“From Chicago you look down upon all the other cities of the world like looking at the past,” wrote reporter, novelist, and photographer Heinrich Hauser. Born in Berlin at the turn of the last century, Hauser was fascinated by Chicago: in the summer of 1931 he shot a 70-minute black-and-white documentary titled Chicago–A World City Stretches Its Wings, and the same year he published his book Feldwege nach Chicago, in which he marveled at the city’s might and strangeness. Hauser died in 1955, but nearly 30 years later his silent film turned up in a West German archive, and in 1998 two Germans, a radio producer and a sound designer, came to Chicago to create an allusive sound track with a voice-over drawn from Hauser’s book. The English-language version will premiere this Tuesday and Wednesday, March 26 and 27, at the Chicago Cultural Center, giving Chicagoans a chance to revisit the city that struck Hauser as “a thunderstorm of fantastic, flashing impressions.”
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His first novel, Das zwanzigste Jahr, appeared in 1925, and four years later Hauser won the prestigious Gerhart-Hauptmann-Preis literary prize for his book Bitter Waters. In 1931 he made the transition to cinema with Die letzten Segelschiffe (“The Last Sailing Ships”), a chronicle of his prolonged sea voyage from Hamburg to Talcahuano, Chile. But his only other film was Chicago–A World City Stretches Its Wings, which premiered in October 1931 at the Alhambra movie house on Kurfurstendamm in Berlin. The Berliner Borsen-Zeitung hailed the film’s vision of “an America stripped of illusions.” Another reviewer called it “just a small piece of life as it really is.”
The film is a vivid portrait of an industrial city soldiering through the Depression: el trains, stockyards, train yards, store windows, homeless men, the Maxwell Street market, a roller coaster at the Riverview amusement park. Hauser’s camera work is striking, and he has a keen eye for incident (in one scene a boy fashions bargelike shoes from discarded boxes and shuffles along a sidewalk). Some parts of the film recall Conrad O. Nelson’s 12-minute panorama Halsted Street, made the same year. The workings of an automated assembly line are interrupted by the intertitle “Wo ist der Mensch?” (“Where are the men?”), and in one didactic segment a montage of smashed cars and destitute men provokes the title “Wracks” (“wrecks”).
Hauser–who was married five times–returned to Chicago in the 40s, working as a gardener for the University of Chicago, as a security guard for Marshall Field’s, and as a translator for the Henry Regnery Company in Hinsdale. He published science fiction under the pseudonym Alexander Blade (his story “The Brain” was published in the October 1948 issue of Amazing Stories–“A Giant Calculating Machine Decides to Rule the World!”). In 1945 he bought another farm, in a German immigrant community south of Saint Louis, and upon his return to Germany in 1950 he wrote the book My Farm on the Mississippi: The Story of a German in Missouri, 1945-1948. Fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial visitors, he moved to an obscure quarry he felt would be a likely landing site for UFOs. By the time he died at age 54 he’d sunk into a deep depression, despondent about the state of his homeland and wounded that the U.S. government had barred him from returning to America.
