With THE GOLEM (1914) and THE GOLEM AND HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD (1920), Paul Wegener created two masterpieces of German silent cinema that for many decades were only available in incomplete versions. Both films are now available again THE GOLEM in a reconstruction assembled from recently discovered fragments, and THE GOLEM AND HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD in a newly restored complete version featuring the long-lost original orchestral score by Hans Landsberger. Beside the illustrated bilingual booklet the DVD offers additional features: a photo reconstrucztion of the lost film THE GOLEM AND THE DANCER, a documentary about the forgotten composer Hans Landsberger and the restoration of THE GOLEM AND HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD, an interview with Stefan Drössler about the reconstruction of THE GOLEM, and an essential talk with Alexander Kluge about the Golem, artificial men and AI.
The films
Der Golem - Germany 1914 - Directed by: Henrik Galeen - Written by: Paul Wegener, Henrik Galeen - Cinematography by: Guido Seeber - Set design and Costume design by: Rochus Gliese - Cast: Paul Wegener, Henrik Galeen, Lyda Salmonova, Rudolf Blümner, Karl Ebert - Produced by: Deutsche Bioscop-Gesellschaft m.b.H., Berlin - Premiere: January 14, 1914 (U.T.-Lichtspiele Friedrichstraße, Berlin) - Rekonstruction by: Stefan Drössler - Scanning and mastering by: Thomas Bakels, Marie Bendl - Edited by: Christian Ketels - Sound recorded by: Gunther Bittmann - Music: Sabrina Zimmermann (violin), Mark Pogolski (piano) - © 2017 by Filmmuseum München
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam - Germany 1920 - Directed and written by: Paul Wegener - Cinematography by: Karl Freund - Set design by: Hans Poelzig - Costume design by: Rochus Gliese - Cast: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinrück, Lyda Salmonova, Ernst Deutsch, Otto Gebühr, Lothar Müthel - Produced by: Projektions-A.-G. Union, Berlin - Premiere: October 29, 1920 (Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Berlin) - Rekonstruction by: Stefan Drössler - Scanning and mastering by: Thomas Bakels - Editing and image restoration by: Christian Ketels, Stefan Wimmer - Original score by: Hans Landsberger - Score edited and arranged by: Richard Siedhoff - Music performed by: Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg - Conductor: Burkhard Götze - Sound recorded by: Karsten Zimmermann - © 2020 by Filmmuseum München
Der Golem und die Tänzerin - Germany 1917 - Directed by: Rochus Gliese - Written by: Paul Wegener - Cinematography by: Mads Anton Madsen - Set design and costume design by: Rochus Gliese - Cast: Paul Wegene, Lyda Salmonova, Rochus Gliese, Emilie Kurz, Erich Schönfelder - Produced by: Projektions-A.-G. Union, Berlin - Premiere: June 8, 1917 (U.T.-Lichtspiele Kurfürstendamm, Nollendorfplatz, Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden, Berlin) - Rekonstruction by: Stefan Drössler - Edited by: Christian Ketels - Music composed, performed and recorded by: Richard Siedhoff - © 2026 by film&kunst München
Die Rekonstruktion des Golem-Films von 1914 - Germany 2023 - Directed, photographed and edited by: Richard Siedhoff - With: Stefan Drössler - Produced by: Richard Siedhoff, Weimar - First release - © 2023 by Richard Siedhoff
Der vergessene Filmkomponist: Hans Landsberger - Germany 2023 - Directed and edited by: Richard Siedhoff - Research: Barbara Elkeles, Philippa James-Buth, Stefan Drössler, Richard Siedhoff - Photographed by: Giacomo Blome, Marius Böttcher, Richard Siedhoff, Burkhard Götze, Jens Kappert, Mykyta Sierov - Voice: Thomas Grysko - With: Barbara Elkeles, Philippa James-Buth, Stefan Drössler, Richard Siedhoff, Burkhard Götze - Produced by: Richard Siedhoff, Weimar - First release - © 2023 by Richard Siedhoff
Der Golem, künstliche Menschen und künstliche Intelligenz - Germany 2021 - Directed by: Stefan Drössler - Photographed by: Thomas Willke, Gunther Bittmann - Edited by: Stefan Drössler, Wolfgang Woehl - With: Alexander Kluge, Stefan Drössler - Produced by: Filmmuseum München - First release - © 2021 by Filmmuseum München
About Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam
When Paul Wegener produced a remake of DER GOLEM in 1920 with considerably greater effort than his first film, he conceived it as a prequel: it tells the story leading up to the events of the 1914 film. Wegener had the buildings for medieval Prague designed by architect Hans Poelzig and constructed by Kurt Richter on the studio grounds: "It is not Prague that my friend, the architect Poelzig, has built. Not Prague, and not any other city, but a city of poetry, a dream, an architectural paraphrase on the theme of the 'Golem'. These alleys and squares are not meant to resemble anything real; they are meant to create the atmosphere in which the Golem breathes." They were not backdrops, but sculpted structures that were actually destroyed by the fire set by the Golem. The press reported: "It was a gruesomely beautiful sight to see one house after another engulfed in flames, as the excited men, women and children of the ghetto city ran together amid smoke and falling beams, while cameramen stood everywhere to capture these scenes on film."
