Faces of Evil: Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Seeing is a divine act.

(Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity 14; qtd. in Schmidt-Burkhardt 17)

Fritz Lang's 1922 silent film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler¹ is characterized by a paradox, according to which the enigmatic protagonist and master criminal Dr. Mabuse appears ubiquitous all the while remaining strangely invisible. He is always there but under different guises. Mabuse presents himself as a Dutch professor or proletarian stoking the masses, as a young gambler or elderly businessman, as an occult conjurer or drunken labourer, as a psychoanalyst or stockbroker. No doubt, Mabuse's role as stockbroker in particular corresponds to the immediate events in the Weimar economy. "For filmgoers in the Weimar Republic," Tom Gunning writes,

the simultaneously arbitrary and dire nature of money and prices was not a theoretical concept but a matter of survival in everyday life. Besides chronicling the stock market speculation of late 1921, Mabuse and his manipulative relation to money and prices [. . .] make him the image of galloping inflation of the period. [. . .] Early 1921 had seen a brief stabilization, but by November 1921, when Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler began shooting, the value of the mark had dropped to one-quarter of what it had been at the beginning of the year. The film was released (part 1 in April of 1922, part 2 in May) as the inflationary spiral was increasing once again. But by August, spurred partly by the chaos following Walter Rathenau's assassination, it had moved from galloping inflation (a yearly rate of 50 percent or more) to hyperinflation (monthly increases of 50 percent or more). Of course, by the end of 1923 this index had reached billions. Whether reflecting the already serious inflation of prices at the time it was released or the truly surreal demonstration of the arbitrary relation between goods and money that the film shortly anticipated, the image of Mabuse's sinister manipulations of stock prices became emblematic for the experience of hyperinflation.

("Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse" 104)

It is along these lines that Gerald D. Feldman's historical study of the inflation years, The Great Disorder, characterizes the "hyperinflation [in] German society in 1922" as "the year of Dr. Mabuse" (xii; see also Fergusson 68-84). Curiously, not only does Mabuse have many faces, but he also is the bearer of different names, including "Herr Balling," "Professor van den Gruich," "Sandor Weltmann," and so forth. What characterizes Mabuse's enigmatic power is his ubiquity in combination with his distinct elusiveness. Only because Mabuse appears as an erratic player with many faces and many names does he seem threatening. Only because he defies conceptual appropriation as much as physical arrest is he perceived as an ominous being, as anathema. Yet what, critics have asked, does this imply with regard to the film's sociohistorical economy, and what does it signify with respect to its political thrust? Siegfried Kracauer, in his classic study From Caligari to Hitler, famously characterized Mabuse as "a contemporary tyrant" (81), "a creature of darkness" (83), and an "unscrupulous master-mind animated by the lust for unlimited power" (81). Kracauer's contention, according to which Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler "reflects society under a tyrannical regime" (83), resonates with a myriad of commentaries which, implicitly or explicitly, evoke some sort of stable antithetical relationship between "public order" (Patalas 89) and the master criminal "Mabuse" (see also Göttler; Sturm). This view appears problematic in so far as it accounts for the evil threat "Mabuse" as an extraneous force that appears to attack and corrupt humankind from the outside and, as such, one might assume, can also be overcome as a result of a modification of these extraneous conditions.

In a much more nuanced approach, film historian Sara Hall argues that

the Dr. Mabuse series [. . .] has been remembered as the Weimar narrative about the pursuit of an enounced "I" who can be held responsible for the seemingly random chaotic political, economic, and violent contingencies of modern life. [. . .] These films were made and released in one of the most tumultuous periods of twentieth-century German history: police and government...