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Fritz Lang lived his life—and cultivated his legend—with the glinted eyes of a maniac. He was determined to carry his secrets to the grave. The true story of his life, he believed, was nobody's business. It was irrelevant, according to his point of view. Irrelevant to his vast audience of moviegoers, though they might be fascinated by the bigger-than-life figure who directed with such mesmerizing force some fifty motion pictures over the span of forty-five years. It was irrelevant to a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the great and near-great films, and especially to those that were not all that great. Though he might offer up tidbits of his life story, and enhance biographical interviews with personal detail, it was all part of his conscious myth-making. Understanding early that cunning publicity could nurture his career, Lang cultivated and controlled—literally blue-penciled—his own self-mythology. One thing the director feared was genuine reportage, or biography. It would turn him into a hunted man—the fated victim, as in one of his suspense stories. Biography would kill the mystique. Journalists or acquaintances who inquired into the film director's life, into the twists of fate that dictated the wandering path of his career, into the tales of famous and obscure women who figured in dramatic interludes in his life, or into the machinations of a particularly troubled production, might receive clever fiction or convenient lies, a stony look or a brusque invitation to leave. They might even receive a helping of truth. It depended. Lang could be liberal with his favorite anecdotes, tirelessly repeated, polished to a glow. The story of how he fled Goebbels and Nazi Germany in 1933 is famous because the director told it so many times. It was his crowning concoction, replete with details a novelist would relish: an office with swastika decor, the hands of an enormous clock ticking toward a fateful hour, the director's pockets sewn with escape money. Lang dodged the Nazi taint in much the same way he would later evade a Communist one in America, with a well-knit story that could not easily be dissected or disproved. Usually, though, he was stingy with the facts of his life. It was Lang himself who dictated and edited the brief autobiographical essay (some 2,600 words— six pages of text, as set against more than four hundred pages of appreciative C H A P T E R 1 1890 1911 6 FRITZ LANG gloss) in what has been widely regarded as the definitive book about the director , Lotte Eisner's Fritz Lang, first published in 1976. Lang emphatically told his old friend Eisner, with whom he had been acquainted since the late 1920s, "My private life has nothing to do with my films." He uttered the same sentiment in interviews more than once. Did Herr Lang realize that mountains of contradictory records and sources would survive him: journals, home movies, immigration papers and interrogation files, studio and government archives, even the memories of trustworthy friends and acquaintances? That not all of his associates could be trusted to disremember, or remain discreet? Did Herr Lang realize—was it a private joke?—that his films themselves offered a kind of autobiography, revealing perhaps more than he intended of his own life story? That, in fact, his films had a great deal to do with his private life? Or was the subconscious—that inner cacophony of voices that in his bestknown films always cried out to be heard, triggering crime and entreating punishment—working a dark magic on Fritz Lang all along? Certainly life began auspiciously for Fritz Lang, born to favorable circumstances in the Golden Autumn of Vienna, Austria—the last decade before the nineteenth century was rolled away to make way for the new. Austria, under the benevolent and seemingly interminable reign of "der alte Herr," Franz Josef, emperor from 1848 to 1916, was enjoying an era of unprecedented confidence and revitalization; tolerance and liberalism in politics; a renaissance of the arts and sciences that established the names of Klimt, Schnitzler, Mahler, and Freud. Vienna, the pulse and soul of the nation, grew and prospered. The capital, in Lang's memory, was like "a confectionery city in a fairy-tale time," whose lucky citizens lived untroubled by what was happening in the world beyond its limits. In 1890, it was one of the world's five largest cities, with a mushrooming population that included...

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