Veidt Dances an Expressionist Ballet

My interest in Conrad Veidt was tipped by a Halloween-season showing of the 1924 silent thriller, The Hands of Orlach, for which Dennis James provided live organ accompaniment at the Indiana University Auditorium. Veidt’s career spanned a quarter century, beginning in 1917 with the silent movies and into the talkies, ending at his death in 1943 at age 50.

Hans Walter Konrad Weidt was born in Berlin, Germany, on 22 January 1893. He was drafted into the German Army during World War I and saw action in the Battle of Warsaw but contracted a serious illness that subsequently earned him a discharge in 1917. That year he returned to Berlin to pursue an acting career. He would eventually appear in more than a hundred films.

One of his earliest, most memorable performances was in the classic German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in 1920. Veidt played the sleepwalker Cesare to Werner Krauss’ Dr. Caligari. By the end of the decade, he was making movies in Hollywood as well.

Veidt was vigorously opposed to the Nazi regime. When Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began a purge to rid the German film industry of Jews and liberals in 1933, Veidt and his third wife, Ilona, a Hungarian Jew, emigrated to England. Throughout the World War II era, he donated large amounts of his personal fortune to the British war effort.

He became a British citizen in 1938, although he and Ilona moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s. Ironically, his best-known Hollywood role was as a Nazi officer, Major Heinrich Strasser, in the 1942 Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Bergman film, Casablanca.

Veidt suffered a massive heart attack while playing golf in Los Angeles and died on 3 April 1943.

Handsome, gaunt, and exuding an aura of anxiety, sometimes ecstatic and sometimes maniacal, Veidt was at his best in the German Expressionist films of the late Teens to early Thirties. In The Hands of Orlach, in which he plays a pianist whose injured hands are replaced with those of an executed murder, according to critic Lotte Eisner, Veidt “dances a kind of Expressionist ballet, bending and twisting extravagantly, simultaneously drawn and repelled by the murderous dagger held by hands which do not seem to belong to him.”

It was a pleasure to rediscover not only the tantalizing stylizations of the German Expressionist silent films but also to witness one of the masters of that art at work.

Professor Media*

From the broadsheets and banned theater of America’s founding era to TV news, Twitter, and sitcoms today, media have been our professors, teaching us about our world and shaping how we think about and respond to important issues. Mass media are more directly educative for most adults than any type of formal schooling. Increasingly, as the current mania for standardized testing narrows the school curriculum, media also are surpassing classroom teachers as our children’s most influential educators.

This media-education interconnection is complex and often problematic. While media have helped to shape progress on some issues of importance to American democracy, they also have contributed to ignorance and misunderstanding. The First Amendment protects freedom of expression, but it does not ensure truth. Societally reflective sitcoms, for example, have paved the way for progress on social issues, from civil rights to marriage equality. But biased political advertising and propagandistic “news” have contributed to political stagnation and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Media are seductive. We spend hours on “screen time.” Those who control the media well understand that what is portrayed and how it is framed shapes socially shared knowledge. The rise of corporate oligarchy in the United States has been achieved, in part, through concerted propaganda passed off as truth. What this means is that, if we are to reclaim American democracy, greater attention needs to be paid to the educative power of media—and not merely to the traditional forms (movies, radio, television) but to new media that we carry with us in our mobile phones and tablet computers. According to a Pew study last year, one in three Americans gets news through Facebook.** And two-thirds of adult Americans use Facebook.

For media consumers—which means everyone, children and adults—it has never been more important to exercise effective credibility strategies, such as critically examining claims of “truth.” A quote attributed to American economist Thomas Sowell is apt: “If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly.” However, such understanding must be taught, not just in schools but through the media themselves.

Principles of journalism must cross all platforms, from sitcoms to news reports. Are “facts” accurate, credible, verifiable, contextually appropriate, and unbiased? Whether the purveyor is a talking head or a comic character, how is “truth” situated? If we subscribe to the biblical admonition that the “truth will set you free,” then we also must invoke the first part of that quotation about “knowing the truth,” which is the real challenge, regardless of the context.

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

** http://www.journalism.org/2013/10/24/the-role-of-news-on-facebook/