In 1982, Mephisto, directed by István Szabó, became the first Hungarian film to win the Academy Award for Best International Feature. Forty-three years on, its return feels less like a rediscovery than a reckoning. A new edition of the trylogy was remade and
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
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Szabó’s film, now restored and rereleased in Britain, is ostensibly a political parable: the story of Hendrik Höfgen, an ambitious stage actor in interwar Germany who trades his left-leaning ideals for prestige under Nazism. But to read Mephisto solely as an allegory of fascist collaboration is to miss its deeper, queerer currents—currents that bind desire, performance, and survival into a single moral knot.
The film is adapted from the banned novel by Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann and one of the most incisive literary voices of the German exile community. Mann wrote the novel in 1936 as a thinly veiled portrait of his former lover, the actor Gustaf Gründgens. The book was an act of both political indictment and intimate betrayal, exposing how artistic brilliance could coexist with moral abdication. Its publication triggered decades of legal battles and censorship, a testament to how dangerous such truths remained in postwar Germany.
At the centre of the film stands Klaus Maria Brandauer, whose performance remains one of the most unsettling in European cinema. Brandauer’s Höfgen is vain, seductive, and terrified, his ambition inseparable from a fragile masculinity that must constantly be affirmed by applause and proximity to power. What Szabó reveals—without ever naming it—is how queerness operates here as both vulnerability and currency. Höfgen’s world is one of coded desires, silences, and strategic blindness, where survival depends on knowing when to be seen and when to disappear.
This preoccupation runs through Szabó’s so-called German trilogy, recently restored alongside Mephisto. Colonel Redl centres on a homosexual officer in the Austro-Hungarian Empire destroyed by the very structures that briefly elevate him; Hanussen follows a Jewish clairvoyant navigating the occult appetites of Nazism. Together, these films form a sustained meditation on minority subjectivities trapped inside authoritarian systems—figures whose talents are exploited even as their existence is disavowed.
Asked recently whether Mephisto still speaks to the present, Szabó, now 87, observed that collaboration does not require dictatorship. Power, he suggested, often operates through seduction rather than coercion. It is a remark that lands with particular force today, when culture remains a site of quiet compromise, and when queerness is still tolerated conditionally—celebrated when useful, erased when inconvenient.
Szabó has long insisted that he is a Central European filmmaker before anything else. History, he likes to say, marches relentlessly through the region. In Mephisto, that march is staged as theatre: footlights, curtains, applause. What lingers, decades later, is the uncomfortable recognition that the stage has never really emptied—and that the bargain between talent and power remains as alluring, and as perilous, as ever.
The trilogy Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Hanussen, remastered, was released this month as a limited-edition Blu-ray box set, available for purchase on sites such as Amazon or eBay.
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