What does it mean, this tale we are about to read? How shall we understand it, ladies and gentlemen? Soon the music will begin, a movie will unfold. Where is the screen? Within? Without? It tells of matters both bitter and sweet. It tells of the world's conflicts and the soul's mysteries. Who knows where this tale came from? We can only read... and wonder.
Music sounds, the film begins.
You may applaud when it's over, ladies and gentlemen. An old castle, an old story.
Read now...
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This, with a few changes, was the prelude I wrote for the libretto of Bluebeard's Castle. Isn't it just perfectly awful? Perfectly cliche? I have never written a more exquisite bit of poetry or prose in my life, but the exquisiteness of this passage is agony: of a banality entirely worthy of Bela Balasz's place in world culture. Sadly it was saved by Bartok's magnificent score, the other Bela, the real Bela who never used more than seven words a day. He was the one with inspiration, I just lifted the deliberately functional words I wrote to describe the plot in the outline and put it into the libretto. It is truly amazing how opera can be so compelling while having no literary merit whatsoever.
Here is the most humiliating part: it was entirely deliberate. I wanted to write bad drama and I completely succeeded. The more insipid the script, the more flights permitted the composer of imaginative leaps that defy all rational consideration. One chord can provide a thousand implications where a mere sentence provides five.
And if music is liberated by bad writing, how much more liberated by it is film? We had thought there to be no art work more total than opera--a combination of all nine muses. But cinema is the tenth muse: all nine muses work together in opera, but cinema provides the portal through which we may encounter the muses themselves.
And what better subject is there to inspire ten muses to sing than the women themselves who inspire such flights? Opera is the realm of Violetta, Aida, Isolde, Mimi, Susanna, Pamina: operas through which heterosexual composers pour their longings--whether requited, unrequited, seduction or lament, it never matters. What matters is the longing, the pedestal, the sehnsucht, the desire to memorialize an ineffable longing forever in a sculpture of stone and ice. Until the emergence of this new composer, Britten, there has not been an unquestionably great homosexual operatist. The rest is all female heroines to whom the men fall in love, onstage and in the audience, even when the soprano needs to lose 50 kilograms. Yet homosexuals too identify with these heroines as though themselves.
Given the ability to see women in closeup, I thought movies would be entirely straight. Then I saw The Blue Angel, and the homosexuals were as in love with Marlene Dietrich as we were. I met Lena back in '24, noticing her on a movie set when no one else seemed to. She was magnetic even when she was an extra and knew just who she was. Within five minutes of introducing myself I said I would write her a script. The exchange was implied, but even then she was determined. She announced to me that one day she would be a star and we'd work together, 'I would hate to ruin the sexual tension between us.' We did not work together, the tension was as one-sided as what she shared with a hundred million men.
And yet it was a mystery to me how one day I would become Professor Unrat.
We all know the woman who gave me horns by a different name, but her first name was Helene, and this Helene so bewitched that the Fuhrer himself went to war with her image in his mind.
There were the almond eyes of a mesmerist, narrowing at the slightest hint of a joke and lids melting at the slightest erotic attention. What's in the eyes is pure adventure: mischief upheld by utter control and self-assertion. What's behind the eyes is a Neuchatel clock: look closely and within a second of anything explained to her one sees the eyes dart and the head jolt. Behind the laughs and wit is a person whom the very eyes told you would do everything, go everywhere, and master it all with determination of iron and concrete. Whatever the world is for other women, the world was built for her willpower. The world is built for those who master all to which they take upon themselves and do so so agreeably that no one is aware of her mastery's extent until the work is done; and therefore, look closely. You know that one day the world will stand at her attention.
I have always been fascinated by the rare such woman, that woman who climbs from the pits of Tartarus to which the fairer sex is always hurled: women like Bluebeard's Judit with the determination to fight with Bluebeard's entire armory. Some are moral giants like that Scholl girl; others, like Marlene Dietrich, become the toast of the earth. Others? Others are like Leni.
Like any great work of art, Leni is a work of a thousand interpretations. There is the story of her evil, there is the story of her ambition, there is the story of her spite and seduction. None of these are true.