The festive premiere took place on 29 October 1920 in the sold-out Ufa-Palast am Zoo: "Five acts with an introduction by Paul Wegener. Symphonic music by Hans Landsberger." During the intervals between acts, thunderous applause broke out, which, according to the Film-Kurier, took on "completely Mediterranean forms of expression". The film was unanimously hailed as "a milestone in the history of cinematography" that could be successful "on the world market". The film was in fact sold to many countries, and was the most successful German film in the USA alongside Ernst Lubitsch's MADAME DUBARRY (PASSION, 1919). Not only did it run for a sensational 16 weeks beginning on 19 June 1921 at the 900-seat Criterion premiere cinema in New York's Times Square, it also enjoyed similar exceptional success in other cities large and small.
Only English, Russian, Italian and Czech versions of THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD have survived. They have all been altered, abridged or edited. In the early 1980s, Enno Patalas recon- structed the original German version by combining material from a copy held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which had acquired it from Ufa in the 1930s, and a copy from Gosfilmofond. He lengthened the individual frames of 23 original German intertitles and inserts contained in both copies and took the wording of the missing German titles from a novelisation of the film written by Paul Wegener in 1921 and a censorship card created in 1931 for a re-release. In 1995, the Cineteca del Commune di Bologna launched a restoration as part of the European Lumière project, in which the Munich copy was duplicated and coloured using the Desmet method based on a tinted copy found in the Cineteca Italiana in Milan.
When the Filmmuseum München began creating a digital version of the film in 2012, it used the original film copies to achieve significantly better image quality and colour authenticity. A comparison with an American distribution copy from the George Eastman House collection revealed that all of the film copies used by Enno Patalas for his reconstruction came from the same negative, while the American copy showed shots from a slightly different angle, with a better image detail or more coherent movement sequences. However, most of these shots were shortened by fades in and out; scenes were rearranged and re-edited into parallel montages. When the existence of a fragmentary nega- tive in the collection of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, containing the same shots as the American copy, became known in 2014, it was possible to draw new conclusions about the film's distribution history.
After exploiting the film in Germany, Ufa probably sent its best negative, the so-called A negative, to the USA in 1921. There it was edited by Hugo Riesenfeld, who created the musical accompaniment for the American premiere at the Criterion Theatre: he inserted English intertitles, shortened many shots in the film, cut some out entirely, and rearranged scenes. When the negative later returned to Germany, attempts were made to cut the rearranged scenes back into their original order, resulting in the loss of further film frames and entire scenes. When the film materials stored in the Reichsfilmarchiv were transferred to the Gosfilmofond collection in Moscow in 1945, two reels of the B negative were used to supplement a Russian copy of the film that had been made from the same camera negative, and a new duplicate negative was produced. The mangled A negative was handed over to the Cinemathèque Royale de Belgique in 1974.
In its reconstruction, completed in 2020, the Filmmuseum München used Dr Hans Landsberger's premiere score as a guide, which made it possible to determine the exact length of each shot. Preference was given to material from the A negative; where this had been shortened, more complete shots from the B negative were used. Missing opening titles, act titles and intertitles, as well as inserts, were painstakingly reconstructed in the style of the existing templates. New colour grading largely evens out the varying image quality of the film materials, rough image damage has been repaired, and the colours now correspond very closely to the colour scheme of the tinted Italian film copy. The premiere music also made it possible to determine the exact screening speed of the film.
Stefan Drössler
DVD features (2disc DVD)
DVD 1
- Der Golem 1914, 25'
- Score by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski
- Der Golem und die Tänzerin 1917, 12'
- Score by Richard Siedhoff
- Die Rekonstruktion des Golem-Films von 1914 2023, 12'
- Der Golem, künstliche Menschen und künstliche Intelligenz 2021, 77'
DVD 2
- Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam 1920, 90'
- Orchestral score by Hans Landsberger
- Der vergessene Filmkomponist: Hans Landsberger 2024, 71'
- 24 pages booklet with essays by Stefan Drössler, Richard Siedhoff and Martina Lüdicke as well as texts by Hans Landsberger and Rochus Gliese
Edited by: Filmmuseum München
DVD authoring: Tobias Dressel, Gunther Bittmann
DVD supervision: Stefan Drössler
1. Edition August 2026
