The Vengeance of Rome (68 page)

She explained how modern pictures shot each scene over again in a number of languages. Only later would studios discover the less expensive method of dubbing. I had just seen Rex Ingram's most recent film, which was made in Morocco with an international cast, none of whom could be understood in any of the languages they spoke! I had known Ingram in Hollywood. The Irishman had studios in Nice and refused to return to the United States. He said sound had been the death knell of artistic pictures. He had announced that henceforth he would paint or write but would never make pictures again.

The Germans led the world in the production of multiple-language films.
The Blue Angel
had just been made at UfA's Neubabelsberg studios, each scene shot first in English, then in German, then in French. Hollywood, of course, could not make such films, because it did not have the wealth of actors able casually to speak several languages. It was almost impossible for the modern European cosmopolitan not to be familiar at least with English and French if he was German. Italians were often fluent in all three languages, as well as their own. The only problem German producers faced was the American and British public's failures to appreciate the boulevard comedies and military farces, the staple of the Berlin and Munich cinemas, produced in their dozens. Even the operettas, though widely imitated, did not pull in the natives of Bradford and Boston. Horror films and science fiction did reasonably well, largely because they depended on visual effects, and Germans were recognised as the masters of modern illusion.
Metropolis
had been a minor success in the UK.
Die Drei von der Tankstelle
, with its wonderful contemporary settings and many of the top UfA stars, had done no serious business overseas. Even
Der Kongress tanzt
, immediately imitated by the Americans, did not hit the million-dollar jackpot.

‘‘Uggy's not that ‘appy with foreigners comin' ‘ere an' makin' their pictures,' Mrs Cornelius confided. ‘They bring a few dollars in, but that's it. Orl ther real profit goes back ter “Jew York” as ‘Uggy calls it. ‘E says Germans should be makin' ther movies and
exportin
' them ter America, not the ovver way abart. So that's wot we're gonna do. Quotas on Yank pictures. Cowboy pictures fer cowboys ter watch in Wyomin' an' Texas.' She threw back her head and roared, startling a waiter behind her. ‘An' ‘is big enfusiasm's Karl wotsit's books. It's like a bloody religion wiv ‘im. ‘E finks ‘e'll convert ther Yanks ter bring back ther poor ol' Kaiser. Yer really reckon ‘em, do yer? Them books?'

I told her how May's tales of Turk and Texan were totally engrossing, instilling the love of nature, freedom and individuality which mark the best type of modern man. May compared the Apache to the Turk and said they both represented great races who had fallen on hard times, unable to resist more aggressive enemies. He pointed to Indian architecture to show how the Red Man could attain any level of civilisation he wished.

I began to speak of this. ‘Yeah,' she said, yawning. ‘‘Uggy's explained orl that more'n once.'

‘Exemplifying the finest German virtues while showing due respect for the Red Man's innate nobility and purity of soul.'

‘Dead right, Ive. So?'

‘This is extraordinary.' I could think of no finer part to play. Yet I had become so used to movies presenting the lowest common denominator. ‘You are certain, Mrs Cornelius, that your Baron wants to make a film series based on Karl May's famous philosophical adventure tales? The “Winnetou” books?'

‘On the money, Ive.'

‘I am honoured.'

I added that I heard the May company was wary of vulgarising the Master's work on film. She assured me Hugenberg had secured rights by demonstrating to the family his sincere reverence, patriotism and belief in promoting Karl May's serious ideas concerning brotherly love and the right of all races to live on their own traditional land, unthreatened by invaders of any kind, whether with guns or with an alien culture. This matched what I had already heard of Alfred Hugenberg. He was a Cabinet minister, leader of a major German political party and German through and through. I had read one of his election addresses while waiting for Kitty to come out of the toilet at the
Kino
. Mutual respect was the secret of civil discourse between nations. While he understood the benefits of democracy, he still supported a monarch on the German throne. A monarch represented the state in a way a president could not. He admired Hindenburg, felt that the old Field Marshal really wished to see a Kaiser restored, and was also obsessed with
der alte Fritz
, Frederick the Great. Germany would only hold her head up in the world once more when she had an emperor. Mrs Cornelius said it was well known in film circles that if you wanted to get a start with UfA, you should suggest an ‘Old Fritz' theme to Huggy Bear.

