Metropolis ~ Chapter 2
From Metropolis - New Translation
This piece is part of my ongoing translation of the novel of Thea von Harbou’s “Metropolis”. If you’d like to find out more about the project, check out the essay below:
The brain-box of the New Tower of Babel was populated with numbers. Spoken from a clear, quiet and unmoving voice from an invisible source, the numbers dropped in a rhythm down through the cool air of the room, collecting, as in a water basin, at the table which the great brain of Metropolis worked, becoming actualised under the pencils of his secretaries. These eight young men resembled each other, like brothers, although they were not. While they sat like stone figures, with only the writing finger of the right hand animated, every single one of them, with sweat-bedewed brows and parted lips, looked like the personification of breathlessness. None of them raised their head as Freder entered - not even his father.
The lamp under the third loudspeaker glowed white-red.
New York spoke.
Joh Fredersen was comparing the figures of the evening exchange rates with the charts that lay before him. At one point, his voice rung out, vibrationless: "Mistake. Further inquiry."
The First Secretary startled, stooped lower, rose and removed himself on his soundless soles. Joh Fredersen's left eyebrow rose somewhat as he watched him going – but only for as long as was possible without him turning his head.
A thin, concise pencil-line struck through a name.
The white-red light glowed. The voice spoke. The numbers dropped down into the great room - the brain-box of Metropolis.
Freder remained standing, motionless, by the door. He wasn’t sure whether or not his father had already noticed him. Whenever he entered this room, he was once again a boy of ten years old, uncertainty as the fundamental feature of his being, opposite this great, confined and almighty certainty, who was called Joh Fredersen and was his father.
The First Secretary walked past him, greeting him silently and respectfully. He resembled a competitor leaving the track defeated. The chalky face of the young man hovered for a moment before Freder's eyes, like a big, white, lacquer mask. Then it was blanked out.
Numbers dropped down through the room.
A chair was empty. On seven others sat seven men, pursuing the numbers which sprang unceasingly from the invisible.
A lamp glowed white-red.
New York spoke.
A lamp shone out: white-green.
London began speaking.
Freder looked up at the clock which, opposite the door, dominated the entire wall like a Ferris wheel. It was the same clock which, from the heights of the New Tower of Babel, bathed by spotlights, sprayed its flashes of seconds over the great Metropolis. Joh Fredersen's head extended in to it. It hung as a crushing yet enduring halo above the brain of Metropolis.
Upon the narrow floor-to-ceiling windows, the searchlights raved in the delirium of a colourful battle. Cascades of light frothed against the panes. Outside, deep down, at the foot of the New Tower of Babel, Metropolis boiled. But, in this room, there was not a sound to be heard except the incessantly dripping numbers; the Rotwang Process had rendered the walls and windows soundproof.
In this room, which was simultaneously crowned and enslaved by this mighty timepiece - the numerical clock - nothing had any significance but numbers. The son of the great Master of Metropolis realised that, as long as numbers came dripping out of the invisible, no word which was not a number, and that came from a visible mouth, was entitled to be heard.
As such, he stood silently, gazing incessantly upon the dark skull of his father, and saw how the monstrous hand of the clock relentlessly pushed onwards, like a sickle - a reaping scythe - passed through the skull of his father, without harming him, pressing upwards again, up the ring beset with numbers, creeping above the heights and sinking again to repeat the futile blow of the scythe.
At last the white-red light went out. A voice ceased.
Then the white-green light went out too.
Silence.
The hands of those writing halted, and for the duration of a sparse moment, they sat as though paralytic, flaccid, exhausted. Then the voice of Joh Fredersen, with a dry gentleness, said: "Thank you. Tomorrow."
And, without looking round: "What do you want, my boy?"
The seven strangers abandoned the now-silent room. Freder stepped beside his father, whose glance was washing over the charts of captured number-drops. Freder's eyes hung to the blue metal plate near the right hand of his father.
"How did you know I was there?" he asked, softly.
Joh Fredersen did not look up at him. Although his face had gained an expression of patience and pride at the first question which his son had posed to him, none of his vigilance had been lost. He glanced at the clock. His fingers glided over the smooth keys of the keyboard. Without a sound, orders flashed out to waiting men.
