The Lost One Read online

  True to lifelong form, he relocated often, changing rooms more often than shoes. But wherever his fortunes led him—from apartment to hotel and back again—he stayed inside Vienna’s ring, close to cafés and to the Burgtheater, the Rathaus, the Stephansdom, the Staatsoper, and the Hofburg.

  Another trend took tighter hold of Lorre’s life. After collapsing on stage, he woke up in a crowded ward of shaking alcoholics and sweating drug addicts at the Wiener Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The cattle-pen conditions made getting a private room a priority. Alajos, who had since moved into the city, soon arrived and arranged for upgraded accommodations. For several months Lorre remained at the public hospital, where he underwent the first of many treatments for drug addiction. When Alajos asked about his son’s prospects for recovery, the physician told him that his efforts had been unsuccessful and suggested hypnosis, as a last resort. Francis related that although Alajos was somewhat dubious, he did not stand in the way.

  “What was the result?” he asked after his son’s first session.

  The doctor shrugged his shoulders and replied, “I think I’ll give him more morphine.”

  Discharged without being cured, Lorre began forging prescriptions and falsifying doctors’ names to satisfy his addiction.

  Franz Theodor Csokor, in whose play Die Stunde des Absterbens (The Hour of Dying Off) Lorre had appeared at Max Reinhardt’s Theater in the Josefstadt in late February 1927, unselfishly lent a helping hand to young and troubled talents. He thought the actor was ready for Berlin, “the most exciting, the most alive, the most productive, and by far the most immoral city in Europe.” Its artistic milieu mirrored the hectic metropolis at large. Rattling tramways, screaming car tires, and the rumbling underground gave voice to a brash dynamism. Fed by a “striking mixture of cynicism and confidence,” Germany’s postwar generation rebelled against the “sticky, perfumed, sultry” traditions of its parents, expressing its detachment through Tendenzkunst, art with a political, economic, and social purpose. A flood of isms—futurism, Dadaism, cubism, constructivism, surrealism, impressionism, postexpressionism—interpreted industry, caricatured the military machine, and indicted middle-class morality. Artists of every stripe thronged to dazzling and decadent Berlin, where, Brecht exclaimed to his friend the set designer Caspar Neher, “Everything is jam-packed with bad taste but on what a scale!”

  The efflorescence of the arts in Berlin obscured an economic downside. The same city that offered “organically structured” living accommodations to the well-to-do ignored housing shortages that condemned the lower classes to crowded tenements. Severe unemployment in the wake of the Great Crash gave rise to evictions, strikes, demonstrations, and political unrest. In 1925 Berlin was home to more than twenty-eight thousand artists, a high percentage of whom needed to take on second jobs to survive. Conditioned to higher rates of unemployment than workers in other sectors of the economy, theater personnel nervously watched joblessness rise to a startling 44 percent by early 1932, 10 percent higher than the general unemployment rate. Between the 1929–30 and 1932–33 seasons, the number of theaters in operation fell from 242 to 199. Cutting the length of their season kept the doors of some theaters open. Others trimmed salaries and turned contract players into freelance actors. By the 1931–32 season, nearly 50 percent of the working members of the Buhnengenossenschaft (Society of German Theater Employees) earned less than seventy-two dollars a month.

  In the winter of 1927–28, Lorre turned up at Berlin’s Renaissance Theater with a word of recommendation from Csokor to director Gustav Hartung’s assistant and “alter ego,” Rudolph Joseph, who had the authority to hire and fire actors, make contracts, and attend to the general running of the theater. Joseph remembered that the young man was polite enough but that “he didn’t look too healthy and had rather wet hands.” He asked for a job. Joseph usually knew right away whether an actor would fit into the ensemble. Lorre struck him as an “odd type,” whom he might not be able to place in parts very often. Certainly, nothing about the newcomer suggested he would become one of the leading actors in Berlin. Joseph wanted to think it over and talk with him again. But Lorre didn’t return. Soon after arriving in Berlin, he had suffered an internal hemorrhage and been diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He was placed in the hospital for three months and given “big amounts of morphine, as a result of which I became addicted.” Csokor wrote Joseph and asked him not to be angry with the young man, who had admitted himself to a sanatorium for treatment of his morphine addiction, confident that he would “come out of here very big or not at all.”