Doctor Hugenberg had been granted the May rights because he was leader of the Nationalist Monarchists and an influential director of Krupp. Since the War he had built up a publishing empire to spread his ideas and had saved the German film industry from extinction or absorption by the Americans. During the hard, hungry years he had turned a bankrupt concern into one of the most powerful and profitable in the world. He could offer the public conscientious and respectable versions of the May books and thus introduce him to Britain and America.

Nowadays, as with everything else, such great men find their names dragged in the mud, and every detail of their past dug up and dissected by the
Daily Mail
, so it is no surprise
Der Spiegel
and its kind, forever attacking their own country and its leaders, published scurrilous tales of Karl May's early life which they claimed had been led as a con man! They also
said he had spent some seven years in prison as punishment for his crimes. His ‘crime' in fact seemed to be possession of a rich and wide imagination! Sufficient crime in a Prussian Germany to have him jailed.

How hard it is for the unimaginative man to imagine the imaginative man. How hard for the intelligent man to enjoy the simple terrors of the dullard. Does the stationmaster waving his green flag to signal that the train is safe to leave the station ever anticipate the twisted rail, the broken signal up ahead? No, he is satisfied that he has accomplished everything possible. The train arrives safely. The train leaves safely. Whatever takes place on the train or outside the limits of his responsibility is nothing to do with him. He never connects. He never understands the nature of collective responsibility. But I see the whole rail system. I am part of the problem. I take some of the responsibility. I know that it is always my fault when something goes wrong, but it is not very much my fault. Any man's death, says the poet, makes me smaller, because I am everyman. I am everyman. My dreams are what made me exemplary. My experience is what makes me extraordinary. But I am otherwise no different to you. Believe me, Karl May was not the only one to suffer because he was different and above the herd. Today I would be living in luxury on an island in Scotland, tranquil and unassailable, were it not for several bitter twists of fate, any one of which might have sent another mad. But I have my creed …

Gott schütze unseren Zaren!

Den Bewahrer unseres Ruhms!

Und zerschmettere unsere Feinde!

Oh alter, orthodoxer Zar!

They cry out for justice. History mourns. God Himself is chastened before their outrage. I take my hope from the best minds of Europe …

Gott schrieb die Schöpfung nicht als Trauerspiel;

ein tragisch Ende kann es nirgends geben.

Zwar jedes Leben ringt nach einem Ziel,

Doch dieses Ziel liegt stets im nächsten Leben.

How we long for truth and justice to rule, for black and white to regard each other with mutual dignity and cultivate their own cultures, their own proud traditions. Believe me, I am not one of those who say that Karl May laid the sentimental groundwork for German imperial expansion. This is arrant nonsense. Germany had an almost impeccable colonial record. It is the Belgians, with whom she waged war, who committed the atrocities, and
Germany punished her for it, yet Germany was depicted as the aggressor in the French and British press.

The Belgian rape of Africa became the German rape of Belgian nuns! Is it any surprise that when the Jews began in the thirties to make their hysterical charges against Germany they were not believed? The air was filled with tales of horror. The screens showed their pessimistic view of the sacrifices we had made with such monuments of misery as
All Quiet on the Western Front
,
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and
Drei Tage Mittelarrest
.

Next day Mr Mix told me that his dream had come true when he ran into Ingram's crew shooting in Morocco and was able to secure not only a bit part but a passport to Europe. Ingram, though disgruntled and unhappy with his film, had been a sympathetic employer, Mix said. But Ingram had returned to Nice, and Mr Mix found no more film work. He eventually joined a travelling minstrel show in Lyons, and learned to play the banjo and the guitar.

