This single sentence outlines the film's leitmotif and strikingly describes post war behaviour in Germany. Keeping silent as a cure for feelings of guilt, punishment, possible disadvantages and insecurity: against the recognition of the truth. Keeping silent as a way of coming to terms with the past became a commonly accepted lie, with which many people started to live comfortably.
The Nuremberg trials were closed too hastily in 1949. The USA was eager to influence the Germans and involve them in the hysterical anti-communism of the nascent McCarthy era. They believed they would best succeed by winning over the Germans as allies and stopped the prosecution of the Nazis.
This politically prevailing tone was disturbed by a man, Peter Lorre, who analyzed this particular situation by making a film, using all his abilities to create stories in words and images. This Film Der Verlorene talks about things nobody actually wanted to talk or even think about, and it was quickly hushed up. So it happened that Peter Lorre's return to Germany failed and came to an end together with his film, which was screened in German cinemas for only ten days. Nobody wanted to deal with the truth, presented in so artistically convincing a form, and therefore the more dangerous. The dialogue expressed what no one wanted to hear.
This film can be read in many different ways: dialogues between shadows and men, shadows and light, men and background, appearing and disappearing, dependence and complicity, murder and suicide. People often enter rooms as fearful or frightening shadows.
The images of the present refer oppressively to the dispelled images of the past. At the beginning of the film, Lorre, a physician in a refugee camp, walks tiredly and shuffles along the railway tracks towards his work place. At the end he walks back along the same track in order to commit suicide.
In this way Lorre sets the scene of many thousand murders - not only on a level of imagination. Lorre visualizes German history with all its consequences and its many-sideness, from concentration camp to refugee camp. The film describes the decline of the physician and scientist Dr. Rothe from his important war work as an accomplice of the Nazis, privileged but none the less spied on, to his postwar shadow identity as a camp doctor under the false name Dr. Neumeister. "By coincidence" he meets his counterpart, spy and former assistant, Hösch, who again becomes his assistant. Lorre: "You helped me then, shall I help you now?" Hösch too reappeared without papers and under the false name 'Novak' but without having lost his identity. He is an opportunist, who easily gets out of any difficulty. Loud-voiced, which gives away his past, he plans his future. Although he is a loser he wants to be on the winning side, the most important theme of the 50ies. The protagonists' body language and way of speaking could not be more different: The incomparable Lorre with his sad eyes, his low and resigned voice which speaks the horrible truth: "Almighty emotion of fear, fear kills every other emotion" and he says to his former assistant: "I almost start to like you since you are afraid - don't be scared, everything will stay outside, even anxiety…"
Very disturbing too is the behaviour of his dead lover's mother, who never takes offence at anything, not even at the murder of her daughter by Dr. Rothe, which has been suppressed as suicide, and which is entirely impossible for her to believe. She says: "You don't need to apologize." And here again appears the complicity between the victim and the murderer whom she even offers further accommodation. A highly oppressive perspective transferred to the complex effects of Nazi crimes upon German society.
Only outsiders are able to identify the murderer. A prostitute shouts "Murderer!" and so saves her life, alarming her neighbours, who come out of their doors out of voyeurism and curiosity rather than to help. A drunk talks to Lorre in the crowded underground: "I know you". He persistently repeats his words, uncontrollably: "I know you. One never forgets such a face. Do you know me?" Getting no answer, he puts his finger on his lips saying "Hush, the enemy is listening! Do you know me? You don't know me? I know you!" Other passengers get involved and want the troublemaker to shut up. An ingenious grotesque of disguised identities. Air raid: "Everybody into the shelters!". Lorre stays behind together with a love-hungry soldier's wife who has just managed to jump into the last metro. Lorre says "We are the last". He kills her, but before, as he did when murdering his lover, he stubs out a cigarette - killing, eliminating. After having overindulged in food and drink, Novak is drunk and asleep. "Wake up, wake up!" Lorre shouts at him, having just confessed his murders. Then he says to himself "Nobody's listening". And Lorre kills one last time, but this time on purpose. Repeating self-satisfied Novak's motto "Jump out of the way in time!" he shoots him with his revolver.
The film represents postwar German history so precisely, only possible for someone who had himself been a victim and then played a perpetrator, who knows his guilt. In fact, Lorre has expressed the story of his life as an actor as well as his harsh experiences as an emigrant, which he was able to link together in an extraordinarily thrilling way. The film diagnoses what was to be Lorre's fate: he never found his place again.
Ulrike Ottinger

Der Verlorene
1951, B/W, 35 mm
Director: Peter Lorre. Script: Peter Lorre, Axel Eggebrecht, Benno Vigny. Director of photography: Vaclac Vich. Editing: C.O. Bartning. Production: Arnold Pressburger. Duration: 98 min.
Peter Lorre (Dr. Karl Rothe), Karl John (Hoesch), Helmuth Rudolph (Oberst Winkler), Renate Mannhardt (Inge Hermann), Johanna Hofer (Frau Hermann) …

