Metropolis — Thea von Harbou — The classic twentieth-century science fiction novel by the screenwriter of the Fritz Lang film, the famed director’s wife and collaborator.
A divided twenty-first-century city sets the stage for this novel of a future dystopia. While the wealthy live in a decadent playground of sex and drugs, workers toil underground operating the machines that keep the city running.
When Freder, the son of the leader of Metropolis, sees the horrific conditions the workers are exposed to, he becomes disillusioned with his father’s vision and captivated by a woman named Maria who is fighting for unity among the classes. Desperate to maintain the status quo, Freder’s father unleashes a robot that looks like Maria to wreak suspicion and doubt and crush the rebellion, a move that puts Freder and the real Maria’s love—and lives—at risk.
‘The language of the novel is sometimes as thesauric as Shiel, as kaleidoscopic as Merritt, as bone-spare as Ray Bradbury, as poetic as Poe, as macabre as Machen. . . . You will have an experience in reading that will last you all the rest of your life.’ —Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Spacemen magazine
‘The movie’s status as one of the great dystopian science fiction tales is secure. Thea von Harbou’s novel deserves to be recognized as an important work of science fiction in its own right. It’s also a relatively rare and therefore interesting example of German science fiction.’ —Vintage Pop Fictions
‘The latent power of the story seems clearer in prose. You can see more clearly the contrast of past and present, of magic and technology, of gods and gadgetry.’ —Black Gate
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Thea Gabriele von Harbou was a prolific German author and screenwriter, best known today for writing the screenplay of the silent film epic Metropolis (1927). She published over forty books, including novels, children’s books, and collections of short stories, essays, poems, and novellas.
For the German film industry, she wrote or collaborated on more than seventy screenplays in the silent and sound era. At one time, she was the highest-paid screenwriter in Germany.
She married three times: first to actor Rudolph Klein-Rogge, who played leading roles in many of her films, second to film director Fritz Lang, and third to Indian journalist and patriot Ayi Tendulkar. She had no children of her own.
In spite of her extraordinary success in the male-dominated film industry, she was no feminist. Her biographer Reinhold Keiner confirms, ‘She herself was ‘a pretty explicit opponent of that flow, in which the women open up areas in which they . . . do not belong, and they close the areas where they could be queens.» However, she lived the life of a career woman, and the women in her novels and films are usually strong-willed, self-sacrificing women called upon to rescue and redeem the men in their lives.
Thea showed an interest in writing from an early age and sold her first short story at the age of nine and her first novel at the age of fifteen.
Against her family’s wishes, she enrolled in the School of Performing Arts at the Düsseldorf Playhouse when she was seventeen, and for the next six years she pursued a successful career as a stage actor while she continued to publish stories and novels. Her last repertory season was at the State Theatre in Aachen, where Rudolph-Klein Rogge was the leading man and director. In August 1914, they married, and she turned her attention full-time to writing.
In 1919, director-producer Joe May hired her to collaborate on the screenplay of her story ‘The Legend of St. Simplicity’ as a vehicle for his actor wife Mia May. That film’s success then led May to hire her to collaborate with Fritz Lang on an epic adaptation of her 1918 novel The Indian Tomb, which May directed. That collaboration with Lang initiated a thirteen-year creative partnership that produced some of the best-known films of the Weimar cinema, including Dr. Mabuse, The Nibelungen, Metropolis, Woman in the Moon, and the early sound film M—Murderers Among Us.
She and Lang divorced in 1933, but she continued to work in the German film industry. Some of her noteworthy sound films include her superb 1937 adaptation of von Kleist’s comedy The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug), the 1938 suspense film Covered Tracks (Verwehte Spuren), and the 1941 sentimental drama Annelie.
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