Postwar Germany is a site of hauntings. The ghost, beyond its literal reference to the dead whose souls roam the streets, stands for guilt. The guilt of the survivor, who confesses to the rubble: “Tausende [sind] Tot. Tausende, die noch gern gelebt haben, nur ich, ich war wieder am Leben” (Lorre, Der Verlorene, 1:27:43). Postwar Germany is a sight of haunting, for it is characterized by denial, as can be seen in the immense success of Heimat films such as Grün ist die Heide (Deppe, Grün ist die Heide). (It is important to note that Heimatfilme were a genre that dominated German media in the early postwar years and were characterized by an overwhelming idealization of the German countryside and a complete denial of the war devastations. They are thus diametrically opposed to Der Verlorene, which is directly concerned with the events of the war as well as their tremendous, lasting influence on German life.) The disdain with which Peter Lorre’s film Der Verlorene was received upon its release can thus be explained as a non-consensual exposure to the apparition which loomed over the rummaged land, disallowing the ability to avert one’s gaze any longer. The haunted nation is personified in the figure of Dr. Rotte/Neuermeister in Der Verlorene, who is encapsulated in an atmosphere of uncanniness.
The film noir begins at a refugee camp near Hamburg, in which we see Dr. Neumeister, played by Lorre himself, treating the residents. In the midst of a resident’s vaccination, a figure by the name of Nowak appears, visibly unsettling Neumeister. After a small interlude, the two meet for drinks, spurring a dialogue during which it is made apparent that the two figures were previously acquainted with each other. Then, in a narrative form emulating in medias res, Dr. Neumeister’s reminiscing leads the scene to turn into a flashback. We follow Neumeister, then known as Dr. Rothe, who is conducting work at a Nazi research facility, assisted by Nowak, previously known as Hösch. In a heated discussion, Hösch informs Dr. Rothe that his fiancé is a spy for the Allied forces who continually betrays his love for information. After heading home, urged by Hösch to terminate his relationship with his fiancé, Inge, he strangles her.
The instance of Inge’s murder metamorphoses Rothe, with the character visibly shifting to the sinister. After his willful confession is denied the punishment he seeks, Dr. Rothe embarks upon a series of seemingly unprovoked sex murders. The flashback elapses, returning to Nowak and Dr. Neumeister’s table now littered with discarded bottles. Dr. Neumeister finally shoots Hösch and commits suicide by standing in front of an approaching train. Desctruction, displacement, and violence loom over the film, whose narrative structure, sonic, and visual elements explore the tension between the trauma left behind by National Socialism and the existential exile which it imposed upon its victims.
Mourning, as Freud posits in Mourning and Melancholia, consists of a cessation of all attachment to the object of affection after the subject in mourning is made aware of the object’s death. We might then understand Postwar Germany as a subject in mourning, haunted by the trauma of violence, destruction, and complicity which fascism bred.
Through the theoretical lens of Freud’s The Uncanny, this ghastly manifestation of trauma can be seen as a double. The visual motif of shadows and reflections throughout Der Verlorene act as a tangible representation of the double which is born after Inge’s strangulation. Similarly, the objects to which the main character is obsessively attached – such as Inge’s pearl necklace – act as material scraps of Dr. Rotte’s life before the division of his ego. Dr. Rotte’s double constitutes the embodiment of the trauma which he experienced prior to the violent separation of his ego, facilitating the return of the repressed which leads him to his series of sex murders and is eventually overcome by the death drive in the scene of his suicide.
Shadows & Reflections
As A Symbolic Representation of the Double
Freud defines the uncanny as that which “belongs to ‘all that is terrible’, arousing dread and creeping horror. Situations that produce an eerie sensation capture the paradox of being attracted to yet disturbed by an object” (1). Drawing on Otto Rank, Freud posits the double as an ‘entity’ intimately connected with the uncanny. The double, the shadow, the reflection, all act as insurance against the annihilation and death of the self, thus constituting an “energetic denial of the power of death” (9). Freud extends the notion of the double into the realm of future ideation, incorporating the “unfulfilled but possible futures to which we like to cling in fantasy, […] [the] strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed” (10).
