Fritz Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) has led a troubled life. Banned in its native Germany right after its completion in early 1933, the film circulated for many years mainly in an inferior French-language version. The German version resurfaced in 1951 in a print missing about twelve minutes; the following year, Testament emerged in the United States further abridged and dubbed in English. Later, subtitled prints of the German version—often, if not always, murky and with muddled sound—became available in the United States. In the year 2000, the film was restored under the direction of Martin Koerber, and it is now in crystalline condition and shorter by only about seventy meters (under three minutes) than the print that left Lang’s hands in 1933.

The film’s reputation can only be enhanced by the restoration and by its release in a superb new DVD edition from The Criterion Collection. The image is crisp and clear, the sound vibrant. There remain no obstacles, none arising from conditions of distribution at any rate, to appreciating Testament as one of Lang’s masterpieces. In formal complexity and brilliance of design, it’s at least the equal of Lang’s M (1931), to which, as David Kalat notes in his excellent audio-commentary track, Testament is as much a sequel as it is a sequel to Lang’s Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, 1922), which introduced novelist Norbert Jacques’s character to the screen.

As conceived by Jacques and as portrayed in the 1922 film by actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Mabuse is an archetypal figure of Weimar Germany, a master criminal of many disguises, manipulating people and organizations to create social and personal crises for his pleasure. (In a short documentary on Jacques included on Disc Two of Criterion’s Testament edition, writer Michael Farin traces the origins of Mabuse back to Caligari, Fantomas, and Nosferatu.) Returning to the character in Testament (in which Klein-Rogge again plays the role), Lang makes him more ambiguous. The “testament” of the title refers to sheets of paper on which the mad Mabuse scrawls detailed instructions for the acts of terror through which he hopes to build an “empire of crime.” Trapped in a cell in an insane asylum, from which he emerges only as a superimposed, ghostly form directing the actions of asylum head Dr. Baum (Oskar Beregi, Sr.) or taking over Baum’s body, Mabuse has become less a human being than an idea, a force that floats over the photographic image and circulates through written texts.

The shift in emphasis from Mabuse as a character in the film to Mabuse as a detached spirit hovering over it and circulating through it by means of (or in the form of) language is one of the aspects of Testament that make it a remarkably modern film. Mabuse is a metaphor, a name, a “virus” (as Philippe Dubois has written recently)—not assignable to a particular body or space and thus hard to fight. One of the masterstrokes of the film is to introduce, as Mabuse’s chief adversary, another figure from Lang’s cinematic past, Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), terror of the Berlin underworld, the rotund, ironic detective who investigated the serial killings in M. By bringing back this figure, who incarnates the promise of the eventual victory of the social order over the scoundrels who prey on it, and showing him as barely able to cope with the irrational, unlocalized, and inhuman hypercriminality represented by Mabuse, Lang makes the latter more frightening.

In Testament, Lang links Mabuse with the apparatus of cinema (as he will do again in his last film, 1960’s Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse]). The image of the gang leader’s living body, seated at a desk behind a curtain, issuing orders to his henchmen, turns out to be an illusion created by a loudspeaker and by the two-dimensional shape (a cardboard cutout) of the upper half of a human figure. At the center of the labyrinth formed by this narrative about a criminal gang is the revelation that the leader of the gang is nowhere—which is equivalent to the truth that no real presence need accompany the cinematic sign. Mabuse is a mechanism that allows Lang to denounce the cinema as the manufacture of illusion.

Lang is the least consoling of filmmakers, and Testament is one of his starkest works. Yet it’s also a work of dazzling exuberance. From the disorienting and nerve-shattering opening, in which Lang forces the audience to share the anguish of the renegade cop Hofmeister (Karl Meixner), hiding from Mabuse’s minions in a factory filled with the sourceless noise of heavy machinery, Testament is a filmic machine in perpetual motion, a complicated network of intellectual jolts. Each of the film’s locations becomes a metaphor for Langian cinema: the featureless room where the gang members receive instructions from their shadowy boss; police headquarters, where Lohmann stages encounters between known criminals and suspects and plots the courses of human life on a vast wall map; the forest through which Baum leads Lohmann on a car chase, headlights animating Dunsinane-like trees while the camera hurtles forward into an infinite night; the asylum, with its grid of corridors and its sealed cells.

