Biography
Screenwriting came third on Thea von Harbou's list of successful careers, after actress and bestselling novelist, but it is her film writing for which she is remembered. Indeed, she is one of the most renowned and one of the most reviled figures in the history of German cinema, depending upon which decade of her film career one is talking about. Von Harbou was born in 1888 in Tauperlitz, to an aristocratic Prussian family with military and civil service ties as well as a smattering of members of low-level noble rank. Educated in a convent school and later by private tutors, von Harbou was a precocious child who became fluent in several languages and showed special talents in music and literature. An avid reader of classics, drama, and philosophical texts as well as poetry, she wrote and sold her first piece of short fiction before she'd reached her teens. At 13, von Harbou published a volume of deeply philosophical poems and bidded fair to enjoy a literary career. First, however, she chose to earn a living as soon as she'd reached an appropriate age, and at 18 -- after overcoming the objections of her outraged father -- set out on an acting career. Toward this end, her knowledge of drama and whatever talent she possessed was aided and abetted by her other great asset -- von Harbou was a beautiful girl in the classic German mold, with blond hair, blue eyes, and an imposing presence despite a modest five-and-a-half foot height.
She made her stage debut in Dusseldorf in 1906, and later worked in Weimar and Aachen. In 1910, at age 22, while still doing theatrical work in Weimar, she published her first book, a romance novel entitled Die Nach uns Kommen, which became a bestseller. She followed this up with short works such as Die Krieg und Die Frauen, which were also successful. She continued acting and, in the early teens at Aachen, crossed paths with the actor
Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who became her mentor and, in 1917, her first husband. She'd followed up her first book with a string of short stories that covered all genres and seemed to possess a strong philosophical bent. Following the outbreak of the First World War, she also wrote works in a strongly nationalistic vein. According to
Fritz Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan, it was after von Harbou's marriage to Klein-Rogge that she gave up acting to pursue writing full-time. It was almost by accident that von Harbou entered the movie industry; the news that producer
Joe May had bought the film rights to one of her books caused her to get in touch with May, who ended up hiring her as a screenwriter for his production company, not only to adapt her own work but to work on original screenplays. It was a little later, while working on the screenplay for
Das Indische Grabmal (based on one of her novels), that she first met Lang; the two were attracted to each other from the start, both intellectually and romantically. At the time, however, she was married to Klein-Rogge and Lang was married to his first wife, Lisa Rosenthal, but they did enter into a fruitful professional relationship.
Beginning with
Das Wandernde Bild in 1920 and continuing through 1933's Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, von Harbou wrote the screenplays to every one of Lang's movies. She also authored the scripts for other directors, most notably F.W. Murnau's
Phantom (1922) and
Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs (1924), and
Carl Theodor Dreyer's Mikael (1924), but it was Lang with whom she became most closely associated, both professionally and personally. By 1920, she and Klein-Rogge had separated, and their marriage would soon be dissolved. Lang's marital situation -- which didn't prevent him from setting up housekeeping with von Harbou -- resolved itself in a manner more befitting one of his later Hollywood-era screenplays. According to what Lang told actor
Howard Vernon (as recalled by McGilligan in his book Fritz Lang: Nature of the Beast), his first wife encountered Lang and von Harbou in a sexual encounter, went to another floor of the house, and shot herself to death with a pistol that Lang had held onto from his World War I military service in the Austrian army. It was the summer of 1922 before Lang and von Harbou became husband and wife. His films were without peer during this period, not just in Germany but internationally, and were also among the most influential in the entire world, not only attracting and delighting audiences on four continents but serving as an inspiration for the next generation of directors.
Von Harbou as a screenwriter displayed an extraordinary talent for storytelling and an ear for compellingly realistic dialogue and finely drawn, complex character relationships. She was also a serious, deeply philosophical writer, her work encompassing conflicts that reflected larger meanings and social themes. Lang later claimed that von Harbou was overrated as a screenwriter, and seldom was able to comprehend the depth of the relationships between her characters. A close look at the best of her screenplays for Lang, however, would seem to contradict this suggestion; certainly in
Metropolis, in its original form, the character relationships are nearly as fascinating as the visuals. Indeed, one of the reasons that
Metropolis, as written, worked so well was because it had a screenplay that matched the dazzling special effects with its depth -- and sometimes even outdid those visuals in complexity.
Metropolis (1927) was von Harbou's most ambitious work, and she wrote it as both a novel and a screenplay. Her script at times reads like a philosophical treatise as much as a dramatic work, and that side of the movie, in the restored version, seems the most arch and artificial -- not that those sections would necessarily have been fatal to the movie, but to producers seeking a commercially successful release in a hurry, especially those outside of Germany, they were the most easily dispensable parts of the movie.