I do not know the truth behind Leni, I doubt even Leni truly knew the person in herself, but as I choose to tell this story: I tell you my Leni. My Leni was the nicest, most generous, gemutlicher woman in Germany. She was oh so generous with time, money, favors, sociability, and beneath it all, I had the sense she would send it all to hell had she a democrat's choice. This relentlessly ambitious mind took upon herself every task she was offered: every task offered everyone else too, and she so hated the extent of it that she took on herself responsibilities precisely so she could destroy herself.
It was neither ambition nor evil that seduced Leni, it was danger. So preoccupied was she with mastering the world's newest, greatest art that she grew to hate the very thing she mastered. This mistress of cinema deliberately lodged herself into history as its greatest villain. On the surface she was Lola Lola from The Blue Angel, but there was no killer from M beneath the surface, beneath the surface was a Brunnhilde driven to ride herself into Siegfried's funeral pyre, a Faust (Fausta) who made a deal with Mephistopheles to inherit a world she never wanted.
The name is Balazs Bela: international socialist, Hungarian exile, editor of fairy tales, Bluebeard's librettist, film theorist who puts readers to sleep; but film reviewer of renown who strikes fear in producer's hearts, and therefore bribed into being a film writer of mediocre distinction. These are all my hobbies: my profession, my calling, my place in history, is seduction. As an artist I'm no candidate for greatness, as a critic I am cliche, but as a seducer, I am the Magyar Byron without a pfennig of his dashing looks. No, my seduction is entirely through words, listening, wit, persistence and good taste in wine. I pity the era when women achieve their long delayed liberation and an ugly Jew must seduce women purely by virtue of his merit.
Great artists like Bartok and Kodaly, Pabst and Korda; life doesn't matter to them. All that is their lives, they put into art. To me, only life matters. Always give me more life, and more, and more. Art is there so crafty men like me may live better. Who is the greater artist: the art-maker who sacrifices everything so he may create, or the aesthete who hears their opera, looks at their art, eats their meal, walks through their garden with women so charming they are artworks unto themselves? Art is a gift to us, a blessing from the Gods. As the man who takes joy in the result, am I not the greater artist than the artist who suffers for it?
But I knew better than consider myself an active candidate for Leni. Most beautiful women are lonely, housebound creatures of intelligence who might as well be spinsters. Leni is a man deposited in the body of a wonderbeauty, and because she speaks their language, forty men of intellect were in love with her at any given time and so were their forty wives. Every city of Europe must have these great women imprisoned by the salon whom but for accident of birth would be great men. Rather, the great men in their midst achieve greatness by the muses they play. Vienna has Alma Schindler, Paris had Georges Sand, but Berlin is Europe's greatest city of all because it teems with these creative women: Marlene Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Lou Salome and Leni Riefenstahl. But Leni alone escaped the confines of salon, sex and submission to become the maestra herself who sets the tempo, balances the harmonies and calibrates the dynamics.
I had no reason to believe she would choose me, and having no end of occupations I happily resigned myself to a gentleman's friendship of exemplary company: exhibiting patience and pleasantness as she took home men of twice my brawn and artists of twice my brain. But knowing that I must be magnanimous to gain entree to her good grace, I offered to write my mediocre dialogue for her directorial debut, free of charge. This hits on the great unmentioned secret of film: only the Jews are willing to pay real money so they may combat their reputations; everyone else is cheap.
Once I got onto her filmset, I happened on the idea of seducing her co-star, Martha Mair. Every night, a new club, every day, a new bottle of champagne. All of cultural Berlin saw us together within a week, yet I never took her home: never much more than a kiss between us. The next week, Leni barged into my office genially with a brilliant idea. Let's scrap Martha's part, write her out of the script and make her part into a man's. She set those almond eyes on me and what could I possibly do but accede?
When Martha found out she barged into my office ferociously first thing in the morning. She told me I sold her out to a more powerful woman who wasn't as beautiful as her: "it's because Leni's a goi! Isn't it?!"
I assured her Leni was no Aryan goddess and Jews like us have to stand up for each other in this business of vampires. What was shameful was that I believed it. She told me I was just another Jewish film executive using his power to get forbidden women and sell out his own landsleit. I told her this wasn't true and she was the only one for which I had eyes, and I would write her a movie that made her a star as big as Leni or Lena. Suddenly her eyes turned into the smoldering bonfire of Theda Bara's Salome. She pulled down my trousers and revived me in the office with the door half ajar. What could I do but promise that Leni and I would restore her part?
