Josef Fenneker, Lithograph Film Poster for Arthur Robison’s 1935 Version of “Der Student von Prag”, Deutsche Kimemathek, Museum für Film and Fernsehen, Berlin
Born in July of 1880 at the Danish city of Randers, Stellan Rye was a film director and screenwriter active during the early twentieth-century. In his short career, he wrote and directed three productions: the 1913 “Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague)”; the 1914 “Der Flug in die Sonne (The Flight into the Sun)”; and the 1914 “Ein Sommernachtstraum
in Unserer Zeit (A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time)”, co-written with German actor and horror novelist Hanns Heinz Ewers.
Rye joined the Reichsheer, the German Army, at the onset of World War I. Taken prisoner almost immediately, he died as a prisoner of war in France on the fourteenth of November in 1914 at the age of thirty-four.
Stellan Rye is best known for the 1913 German silent horror film “Der Student von Prag”, considered to be the first German art film, a pioneering work that raised cinema from its fairground origins to a viable art form. The film is loosely based on several literary works: Alfred de Musset’s poem “The December Night”, Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “William Wilson”, and the German legend of the Renaissance alchemist and magician Johann Georg Faust.
“Der Student von Prag” featured German actor Paul Wegener in his debut film role as the poor university student Balduin. He acted alongside Austrian actor John Gottowt in the role of Scapinelli, and Austrian-German actress Grete Berger as Balduin’s love interest Countess Margit. “Der Student von Prag” was art director and set designer Robert A. Dietrich’s first production in a career that spanned more than a hundred films. The film was shot on locations around Prague and at the Babelsberg Studios, now the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, having
produced films since 1912.
In this horror story, poverty stricken Balduin signs a contract with the diabolical Scapinelli that will award Balduin one hundred-thousand gold pieces in exchange for any item in his lodgings. Scapinelli, dressed in all black, chooses Balduin’s reflection in the mirror and takes it away. During his courtship of Countess Margit, Balduin and Magrit are terrorized by his mirror double. Magrit, too frightened by the sudden appearances of the double, discontinues the courtship. Depressed, Balduin shoots his double with a pistol and it vanishes. However, Balduin himself becomes stricken and falls dead. The evil Scapinelli arrives, tears up the contract and departs happily.
German cinematographer Guido Seeber employed new technical camera effects of seamless double exposures to create one of his most notable accomplishments, the doppelgänger image of Balduin’s mirror double. An accomplished technician and a pioneer in his field, he also employed chiaroscuro, sharp contrasts between light and
shadow, to create distinct areas on the sets. Hungarian composer and pianist Josef Weiss wrote the historic piano score that accompanied “Der Student von Prag”; it was the first film score written for a German language film.
Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was both a critical and commercial success. The film tapped into the real sense of dissociation and alienation that was prominent in a society struggling with the collapse of the German Empire. The themes of the film became a major influence on German cinema produced during the years of the Weimar Republic. The insecurity and social changes that followed the deaths and devastation of the first World War became major themes for post-war German film makers.
Expressionism, developed as an avant-garde style before the war, remained popular during the Weimar Republic and extended to a wide range of the arts, including music, literature, dance and architecture. Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” was remade twice: Austrian Expressionist director Henrik Galeen’s 1926 version 
with Conrad Veidt, and German director Arthur Robison’s 1935 version with Austrian actor Anton Walbrook. Other notable films produced during this time period included Robert Wiene’s 1920 “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and two films by Fritz Lang, the two-part 1922 “Dr. Mabuse”, and the 1927 “Metropolis”.
Notes: All insert images are film stills from the original 1913 “Der Student von Prag”, directed by Stellan Rye, that featured Paul Wegener, John Gottowt and Grete Berger.
A full-length version, with subtitles, of Stellan Rye’s “Der Student von Prag” can be found on the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/der-student-von-prag-1913
Actress Grete Berger, born Margarethe Berg into an Austrian Jewish family, began her career in 1904 at the Deutsches Theater under prominent film and theater director Max Reinhardt. She was cast in several films directed by Stellan Rye or Paul Wegener, among which was her role in the 1913 “Der Student von Prag”. After the accession of power by the National Socialists in 1933, Berger fled with her husband to Italy where in April of 1944 they were arrested by the German occupational authorities. She was transferred, along with Austrian-Hungarian actor Jacob Feldhammer, in May of 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they were murdered on the twenty-third of May in 1944.
An 2023 article on Anton Walbrook, who performed the role of Balduin in Robinson’s 1935 version of “Der Student von Prag”, is located in the Film History Series of this site. A well known German actor who acted alongside some of Germany’s leading ladies, Walbrook, who was homosexual and the son of a Jewish mother, left Germany in 1936 to work for many years in the United States and England.