"The door opened. Nobody had been notified. Nobody comes to me unannounced. Only my son."
A light beneath the glass: a query. Joh Fredersen extinguished the light. The First Secretary entered and came over to the great Master of Metropolis.
"You were right. It was a mistake. It has been rectified," he reported, expressionlessly.
"Thank you." No glance. No gesture. "The G—bank has been instructed to pay you your salary. Good evening."
The young man stood unmoving. Three, four, five, six seconds flicked off the gigantic timepiece. In the young man’s chalky face, two empty eyes burned, impressing the brand of his fear upon Freder's vision.
One of Joh Fredersen's shoulders moved sluggishly.
"Good evening," said the young man, as if strangled.
He went.
"Why did you dismiss him, father?" the son asked.
"I had no need for him," said Joh Fredersen, still not having looked at his son.
"Why not, father?"
"I have no need for people who startle when they are spoken to," said the Master of Metropolis.
"Perhaps he felt ill… perhaps he is worrying about somebody dear to him..."
"Possibly. Perhaps he was, too, still intoxicated from too long a night in Yoshiwara... Beware, Freder, of holding people as good, innocent and victimised just because they suffer. He who suffers is to blame, for himself and for others."
"You do not suffer, father?"
"No."
"You are quite free of blame?"
"The time of blame and suffering lies behind me, Freder."
"And if, now, this man… I have never seen such a thing… but I believe that men that go out of a room, as he did, are determined to bring their lives to an end...”
"Perhaps."
"And if you learnt tomorrow morning that he were dead… that you would really not be affected by it?
"No."
Freder became silent.
His father's hand slipped over a lever, pushing it down. In all the rooms that surrounded the brain-box of the New Tower of Babel, the white lamps went out. The Master of Metropolis had informed the ring-world around him that he did not wish to be disturbed without urgent reason.
"I cannot tolerate it," he continued, "when a man at my right hand, in solidarity with me, working for Metropolis, denies the only great advantage he possesses over a machine."
"And what is that, father?"
"To see work as pleasure," said the Master of Metropolis.
Freder's hand ran through his hair and stayed resting on its pure fairness. He opened his lips, as though he wanted to say something - but he remained silent.
"Do you suppose," Joh Fredersen went on, "that I need my secretaries' pencils to check American stock-exchange reports? The index tables from Rotwang's Trans-Ocean Trumpets are a hundred times more reliable and quicker than clerk's brains and hands. But, by the precision of the machine, I can measure the precision of the men; by the breath of the machine, the lungs of the men who race against her."
"And the man you just dismissed, who is doomed (for to be dismissed by you, father, means: Down! Down!) - he’s lost his breath, hasn’t he?"
"Yes."
"Because he was a man and not a machine…"
"Because he denied his humanity before the machine."
Freder raised his head and his deeply troubled eyes. "I’m not following you any further on this, father," he said, agonisingly.
The expression of patience on Joh Fredersen's face deepened.
"The man," he said quietly, "was my First Secretary. He drew a salary eight times that of my latest. That was synonymous with the obligation to perform eight times as much - to me; not to himself. Tomorrow the Fifth Secretary will take his place. In a week he will have rendered four of the others superfluous. That is a man I can need."
"Because he saves four others..."
"No, Freder. Because he sees the work of four others as pleasure. Because he latches himself entirely on to his work — latching on entirely in pleasure, as if it were a woman."
Freder was silent. Joh Fredersen looked at his son. He looked at him considerately.
"You have experienced something?" he asked.
The eyes of the boy, beautiful and sad, glanced past him, into space. Wild, white light sprayed up against the windows, and, in dissipating, left behind the sky over Metropolis as a black velvet cloth.
"I’ve experienced nothing, except..." said Freder, hesitantly, "that I believe, for the first time in my life, I have comprehended the being of a machine..."
"That would mean a great deal," replied the Master of Metropolis. "But you are probably wrong, Freder. Had you really comprehended the being of a machine, you would not be so perturbed."
Slowly the son turned his eyes to him, along with the helplessness of his incomprehension.
