Mephisto (1981): Life Novelizing Art (Film Review)

István Szabó’s film Mephisto, outside certain filmic circles, isn’t in the public consciousness as much as it should — nor even as much as it would seem given its 1982 Oscar win (made more confusing given Béla Tarr’s well-known, yet (sadly) Oscar-less, status in America). The quality of the film is reason enough for the normativity of my claim, but (too) many high-quality foreign (and domestic) films escape the zeitgeist of the American film-going crowd that, while unfortunate and even “wrong,” their absence isn’t really surprising.

No, the confusion for Mephisto’s absence comes from the important, striking, relevant, and all-too-real irony of the novel on which the film is based. The novel, Mephisto, is itself a roman à clef, based on the rise of German actor, Gustaf Gründgens, during the Nazi regime, and was written by Klaus Mann, son of novelist Thomas Mann (Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Buddenbrooks, and Joseph and His Brothers). (Both Klaus and Thomas Mann appear briefly in the movie as the personnages à clef Mr. Bruckner and Sebastian respectively.) Klaus Mann had been Gründgens’s lover during the latter’s lavender marriage to Klaus’s sister, Erika (Barbara, in the film) but had a falling out (to say the least) once the Nazis secured control. Klaus had done his best to convince his friend and partner of the Nazi’s cruelty and caprice, but Gründgens, whose talent the Nazis praised for the sake of its propagandic utility, had already been thoroughly seduced.

“If I need,” Gründgens thought, “to cozy up to the Nazis in return for more substantive roles, then I’ll deliver a performance worthy of the cost.”

The role, though, that Gründgens was most famous for, first performing it just a year prior to the Enabling Act, was Mephistopheles, the satanic accuser from Goethe’s play Faust. For Klaus, the ironic parallels (or perhaps better put as “perpendiculars”) to the 19th century play must’ve seemed an inverted roman à clef — life novelizing art.

These reasons alone justify attention more than the film currently has, and those don’t even touch the particular qualities of the film, such as Klaus Maria Brandaeur’s impressively layered performance as Hendrik Höfgen, the character modeled on Gründgens. The character is a negative space, a hole occupied by whatever mask he perceives will grant him more opportunities to don yet even more masks, giving Brandaeur a nearly unachievable performance: one of apparent metamorphosis around a fundamentally soft “actor” persona. And yet he pulls it off so effortlessly, you forget that he’s pulling a performance within a performance. What Höfgen’s tale is, though, constitutes a metonym of the larger background story of the Nazis — a read on fascists that reveals their inherent propellant as theatrics, performance, bombast, drama, and masks.

The first act of the film is a series of quick vignettes to breakneck the success of Höfgen from Bolshevik provincial actor to apolitical, hobnobbing star of the Prussian State Theatre. Höfgen’s desire to excel his career, he feels, is achievable through the most esteemed talent, itself achieved through his aesthetic philosophy that art, the stage, should extend into the audience, to make the viewers complicit in the performance. This is first expressed in socialist terms, by pulling down the “high” aesthetics of the bourgeoisie, stripping the symbolism of classic references, and redistributing the performances’ value by grounding them in the very theatre aisles in which the working class sits. However, by the first act’s end, as Höfgen rubs shoulders with the bigwigs of the Prussian State Theatre, he’s told that Germany needs to abandon Bolshevism and return to the Volk. At the height and seeming end of his ladder, Höfgen smiles, nods, and agrees.

The lead’s fast-paced rise is shown in tandem with the rise of the Nazis, which debuts with an individual — a fellow actor in Höfgen’s troupe is a proud and vocal antisemite (whom Höfgen chastises (rather dramatically)) — and ends with Hitler clinching the Chancellorship.

This is our first clue, indirect and subtle, that Höfgen’s impulse to acquire masks-as-power via masks-as-reality maps onto the Nazi’s own desire pathways.

The map familiarizes further during a montage of Höfgen’s film roles, granted to him as a member of the Prussian State Theatre. During this montage, we’re shown Höfgen directing a group of actors (and even while directing he’s gifted the spotlight), shouting at them to expel more passion in their performance, which is then followed by a shot of the young antisemite from earlier, now directing a platoon of Hitler Youth, shouting at them to chant with more passion, more anger, more fervor.

The map then becomes the landscape in the first act’s ultimate scene, Höfgen’s performance as Mephistopheles, the scene portrayed being Mephisto’s convincing of Faust to join forces with a poet, only to then tell Faust that no matter how he changes on the surface “you will always remain exactly what you are”; after this performance, he’s told by an actress friend from his provincial days that she is leaving Germany, that the country’s changing, and yet she confirms for Höfgen that no matter how Germany changes he, Höfgen, will always be liked (the implication being that Germany’s Nazi leanings are based in and fueled by dramatis personae, by masks and those who like to don them).

Eventually, inevitably, Höfgen’s Mephisto performance is seen by a Nazi leader known as the General, who, when standing beside Höfgen in his Mephisto make-up, bears all the material qualities of the Mephistopheles character — he is not a mask (at first), but the real thing. The General shakes Höfgen’s hand and is surprised by its weakness, proclaiming then to understand acting as “pretending strength and hiding weakness.” The irony sinks in the audience’s belly as we know what Höfgen doesn’t yet, that the General is Mephisto to Höfgen’s Faust.

