Dr. Mabuse
Dr. Mabuse is a literary figure of a super criminal invented in 1920 by the Luxembourg writer Norbert Jacques (1880–1954) , who also appears in several film adaptations.
The "birth" of Dr. Mabuse
The figure of Dr. Mabuse took shape when the Luxembourgish writer Norbert Jacques took a ferry across Lake Constance to Constance after the First World War . At that time, the area around Lake Constance, where the author lived at the same time (including Bad Diezlings ), was a busy trading center for the black market, which was in its prime . The author observed a fellow passenger whose stature and face inspired him. In his mind he then turned the observed little slide with the touching charisma into a great criminal ingenuity, around whose figure he then wrote the novel Dr. Mabuse, the player put on. After returning from Constance, he wrote the first Mabuse novel in a restaurant in his former residence in Bad Diezlings within twenty days.
The first two novels and their film adaptations
Dr. Mabuse, the player
In 1921 the first novel with the central character Dr. Mabuse, a genius who commits crimes with his energy and ingenuity. He is a psychoanalyst by profession , a criminal genius with hypnotic abilities and a man with a thousand faces.
Mabuse uses his ability to disguise and influence other people in order to be able to move freely in high society . The novel uses the character to show the reader the "dirty underbelly" of the Weimar Republic . In the eyes of the author and his protagonist, Europe is rotten to the core, filled with the corpse stench of the previous war and populated by vultures in tails and top hats.
The dream of the fictional character Dr. Mabuse is creating a new society, free from corruption and putrefaction. He is planning a utopian colony in Brazil called Eitopomar , which he wants to set up with the fruits of his crimes. (A later sequel, Mabuse's Colony , was left unfinished.)
His opponent, the public prosecutor von Wenk, tries to put an end to Mabuse, but Mabuse can always escape; once an automobile is used, which can be transformed into a motorboat with a “few lever handles”. One can say that in the novel the villain is the real hero and not the lawman (in contrast to the later sequels of the Mabuse series). In the film of the same name, this dimension is left out: There Mabuse is clearly an unscrupulous villain who walks over corpses and strives for power insanely.
The novel was a great success with the public and filmed in 1922 by Fritz Lang ( Dr. Mabuse, the player ), who had his breakthrough with it and would later become one of the country's star directors. His wife, the German actress and screenwriter Thea von Harbou , wrote the screenplay for the first part of the silent film Dr. Mabuse, the player . Although the film, like the novel, was reprimanded for sensational elements, this did not detract from its international success.
Lang placed so much emphasis on Mabuse's disguise scenes in this film that some wondered where Mabuse got the time from to deal with the rest of his criminal organization. The sequence, which illustrates Mabuse's hypnotic power by moving his wide-open eyes into the center of the close-up, gave one critic cause for ridicule: “ New German record - 2.75 m! “Nevertheless, or precisely because of it, Dr. Mabuse to this day to the great triumvirate of ingenious villains of the German silent film, together with Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu .
The will of Dr. Mabuse
Also in Jacques utopian novel Engineer Mars from 1923, which begins with the engineer crossing the Atlantic with an airplane taking off vertically, a Dr. Mabuse.
After the first sequel, Mabuse's Colony , remained a fragment in 1930, Norbert Jacques was finally inspired by Fritz Lang to write The Testament of Dr. Mabuse , which he completed in 1932. The novel served again as a template for Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, but remained unpublished for the time being, as Lang had promised the author a share in the royalties of the film. In 1933 the sound film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse .
In this film, Mabuse sits as a madman in a psychiatric clinic who is incessantly writing a “will” in which he gives instructions for crime and the establishment of a comprehensive “rule of crime”. These instructions are mysteriously carried out by a criminal organization, although the manuscripts remain unpublished in the clinic. Commissioner Lohmann (who had already appeared in M ) tries to arrest the gang, but fails because of their perfect and professional organizational structure. Although he is repeatedly led on the trail of the clinic, Lohmann does not initially see what role the seemingly powerless Mabuse is playing.
The confusion increases when Mabuse suddenly dies. But he succeeded in transferring his will to the mind of the head of the insane asylum, Professor Baum. Now he carries out Mabuse's criminal instructions. When the organization strikes the ultimate blow and wants to blow up a chemical factory, the police can prevent it at the last minute. There is also a tree at the scene. After a surrealistic car chase, Baum flees to his own institution, where he is now, completely insane, being kept as a patient himself. At the end he is seen sitting in a cell, tearing up manuscript pages in a state of complete derision.
The clear allusions to the terror methods of the Nazis and to Adolf Hitler , who also wrote Mein Kampf while in captivity, had not escaped the Nazis, and the film was banned in the Third Reich . However, copies were successfully smuggled abroad. For years only a heavily abridged version of the film was in circulation. A reconstructed version has only been available since the end of 1973.
Actor of the first two films
The German actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge played the title role in both films . He was supported in the first film by Aud Egede-Nissen , Alfred Abel , Bernhard Goetzke and, as a curiosity in a small supporting role, by Gottfried Huppertz (composer, among others of the Karl May film Through the Desert from 1936). In The Testament of Dr. Mabuse performed among others Otto Wernicke , Paul Henckels and Theo Lingen .
Later adaptations
In 1953, Norbert Jacques sold the rights to the figure of Dr. Mabuse to the Berlin CCC film . At the same time as the Edgar Wallace films of the 1960s, Doctor Mabuse was rediscovered for the film. Six new black-and-white Mabuse films were made between 1960 and 1964, but these only emphasized the criminal aspect and barely had any socially critical aspects.
The first film in this new series, The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), directed again by Fritz Lang, who is nevertheless viewed as weaker than his two predecessors. The plot of the film goes back to the Esperanto novel Mr. Tot aĉetas mil okulojn by the Polish author Jean Forge .
