Mephisto (1981)
Movie rating: 8/10
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — Mark 8:36
An alternative title for Mephisto — directed by István Szabó, co-written by Peter Daibo and Szabó, and based on the 1936 novel of the same name by Klaus Mann — could be Anatomy of a Sellout. Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a passionate actor in pre-World War II Germany, yearns to be a star of stage and screen. He struggles to find notice at provincial theatres in Hamburg, trying everything including co-founding a theatre group for workers. Moving to Berlin, he finds acclaim playing the role of Mephistopheles in a Faustian play. When the Nazis come to power, Höfgen’s friends, lovers, and co-workers who oppose the regime are persecuted or driven into exile. But consumed by his desire to become Germany’s greatest actor, Höfgen supports the Third Reich as a means to accolades and success.
The legend of Faust has been adopted into numerous plays, most famously by Christopher Marlowe in England and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany. Its main theme, and by extension that of the film Mephisto, is obvious for anyone with a passing knowledge of the story: the danger of selling one’s soul to the Devil for worldly gain. While Höfgen gains renown for playing Mephisto onstage, it becomes clear over the course of the film that he is in fact Faust, having sold his soul to the Hitler regime to fulfill his acting dreams. His main connection to the Nazi state is the General (Rolf Hoppe), loosely based on Hermann Göring. It is the General who becomes the Mephisto to Höfgen’s Faust, enabling him to play great roles such as Mephisto and Hamlet, gaining fame and eventually running the national theatre.
The film’s visuals illustrate the many faces of “Mephisto” in this story. Höfgen’s makeup and costume when playing Mephisto on stage are made up of three colours: black, white, and red. These are the same colours as the German Empire’s flag from 1871 to 1918, and later the Nazi flag. The Weimar Republic had adopted the red-black-gold flag associated with German republicanism. Conservatives and fascists continued to use the black-white-red imperial colour scheme as a symbol of political reaction and their hatred for the republic, which is why Hitler used the colours of the imperial tricolour when designing the Nazi flag. The colours of Mephisto’s makeup and dress link Höfgen’s starmaking role, which first draws the attention of the General, to his service for the Nazis. With his bald head and black uniform, Höfgen’s Mephisto is also visually similar to the General.
At each step of his newly flourishing career, Höfgen adapts himself to Nazi arts policy and ideology. He disavows his past “flirtation with the left” so the authorities will overlook his participation in a communist theatre group. He stops acting in material such as the popular French farces he previously appeared in, which the regime has banned as part of its attack on “cultural Bolshevism”. Höfgen gives speeches praising Nazi sculptures of idealized Aryan male nudes similar to the work of Arno Breker. Each time he makes excuses to justify his naked careerism, and turns a blind eye to the regime’s authoritarianism, violence, repression, murder of opponents, and extreme racism.
On the other hand, there were already signs that Höfgen was willing to shape his behaviour to fit social pressures. Despite his pre-existing relationship in Hamburg with Juliette Martens (Karin Boyd), Höfgen chooses to marry Barbara Bruckner (Krystyna Janda), yet carries on a secret extramarital affair with Juliette. When Barbara finally leaves him, she asks if he ever really loved her. A white, blonde German woman from a well-to-do family, Barbara is a more socially acceptable partner than Höfgen’s Afro-German mistress Juliette, born to a white German father and Black African mother. After his move to Berlin, the Nazi takeover, and his growing fame, Höfgen comes under pressure from the General to end his affair with Juliette, which the regime considers an act of Rassenschande or “racial shame”.
Early on Höfgen appears left-wing in his politics, as suggested by his work in a communist/workers’ theatre group. But after Hitler is appointed chancellor, the actor claims to have no strong political opinions at all.
(As an aside, I should note this film falsely claims Hitler was “elected” chancellor. In fact the Nazis never gained the support of more than one-third of the German electorate and were declining in popularity when Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor. Mephisto was a Hungarian, Austrian, and West German co-production. I wonder if this reflects the attempt of West German capitalists, who had bankrolled and supported the Nazis, to pass off responsibility for the Nazi takeover onto the German population as a whole.)
It’s hard to tell whether Höfgen’s early left-wing sympathies were genuine, or if he was simply a political chameleon adapting himself to whatever was popular at the moment. Both can be true. Human beings have an incredible capacity to rationalize whatever actions we take to justify them to ourselves. My impression is that Höfgen doesn’t think too hard about politics and is “flexible” in his principles, which is what allows him to seamlessly adapt himself to Nazi rule. Those who lack a coherent philosophical viewpoint will reflect the ideas and prejudices of the society they live in.
What makes Mephisto more than a character study — and it’s a good one, with fine performances by Brandauer and the supporting cast — is that this characteristic of Höfgen was widely shared among German intellectuals, artists, and professionals who quickly proclaimed their loyalty to Hitler’s new order, ignoring the regime’s growing list of victims. In April 1933, the Nazis passed a law removing academics and civil servants with Jewish ancestry. This didn’t bother the almost 900 professors and academics across Germany, including Martin Heidegger, who signed the “Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State” in November.
Many artists used the regime’s cultural policies to boost their own careers. Painters, sculptors, composers, architects, writers, and actors who lent their services to the Nazis often found their careers flourished as a result. The Gottbegnadeten-Liste (“God-gifted list”), published in September 1944 by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, was a list of 1,041 artists considered crucial to Nazi culture and therefore exempt from military service in the final stages of World War II. One of them was actor Gustaf Gründgens, who served as the inspiration for Höfgen in Mann’s novel and its film adaptation.
We don’t see what happens to Hendrik Höfgen during the Second World War in Mephisto, in part because the source material was written before the war. But it really doesn’t matter, because his character’s downward arc is complete. This is the story of a man who sells his soul to the most reactionary, tyrannical, and murderous regime in history. There are plenty of artists officially supported by the Nazis who lived on long after 1945. Gründgens died in 1963, Arno Breker in 1991, Leni Riefenstahl in 2003. But no matter what happened to them in their postwar lives, all are defined and remembered by how they used their talents to support the Nazi dictatorship. Whatever happens to Hendrik Höfgen after the film ends and the credits roll, he has already lost his soul long before his physical death.
