1920s Weimar Republic Cinema : Why did Fritz Lange's Metropolis draw such praise from Nazi figures like Goebbels, despite its anti-authoritarian messages?

This is a very difficult question to answer. You're talking about a person's personal interpretation of a work of art. Now, I'm a big film fan, and a big fan of Fritz Lang, but I couldn't find much about Goebbels' personal interpretation of the movie. There are, of course, stories of Fritz Lang talking about this. He claims that Goebbels was so impressed with his work, despite hating another of his movies, The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, that he offered to put him in charge of the entire German film production. Here's a video of one such interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk22GME79S0 . Now, according to an article in Film Quarterly ( http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft5h4nb36j&chunk.id=d0e11855&toc.id=d0e11855&brand=ucpress ), there is no mention of this meeting in Goebbels' diary, even though it was meticulously written and according to Lang's passport, he didn't actually permanently leave Germany until 4 months after the supposed meeting. Now it would make sense that Goebbels would make this offer, so the story is probably mostly true, but it seems to have been imbelished by Lang for the purposes of storytelling. So since I can't say much about how Goebbels actually felt about the movie, or the reasons behind it, we should instead talk about the movie itself. It is true that the movie seems to have some anti authoritarian messages. The plot is mostly classic dystopian fiction with Freder growing up assuming he lives in an Utopia, only to discover his society's Dark Secret. He then goes on to confront the dystopian overlord in charge, which happens to be his father. There is the critique of industrialism and capitalism, with the central image being that well know symbol of human arrogance, The Tower Of Babel. Then there is Rotwang, who attempts to replace Maria, the leader of the Molochs, with a robotic replacement in order to trick them. Now at some point, the real Maria states the theme of the film: "But the hands that built The Tower Of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it." And then later: "The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart." When asked, "where is our mediator Maria," she answers "Wait for him - he will surely come." This is were Freder comes in. You see, the worker's rebellion eventually leads to chaos and anarchy. They are unable to govern themselves and need a strong leader to lead them. The elite are cleary not the one to do this, and so they need someone in between to manage them. This is Freder. He is the heart from Maria's speech in the shrine earlier in the movie. In the end, the dystopia from the beggining of the movie is replaced with a new Utopia. This seems to have some fascist overtones to it. Fascism, of course, is concerned with unity above all things. Some will even go so far as to point out that the movie was written by Thea Von Harbou, who was in the Nazi party, and who Fritz Lang divorced before fleeing Nazi Germany, thus implying she weaved in some fascist ideals, which Lang didn't notice because was more interested in the robots and visual style of the film. Of course, it seems the real reason for their divorce was that she was cheating on him with an Indian man 17 years her senior, and she claims she only joined the party to lobby on behalf of Indian immigrants to Germany. It becomes hard to tell if she was a fascist or not, but watching the movie, it also becomes hard to tell if it really is against authoritorianism or not. There seems to be a lot of room for interpretation here, and it seems to me that the issue is you're having trouble resolving your idea of the movie's meaning, with your idea of what you think Goebbels would like out of a movie. As to why he thought Lang could make some good propaganda for the party, well, you have to admit the movie did have the kind of epic scale that Goebbels seemed to like out of his films and it makes sense to think that he thought he could use Lang's talent to his advantage.