Des Goldes Fluch

In a cavernous, candle-licked Baltic manor, a cursed cache of gold—once Crusader coin, now melted into a monstrous chalice—seeps malice through generations. A syphilitic baron (Lupu Pick) claws at frescoed walls while his consumptive heir prowls moon-drenched parapets; downstairs, a Jewish banker (Hugo Döblin) counts dust-laden ducats that breed nightmares in his ledger. Between them wafts the ghost of a pauper-poet (Ernst Ludwig) who sold his tongue for one glinting coin and now bleeds couplets from an empty mouth. The gold passes hand to ravaged hand—through fog-choked ports, over peat bogs that belch methane halos—until every possessor is reduced to a twitching marionette of greed: fingers gnawed to bone, eyes reflecting the chalice’s leer. When the baroness (Leontine Kühnberg) tries to drown the accursed metal in a frozen well, the bucket returns brimming with molten light that re-forges itself into a bridal girdle, strangling her in frostbitten ecstasy. The film ends on a silent procession: plague carts creaking toward a sunrise that never arrives, while the gold—now a grinning death mask—gleams atop a pile of shoes.