As youth will, the two friends embarked on endless discussions that hovered around Janowitz’ Holstenwall adventure as well as Mayer’s mental duel with the psychiatrist. These stories seemed to evoke and supplement each other. After such discussions the pair would stroll through the night, irresistibly attracted by a dazzling and clamorous fair on Kantstrasse. It was a bright jungle, more hell than paradise, but a paradise to those who had exchanged the horror of war for the terror of want.

One evening, Mayer dragged his companion to a side-show by which he had been impressed. Under the title “Man or Machine” it presented a strong man who achieved miracles of strength in an apparent stupor. He acted as if he were hypnotized. The strangest thing was that he accompanied his feats with utterances which affected the spellbound spectators as pregnant forebodings.
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Any creative process approaches a moment when only one additional experience is needed to integrate all elements into a whole. The mysterious figure of the strong man supplied such an experience. On the night of this show the friends first visualized the original story of CALIGARI. They wrote the manuscript in the following six weeks.

Defining the part each took in the work, Janowitz calls himself “the father who planted the seed, and Mayer the mother who conceived and ripened it.” At the end, one small problem arose: the authors were at a loss as to what to christen their main character, a psychiatrist shaped after Mayer’s archenemy during the war. A rare volume, Unknown Letters of Stendhal, offered the solution. While Janowitz was skimming through this find of his, he happened to notice that Stendhal, just come from the battlefield, met at La Scala in Milan an officer named Caligari. The name clicked with both authors.