Henrik Galeen | Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1926

man in the mirror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Galeen and Hanns Heinz Ewers (screenplay), Henrik Galeen (director) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1926

 

Generally, I have grouped films with the same theme and characters with the hope that their many variations read in context might reveal the LGBTQ subtexts of the works such as those centered around Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fable, and the Zorro films. But beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, the next three decades each produced a new reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “William Willson” titled The Student Prague beginning in 1913 with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s expressionist work, and continuing in 1926 with Henrik Galeen’s far less stylistically-centered but equally expressionist film, and finally ending in another German director, Arthur Robison’s horror-film version of 1935. Accordingly, it seemed that these three similarly plotted movies told more about the decades in which they were released than in their collective interrelationships.

     Indeed the 1926 version closely follows the story of 1913, save for a few exceptions, with a scene-by-scene match, despite their obvious visual differences. One is tempted to say, in fact, that there is nothing new here, and what I referred to in my essay on the 1913 version with regard to the story’s importance for exploring the narcissus theme, the myth of the other trapped or closeted self, and the importance of the doppelganger myth in connection with queer literature all remain as revelatory aspects of this film as well.

      Galeen’s film, however, is far less focused on its theatrical sets, costumes, and lighting; and because of this, along with its more realistic rendering, seemed even clearer to me in its revelation of the handsome Balduin, (played by the great actor of early German cinema, Conrad Veidt) a university student’s problems concerning his secreted or closeted desires.

      As in Wegener and Rye’s work, Balduin begins the film sitting apart from his fellow student rabble-rousers, presumably unable to afford a drink, while they horse around, shout, and flirt with the local flower seller—no longer a gypsy in this telling—who herself identifies with and is attracted to the lonely Balduin. The others go over to him, attempting to cheer him up by singing and buying him a drink, yet he still seems to reject them, apparently too proud to accept their kind offers and obviously is stewing about the cost of his education, which leaves him little time and, most importantly, even less money to enjoy himself.

      But in this film it also appeared that Balduin was simply a loner of sorts, hardly the popular party-going individual we might have thought him to be underneath his financial problems. And I began to realize that I had made a presumption about the 1913 version that might not at all be true, namely that Balduin at the beginning of the film, the one who aspires to wealth and marriage to an heiress is the good man, while the man in the mirror is the evil being who destroys his life and results in his death.

      Interestingly the author of on-line sight Moira, which offered a well-written summary of the 1926 film, came to my earlier conclusion, writing:

 

The story here is essentially a borrowing from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “William Wilson” (1839) in which a man is thwarted at every step by his doppelganger – although in the Poe story it is the hero who is evil and the doppelganger good, whereas here it is the other way around and with the addition of a pact with the Devil plot.

 

      But watching it more carefully I begin to wonder whether that writer and I weren’t buying in to the basic heteronormative values that Balduin wishes to enjoy. Although the beautiful flower girl throughout the film makes it quite clear that she would be willing to become his lover or even simply go to bed with him, he immediately rejects her and later in the film most violently pushes her away, not so dissimilarly from the way he sends off his well-meaning student friends in the first scene.

     Our young student wants something else, a woman perhaps, but not just any girl but one of wealth and status, an “heiress” as he describes her to the intrusive Scapinelli (Werner Krauss) who bothers his sufferings by offering him what Balduin perceives as a cheap loan. He also sends Scapinelli away, again proving that he doesn’t seek money alone, but status, the entry into another social class than one into which he was born.

      In short, our “sweet innocent” university student is at heart a real striver who is not so much  interested in love but in social achievement, a fact which Scapinelli, who plays devil to this Faustian figure immediately recognizes, calling up the members of a fox hunt party which includes the wealthy Margit von Schwarzenberg (Agnes Esterhazy) and her current fiancé Baron of Waldis (Ferdinand von Alten) to make a wrong turn by leaping over the fences of the country drinking house and spilling Margit to the ground as her horse refuses to jump the fence at Balduin’s feet.

      Once he has introduced Balduin to the woman of his dreams, the heiress Margit, Scapinelli has no difficulty at all in convincing the enterprising student to abandon his own “other” self, his mirror image. The Faust reference in the 1920s was made even more clear given the fact that F. W.  Murnau’s masterful Faust appeared in theaters in the very same year. And recognizing that fact, we have to question the values of our young student in this version, who, although appreciative of the coins Scapinelli piles upon his desk, is really after what we would today call a “trophy wife,” someone who might induct him into the upper class from which all his life he has been excluded.