Furthermore, there is a sense of familiarity inherent to the double which contributes to its uncanniness. One’s double, which manifests in multiplicitous ways in one’s world, is an entity one is intimately aware of and acquainted with, as one is acquainted with one’s reflection. As Freud writes: “we can understand why the linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only though the process of the repression” (13). This metamorphosis of the familiar to the uncanny, embodied in the double, thus presupposes a rupture, an event which transforms that which is known into that which trauma clings to and thus must be repressed.
War undoubtedly presents a rupture– a severing of the continuity of the self. The violence which individuals under conditions of war are subjected to or are complacent is a source of trauma, worsened by the amassment of guilt which ensues. Although the violence might come to its natural end with the lapse of war, memory does not allow it to be expelled from the mind. The trauma haunts, in spite of any attempts to repress that which remembrance brings back to the mind. Thus, regardless of the particularities of one’s experience with WWII, simply by virtue of having survived one has experienced the metamorphosis of the ego from a non-disrupted and centered self to a traumatized and divided self.
Though one’s experiential present is that of an existential exile, the memory of a self unmarred by wartime lingers, clinging to the affective rubble of trauma which surrounds the ego. Considering the familiarity of the double discussed in The Uncanny, it is natural that we assign the label of double to the ghastly presence of trauma which as a miasma poisons the psyche.
The condition of alienation of the existential exile is so pervasive that it transcends mere exile from the body politic. It is an exile from the self before the temporal fissure. After the rupture, the self is encapsulated in this trauma, exiled from pre-exilic time, engaged in a continuous repression of the violence it has experienced. The ego becomes exiled from its origin and intended point of return– the wholeness of the womb. The decentering of the self which is characteristic of this meta-exile is almost literal in this sense, as the transformed ego has to make room for the double which realizes the repressed. The return of the repressed takes place with the repetition of trauma that the double instigates, subjecting the self to the experience of the rupture again and again.
Der Verlorene is similarly characterized by a temporal multiplicity, specifically containing three temporalities: pre-exilic time, Dr. Neuermeister’s proto-exilic time – characterized by his sex-murders – and Dr. Rotte’s exilic narrative present. The scene of Inge’s strangulation acts as the rupture of pre-exilic time into proto-exilic time. It is a decisive break, a crescendo in the sonic premonition of catastrophe which characterizes the first portion of the work. Beyond the sonic uncanniness, the visual language through which the uncanny is articulated – and the double personified – within the film, is that of shadows and reflections. In accordance with the sonic foreshadowing of doom, the visual premonitions are expressed through the shadow/reflection motif.
After Hoesch informs Dr. Neumeister of Inge’s betrayal, Lorre’s character erratically searches through the lab, staining his hands with the blood of the rabbit which he had extracted in an earlier scene. It is here that the function of reflections as a similar articulation of the double in visual language can be seen. Dr. Neumeister’s frantic movement ceases when he finds himself before the mirror, where he runs his hand over his facial features, painting them in crimson. The image of blood on one’s hands functions here as a symbolic representation of the guilt inherent in being responsible for one’s death. Thus, the rabbit’s blood painting his flesh foreshadows both Dr. Neuermeister’s murderous future and the division of his ego into two.
At this point, the figure has not yet entered exilic time – the division of his psyche which enables his later descent into lunacy has not yet taken place, so the ego is an undivided monad and the reflection a representation of whole. The blood, shown hrough the use of a mirror, is a reflection which will soon be metamorphosed into a double. This metamorphosis occurs at the moment Inge’s lifeless body collapses onto the carpeted floor and the lover’s blood stains Dr. Neuermeister’s hand.
It is not only mirror reflections which speak to the double, but also shadows. The function of shadows as visual representations of the repressed becomes evident in the scene preceding Inge’s strangulation. Instead of the characters coexisting in the same space, the viewer is met with a series of vignettes, in which one character can be seen in the foreground and the shadow of the other inhabits the background. The harmonious coexistence of the two characters can thus only be realized in the form of a figure and a shadow, never in the flesh (Der Verlorene, 30:47).