That day, the rest of us had to fly to the Italian Dolomites. I threw up on the fight. It was Leni who insisted on cleaning me up herself and ordered me a change of clothes from the costumes. And from 12:30 we spoke for 17 1/2 hours without a stop, until 5 the next morning before a 6 AM call. She offered me Scottish whiskey and Cuban cigars, which I accepted happily. She poured and lit for herself too, but I never did I see her put the drink or cigar to her mouth. I have only vague memories of what we discussed, but when we finally arrived at her cottage her face became obscured by darkness I felt as though for the first time I appreciated her crainioscopy in action: a mind moving with the speed of lighting, synthesizing all concepts of the world into order tightly enough for Kant: I don't remember her theories, but I remember things mentioned: Max Reinhardt and ballet, classical sculpture and Wagner, silent film and dance: especially dance. She enacted all the movements she wished to put in a musical film like Love Me Tonight or One Hour With You, only taking place in the days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the songs set to the music of Tchaikovsky: and as moonlight bathed her silhouette, she acted a whole ballet from her mind with the grace of Pavlova and the voice of Lilli Lehmann. And then she demonstrated the end: the hero marched off to the Great War, and you saw our hero disappear among a cadre of a thousand marchers: and in the moonlight she stepped in time with the ending march of Sleeping Beauty.
That morning Martha was officially reinstated. She never revived me again.
But 130 minutes later, at 7:10, Leni showed me a perfect sketch of a waterfall shot. A shot we needed by eight in the morning to get the proper sunlight with a 7.5 focal lens, R-stock filmstock with a red filter so that the palette comes out a darkest blue. No one else was there and we couldn't wait for the production team. I asked our driver where might be a good waterfall facing east and he drove us to the waterfall like the madman. When I saw the shot, I told her it couldn't be done, so did the driver. The mountains were much too steep and neither of us were willing to climb all that way to man equipment we thought ourselves sure to drop or fall. She threw her hands up, climbed one of the mountains alone with the camera and placed it herself. She lodged it in the dirt at an angle that could have destroyed the camera if it so much as dropped let alone fell. Then, production cost be damned, she kept the film rolling, descended the mountain, then climbed a second mountain so she could film herself next to the waterfall. With no one even to watch the camera, she got that shot in one take.
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Martha was right about one thing: movies are a business that only works by someone looking out for you. We call it a capitalist enterprise, but it's a business determined by an aristocracy for which every creator requires a Medici. My patron was Harry Sokal; as it turned out he was Leni's patron too. I only had chance to work with her because he recommended his lover to me as an actress, a soon to be bankable starlet, and a piece of arsch: but I knew what it was--offering a chance at his mistress as yet another bribe. But I had nothing like Harry Sokal's power, and by 1931 long knew better than think I had enough influence to win a starlet soon to fill a movie house. I contented myself with Sokal's wife, with his full knowledge of course, a woman whose ideas for films were better than Sokal's but left alone in a giant Charlottenburg villa.
This is the moment I should probably concede I'm married too. We have an open marriage and she understands that beneath these foppish cravats lurks a primitive animal whose Magyar heart she cannot satisfy any more than I hers. In those days of my forties I spent days I should have written plays smoking in the beds of their producers, served a late lunch fixed by their wives as I read their newspapers while smoking in their bathrobes: those wives were usually actresses themselves, withdrawn from the stage when they hit thirty like milk feared spoiled before its smelled. The stupidest of these actresses married other actors: actors who could bestride the floorboards as leading men into their sixties and in ten years would leave their wives of ever so slight wrinkles for a younger actress. The smartest actresses married producers: a specimen smart enough themselves to know that sex is disposable but reputation is not. The producers would come to parties with their wives, striking and ageless in form fitting gowns like velvet wrapped ivory, but so preoccupied are the producers with the newest models that they don't realize that beneath their ivory statues lurk wolverinas who have not been fed properly in years.
