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ALTERED STATE FASH ACTORS (Pt. V): The Nazi Nostradamus; Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse; Kriminelle Telepathy in Babylon Berlin; Inspector Gennat; & National Social Darwinists in the Weimar Republic
🕑 Added 2023-08-16 03:10:51 +0000 UTCWe're back on the Weimar Republic beat, chasing down the hypnotic influence on the war neurotic vets, the nascent Nazi movement, & the rise of fascism in Germany—once again using the Netflix show Babylon Berlin as a vehicle for examining various historical valences.
We pick out the Dr. Max Nonne influence on the character Dr. Schmidt; his Mesmer-esque, animal magnetism laying-of-hands documentary that he produced in the middle of WWI, exhibiting his hypnotherapeutic methods; the fact that Dr. Nonne became a major proponent of the proliferation of hypnotic treatment of vets in Germany & met w/ military officials; his super sus Social Darwinist & eugenicist stance; his culpability in formulating Nazi eugenic, sterilizing, & genocidal practices; his later defense of fellow doctors;... a scene from Babylon Berlin appearing to be a recreation-in-part of Nonne's doc; getting shit-talked by med students at the Charité Hospital; ...
You get a Klonny Gosch audio commentary on the scene in the Red Castle where Dr. Schmidt leads a "criminal telepathy" & hypnosis session aka seance, as requested by the Berlin murder polizei, who need his help in discovering the whereabouts of their suspect for The Phantom; we explore the possibility that Dr. Schmidt is the architect of the killings in a Dr. Mabuse fashion, which, when lumped in w/ the other criminal shit he's getting up to & our speculation about the possibility that he's had a hand in Alfred Nyssen's financial funding of proto-Nazi paramilitaries like the Black Reichswehr, makes things very interesting indeed; we examine the looming figure of Ernst "The Buddha" Gennat, revolutionizer of investigatory techniques with an unreal murder conviction rate & coiner of the phrase "serial killer" (no, not you, Mr. Mindhunter... step off, bruh); gooseberry pie & sleeping in the Red Castle;...
We switch our attention to Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler's favorite clairvoyant, magician, magazine magnate, & owner of the Palace of the Occult; you get a reductive speed run of his life & career, setting up a more in-depth biography in the following EPs; getting born in a prison & circus brat; mother's death from TB; his tragic, self-hating ways as a Jewish fascist; life on the road; Hanussen as yet another touchstone for Dr. Schmidt; similarities b/w Erik Jan Hanussen & Dr. Mabuse (masters of disguise & criminal masterminds); one example of Erik Jan Hanussen's use of his purported "telepathy" for crime fighting; Erik Jan Hanussen's "prophecy" of the Reichstag Fire...
We also do some cross-referential analyzing of Babylon Berlin, the Dr. Mabuse films, Werner Herzog's Invincible (a film about the Jewish strongman Zishe Breitbart who worked w/ Hanussen for a time)...
We talk about Dr. Mabuse's manipulation of the Berlin stock market in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler & compare this to Alfred Nyssen's arc in S3 of BB. We explore a bit of Fritz Lang's life at the time of the Nazi ascent; tease at the implications of the suppression of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse; Lang's meeting w/ Goebbels; his immediate flight for France afterwards, and the crazy story that he left his wife behind & pawned her jewels in order to make it happen;...
And we end on a very dark note, as we reveal yet another symmetry b/w the characters of Dr. Schmidt & the real life figure Erik Jan Hanussen—the fact that both ran a sexual blackmail ring, compiling kompromat on Weimar Republic politicians, aristocrats, & industrialists; in Hanussen's case, often serving to extort the people & extract massive bribes; we reckon w/ the likelihood that Hanussen was engaged in this practice, in part, bc he may have been a British agent; in BB, Dr. Schmidt has sexually blackmailed the police commissioner of Cologne and the real life figure Konrad Adenauer, who was later chancellor of Germany post-WWII; in Hanussen's instance, he was blackmailing folks like Count Helldorf & likely numerous higher-ups in the SA; we trot out the possibility Aleister Crowley was his handler; I speculate as to whether the stories about Hitler's supposed sadomasochism & love of poop stuff may have made their way into OSS files & the Longer Report via Hanussen; and we end w/ a very terrifying and icky account of the SA Obergruppenführer, former Landtag rep, & policeman Count Helldorf beating a 14 yr old Indian boy, a situation that was likely stage-managed by Hanussen to satiate Helldorf's yucky appetites.
Clips:
S3 EP 10 from Babylon Berlin
Palace of the Occult scene from Invincible
Songs:
| "Hypnose" - Babylon Berlin OST |
| Marek Weber - "Tango from Berlin" |
| Einheitsfrontlied - "German Worker's Song" | - a revolutionary anthem written in the shadow of the Nazi Party appealing to a unified left front to oppose the NSDAP; lyrics by Bertolt Brecht
