The Glimmer Palace (42 page)

“Isn’t he in prison?”

“Not anymore.”

Hanne suddenly burst into tears. But when Lilly tried to go to her, to comfort her, Hanne pushed her away.

“You have everything,” she said almost inaudibly. “Look at this place.You have the life I wanted. . . . Why you and not me?”

Lilly stared out the window, at the glazed empty sky above the skeletal trees.

“I don’t have everything,” she said.

But Hanne was oblivious.

“I need money,” Hanne said. “In dollars. Don’t look at me that way.”

Lilly stared at her.

“What way?”

“I mean, why not?” she snapped. “Aren’t you paid in dollars, in real currency, not rye marks? You know what I’ve done for you.You know how much I’ve given you.”

Hanne was breathing rapidly but she would not look at Lilly. When Lilly didn’t reply, she picked up the notes she had laid out on the radiator and ripped them into small pieces.

“A few years ago I could have bought my own brewery with this. Now I can’t even buy a bottle of beer.”

“If it’s food and somewhere to sleep,” Lilly said, “you can stay here with me.You know that.”

Hanne finally looked at her. Her pupils were as black as billiard balls.

“Don’t judge me,” she said.

Lilly opened her purse. She handed her one hundred dollars. Hanne turned and walked out without another word.

ll over the city, the Nationalists and the Communists were printing up their leaflets on the same thin gray paper. In the Reichstag they sang “Deutschland über Alles” on the right and “The Internationale” on the left; they waved red, white, and black flags on one side and red, black, and gold on the other.

Ebert, the president of the republic, was accused of treason by both sides for the part he played in the revolution.The Right insisted he had betrayed the kaiser, the Left that he betrayed the people. He decided to sue the accusers and, by the end of 1924, had nearly one hundred fifty legal actions in motion. Meanwhile several members of his cabinet were implicated in a number of well-publicized cases of corruption. Scandal followed scandal until Ebert was even being investigated on charges of seducing his secretary.When he felt a pain in his belly, he convinced himself it was only the pain of injustice. In fact he had acute peritonitis. Five days later he was dead.

All churlish resentment was forgotten on the day of Ebert’s funeral. As the cortège passed through streets where shopkeepers had once hung out their underwear in protest at his passage, wreaths threaded with black ribbons hung from balconies. The coffin was taken to Potsdam Station, placed on a catafalque, and covered in the Reich’s flag. Outside, branches of pine were strewn all over the pavement to muffle the footsteps of the pedestrians.

It was pouring rain on the day of the elections.The polling stations were quieter than expected. Nevertheless, the next day it was revealed that the new leader of the republic would be the Right’s choice, the safe choice, a former field marshal and veteran of several wars, Paul von Hindenburg, a man who had just celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday.

In the months that followed, life in Berlin seemed to settle down again. American loans to industry meant that factories could install production lines and start hiring. Workers and soldiers, who for several years had been fighting or begging or stealing, found steady jobs and were paid a regular if not particularly generous wage.To the high wail of the factory whistle, they fell in love, got married, started families, or saved for their day off, and politics didn’t seem so important anymore.

To Lilly, Berlin had once seemed the very center of the universe. It had been, in fact, the fastest growing city in the world. But Berlin’s streets seemed dimmer now. It wasn’t just a government-decreed lower wattage for the streetlights. The war had changed everything; the spotlight had shifted, to New York, to Paris, to Buenos Aires.

And after the collapse of any generic notion of world domination came the collapse of almost every other well-buttressed conceit of the kaiser’s empire. Lilly barely noticed the men masquerading as women, wearing lipstick, false eyelashes, and sock-stuffed brassieres, who walked the streets from morning till midnight without shame or inhibition. Or the women dressed as men in ill-fitting suits, who waited in the shade of the city parks to accost unchaperoned girls with their bare, hungry mouths. But the tourists stopped in their tracks, they gawped, they were visibly shocked. “You want depravity,” a whore apparently shouted at an American couple one day. “Then come on in.”

In the cabarets and theaters—Sound and Smoke, Nelson’s, and others—political revues had been replaced by shows with titles such as
Berlin Without a Shirt
,
Everyone’s Naked
, and
What Sailors Dream Of
, which featured naked women’s bodies arranged into tacky tableaux. Critics labeled them
Fleischschauen
, or meat shows, but that didn’t prevent them from being sold out every night including Sunday. Down in the Metropol or Wintergarden, the Tiller or the Hoffman, girls imported straight from the U.S. of A put on displays of coordinated high kicks fully clothed. Although the shows were slammed by the critics as unerotic, sexless, the routines like human machinery, with each component completely lacking in personality, the girls appealed to a latent sense of the military, their high kicks echoing and distorting a military march. German audiences adored them.

“Berlin,You’re Still Berlin”: the song was a hit and everybody sang it, even though everybody sensed it wasn’t true.

t was supposed to save the film industry. It was to be the biggest film production Germany had ever attempted, part science fiction, part fantasy horror. Set in two worlds, one a romantic idyll, the other a brutal modernist underworld, the project was called
Kinetic
.

Friedrich Bernstein had already cast the male lead,Werner Gratz, a young actor with wide blue eyes and a whitened smile who he thought would appeal to a wider audience. His acting at that point had been limited to
Hamlet
, in a theater in provincial Saxony, but he had the arrogance and attitude of someone much more experienced.

Lidi was to play the Girl, a character who lures men to their deaths by making them fall in love with her and then inviting them to follow her to the underworld, a vast industrial city where they are immediately enslaved. When she eventually falls in love with the wide-eyed hero, she realizes what she has done and, filled with remorse, strikes the first blow in what will lead to the destruction of the city. It is only the audience who spots the irony, that the hero’s father is in fact another industrialist who has plans of his own.