  Several months later, Lorre appeared, not at the Renaissance Theater, but at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in search of Brecht. He carried ten marks in his pocket and a letter of introduction from Csokor.

  “In my forechamber sat a small comical man who followed me with his glances,” wrote Ernst Josef Aufricht, an actor turned entrepreneur who had recently leased the Schiffbauerdamm Theater (now the home of the Berliner Ensemble), located just off Friedrichstrasse.

  Each time the theater manager walked by him, Lorre stood and timidly bowed.

  “Do you want something from me?” Aufricht finally inquired. Lorre nodded, and Aufricht asked the young man to follow him.

  “I am an actor,” blurted Lorre, “and I would like to play with you.”

  Aufricht apologized for laughing. “You look like a tadpole.” He peered into Lorre’s large, protruding eyes. “They are rehearsing on stage. Ask for Brecht. I’ll send you to him for the part of the village idiot in Pioniere in Ingolstadt (Engineers in Ingolstadt).”

  Aufricht caught the spirit of their first meeting, if not the facts. Although Lorre did not officially move from Vienna to Berlin until March 1929, giving his address as Schlüterstrasse 48, the actor had turned up the previous summer, when Brecht cast him as Peachum, king of the beggars, in Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera).19 However, when Lorre became ill—one day before opening night, according to his friend Paul E. Marcus, a journalist for the Berliner Börsen Courier who signed his work PEM—Erich Ponto stepped into the role, but nearly walked out on the production when Brecht reduced his part.

  “[Brecht] cast me in one of the plays he was directing,” Lorre later recalled, “because I did not look like an actor.” People who met Lorre never forgot their initial sight of him, certainly not Brecht, who could not “hold with beautiful people,” recalled actress Lotte Lenya. “Anything a little offbeat appealed to him.” “In those days,” said Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of novelist and playwright Lion Feuchtwanger, “so many actors were good looking. Peter’s physical appearance was a new thing to Brecht, who looked for the exception. He wanted characteristics, not beauty, and sought the unique, the distinctive.”

  If his looks caught people’s attention, his personality held it. Photographer Lotte Jacobi found him fascinating: “Whatever he said, he was unique in saying it. I would have done anything he wanted me to do. I don’t know if I had the idea that I was in love with him, but I really was.”

  Lorre aroused the curiosity of the crowd at the Romanischen Café. “Normally, you don’t care about other colleagues,” said actor Jürgen von Alten, who worked with him on the Berlin stage, “but somehow he interested us. Even when he did not open his mouth, he had such a fantastic personal magnetism, an aura. We liked him because he was unique and he also transferred that to the stage. He was an actor who appeared and then the air was thick. We accepted him immediately, as an actor, an artist, though not as a human being. He was very reserved, very shy…. Although I didn’t know him well, I remember him. Lorre is a person you don’t forget.”

  Others thought him strange, particularly his sense of humor and his “ridiculous” views. “We didn’t know if he meant [them] seriously or was making fun,” said Heinz Rühmann, who shared the stage with Lorre in the 1931 production of Valentine Katayev’s popular comedy-farce Die Quadratur des Kreises (Squaring the Circle). According to screenwriter Charles Bennett, Lorre loved to tell of �
�making a movie in Germany that employed forty extras—supposedly soldiers—thirty privates and ten officers. When it came to the lunch break the guys dressed as officers, getting just the same as the guys dressed as soldiers, insisted on eating together; snobbism rampant; being dressed as officers they couldn’t eat with those lower forms of extras who were just soldiers.”

  “He had such funny expressions for people when he wanted to describe them,” said German writer and director Hermann Kosterlitz of Lorre’s oblique outlook.20 “The famous German novelist Thomas Mann had a very long thin face and Peter Lorre once said to me, ‘Don’t you think that Thomas Mann looks like when you sit way in the corner in the front row at the movies?’ The president of Germany was a man who had a very quadratic head. Everything was so military about him, and Peter said to me, ‘Hindenburg looks to me like every inch is square.’”

