Anton Lang

From PATRICK MCGILLIGAN: Fritz LangThe Nature of the Beast St. Martin's Press http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mcgilligan-lang.html "The shadow cast by Vienna's architecture is rendered all the more germane to Fritz Lang's life story by that of his father. Anton Lang was thirty years old when his son was born, and city records attest that he was a Baumeister and part owner of Honus and Lang, a prominent construction enterprise located in a three-story building along the east side of the imperial park, the Augarten.

In latter-day books and articles about his world-famous son, Anton Lang is usually described as an architect. In fact, Baumeister, a German word often confused and translated as "architect" in English and French, means more precisely that Lang's father was a builder or executor of architectural plans. He had the additional honorific, in city archives, of Stadtbaumeister, which simply meant that he was licensed to appear as a project manager before Vienna municipal boards. (...)

The bustling company had several sidelines, including, in the late 1880s, the construction and operation of the Wiener Centralbad, or Vienna Central Baths. The luxurious Wiener Centralbad was situated on valuable real estate close to the St. Stephansdom and the Stadtpark, behind the baroque facade of an everyday apartment block which Endl and Honus had constructed in 1880. The only public baths in the center of town, the Wiener Centralbad catered to the business community, with cold-water pools inside pillared halls for both men and women, a steam room, mud baths, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and massages."

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There is, in fact, no documented evidence of the true identity of Anton Lang's natural father. Only this can be substantiated from Viennese archives: the child of Johanna Lang was born August 1, 1860, in the maternity ward of a foundling's home in what was then the western suburb Alservorstadt (today located more or less downtown). Georges Sturm, a European specialist on Fritz Lang, has performed exhaustive detective work on the family tree, and his research confirms that on the day of the birth the nuns crossed the Alserstrasse and had the infant baptized by a parish priest. The godfather was the sacristan, the father's name unspecified. The birth register plainly listed Anton Lang as an "illegitimate child."

Johanna Lang never named the father, and it appears that Anton himself did not know his identity--a theme repeated almost by chance in Fritz Lang's 1955 film Moonfleet, in which a wistful boy searches for his mother's long-lost "friend," while never quite realizing that the gentleman-smuggler watching over him is his wayward father. People familiar with the director's work will recognize the illicit love affair, illegitimacy, and the "doubling" of identity as recurrent plot situations that would become almost obsessional in his films. Lang liked to glamorize his own illegitimate family history right down to the happy ending in which an "honest man" comes to the rescue as father to the child."