The pitch: she’s a Nazi, who writes movies! Wait, where’d everybody go?

Your Humble Blogger ran across the name Thea von Harbou today, for the first time, as far as I know. What an interesting person.

She was from an aristocratic family, became a writer and then an actress in Germany before the first World War, and then wrote for the movies. She married Fritz Lang and became one of the most prominent screenwriters in Weimar Germany. Then she joined the Nazis (I think there’s a fair line to be drawn between those like Frau von Harbou who joined the party before Hitler took power and those who joined after), split with Mr. Lang, and remained a prominent part of German movie-making under the Nazis.

After the war, she is held as a collaborator. The story is that she directed a production of Faust while in prison. She cleared rubble from the destroyed cities of her homeland, and then worked doing German-language dubs of American movies. In 1954, she attends a showing of one of her early films, and afterward slips, falls and is dead a few days later.

I think you could make a hell of a movie out of that. Now, you’d have to make it clear how evil she was, which might make it a trifle less Oscary, but still.

The images. She wrote a novel called Metropolis, which she later adapted into a movie that is … um, quite well-known. Oh, and a thing called M. The things you could do with those images.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.