Nosferatu (1922)

eine Symphonie des Grauens

Kevin Jackson

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844576500
• eBook ISBN: 9781838717384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, starring Max Schreck as the hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire, remains a potent and disturbing horror film. Kevin Jackson's study traces Nosferatu's eventful production and reception history, including attempts by Stoker's widow to suppress it.

1 Contexts

Weimar Culture

Years passed. One no longer reads the terror of war in the eyes of men; but something of it has remained. Suffering and grief have weakened the heart of man and have bit by bit stirred up the desire to understand what is behind this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men.

Albin Grau, Vampires (1921)

Wittingly or not, all films express something of the age in which they are made, but – at least since the publication in 1947 of Siegfried Kracauer’s sociological study From Caligari to Hitler (see Introduction) – it has widely been accepted that the films made during the short-lived democratic experiment of the Weimar Republic are exceptionally fertile in their allegorical and not-so-allegorical treatment of popular desires, anxieties, hallucinations and dreads. Nosferatu has often been seen, in the distinguished company of Fritz Lang’s brace of early films about the master criminal Dr Mabuse, as one of the outstanding documents of Weimar culture’s dark side.

Albin Grau, a lifelong occultist, was the producer of Nosferatu as well as its designer, and his comparison of the recently fought war to a cosmic ‘vampire’ suggests that at least some of the dramatised anxieties that make the film so enduringly potent were well understood by its makers. Its prevailing themes include human destructiveness, moral and physical pollution, individual and collective insanity, the instinctive horror of corpses and the eternally fated struggle of life against death. These are, to be sure, ancient subjects of tragic art, but as Grau’s essay underlines, they also had a stinging topicality in 1921.

The state of Germany during the decade or so after the Armistice of 1918 – signed just three years before shooting began on Nosferatu – was finely evoked by Lotte Eisner at the opening of her passionate account of Weimar cinema, The Haunted Screen (L’Écran Démoniaque, 1952; translated 1969). Thousands of young German men had died and their families went into mourning, just as the bereaved families of France and Britain were mourning, but without the cold solace of a clear victory. Maimed and disfigured war veterans begged in the city streets of Munich and Berlin, a hideous daily reminder of the late massacres.

German national self-confidence had been shattered by a crushing military defeat; what was left of the economy was in ruins. The punitive, not to say humiliating terms of the war reparations laid down by the Treaty of Versailles exacerbated the condition. The notorious inflation, and then terrifying hyper-inflation of the mark during the Weimar period had become conspicuous as early as 1922, the year of Nosferatu’s release. But there was an even greater nightmare in the popular imagination. Germany had been one of the nations afflicted by the appalling Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918–19, which killed more people world-wide than all the guns and bombs of the previous four years. Contemporary audiences for Nosferatu, with its unsettling scenes of plague rats and mass burials, knew the terrors of contagion intimately.

The Social Democratic leaders of the Weimar Republic were hard-pressed to maintain a balance between the violent forces set loose by the defeat. Rumours ran wild: the country had been sold out, whispered or shouted adherents of the Kaiser, by a conspiracy of Jews and socialists. Agitators on the left proclaimed that the moderate government had sold out the workers, and thwarted them of the chance of a revolution along Russian lines. The so-called Spartacist movement attempted Soviet-style revolutions in 1919; the following year, on 13 March 1920, came the Kapp Putch, in which 5,000 soldiers of the Freicorps occupied Berlin and installed the right-wing journalist Wolfgang Kapp as Chancellor. This attempted coup d’état lasted just four days. Further upheavals lay ahead.

Finally, the collapse of the German economy was accompanied by a collapse in traditional values; some contemporary observers described the Berlin of 1922 as a new Sodom, where every known vice could be indulged, especially by those with dollars or other hard currencies. On the positive side, the sense that everything was teetering on the edge of a precipice could be exhilarating for those, especially the young, who wanted to see Germany made entirely anew, and the avant-garde arts that had begun to flourish in the prewar period, including Expressionist painting, made a dramatic come-back. Weimar culture was unusually rich, and Weimar cinema is sometimes said to be the high-water mark of German film-making.

