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5.3/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.3/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Der Einbruch remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Imagine a break-in where nothing is taken yet everything is lost; that is the paradox Der Einbruch etches onto nitrate like acid on copperplate.
Shot in the winter of 1921, while inflation gnawed the Weimar carcass, the film surfaces now as a phantom limb of German cinema—its title translated too tamely as “The Break-In,” when the German word Einbruch also means collapse, intrusion of the psyche, the moment daylight is mortally wounded. Director-editor Harry Jaeger, moonlighting in front of the lens as the threadbare locksmith, steers the narrative into terrain few silents dared: a crime story that forgets the crime, a morality play that eats its own moral.
The metropolis here is not the jagged skyline of Caligari but a vertical dossier of shabby-chic flats, each corridor soaked in fish-oil lamplight. Cinematographer Alfons Schönfeld tilts the camera only when reality tilts: during the actual lock-picking the frame remains sober, clinical, as though the lens itself were holding its breath. Once inside, the image balloons—mirrors fracture into prismatic shards, superimpositions bloom like bruises, and the banker’s Persian rug becomes a bleeding map of pre-war borders. The effect predates The Unpardonable Sin’s double-exposure horrors yet feels eerily contemporary, as if Jaeger had binge-watched 2020s lo-fi TikTok edits and then brushed the residue off his sleeve.
Intertitles arrive sparse, almost bashful, often obscured by deliberate light-leaks that swallow letters whole. The scarcity forces the viewer to lean in, to become accessory after the fact. Meanwhile, the curated score—newly recorded by Ensemble Nikel—replaces the customary piano thump with prepared-guitar scrapes and bowed cymbals. The resulting texture is less music than oxidation: you taste iron behind your gums, you smell the mildew of old banknotes. In one prolonged close-up, Jaeger’s trembling fingers graze a safe dial; the accompanying drone drops to sub-audible 17 Hz, a frequency that induces the uneasy flutter of parish guilt. The trick is low-tech but vicious—your body confesses before your mouth.
Halfway through, the film pirouettes into a psychosexual farce. The locksmith, expecting confrontation, instead encounters Greta Serne’s character—credited only as Die Frau—who sleepwalks into the salon trailing camphor and lilac. She addresses the intruder as Heinrich, her brother who fell at Ypres. Jaeger, bewildered, plays along, and the burglary morph into a séance. The camera adopts her somnambulist rhythm, gliding through rooms at ankle height, as though the carpet itself were dreaming. Their duet—half sibling ghost-story, half thwarted seduction—would be absurd if it weren’t so heartbreaking. When she finally awakens at cockcrow, she does not scream; she simply offers him a boiled sweet. The moment is so tender it bruises, and you realize the film’s true loot is not securities but the luxury of being seen, even by hallucination.
Jaeger’s performance is a study in skeletal minimalism: eyes that telegraph panic like semaphore, shoulders that retreat into the coat as if embarrassed by their own bones. He never begs sympathy; he barely asks for oxygen. The effect recalls The Head Waiter’s chameleon stoicism, yet Jaeger adds a tremor of post-war shellshock that feels lived-in, not laminated. Legend claims he spent nights inside an actual shuttered bank to prepare, befriending janitors and memorizing the smell of parquet polish. Whether apocrypha or not, the homework shows: when he finally twirls the emptied safe, the hollow clang carries the weight of a generation’s overdrawn soul.
In the film’s centrepiece, the banker—played with cadaverous elegance by Erhard Klaus—challenges the burglar to a match using ivory pieces stained with iodine. Each captured piece is replaced by a personal totem: a pawn becomes the locksmith’s mother’s ring; a knight, the banker’s war decoration. The sequence lasts a breathless eleven minutes, cross-cut with street shots of policemen randomly arresting vagrants, suggesting the board is merely Berlin in miniature. When Jaeger topples his king in resignation, the piece shatters, revealing a scroll inside: IOUs signed by the locksmith’s father decades earlier. Debt, the film argues, is heritable like eye colour; larceny merely the interest compounding in the dark.
Expressionist cinema loved its flashbacks, yet Der Einbruch weaponizes them like shrapnel. Jaeger’s childhood memory of pawning his father’s watch intrudes mid-gesture, shot in overexposed white so faces vaporize into chalk. Later, future shadows leak in: superimposed images of him as an old man, stooped, selling matches outside the same apartment block. The implication—time is not linear but a palimpsest of unpaid tab—anticipates the narrative Möbius of Ashes of Embers, though predating it by two years. Editors of the era spliced such premonitions manually, frame by frame; the labour shows in the slight tremble of the dissolve, a ghost handshake across decades.
Censors of 1922 clipped nothing from the film—there was no on-screen canoodling to snip—yet the erotic tension is so thick you could butter bread with it. Watch how Jaeger’s gaze lingers on the banker’s waistcoat buttons, or how Greta Serne’s fingers, lacquered in chipped garnet, curl around a doorframe as if around an invisible wrist. The absence of release makes the air itch. Critics who pigeonhole Weimar cinema as either brazenly libertine (Jazz and Jailbirds) or puritanical miss this grey hum, the ache of desire deferred by poverty and protocol.
When Jaeger finally scuttles out at sunrise, the street is a ticker-tape parade of worthless papiermark notes swirling like confetti. He stuffs some into his shoes for warmth. The gesture is comic until you remember that in 1923 those same notes would be weighed, not counted. The film thus stages a prequel to the economic apocalypse, treating inflation not as backdrop but as character—an invisible third burglar that robs everybody off-camera. Historical hindsight injects a shiver: we know the locksmith’s existential defeat will metastasize into national humiliation, that the safe he could not crack will become the Weimar Republic itself.
The 4K restoration by Deutsches Filminstitut refuses to airbrush every scuff. During the chess scene, a vertical scratch pulses like a vein; the restorers left it intact, arguing it rhymes with the iodine stains. The tinting, based on a single surviving nitrate reel, alternates between nicotine amber for interiors and arsenic green for the dawn escape, replicating the chemical mood swings of the era. Projectionists at the Berlinale premiere reported audiences gasping not at plot twists but at the texture itself—grain swirling like wet sand, perforation holes fluttering like moth wings. In an age of algorithmic cleanliness, such tactility feels radical, almost obscene.
Where Nearly a King treats class anxiety as bedroom farce, Der Einbruch turns it into a séance. Its DNA shares strands with The Unwritten Law’s punitive moralism, yet Jaeger’s film refuses to punish its protagonist with anything so banal as prison. Instead, it sentences him to epiphany—the cruelest penalty of all. Conversely, fans of A Prisoner for Life will recognize the carceral motif inverted: here the cell is memory, the warden oneself.
Because it offers no catharsis, only corrosion. Because the close-up of a key entering a lock is filmed like a dental extraction, and you will never again hear the click of your own front door without flinching. Because history, that inveterate plagiarist, has lifted whole scenes from this movie and replayed them in hyperinflationary Venezia, in shuttered Cypriot banks, in crypto-exchange bankruptcies. Because Harry Jaeger vanished a year later—rumor says to Bratislava, rumor says to the Foreign Legion—leaving this lone artifact that whispers: every debt is a door, every door a verdict. And if you listen past the hiss of the optical track, you might hear the creak of your own hinges opening at 3 a.m., the burglar already inside, wearing your slippers, carrying nothing but the echo of your breath.
IMDb —
1930
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