Leni would seem to be properly fed every day since she was twenty: men, women, men who thought they were women, women who thought themselves men; stars, directors, producers, stuntmen, cameramen, athletes, military men. Weimar Berlin was a place of sex without precedent or succession. Yet I believe there was one place she was not fed.
As a screenwriter, there is very little to do in post-production. I had yet to receive a new assignment, and tried to read Narcissus und Goldmund: the latest Hesse. I did not get more than five pages before I heard sobbing from a few offices over: I would not recognize the weeping had I not heard the same voice sing: it was Leni.
I seized my chance and went to attempt consolation.
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Leni: (between sobs) The film's no good.
Bela: It isn't?
Leni: It's furchtbar.
Bela: How can it be furchtbar?
Leni: You didn't see it!
Bela: I saw the rushes, what I saw was everything we hoped it would be.
Leni: Then I ruined it (starts crying again).
Bela: You didn't ruin anything.
Leni: How could this film turn out this way?
Bela: How did it turn out?
Leni: The studio hates it! The test audiences hate it! I watched the movie on my own, now I hate it!
Bela: They don't see what I see.
Leni: What do you see?
Bela: A beautiful woman who's also a genius.
Leni: GET OUT!
Bela: I'm sorry?
Leni: LEAVE MY SET!
And she threw the movie cannister at me.
Bela: What did I say?
No member of the fairer sex ever dared speak to me like this.
Leni: I am not one of your schlampes who falls for easy praise!
Bela: I think you misunderstood me.
Leni: All Berlin knows the great Bela Balazs! The mediocrity who writes Hungarian chicanery in German newspapers that derides the achievements of German artists and technicians who work seventeen hours a day to create the films you so deride then gets to sleep producers' wives so their films get good reviews!
Bela: Well you certainly misunderstand my job.
Leni: Critics are parasites! We have no need for you!
Bela: I'm not a critic. I'm a man of film: reviewer, theorist, screenwriter, and friend to talent. If I thought I had any talent myself I would direct.
Leni: What friend?
Bela: In the beginning of my career I was friend to the talent of composers: Bartok, Kodaly, they needed a man who would listen to their ideas, occasionally provide a piece of commentary, then promote their work to the intelligentsia and even the masses should the occasion arise. It's true, I'm Hungarian. Think for a moment how many poor gypsy musicians might have been great composers if they had the education or the money.
Leni: Why did you go to film then?
Bela: Beacuse film is democratic. Film is art for the age of the worker. A great artist of film needn't be an aristocrat or bourgeois, they just need to show up to work with a camera. A great artist of film may even be a Jew, or even, God beware it, a woman.
Leni: There are enough great Jewish directors.
Bela: We had no way of knowing that twenty years ago. How do you think the Wiene brothers became as great as they are? They had their talent but they needed opportunities, and they needed writers to champion them. Without writers like me, Robert Wiene would have been done after Dr. Caligari and we wouldn't have Raskalnikow or IMRI or Hands of Orloc.
Leni: So you came to film to promote talented Jews in the press?
Bela: I promote talented people, not Jews. I championed Metropolis when people hated it. I wrote about Pandora's Box and Faust when no one saw them. I was one of the first critics to tell people to see Nosferatu. I wrote about why Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss were actors as great as anyone acting in Brecht. I wrote about Lena Dietrich when she was a bit player and I certainly never slept with her!
Leni: Then why did you never write about me?
Bela: Because we had the same patron: Harry Sokal, and even a corrupt lusting like me has some ethics.
Leni: But you'll write for me?
Bela: I made a point of writing for you, even for free. I got to all these men when they were already artists, but I wanted to see the birth of a genius at its inception and watch as it mastered film in embryo.
Leni: This is quatsch!
Bela: This is genius! But it needs help!
Leni; Genius doesn't need help.
Bela: This is what I've tried to tell you. Nothing needs more help than genius! Genius is fragile, genius blows away at the slightest setback. But an artist becomes a genius because he disregards the setback and keeps working until the work of genius appears!
Leni: This is not a work of genius.
Bela: You don't know that yet! Why don't we recut the movie together.
Leni: But I...
Bela: Let's watch the movie...
Leni: It's terrible.
Bela: It's not terrible. Even if it's terrible, it's not terrible.