In his audio commentary, Kalat, emphasizing the arbitrary and bewildering nature of the narrative, likens Testament to a Möbius strip: “The story has no discernable beginning or end. Everything is happening all at once.” Lang’s storytelling style is, as Kalat says, modernist, putting “the viewer in a near-constant state of uncertainty, as the jigsaw puzzle of the story is carefully assembled, taken apart, and reassembled in a new shape.” What Kalat calls the “rhyming” patterns Lang creates for the film (citing, for example, the shots of Mabuse scattering manuscript pages on the floor of his cell and, a little later in the film, of the doomed Dr. Kramm, a visitor in Baum’s study, retrieving papers he has accidentally knocked to the floor) secure a surface impression of logic while drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into a void of contradictory meanings and finally into a lunatic’s cell—on which the door closes in the film’s startling last shot.

The Mabuse character has often been seen as a precursor of Hitler—an identification that Lang himself challenged in the 1964 documentary Zum Beispiel Fritz Lang (For Example Fritz Lang), an excerpt from which is included on Disc Two of the Criterion Testament. In his interview in this film (made by Erwin Leiser for West German TV), Lang prefers to see in the Mabuse of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler a “Nietzschean superman.”

On the other hand, if Testament has usually been seen as an anti-Nazi work, it was Lang who established this interpretation. Lang claimed in interviews that he didn’t want to make a sequel to Mabuse but accepted the assignment when he realized he could use the character as a pretext to criticize the burgeoning Nazi movement. According to Lang, he used Nazi catchphrases in the film, attributing them to criminals. Thus Mabuse’s “empire of crime” is to be identified with the terrorist, totalitarian state that the Nazis would establish. In Lang’s view, the Nazis banned Testament because Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (created on March 14, 1933, ten days before the scheduled premiere of Testament, which Lang was then still cutting), recognized Lang’s intended criticism.

It has, however, never been demonstrated that Goebbels or other Party officials saw Testament as critical of Nazism. On March 29, the day after Goebbels saw the film and ordered it banned, the minutes of a session of the German Board of Film Censors noted that the film posed a danger to the state because it could be used by the communists as “a veritable textbook on how to prepare and commit terrorist acts.” The board banned Testament from distribution in Germany as “a threat to law and order and public safety.” According to Goebbels’s biographers, Heinrich Fraenkel and Roger Manvell, Goebbels said, “I banned [Testament] because it proves that an extremely determined group of men, whether they seriously want to or not, are perfectly capable of unhinging no matter which state by using violence.” During the famed private meeting at which Goebbels supposedly offered Lang the position of head of a new agency supervising the German film industry, the propaganda minister, according to Lang, apologized for banning Testament, saying, “It was just the ending we didn’t like.” Lang recalled Goebbels’s objection in two different ways: in one, Goebbels said that the story should have ended with the advent of a Führer to defeat Mabuse and restore order; in another, Goebbels suggested that the villain should have been killed by an enraged mob.

Lang’s meeting with Goebbels, which the director often recounted, has entered into legend. In For Example Fritz Lang, Lang gives a gripping and entertaining rendition of the story, including a number of cinematic details: the succession of long corridors and fearsome guards Lang had to pass through to reach the propaganda minister’s private office; the sweat pouring down Lang’s back as he politely agreed with everything Goebbels said; the large hands of the clock outside the window, at which Lang glanced nervously throughout the meeting—hoping he would be dismissed in time to reach his bank and withdraw some money for the permanent trip out of Germany he now realized he must take. By the time Goebbels adjourned their meeting, the banks had closed. Lang returned home, ordered his valet to pack him a travel bag, and then left Germany by train, never to return until long after the end of World War II.

In recent years, Lang’s narrative has been the target of numerous debunkers, taking their cue, perhaps, from Patrick McGilligan’s 1997 biography Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, which disclosed that, as Lang’s passport proves, the director was in Berlin several times after April 1933 (the month when, according to Lang, he met with Goebbels) and didn’t leave Germany for good until July. Thus Lang’s departure from Germany was by no means the hasty, suspense-filled adventure he made it out to be, but a carefully planned emigration. McGilligan noted that Goebbels’s usually inclusive diaries mention no meetings with Lang in 1933; the only source for the story of Goebbels’s proposal to Lang is Lang himself. The first mention of the story that McGilligan found was in 1942—a year when it was clearly in the interest of Lang (by then well along in his Hollywood career) to establish himself as an anti-Nazi of long standing. Lang’s first assertion of the anti-Nazi content of Testament apparently dates from 1943, the year that saw both the release of Lang’s film about the Czech Resistance, Hangmen Also Die!, and the American premiere of the French version of Testament (under the title The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse).