       Galeen’s film makes clear where Balduin’s sensibilities lie when the young man arrives at a party at the von Schwarzenberg mansion in a full-horse carriage and proceeds to dance a minuet with the girl’s elderly mother. He does not attend the affair as a secretive and would-be lover, a man sexually compelled to attempt to lure Margit away from her intended fiancé, but as a young newly endowed entrepreneur, a businessman out to transact a deal which will allow him to marry his fairytale princess. Even his secret missive demonstrates no passion, but simply a plea to meet Margit before her marriage to the Baron to see if he might find a way into her heart—in short, to make a deal.

       The Baron realizes, once Balduin’s intentions have been clear to him, he has only his title and his far more substantial wealth to offer Margit, whereas the now financially stable student has his beauty and youth as a lure to draw the girl to him. And accordingly, Waldis has no choice but to insult Balduin, forcing the younger man to challenge him to a duel which was seemingly the only way to properly settle insults in those days.

    The one gift, his single achievement before his deal with the devil Scapinelli, was the young student’s prowess as a swordsman. If there is any romantic hero within the social achiever we now see him as, it is as the young fencer, who early on wins a bet with an older challenger and further arouses the attentions of the romantic flower seller.

  Although Balduin immediately takes up the challenge to duel, Margit’s father, Count of Schwarzenberg (Fritz Alberti) quickly rushes to the boy’s side begging him not to kill the Baron, to which Balduin immediately agrees, obviously realizing that to kill the Baron would end any relationship that he may have that my help negotiating with the von Schwarzenberg family.

     But the mirror image, his real self—perhaps homosexual or at least disinterested in women, but even if not gay still a fun-loving but honorable young man—makes no such deals with respectability and, when Balduin, whose coach loses its wheel on his way to the duel, fails to show up, he takes his place, easily outwitting his challenger, resulting in the cad’s death.

    Of course, once Balduin realizes that his other self has queered the deal he has made with the wealthy family, he is now terrorized by his doppelganger who, like any young student with money might do, parties wildly—in this case perhaps with the intention of purposely doing-in his hypocritical “other”—carrying on to such a degree that, along with the killing of the Baron gets him expelled from the university. Balduin has every reason to fear his own shadow; and even more reason to be terrorized that he has so easily given up on his true self when, in attempting to explain his condition to Margit, he discovers that he has no reflection in her bedroom mirror, making it clear just how superficial he has been all along in not truly seeking her love but the role in the world which her love might offer him.

     In complete despair, he retreats to his room to be comforted by the flower girl, who in fact, has been part of his undoing, having revealed his note to the Baron which led to his death and to Balduin’s undoing. But, as I suggested before, Balduin brutally sends her away, not because of discovering the truth, but because of his complete disinterest in a girl who, had he been seeking heterosexual love, might have been the Gretchen or Marguerite of the opera—who asks that he give up his last symbol of the world of his false desires, Margit’s crucifix—now just a trinket which cannot save him.

       What Galeen reveals in the final show-down between Balduin and his shadow is that the man-without-a-shadow has terribly aged, becoming a hardened and howling older man, while his shadow self is still an attractive young student. And in some respects, his murder of his former self equally represents jealousy and revenge for that fact. Galeen handles the final shooting of Balduin far better than did the 1913 version. Here the shadow, returned to the mirror, pulls his own shirt open to prepare a naked target for the gunman, who when he shoots, observes the fragments of self fall into pieces of glass around him, some of the fragments still revealing his own reflection. At first, unaware of his own wounds, he seems to take comfort in that fact, that his “other” image is now trapped in the glass, but gradually he realizes that those fragments are the last images of a dying man, himself.

      The villain in this film, we suddenly perceive, is not the mirror image but the supposedly “real” Balduin, who we discover is really all image, while the mirror image has behaved as the full human being Balduin once was.

       Balduin, we realize in retrospect, was never meant to enter a heteronormative life, and even our belief that his attempts to find that world are admirable are proven to be mistaken. The student of Prague never properly learned the most important lesson of life, to be himself.

 

August 14, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).