SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
It is helpful to know the historical background of Mephisto, and then perhaps as helpful to forget it. Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto appeared in 1936 and was a roman à clef so transparent that it was more than 40 years before it could be published in Germany, long after the death in 1963 of the original of its central character, Gustav Grundgens. Mann had known Grundgens at least as early as 1925, when Grundgens, then 26, had produced the precocious 17-year-old’s first play at the Hamburg Kammerspiele. Both young men acted in the production, with Mann’s twenty-year-old sister, Erika, and Paula Wedekind, daughter of the dramatist. Two years later, after the same quartet had performed Mann’s second play, Grundgens and Erika married.
In 1933, Thomas Mann and his family emigrated to Switzerland and thence to the United States. Grundgens stayed behind (he and Erika eventually divorced) to go from strength to strength as the favourite of the Nazi establishment, and certainly as one of the most gifted artists, both as director and actor, working in the theatre and cinema of the Third Reich. His character and career were, however, ambivalent. While working in official favour he always sought in his own work to avoid the more strident mannerisms of the official art; and at the same time he is known to have aided Jewish artists to escape persecution. His career continued practically without interruption after the war.
Klaus Mann took the title of Mephisto from Grundgens’ greatest role, in Goethe’s Faust. His novel is the story of an artist who for the sake of his career and acclaim readily sells soul and conscience to the service of the Nazis. István Szabó’s script for Mephisto, written in collaboration with Péter Dobai, claims only to be ‘based on’ Mann’s novel. Szabó clearly wants even less to be bound by the historical facts. ‘We have positively tried to avoid all possibilities of concrete identification,’ he has said. ‘What interested us was not what happened to particular people, but what happened to a multitude of people, the link between a character of this kind and history.’ For his purposes he has made his Hendrik Höfgen a much more flamboyant actor than Grundgens, even though they play the same stage roles. Moreover the script recognises that the hindsight of 40 years has taught us much about the period and its dilemmas that Mann, even with his experience, could not have seen.
Szabó uses Höfgen to explore, much deeper than any previous filmmaker, the quandaries and responsibilities of an artist in a totalitarian state. To be sanctimonious in judging and condemning the German artists who stayed on is far too easy from our distance in time; and Szabó does not make that mistake. Never, anywhere, have the opportunities and rewards come easily for artists working in the cinema and theatre; and it would have been as hard for a German artist of the 30s as for any other voluntarily to give up achieved success. When pressed to leave Germany with his wife, Höfgen echoes the feelings of Erich Engel and of many other equally uncorrupted artists who could not bring themselves to uproot. His language, he explains, is his whole livelihood. What would he do in another place? (Some time ago, in a programme note on Nazi cinema for the American Film Institute, I wrote that among all the film artists who left Germany because their race and political affiliations removed the possibility to work, I knew of none who had left without being forced, only out of moral principle and in protest against the regime. The AFI reproachfully told me that they had removed this passage, ‘since very many artists left in protest’; but they never named one.)
Szabó’s Höfgen is an unscrupulous charmer, user, opportunist. He abandons his mistress for his wife, uses his wife’s family connections to get on in the theatre; and when his wife emigrates (to Paris) in 1933 he retrieves the indiscretion of his left-wing theatre past by playing up to the mistress of the Prime Minister and General (a character roughly based, it would appear, on Göring; and brilliantly characterised, with his shifts from bonhomie to crude violence, by the East German actor Rolf Hoppe). Capable only of playing roles, Höfgen self-consciously reproaches his own character as Machiavellian villain; but you feel his conscience is so coddled that he is admiringly accusing himself of no more than some clever social climbing. To every part demanded of him he quite happily adapts his mask. He divorces his wife; accepts the expulsion of his ethnically undesirable Negro mistress; revises his Mephisto performance to suit the prevailing ideology; gives earnest lectures on German culture; redefines Hamlet as a Hitlerian hero.
Höfgen’s resource as well as his weakness is that he is an actor, with the actor’s neurotic hunger to be loved and admired by everyone. Incapable it seems of loving anyone himself, constantly forced by his nature to affect roles, he strives with pathetic diligence to please. The mask nevertheless occasionally falls to reveal despicable vulnerability. So important does Szabó regard these undefended moments that our very first view of Höfgen is at one of them: as a young actor he sits in his dressing-room scourging himself with an hysterical fury of jealousy and frustration while another performer, an operetta soubrette, queens it on the stage.
He is most exposed when friendship uncharacteristically gets the better of him: the flimsiness of his relationships with state power is exposed when he pleads for the safety of his oldest friend, a comrade from left-wing theatre days. His tragic enlightenment comes only when he leaves the reassuring adulation of Germany to go abroad, to encounter the scorn – intolerable to a creature who feeds on admiration – of former acquaintances. (The actor chosen to deliver the literal slap in the face is an English non-professional, type-cast as a Times critic, and demonstrating that it’s a mistake to put up amateurs against professionals as good as Szabô’s.)
In respects quite different from the intelligence and sensitivity of its human portrait and moral inquiry, the film is a model to other filmmakers. It imposes itself by the dynamism of its narrative and its visual spectacle, all achieved on a budget that would not have paid for a single set-piece in Heaven’s Gate. The secret lies not in some miraculous East European economy (as a West German-Hungarian co-production all but a few establishing shots were filmed in Budapest), but in a confidently planned scenario, the control of an increasingly assured director, pure technical excellence (the director of photography is Szabó’s usual collaborator, Lajos Koltai) and above all rational use of resources. Practically everything is shot on location, selected and impressionistically transformed with banners and other properties. The rough edges and approximations (an American Express plaque glimpsed in a 1936 café; obviously post-war sanitary plumbing in a pre-war lavatory) are irrelevant and never impair Szabó’s mesmeric evocation of a mood, a time and a place.
