Das ganze Sein ist flammend Leid

A Prague alchemist’s shadow lengthens across crumbling gables as plague bells toll; Bela Lugosi’s eyes, twin funeral candles, guide us through a city where every cobblestone is a broken tooth in the jaw of God. Carl Sick, gaunt as a death-mask, plays the astronomer who discovers that starlight is merely the scar-tissue of crucified angels; Alice Matay is the consumptive seamstress who sews her own shroud while humming a Viennese waltz she no longer remembers the name of. Ernst Rückert’s burgomaster auctions off his soul in a candle-lit cellar, the parchment contract signed with the blood of a still-born calf. Fritz Greiner’s war cripple drags a wooden leg that scrapes out the Morse for ‘forgive me’ on the frost-rimed streets. Ruth von Maers haunts mirror-warehouses where looking-glasses breed reflections that refuse to return, each pane birthing a doppelgänger more hollow than the last. The narrative spirals like incense smoke around a copper serpent: syllables of Kabbalah, whispers of Hasidic lament, the metallic taste of aether. A golem of phosphorus paper rises from the gutter, its face a palimpsest of every pogrom ever erased from history books. Time dilates; calendars bleed; the ghetto clock runs backwards, ferrying Sabbath candles into the maws of infants who will never age. The final reel combusts: the astronomical observatory becomes a burning bush of star-charts, Lugosi clutching a prism that refracts not light but the collective scream of Europe’s unborn. The city, Prague or perhaps merely the dream of Prague, folds itself into a Möbius strip and slips into the Moldau, leaving only a sulphuric smear where once metaphysics stood.