Karl May

Rapper's The Adventures of Mark Twain is the basis, Troell's Hamsun the beneficiary. "A Munchausen for the proletariat," Karl May (Helmut Käutner) in old age, builder of myths and "perverter of youth" and sacred fraud. "Shall I appear before you as a cowboy or a writer?" The New World invented from a study in Saxony, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou as idealized blood brothers and grist to the mill of Teutonic fantasies. Legal picadillos from the past become the weapons of his foes, snoops and philistines and rationalists drag his name through the mud. When not confronting a mob of bureaucrats descending upon his villa, he's dealing with delicate marital matters—divorce from the wife of two decades (Kristina Söderbaum), companionship from the former secretary (Käthe Gold). "The soul is a vast land into which we flee." There are sprinkles of mental simulacra (the exotic "Orient" as flagrant rear-projection, artificial snow for a storybook village), for the most part though Hans-Jürgen Syberberg envisions the author's twilight as an earthbound Möbius strip of litigation. Mounds of missives, soulful ruminations in parlors and carriages, insinuations and blackmail. "Not much psyche but plenty of psychology" in these modern times. Cinema is still a flipbook in a box, the publisher's realm is a maquette contemplated through a black monocle. The Mohawk in the courtroom has never heard of May, George Grosz is a guest for tea, a certain young Adolf borrows shoes at the Austrian flophouse to attend his hero's speech. Nazi-kino troupers abound, Lil Dagover is the shrunken Baroness who can sniff the hatred in the air. Bogus teepee and bogus lion under a bogus blizzard at the end of the line. "He needs our Hell for his redemption," Syberberg's Reich inferno lurks on the horizon. With Attila Hörbiger, Willy Trenk-Trebitsch, Mady Rahl, Rudolf Prack, Leon Askin, Harry Hardt, Fritz von Friedl, and Peter Kern.