Leni: I can't bare to let you watch it.
Bela: You will let me watch it! After seeing your temper I'm convinced you're the strongest woman in Germany and you can survive letting someone see a movie that isn't up to the standards of a genius.
Leni: Do you promise not to tell people about the cut you saw here?
Bela: I swear.
Leni: You'd never go behind my back like that?
Bela: Your secret is safe here. You're safe here. I promise.
She embraced me and did not leave my arms.
Leni: A great artist would make a great film.
Bela: You HAVE made a great film. But a film is born three times, once in script, once in filming, once in editing.
Leni: This film is still born.
Bela: Such a thing does not exist.
Leni: I have no idea how to make it better.
Bela: Do you know why I offered to work for you free of charge?
Leni: You came to me because you wanted to sleep with me.
Bela: Yes, but I heard you were the most talented, intelligent young artist in Germany, and the reports were true.
Leni: I'd only be the most talented if Lang and Sternberg leave.
Bela: You're the most talented now! What would Sternberg be without Lena Dietrich? What would Lang be without Thea von Harbou?
Leni: They are geniuses!
Bela: They are geniuses because women inspire them to be geniuses! Without the muse there is nothing!
Leni: Then I'm just a muse.
Bela: No you're not. You're the rare muse who has stepped out from stone to become the poetess herself! You are your own muse and need no man.
Leni: (looks at me) I need men very badly.
Bela: You're right. People only call me Berlin's best scriptwriter because they're afraid how I might review them otherwise. But since people call me that, I can offer my services to anyone I want. I could go to Sternberg or Lang or Wiene or Pabst, get a lot of money and try to bed their stars: it would be a lot easier. But here was a beautiful woman kissed by genius. I chose you. Germany's chosen you.
And she kissed me.
For the first time in my life, I was faithful.
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We cut the movie. It was good. Not as good as the dailies, but I knew it would be a hit.
But then when it was time to show the movie to Harry, she'd recut the movie completely and it was the movie of a genius.
And then we retired to the waterways of Spreewald, and we were happy.
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We came in the spring, we stayed until winter. There was no money in film for the sorts of films she wanted to make.
Leni didn't care much about politics, but she was a good socialist like us all. Just like Brecht made plays, she wanted to make films that exposed the injustices of the world so we could not look away. Her heart was set on a project filmed on location in Africa to expose the modern day slave trade. While the plot would be filmed in studio, it would be surrounded by a full half-hour's footage of the slaves themselves in all their appalling conditions. Every day I'd hear her on the phone explaining her vision to another producer: all of whom told her the same mantra--there isn't the money for it.
It was true. This was the Great Depression. There was barely money for a trip to Africa, let alone a movie on location, where lives of entire crews would be endangered in attempts to get the proper footage. But Leni was a woman of implacable resolve. This was the movie she wanted to make, and she waited all too patiently. When there was no money in Germany, she tried producers in France, Italy, Great Britain, all of whom told her the same. She would not be deterred, and attempted to find the numbers of adventurous Hollywood producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick: known for taking at least mild risks.
Yet you would never know: you never saw her upset. Every day, she simply hung up the phone after speaking with yet another producer, went back to her drawings, her mountains, her rivers, passed the days in perfect harmony with the surroundings, and then we went to bed.
She canoed. We canoed. I finished a screenplay, called The Visions of Hildegard. She photographed our property every day then moved onto photographing the property of neighbors. I read my books. She climbed the Krausnicks, and when she reached the mountain's peak, drew everything she saw. We played tennis. She taught me to dance. We played four-hand piano duets. We swam in the waterways together. She was happier than she'd ever been; or so she claimed. I was happier than I'd ever been, but I knew better than to say it out loud. We planned on returning to Berlin in the winter, ready to sell the movie to whomever held pursestrings at that moment with a pitch I helped plan for her as though it were a screenplay itself.
But we loved the country so much that we decided to stay through the winter, play in the snow and keep each other warm.
And we discussed what happens in the unlikely event a certain Uncle Wolfie takes power. We didn't want to think about it, but she forced me to. I had contacts in Russian film, I'd visited the Soviet Union just last year. I'd previously corresponded with Dziga Vertov at length for years, met Alexander Dovzhenko a number of times in the studio. Post filming he'd lock the door to his studio and next to the camera we'd discuss film and art over copious vodka. Vertov even arranged dinner with Czar of Cinema himself: Sergei Eisenstein.
