Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Reactionary Modernism: Barbara Hales

Wir mussen eindringen in die Krafte der Großstadt, in die Krafte unserer Zeit, die Maschine, die Masse, den Arbeiter. (We must penetrate the forces of the big city, the forces of our time, the machine, the masses, the worker.) - Emst Jünger, "Großstadt und Land"

The relationship between German director Fritz Lang's film. Metropolis, and fascist doctrine of the Third Reich is closer than some critics have suggested. While critics such as Lotte Eisner and Andreas Huyssen have made the connection between Metropolis and both German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit, these interpretations fail to address the notion that the growing conservative movement in Weimar Germany may have informed Lang's work. Huyssen's claim that Metropolis vacillates between the destructive capacity of technology, found in the expressionism of post World War I Germany, and the cult of technology in the era of Neue Sachlichkeit (67), ignores the influence of conservative ideologues on Weimar culture and politics. Huyssen notes that Fritz Lang's exile distances the director from any complicity in Hitler's regime. But Lang's part in the founding of the direction group of the NSBO (Die Nationalsozialistische Betriebsorganisation) in 1933, shortly before his flight from Germany, conspicuously links Lang to conservative modernist/national socialist thinking apparent in Weimar Germany and in Hitler's Reich. The idea of Fritz Lang as fascist film maker thus deserves some consideration. It is time to question the scapegoating of Thea von Harbou as Lang's "fascist script writer" (Eisner, Haunted Screen 232-33), and to reevaluate Lang as a director influenced by the brand of conservative modernist ideology present in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' interest in Metropolis, as well as in Lang's Nibelungen series, prompted him to offer Lang the leadership of the entire German film production in 1933. The ideas of romanticism and the cult of technology, found in both Metropolis and the Nibelungen series, were in fact already a vital part of fascist ideology.

In a discussion of Fritz Lang's monumental film. Metropolis, elements of romantic thought work in tandem with glorified images of technology to form a filmic text. This combination reflects certain elements of Weimar conservative thinking, made popular by figures such as Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler, whose conservative modernist philosophies were appropriated by the Nazis in forming the doctrine of "stahleme Romantik," representing the national socialist effort to discover a "new romanticism in the results of modern inventions and technology" (Goebbels qtd. in Herf 196). Spengler's inventor/discoverer is captured in Metropolis in the character of Rotwang, who delves into nature's secrets as a futuristic Faustian figure. Jünger’s notions of an ultimate will and human sacrifice to technology may also be seen in the film, in the symbiotic relationship between worker and machine. It is not known whether Lang intentionally set out to capture the conservative idea of binding Technik and Kultur, but Lang has been reported as having said that "what interested him most in Metropolis was the conflict between the magical and occult (the world of Rotwang) and modern technology" (Eisner, Fritz Lang 90).

Lang's classic film. Metropolis, as I will argue, is a visual testament to the strength and beauty of technology. It is a reflection of the cult of Technik and Kultur found in Weimar conservative circles after the First World War. Jeffrey Herf defines the philosophy of conservative modernism as a "reconciliation between the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism, and the most obvious manifestation of means-end rationality [of] modern technology" (Herf 1). Informed by Herf's writings on reactionary modernism, I will turn to a brief description of conservative modernism in order to juxtapose this brand of conservative ideology to Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

The conservative modernist devotion to technology and to romantic tradition is cited as a direct result of German military defeat in 1918. For many Germans, the Weimar government was a symbol for German national humiliation and resignation, which according to Herf, incited a conservative revolution:

The conservative revolution as a cultural and social movement was a product of the lost war and its consequences....The leading figures of both the conservative revolution and of National Socialism were born between 1885 and 1895.... The war gave them a contempt for bourgeois society, accustomed them to violence, and gave them a sense of community. (Herf 23)

Those men who fought together in World War I found what Herf describes as a concrete Utopia in the trenches, a community superior to bourgeois society. This conceptualization of Utopia developed into a political ideology, borrowing the primacy of the self and its will from the German Romantic movement and from a new respect for technology acquired through the war experience. The joining of the romantic notion of will and technology, the combination of technology and culture (Herf" 2), formed an ideological basis.