Given the equation the film has provided, then, we can expect that the Nazis at large are the Mephisto to Germany’s Faust, to whom the Nazis are promising an ultimate idealism. The Nazis provide both Höfgen and Germany with a series of dramatic masks they can forever hide behind to avoid having to address the root of this idealism. The Volk and Höfgen’s principles are both unattainable — though not due to some transcendent, utopian quality that, for example, Bolshevism has, but instead because their allure depends on their indefinability, their perforated and transformable meanings, adaptable to whatever the circumstances require. And the masks that allow for this ever-changing suitability are the excuse forever passing off the answer to the question,

What does it mean to be German? Who is Höfgen? Masks leave the answerers to these questions in the perfect position to maintain power while they forego responsibility.

Early in the movie, Höfgen is told by his closest friend that he should attend therapy, though she knows he’d be unable to talk about himself. Later, during his marriage proposal to Barbara, Höfgen says he’s merely an amalgam of all the characters he’s played. He is the epitome of insecurity. And while we aren’t given reasons by way of Höfgen’s biography, he does reveal a single childhood scene, une clef: As a boy he (arrogantly) thought of himself as the most talented singer in the boys’ choir, and so he belted his heart out — until he was told, not harshly but calmly, by the choir director to “just be quiet,” a comment so devastating, it embedded in him a shame that he claims has never passed, that he’s always fighting against. Germany’s humiliation after World War I, their catastrophic economy, their loss of resourceful land to the French, the decimation of their cultural identity came after the hubris they displayed prior to the war. Insecurity, made all the more clear once the false and defenseless security is stripped, brings Höfgen (and Germany) to the theater to play out fantasies behind a series of masks/excuses to “pretend strength and hide weakness,” to fake responsibility and avoid integrity.

By the movie’s conclusion, we see how Höfgen’s original Bolshevik aesthetic philosophy has been reversed. Frustrated with the censorship of the Nazis (no Jewish actors, only actors with blond hair, no art displaying weakness — and if it does, manipulate the art’s message such that it displays only strength), Höfgen has finally convinced the Nazis to let him put Hamlet to stage, telling them the play is about race (the prince of Denmark is the only truly Danish prince, deserving of his throne) and power (Hamlet’s breakdowns aren’t evidence of madness, they’re expressions of strength at the weightiest problems that only leaders can endure). Höfgen, in his performance, wants to bring back his philosophy of extension, pushing the theater aisles. But whereas years ago, this philosophy was used to ground bourgeois art, to reflect the reality of the working class, it is now clearly used to impress upon the audience the Nazified misreading of Hamlet, to create a mask for reality. And it is on Hamlet, not Faust, that the movie concludes; Hamlet is the evolution of Faust within the framework of this movie (which is itself Faust).

In his comparative essay, “‘Doctor Faustas and Hamlet’: Contrasting Kinds of Christian Tragedy,” Thomas Stroup contrasts the two stories:

“…the contrast serves to to distinguish two sorts of tragedy and tragic figures in the drama of the Elizabethan period. Even, depending upon how we define them, two sorts of Christian tragedy. The one (Faust) is the tragedy of the man who asserts his freedom of will, sets out early to have his own way, distrusts God, evades Him, or abjures Him, and in his pride denies God’s help and fails ever to change his wilful ways. The other (Hamlet) is the tragic character who, like Hamlet, has an obligation placed upon him, a mission to perform which is not of his own making, and who manages, through trial and error and suffering, a sort of divine comedy, as Joseph Bryant suggests. The protagonist recognizes early his desperate condition and works his way of faith and trust; out of the exercise of his free will he brings that will into utter conformity with God’s will. Thus he achieves the complete freedom necessary to success in his enterprise. The other is from the first drawn more and more into a desperate condition, exercising his own will to evade God’s will until paradoxically he is completely controlled, not by his own free will, but by his own passion, and is lost, body and soul. He is the self-deceived Faustus or Mortimer or Richard III or Macbeth or Vindice or perhaps (for all her brilliance) Vittoria Corrombona. The other is the man who rises through obligations imposed from without himself — kingship, for example — and through deception from outside himself, through blunder and error, through intellectual and spiritual struggle, gathers the wisdom of submission and acceptance necessary, as Verges so aptly puts it, to ‘suffer salvation, body and soul.’ He is Edward II, Romeo (perhaps), Hamlet, Lear, the Duchess of Malfi, and Milton’s Samson. The one has an early affinity with Oedipus before he went to Colonus; the other with Dante, Everyman, the Red Cross Knight. The one begins in what he thinks is his superior wisdom and ends his career in foolishness and despair. The other begins in ignorance and something approaching despair; he ends in wisdom and achieves Grace and assurance. We do well to remember the morality play called Wisdom, Who is Christ.” (250–1)

In Hamlet, the Danish prince arranges the play within the play to oust the truth from Claudius about his role in the King’s murder. Höfgen plays Mephisto on stage, but in reality is Faust.

Hamlet, the play, then becomes the play within reality that Höfgen unknowingly puts on to oust the truth from himself about his culpability in the Nazi’s maintenance of power.

Höfgen is both Hamlet and Faust, both the man evading God’s will and the one who plays the part of feeling duty’s crushing weight.

This is why the movie ends with the hypocritical line from Hofgen, said in terror amidst the limelight’s chase at the behest of the cackling General, “What does he want with me? I’m just an actor.” He is Germany par excellence, a mask — he is Claudius fleeing the scene of his own play — he is the masquerade of strength, hiding all weakness, finally crumbling beneath the weight, not of duty, not of guilt, but compacted falsities.

References

Stroup, Thomas B. “‘Doctor Faustas and Hamlet’: Contrasting Kinds of Christian Tragedy.” Comparative Drama, vol. 5, no. 4, 1971, pp. 243–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41152563.