All this is reasonably common knowledge. Less well remembered is the major occult revival which took place in Germany at this time – a revival in which Grau played a leading part. In the words of Eisner:

Mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves, had flourished in the face of death on the battlefields. … And the ghosts which had haunted the German Romantics revived, like the shades of Hades after draughts of blood. A new stimulus was thus given to the eternal attraction towards all that was obscure and undetermined, towards the kind of brooding speculative reflection called Grübelei.²²

Which is to say that the supernatural, macabre nature of Nosferatu was very much à la mode in 1922; and the producers could reasonably expect it to attract a substantial audience. Consider how many of the classics of Weimar cinema have macabre or supernatural elements: Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1919, directed by Robert Weine); Der Golem (1920, directed by Paul Wegener); Der Müde Tod (1921, directed by Fritz Lang); as well as Der Knabe in Blau (1919), Satanas (1919), Der Januskopf (1920, a version of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and Faust (1926) … all of them directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Murnau

In an age when many if not most film directors around the world were innocent of higher education, and often of humble origin, Murnau was not merely a young gentleman from a comfortably off (at one time, rich) background, but also an aesthete, an intellectual and a scholar of literature and art, who abandoned his original academic career for the stage and the screen. In an interview with Cahiers du cinéma (August 1961), Edgar G. Ulmer, who had worked as Murnau’s assistant before becoming a director in his own right, maintained that there had never been such a cultivated director.

He was born in Bielefeld, in the province of Westphalia, on 28 December 1888, the second of three sons of his father’s second marriage; there were two step-sisters from his father’s first marriage, Ida and Anna. His father, Heinrich Plumpe, was a wealthy textile manufacturer; his mother Otilie, née Volbracht, sometimes worked as a teacher. The infant was christened Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe: ‘Murnau’ was a stage name.

According to his older brother, Robert Plumpe, their forebears had suffered from chronic restlessness across the centuries, and seldom settled in one place for more than a few years. Towards the end of his life, Murnau wrote to his mother from Tahiti: ‘I am at home in no house and in no country.’ In the Christmas holidays of 1920, about eighteen months before he began to shoot Nosferatu, Wilhelm – as his family called him – stayed with Robert and his wife in their new home. Until the war, Friedrich had shown little interest in his ancestors, but the experience of combat somehow seemed to have woken a sense of family feeling in him.

Robert, who had investigated their ancestry, gave Wilhelm a long talk about their ancient roots. Their forefathers had been Swedish, but had moved to Pomerania in about 1,000 AD. Around 1350, they had been awarded a coat of arms – Robert had recently rediscovered it – and settled on a large estate at Varzmin. But this was an area torn by conflict, and towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Peter von Plumpe sold the estate and moved to Westphalia. Friedrich was fascinated by one strange detail in this account:

When I told Wilhelm that two women of our family had been burned as witches at Recklinghausen, he looked at me doubtfully, but eager to be convinced.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘It’s true. It happened in 1650. I still have to do some more research to find out whether one of their daughters, Trine Plumpe, was burnt too. At any rate, her mother and grandmother were, and she herself was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in the Tower at Horneburg.’

Wilhelm seemed very struck by this, and remained deep in thought.²³

The supernatural was, it seems, in Murnau’s blood.

In the 1880s, the Plumpe family were living in a house on the Bahnhofstrasse, on a site later converted into a cinema. But when Wilhelm was still a young boy, Heinrich decided to give up industry to lead the life of a country gentleman. In 1892, as Robert recalled:

He sold the business and bought a magnificent estate at Wilhelmshöhe, near Kassel, with a lot of land, hunting, a carriage and a horse. We children were delighted. There was everything we could wish for in that garden – a see-saw, a horizontal bar, a trapeze, all the things provided nowadays in playgrounds. It was a miniature paradise.²⁴

But a short-lived paradise: Herr Plumpe made a catastrophic investment in a new industrial process, and lost his most of his fortune. They moved into a rented apartment.

As might be expected from the tone of his work, Wilhelm was a delicate, imaginative boy, often lost in daydreams. He was a voracious and precocious reader, and by the age of twelve was already familiar with Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Shakespeare. His father, alarmed that this mania for books was ruining his son’s health, would take him on holidays to the island of Juist, tear the book from his hands and tell him to look directly at nature. The ploy worked: Wilhelm became a keen swimmer, learned how to sail and would spend hour after hour simply gazing out to sea – much as Ellen does while waiting for Hutter’s return in Nosferatu. Eisner suggests that the country landscapes of his youth were a profound influence on his films.

Throughout childhood, his chief delight was to stage plays in his puppet theatre – originally a modest toy, but soon replaced by a much larger structure built for him by his more practical brothers, and complete with lighting, a trap and flies. He roped in his siblings to play the parts he wrote for them, often basing his productions on the most recent play he had seen at the local theatre, and charged admission to fund further productions.

