Abstract
Hanns Heinz Ewers’s 1911 novel Alraune. Eine Geschichte lebenden Wesens (Alraune: A Story of a Living Creature) is considered one of the fundamental inspirations of modern horror literature and of the horror-film genre.1 The creation of an impulsive femme fatale by an ambitious scientist seems to integrate two defining tropes of modern imagination: Mary Shelley’s monstrous Frankenstein and Frank Wedekind’s promiscuous Lulu. Written in Italy prior to World War I and located in a tranquil turn-of-the-century German town, Alraune appears to have been particularly attractive to Weimar Jewish filmmakers, who produced three different cinematic adaptations of the novel (Eugen Illés, 1918; Henrik Galeen, 1927; and Richard Oswald, 1930).2 Jewish interest in filming Alraune is especially intriguing in view of the story’s alleged emphasis on conservative fear of social change and its racist (and even anti-Semitic) overtones.
I look at myself
In the mirror, and in fact
I am not a boy and not a girl
I am a German democrat
—Kurt Tucholsky, “Der Geschlechtslose”
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Notes
Howard P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 1945), 46–47;
Robert Reginald and Robert Menville, Classics of Fantastic Literature: Selected Review Essays (San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 2005), 59–60;
Casper Tybjerg, “Shadow Souls and Strange Adventures: Horror and the Supernatural in the European Silent Film,” in The Horror Film, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 15–39, here 22;
Alain Silver and James Ursini, Horror Film Reader (Pompton Plains: Limelight, 2000), 3–4.
Frank Braun enthusiastically elaborates on this erotic encounter, portraying the soil under the gallows as the “eternal mother,” which is “also the eternal prostitute,” for “she never denies herself, whoever desires her may take her wanton body.” Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune. Geschichte eines lebenden Wesens (München: Müller, 1926 [1911]), 61–62.
Klaus Gmachl, Zauberlehrling, Alraune und Vampir: Die Frank Braun-Romane von Hanns Heinz Ewers (Norderstadt: BoD, 2005), 312.
See discussion in Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Germany: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity: (New York, 2001), 3.
On these fantasies and their role in the crisis of modern (male) experience, see Ute Frevert, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 176–179;
Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 40–43;
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Vol. 1) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 350–358.
See also C. F. von Weizsäcker, The World View of Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 11–12.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (New York: Cardinal, 1962). David Blackbourn’s celebrated survey of the German “long century” begins even earlier, in order to identify it with the ascent of bourgeois culture during this period and the impact of Enlightenment thought on it.
David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Waukegan: Fontana Press, 1997).
The recurrent emphasis on Alraune’s (biological) origins locates the experiment within the context of racist challenge: if biology determines personality, science can determine the “objective” differences between different ethnic groups. Valery A. Weinstein, Mistaken Identity in Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Film, PhD dissertation, Cornell, May, 2000, 112, 144.
Wilfried Kugel, Der Unverantwortliche: das Leben des Hanns Heinz Ewers (Düsseldorf: Grupello Verlag, 1992), 165, 338.
Of the kind discussed in Shulamit Volkov, “Anti-Semitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and Historiography of Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany,” LBI Yearbook XXIII (1978), 25–46. Ewers’s skilful blending of the horrors and fantasies of modern consciousness into an image of a scientifically formed intruder has most likely echoed a widespread sense of rupture with past traditions, values, and practices.
See, for instance, Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into the Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Verso, 1982);
David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Works of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Oxford: Polity Press, 1985);
Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: University Press, 1984).
Valerie Weinstein, “Henrik Galeen’s Alraune (1927): The Vamp and the Root of Horror,” in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, ed. Christian Rogowski (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 198–210, here 198.
For definitions of the “vamp” as a stereotypical portrayal of women characters, see: Robert Müller, “Von der Kunst der Verführung: Der Vamp,” in Diesseits der “Dämonischen Leinwand”: Neue Perspektiven auf das späte Weimarer Kino, ed. Thomas Koebner (Augsburg: Richard Boorberg, 2003), 259–280;
Barbara Hales, “Projecting Trauma: The Femme-Fatale in Weimar and Hollywood Film-Noir,” Women in German Yearbook 23 (2007): 224–243.
