Der grüne Skarabäus

Berlin, 1913: a beetle-green gem, reputedly cursed by Egyptian priests, slips from the velvet tray of a bankrupt antiquarian into the gloved palm of libertine Countess Vera von Kastell. Overnight, the city’s salons—already electric with talk of women’s suffrage and psychoanalysis—become a shadow-theatre of swapped identities, forged love-letters, and midnight assignations beside the Spree. The stone’s iridescent wing-cases seem to exhale hallucination: a respectable bank clerk (Paulig) imagines himself a reincarnated tomb robber; a demure stenographer peels off her collar to reveal the scarab tattooed on her sternum; a police inspector pursues a thief who, in every daguerreotype, turns out to be himself. As the gem changes hands—pawnshop, boudoir, anarchist print-shop—it refracts Wilhelmine anxieties: fear of working-class uprising, titillation over New Woman liberty, dread that empire itself is a brittle sarcophagus. In the final reel the beetle vanishes inside a flickering cinematograph, its carapace dissolving into silver nitrate so that the audience, too, feels the prick of six tiny legs crawling beneath their skin.