Proponents of the ideology of conservative modernism believed that a bond between technology and irrational thought could call up experience which existed on a metaphysical plane. For Jünger, technology became the embodiment of will and beauty, and was a key to the mysteries of nature or the metaphysical. Technology thus was essential in self-fulfillment, and potentially unmasked "den eigentlichen Sinn des Lebens" (1: 461).

Oswald Spengler shared many of Ernst Jünger's views on the linking of metaphysical experience and technology. Spengler's idea of Western man as discoverer or inventor capable of unleashing the hidden powers of nature, justified the exploration of technology as a form of nature (Spengler 1186). Through exploring the "magic soul" of technology, the inventor could expand into the realm of nature, realizing a drive to conquer natural forces (Spengler 1186).

The conservative embrace of self-realization through authentic experience and renewal of personal identity may be seen in much of German romantic literature. The German romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was revolutionary in that it abandoned the objective rationalism of Enlightenment thought and attempted to find the true essence of nature through the notion of self. Novalis' plea, "Wo gehn wir denn hin? Immer nach Hause" (qtd. in Grassi and Hess 200) was important in the romantic search for the intimate community to be found in the mysterious forces of nature. In the opinion of many romantic thinkers, the unconscious provided the key to unlocking these mysteries. But nature's mysteries were often considered to be very dangerous. As seen in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, a romantic preoccupation with the world beyond, or the world of the supernatural, could unleash the “Ur-forces" of good and evil. Terrors apparent beneath the surface of romanticism represented the secret hidden in nature. Thomas Mann's discussion of German Romanticism, recognizes in romantic thinking "a dark powerfulness and piety ... an ancientness of soul that feels close to the chthonic, irrational and demonic powers of life" (qtd. in Craig 194).

The evil side of romantic mystery, the fascination with death and the notion of change affected by violent means, is an important aspect of German Romanticism which was appropriated by reactionary' modernists like Oswald Spengler, in forming their own brand of romanticism. In the modem world, Spengler saw the dark forces at work under the machine surface (Spengler 1189). Western man's soul was destined to look beyond the surface of these modem artifacts. As inventor or discoverer, Westem man would be able to unlock the secret mysteries of the natural world.

Like Oswald Spengler, Emst Jünger also explored the power of the machine. Jünger's belief in a "magical realism" presents a celebration of technology and the machine. In Jünger's essay, "Nationalism and Modem Life" (1927) the technology of the city is portrayed as no less mystical than the natural landscape praised by German Romantics (Herf 85). A simple street scene for Jünger becomes cause for celebration:

In the big city, between automobiles and electric signs, in political mass meetings, in the motorized tempo of work and leisure...it is necessary to stand like a person from another world... and say: All of this has its meaning, a deep meaning, which I felt also in myself. (Jünger qtd. in Herf 84)

In Jünger's essay, "Großstadt und Land" (1926), the spirit of the city depicts the ideas of "Blut, Tradition . . . und Rasse" (579). It is the city, not the countryside, which possesses the spirit to energize a new Germany. According to Jünger, "wesentlich ist, dab sie [die groBe Stadt], das Gehim ist, durch das der Grundwille unserer Zeit denkt, der Arm mit dem er schafft und schlagt und das vermittelnde BewuBtsein, durch welches das Endliche das aufnimmt, was das Unendliche ihm zu sagen hat" ("Großstadt imd Land" 581). The Metropolis could then fulfill romantic yearnings, which were directed towards the pastoral in nineteenth century’ German Romanticism (Trager 56).

