gesetz, insofern seine Aufgabe in der
     Repräsentation des Typus liegt. Daher verlangt man von ihm nicht Einmaligkeit, sondern
     Eindeutigkeit.”
60   Ulrich Rauscher, “Der Bassermann-Film” (1913), in Fritz Güttinger (ed.), Kein Tag ohne Kino.
     Schriftsteller über den Stummfilm (Frankfurt/M: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1984), p. 142.
61   “Der Andere,” Der Tag (January 22, 1913), p. 3.
62   “Der erste Bassermann-Film,” Göttinger Anzeiger (January 21, 1913), [n. p.].
63   “Der Andere,” Köllner Zeitung (February 23, 1913), [n. p.].
64   Alfred Klaar, “Paul Lindau als Filmdramatiker,” Vossische Zeitung (January 22, 1913), p. 2.
65   On the various visible stigmata of criminals, see the third volume of Lombroso’s Der
     Verbrecher, where Lombroso printed most of his tables of criminal physiognomies with
     explanations of their pathological traits. Among the most common traits Lombroso thought
     to have identified were strong facial wrinkles and enormous chins or jawbones. In his com-
     mentary to the portrait of one murderer, for example, Lombroso writes: “Mörder.
     Stenokrotaphie, starke Runzeln, enorme Kiefer und Jochbeine, Lemurenfortsatz.
     Vollständigster Typus.” C. Lombroso, op. cit., Vol. 3, p. 8.
     Mack’s reviewers understood the implications of cinematography for the study of pathology.
     As a reporter from the Nationalzeitung described it, Bassermann’s physiognomical perform-
     ance provided an invaluable source not only for actors but also for psychologists: “Jede
     Wandlung aus dem einen in das andere Dasein gab [Bassermann] mit allen Übergängen und
     mit einer Sorgfalt, die ihm der Mimiker und der Psychologe (der hier ruhig vor dem leucht-
     enden Bild seine Anmerkungen machen kann) danken wird.” See “Große Kino-Premiere,”
     Nationalzeitung (January 22, 1913), p. 3.
66   A. Klaar, op. cit., p. 2. Nearly all of the critics commented on the way in which the pathologi-
     cal elements of Lindau’s play made it an appropriate choice for the cinema. For the critic Paul
     Lindenberg, for example, the mixture of crime and pathology in Lindau’s play made it an
     ideal candidate for filmic adaptation: “Das Stück, vor etwa zehn Jahren hier mit Erfolg
     gegeben, ist allerdings außerordentlich geeignet, ‘im Film’ dargestellt zu werden, denn in
     seiner Vereinigung von Psychiatrischem und Kriminellem bringt es in steter Steigerung eine
     Fülle von packender Ereignisse und übt von Anfang bis zum Ende eine Spannung aus, der

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MICHAEL COWAN

      sich jeder willig hingibt.” See Paul Lindenberg, “Berliner Stimmungsbilder” (Berlin: c. 1913,
      n.p.). Bassermannnachlass, Archiv des Instituts für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität,
      Berlin. See also “Große Kino-Premiere,” op. cit., p. 3; Fritz Engel, “Der veredelte Film. Lindau
      und Bassermann in den ‘Lichtspielen,’” Berliner Tageblatt (January 22, 1913), [n. p.].
67    Heinrich Stümcke, “Die deutschen Dramatiker und das Filmtheater,” Bühne und Welt, Vol.
      15, no. 5 (1912), p. 207. In their drive to distinguish the theater from the cinema, the cinema’s
      critics insisted on defining the theater primarily as a medium of the word (downplaying, in
      the process, the role of such visual elements of stage sets, costumes, gestures and facial
      expression). With the elimination of speech, they argued, the cinema eliminated thought as
      such. As Oesterheld described it in an article reprinted in Die Aktion in 1913: “Die
      Filmwirkung ist die bewusste und notwendige Ausschaltung von Gedanken und Wort, gibt
      nur Raum und Vorgang, gibt nur Bild im Bilde, ist also eine schematische Veräusserlichung
      jener Kunstform, an der Genie und Geist von Jahrhunderten gearbeitet haben.” See Erich
      Oesterheld, “Wie die deutschen Dramatiker Barbaren wurden,” Die Aktion, Vol. 3, no. 9
      (1913), p. 264.
      Or in the words of another writer for Die Volksbildung: “Es ist ein Unding, dramatische
      Vorgänge, die sich auf das Innenleben eines Menschen beziehen, ohne Wort darstellen zu
      wollen. [...] Alles Innerliche, alles im Kern der Sache Dramatische, ist dem Kino ver-
      schlossen.” See Walter Asmus, “Das veredelte Filmdrama,” Volksbildung, Vol. 43, no. 8 (1913),
      p. 146.
      On this point, the cinema’s theatrical critics were in agreement with the reformers; as Adolf
      Sellmann described it in an article from 1914: “Die Dichtkunst wird mißhandelt durch die
      Sensationsdramen, die wegen des Mangels jeden Dialogs und Monologs ohne geistigen
      Inhalt sind.” See Adolf Sellman, “Kinematograph und Jugendpflege,” Die Hochwacht, Vol. 4,
      no. 9 (June 1914), p. 242.
68    See Stümcke, op. cit., 204.
69    See Julius Bab, Albert Bassermann. Weg und Werk eines deutschen Schauspielers um die
      Wende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Erich Weibezahl, 1929), pp. 101-102: “ Sein höchst
      ungewöhnlicher Fanatismus im Kampf gegen das Photographiertwerden ging so weit, daß er
      ein Blatt, das irgendwie doch ein Bild von ihm erwischt hatte, verklagte und den Prozeß
      durch alle Instanzen führte.”
70    Again and again in his biography of Bassermann from 1929, Bab depicts his subject as a soli-
      tary artist bent on maintaining his distinction from the urban masses: “Ein junger
      Schauspieler kommt nach langen Jahren Kleinstadtengagements nach Berlin, er hat eine ver-
      hältnismäßig gute und sichere Position. [...] Was wird geschehen? Wird ihn nicht selbstver-
      ständlich der Betrieb der Weltstadt anziehen? [...] Wird es nicht Künstlerstammtische geben,
      angenehme und auch nützliche Beziehungen zu Malern, Literaten und Journalisten, die
      einen jungen Ruhm vorwärts treiben? – Nichts von alledem geschieht. Die Luft von
      Einsamkeit, die bereits den jungen Schauspieler in Meiningen spürbar umgab, fängt in
      Berlin an um den Dreißigjährigen immer, immer undurchdringlicher zu werden” (ibid., p.
      97). See also Bab’s description of Bassermann’s private orthography: “Denn die Schrift ist ja
      nur ein Verständigungsmittel, eine rein soziale Funktion. Und es kommt im Grunde genom-
      men gar nicht darauf an, wie geschrieben wird, sondern nur, daß alle Beteiligten innerhalb
      dieses Schiftbereiches gleich schreiben. [...] Wenn also diese höchst persönliche Schreibweise
      Albert Bassermann’s überhaupt mehr als eine drollige Marotte bedeutet, so kann diese
      Bedeutung [...] nur gefunden werden in diesem Trieb zur Isolierung – in einem Hang zur
      Einsamkeit, der fast unvermeidlich auch in einigen Punkten zum Eigenbrödlertum führen