Oskar Kalbus, Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst (Althona: Cigaretten-Bilderdienst, 1935), vol. I, 129.
Little is known about Galeen’s early years. The information on his birthplace and family is cited from Stratenwerth’s short survey, which is based on the account of Galeen’s daughter, Elvi. Irene Stratenwerth and Simon Hermann (eds.), “Wiesenberg und Gesang,” in Pioniere in Celluloid: Juden in der frühen Filmwelt (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 2004), 139–145, as well as from Hans-Michael Bock and Tim Bergfelder (eds.), The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopedia of German Cinema (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 145–146.
Galeen’s actual role in the making of this film is still debated by scholars. The association between the Golem and anti-Jewish sentiments within German society (and anti-Ostjuden within German Jewish society) has been underscored in several studies: Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From the “Golem” to “Don’t Touch my Holocaust” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1–27;
John D. Barlow, German Expressionist Film (New York: Twayne, 1982), 70;
Tania E. Kinsella, “Obscured Origins: The Early German Art Film and 18th Century Classical Aesthetics,” PhD dissertation, Chapel-Hill, 2001, 119, 128. In comparing the Golems imagery to that of Faust—a non-Jewish theme with some similarities—Prawer justly questions these tendencies.
Siegbert S. Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 34–41.
Jürgen Müller, “Der Vampir als Volksfeind. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnaus ‘Nosferatu’: ein Beitrag zur politischen Ikonografie der Weimarer Zeit,” Fotogeschichte 72 (1999): 39–58, here 51;
Patrick C. Hogan, “Narrative Universals, Nationalism, and Sacrifice Terror: from Nosferatu to Nazism,” Film Studies 8 (2006): 93–105; Sander L. Gilman, “Sibling Incest, Madness, and the ‘Jews,’” Social Research 65:2 (Summer 98): 401–433. Paul Coates asserts that Nosferatu has “stereotypically Semitic” characteristics that “anticipate the repertoire of anti-Semitism.”
Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95–96.
A more ambiguous reference to this anti-Semitic imagery is found in Kaes’s recent readings of Nosferatu: Anton Kaes, Shell-Shock Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 109–112.
Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
The various interpretations of Nosferatu associate him with several different social and psychological phenomena, from an allegory on sexual maturity to the longing for a merciless tyrant: Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 62;
Eric Rentschler, Ministry of Illusions: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 156;
Joe L. Collier, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 114–115;
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947), 77–79. According to Thomas Elsaesser, Nosferatu embodies “several contradicting and conflicting ethnic or racial ‘others.’” Elsaesser, “No End to Nosferatu,” Weimar Cinema, 82.
This key sequence appears as the climax to the long section of the film devoted to the territory that lies in-between the seemingly contradicting poles of “here” (Bremen) and “there” (Nosferatu’s mansion). The parallel race “home” undertaken by the vampire and the “normal” bourgeois protagonist undermines the dichotomy between these characters. As Judith Mayne noted, in this sequence the dichotomy between the different spheres—and the different characters—which has been constructed throughout the film, collapses. Judith Mayne, “Dracula in the Twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922),” in German Film and Literature, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Methuen, 1986), 23, 27.
As Robin Wood asserted, the confusion here regarding for whom the wife, Nina, is waiting, implies the similarities between these two men. Robin Wood, “Burying the Undead: The Use and Obsolescence of Count Dracula,” Mosaic 16 (Winter/Spring 1983): 175–187, here 184.
Lulu’s “pure femininity” is mentioned in Wedekind’s depiction of the essence of his Lulu, the Lulunatur (cited in: Frank Gehler, “Erdgeist,” in Deutsche Spielfilme von den Anfängen bis 1933, ed. Günther Dahlke (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1988), 40.
For the roles of the polarized paradigm of the “pure” (“virgin”) mother and the whore-mother in bourgeois culture, see E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 27–56.
David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 177 (see discussion in chapter one).
Kurt Tucholsky, “Der Geschlechtslose,” in Gedichte, ed. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992).