The idea of yearning is important in Emst Jünger's concept of the modem Metropolis. Individual yearning must melt into a larger life cycle, where the individual becomes a part of the innermost will. In order to insure that the individual becomes a part of this common will, the state must mobilize technology, unleashing disciplined life, where individual freedom is lost to authoritarian planning (7: 127). For the individual as worker, this disciplined life under the confines of technology brings with it "ein mit Lust gemischtes Gefiihl des Entsetzens" (7: 128). Workers recognize a type of sado-masochistic pleasure in submitting to technology, as technology functions as a source of beauty and danger (7: 128). In the service of machines, Jünger's worker can experience a thrill in the functioning of engines, "die kalte, niemals zu sattigende Wut, ein sehr modemes Gefiihl, das im Spiel mit der Materie schon den Reiz gefahrlicherer Spiele ahnt" (9: 154). Thus, the worker gains a relationship to elementary power through domination by and service to technology (8: 94).

The notion of the inventor who delves into the world beyond in search of the secrets of nature, and the idea that technology is linked to nature, are both played out in the film Metropolis in the character of the diabolical inventor, Rotwang. Rotwang is essential to industrialist Joh Fredersen, in Fredersen's plan to maintain the separation between capital and labor. Fredersen and Rotwang conspire to construct an evil Maria figure, who will "sow discord among the workers" (Lang). The plan involves capturing the worker's spiritual leader, Maria, and creating from this good Maria's body a double, who looks like Maria, but is really the evil prototype robot programmed to lead the workers astray. Rotwang's invention of the robot, and the robot's transformation into the evil Maria are key narrative elements. Rotwang's creation of the evil Maria is the catalyst which leads to the destruction of the workers' city, and ultimately brings Fredersen and the workers together in the end.

Rotwang the inventor then holds the fate of the city of Metropolis in his hand(s). Rotwang fashions this fate in his cavernous laboratory, where he uses a combination of ancient alchemy and electrochemistry to carry out his experiments. In a step back into the mystical past of wizards and sorcerers, his laboratory is housed in an ancient building supported by underground catacombs, resembling the architecture of the Jewish ghetto seen in Paul Wegener's film, Der Golem. The dangerous nature of his conjuring and the construct of his Jewishness signal Rotwang's otherness, which is initially checked by Fredersen. Just as the Jew, for Jünger and Spengler, possesses the power of the outsider the Jew Rotwang, is the harbinger of nature and thus threatening and powerful.

More mystical still is Rotwang's dedication to the memory of his dead lover, Hel. The character of Hel, cut from the American version of Metropolis, is the deceased wife of Fredersen and formerly the object of desire for both Rotwang and Fredersen. Rotwang's worship of an enormous bust of Hel in the original version, signifies Rotwang's allegiance to his deceased lover, Hel, the underworld goddess of the dead who appears in the Nordic saga "Ossian" (Fischer 76). Similar to the' romantic preoccupation with the dead, Rotwang is looking to uncover the secrets of nature through a bond with the underworld.

In the setting of Metropolis or mother city, Hel, the goddess of the underworld is Rotwang's guiding force in uncovering other-worldly mysteries ("For me she [Hel] is not dead ... for me she lives!" (Lang qtd. in Patalas 163)). And the instrument which Rotwang uses in his search for these mysteries is the good Maria from the workers' city. The good Maria provides a link to nature which Rotwang exploits. Maria has already mastered the secret power of the catacombs in her religious speeches to the workers. Maria's realm, the bowels of Metropolis, presents a type of giant womb, holding the mysteries of life and death. Maria's relation to the catacombs and her status as messiah figure define her as liaison between this-worldly and other-worldly existence, the space which Rotwang is trying to bridge.

Rotwang's splitting of the good Maria opens up nature's mysteries. The product resulting from this split, the evil Maria, holds the secret of the ages. A combination between machine and woman, the evil Maria is a combination of the organic and robotic bodies. The notion of Maria as cyborg reflects conservative modernist ideas of the joining of machine and body. According to Ernst Jünger, the transferring of the inner will onto technology not only creates a man-machine symbiosis, but is also an improvement on the body. Unlike the human body, the machine is capable of achieving Utopian flawlessness (1: 446). In the words of Rotwang, the robot "made in the image of man, never tires or makes mistakes" (Lang).

