Johanna Lang

From PATRICK MCGILLIGAN: Fritz LangThe Nature of the Beast St. Martin's Press http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mcgilligan-lang.html

" Like many of the women central to a Lang film, Anton Lang's mother was a beautiful woman, mysterious, almost ruthlessly determined to accomplish her goals in life--a trait, relatives always said, Fritz Lang inherited from her.

Johanna Lang was born in 1839 in Sichelbach, a village in southern Moravia, then a Habsburg province approximately ninety miles northwest of Vienna near the Austrian border. Today this area is part of the Czech Republic.

Lotte Eisner wrote that Lang told her his paternal grandmother grew up in the country, came to Vienna as a young girl, and became housekeeper of a patrician Viennese family. There Johanna Lang fell in love with the son of the house, and found herself pregnant. Born and raised a Catholic (the first inkling of the Catholicism deeply ingrained in Lang's life), she had landed in a sinful, scandalous predicament."