William Boyd - The New Confessions

It was not only the arrival of the talkies that had done for The Confessions . The Wall Street crash had contributed too. As the repercussions of financial collapse in America struck the tottering edifice of German industry in 1930, Realismus Films came alarmingly close to bankruptcy. The Spandau studios were closed and we moved back to our offices near the gasworks in Grunewald. The editing suites were cramped and uncomfortable and our machines were badly serviced. While I worked in these straightened circumstances on the miles of film we had shot, crowds stampeded to the cinemas to see and hear the babble of inane voices in Die Nacht Gehört Uns and Melodie des Herzens . Perhaps if we had had more finance and better facilities The Confessions might still have made its mark, as talkies were rare and their quality lamentable. However, by the time it was finally ready — February 1931—the cinemas were full of insufferable operettas, dire homespun musicals cast with petit bourgeois lads and lasses or blatant publicity vehicles for superannuated tenors like Kiepura and Neumark.

The Confessions: Part I in its final version ran five hours and forty-eight minutes. It had not been difficult to persuade Eddie that its only chance of success lay in emphasizing its scale and extraordinary properties. We hired the enormous Gloria-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm and installed three vast screens. A sixty-man orchestra was assembled (at the last minute Furtwängler denied us the Berlin Philharmonic — I never spoke to him again after that day). On February 27 there was a gala performance. The great auditorium was half-empty; only a few hundred people saw The Confessions as it was intended to be. There was, consolingly, a rapturous reception from the press, but its tone was sad and valedictory. The Illustrierter Film-Kunst was representative:

It is as if Todd had launched, in this the era of the motorcar, the airplane and the transatlantic liner, a splendid three-masted clipper ship with billowing white sails, sumptuous saloons and the most elegant lines. Magnificent, but of another age than ours.

The film ran for a week in the Gloria-Palast to average houses before we had to close. The sole benefit was that the publicity revived Realismus’s fortunes briefly. Leo Druce quickly made a musical comedy about three out-of-work window cleaners that enjoyed a modicum of success. Offers multiplied for me. I could have made any number of films in half a dozen countries had I so wished, but I turned them all down. I will not dwell on my feelings, but my despair at what had happened was so intense I half-seriously contemplated suicide, especially when — against my wishes — Doon went to Italy to make the film with Mavrocordato. Karl-Heinz was busy at UFA with a new contract. It is a measure of how low I was that I did not interfere when Eddie cut and dubbed a ninety-minute version of The Confessions with a partial soundtrack of execrable quality, called Jean Jacques! This was to appease Pathé and the French investors and I believe played only in France and Belgium. I have never seen it; I insisted my name be removed from the credits; I abjure it utterly.

I bought a modern apartment in the west end, but Doon never moved in with me. I was so distracted that I soon gave up trying to persuade her. We continued to see each other as before, shuttling between the two addresses, as her work and political activities permitted, up to her departure for Paris. I suppose we led a social life, but I remember little about those difficult months after the collapse of The Confessions . Among my papers I have a small engagement diary for 1932. I quote its entries in full.

January 10: Eddie, KS, B von A at R .

January 25: Dinner, Leo .

February 2: Doon’s b’day — Café Berlin .

February 27: Heavy snow. Dentist .

The rest is blank.

It was Eddie who encouraged me to think of adapting The Confessions for sound. His motives were not entirely altruistic. The film had cost the best part of two million dollars and virtually none of that had been recouped. Obviously we could do nothing with Part I , but he reminded me we still had Part II and Part III to go. Could we not commence filming these in sound and use some of the material of Part I as flashback? Slowly, my enthusiasm began to regenerate itself. Over several weeks I ran the film again and again. Yes, there were sequences that could be saved by voice-over narration. New schemes and possibilities presented themselves to me and by the end of 1932 I started the over-dubbing.

I had to do this piecemeal as both Doon and Karl-Heinz were busy on other films, and moreover it took many attempts to get the synchronization perfect. But I was working again, and in between these dubbing sessions I wrote a narrative monologue for Karl-Heinz’s voice-over and we started recording music for key scenes.

Does it sound absurdly naïve, today, to relate that I was hardly concerned about the rise of the Nazi party? To be perfectly honest, I thought they were a crowd of farcical jokers. I remember going — reluctantly and under duress — to an association meeting with Doon in the spring of ’32 where a scuffle broke out at the door and there was a distant sound of breaking glass. Afterwards I asked what all the fuss had been about.

“Fucking Nazis,” Doon said.

“What are they after?”

She looked at me in hostile astonishment.

“Jesus, Jamie, where are you living?”

“In Chambéry,” I said.

Doon understood. But it was as close as the Nazis ever came to me. I am sure she told me in great detail what was happening in the country, but I let it wash over me. It is quite easy to give an impression of intent listening even when your mind is somewhere else entirely. I remember in mid-’32, before the general elections, how Doon used vociferously to support the Communists’ decision not to vote with the Social Democrats. And when the Nazis won all those seats she still maintained it had been the right course of action.… Social Democrats, Communists, Nationalists, Nazis, Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher, ban the SS and the SA, rescind the ban on the SS and the SA — round how many Berlin dinner parties did these names and topics hum? True, I did notice the uniforms on the streets, and there always seemed to be a march, a demonstration or a rally going on. But remember, it was not my country and as far as I was concerned there were more pressing affairs to be dealt with.

Georg Pfau, though, told me something that I do still recall. Poor Georg was attacked by party thugs with depressing regularity. Number 129B was near a hall frequently used by the KPD for their meetings, and Georg, who often walked home from work late, was set upon twice by Nazi gangs and was once even victim of a Communist ambush.

He turned up at the studios one day for a sound-recording session (he had a basket of cicadas for me) with both eyes blackened and a large blue bruise on his forehead. I commiserated with him.

“At the root,” he said to me slowly, “it’s a Bavarian problem. You see, the Bavarians hate us Prussians. That’s the danger. And they won’t be happy until they have us under their control. That’s what all this verdammt trouble’s about. It’s a German civil war. That’s what we’re living through.”

He was very gloomy about it. I used to repeat his remarks at dinner parties whenever the conversation turned to politics and it always promoted serious debate — in which I took no part, content simply to have initiated it. But Georg’s dark pessimism was somewhat unusual. Among our friends and acquaintances the mood was excited, but one of patience too. “Yes,” people would say, “things are bad now but it’s only a phase. It’ll pass, you’ll see.”