Metropolis

About von Harbou:



THEA GABRIELE VON HARBOU (December 27, 1888 – July 1, 1954) was a German actress and author of Prussian aristocratic origin. In 1905, she published her first novel in the Deutsche Roman-Zeitung. However, she then started to work as an actress, beginning in 1906 in Düsseldorf, then moving to Weimar (1908), Chemnitz (1911) and Aachen (1913). In Aachen she met her first husband, the actor and director Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whom she married in 1914. In 1920, she wrote her first film script Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, Mysteries of India), together with Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang became her second husband in 1922, and they collaborated in the following years, writing the screenplays for Metropolis and M together. They separated in October 1931 and divorced in 1933. In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power, she joined the Nazi Party. This presumably led to the divorce from Lang, who left Germany in 1934 for Paris after his film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse had been declared illegal by Nazi officials because of perceived criticism of Nazi ideology. Harbou wrote the script for Der Herrscher 1937, directed by Veit Harlan and starring Emil Jannings. The movie celebrates unconditional submission under absolute authority, eventually finding reward in total victory. After the war she was detained by the British military government, and then did unskilled labor, like cleaning up rubble from the bombing. After receiving a working permit she did some synchronizing of movies, but also continued to write scripts. In 1954 she died in Berlin. Source: Wikipedia


Contents:


About von Harbou

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25





This book is not of today or of the future.


It tells of no place.


It serves no cause, party or class.


It has a moral which grows on the pillar of understanding:


"The mediator between brain and muscle must be the Heart."


—T. vH.




Chapter 1

 


NOW THE RUMBLING of the great organ swelled to a roar, pressing, like a rising giant, against the vaulted ceiling, to burst through it.

Freder bent his head backwards, his wide-open, burning eyes stared unseeingly upward. His hands formed music from the chaos of the notes; struggling with the vibration of the sound and stirring him to his innermost depths.

He was never so near tears in his life and, blissfully helpless, he yielded himself up to the glowing moisture which dazzled him.

Above him, the vault of heaven in lapis lazuli; hovering therein, the twelve-fold mystery, the Signs of the Zodiac in gold. Set higher above them, the seven crowned ones: the planets. High above all a silver-shining bevy of stars: the universe.

Before the bedewed eyes of the organ-player, to his music, the stars of heavens began the solemn mighty dance.

The breakers of the notes dissolved the room into nothing. The organ, which Freder played, stood in the middle of the sea.

It was a reef upon which the waves foamed. Carrying crests of froth, they dashed violently onward, and the seventh was always the mightiest.

But high above the sea, which bellowed in the uproar of the waves, the stars of heaven danced the solemn, mighty dance.

Shaken to her core, the old earth started from her sleep. Her torrents dried up; her mountains fell to ruin. From the ripped open depths the fire welled up; The earth burnt with all she bore. The waves of the sea became waves of fire. The organ flared up, a roaring torch of music. The earth, the sea and the hymn-blazing organ crashed in and became ashes.

But high above the deserts and the spaces, to which creation was burnt, the stars of heaven danced the solemn mighty dance.

Then, from the grey, scattered ashes, on trembling wings unspeakably beautiful and solitary, rose a bird with jewelled feathers. It uttered a mournful cry. No bird which ever lived could have mourned so agonisingly.

It hovered above the ashes of the completely ruined earth. It hovered hither and thither, not knowing where to settle.