General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (German: Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) is a 1933 German crime thriller directed by Fritz Lang, in which the imprisoned criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse continues to direct a campaign of terror from an asylum through his written plans, which are carried out by criminals under the sway of his psychiatrist, Professor Baum. It was produced by Seymour Nebenzal, written by Thea von Harbou, and stars Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Mabuse, Oscar Beregi as Baum, and Otto Wernicke as Inspector Lohmann.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Fritz Lang; screenplay by Thea von Harbou; produced by Seymour Nebenzal¹
Original version	12 acts, 3,334 m, 122 minutes, 35 mm, black and white, Tobis-Klangfilm sound³
German ban	Banned by the film censorship office on 29 March 1933 (decision B.33537), approved only for exhibition abroad³
Premieres	German version: Budapest, April 1933, and Vienna, 12 May 1933; French version: Paris, 21 April 1933; German premiere only in 1951⁴^•⁵
Series position	Sequel to Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) and M (1931), with Wernicke reprising Inspector Lohmann from M⁶
Other versions	A French-language version shot concurrently, and The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse, an edited and dubbed American version released in 1952⁷^•⁸
Restoration	Restored and reconstructed in 2000/2001 by the Deutsches Filminstitut with the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv, the Filmmuseum München, KirchMedia, and ZDF/ARTE⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Dr. Mabuse, the criminal genius and hypnotist confined to a nerve clinic at the end of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), spends his days compulsively writing murder and terror plans, his legacy a testament that serves as an instruction manual for crime.¹⁰ Through telepathic manipulation he influences the people around him and spreads fear beyond his own death.¹⁰

The film opens with a cat-and-mouse sequence in which Hofmeister (Karl Meixner), a former policeman, is trapped by criminals; his ordeal lands him in the asylum, where he observes Professor Baum's preoccupation with the patient Mabuse.²^•¹¹ When Mabuse's notes are found to be connected with a rash of recent crimes, Commissioner Lohmann must determine how Mabuse is communicating with the criminals despite conflicting reports on the doctor's whereabouts.² Lohmann discovers that Mabuse is already dead, but the crimes continue; a string of clues leads him back to Professor Baum, who has planned an attack on a chemical factory, and Lohmann and Kent alert the factory's guards, but the fire is already underway when they arrive, with firefighters eventually bringing the flames under control.³^•¹⁸ The police follow Baum back to his clinic and find him in Mabuse's old room, destroying all of Mabuse's plans and instructions.³ In the final scene Baum is locked in a cell, wild-eyed, slowly tearing up the testament, suggesting something cyclical is underway.¹²

Place in Lang's career and the Mabuse series

The film is, in technical terms, a sequel to two separate films: Lang's silent Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), which introduced the character, and M (1931), Lang's first sound film, in which Mabuse does not appear but Inspector Lohmann does.¹¹^•¹² It was one of only two sound films Lang made in Germany before leaving the country, and it is regarded as a summation of his German career, though critics have judged it less tightly constructed than M.¹³

The ban. The film was scheduled to premiere in Berlin on 24 March 1933; the premiere was postponed, and on 29 March 1933 the film censorship office banned it for Germany, permitting exhibition only abroad.¹⁴^•³ The Reich Interior Ministry's expert Walter Erbe justified the ban on the grounds that the continuous depiction of serious crimes and the mingling of crime and madness endangered public order and security.⁵ Because the production company Nero-Film had already sent a negative of the French version to Paris before the ban, that version premiered there on 21 April 1933, and the smuggled German version premiered in Budapest the same day.⁴ The film did not reach a German premiere until 1951.⁵

The Hitler question. Lang repeatedly stated that he had placed slogans and ideas expounded by the Nazis, including phrases from Hitler's speeches, into the mouth of Mabuse and his gang as a warning of an imminent menace.⁶^•¹³ The film scholar Michael Koller writes that Lang's much-cited statement on this point is not true, and Deutsche Welle notes that Lang appears to have drawn the connection between Mabuse and Hitler more tightly in retrospect than it was at the time of production.¹³^•¹⁵ Contemporary reviewers nonetheless heard the link: Time Out wrote that by 1932 the character was mouthing undisguised Nazi slogans from his asylum prison.²

Sound and style

Lang used sound-image counterpoint as a central device: a sound suggests one thing while the image shows something else, forcing the viewer to readjust and creating on screen the disorder that Mabuse strives for.¹³ A Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung essay notes that Mabuse takes full advantage of sound technology to become an invisible voice, an example of what Michel Chion later called the acousmêtre, a disembodied voice that seems to come from everywhere and therefore has no clearly defined limits to its power.¹⁶ The cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner, with moving camera by Karl Vass, was praised in a filmportal.de commentary, particularly the superimposition in which the ghostly Mabuse merges into Baum's silhouette.³^•¹¹

Later versions and legacy

Lang shot a French-language version, Le Testament du Dr. Mabuse, concurrently with the German one, with Klein-Rogge reprising his role alongside Thomy Bourdelle, Jim Gérald, René Ferté, and Monique Rolland; it runs about 94 minutes and, in the assessment of the MVD special-edition notes, has little to recommend it over the original.⁷ An edited and dubbed American version, The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse, was released in 1952.⁸ The unedited German version did not premiere in the United States until 1973.¹¹

Lang returned to the character in 1960 with The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse), which is again a direct sequel to Testament, and a 1962 remake also titled The Testament of Dr. Mabuse followed.⁷ The Deutsche Kinemathek credits the film with laying the foundation for the modern crime and mystery genre, and its restoration, prepared for the 2001 Berlinale retrospective of Lang's films, was released on home video by Criterion and by Eureka Entertainment's Masters of Cinema series.¹⁰^•⁶^•¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026