As a Motif in Der Verlorene
After Hoesch informs Dr. Rotte of Inge’s betrayal – and as is further suggested by the earlier mirror scene – the birth of the double is steadfastly approaching. The only part of Dr. Neumeister that can inhabit the pre-exilic temporal plane that Inge occupies is the whole, unalloyed ego. This interpretation is further supported by the fact that the characters meet in the flesh once again only for Inge to be strangled. The shadow of Rotte in this scene thus constitutes a double, the personified repression of the trauma which he has experienced, apotheosized in his learning of Inge’s betrayal. The version of his ego which retains its solidity, which hasn’t been immolated by estrangement, exile, and Inge’s betrayal no longer dominates his psyche. Inge is a figure of pre-exilic time and after the rupture, Dr. Neumeister’s whole ego, which inhabited this temporality alongside Inge, has ceased to exist.
After the temporal fissure caused by Inge’s strangulation, the condition of alienation into which Dr. Neuermeister is thrust upon his entrance into exilic time is so pervasive that it is constitutive of both an estrangement from the body politic – in his transformation into a misanthrope and murderer – and the decentering of the self. The phantasy of pre-exilic life and the pre-exilic unalloyed self to which Lorre’s character clings on is referred to as “home.”
Throughout the film, the main figure repeats: “Wieder hatte ich nur einen Wunsch: nach Hause,” and “Ich möchte nach Hause” (Der Verlorene, 1:27:43). This longing for home is a manifestation of the death drive. The rupture of the self disrupts the sense of wholeness which one possessed in pre-exilic time. Thus, beyond the repetition of trauma which is facilitated with the return of the repressed, the subject continues to seek a mode of existence which somehow resembles the undivided ego. Dr. Rotte yearns to return to a state of existence such as the womb. Such a state now coincides with the death of the ego. Thus, the function of the double as a symbolic portrayal of “home” represents the character’s origin and his desired destination. Within the darkness of the shadow and the estranged familiarity of the reflection resides the yearning for death: a state which resembles the wholeness of the self in the womb.
Indeed, the beginning and end of the film are bookmarked by the image of a steadily approaching train, a motif directly relevant to the function of the shadow as an origin and intended point of return. In the beginning of the film, seeing the train awakens within the spectator the expectation of physical displacement. However, throughout the film, the displacement proves to be existential, as well as temporal displacement: the former encapsulated in the displacement of the ego, to make space for the double and the latter in the transition from pre-exilic to exilic time.
The scene in which Dr. Neuermeister is aboard the train, facing the figure of the verrücktes vagabond, not only shows his inability to physically be displaced, but also acts as direct evidence of existential displacement. The vagabond incessantly asks and exclaims to Dr. Neumeister: “Kennen Sie mich?” and “Ich kenne Sie” (Der Verlorene, 1:00:19-58). However, the figure never recounts a name; in fact, the only identifier is provided by the prostitute who refers to him as: “Totmacher.” The character is no longer identified by what he once was – Dr. Neumeister, a whole, unalloyed ego – rather, he has become a misanthrope, a murderer. All the markers of identification which would’ve been appropriate in pre-exilic time are now encapsulated in the double, rather than the character himself. Physical displacement to home has also moved to the sphere of the unrealizable. With the origin and intended point of return belonging to the realm of the double, home has been reduced to shadows and reflections which are tauntingly present yet unreachable.
The return of the train imagery in the final scene of the film further supports this interpretation. Dr. Rotte has been left with one wish: nach Hause. However, home has become a terrain that is fundamentally non-possessable. Thus, boarding the train to return to Magdalenenstrasse would be a futile attempt at escape. The fact that the character positions himself in front of the train as a means of committing suicide acts as evidence to the existential nature of his exile. If his ego remained a monad, physical displacement would be sufficient in rectifying his condition. However, with the rupture of the self, the origin is relegated to the realm of the non-possessable. In the case of Dr. Rotte, the strivings of the ego which the double represents have been so thoroughly crushed by adverse external circumstances that the only form of plausible return is death. Death thus becomes the central character’s final attempt to return to the wholeness and purity of the womb.
The angle at which the scene of Dr. Rotte’s suicide is taken ensures that the light falls onto the figure, cutting off the part of the image in which the spectator might see his shadow on the train tracks. Instead, the clouds which overwhelm the background of the shadow make it seem as though the character is a shadow on a white surface (Der Verlorene, 1:32:56). Temporarily, flesh and shadow are reconciled, further indicating the function of death as an attempt at reconciliation of the ego and the double.