Rotwang's return to nature through technological invention reflects Jünger's idea of coming in contact with the elementary (8: 54). Technology's magic soul, in the Spenglerian sense of the phrase, has been broached by the inventor figure who knows how to deal in magic. But as much as the evil Maria is the representative of modern technology, she is also the embodiment of the romantic notion of the dangerous woman. The dark nature of woman as devouring demon and deceiver is portrayed in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century. Woman, with her reproductive functions of menstruation, pregnancy, and birth, appears in romantic literature in relation to fluid. Woman is both oceanic and dangerous. In a nineteenth century "song of the ocean," woman is flowing and vengeful: "Ancient ocean with your crystalline waves, you are laid out like the azure stains we see on the beaten backs of cabin boys; you are a monstrous blue beaten into the back of the earth" (Lautreamont qtd. in Theweleit 360). In nineteenth century romantic literature, woman as flood (flood of desires) is let loose as the representative of a dark nature, only to be damned up again in the end.

The representation of woman as desirous and desiring flood is evident in Metropolis in the character of the evil Maria. The first shot of the evil Maria outside the laboratory shows her striking a seductive pose with industrialist Fredersen, which is viewed in horror by Fredersen's son, Freder. The father and son's competing desire for Maria sends Freder into an hallucinatory trance, in which he sees the Maria riding the giant beast of the apocalypse, a monster representative of Hel's underworld. In an expressionist montage of images, Freder hallucinates a series of visions depicting both desire and death. The seductive belly dance of the evil Maria is juxtaposed to a statue of death which has come alive and is wielding a scythe. As the statues of the seven deadly sins come to life in Freder's imagination, the sins meld into an image of a thousand disembodied eyes watching the evil Maria's strip tease. Notions of inner visions and apocalypse, evident in German Romanticism, and in German Expressionism of the early twentieth century, come together in her dance. The exaggerated movement and flowing dance steps suggest the expressionist aesthetic of inner state expressed in movement.

The evil Maria as monstrous flood of desire is a part of nature unleashed onto the male community, wreaking havoc and inciting a type of fragmentation (disembodied eyes) and violence (the flooding of cities). The evil Maria's performance in the catacombs, directly following her seductive dance, is a further example of woman as dangerous spectacle. Standing at the altar of crosses and seductive candlelight, Maria's plea to the workers ("let the machines stop" (Lang)) is delivered in the form of a toned down strip tease. Maria, wringing her dress from her chest, implores the workers to group around her and hear her message. The workers' rage as they prepare to carry out the evil Maria's orders, takes the form of a mob scene, where raging desire is unleashed on the machines of Metropolis.

Thus the dark mysteries of nature and technology are played out on the body of the evil Maria. In the end, this body signifies the destructive capacity of nature and a type of sexualized technology which can only be controlled by defeat and death. The immolation of the witch/robot, Maria, at the hands of the workers, pictures the natural outcome of the fight between good and evil forces. The trope of good versus evil, a common device in German romantic literature, can be seen in Joseph von Eichendorffs Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815) as the confrontation between "Licht und Schatten ... in wunderbaren Massen gewaltig miteinander, dunkle Wolken zieh'n Verhangnisschwer dazwischen, ungewiB, ob sie Tod oder Segen fiihren" (Friihwald and Schillbach 380).

At the end of the film. Metropolis, the evil Maria is suppressed, as the forces of good have won out over evil. But a representative of nature continues to exist in the form of the good Maria. The good Maria, shown as a mother figure during the flood, remains a mystery in her qualities as Madonna. The good Maria's potential to release her Doppelganger also marks her as a potential threat, the danger of nature run amok. Woman as dark nature, portrayed in Metropolis, is similar to the dangerous figure of woman in German romantic literature and in the literature of various conservative modernists. Ernst Jünger's notion of woman as "eine Frauenleiche mit strahnigem Haar, auf schwarzen Grundwassem treibend" (7: 23) is tied to romantic notions of woman as part of a fluid, mystery, and death.