In his audio commentary on Testament, Kalat attacks several of Lang’s statements, starting with the one about his reluctance to make a sequel to Mabuse. As Kalat says, Lang wanted to make another Mabuse film and, in 1930, solicited story suggestions from Jacques. (Jacques’s novel Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse—unpublished until 1950 because of an agreement the author made with Lang’s wife and coscenarist, Thea von Harbou—was based on Lang’s 1930 story outline for the film.) For Kalat, the story of Lang’s meeting with Goebbels and his flight from Germany is “the ultimate in Lang’s dissembling.”

I’m uneasy with the relish with which Kalat assails Lang’s stories. The director may well have first resisted, then embraced the idea of a sequel before he contacted Jacques. Lang drew plot elements for Testament from contemporary events, and (however little weight one gives to his claim that the film incorporates the Nazis’ own sayings) it would be absurd to suppose that he was unconscious of the parallels between Mabuse and Nazism. It’s also entirely plausible that Goebbels offered Lang (the maker, after all, of Die Nibelungen, which brought to the screen to spellbinding effect a central text of Aryan mythology) an important supervisory position in the film industry. And though Lang delayed his final departure from Germany until July, it’s easy to imagine that he must have prepared for the trip under considerable psychological pressure and that he had to keep his intentions secret.

But I’m in complete agreement with Kalat when he warns that “it too greatly constrains the enduring power of the Mabuse myth to say, ‘Mabuse equals Hitler, end of story,’” and that it’s reductive and erroneous to read Testament only as an allegory about Nazism. As Kalat contends, Mabuse stands not for a specific political order or ideology but for the kind of vast, systemic, and free-floating conspiracy that makes blame difficult to assign. Kalat aptly cites the massive corruption revealed by the Enron scandal as a contemporary example of the kind of structure Lang analyzes in Testament.

Kalat’s discussion of Testament is the best kind of criticism, enriching, rather than depleting, the work it approaches. Kalat is illuminating in pointing out the intelligence of Lang’s use of sound, noting that “it shows real sensitivity towards sound on Lang’s part” to make a plot point, as he does in Testament, of the difference between live speech and recorded speech. The commentator also rightly criticizes the tendency to label Lang (with all other German filmmakers of the silent era) as “Expressionist,” preferring to pinpoint, in Lang’s work, isolated uses of Expressionist devices that need to be seen “in the larger context of a filmmaker struggling to tell his stories with a keen eye for realism.” For Kalat, rather than a work of Expressionism, Testament is, like M, “a rich canvas of social details and characters that forms a document of its time.”

An interesting passage in Kalat’s commentary (essentially repeated from his 2001 book The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels) concerns Lilli (Wera Liessem), the heroine of Testament. On the surface a rather insipid and conventional creature, Lilli is, for Kalat, one of the self-destructive women who fall for the wrong men throughout Lang’s cinema. Kalat points out that in manipulating her lover, the conscience-stricken criminal Kent (Gustav Diessl), into performing an action likely to lead to his death, she resembles her ostensible opposite, Mabuse. This insight can be compared with Jean-Louis Comolli and François Géré’s famous Cahiers du cinéma analysis of the parallels between the Nazis and the Czech Resistance in Hangmen Also Die! It might be added that in his analysis of Lilli, Kalat uncovers a structure that’s common to many Lang films and distinctive of their subversion of conventional narratives: the femme fatale and the victimized woman are the same. This is the case in Lang’s two remakes of Jean Renoir films, Scarlet Street (1945) and Human Desire (1954). The portrayal of Lilli in Testament should also be compared with Sylvia Sidney’s roles in Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), and You and Me (1938), and with Joan Fontaine’s Susan in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), among other Langian women.

Disc Two of the Criterion edition contains Le Testament de Dr. Mabuse, the French version of the film, which Lang shot simultaneously with the German one, using a different cast (of the principals, only Klein-Rogge and Karl Meixner appear in both versions). The print, with Dutch subtitles, is worn and soft, but its defective state is only one of the reasons why those who turn to Le Testament directly from Das Testament may find themselves fast-forwarding through much of it. Apart from the actors, the differences between the French and German versions are mostly either trivial or not of a kind as to reveal anything interesting about Lang’s conception of the film, and in every respect in which the two versions differ, including the actors, the German version is clearly superior.

In The Three Faces of Dr. Mabuse, a bonus documentary included on Disc Two, Kalat offers a useful comparison between the versions. He explains that one goal of the producers of the French version was to shorten the running time of the film; as he notes, this was largely accomplished through reducing the scenes between Kent and Lilli (notably, by omitting the flashback to their first meeting at an employment office). Kalat also compares scenes in the two versions to demonstrate the inferiority of the French cast to the German (Jim Gérald is especially inadequate as Lohmann), although he praises Thomy Bourdelle, the French Dr. Baum.