Once the scene of his suicide fades into black, we see, as in the beginning of the film, a brick wall which now announces the end. The declaration “Ende” is framed by two distinct shadows which overpower the frame. Although the visual language used in the suicide scene momentarily allows the spectator to hope that Dr. Rotte’s wish might be granted, the double creeping through the edges of the ending scene suggests otherwise. In the historical context of postwar Germany as a sight of hauntings.,the double remains as the memory of the destruction, violence, and terror endured under fascism; it is the phantasmagoria of a country in which ‘die Heide bleibt Grün’ is just that – a fabrication of minds eager to escape from their complicity.
Materiality, Partiality, & the Existential Condition of Exile
Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen,
In diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;
Sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,
Doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.
Da steht auch mein Mensch und starrt in die Höhe,
Und ringt die Hände, vor Schmerzens Gewalt
Mir graust es, wenn ich sein Antlitz sehe–
Der Mond zeigt mir meine eigne Gestalt.
Du Doppelgänger! Du bleicher Geselle!
Was äffst du nach mein Liebesleid,
Das mich gequält auf dieser Stelle,
So manche Nacht, in alter Zeit?
Der Doppelgänger, Heinrich Heine
Heinrich Heine beautifully reveals the significance of the material remnants of life before the rupture – in this case, the lost lover’s house. Der Verlorene, is littered with material objects, scraps of Dr. Neumeister’s life before Inge’s strangulation. It is these fragments, residues, and remnants of trauma which facilitate a regime of haunting. In Postwar Germany, residuals of a disowned past also haunt the landscape, regardless of the denial which aims to annihilate or sublimate the survivor’s guilt. Although there were insistent efforts made to remove the stain of fascism from the fabric of society, dilapidated sites remain, forever carrying with them memories which cannot be expelled. The lover’s house in Heinrich Heine’s poem demonstrates this phenomenon, showing the significance of the material remnants left behind from times past and their enabling of remembrance in the present.
In the same way that these traces of fascism haunt postwar Germany, the scraps left behind from pre-exilic time remain, haunting the film’s central figure. Indeed, the persistent presence of material objects creates strong continuities between pre-exilic, proto-exilic, and the exilic narrative present, facilitating the return of the repressed. The material remnants of pre-exilic time further enable the cyclical nature of exile, acting as an insistent reminder of the trauma which brought upon the self the condition of exile to begin with. They are tangible realizations of that which the double represents, never quite allowing the memory of the past to fade. As is the case in Heine’s poem The Doppelgänger the material remnant of the past intensifies the past’s absence. The lover’s house facilitates the constant interjection of past into present, “haunting” the subject engaged in an effort to expel the pain of mourning. The immaterial is radically different, yet the food rations, the difficulty in finding a dwelling, the steadfastly approaching train, Inge’s pearls, and Hoesch’s gun remain unchanged, material phantoms to which repressed trauma clings.
The significance of the material object as a physical manifestation of the double can be seen in the scene of Inge’s strangulation. In the moments immediately preceding her death, Inge’s pearls at the center of the frame appear almost autoluminous (Der Verlorene, 35:48). By contrast, in the foreground, the figure of Rotte is almost entirely black, indicating a direct juxtaposition between the life as symbolized by the pearls and the rupture into proto-exilic time soon to come. When his hand moves from caressing her face to her pearls and then to her neck, it acts as a foreshadowing of the fact that his hand will soon replace the necklace during the act of strangulation (Der Verlorene, 36:25). As though a transition between vignettes, the camera then turns to Dr. Neumeister’s face, showing him closing his eyes. The image of Dr. Neumeister closing his eyes right before strangling Inge is again indicative of the act rupturing his ego. The closed eyes act as a symbolic representation of the whole ego’s death, which brings the birth of the double (Fingestein).
It is at this moment that the camera fades and his ego is divided into two. As he recounts the story of Inge’s strangulation to Hoesch, the camera shows Neumeister playing with Inge’s pearl as he reflects: “Dann war da etwas zwischen meinen Händen, glaube ich. Ich spielte damit, ohne zu wissen was es war” (Der Verlorene, 37:56). This transition from the dear adornment of a lover to an unfamiliar object which elicits uncanniness leads us back to Freud’s discussion of the development of the unheimlich from the heimlich. The object is momentarily unfamiliar to Dr. Neuermeister because his ego has been reborn and the tether of familiarity between the pearl and his past life has now been displaced to the terrain of shadows and reflections. It has become a tangible realization of trauma, which in its repression loses the sense of familiarity previously inherent to it. Thus, Inge’s pearls become a fragment of pre-exilic time of which now remains only a burgeoning striving and a simmering longing.