This film was followed by:
- Director: Harald Reinl ; with Gert Fröbe , Lex Barker , Daliah Lavi
- Director: Harald Reinl ; with Lex Barker , Karin Dor , Siegfried Lowitz
- The will of Dr. Mabuse (1962)
- Director: Werner Klingler ; with Gert Fröbe , Senta Berger , Helmut Schmid
- Director: Paul May ; with Peter van Eyck , Werner Peters , Sabine Bethmann , Klaus Kinski
- The death rays of Dr. Mabuse (1964)
- Director: Hugo Fregonese ; with Peter van Eyck , OE Hasse , Yvonne Furneaux
Again, the films were enriched by well-known national and international actors, including Lex Barker , Gert Fröbe , Rudolf Forster , Peter van Eyck , Wolfgang Völz , Werner Peters , Rudolf Fernau , Siegfried Lowitz , Karin Dor , Daliah Lavi , Klaus Kinski , OE Hasse , Leon Askin and, last but not least, Wolfgang Preiss , who appeared in all six films of the 1960s with Dr. Mabuse played.
After the Mabuse series by CCC, two more films about Dr. Mabuse:
- Dr. M Strikes (1972) directed by Jess Franco
- Dr. M ( Docteur M , 1990) directed by Claude Chabrol
In 2013 another film, "Doctor Mabuse", directed by Ansel Faraj and starring Jerry Lacy as Dr. Mabuse and Nathan Wilson filmed as Inspector Lohmann. In 2014 a sequel "Doctor Mabuse: Etiopomar" [sic!] Followed. Both films have not yet been released in Germany.
Radio plays
The novels “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ” and “ The Testament of Dr. Mabuse ” were produced in 1997 and 1999 as radio plays by Westdeutscher Rundfunk . Ulrich Wildgruber ( “Player” ) and Otto Sander ( “Testament” ) played the title role , and Dieter Mann (narrator) and Rolf Becker (Wenk) or Hermann Treusch (Baum) and Gunter Schoss (Lohmann) took part. The radio plays edited by Michael Farin (on “Spieler” together with Hans Schmid ) were directed by Annette Kurth and Thomas Werner . The music for “Dr. Mabuse, the player ” contributed the well-known silent film pianist Willy Sommerfeld .
reception
In 1969 the English film Scream and scream again was made , which was released in Germany under the title The Living Corpses of Dr. Mabuse came into theaters. In the German dubbed version, the character played by Vincent Price became “Dr. Browning ”(in the original version)“ Dr. Mabuse ”.
" Dr. med. Mabuse ”is also the title of a critical health care journal that has existed for decades and is published by Mabuse-Verlag.
In 1983, Dr. Mabuse in an episode of the Austrian television series Kottan investigates under the inconspicuous anagram “Dr. Buesam “back again.
A Dr. Mabuse in an episode of the Green Hornet television series .
There are also several songs or compositions with the title Dr. Mabuse or Doctor Mabuse or Mabuse :
- 1984: Dr. Mabuse from the Propaganda group
- 1994 by the Blue System group
- 1999 by Ran Blake
- 2007 by the group Locas in Love
- 2010 by the group Die Krupps
Volume 55 of the youth book series " TKKG " by Stefan Wolf is entitled Im Schattenreich des Dr. Mubase ( radio play - episode 74). In it the four junior detectives cover the criminal machinations of Dr. Mubase in his own private clinic.
In 1985, José María Beroy published a Dr. Mabuse comic in Spain. This first appeared in the Schwermetall series at the end of the eighties and then as a separate album "Schwermetall Presents 20: Dr. Mabuse".
In 2000 and 2001, Carlsen published the six-part, black-and-white comic series Mabuse (“based on the motifs of the novel by Norbert Jacques”) by the Kreitz , Breitschuh and Dinter team of authors . The plot was moved to 1998 (including the Eschede railway accident ), the main locations are Hamburg and various fictional locations in northern Germany. The core of the story is the duel between Hamburg public prosecutor Georg Lohmann and Dr. Mabuse. This appears as a phantom, which uses hypnotic powers to seize other people. His goal is to get hold of a medical experiment in order to be able to assume human form again. Each volume also contains a short introduction to the origin and development of the Mabuse material, its classification in the historical framework and the history of reception (films).
2018 was the radio play Professor Van Dusen an antagonist named Dr. Raguse introduced (following Professor van Dusen in the villa of the dead ).
Discography
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Detective film music No. 4 with music from the Mabuse films of the 1960s
2000, BSC Music, Prudence 398.6560.2
literature
- Norbert Jacques: Dr. Mabuse, the player. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-13952-9 .
- Norbert Jacques: Dr. Mabuse, the player (audio book), MEDIA Net-Edition, Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-939988-05-2 .
- Norbert Jacques: Dr. Mabuse's Last Game (audio book), MEDIA Net-Edition, Kassel 2010, ISBN 978-3-939988-06-9 .
- Norbert Jacques: The will of Dr. Mabuse. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-13954-5 .
- Norbert Jacques: Mabuse's colony. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-13953-7 .
- Peter Osteried: The classic crime film 1: Dr. Mabuse , MPW Verlag, Hille, 2010, ISBN 3-942621-00-2 .
- Mabuse . Freely based on motifs from the novel by Norbert Jacques. Carlsen, Hamburg 2000f. (Six part comic.)
- Solveig Wrage: Dr. Mabuse im Film , Reinhard Weber Verlag, Landshut 2011, ISBN 978-3943127003 .
- Oksana Bulgakowa , ed .: The unusual adventures of Dr. Mabuse in the land of the Bolsheviks . The book for the film series “Moscow - Berlin”. Arsenal (Filminstitut) , Berlin 1995 ISBN 3927876100 .