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 t ...