Summary
Summary of Metropolis
Who it’s for
For readers who love early science fiction, stories with big symbols, and visions of class and power in a future city, and anyone who knows the Fritz Lang film and wants the novel behind it.
What this book is
Metropolis is a novel by the German writer Thea von Harbou, published in 1925 and written in step with the film script she prepared for her husband, the director Fritz Lang. It imagines a vast tower city of the future. In the bright upper levels, the sons of the rich play and race. In the depths below, workers feed the machines that keep the city alive. Harbou asks a plain question. What happens when the people who plan and the people who labour stop seeing each other as human?
The book is short, fast and full of strong images: a roaring machine hall, a cathedral, a night club, a house with a strange old door in the middle of the city. It follows a rich young man who sees the workers' lives for the first time, a woman who calls for patience, and an inventor with a private grief. You get a story with the pull of a thriller and the shape of a parable. Let us begin with the city itself and the two worlds it holds apart.
In this summary
- 1A city split into head and handsFree
- 2A glimpse of Maria breaks Freder's comfort
- 3A son takes a worker's place
- 4Maria preaches patience in the catacombs
- 5Rotwang builds a machine in Maria's face
- 6What the story means and how it is told
Key point 1 of 6
A city split into head and hands
The story opens in Metropolis, a city of towers, bridges and traffic lanes in the air. It is ruled by one man, Joh Fredersen, who is called the Master of Metropolis. He thinks like an engineer. Whatever keeps the city running is good, and whatever slows it is waste.
The city has a clear order. The thinkers and the wealthy live and play above ground in sunlight. The workers live far below, in a district where the machines never stop and the shifts change by the clock. The two groups hardly meet. One group has the plans and the money, and the other has the muscle and the hours.
Fredersen's son Freder belongs to the sunlit world. He is young, fast and carefree, and he spends his days in the Club of the Sons and on the sports grounds. He has never asked where the city's power comes from. Nothing in his life has forced him to ask.
This part of the book sets the rule that everything else tests. Harbou does not paint the rich as villains from the start. They are simply blind, and the blindness is built into the city's design. A city can be wonderful and cruel at once, and the book wants you to feel both.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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