Edgar G. Ulmer and The Black Cat: Horror and the Bauhaus Modern

Edgar G. Ulmer and The Black Cat:

 Horror and the Bauhaus Modern

            World War I made an indelible mark on artists of the period, many of whom fought on the battlefields of Europe. The German painter, Otto Dix, for example, survived four years of trench warfare but never recovered from its traumatizing effects. The nihilistic worldview resulting from Dix’s war experience comes out in his work. One of his only expressionistic paintings, Lichtsignale (The Flare, 1917), most clearly demonstrates how reality becomes horrifying—how the repercussions of war replicate (or foreshadow) images we associate with fantastical horror films. In the painting, explosive flares, like lighting flashes in terrifying films like Frankenstein, reveal a mound of twisted corpses, skulls and distended limbs, hidden in the darkness. The painting shows us real horror, expressed more effectively, perhaps, because of its fragmented style that reflects the chaos on display. In Dix’s work, only death can be found behind the darkness. This same revelation of real terror brought to the fore with the help of some of the conventions of the horror genre occurs in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934), a Universal Studio film. The film discusses the futile past and looks forward to the future of another immoral war. By examining the film, our intention is to discuss issues of artists’ responses to World War I by joining Austrian aesthetic movements with the horror genre. Edgar G. Ulmer serves as a bridge between European aesthetic responses to WWI and the popularity of Universal’s horror films in 1930s Hollywood. The Black Cat offers a space in which the consequences of the Great War—massive death and destruction—can be discussed, interrogated, and held up, perhaps, as a warning against the War to come.

The set design of The Black Cat demonstrates immediately that the film responds in complicated ways to World War I. But it is the film’s plot that clarifies how deeply the film is embedded in historical memory, since it is built around Werdegast’s return from a Russian prison. As commander of Fort Marmorus during its last World War I battle, Poelzig betrayed the fort to the Russians, their enemy, causing the deaths of thousands and the capture of his officers, including Werdegast. Werdegast has not forgiven Poelzig for his gruesome act and seeks vengeance for himself and for his wife and daughter. Poelzig has built on his previous terror, killing Werdegast’s wife and other young attractive women he has embalmed and preserved under glass. Like a zoo keeper, Poelzig admires his collection of beautiful corpses, so much so that he tries to sacrifice Joan Alison, the innocent American witness, in a Satanic ritual because he had already murdered Werdegast’s daughter, Karen, and Joan must take her place. With its clear references to Alister Crowley, the ceremony also highlights post-War conditions where decadent behavior serves as a way to escape the real horrors around them. The sacrificial scene brings to mind a combination of two of Otto Dix’s triptychons, Grosstadt (1927-28) and der Krieg (1929). Grosstadt illustrates how poverty and pain after the war encourage a painted life of escape; while der Kriegis meant to resurface memories of war terrors buried beneath a decadent life. In the scene from The Black Cat Joan lies prostrate on an angled cross, with other angled steel rods, like the bayonets and tree stumps in the Dix triptychon. Poelzig’s speech reinforces this modern image.  During the ritual, Poelzig chants in Latin, “The truth is great, and it will come to the fore … with a grain of salt” (Soister 171), a Nietzschean sentiment that, again, highlights modern skepticism nihilism and, perhaps, existential angst. The ceremony also strips Werdegast of any hope that might preserve his future, since he saves Joan but discovers the body of his daughter while helping Joan escape—Werdegast’s daughter (also Karen) had also been sacrificed and her beauty preserved.

Discovering his murdered daughter triggers Werdegast act of vengeance on Poelzig, now for the atrocious acts he had committed during and after the war. With Thamal, his servant’s, help, Werdegast straps Poelzig into the embalming rack and begins literally flaying him alive. Joan screams, Peter escapes his basement prison to save her, and—after mistaking Werdegast’s attempts to help Joan escape as an assault—shoots Werdegast. The Alisons role as innocents is cemented when Joan tells Peter, “He wanted to help us.” Werdegast protects them telling them, “You poor fool. I was only trying to help. Now go! Please go!” With the Alisons out of the picture, Werdegast can bury the World War I memories that haunt him—as he buries himself, Poelzig and the fort below the Bauhaus mansion. After activating the dynamite under what is left of Fort Marmorus, Werdegast explains, “Five minutes and Marmorus, you and I and your rotten cult will be no more.” Before the fort explodes, Werdegast tells Poelzig, “It has been a good game.” For Werdegast and Poelzig, death is the only escape from the horrors of war—just as in the Dix painting (The Flare) only death waits behind flashing light. Poelzig’s introduction to their game clarifies its ending:

You say your soul was killed and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmorus fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead? And now you come to me, playing at being an avenging angel—childishly thirsty for my blood. We understand each other too well. We know too much of life. We shall play a little game, Vitus. A game of death.

The Black Cat illustrates not only the historical context of its setting. It also harks back to a Europe before the war. As the layers of Poelzig’s house are uncovered, so too are layers of memory “housed” by Poelzig and Werdegast. Poelzig, the greatest Austrian architect, and Werdegast, the greatest Hungarian psychiatrist represent the Austrian-Hungarian Empire—broken up by the War that destroyed them and their relationships—the dissolution of the Hapsbury and of the Austro-Hungarian empires moved the Western world into the modern age. As an Austrian and a Hungarian, respectively, Poelzig and Werdegast’s destruction—first symbolically by the War’s consequences, and then literally by the dynamite explosion of the house—parallels the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It also may represent an escape from a history too painful to remember to something new—something modern.The Black Cat, too, moves us from the horrific past that is destroyed by dynamite toward a (modern) future, away from the “Old World.” Set and released in 1934, the year after Hitler’s election as Chancellor of German, The Black Cat demonstrates Ulmer and Laemmle’s awareness of possible terrifying repercussions of fascism, the National Socialists, and its dictator. Within the context of the film, it seems that the only solution is destruction and then possible regeneration. The old Fort Marmarus must be destroyed, as must its representatives—Werdegast and Poelzig. Only the innocents—the American Alisons—survive. But this argument—that the old must be destroyed for new and fresh ideals to take their place—is complicated by the literal destruction of Poelzig’s Bauhaus-style mansion at the end of the film.

The claim seems to be that a modern world built on the graves of the war dead will collapse, that the only escape from terrifying historical memory is a literal escape and, perhaps, one that requires obliviousness as well as innocence. This simple solution to the destructive nature on which a culture has been built becomes a true image of the actual fall of the Bauhaus in Germany in 1933. The Bauhaus was destroyed in Germany, but it “escaped” to the United States where its ideas survived and flourished. The literal fall of Poelzig’s Bauhaus seems to hold at least two meanings: It represents the destruction of the Bauhaus in Germany (that occurred a year before the film’s release). And it points us to a real solution to horror, destruction and regeneration. Such a view of regeneration may bring us back to Poe’s story, “The Black Cat,” illustrated in the film only by the presence of an immortal cat. In Poe’s “The Black Cat”, all that is evil must be burned for purity to return. To regenerate and regain purity—to find something other than death behind the light—Fort Marmarus and the modernist Bauhaus built upon its foundation must be destroyed, at least according to The Black Cat. So does the film critique or exult the modern aesthetic it highlights throughout?  Perhaps it does both. It shows us that to bury the past, we must destroy its foundation, even if such destruction takes the new (Bauhaus mansion) with it (the fort below). But once the fort and the modern structure above it collapse, the perspective changes, returning to the innocent Americans who began the tale. The Bauhaus school left Germany in 1933 but was rebuilt in the United States soon after—the new world to which the Alisons return after their adventure in the old.