Dr. Mabuse

Dr. Mabuse is a master of disguise and telepathic hypnosis known to employ body transference, most often through demonic possession, but sometimes utilizing object technologies such as television or phonograph machines, to build a "society of crime". Mabuse rarely commits his crimes in person, instead operating primarily through a network of agents enacting his schemes. Mabuse's agents range from career criminals working for him, to innocents blackmailed or hypnotized into cooperation, to dupes manipulated so successfully that they do not realize that they are doing exactly what Mabuse planned for them to do.

Mabuse's identity often changes; one "Dr. Mabuse" may be defeated and sent to an asylum, jail or the grave, only for a new "Dr. Mabuse" to later appear, as depicted in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The replacement invariably has the same methods, the same powers of hypnosis and the same criminal genius. There are even suggestions in some installments of the series that the "real" Mabuse is some sort of spirit that possesses a series of hosts.

Mabuse has had a number of nemeses, with the main ones including Prosecutor (or Chief Inspector) von Wenk in Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (played by Bernhard Goetzke) and Kommissar Karl Lohmann (played variously by Otto Wernicke and Gert Fröbe as "Inspector Carl Lohemann").

Mabuse first appeared in the 1921 German novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler ("Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler") by Norbert Jacques. The novel benefitted from unprecedented publicity and quickly became a best-seller. Fritz Lang, already an accomplished director, worked with his wife Thea von Harbou on a revision of the novel to bring it to the screen, where it also became a great success. The film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), with a playing time of more than four hours, was released in two sections: The Great Gambler: An Image of the Time and Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age.

Despite the success of the novel and the film, it was almost a decade before anything more was done with the character. Jacques had been working on a sequel to the novel, named Mabuse's Colony, in which Mabuse has died and a group of his devotees are starting an island colony, based on the principles described by Mabuse's manifesto. However, the novel was unfinished. After conversations with Lang and von Harbou, Jacques agreed to discontinue the novel and the sequel instead became the 1933 movie The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which the Mabuse of 1922 – played again by Rudolf Klein-Rogge – is an inmate in an insane asylum but has for some time been obsessively writing meticulous plans for crime and terrorism, plans that are being performed by a gang of criminals outside the asylum, who receive their orders from a person who has identified himself to them only as Dr. Mabuse.

Novels

• Dr. Mabuse, Master of Mystery (original title: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler) – English translation by Lilian A. Clare published in 1923.
• Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse – written in the early 1930s, but not published until 1950 under the title Dr. Mabuses letztes Spiel.[16] In the late 1980s, it was reprinted under its original title Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse.[16]
• Mabuses Kolonie – unfinished novel that was written in 1930 and published in 1994.
• Mabuse also appears in Jacques's 1923 sci-fi novel Ingenieur Mars.[17]
• Jacques wrote a novel called Der Chemiker des Dr. Mabuse, but he ultimately removed all references to Mabuse from it and serialized it in 1934 under the title Chemiker Null.[18]

Short stories

• "Dr. Mabuse auf dem Presseball" (1923)

Notes

Sources

• Kalat, David (2001). The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Movies and Five Novels. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786423374.

Further reading

• Haase, Holger: The Many Masks of Dr. Mabuse: Mabuse in the 1960s. (Kindle 2020)

• Media related to Dr. Mabuse at Wikimedia Commons