The Kaiser's Lackey

Wolfgang Staudte's 1951 DEFA production adapts Heinrich Mann's novel, published in 1918. Diederich Hessling grows up frightened of everyone and everything, then turns that fear into a method: bow to whoever is above you and step on whoever is below. The formula carries him upward through a duelling student fraternity, a paper factory, and the bargaining of a town council. The film satirises the culture of obedience in imperial Germany through a single character portrait, and it does so without granting its protagonist even a trace of sympathy. It opened in East Germany in 1951; West German audiences saw it only in 1957, after roughly fifteen minutes were cut and a prefatory note was added. Werner Peters carries the title role.