Watching French actors repeat more or less exactly the motions and gestures of their German counterparts and fall into the same allotted places in the mise-en-scène confirms the intellectuality of Lang’s film. The French version is a vivid demonstration of how, for Lang, the idea of the shot presides over the concrete reality of the shot—a principle that echoes the very premise of Testament, in which human actions and physical reality fulfill a design set down on paper.

The third of “The Three Faces” is the seventy-five-minute English-dubbed version of Testament from 1952, The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse. Kalat’s presentation of this curio highlights the introduction of dialog equating Mabuse-ism with totalitarianism. In the American version (set in 1939, as a narrator declares over a shot of the skyline of a bombed city), Baum, from behind his curtain, tells Kent: “The individual is nothing. The machine is everything…The organization and its leaders are all that count.” Baum explains to Lohmann that Mabuse was the declared enemy of “democracy,” and Lohmann calls Mabuse a would-be “dictator.” Observing that Lang had objected bitterly to the 1951 American remake of M, only to be silent on the recutting of Testament by the same producer (Seymour Nebenzal) a year later, Kalat hypothesizes that Lang may have been pleased that at least his name was still on it. A more likely reason for Lang’s silence was that he liked the way the new dialog backed up his characterization of Testament as an anti-Nazi film.

Another documentary featured on Disc Two, Thomas Honickel’s 1984 Mabuse im Gedächtnis (Mabuse in Mind), presents a fascinating encounter with the now aged Rudolf Schündler, who played the fanatical young gunman Hardy in Testament. Schündler recalls that Lang’s precise direction of his head movements in answering a phone gave him trouble: as a stage actor, he was unaccustomed to such detailed manipulation by a director. Noticing the actor’s discomfort, Lang put his arm around him and encouraged him—a gesture that, Schündler says, magically improved his ability to carry out Lang’s direction. The actor praises Lang’s sense of responsibility, his meticulousness, his memory, his fidelity to the screenplay, and—surprisingly—his “flexibility.” I was also surprised by Schündler’s comment that he and Lang thought of Hardy as a homosexual. This revelation links the figure (whose appearance, manner, and actions partly suggest a prototypical Hitler Youth) to a Gestapo interrogator in Hangmen Also Die! whom Lang also thought of as gay.

The other bonuses on Disc Two are an album of production-design sketches, posters from all Lang’s Mabuse films, stills from both the German and French versions of Testament, and pages from German pressbooks. The foldout accompanying the two DVDs includes an excellent introduction to the film by Tom Gunning, whose book The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000; see review in Cineaste, Vol. XXVI, No. 2) is the most substantial study of Lang’s films available in English.

Altogether the Criterion edition is a splendid presentation of an inexhaustible and still contemporary film. The culmination of Lang’s work in Germany, Testament looks forward to the longer period of his career that he spent in America: it is a pivotal, transitional film. In the figure of Lohmann, Lang gives a definitive image of and bids farewell to a certain human type, perhaps even to a certain faith in humanity—faith in the exception, in what spills over or protrudes (like Lohmann’s outsized gut), in the capacity of the individual to take and express pleasure through, and in spite of, his official role. Lang’s later policemen will mostly be petty sadists, prisoners of their role, or people whose identification with the role causes them to suffer spiritual death, like Bannion in The Big Heat (1953). When a Lohmann-esque figure returns, he is a villain: Gruber in Hangmen Also Die! (Gert Fröbe’s Kommissar in The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse has Lohmann’s corpulence but none of his zest.)

But in Testament, faith in humanity is already tempered by skepticism about the ability of humanity, or any ideology that puts trust in ‘human nature,‘ to contend with a system whose power comes from exploiting the deficiencies of human nature and the desire for death that is the negative manifestation of the difference between actor and role. Testament anticipates Lang’s American films in its analysis of the workings of this malignant system as a kind of cinema: a lure, a projection of illusion and fantasy, a mechanism for displacement and transformation.

In the stark rooms of Testament and in the explosions engineered by the Mabuse gang, Lang establishes the imagery of dehumanization and destruction that will recur throughout his American films. Though the narrative style of Testament, with visual and aural repetitions complementing an elaborate relay among characters and plot lines, represents, perhaps, a peak of complexity for Lang, his later films abound in similar structural inventions. In the ideological and political questions it raises, no less than in its style and structure, Testament is clearly at the center of Lang’s work.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
Directed by Fritz Lang; screenplay by Lang and Thea von Harbou; cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner and Karl Vass. Starring Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Oskar Beregi, Sr., Gustav Diessl, Wera Liessem, Karl Meixner. DVD, black and white, 121 minutes, German dialog with optional English subtitles. Distributed by The Criterion Collection.