The plot was ridiculous, the costumes “archaically modern,” and the sets suitably fabulous. The budget, two million marks, was the largest any film in Germany had ever been allocated, and Bernstein boasted that he planned to employ ten thousand extras and a menagerie of circus animals. Well-known artists were drafted to sketch the storyboards, and fashion designers from Paris were given the briefs for the costumes. A whole city in miniature made of plywood and cardboard would take up the floor space of one entire lot and feature staggeringly tall buildings and chasmed streets. The airspace above would be filled with balsa-wood airships and tissue-paper zeppelins that would buzz around gracefully until they exploded in the final few scenes. Whole forests made of papier-mâché would be set ablaze, and in one scene that was later written out a model train would shoot off the end of the tracks and smash catastrophically into a river.

And yet, at the heart of this lavish project was a conceit that Bernstein hoped would have universal appeal.
Kinetic
would be a simple love story with an epic resonance. Or, as the financiers stated more succinctly, it was the first film to be produced in Germany “on an American scale.”

“It was either going to make my career,” Lidi said much later, “or sink it. At that time I didn’t care either way.”

The Empty Chair

T
he camera is liberated, released, unhindered by the screws and straps, by the nuts and bolts, that once contained her. Once so passive, so patient, so static, so frigid, she has thrown off her chastity belt, the tripod.

In Babelsberg, Karl Freund straps his Leica Model 402 to his belly and hauls a pack of batteries onto his back for balance.The actor Emil Jannings, fresh from the previous scene, watches with a bottle of Scotch in his hand. And then, with camera rolling, Freund staggers and rollicks, he sways and trips, he falls and recovers. “The audience will get drunk just watching it,” Jannings says at the end of the take.

Freund has mounted his beloved Leica on a bicycle, on trolleys, in baskets. In one scene the camera traveled for twenty meters from the ear of a sleeping actor to the mouth of a trumpet. In another, several suitcases were juggled on strings while the camera was lowered between them. The effect had the producer gripping the sides of his seat and claiming vertigo. But Freund isn’t the only one to employ the so-called unchained camera. For
Faust
they built a plaster ramp shaped like a wave. Up and down, the camera went, up and down over a landscape built in miniature. For those who’d flown only in dreams, the experience was unforgettable.

It was the first film Lilly had ever made without Ilya. And from the first moment on the set, it was completely different. The pervading atmosphere on the set of
Kinetic
was one of adrenalized boredom. Her costume took three hours to put on, the makeup an hour. Gratz’s face took less time, but after it was applied it was often immediately wiped off again with claims by Werner that he could not act “looking like a painted freak.”

And yet when the light was right and the makeup was perfect and the scene was set, Werner Gratz would come to life and his face would express more than the script had ever hoped. The provincial audiences had been right to give him all those standing ovations.

“He is a genius,” one critic wrote in a review in a local newspaper, which Werner carried around in his wallet. “One cannot help but weep with him over his beloved Ophelia.”

Maybe he knew his intrinsic worth. Maybe that was why he insisted on top billing. Maybe that was why, when his request was turned down by the producers for the fifteenth time, he began to despise the actress whose name would always be bigger and brighter and, more important, higher than his.

If Lilly often looked vacuous as she played the coldhearted heroine, however, it was because she had been waiting around for hours, for days, for weeks, in full costume. Most of her previous films had taken around forty days to shoot.
Kinetic
would take three hundred ten. One day, however, it all became too much for her. They were filming a love scene and were on the twelfth take.The scene called for a secret tryst followed by a kiss. When Werner kissed her for the twelfth time, it was a clasp of such blatant distaste that he pulled back and looked her in the eye.

“Just kiss me like you kissed that Russian,” he said. “You know, the one you had that sordid little fling with.”

He kissed her again.This time she did not let him go.

“Bitch!” Werner Gratz shouted, and spun round toward the camera.The cameraman, unsure whether this was part of the script, kept rolling, as a thick, dark trickle ran down the hero’s powdered chin.

“She fucking bit me!”

“Cut!” shouted the director. “Cut, cut, cut!”

“You can’t get out of it, I’m afraid,” said Mr. Leyer later. “You’ve signed the contract. But listen, it’s not easy for anyone.”

It was a shoot that, as many of the crew claimed, was living hell. The sets of papier-mâché, plasterboard, and painted fabric were enormous, the architecture monumental; the crowd scenes were hugely ambitious, with thousands of men, women, and children choreographed to move as one shifting mass; the lighting was theatrical and required numerous rehearsals and dozens of riggers to man the multiple spotlights.

Seven extras were injured when a plasterboard skyscraper fell on them.The actual wood and painted cardboard didn’t crush them: five hundred of their fellow extras in a rush to get a cup of coffee caused a human stampede. The tiger that was to be tamed and befriended by the hero escaped, and even though it was entirely toothless and ate only minced chicken, it was shot by an ex-Spartacist sniper who had been given a job as a security man, and it ended up as a tatty rug on somebody’s floor.

Everything that could possibly go wrong did. Explosives didn’t detonate but set everything on fire; bulbs blew; scenic flats bent or fell over; models fell apart when the glue that held them together melted under the lights; cameras jammed; films came out underexposed, overexposed, or just plain blank; extras broke bones by slipping on stairs, on spills of paint, or on carelessly discarded fruit peels. Everything that could fail failed; everything that could break broke; the real world seemed to be conspiring against the synthetic reality of the film. Even the weather was appalling: torrential rain that followed unbearable heat, blizzards that piled the streets with snow and then melted, causing widespread flooding.