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                                                THEATER AND CINEMA IN THE “AGE OF NERVOUSNESS”

   muß.” Ibid., p. 104.
71 See Helmut Heinz Diederichs, Anfänge deutscher Filmkritik (Stuttgart: Robert Fischer-Uwe
   Wiedleroither, 1986), pp. 54-65.
72 H. Lorm, op. cit., p. 2009.
73 “Der andere Albert Bassermann,” Tägliche Rundschau (January 22, 1913), p. 2. Speculating on
   why so many reporters had rushed to the premiere of Der Andere, another reporter for a
   Berlin daily answered: “Erstens aus Schadenfreude: um zu sehen, wie einer, der sich jahrelang
   gegen eine photographische Aufnahme sträubte, nun stundenlang in effegie hingleitet.” See
   “Der Andere,” Berliner Börsen-Courier (January 22, 1913), p. 5.
74 According to one review, “Jeder von den Premiergästen erhielt eines der hunderttausend
   Bilder aus diesem Film zum Andenken mit.” See “Große Kino-Premiere,” op. cit., p. 3.
   One week after the premiere, Bassermann himself published an interview in the B. Z. am
   Mittag, in which, in a description that could have been referring to Der Andere itself, he
   admitted his secret love for scandalous sensational films: “Die nordischen sind uns im Kino
   noch ein Stück voraus; ebenso gewisse Franzosen, weil sie schon langjährige Übung haben.
   Schade, daß sie fast ausnahmslos Schauersensationsdramen spielen, die ich – zu meiner
   Schande muß ich gestehen! – am liebsten sehe, die eben aber ganz entschieden den
   Geschmack der Allgemeinheit, den wir auf der Bühne Gott sei Dank einigermaßen gehoben
   haben, wieder herunterbringen.” Cited in M. Wedel (ed.), op. cit., p. 92.
75 Rudolf Kurtz, Berlin, die Filmstadt und Max Mack, cited in ibid., p. 136.
76 M. Mack, Wie komme ich zum Film?, cited in ibid., p. 116.
77 Julius Bab, “Die Kinematographen-Frage,” Die Hilfe, Vol. 19, no. 18 (1913), p. 281.
78 Ibid. Another writer for Die Schaubühne similarly complained that film robbed Bassermann
   of his most individual element, the voice: “[E]in Blinder hätte von Bassermann unendlich
   viel: diese Stimme, die nicht zum zweiten Mal existiert, und in der die ganze Seele liegt. Ein
   Tauber dagegen hätte von Bassermann wenig: eine Mimik, die gewiß nicht durchschnittlich,
   aber ebenso gewiß nicht einzigartig ist.” “Stucken und Bassermann,” Die Schaubühne, Vol.
   10, no. 5 (1914), p. 137.
   Here, too, Mack essentially shared his critics’ understanding of film as a medium that sacri-
   ficed the soul, although he did not share their negative assessment. One sees this, in particu-
   lar, in Mack’s comments on film acting and film characters. “Der Film ist vor allem
   Photographie,” he wrote in Wie komme ich zum Film?. “Das heißt, [der Schauspieler] bringt
   nicht die schöne Seele auf die Leinwand, sondern den materiellen Körper, das Äußere. Und
   das Problem des Äußeren ist die erste, die Kernfrage, um überhaupt im Film einen Erfolg zu
   erringen.” Cited in Wedel (ed.), op. cit., p. 77.
79 Max Lehrs, “Als ich zum ersten Mal im Kino war,” Berliner Tageblatt (March 16, 1913), p. 1.
80 Ibid.




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