  On another occasion, Lorre brought a girlfriend named Dina to a reserved table shared by Koster, director Erich Engel, and choreographer Ernst Matray at the Café Vienna on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. When she momentarily left, Lorre asked Koster what he thought of her. “Very pretty,” replied Koster. “She has the smallest mouth that I’ve ever seen,” pointed out Lorre. “She has such a small mouth, she has to eat asparagus with Vaseline.”

  Lorre’s sense of humor also rang in Max Ophüls’s ear—he later remembered hearing the actor refer to his red sports car as an “unchained bidet.”21

  Lorre found Brecht onstage. He was a tall, slender man with close-cropped black hair and brown eyes set deeply behind steel-rimmed glasses. More often than not unshaven and reeking of sweat, he nonetheless exuded an animal magnetism that made mistresses of many of his female admirers, who described him as energetic, charming, and charismatic. “He showed himself to be like his poetry,” recalled historian Lotte H. Eisner, displaying “a fierce cynicism touched by a comedian’s melancholy.” The dialectical combination disconcerted some and fascinated others. Such men as Peter Lorre, who described Brecht as “overpowering,” and playwright Arnolt Bronnen, who recognized that “in that small, insignificant man beats the heart of our times,” fell just as easily under his spell.

  Brecht and Lorre talked for half an hour. “It was as if we had known each other for twenty years,” the actor later recalled. Brecht told Lorre that he was “going to play the lead in another play I have.” For now, however, he would step into the smaller role of a young simpleton. Brecht recommended signing the actor to a three-year contract. Aufricht wanted to think it over, at least until opening night. Meanwhile, Lorre looked up Max Reinhardt.

  “Why do you want to come to me?” asked the theater director. “In Berlin, it doesn’t matter where you start. Berlin’s critics have the best tuned ears and the most papers. You just have to have some talent. Even if you have only a marginal appearance, you will be discovered and find yourself in the headlines. This is a better start than I can offer you. In my ensemble, you would get lost among so many prominent actors.” Asked if he had any other possibilities, Lorre replied that the Schiffbauerdamm would probably engage him. “I strongly advise you to take it then,” said the professor, smiling. “You know, there is a superstition about that. The Theater am Schiffbauerdamm lies directly on the Spree. From there radiates an aura.”

  In August 1928 Aufricht had opened the fall season in a “blaze of glory” with Brecht’s production of Die Dreigroschenoper, adapted from John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, an eighteenth-century satire of British society, directed by Erich Engel and set to music by Kurt Weill. Brecht revolutionized poetic language, letting “the naked human being speak, but in a language we have not heard in years.” By 1926, however, the loneliness, alienation, and disillusionment of his earlier plays had given way to a new social awareness in which man held the capacity to change the world instead of being changed by it. At the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Lorre met a man in progress who led the way by staying one step ahead.

  The Schiffbauerdamm Theater was becoming all the more fashionable because of the lively tone of its entertainment, which was irreverent, antimilitary, leftist, and for its conservative critics, smutty and perverse. After transferring Die Dreigroschenoper to another theater, Aufricht staged Peter Martin Lampel’s antiwar play Giftgas über Berlin (Poison Gas over Berlin), which exposed illegal experiments by the Reichswehr. Censorship and critical indifference closed the show after a single private performance. Aufricht asked himself how he could top his first two scandals and not disappoint his audience. To fill the gap and buy time for Brecht to deliver a new play, he settled on Marieluise Fleisser’s Pioniere in Ingolstadt, a comedy that had premiered to positive review as Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt) in Dresden one year earlier.

  Fleisser had met Brecht in 1923 and become blindly infatuated with the man she described as “the genius, the peak, the potency, the strong flowing life, a sun, the pure dynamite, the rebel, the irreverent one, the most cried at one, the almighty, the personal lord and master, the creator.” After hearing her tell about a company of soldiers on a bridge-building assignment in her hometown in southern Bavaria, he persuaded her to glue together memories of the event. “You must write like a child,” he told her. To guide his Galatea, Brecht, who by this time thought of the Schiffbauerdamm as his theater, recommended Jacob Geis, a director whom he could direct. At rehearsals, he intervened to promote his own ideas for a new theatrical style, loosening the scenic connections in Fleisser’s simple story to create “an epic tableau with different motifs.” Brecht coaxed endless rewrites from Fleisser—“change and change again, there was no satisfying him,” she remembered. The handpicked cast, including Lorre, “endured it, when they didn’t complain.”

