Chapter Three

Nightmare Bodies

Today I found in Mametz Wood

A certain cure for lust of blood:

. . . a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk

With clothes and face a sodden green,

Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,

Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

—ROBERT GRAVES, “A Dead Boche” (1916)

Trauma and the Uncanny

Sigmund Freud sat at his desk at Berggasse 19 in Vienna in late 1918 thinking about the chilling nature of dolls, the inanimate that threaten to animate. He held one of his omnipresent cigars while he pondered horror.

He could barely keep his hands warm. The war meant that scarcity of all kinds affected Vienna, and the room chilled for lack of coal. Freud wrote letters around the same time that began with complaints about the cold. In fact, he and his family may have even suffered from hunger without the aid of the occasional packages from friends in Budapest and the Netherlands.¹

A lack of basic necessities had caused Freud to cut back his twenty-­cigar-a-day habit. (Oral cancer forced the physician into sixteen surgeries over the next twenty years, yet he refused to give up tobacco.) On this day, while Freud worried and chewed at his cigar, the ancient dynasty of the Hapsburgs collapsed with shocking suddenness, the end of almost half a millennia of imperial rule. While Austria-Hungary entered its death throes, Freud waited for word of his two sons serving in the final march of the Hapsburg armies. His family, it would turn out, had been lucky. One son suffered a slight wound, and the other, though missing at the end of the war, was soon repatriated from an Italian prison camp.

At the beginning of 1915, just six months into the conflict, Freud had written an odd essay titled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (often translated as “Reflections on War and Death”). It includes some analysis of the psychology of war but primarily contains a set of despairing reflections on the course the world had taken. It’s obviously influenced by the possible fate of his own family and Vienna itself, the city of the baroque and bohemian whose coffeehouses had buzzed with caffeine highs and intellectual ferment for decades. Freud believed, even before the war entered its most terrible phase, that life as he had known it had come to an end. “We cannot but feel that no event has ever destroyed so much that is precious in the common possession of humanity,” he writes.²

Freud had the intellectual’s tendency to fail at separating personal problems from conceptual conundrums. His sons’ army service on the eastern front, and his wider circle of students and colleagues serving in the medical corps all over Europe, interested him in what many physicians called “war neurosis,” known more popularly as shell shock. In response, Freud wrote “Mourning and Melancholia,” a work that still shapes our understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He began the essay in 1915 though he did not published it. In it, he undertook the problem of what happened to human beings subjected to the kind of war Europe was waging on itself. Freud raised the possibility, soon proved by the terrors that an entire generation had to confront, that a specific kind of sadness could possess brain and bones: a phantasm that never died.

Trauma, Freud recognized, settled like a hard frost into a mind grieving itself to death. “Melancholia,” the term Freud chose to describe this state, in contrast to a healthy processing of loss, constitutes a kind of mourning without end, a repetition of the original trauma in night terrors, nervousness, anger, and even waking nightmares. Men at the front suffered all these things, along with unexplained blindness (called “hysterical blindness” by doctors in the war), muteness with no organic cause, or sustained crying.

Seeing oneself as a corpse waiting to happen became a legacy of the war. Freud sees in this vast capacity for traumatic sorrow a solution to the riddle of suicide. Why would the human being, whose very existence was predicated on narcissistic self-love, consent to its own destruction? Such a reversal of the deepest instinctual drives of the species becomes possible once the subject sees himself as an object. Trauma turned a human being’s “murderous impulses” against himself.³

Now, as the war came to a close, Freud thought about the fiction of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the same writer of dark fairy tales whose work Ernst Lubitsch had drawn on for The Doll. Why did Hoffmann’s subtle short story “The Sandman”—with its two monstrosities: a mechanical doll that becomes an object of desire and a creature that takes the eyes of children in the night—frighten people so badly? The final convulsions of the war caused Freud to wonder about the nature of fear and, in an almost direct meditation on his experience waiting for news of his son, the fear invoked by the return of the dead. His 1919 essay on the art of supernatural terror, “The Uncanny,” became his answer.

Freud traced the root of the word unheimlich (literally “un-home-like,” but translated into English as “uncanny”) to the idea of being “un-homed,” being in unfamiliar territory but still remembering the familiar. The chill of the uncanny settles on us when we confront strangeness and experience a shock in the midst of the everyday. We look at something that is utterly different from us yet behaves like us. The dread can work in the obverse fashion as well, when the familiar becomes strange, when our expectations of the world are not only proved wrong but twisted into unrecognizable geometries.

