Metropolis (novel)

Metropolis

Thea von Harbou
Initial release: 1925 (serialized), 1926 (book)

art from M. W. Kaluta for a 1988
illustrated edition

Fritz Lang's Metropolis sits in several categories: it's one of the most well-known films of the silent era, an important entry in the German expressionist movement, a landmark science fiction film (and the first brick in what would eventually become the cyberpunk genre), and is just a really fun movie all around. What's less known about it is its authorship; the screenplay was written jointly between Lang and his then-wife, Thea von Harbou. von Harbou was a writer who found a career in film, eventually working on both sides of the camera. She wrote screenplays, acted in films and even made them. She was also a seemingly committed Nazi, a fact that eventually contributed to Lang divorcing her (an act that she herself had admitted had been long in coming for entirely non-political reasons anyway) and fleeing Germany. How much of her personal politics come through in Metropolis — the politics of which is actually quite muddled — is unclear. Well, as it turns out, the film was based on a book written specifically as a treatment (and a promotion) for the film. I sat down to read Thea von Harbou's Metropolis and here's what I found.

The book has long been
in the public domain
and there are many
versions of the English
translation, which was
commissioned by a
British publisher and
dates back to 1927.
After extensive
research, the version
I picked was the
Heathen edition, which
replaces most of the
British spellings and
antiquated formatting
for modern American,
while also annotating
the text to explain or
define the many
archaic words and 
concepts that were
common then but have
fallen out of use in the
century since. It is
otherwise identical to
the original translation.

The first is that the muted occult aspects of the film are much more pronounced, arguably even the point, of the novel. von Harbou invokes everything from esoteric Christianity to Hindu deities to more broadly pagan concepts. She spends some time describing the house of Rotwang as an ancient medieval home, built when Metropolis was just a little burg, by a mysterious and sinister wizard who eventually disappeared. Rotwang himself floats somewhere between scientist and alchemist, hired to build robots by Joh Fredersen, the city's master and his personal nemesis, but instead builds Futura, a mechanical woman (or perhaps golem?) with no face. If you know the film's plot, you know he eventually uses occult science to turn Futura into a clone of Maria, the motherly love interest of Freder, the story's protagonist and son of Joh. The most the film is willing to overtly allude to this is via the use of occult symbology in Rotwang's lab; but in the book his entire house is suffuse with magic, doors opening of their own accord. On a thematic level, the film is full of occult concepts and ideas, but they're much more explicit in the book.

A major subplot in the book is the old church; in the film it's seemingly empty, a relic, but in the book, it is the headquarters for an extremist religious faction that opposes Joh, eventually using the confusion of the worker uprising to march on the New Tower of Babel, the heart of the city. Curiously, this subplot is not strongly elaborated upon much; they largely lurk in the background, a looming threat that comes into full bloom in the final chapters.

While Fritz Lang's Metropolis had a muddled political message that nevertheless appealed to the burgeoning Nazi movement, Thea von Harbou's book is more coherent. I struggle to really call it fascist, despite her Nazi sympathies. Her depiction of the workers is probably the most obvious argument to make: while the book explicitly describes them as being treated as slaves, they are as a group irrational and easily manipulated by the fake Maria, but on an individual level they are also foolish and prone to violence: when Georgi trades clothes with Freder and goes to the surface, instead of going to the apartment he was supposed to meet Joh's fired secretary at, he winds up at Yoshiwara, an exclusive nightclub for the upper class, and after a night of debauchery and designer drugs rains holy terror on everyone within the building before being personally fetched by Joh's assistant. But this speaks more to garden-variety classism, which importantly exists in just about every political tendency except (most forms of) leftism. Revolution is depicted as madness, a clear response to the German revolution of 1918-19, yet at the same time was not the real Maria leading a revolution of her own before being co-opted by Futura?

But she does not spare the upper class much either: a recurring theme is their decadence and cowardice. Joh Fredersen throws away employees without so much of a thought. His own mother, a character not in the film, berates him as having turned away from God to become a monstrous figure, a man who sold his soul to build a city. As the city physically falls apart and the workers riot in the street, however, Joh has something of a redemption arc, brought on by grief over his mistaken belief that Freder, the only person he really cares about, had died. This is somewhat hinted at in the film, but it's much more explicit in the novel. It's nevertheless even more questionable here whether he deserves that redemption, as he claims that he's letting the workers destroy the city so that Freder can rebuild it, and this is after creating the conditions that the workers are rioting about in the first place.

Ultimately, the message of Thea von Harbou's Metropolis is slightly more nuanced, but still otherwise muddled and conservative, compared to the film. In the film Freder is something of a Christ figure, the one man who can bring together the capitalist and the worker. In the novel, though he freely offers himself up as the "medium between head and hands," the hokey ending of the film is absent, and Joh instead comes to his senses out of love for his son, ultimately returning to his mother to seek her absolution. 

Is Metropolis (either version) a work of fascist ideology? I think the answer is complicated. von Harbou's role in the Nazi regime is pretty undeniable, but her politics as seen through Metropolis (either version) is more softly conservative, blending communist ideas with fascist ones to create a secret third thing that makes no real sense. It's more interesting to me as an early example of occult science fiction, a recurring theme that can be seen in the allegorical (like Neuromancer — it's in the title!) or the literal (Warhammer 40,000 has about as many examples, but probably also Shadowrun.) The frequent invoking of various deities and other concepts, many of which are unknown, ignored, or untolerated in mainstream Christianity makes for a bit of a weird read, but also very much a product of a decade in which occult societies and outright cults exploded in number and size in the dark days of the aftermath of World War I.

So, then, maybe Metropolis is better read (and watched) in the context of the mid-1920s, less than a decade after Europe stopped tearing itself apart: a reaction to the revolutions of the late 1910s and the weak democracy of Wiemar Germany: Thea's world of the future is not some Nazi Utopia, but the status quo of 1926 driven to its logical conclusion, a hot mess of conflicting ideas and a deep class divide that threatens to tear society apart. She never said when the story took place, but maybe her idea of 2026 wouldn't have been too different from our 2026, yeah?

-june❤