Prior to Alraune Oswald had participated in 98 film productions. His first script was filmed in 1914; his first work as a director was produced in December that year. Robert Kaul and Walter G. Scheuer, Richard Oswald (Berlin: Deutsche-Kinemathek, 1970), 41–75. Hans-Michael Bock, “Biographie,” in Richard Oswald: Regisseur und Produzent, ed. Helga Belach and Wolfgang Jacobsen (Munich: Text+Kritik), 136–180; Jürgen Kasten and Armin Loacker (eds.), Richard Oswald: Kino zwischen Spektakel, Aufklärung und Unterhaltung (Vienna: Verlag Filmarchive Austria), 547–559.
For instance, Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 43–47; Anton Kaes, “Film in der Weimarer Republik: Motor der Moderne,” in Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans H. Prinzler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004), 38–98, here 42–44.
Different from the Others has been depicted by scholars as the first film to discuss homosexuality openly. Richard Dyer, “Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany,” New German Critique 51 (Fall 1990): 5–60.
Robert Kiss, “Queer Traditions in German Cinema,” in The German Cinema Book, ed. Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz Göktürk (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 48–56, here 48;
Wolfgang Theis, “Anders als die Andern: Geschichte eines Filmskandals.” Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950, Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur, ed. Michael Bolle (Berlin: Frölich & Kaufmann, 1984), 28–30.
Richard T. Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 177–218.
See, for instance, John C. Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” in Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press), 259–292, here 268. As Nickolas Baer has recently argued, Hirschfeld’s ambivalent method of physiognomic classification simultaneously reinstates the biological-essential difference of sexually “deviant” individuals and empties it of any possible meaning: Hirschfeld’s categorization includes so many different variants and exceptions that they render any generalizations derived from it invalid. Nickolas Baer, “The Dialectic of the Aufklärungsfilm: Essentialism and Nominalism in Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (1919),” paper delivered at the German Studies Association Annual Conference, October 2010.
On the ideologies within the gay rights movement in Weimar Germany, see James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 71–102; idem, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern.” Film History 11:2 (1999): 181–203.
Richard McCormick, “Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform (1931),” Weimar Cinema, 271–290; Ofer Ashkenazi, “Prisoners’ Fantasies: The Longing for Law and Order in Weimar Film,” Journal of European Studies (Fall 2009), 39(3): 290–304.
Michel Foucault famously noted that modern perception of sexuality was correlated with a “new concept of race.” The categorization (and the moral magnitude) of sexual “perversions” grew together with “racism in its modern, ‘biologizing,’ statist form.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Allen Lane, 1979). Oswald’s film exploits this modern bourgeois imagery to implicitly refer to racial biology through sexual biology.
Helmut Korte, Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik: ein rezeptionshistorischer Versuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 132–133 and 297–299. Already in April 1929 the Film-Kurier stated that “studios that did not adapt to the production of sound film have been left empty.” Anonymous, “Der stumme Film muss bleiben: Nur-sprechen-Produktion reicht für Deutschland nicht aus,” Film-Kurier, April 30, 1929.
On the postwar formation of the myth of prewar harmony, see: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975);
Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Several studies have noted the dual role of the perfect woman and the ultimate machine in Metropolis. See, for instance: Andeas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass, Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 65–81;
R. L. Rutsky, “The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modernism,” New German Critique 60 (Autumn 1993): 3–32.
The association between Helm’s roles in Alraune and in Metropolis was underlined by the critics who reviewed Galeen’s earlier versio; for instance, Anonymous, “Alraune,” Reichsfilmblatt, 45, 1927, 20.
Both interpretations fit the mood in urban Germany in 1930. See, for instance, Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen: die Erinnerungen 1914–1933 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), 78.
Avraham Barkai, “Political Orientation and Crisis Consciousness,” German-Jewish History in Modern Times: Renewal and Destruction, 1918–1945, ed. Michael A. Meyer, Michael Brenner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 103. Weimar “golden years” (roughly 1924–1928) were not devoid of popular anti-Semitism. The deterioration of the legitimacy and power of the central government since 1929, however, undermined the continuing efforts to struggle against anti-Semitic assaults.
Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999).
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© 2012 Ofer Ashkenazi
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Ashkenazi, O. (2012). Assimilating the Shrew: Alraune and the Discussion of Biological Difference in Weimar Horror Film. In: Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010841_4
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