Doctor Mabuse - History

History

Dr. Mabuse first appeared in the 1921 novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (translation: "Dr. Mabuse The Player" or "Dr. Mabuse The Gambler") by Norbert Jacques. The novel was the beneficiary of unprecedented publicity efforts and became a best-seller very soon. Lang, already an accomplished director, worked with his wife Thea von Harbou to translate the novel to the screen, where it also became a great success. The film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), with a playing time of more than four hours, was released in two separate sections: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, an Image of the Times and Inferno, People of the Times.

After the great success of both the novel and the movie, 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 Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, in which the Mabuse of 1920 (still played 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.