A man at a carnival sideshow asks a sleepwalker how long he will live and is told: until dawn tomorrow. For the writers of the 1920 German silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, that was no campfire scare but an echo of soldiers in the trenches waiting for the morning artillery. This episode explores how Hans Janowitz, a former infantry officer, and Carl Mayer, who feigned madness before a bullying military psychiatrist to avoid service, channeled their distrust of authority into a mad doctor and his murderous somnambulist.

The conversation looks at the Berlin sideshow that inspired Caesar, the painted shadows and impossible angles of the expressionist sets, the tension between avant-garde ambition and a broke studio’s budget, and the frame story that recasts the narrator as an asylum inmate. It weighs Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler thesis against the 1978 discovery of the original script in Werner Krauss’ archives, and traces the film’s influence on Universal horror, Frankenstein’s monster and film noir.

• Why the sleepwalker Caesar works as a metaphor for a populace programmed to kill without thinking
• How producer Rudolf Meinert bet that eccentric sets would sell the film abroad
• Why the asylum courtyard still looks mad if the twist is supposed to restore sanity
• What Kracauer got wrong about the frame story being forced on the writers
• How Karl Freund carried expressionist lighting to Universal Studios and into American cinema