Synopsis
In a refugee camp in Hamburg, shortly after the end of WW II. The physician Karl Rothe works under a false name as a camp doctor. One day a new assistant joins him whom he recognizes as his former research assistant and Nazi spy Hoesch who now calls himself Novak. That evening both men meet in the canteen exchanging memories:
In 1943 Rothe works as a highly recommended researcher in a medical research institute in Hamburg. His coworker Hoesch spys on him for the German Counter Intelligence. Hoesch's leading officer tells Rothe that his research results have been betrayed to the British. The suspect is his fiancée Inge. Hoesch tells Rothe that he and Inge desire each other and that he has slept with her. In blind rage Rothe strangles Inge, the woman he loves. Since his crucial knowledge makes him irreplaceable for the war industry the murder is covered up as suicide. Rothe, however, is broken. Tormented by feelings of guilt he wants to commit suicide, but instead again kills a woman during an air raid. He decides to kill Hoesch and his leading officer, who are part of a resistance group, in order to avenge the double betrayal he had to experience at their hands. But Rothe's attempt fails and Hoesch and his Gestapo friends escape. The destruction of his home and his landlady's death during an air raid provide Rothe with the opportunity to disappear and change his identity. That evening in the canteen Hoesch tells Rothe the whole truth of the story. The unrepentant and ruthless Hoesch is in the process of preparing himself for a new life in a new Germany and offers Rothe a longterm and mutual agreement to keep silent. But Rothe shoots Hoesch, having finally found the chance of revenge, and throws himself under a train as dawn breaks.

About the film:
Tales of a lost film
Peter Lorre is one of the very few actors who became identified with one particular role. Starting with his first part in Fritz Lang's 'M', Lorre was considered the typical psychopathic murderer. Contemporaries knew him as an actor of an extraordinary variety. Graham Greene wrote that Lorre was able to act everything. He characterized him as a genius, sometimes achieving his greatest effects independent of the director. But in his American exile he was restricted to roles representing the dark, mysterious psycopath, apparently weak and defenceless, but capable of killing.
In 1946 his career in Hollywood declined. Many of his friends returned to Germany. Only a few years later Lorre too decided to return to Germany. The story of a doctor who killed his assistant in a refugee camp to avenge irreparable guilt was the chance for him to write his own film script and be the director and actor at the same time. He wrote the script with the assistance of highly respected authors like Axel Eggebrecht. Yet from the beginning the film had bad luck - shooting delayed for weeks, running out of money, and the death of the producer Arnold Pressburger before the film was finished. Furthermore the draft cut was burnt in the print factory so that Lorre had to edit all the material again. He worked fanatically on the film, "rehearsing with a patience, which I never experienced before", actress Renate Mannhardt remembered, "he pushed us on and on until we lost ourselves slipping completely into the part we had to act". Despite both excellent and controversal reviews in Germany and at the Biennale in Venice, the film Der Verlorene disappeared from cinema after only 2 weeks of screening.
The dark, stylistically innovative film, with its harsh analysis of the guilt of Nazi Germany found no echo in its audience. Lorre's confrontation of the Germans with their past was just too uncompromising, hard and pessimistic, in fact too realistic, at a time when people wished to forget and repress the past rather than to be reminded. At a time of economic growth, the socalled Wirtschaftswunder, audiences were looking for superficial kitsch and could only reject such a film. After the failure of Der Verlorene Lorre , disappointed and bitter, went back to Hollywood. Film historians regard Der Verlorene as one of the very few masterpieces amongst West Germany's postwar films. Rarely screened the film now thrills its audience.

Biography Peter Lorre
Peter Lorre was born in Hungary in 1904 as Ladislav Loewenstein. He started his acting career in Vienna in 1921. The director Jacob Moreno gave him his stage name Peter Lorre. In 1929 Lorre celebrated his first big stage success in Berlin's "Theater am Schiffbauerdamm" starring in Bertolt Brecht's productions.
Playing the lead of a psychopathic childmurderer in Fritz Lang's 'M' made him a movie-star worldwide. This also had a major impact on his film career in which he was mainly cast as melancholy and psychopathic characters.
After 1936 Lorre lived in Hollywood. Starring as supporting actor in films like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Arsenic and Old Lace established his reputation as one of the best actors of his time.
In 1950 Lorre returned to Germany in order to direct his first and only film: Der Verlorene, which failed only 14 days after its release. Disappointed and discouraged Lorre moved back to Hollywood where he played characteristically melancholy parts in numerous B-pictures until his death in 1964.