The dark side of nature, uncovered by the inventor Rotwang and embodied in the cyborg Maria confirms Siegfried Kracauer's notion that "Metropolis was rich in subterranean content" (Kracauer 163). The joining of technology and female sexualitv' in the evil Maria shows a tampering with nature and a delving into the subterranean powers of the underworld, symbolized by Rotwang's pentagram. In the context of conservative modernist philosophy, exploring the mysteries of nature constitutes getting beyond surface form, and exploring hidden truths beneficial to the individual through a strengthening of the common will. According to Ernst Jünger, behind all outer form exists a hidden will. The surface mechanical form of technology represents the shell covering a deep moving power. Jünger's theories involving the bond between outer form and hidden will are important in a juxtaposition of the idea of technology portrayed in Metropolis to technology seen in conservative modernist writings.

Ernst Jünger's description of the cult of labor, "das Tempo der Faust, der Gedanken, des Herzens, das Leben bei Tage und Nacht, die Wissenschaft, die Liebe, die Kunst, der Glaube" (8: 72), is captured in the images of technology portrayed in the film, Metropolis. While Metropolis' narrative describes the exploitation of workers via industrial management, the beauty in the images of technology carry greater weight in determining the mood of the film. The first sequence of Metropolis attests to the splendor of technology, which overpowers the dark severity of the workers' situation in subsequent scenes.

The opening sequence in Metropolis begins with a majestic skyscraper in a city setting, bombarded by sharp, geometrical shards of light. The two-dimensional drawing of the city skyline is expanded into a world of three-dimensional pistons moving up and down. The pistons flooded by light introduce a futuristic montage of machines, providing a juxtaposition of various machine parts in perfect rhythm and synchronicity with their environment. With a series of cuts from moving pistons and synchromeshes to a ten hour clock, then to a group of horns releasing streams of smoke, a link with technology and the city is made through a grand array of powerful images.

Most film critics at the end of the twenties agreed that the "interesting portions of Metropolis [were] those which show[ed] machinery and the mechanized mankind of the future" (Seldes qtd. in Ott 140). Luis Buñuel, writing for a Spanish journal in 1927, saw in Metropolis a mechanized world, where "physics and chemistry [were] transformed into rhythm" and where there was "never a static moment" (qtd. in Eisner, Fritz Lang 93). While Buñuel comments on the dangerous syncretism of the Metropolis narrative, his fascination with the film's impressive technology reflects a cyborg mentality which undercuts left political critique of the text. This ambiguous relationship to technology suggests that inner beauty and the functioning of machinery form a union which is captured in the worker's symbiotic relationship to the machine. The workers share the rhythm of the machines: "their arms become the spokes of an immense wheel, their bodies set into recesses on the facade of the machine-house represent the hands of a gigantic clock. The human element is stylized into a mechanical element" (Eisner, Haunted Screen 229).

The blending of machine and man implies the melding of body and machine parts, similar to Rotwang's creation of the cyborg Maria. This notion of the joining of technology and the human body, is common in the writing of German engineers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These engineers were both the forerunners and later vital contributors to conservative modernist Lebensphilosophie apparent in Weimar Germany. Their writings express the desire to join or replace the weaker parts of the human body with machine parts. In the work of engineer Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (1877), the logic of replacing human organs with mechanical devices is presented in detail. The hammer would replace the arm, eyeglasses, telescopes and loud speakers were to replace the human eye and ear, and telephone and telegraph were external versions of the nervous system (Herf 158). In Technik und Kultur (1906), engineer Edward Mayer discusses the "instinct to reform" a part of "human essence" which is at work to de-mystify nature (qtd. in Herf 158). In Meyer's words, the "essence of technology, is the secret of man's victory" (qtd. in Herf 158). And returning to the ideas of Ernst Jünger, the blending of worker and machine could achieve the perfection of the machine. In this perfection, the worker would realize the advantages of authoritarian planning and the disciplined life under technology (7: 127).