We have minor experiences with Freud’s uncanny all the time. They range from “things feeling off” to things that are truly chilling. We’ve all had the experience of mild peculiarity that accompanies seeing an acquaintance out of their normal context. At the other end of the spectrum, learning a terrible secret or confronting a personal catastrophe that makes the normal and familiar utterly disorienting chills us to the bone. (The slang term “the new normal” contains or at least explains this dread.) We try to ward against the uncanny by insisting, gruesomely and probably falsely, that we are “comfortable in our own skin.” What other skin would make you comfortable? If you spent much time thinking about being a bundle of nerves and muscle wrapped in skin, would you remain comfortable in it?

Freud’s reflections on the nature of horror make only one definitive allusion to the war, but its presence hovered behind him as he wrote. He chooses to illustrate the idea of the uncanny, this sense of existential homelessness, by reflecting on the ideas of the doll and the doppelgänger (the ghostly double), both terrors reflecting a world filled with corpses and the most shudder-­inducing possibilities of the uncanny manifested on a global scale.⁴

The doppelgänger has long haunted tales of morbidity. It’s not clear whether Freud ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “William Wilson” (1839), but had he done so it would have confirmed his idea that the existence of a double can only create terror, coming at us like the incarnation of the sadistic punisher of the ego that haunts the halls of the mind. Although he only broaches the idea that Poe fully explores in his tale, Freud conceptualizes the double as the representative of our own death. It is an agent of terror—found in a doll, a puppet, a mirror, or an automaton—a reminder that we are bodies destined to become corpses.

In fact, Freud writes that for most people the uncanny “is represented by anything to do with death, dead bodies.” One of the many peculiar aspects of the essay is that it digresses and repeats itself, with Freud sometimes undermining his earlier claims. It’s as if he doesn’t want to talk about what he’s actually talking about. We get to the end of the essay before he admits that he’s really writing about the dead. He doesn’t fully explore the possibility, but our fascination with—or, alternatively, revulsion to—mirrors may come precisely from the fear of the double, our fear of death.⁵

The brief mention of the significance of mirrors represents one of the more interesting of Freud’s meanderings. It’s true that some people can stare at an image of themselves for long periods, attempting to meet unrealistic expectations of beauty. But we have myths, tales, and urban legends reaching back to the classical story of Narcissus that warn about the dangers of gorging on the image of the self. One example that centers on the danger that lies in the mirror is the performance ritual of “Bloody Mary,” first recorded by folklorists in great detail at midcentury. To perform the ritual, you stand in front of a mirror in a darkened room and repeatedly invoke a name, most often Bloody Mary but sometimes Mary Worth, sometimes Mary Weather. After a certain number of repetitions (some accounts say three times, others thirteen, still others some other number), you will see the monster—Mary’s spirit—in the mirror. Variations of the ritual involve lighting a candle and turning around three times. Whatever the details, the monster accompanies the reflection, hugs itself to the reflection of the self, another kind of repetition. It becomes a vertiginous hymn to our own death, sung as a duet.⁶

Like the doppelgänger, the doll can cause “intellectual uncertainty,” a concept that doesn’t capture the truly dizzying effect of such an encounter. But Freud used this phrase to evoke a disturbing sense of the unknown that produces the sense of being “un-homed.” When this occurs, not only are we having an unpleasant experience, but we are asking a question: Will it become alive? Freud realized that we are also asking the obverse: Are we really just like it?

Sitting at his desk, shivering in the cold, he wrote that the doll, the automaton, the waxwork, “arouse in the onlooker vague notions of automatic-­mechanical processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of the living person.” Then, perhaps after looking around the office at his collection of Greek and Egyptian artifacts and wondering if his sons had died, he changed the subject. He didn’t really want to talk about it.⁷

Closer to our own time, discussions of artificial intelligence have broached elements of Freud’s thesis. Masahiro Mori, a robotics expert at Tokyo’s Mukta Research Institute, first used the term “uncanny valley” in 1970. Mori’s original idea suggested that once we began to build more and more lifelike computers, we will at first look at them with empathy, but, as time goes by, they will become eerie to the point of revulsion. This observation led him to conclude that engineers should refrain from constructing robots that are too lifelike, a suggestion most of his influential students have ignored. They have instead assured themselves that they can navigate the uncanny valley if they successfully humanize artificial intelligence.