Metropolis was modified and shortened, and its text simplified by cutting -- removing some of the philosophical elements as well as chopping out character elements and plot -- almost immediately after the movie's German premiere, and was tampered with even more severely in the versions prepared for distribution in the United States and the rest of the world. The novel reveals the seriousness with which von Harbou took the original tale, with all of its sociological, philosophical, and religious overtones -- elements that were recaptured in the late '90s restoration of the retrievable elements of the original film.
By the early '30s, Lang and von Harbou's marriage was in trouble, although they continued working together right up to 1932 and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which was a daring exercise in topical filmmaking in which the words of Adolf Hitler were given to the criminal mastermind villain of the piece. There had been personal stresses and infidelities on both sides, but the main breaking point between them was von Harbou's increasingly visible support for the soon-to-be-ascendant Nazi Party. As early as 1931, she was expressing admiration for Hitler and his intended way of reshaping Germany. Strangely enough, during this same period, Lang was being lionized by the party over such works as the crime thriller
M and his 1920s films
Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge, with their basis in German mythology. As it happened, there was no chance that Lang would or could remain in Germany under their rule, once they came to power. Apart from his lack of sympathy to their cause or ideology, and the fact that many of the people to whom he was closest professionally were Jewish, his own family background was a source of anti-Semitic rumblings and rumor that could easily have destroyed him. In later years, he alleged that von Harbou turned him in to the authorities, denouncing him and providing evidence against him to Dr. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister, who controlled all lawful cultural activities in Germany. They were divorced in the spring of 1933, and Lang left the country later that year. The subsequent arcs of their respective careers sharply diverged from there.
Von Harbou was elected to lead the association of German screenwriters, lending her credibility to the Nazi regime, and she chose to move into the director's chair for two movies,
Elisabeth und der Narr and
Hanneles Himmelfahrt, which she also wrote. Both movies were held up from release for a time by the government censors, and marked her only efforts as a filmmaker. Over the ensuing 11 years, von Harbou rewrote some of the more ham-fisted propaganda scripts presented for filmming, in addition to authoring more than a dozen screenplays for various filmmakers, most of them heavily steeped in pro-Nazi propaganda. In 1938, she also very quietly married Ayi Tendulkar, an Indian-born mathematics and engineering graduate, with whom she'd been having an affair since the early '30s. For all of von Harbou's success in collaboration with Lang, none of her Nazi-era work achieved either popularity or any significant critical acceptance, and in collaborating with Hitler's regime, she sacrificed whatever artistic and moral credibility she had acquired over the preceding 15 years. Meanwhile, after a few rough moments in the 1930s (mostly at MGM, where he made his most highly regarded American movie,
Fury), Lang found a profitable, if not entirely comfortable, home in Hollywood. Despite an often unpleasant, autocratic manner and a reputation for harshness in dealing with his actors and, even more so, with producers, he remained fully employed and made a string of mostly good (and occasionally great) movies over the 25 years following his departure from Germany.
Von Harbou's output slackened considerably after 1940 and came to a halt with the Allied victory in 1945. She and her family later claimed that her involvement with the Hitler government and support of the Nazi Party had been patriotic rather than ideological, but Lang insisted otherwise. The occupying and postwar German authorities were also more suspicious of von Harbou than they were of many others, as two of the movies based on her screenplays, Fahrt ins Glück and
Via Mala, were withheld from release until three years after the end of the war, while a third, Erzieherin Gesucht, didn't reach the public until 1950. She didn't resume screenwriting until that year, with
Es Kommt Ein Tag. Another production,
Angelika, followed the next year, and she closed out her movie career in 1953 with
Dein Herz Ist Meine Heimat. She also wrote a small handful of literary works following World War II, Das Dieb von Bagdad (1949) and Gartenstrasse (1952).
Von Harbou occasionally spoke in public during her final years and wrote articles about her work, but was largely eclipsed professionally, shunned by a German literary community and a reading public that despised her Nazi-era activities, and rejected by a German film industry eager to regain commercial and moral credibility after freeing itself of the Nazi taint. Lang himself denounced her sympathies and reputation in later years, though he also did a new screen adaptation of
Das Indische Grabmal in 1959. Despite his dispute of von Harbou's abilities, she and Lang remain joined at the hip -- von Harbou's greatest literary visibility in the years after her death came through the reprinting of her novel Metropolis, while the restoration of various 1920s Lang films inevitably raised her profile among cineastes too young to have known her work in her own lifetime. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide