Homeward Bound? Peter Lorre's "The Lost Man" and the End of Exile

[Peter Lorre] wrote, directed, and starred in the noir-styled thriller Der Verlorene (The Lost Man, 1951). 2 The film represented the beloved Weimar actor's return to the German screen after sixteen years in exile, and it would be his first and last attempt at directing. Beyond the surface tale of one man's descent into madness, the film serves as a meditation on emigration and re-emigration. The Lost Man is an "accented" film, to borrow Hamid Naficy's term, a film that stages the complex negotiations between the filmmaker's interconnected but divergent lives in exile and at home. 3 Lorre's film exemplifies the emigre's "double focus:" it is preoccupied with the present and the past, with both the exile world abroad and the Heimat, once lost and now found. Lorre explores the pressing political concerns of postwar Germany through a look backward at the American film industry, and still further back, at the world of Weimar cinema. He pursues the origins and effects of National Socialism, and through his use of the motif of migration, he questions the extent to which the nation has recovered from its recent past. He turns a diagnostic eye on the German situation, informed by the prevailing American understanding of German fascism as a disease that was perhaps incurable. 4 His findings suggest that the national psyche, unlike the economy, has failed to undergo a "miracle cure." 5 Lorre, the returning emigre filmmaker, adopts a position of distant proximity reminiscent of Georg Simmel's "stranger," and examines German society at once from outside and within. 6 Born in Austria-Hungary and Jewish, and thus a foreigner in Germany even before the Nazi regime forced him to flee, Lorre is indeed an outsider who has come to stay. This movement between closeness and distance finds formal expression in Lorre's film. The Lost Man shifts between moments of sober objectivity (paralleling the film's claim to historicity) and turbid psychological scenarios, in which Lorre delves into the effects of National Socialism on the mental life of an average citizen. He performs the contradictory position of the exile, whose displacement renders him not just a "stranger in a strange land," but also a stranger in his homeland. When Lorre assembled the crew of The Lost Man, he drew together an international group of acquaintances from his experiences in Weimar Germany and the United States. He coaxed [Arnold Pressburger] back from a successful producing career (in exile in France and t