The union of man and machine, a notion common to conservative modernist representatives such as Kapp and Jünger, is clearly seen in various scenes in Metropolis. The main machine complex, shown at the beginning of the film when the machinery' overheats, is composed of a vast towering mountain of machine parts, with individual niches where workers fit and meld with the electric dials and settings. As the workers operate the machinery, they move in tune with the machine, like cogs in the giant wheel of technology. But even when the workers are separated from the machine world, their machine-like characteristics and mass movements resemble the machine. In Metropolis, the symmetry and rhythm of the workers represent technology in its synchronicity and precision.

In her book. The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner discusses the machine-like quality of the crowd scenes in Metropolis. These mass scenes, resembling Envin Piscator's "agglomeration of human figures" of the Sprechchore (Eisner, Haunted Screen 223), take on the role of the machine in their power and symmetry. The opening montage in Metropolis foreshadows the rhythm and synchronicity of the mass movement of workers at the beginning of the film, who enter the elevator in the process of changing working shifts. The mass of workers meet in "two columns . . . marching with rhythmic, jerky steps, ... the solid block of workers . . . heaped into the lifts, heads bowed, completely lacking individual existence" (Eisner, Haunted Screen 225). Also the deployment of workers who cross the courtyard of their underground housing complex depicts the "mechanical distribution of the impersonal masses . . . moving in several rectangular or rhomboidal divisions, whose absolute sharpness of outline is never broken by an individual movement" (Eisner, Haunted Screen 225-26). Even the procession of worker-victims who willingly enter the mouth of Moloch in Freder's hallucination, proceeds in machine-like fashion. The columns of workers who go into the mouth of Moloch signify the ultimate bonding of worker and machine, as the cold fury of the machine is never satiated.

The mass of workers further functions as machine entity when all the machines are destroyed. The workers' circular motion around the disabled machinery takes the place of the machines themselves in its symmetry and precision. At the end of the film, when the workers march to the cathedral in their triangular procession, the workers as mass declare the power and majesty of the machine. The power of this image cannot be compromised by the scene's sentimental narrative, which describes a union between the brain and the hands via the heart.

The worker's oppression in their underground industrial existence, symbolized in the Tower of Babel scene, is made apparent in the workers' desire to destroy the machine room. But the images of technology presented at the beginning and throughout the film, the grand enormity of the machinery, and the breathtaking cityscapes of Metropolis, overwhelm the notion of oppression and violence played out in the narrative. The workers of the modern city appear to be so symbiotically connected to the machines that a separation between worker and machine seems impossible. The end of the film supports the notion of symbiosis, as the workers remain workers in a truce between the hands and the brain. Whatever hardships the workers encounter in the service of the machines, technology wins out in the end. The beauty' and eternal quality of the city of Metropolis is assured continued existence through a reconciliation between management and labor.

In an analysis of the role of technology within the diegesis of Metropolis, it is interesting to look outside the film to the technology involved in the production of the film itself. Just as Lang's film portrays a future city of technology and light, the filming of Metropolis is inextricably connected to the city and its technology. Shot in the UFA studio in Berlin and produced at a cost of over five million marks, Fritz Lang utilized technical developments unheard of at the time. Lang's use of the Eugen Shufftan Process, a system involving rear-screen projections, mirrors, and miniatures, was heralded by the German film industry, and closely watched by Hollywood. The thirty-seven thousand actors and numerous giant machines manipulated in this monumental film effort, attest to the fact that technology was an integral part of the making of Metropolis. The medium of film was itself an extension of technical innovation apparent in the Weimar of the twenties:

[Das Kino] ist kurz, rapid, gleichsam chiffriert, und es halt sich bei nichts auf. Es hat etwas Knappes, Prazises, Militarisches. Das paBt sehr gut zu unserem Zeitalter, das ein Zeitalter der Extrakte ist. (Friedell 43)

The twenties in Germany were further marked by the implementation of American technical and industrial innovations. The Americanization of the workplace, the advent of mass production, consumption, Taylorism, and the rationalization of industry in German cities may all be seen as influencing Lang's film, which was heavily indebted to its technical era. Like Rotwang the inventor, Lang's own fascination with technology led him to create the most expensive film of the Weimar era, employing his skills as an architect and builder in order to capture the precision and technical prowess of the twenties.

