Das Haus zum Mond

Summary

A Weimar-era fever-dream etched in nitrate: crumbling Berlin mansion tilts toward the moon like a drunken astrolabe, its corridors echoing with the footfalls of bankrupt aristocrats, clairvoyant maids, and a cataleptic heir who believes he is the last breath of the Hohenzollerns. Inside, walls sweat candle-wax memories of empire; outside, inflationary banknotes snow through the linden trees. Ancestral portraits blink when no one watches, while a copper telescope, bolted to the rafters, turns the lunar surface into a colossal silent witness. When creditors hammer the doors, the family stages a masquerade of baroque delusion—corpses posed at dinner tables, servants speaking only in iambic pentameter, a nightly séance where the moonlight is siphoned into crystal decanters. The plot liquefies: a betrothal to a cardboard duchess, a duel fought with pocket-watches instead of pistols, a burglary in which the burglar leaves behind more valuables than he steals. Clocks run backward; wallpaper births migratory birds; the house itself, brick by brick, detaches from the soil and drifts skyward, trailing rootless chandeliers and ancestral ghosts like half-finished sentences. In the final reel, only the echo of a child’s laughter remains, orbiting the moon forever, a satellite of irretrievable longing.

Synopsis