As he grew older, Wilhelm developed into a star pupil, always at the top of his class, though his contemporaries stressed that he was never given to displays of arrogance, and he was well-liked. His father did not approve of his scholarly and artistic ways, but he yielded to the pleadings of his wife, and indulged Wilhelm even to the extent of funding lengthy trips to France, Switzerland and other countries during school vacations. It may have been that Wilhelm’s father already suspected that Wilhelm was gay. As Lotte Eisner put it, with appropriately humane indignation: ‘Murnau, born in 1888, lived under the ominous shadow which the inhuman Paragraph 175 of the pre-1918 German Penal Code, cast over him and those like him.’ Some commentators – including the film-maker Stan Brakhage – have proposed that Murnau’s homosexual identity, necessarily kept a carefully guarded secret until his trip to the South Seas, was the tacit subject of most if not all of his films.

After taking his baccalauréat – he graduated cum laude in 1907 – Wilhelm went to study philology at Berlin, accompanied by his best friend Hans Ehrenbaum Degele, a fledgling poet, who was the son of a well-known opera singer, Mary Ehrenbaum Degele, and a Jewish banker.

It is worth noting that Murnau was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women throughout his short life; if there is any truth in the contention that Count Orlok represents an anti-Semitic fantasy, that animus is highly unlikely to stem from the director’s conscious mind. One of his fellow actors in the Reinhardt troupe, Alexander Granach (who plays Knock in Nosferatu), recalled in his memoir Da geht ein Mensch (translated as There Goes an Actor), how Murnau ‘always chivalrous, defended him, a little Jew from Galicia whose German was still imperfect, from the anti-Semitic attacks of Professor Held, who was himself Jewish’.²⁵

Wilhelm and Hans were probably lovers as well as friends – such, at any rate, is one of the assumptions made by Jim Shepard in his meticulously researched biographical novel about Murnau, Nosferatu in Love (1998). Whether or not this was the case, Hans’s parents embraced Wilhelm as another son, and his father showered both young men with generous gifts. It was at this time that Wilhelm also forged important friendships with other young artists and writers, notably Franz Marc, the Expressionist painter.

Among the courses Wilhelm took in these years of higher education were: Romantic German Literature, Shakespeare and German Art History. He also studied the Niebelungenlied, an Introduction to Old English, ‘Explanation of Monuments’, ‘Basic Questions of Ethics’, ‘Readings in Carlyle’, ‘Luther’, ‘Lessing’ and ‘Public Speaking’. the artists he studied included Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grunewald and Hans Holbein. His principal art history teacher was Carl Neumann (1860–1934), a Rembrandt expert. (There is at least one direct allusion to Rembrandt in Nosferatu.) He was working towards a doctorate, and in later years was often addressed as ‘Herr Doctor’, but in fact he abandoned his studies when a more seductive career opened up to him.

The celebrated director Max Reinhardt saw him acting in a Heidelberg student production, and he was so impressed that he invited the young man to join his acting school. Wilhelm abandoned his studies at the end of the summer semester, 1911. The worlds of theatre and cinema were closely related, and it is striking that three of the principal creators of Nosferatu were veterans of Reinhardt’s company: Murnau; Henrik Galeen, its screenwriter; Max Shreck, its leading player (the name ‘Shreck’, which means ‘Terror’ in German, was the actor’s actual surname, though it has often been assumed that it was a rather obvious stage name). Murnau toured with the company in Budapest, Salzburg and Vienna. One of the attractions of working for Reinhardt must have been his friendly attitude to homosexuals; though a devoted heterosexual himself, Reinhardt offered a protected space where his associates could be open and relaxed about their gay identities.

For his father, Murnau’s decision to abandon his studies and become an actor was the last straw. ‘No, not another penny,’ he said. ‘I paid for him to become a professor, not a starving actor.’ Unknown to him, Wilhelm’s mother asked her father to send Wilhelm regular small sums of money. It was at this time that Wilhelm adopted the ruthless policy, which he maintained until about 1920, of cutting himself off from all his family except his mother and almost all of the friends he had known in his school days. This was also the point at which he cast off his father’s name, and adopted the stage name of ‘Murnau’ – a nod to the Upper Bavarian artists’ colony, Murnau am Staffelsee, which he had visited with Hans.

Murnau’s early career in the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Contexts
• 2 Production
• 3 Nosferatu: Acts I and II
• 4 Nosferatu: Acts III–V
• 5 Release, Reactions, Reputation
• 6 Afterlives
• Notes
• Credits
• Select Bibliography
• eCopyright