Critics who reviewed Fritz Lang's film. Metropolis, in 1927, were singularly impressed by the image of technology. The magazine The New Republic praised "Metropolis with its beautiful shots of fantastic buildings, and its terrific use of electrical phenomena as elements in a dynamic composition which actually becomes the climax of the picture" (Seldes qtd. in Ott 140). Another review of the film by The Nation commented on the thrill of the machine: "only the machines seem real; gigantic purring gods grinding down life. Machines, machines, machines, sliding through the earth, challenging the cosmos, pounding out human resistance as they set the awful tempo of life" (Gerstein qtd. in Ott 134). Even the audience who viewed the film's premiere at the UFA Palace in Berlin in 1927 commended its visual and technical qualities. It was Axel Eggebrecht, alone among Weimar critics, who stressed the failure of Metropolis to adequately portray the technology of the future, and urban life of the present (Huyssen 66). While many people who reviewed Metropolis found fault with the reconciliation between capital and labor at the end of the film, the cyborg magic of Metropolis enchanted critics and audiences alike in Europe and America.

The foregrounding of technology in Metropolis thus exposes a level of analysis which has been ignored by critics. Metropolis is not only embedded in the age of American technological innovation in Europe, and in an age which criticized this technology (German Expressionism), but also in a time when writers like Ernst Jünger and Oswald Spengler were exploring the power of the machine and its relation to human will. Acknowledging Jeffrey Herf's thesis that there is a connection between German Romanticism and the glorification of technology inherent in the works of various Weimar conservative ideologues, it is clear that the ideas of conservative modernism resonate within Lang's film, Metropolis. Metropolis, with its mystical inventor, its impressive machine city, and its seductive technology reflects conservative modernist thinking in Weimar Germany, and resembles the Nazi notion of steely romanticism in the thirties and forties. The film, Metropolis, an aesthetic appealing to both Goebbels and Hitler, is ultimately a sign of its time.

Works Cited

Craig, Gordon. The Germans. New York: Viking Penguin, 1982.

Eisner, Lotte H. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.

The Haunted Screen. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1973.

Fischer, Ernst. Ursprung und Wesen der Romantik. Frankfurt a.M.: Veriag Sender, 1986.

Friedell, Egon. "Prolog vor dem Film." Kino-Debatte: Literatur und Film 1909-1929. Ed. Anton Kaes. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1978.

Fruhwald, Wolfgang and Brigitte Schillbach, eds. Joseph von Eichendorff Werke. Vol. 2. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Veriag, 1985.

Grassi, Emetto and Walter Hess, eds. Novalis. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1963.

Herf, Jeffrey. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Ernst Jünger. "Großstadt und Land." Deutsches Volkstum 8 (1926): 577-581.

Ernst Jünger. Samtliche Werke. 15 vols. Stuttgart Klett-Cotta, 1980.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Lang, Fritz, dir. Metropolis. With Brigitte Helm and Gustave Frohlich. Berlin, 1926.

Ott, Frederick W. The Films of Fritz Lang. Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1979.

Patalas, Enno. "Metropolis, Scene 103." Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Eds. Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel, and Janet Bergstrom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Munchen: Verlag Beck, 1923.

Theweldt, Klaus. Male Fantasies: Women, floods, bodies, history. Trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Trager, Claus. “Ursprunge und Stellung der Romantik." Weimarer Beitrage (1975): 37-73.

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