He was up all night. He imagined the wind making weathervane soup for the insomniacs. He was sitting at his desk in his study. There was a breeze. The night air filled the room.

Hans was the anguish that pulled its plow through his sleep. After six years, Murnau was still a house in which the largest room was sealed.

On nights like that he sorted through involuntary memories with a narcissist’s absorption. Mary Degele had claimed that in the old days on stormy spring nights, they could breathe the fresh sea air, blown all the way in to the city from the North Sea.

One night years ago, a man had set up a telescope on the main street in Wilhelmshöhe, asking twenty pfennigs a look. Twenty pfennigs to infinity! Fourteen-year-old Wilhelm had had the twenty pfennigs. The moon had swum in the dark lens-circle.

During Murnau’s flirtation with Veidt, Hans had sent him a cautionary parable printed on a stiff card: Unable to resist, a boy took a bite from a gingerbread heart he’d intended for his sweetheart. To restore its original shape, he was forced to take more bites, and more, each time to no avail, forming his gingerbread successively into a circle, a square, a smaller and smaller heart.

Under some preliminary correspondence concerning locations, he found a buttered roll on its little dish. Somewhere along the line, he’d evolved into a man of strong opinions and solitary meals.

Under the roll was his typed response to Film-Kurier’s request, for their Christmas issue, for an autobiography and “dream-list for a cinema of the future.” He was unhappy with the false jauntiness of what he had so far:

F. W. Murnau, thirty-two years old, sighs like Alexander for more worlds to conquer. He rose from spear-carrier for Max Reinhardt to filmmaking in ten years. He first appeared in the Deutsches Theater in ’09, having won a scholarship after Reinhardt had seen him in an amateur production. He remained in the company until conscripted, working as assistant director whenever possible.