CALIGARI shows the “Soul at Work.” On what adventures does the revolutionized soul embark? The narrative and pictorial elements of the film gravitate towards two opposite poles. One can be labeled “Authority,” or, more explicitly, “Tyranny.” The theme of tyranny, with which the authors were obsessed, pervades the screen from beginning to end. Swivel-chairs of enormous height symbolize the superiority of the city officials turning on them, and, similarly, the gigantic back of the chair in Alan’s attic testifies to the invisible presence of powers that have their grip on him.
Staircases reinforce the effect of the furniture: numerous steps ascend to police headquarters, and in the lunatic asylum itself no less than three parallel flights of stairs are called upon to mark Dr. Caligari’s position at the top of the hierarchy. That the film succeeds in picturing him as a tyrant figure of the stamp of Homunculus and Lubitsch’s Henry VIII is substantiated by a most illuminating statement in Joseph Freeman’s novel, Never Call Retreat. Its hero, a Viennese professor of history, tells of his life in a German concentration camp where, after being tortured, he is thrown into a cell: “Lying alone in that cell, I thought of Dr. Caligari; then, without transition, of the Emperor Valentinian, master of the Roman world, who took great delight in imposing the death sentence for slight or imaginary offenses. This Caesar’s favorite expressions were: ‘Strike off his head !’ — ‘Burn him alive !’ — ‘Let him be beaten with clubs till he expires!’ I thought what a genuine twentieth century ruler the emperor was, and promptly fell asleep.”
This dreamlike reasoning penetrates Dr. Caligari to the core by conceiving him as a counterpart of Valentinian and a premonition of Hitler.
Caligari is a very specific premonition in the sense that he uses hypnotic power to force his will upon his tool — a technique foreshadowing, in content and purpose, that [73] manipulation of the soul which Hitler was the first to practice on a gigantic scale. Even though, at the time of CALIGARI, the motif of the masterful hypnotizer was not unknown on the screen — it played a prominent role in the American film TRILBY, shown in Berlin during the war — nothing in their environment invited the two authors to feature it. They must have been driven by one of those dark impulses which, stemming from the slowly moving foundations of a people’s life, sometimes engender true visions.
One should expect the pole opposing that of tyranny to be the pole of freedom; for it was doubtless their love of freedom which made Janowitz and Mayer disclose the nature of tyranny. Now this counterpole is the rallying-point of elements pertaining to the fair — the fair with its rows of tents, its confused crowds besieging them, and its diversity of thrilling amusements. Here Francis and Alan happily join the swarm of onlookers; here, on the scene of his triumphs, Dr. Caligari is finally trapped. In their attempts to define the character of a fair, literary sources repeatedly evoke the memory of Babel and Babylon alike. A seventeenth century pamphlet describes the noise typical of a fair as “such a distracted noise that you would think Babel not comparable to it?” and, almost two hundred years later, a young English poet feels enthusiastic about “that Babylon of booths — the Fair.”
