4 March 1921: With Das Floss der Toten, the Dead Come Back to Town Philipp Stiasny W HAT HAPPENS WHEN a man presumed dead returns home alive and unexpectedly knocks at the door? This very conundrum served as the basis for numerous returnee films that emerged in the years fol- lowing the First World War. Taken together, the films — which featured literal returning soldiers as well as more allegorical travelers seeking home — formed a cycle that provided a key public forum for exploring a broad constellation of domestic issues confronting postwar German soci- ety: the trauma of marital separation and infidelity, the bonds of male friendship and their violation through betrayal, and, obliquely, the death of millions of men who did not survive the mechanized mass death that characterized trench warfare. One day in Berlin in the summer of 1920 a dead man comes knock- ing: a soldier swallowed by the war, later held captive in Siberia and reported missing. After waiting six years without word, his wife has had him declared dead and has remarried. Now he is back and there is one husband too many. Legally, the returnee, whose death has been officially established, no longer even exists. A true story, it merited no more than a short paragraph in the tabloid B.Z. am Mittag, which reported the story on 29 July 1920. One week later the trade journal Der Film announced the production of a new movie whose fictional story closely resembled the real one related in the newspaper. Das Floss der Toten (The raft of the dead), directed by Carl Boese, opened in theaters on 4 March 1921. It tells the story of two European engineers, Roland Ford (Otto Gebühr) and John Kelley (Carl Clewing), who are working abroad on a railway construction site in colonial Africa. Both are in love with Maria (Aud Egede Nissen), but she chooses Roland. On their journey back to Europe, the two friends are shipwrecked and lose contact with each other. While John succeeds in making his way home, Roland — rescued by fishermen on a remote island — suffers from shock-induced amnesia. He has become a man without a name. A year passes and Roland is declared dead. Maria, already the mother of Roland’s child, succumbs to John’s courting and marries him. Some time Kapczynski.indd 93 Kapczynski.indd 93 4/21/2012 8:04:00 AM 4/21/2012 8:04:00 AM ~ ~ ~ Uncorrected Proofs of Copyrighted Material ~ ~ ~