  On Saturday, March 30, 1929, at 8:30 p.m., an expectant audience filled the nearly eight hundred seats beneath the gilt-edged canopy of gargoyles, angels, and cupids. The entertainment was less respectable than the quaint decor. “This Lustspiel presents the morals and customs of deeper Bavaria,” advertised a prefatory note. “Using them one can study certain atavistic and prehistoric worlds of feelings.” In the first “picture,” a company of soldiers on a bridge-building mission marches into Ingolstadt. Like all men-at-arms, they also look for love among the local servant girls. While the sensual Alma (Lotte Lenya) satisfies her sexual appetite with the eager soldiers, the chaste Berta (Hilde Körber) nurses a broken heart when her love is not returned. Fabian (Peter Lorre), “a half-cretin of a high school student,” aspires to the soldiers’ lusty and callous indifference toward women, but their ridicule transforms his feelings of inadequacy into half-baked schemes of vengeance. After wreaking havoc in the ordered lives of the citizens of Ingolstadt, the soldiers exit town over the bridge they have built. Behind them they leave the used and abused servant girls, and Fabian, who satisfies his desire with a local whore.

  Fleisser recalled that Brecht “was aiming for scandal because that guaranteed success.” By sexually charging the performance, he pushed public tolerance for prurient entertainment past acceptable limits and nearly pulled the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm apart at the seams. Some hissed; others cried, “Silence!” At times Aufricht thought the company couldn’t go on with the show. A member of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung or Storm Troops, a.k.a. Brown Shirts), wrote one reviewer, voiced his protest with a stink bomb. When Fleisser and the cast came on stage afterward, members of the audience booed, whistled, and applauded for fifteen minutes. Lampooning the army was in bad taste, but that a woman should do so was intolerable. Sex in a cemetery and defloration in a heaving and pitching wooden crate was too offensive for words. A police officer, who coincidentally had been a lieutenant with the soldiers at Ingolstadt, declared, “Do you believe that we allow such things?” A threatened ban on the play forced cuts, and Aufricht invited the critics to a revised performance on Easter Sunday.

  “The times had their special sharpness,” wrote Fleisser with understated economy worthy of Brecht. “They were already loaded up with that which came afterwards.” No
one, it seemed, occupied the middle ground. Rival critics Alfred Kerr and Herbert Jhering singled out Fleisser as a most gifted young writer and her piece a natural portrait of everyday life, “splendid in local stupidity.” Others condemned Pioniere in Ingolstadt’s sexual explicitness as sordid, unwholesome, and deliberately orgiastic and faulted the play for its undeveloped story and characters, its fragmentary construction, slow tempo, and failure to surpass the depiction of the Bavarian milieu—all failings Fleisser chalked up to Brecht’s domineering influence.

  The loudest voice took a dimmer view. Richard Biedryznski, writing for the Deutsche Zeitung, pointed to the play as a precursor to anarchy: “Things are ready to explode. The more unrestrained impudence becomes, so grows our disgust, our self defense and our exaltation of the censorship of vulgarity. Mean-ness breeds anger…. The concert has begun. It will continue in the street. Soon the battue can start and the best actors won’t be able prevent the cultural bankruptcy of the theater and its political annihilation.” What sounded like bad press was praise to Brecht’s ears. Besides shocking the audience to its conservative core, he had taken another developmental step toward his epic theater. Branded as an informer and a traitor, Fleisser became a social pariah. Though her father advised her not to return to Ingolstadt, she eventually did so. In 1933 the Nazis burned her books and forbade her to write.

  Lorre fared much better than the play itself—establishing a pattern of rising above theatrical storms—by sticking to Fleisser’s conception of a feebleminded youth whose helplessness of expression blocks his feelings, until he discovers the colloquial language of sex. True to Fleisser’s “natural art,” he traversed the border between comedy and tragedy with complete facility, expressing the most complicated of feelings—pathos and passion—by the simplest means. “Peter was completely uninhibited when he was acting,” said Lotte Lenya. “Just all at once, his talent came out. It came natural to him, that same kind of tragedy that moves people without their having to do anything, just be there. Just one look of Lorre’s conveyed more than any other actors could do in a whole scene.”