for poor people depicted in the film were also reflections of conditions in Germany at the time. The character of Dr. Mabuse can also be seen as depiction of "the power of evil or a distorted inner psyche". Lang scholar Paul Jensen interpreted Mabuse as "a symbol to unite all the negative factors in Germany at the time". The film depicts difficult problems such as rampant crime, worthless money and a volatile stock market as thus being under the control of a single man. Bernd Widdig points out that while Dr. Mabuse is not an anti-Semitic film, aspects of Mabuse's character may have reflected contemporary stereotypes of Jews, especially since he acts in stereotypically Jewish roles such as psychoanalyst, banker, peddler and revolutionary, and consistent with the views on Jews of some contemporary Germans his manipulations were responsible for problems in society. A contemporary Nazi critic wrote that Mabuse is "a quintessential Jewish figure" who goes through time with the singular goal of "mastery of the world" regardless of the consequences to others and whose descent into insanity caused his crimes to go unpunished in what the Nazi critic described as "the typical case of the Jewish criminal". On the other hand, Mabuse with his hypnotic power over the masses in pursuit of evil has also been seen as a foreshadowing of Adolf Hitler. In the sequel The Testament of Dr. Mabuse the link between the Mabuse character and the Nazis is made stronger. Lang stated that he viewed Mabuse as a Nietzschean Übermensch. Lang also saw Mabuse's character as emblematic of a certain kind of money-accumulator in Weimar Germany referred to as a "Raffke". The producer of Dr. Mabuse, Erich Pommer, saw the film as a depiction of the contemporary conflict between the liberal conservatives and the Marxist Spartacists in which the Mabuse character represented the Spartacists, yet another view saw populist themes in the film. Another theme in the film is surveillance and seeing without being seen. Yet another theme is that of being versus seeming, portrayed through Mabuse's disguises and through buildings whose interiors seem inconsistent with their exteriors. Reception Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung called the first part "the attempt to create an image of our chaotic times" in its 30 April 1922 issue. It went on to state that it "will give people fifty or one hundred years from now an idea of an age that they