"How can one be anything other than perturbed," he said, "if one takes the route to you, as I did, through the machine-halls - through the glorious halls of your glorious machines - and sees the creatures who are chained to them by laws of eternal watchfulness: lidless eyes..."
He paused, his lips dry as dust.
Joh Fredersen lent backwards. He had not let his gaze fall from his son, and still held it fast.
"Why did take the route through the machine-halls," he asked calmly. "It is neither the shortest, nor the most convenient."
"I wanted..." said his son, searching distant for the words, "just once to look the men in the face—whose little children are my brothers — my sisters…"
He made a movement as if he wanted to catch those words, barely uttered, in the air and and retrieve them. But they were spoken. Joh Fredersen did not stir. "Hm," said the other with very tight lips. The pencil which he held between his fingers tapped gently, with a dry sound, twice, three times against the table's edge. Joh Fredersen's eyes wandered from his son to the twitching flash of the seconds on the clock, then sunk back again to him.
"And what did you find?" he asked.
Seconds of silence. Then it was as though the son, uprooting and tearing loose his entire self, threw himself upon his father with a gesture of utter self-exposure. Yet, he stood quietly, with head now bent a little, and spoke so softly as though every word were suffocated between his lips.
"Father! Help the men who live by your machines!"
"I cannot help them," said the brain of Metropolis. "Nobody can help them. They are where they need to be. They are what they need to be. They are unfit for anything more or anything different."
"I do not know what they are fit for," said Freder expressionlessly. His head fell upon his chest as though half-decapitated. "I only know what I saw — and that it was dreadful to look upon… I went through the machine-halls; they were like temples. All the great Gods were living in white temples. I saw Baal and Moloch, Huitzilopotchli and Durgha; some dreadfully genial, some horribly alone. I saw the divine car of the Juggernaut and the Towers of Silence, the sickle sword of Muhammad and the crosses of Golgotha. And all the machines, machines, machines, which, bound on their pedestals, like deities on their temple thrones, were living their god-like existence from the houses that bore them: Eyeless but all-seeing, earless but all-hearing, without speech, yet, in themselves, a self-proclaiming mouth — not man, not woman, and yet procreating, conceiving, and birthing — lifeless, yet shaking the air of their temples with the never-expiring breath of their vitality. And, near the God-Machines, the slaves of the God-Machines: men, as if ground between machine-communion and machine-solitude. They have no loads to carry: the machine carries the loads. They neither have to lift nor heave: the machine lifts and heaves. They have nothing else to do but forever be one and the same – each one in his place, each one at his machine. Measured by narrow seconds, always with the same grip on the same second, on each of those seconds. They have eyes, but it’s as if they are blind except for one thing: the scale of the manometer. They have ears, but it’s as if they are deaf except for one thing: the hiss of their machine. They watch and watch, having no thought except for one thing: should their watchfulness waiver, the machine will awaken from its feigned sleep and begin to hurtle, hurtling itself into pieces. And the machine, having neither head nor brain, sucks and sucks the brain of the watchman from his paralysed skull, with the tension of the watchfulness - eternal watchfulness – and not subsiding, and sucks, not subsiding, until a being hangs from the sucked-out skull, no longer a man and not yet a machine, pumped-dry, hollowed-out, used-up. And the machine, which has slurped-up and devoured the spinal cord and brain of the man, and has wiped clean the hollows in his skull with a soft, long tongue of its soft, long whirring, the machine gleams in its silver-velvet lustre, showered with anointing oil, beautiful and infallible — Baal and Moloch, Huitzilopotchli and Durgha. And you, father, you rest your fingertips upon the little blue metal plate near your right hand, and your great, glorious, tremendous city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain. And then the living fodder rolls in, like a stream, into the machine-halls resembling temples, and the used-up are spat out…”
His voice failed him. He struck the knuckles of his hands violently together, and looked at his father, "and are but human beings, father!"
"Unfortunately. Yes."
The father's voice sounded to the son's ear as though he spoke from behind seven closed doors.
"That men are used up by the machines so rapidly, Freder, is not evidence of the gluttony of the machine; rather, of the deficiency of human material. Man is the product of chance, Freder. A once-and-for-eternity being. If he has defects when cast, he cannot be sent back to the smelter. One is forced to use him up him as he is. Moreover, it’s been statistically proven that the efficiency of the unspirited worker lessens from month to month..."
