Metropolis

Freder bent his head backwards, his wide-open, burning eyes stared unseeingly upward. His hands formed music from the chaos of the notes; struggling with the vibration of the so...

From an invisible source the numbers dropped rhythmically down through the cooled air of the room, being collected, as in a water-basin, at the table at which the great brain of...

The man who had been Joh Fredersen’s first secretary stood in a cell of the Pater-noster, the never-stop passenger lift which, like a series of never ceasing well-buckets, trans...

There was a house in the great Metropolis which was older than the town. Many said that it was older, even, than the cathedral, and, before the Archangel Michael raised his voic...

The man before the machine which was like Ganesha, the god with the elephant’s head, was no longer a human being. Merely a dripping piece of exhaustion, from the pores of which...

The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man—be he never so widely trav...

“Where is Georgi?” asked Freder, his eyes wandering through Josaphat’s three rooms, which stretched out before him—beautiful, with a rather bewildering super-abundance of armcha...

Freder walked up the steps of the cathedral hesitatingly; he was walking up them for the first time. Hel, his mother, used often to go to the cathedral. But her son had never ye...

The aeroplane which had carried Josaphat away from Metropolis swam in the golden air of the setting sun, rushing towards it at a tearing speed, as though fastened to the westwar...

Whenever Josaphat tried, during the days which followed, to break through the barrier which was drawn around Freder, there was always a strange person there, and always a differ...

“Of course it was a dream.... And they say dreams are bubbles, don’t they? But just listen to this, Josaphat.... I emerged from this dream back into reality with a feeling of sa...

It was a farmhouse, one-storied, thatch-roofed, over-shadowed by a walnut tree and it stood upon the flat back of one of the stone giants, not far from the cathedral. A garden f...

It was midnight and no light was burning. Only through the window there fell the radiance of the city, lying like a pale gleam upon the face of the girl who sat, leaning back ag...

A vault, like the vault of a sepulchre—human heads so closely crowded as to produce the effect of clods of a freshly ploughed field. All faces turned to one point: to the source...

Maria did not dare to stir. She did not even dare to breathe. She did not close her eyes for quaking fear that, between the lowering and raising of her eye-lids, a fresh horror...

Joh Fredersen’s son knew quite well that his father could not hear him, for he, the son, was standing in the lowest part of the pedestal of the New Tower of Babel, whither the t...

Maria felt something licking at her feet, like the tongue of a great, gentle dog. She bent down to fumble for the animal’s head, and felt that it was water into which she was gr...

“Of course ... as soon as my story’s finished.... Just think: Foxy Fox went for a walk—went for a walk through the beautiful flowery meadows; he had his Sunday coat on, and he h...

They had taken the children into the house and Freder’s eyes sought Maria, who was kneeling in the street, among the last remaining children, consoling them, and bestowing her l...

Josaphat shouted so that his voice cracked, and raced with the bounds of a harried wolf, through passages, across steps of the great pump-works. His shouts were not heard. In th...

Rotwang awoke; but he knew quite well he was dead. And this consciousness filled him with the deepest satisfaction. His aching body no longer had anything to do with him. That w...

A ghostly darkness lay upon the New Tower of Babel. The light had gone completely out, gone out as though it had been killed—at the moment when the gigantic wheel of the Heart-m...

It was the softest, the most cautious call of which a human voice is capable. But Maria answered it just as little as she had answered the shouts of despair with which the man w...

“Oh Freder, while your father was standing here it seemed to me as though I heard a spring rushing within a rock. A spring, weighted with salt, and red with blood. But I knew to...

Death had passed over Metropolis. Destruction of the world and the Day of Judgment had shouted from out the roars of explosion, the clanging of the bells of the cathedral. But J...