‘I guess I'm just destined to be in show business all my life, Herr Max.' He had made his way from Lyons, travelling across the country as an entertainer, singing mostly Al Jolson songs, working briefly in Paris with Josephine Baker before coming to Berlin with a show called
Black Birds
, which was still doing well. There he had gone to an audition and discovered the songstress he would accompany was none other than his old benefactress Mrs Cornelius!

We all had a meal together. ‘‘Old ‘ome week,' said Mrs C. He had been happy to rejoin her when she, too, transferred from Berlin to Munich. He had become quite a sophisticate with a taste for good tailoring. Clearly not all the Munich Fräuleins saw him as a mere darkie entertainer. Even I admitted there was something wonderfully masculine about Mr Mix. You felt as if you were in the presence of a wild leopard, always in some degree of danger when he was near. And sometimes I think he knew his power.

He told me how they had performed their act in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Bonn, and had dates already promised for Paris, Amsterdam and even, perhaps, London. It soon became clear to me that it was in my interest to maintain close contact with my old friends. Now here he was, my
compañero
of cattle truck and Caliphate!

I had greeted Mr Mix with a genuine sense of warmth, feelings he reciprocated when he learned of all my adventures abroad. He enthusiastically exclaimed: ‘
Ich liebe Deutschland!
' That is the kind of emotion Germany inspired at the time, even in those not born there.

So, too, said Adolf Hitler and so said the German people. Goebbels, who had only recently condemned Hitler as the bourgeois puppet of the
industrialists Strasser still claimed him to be, stood up in the public squares of all the cities in Germany and reminded the people how the country had been stabbed in the back by alien financiers with German politicians in their power, supporting the machinations of Jewish socialism, the Trojan horse of Bolshevik Russia. He pointed out, with surprising eloquence, how their professed pacifism, exhibited in such films as
The Game of Guns
, was no more than an effort further to weaken the German soldier and turn him into a creature without character or meaning, who had fought for nothing, died for nothing and come home to nothing. Who was now nothing, with nothing to value, nothing to defend. Who was only useful as a puppet, a slave to the forces of Big Business, which would gobble him up unless they were stopped. The only countering force strong enough and wise enough to stop them was Adolf Hitler and the NSDAP Party.

I saw Goebbels give this speech in Munich in early 1932. He had a way of getting the crowd's sympathy for his deformity, refusing assistance as he climbed to the podium, his spindly arms akimbo as his skull-face regarded the audience. He could have been a villain in a boys' story, yet within moments he had the audience on his side by joking, appealing to their reason, their sentiments, their love of country.

He had learned from Hitler how to begin quietly and build up, to establish his commonality with the audience, to share its humour and way of seeing the world. But then with a catch in his voice and a tear in his eye, he would remind us what humiliation the great German nation had suffered. ‘Look,' he would say, ‘I'm just an ordinary chap trying to do his best in the world, trying to understand what's going on. We have the same questions in common. The same problems.' He couldn't help noticing how Germany had been tricked into war and then tricked into defeat. How aliens of every stripe had taken advantage of German hospitality, German goodwill, German honour and who now bled their host nation dry. How only Adolf Hitler, that brave young leader, who had known the same terrors and deprivations as his fellow Germans, could unite the country and make it great again. It was time for dynamic new ideas, fresh will-power, vigorous, healthy Young Germany rising triumphant from the ashes of the Old. A Third Reich, strong and proud, holding dominion over her own lands, the lands the Allies had stripped in their hideous feeding frenzy, rewarding the alien businessmen who had helped them march into Germany and despoil her monuments, her traditions, even her women! Black troops had entered the Rhineland leaving black babies behind. The evidence was there for all to see!

Those troops were the threat the Allies used to control Germany! Whenever they felt like it they could release thousands of Algerians, Somalis, Egyptians and Indians upon the entire country. Germania would then truly know what it was to feel the heel of the black barbarian upon her neck. And, jested Goebbels grimly in a vulgar aside, not only her neck would suffer.

I went to the meeting with Mrs Cornelius, her ‘Baron' and Seryozha. Mr Mix had also insisted on attending, though the guards controlling the crowd had not allowed him to come in very close. He grinned at me and waved when from the crowd his eyes met mine.