Dr. Mabuse is a fictional character, a villain, created by author Norbert Jacques but made most famous by the three films German director Fritz Lang made about him over a period of almost forty years. Though the character was designed to deliberately mimic pulp-style villains in the mold of Dr. Fu Manchu and particularly Fantômas, the latter of which was a direct inspiration, Jacques' aim was both to capture the commercial success of such pulp tales and to make political comment on the establishment of the day, in much the same way that the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had done just a few years previously.
Description
As befits his pulp influences, Dr. Mabuse is a master of disguise like Fantômas and a master of 'telepathic hypnosis', not unlike the hypnotist Dr. Caligari. Like Fu Manchu, Mabuse commits very few of his crimes in person, instead operating primarily through a network of agents acting out schemes he has laid down for them. Mabuse's agents range from career criminals following him for money, to innocents blackmailed or hypnotized into cooperation, to dupes so successfully manipulated that they do not realize that they are doing exactly what Mabuse planned for them to do.
There are other things, however, which makes Mabuse unusual among pulp-style villains. One of them is that his identity changes; that is, one 'Dr. Mabuse' may be defeated, the human being bearing that identity going to an asylum, a jail, or a grave, only for a new 'Dr. Mabuse' to later appear, with the same methods, the same powers of hypnosis, and the same criminal genius. There are even suggestions in some installments of the series that the 'real' Mabuse is some sort of spirit that possesses host after host.
Another trait that separates Mabuse from similar characters is the self-destructive bent to his personality and his plans. (Some have even suggested that Jacques took the name Mabuse not, as he claimed, from the painter who used that pseudonym , but from a pun: M'abuse is French for I abuse myself.) Several times Mabuse's plans are foiled only because he himself interfered with them, as if trying to bring down on himself his own downfall. This dovetails with another important distinction about Mabuse: whereas Fu Manchu aims to conquer the world, then rule it, Mabuse makes clear more than once that his intent is to destroy the world -- and then rule the ashes. This may explain why the character is regarded in Germany almost more as a horror icon, akin to Dracula or Frankenstein, than as a criminal mastermind of adventure tales akin to Fu Manchu.
History
Dr. Mabuse first appeared in the novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (trans. "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler") by Norbert Jacques. The novel was the beneficiary of unprecedented publicity efforts and became a best-seller immediately. Fritz Lang, already an accomplished director, worked with his wife Thea von Harbou to translate the novel to the screen, where it also became a huge hit. (The film history can be confusing on the subject of this film adaptation; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) is technically a single film with a running time of almost four hours, but it was released in two separate sections: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, An Image of the Times and Inferno, People of the Times. This practice was popular at the time but fell into disuse; in recent time the practice was revived by Quentin Tarantino with his film Kill Bill).
After the great success of both the novel and the film, it was almost a decade before anything more was done with the character. Jacques had been working on a sequel to the novel, titled Mabuse's Colony, in which Mabuse has died and a group of his followers are starting an island colony based on the principles set out in Mabuse's manifesto. However, the novel was stalled and unfinished. After conversations with Lang and von Harbou, Jacques agreed to shelve the novel and the sequel instead became the 1933 movie Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, in which the Mabuse of 1920 (still played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge ) is a mute prisoner in an insane asylum, but has for some time been obsessively scribbling out meticulous plans for crime and terrorism -- plans that are being carried out by a gang of criminals in the world outside, who receive their orders from a literally shadowy, unknown figure who has identified himself to them only as Dr. Mabuse.