Such an enlightened country was surely looking for a woman of genius, and would crow to the west about giving her the chance to make her masterpieces while the West was still caught in the chauvinism of old.
But even Leni tabled that discussion whenever she could.
Then Uncle Wolfie was elected. We didn't even vote.
When she heard the news, Leni was utterly firm in her instant decision.
Leni: We're not going back to Berlin. We'll never go back if we have to.
Bela: You have contracts.
Leni: Everything changes now. Contracts mean nothing.
Bela: But what about your career?
Leni: NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM RETURNING! You will not return to Berlin! I'm staying with you until we go to Moscow and I will tie you to the bed if I have to!
Bela: But what about your artworks, your cameras, your
Leni: NOTHING GOOD WILL COME FROM BERLIN!
Three weeks later, she off-handedly brought up the idea of having a child after the move to Moscow.
The day before she brought it up, we had the most unlikely visit I'd ever had in my life. Fritz Lang: film's Kaiser himself, there in our cottage with his monocle and pursed lips: maker of Metropolis, the most expensive movie ever made and possibly the best. Nobody saw it, no friend saw it no matter how often I mentioned it. And just when everyone was ready to declare this Kaiser deposed, he'd made M: a movie that perfectly reflected of the Fatherland itself--poor, bruised, deacdent, awash in crime and murdering the future of its children. Of course, he wasn't there to visit me, he was there for Leni, and asked to speak to her alone.
My crest fell to the floor. I knew he was there to take Leni away from this paradise. I could never have known what he offered her: abscond with him to Hollywood. Goebbels had just offered him to run the German film industry, and he was taking the next train out of Germany for as long as the Nazis were in power, knowing that saying no to Hitler may forfeit his life and Thea's.
He wanted Leni to come with him: run away with him practically. I have no idea if Lang had any erotic designs on Leni: he looked as though he'd never even heard of eros and his ultra-violent movies always looked similar. But Sternberg had Lena Dietrich, and even if Lang had his wife Thea to write his screenplays, he needed a German star to work with him and tap the European markets where German movies were the brand of the highest quality. 'You are Marlene's exact opposite" He told her. "Apollo to her Dionysus." Dancing where Lena sang. Naive where Lena was sophisticated. There would be plenty of young starlets to compete with, but a beautiful woman with a foreign accent who learns good English would go everywhere in that town. And if she wanted to direct, Hollywood may not allow it but Broadway would, the Metropolitan Opera would, and a Ballet Russe choreographer named Balanchine is trying to found a national ballet company for America and would require a second choreographer.
Leni left the meeting. Lang boarded the train for Switzerland. Leni threw up.
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Happiness is a woman's arms, happiness is the bracelet and frills touching your back and chest, happiness is a night at the theater with a hand in yours, happiness is sneaking about with secrets to keep, the thrill of the chase and the thrill of breaking expectations, the thrill of hiding and the thrill of inventing explanations when caught, happiness is the hotel room assignation and the walk across the street to and from whomever you meet. Happiness is a luxury in 1933.
I found a copy of the book: 'the book.' Not in 1933, but '32. Still three months into our new life: every fifth sentence underlined and notes in the margins everywhere. And as I struggled with the presence of Mein Kampf I put it out of mind for Leni. I am in love with a new woman every fourth day, but for all 1932, I was in love, and love is forgiveness. You forgive the object all flaws, all annoyances, all dangers. All that remains when you're in love is love, love that you strive for eternal prolongment even as to be in love is not to be in life. Was Leni capable of love? Was I? Am I?
She said I love you every day, but what is 'I love you' to a woman of craft and genius? The greatest love, the greatest geschlechtsvehrker, is not to be compared next to greatness of creative compulsion, and the creative height of a genius must be the view from Olympus, making love to gods in manners that feel almost physical. What is the physical world next to this conceptual thing in itself that brings non-being into being?
And what are the heights of one dwarf-like Jewish man next to the heights of tens of thousands upon camera, all of whom represent strength?
