In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

146 ARRAYS
straBe (known as "PPP") shows a drawing of a huge crowd pressing at
its entrance and barely controlled by mounted police (8 Uhr-Abendblatt,
February 4).
Going to the movies heightens and intensifies the spectators' experience
of their own lives. In an early sequence, the film Metropolis presents
"picture palaces," together with theaters, lecture rooms, a library, and a
stadium [see Endurance], as the main attraction of the "Club of the
Sons" where rich adolescents enjoy a life of exuberant luxury (Lang, 22).
In "Unordnung und fruhes Leid" ("Disorder and Early Sorrow"),
Thomas Mann presents an example from the opposite end of the social
hierarchy. Xaver Kleinsgutl, a good-looking peasant boy who works as
servant to an impoverished bourgeois family, is fond of daydreaming
about the movie world, much like the scions of Metropolis. The films
that Xaver sees evoke a mood of joyful melancholy, and his hopes are
firmly set on a career as a movie star: "With his whole soul he loves the
cinema; after an evening spent there, he is often filled with melancholy
and yearning, and tends to talk to himself. Vague hopes stir in him that
someday he may make his fortune in that splendid world and belong to
it by rights-hopes based on his shock of hair and on his physical agility
and daring. He likes to climb the ash tree in the front garden ... keeping
a lookout for a film director who might chance to come along and hire
him" (Mann, 513).
Some serious-minded intellectuals decry the conflation of cinema reality
with what they call "real" reality. They take the opportunity to
construct an image of high moral responsibility on the ontological distinction
between the two. Miguel de Unamuno thus accuses Spanish
government officials of confusing historical reality with film reality: "The
judgment of history-which is for them a film-matters but little to
them: the conceited tragedian without a moral or historical sense, the
film actor obeying his destiny, seeks fame even though he is infamous"
(Unamuno, 193, May 13). If Xaver Kleinsgutl, the dreamy Bavarian lad
invented by Thomas Mann, were a real-life person, he could become the
beneficiary of an obsessive rescue program for his generation designed
by the Bavarian politician Adolf Hitler [see Murder]:
Our entire public life today resembles a hothouse of sexual images and
stimuli. One has only to look at the programs of our movie houses,
music halls, and theaters; and one can hardly deny that this is not the