Ihre Hoheit

A lantern-slide phantasmagoria of imperial ennui, Ihre Hoheit drapes its porcelain princess in moonlit melancholy: Henny Porten’s arch-duchess, bred on marble corridors and ancestral portraits that blink like moth-wings, awakens one carnival midnight to the sour perfume of dynastic rot. Courtiers glide backward in stately minuets while chandeliers weep wax tears; outside, a republic of shadows conspires beneath gas-lamps. Into this chiaroscuro steps a penniless cartographer—Fritz Richard, all ink-stained cuffs and volcano eyes—bearing a creased map purporting to chart the exact latitude where majesty dissolves into common breath. Their clandestine cartography of glances redraws borders: a gloved hand on a dusty globe becomes a caress; a stolen stamp on a diplomatic envelope turns blood-red. When the palace gates clang shut like a broken music-box, the princess trades her diamond diadem for the cartographer’s frayed coat and flees through Vienna’s vein-like alleys, pursued by phantoms of obligation wearing the wax masks of her ancestors. In a beer-cellar smelling of brass and hops, republicans toast her as comrade while she trembles, half-drunk on foam, discovering that equality tastes of copper pennies. The final reel dissolves in a railway depot at dawn: she boards a third-class carriage bound for nowhere, the camera lingering on her ungloved fingers—those ten small exiles—while a forgotten military band strikes up a hymn whose lyrics have been censored by time. No coronation, no wedding, no apotheosis—only the locomotive’s white plume swallowing the future, and Porten’s face settling into a serenity as austere as unmarked paper.