David Robinson, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1981
Mephisto
A Film by/ Directed by: István Szabó
©: Magyar Filmgyártó Vallalat
Production Company: Objektiv Filmstúdió
In collaboration with: Manfred Durniok Film- und Fernsehproduktion
For: Film und Fernsehen, Hessischer Rundfunk, Østerreichischer Rundfunk
Production Supervisor: Lajos Óvári
Production Co-ordinator: József Marx
Production Managers: Sándor Mórocz, Péter Rajczy, József Pleskonics
Assistant Director: Mara Luttor
Screenplay: Péter Dobai, István Szabó
Dramaturge: János Rózsa
Hungarian Dialogue: András Szeredás
Based on the novel by: Klaus Mann
Director of Photography: Lajos Koltai
Assistant Photographer: Gyula Kovács
Lighting Director: József Marton
Stills Photography: Magdá B. Müller
Editor: Zsuzsa Csákány
Art Director: József Romvári
Set Decorator: Éva Martin
Costumes: Agnès Gyarmathy
Wardrobe: Judit Rákosi
Make-up: Edith Basilides
Hair: Rozália Szegedi
Laboratory: Magyar Filmlaboratórium Vallalat
Music Composed and Arranged by: Zdenkó Tamássy
Choreography: Maria Ligeti, Bela Szirmai
Sound Recording: György Fék
German Post-synching: Heinz Freitag, Carla Hesse
Consultants: Bertalan Papp, Sándor Zeidler
Collaborators: Margit Szalontai, Klára Ivanyi, János Csáki, István Decsi, Támas Éger, Béla Gajdos, Csaba Kenéz, Zoltán Kerényi, György Kósa, Gyula Langer, Judit Lökös, Borbála Sártory, Júlia Sivó, Antal Szabó, Tibor Szollár, Ildikó Varga, Attila Varsányi, Róbert Vranik, Judit Zvada
Collaborators - Berlin: Siegfried Hausknecht, Martin Sonnabend, Werner Schulze, Paul Schimanski, Thomas Knauf
Collaborator - Hamburg: Georg Restel
Collaborator - Paris: Jean Badal
Translation: Angelika Maté, Péter Maté
Cast
Klaus Maria Brandauer (Hendrik Höfgen)
Ildikó Bánsági (Nicoletta von Niebuhr)
Krystyna Janda (Barbara Bruckner)
Rolf Hoppe (General)
György Cserhalmi (Hans Miklas)
Péter Andorai (Otto Ulrichs)
Karin Boyd (Juliette Martens)
Christine Harbort (Lotte Lindenthal)
Tamás Major (Oskar H. Kroge, director)
Ildikó Kishonti (Dora Martin, primadonna)
Mária Bisztrai (heroine)
Sándor Lukács (Rolf Bonetti, bon vivant)
Hamburg
Agnés Bánfalvi (Angelica Siebert, ‘Naive’)
Judit Hernádi (Rahel Mohrenwitz, ‘Sentimentale’)
Vilmos Kun (Knurr, stagehand)
Ida Versényi (Mrs. Efeu, prompter)
István Komlós (Böck, wardrobe chief)
The Family
Sári Gencsy (Bella Höfgen)
Zdzislaw Mrozewski (Professor Bruckner)
Stanislava Strobachová (general’s wife)
Károly Ujlaky (Sebastian)
Berlin
Prof. Martin Hellberg (professor)
Katalin Sólyom (Miss Bernhardt, theatre secretary)
György Bánffy (‘Faust’)
Jósef Csör (‘Joachim’)
Christian Grasshof (Cäsar von Mack)
Hédi Temessy (banker’s wife)
David Robinson (Davidson, critic)
Géza Kovács (Müller-Andrea, critic)
Teri Tordai (sculptor)
Hans Ulrich Laufer (Radig,editor)
Margrid Hellberg (young singer)
Kerstin Hellberg (young singer)
Budapest
Irén Bordán (film actress)
Oskár Gáti (film actor)
The General’s Adjutants
Tamás Balikó, Ödön Rubold, István Palotai, Bertalan Papp
and
Rozsa Balogh, Bazsa Kiss, Mónika Bognár, Géza Laczkovich, Bela Bolykovszky, György Lencz, Erzsébet Czeglédi, József Lukácsi, János Dömölky, Nandor Majoros, Maria Fekete, Rita Máté, Tamás Fésüs, Lajos Mezey, Katalin Fráter, Vilmos Mosóczy, O. Gombik, Tamás Philipovics, Katalin Karancz, Fruzsina Pregitzer, István Karsai, Péter Tihanyi, Gizella Ramschorn, Tamás Tóth, Erzsi Sándor, Vidor Török, András Sebestyén, Katalin Varga, Csilla Strébely, Imre Zvoronics, Mihály Szacsky, János Xantus
István Szabó (theatre party attendant) *
Hungary-West Germany-Austria 1981©
144 mins
Digital 4K (restoration)
*Uncredited
Restored in 4K by the National Film Institute Hungary – Film Archive. Courtesy of Second Run.
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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