Freder laughed. The laugh came out so dry and so parched from his lips that Joh Fredersen jerked his head upwards, observing his son through narrowed eyelids. Slowly, he raised his eyebrows.
"Do you not fear, father - supposing the statistics are correct and the wearing-out of men is progressing increasingly rapidly - that one fine day there will be no more fodder left for the man-eating God-machines, and that the Moloch of glass, rubber and steel, the Durgha of aluminium with platinum veins, will have to starve miserably?"
"The case is conceivable," said the brain of Metropolis.
"And what then?"
"By then," said the brain of Metropolis, "a substitute for those men will have already been found."
"The improved man, you mean? The Machine-Man?"
"Perhaps," said the brain of Metropolis.
Freder swept the damp hair from his brow. He bent forward so that his breath came into contact with his father.
"Then listen to just this one thing, father," he whispered, the veins on his temples flickering blue. "Make sure that the Machine-Men have no head, or at least, no face. Or, give him a face that always smiles. Or, a Harlequin's face, or a closed visor. So one is not appalled if one look at him! Because, as I walked through the machine-halls today, I saw the men there who guard your machines. And they knew me, and I greeted them, one after the other. But not one gave me a greeting back. All too eagerly, the machines reeled in their nerve-fibres. And when I looked at them, father, quite closely - as closely as I look at you now – then I saw I was looking at my own face! Every single man, father, who fronted your machines, has my face - the face of your son..."
"Then of mine too, Freder, for we look alike" said the Master over the great Metropolis. He looked at the clock and reached out his hand. In all the rooms that surrounded the brain-box of the New Tower of Babel, the white lamps flared up.
"And it doesn’t fill you with dread," asked the son, "to know so many shadows - so many phantoms - of yourself are at work on your creation?"
"The time of horror lies behind me, Freder."
Then, Freder turned around and went, like a blind man—first missing the door with his groping hand, eventually finding it. It opened in front of him, and he went out. It closed behind him, and he stood silently, in a room that seemed strange and icy to him.
From the chairs which they had been waiting on, forms rose up, bowing low before the son of Joh Fredersen, the Master of Metropolis. Freder only recognized one of them: The Thin Man.
He thanked those who greeted him, yet still stood by the door, seeming like he didn’t know his way. Behind him, The Thin Man narrowly squeezed in to Joh Fredersen, who had requested him.
The Master of Metropolis stood by the window, his back to the door.
"Wait!" said the dark, broad-angled back.
The Thin Man did not stir. He breathed inaudibly. With his eyelids lowered, he seemed to sleep while standing. But his mouth, through the tremendous tension of its muscles, made him the embodiment of concentration.
Joh Fredersen let his eyes pass over Metropolis, which was a restless, roaring sea with a surf of light. Under the torrents and waves, the Niagara Falls of light, under the colour-play of the swirling towers of glitz and glam, Metropolis appeared to have become transparent. Dissected into cones and cubes by the mowing scythes of the spotlights, the houses gleamed, towering up hoveringly, while light flowed down their flanks like rain. The streets lapped up the glowing radiance, themselves glowing, and the things that were gliding upon them, in an uninterrupted stream, threw cones of light before them.
Only the cathedral, which wore the star-crowned Virgin atop its spire, lay stretched-out wide before the city, lying like a black giant in a magical sleep.
Joh Fredersen turned around slowly. He saw The Thin Man standing by the door. The Thin Man greeted him. Joh Fredersen came towards him.
He crossed the whole width of the room in silence; he walked slowly, until he reached the man. Standing before him, he looked at him, as though he were peeling everything corporeal from the man’s innermost self through his gaze.
The Thin Man stood firm through this peeling gaze.
Joh Fredersen said, speaking quite softly: "From now on, I wish to be informed of my son’s every movement."
The Thin Man bowed, waited, saluted and went. But he could no longer find the son of his great master where he had left him. And he was not destined to find him again.
< Chapter 1 = = = = = = = = = = = Chapter 3 >