Behind the name Caligari is the name Wiene, Dr. Robert Wiene. If the identity of the first of the two doctors is extremely suspect, then we are not much better off knowing about Dr. Wiene. We know he had a Czechoslovakian passport. That he was born in Wrocław, while his father was a native of Nitra and his mother of Bratislava. That to the authorities he was once German, then Hungarian, then Czech again. Whether he spoke Czech or Slovak at all, we have no idea. We do know that 150 years have passed since his birth this year.
He was one of the first generation of German directors with artistic ambitions, such as Carl Froelich, Paul Wegener, Joe May, Richard Oswald or Guido Seeber, who was introduced in Ponrep this year. He made his debut as a director in 1914, and by the 1910s he was a major artistic figure in German cinema alongside the younger and more predatory Ernst Lubitsch. He is best known for his three Expressionist films, but also succeeded in other genres. The King of Nazareth was a biblical film, Orlac's Hands a psychological thriller, and The Pink Cavalier an eighteenth-century comedy with an original score by Richard Strauss. He often filmed in Austria, and after 1933 he shared the fate of many other great German filmmakers of Jewish origin, that is: he sought and found work in film studios in various European countries. He died on 15 July 1938.