Der Verlorene is densely populated by images of Dr. Neumeister reaching into his pocket and toying with Inge’s pearls, a motif that reinstates the cyclical temporality of exile as an existential condition. The material scraps of pre-exilic time rupture linear temporality and, much like the ever-presence of the shadows and reflections, inconveniently bring forth that which the main character attempts to extinguish through repression. It is these leftovers and the vestigial memory of a past brimming with horror that haunt both the central figure of the film as well as postwar Germany. The unsurveilled and unregulated ruins of sites central to Nazi history offer home to the urban uncanny which lurks the streets. As one cannot return to shadows, so too is one unable to return to the origin embodied by the double. The fact that what remains is a scrap further supports this hypothesis.
As apparitions in traditional folklore haunting, scraps flit across space and cannot be characterized as wholes. Amongst the plethora of ghost tales of German folklore, the Wiedergänger constitutes a prime example of an apparition which in an effort to avenge injustice, returns to the world of the living in order to disrupt normality and terrorize (Geulen). By virtue of its partiality, the ghost of Inge, represented or encompassed in a necklace, a series of pearls on a string, resists reconstruction into a whole. It is a trace which is traceable to a past that lends itself only to naive strivings, to imagination, and memory. Once one enters the existential condition of exile, the remnants that they are left with, much like the double, are traceable to but not completely revealing of the origin, “they are apparitions which suggest avenues via which we might remember the past but provide no map” (Edensor 48).
Concluding Scraps
Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene orbits around the existential condition of exile. In its haunted uncanniness, it is littered with material and immaterial manifestations of pre-exilic time, which illuminate the intricacies of exilic time itself. The figure of Dr. Neumeister/Rotte acts as a symbolic representation of postwar Germany. Although the aesthetic regulation of German cities aims toward a reorganization of its relationship to the past, the surveillance and often erasure of the scraps left behind by the Third Reich does not erase the vision of a past life which lurks in shadows, reflections, and material remnants. The repressed returns.
Der Verlorene, much like the untouched ruins of Nazism, escapes official and curated descriptions of the past, conjuring the uncanny which hides behind corners and in the back of survivors’ minds. Peter Lorre’s film can almost be described as a ghost itself considering how it lingers where order and aesthetic surveillance diminishes. It is a wasteland of memories, doubles, and uncanniness: “ruins are spaces where the unseen and forgotten lurk, but they are especially important, because […] it is essential to see things and people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness” (Edensor 20).
Although it was received with great disdain, the film is an ingenious representation of the existential condition of exile, of the decentering of the self which comes with having survived and been complicit to abhorrent crimes. The introduction of the Freudian lens in this line of analysis illuminates the shadow/reflection visual language as a manifestation of the repressed trauma in the form of the ‘double’. This then awakes the death drive and engages the main character in a ceaseless yearning for the wholeness of the womb. Alongside the above, scrutinizing the materiality of the scrap – specifically Inge’s necklace – which Dr. Neumeister clings to allows us to understand physicality as another significant dimension of existential exile and repression of past trauma both within the context of the film’s narrative as well as in Postwar Germany.
Works Cited
Detre, Laura. “You Are the Murderers: German Guilt in Peter Lorre’s ‘Der Verlorene.’” Colloquia Germanica 48.3 (2015): 171–181.
Edensor, Tim. “The Ghosts of Industrial Ruins: Ordering and Disordering Memory in Excessive Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23.6 (2005): 829–849. https://doi.org/10.1068/d58j.
Geulen, Eva. “Wiedergänger der Geistesgeschichte.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 97.1 (2023): 87–94.
Fingesten, Peter. “Sight and Insight: A Contribution Toward An Iconography of the Eye.” Criticism 1.1 (1959): 19–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23091098.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin Books, 2003.
Heine, Heinrich, and Frederic Ewen. The Poetry and Prose of Heinrich Heine. New York: Citadel Press, 1948.
Lorre, Peter. et al. Der Verlorene. Germany: Arthaus, 1951.
Yaeger, Patricia. “Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or What Does It Mean to Still Be Haunted by Southern Literature?” South Central Review 22.1 (2005): 87–108.