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.