„I slept and dreamed – or was I awake? With undimmed eyes, almost too clearly, I saw the familiar room in which I was lying. The shutters of the window were half open – the moonlight was streaming into the room. And I saw myself face to face, not terrifying, but unmistakeable, with Death. Made of black and white, light and shade, the rip cage, the naked bones. On top of it the head, barely recognisable, shaded by the wide-brimmed hat.

Death and I gazed at each other. I don’t know whether I should call the feeling I experienced at that moment one of fear. It was horror without panic. And even the horror made way for a kind of mystical ecstasy which gave me, boy though I still was, the complete understanding of the ecstasy which made martyrs and saints embrace death.

I raised myself in order to accompany him. In my weak state I collapsed. People came and lifted me up. Death had disappeared.

I recovered quickly. But love of death, compounded of horror and affection, which the Gothic master depicted, stayed with me and became a part of my films: humanized in Destiny, symbolic in Die Nibelungen, living Gothic in Metropolis.

From: Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, New York, 1976, p. 55 f