Why does this happen? Why would an atmosphere of the weird rather than a sense of interest and curiosity accompany a machine that appears “too human”? Theorists use a technical term that, like many technical terms, seems specifically crafted to avoid a hard truth: a mechanical double of ourselves, like the eerie feeling that automata of any kind produce, creates what robotics experts call “mortality salience.” They are mechanisms that look and act like us, and when we interact with them the possibility arises that we, too, are soulless automata. They can be disassembled into parts, and so can we. Mortality salience transforms them from objects of interest into memento mori, reminders that our death approaches and that we will likely not extrude a shining soul, acquire wings, and float to the sky.⁸

Freud might have liked the notion of mortality salience, since he also saw the grim phantasm of our own corpse in the doll and the double. Then again, perhaps he would have dismissed the idea, given how he seemed to be reaching toward it in 1918 and kept getting himself lost. Freud scholars have in fact noted that there’s something uncanny about “The Uncanny,” as if Freud had penned a gothic novel rather than a highfalutin academic essay.⁹

For example, in another head fake, Freud claimed that he personally had almost no experience of the uncanny—a strange assertion for someone who seemed to suggest that the shudder-inducing experience can, indeed must, appear before all of us like the cold shadow of a vampire. Speaking of himself in the third person, he insisted that it had been “a long time since he experienced or became acquainted with anything that conveyed the impression of the Uncanny.” The entire first section that follows, before he settles into writing about dolls and doubles, contains an exhaustive (and, honestly, for most readers exhausting) linguistic survey of the possible meanings of unheimlich.¹⁰

When he finally makes his point in language that needs no interpretation, it comes toward us like the final jump scare in a horror flick that makes the theater scream: “Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm . . . all these have something highly uncanny about them.” Indeed they do, but why after so much theoretical discussion of the terror of the unfamiliar in the midst of the familiar are we suddenly in a pile of mutilated bodies?¹¹

These final observations come within a page of Freud’s most direct allusion to the Great War. The severed body parts lying half buried in collapsed trenchworks on the western front, and on battlefields from the Balkans to South Africa, startled the very beginning of the twentieth century into an uncanny fever dream. The war had made an entire generation confront the idea of the human body as an object, eyes lightless in death, disassembled into separate pieces.

Paul Fussell, a combat veteran of World War II as well as a scholar of the literature of the Great War, observed, “In a war, as in air accidents, ‘insides’ are much more visible than it is normally well to imagine.” A corpse surrounded by funereal ritual might help us sentimentalize death. Living through—barely—four years of a war in which human beings are transmuted into corpses by industrial processes removes the possibility of sentiment. The world willingly watched films about death dolls like Caligari’s Cesare or Paul Leni’s carnival horrors come to life. Suicide, Freud’s “murderous impulses” against the self, took on new meaning. Suicide had a simplicity in its method of making a corpse.¹²

The many suicides among those traumatized by the Great War confirm this. In 1919, veterans accounted for 40 percent of all the suicides in Canada. In New Zealand, whose troops had seen some of the most horrific fighting on the western front and at Gallipoli, suicide rates among veterans ran as high as four times those of nonveterans in the same age cohort.¹³

Shell-Shocked

The encounter with the uncanny in the trenches could portend a meeting with a new monster born of modern warfare. Early in the war, the last week of August 1914, military authorities sent home a small number of British soldiers described as “broken” by their first experience of battle at the Belgian city of Mons. A British physician in September described the hospitals filling with “frequent examples of gross hysterical conditions” associated with what the doctors considered trivial bullet and shrapnel wounds. War neurosis, or shell shock, had first appeared, though few understood the reasons why in those first months.¹⁴

A report on shell shock produced by the British War Office in 1922 sought to investigate the phenomenon, apparently not to reconsider the inhuman decisions made in the war, but instead to help military personnel and medical professionals contend with the problem adequately in future conflicts. The committee appointed by the War Office spent a rather significant amount of time discussing how the term “shell shock” had come into use to describe the effect of concussive shelling on the human psyche but also represented a more generalized description of the emotional effects of the trenches themselves.¹⁵

This discussion seems somewhat moot, given that the vast majority of soldiers experienced both. They endured the continuous shelling, worsening at times of major offensives. Their defensive fortifications became death traps. Corpses piled up unburied, sanitary water became scarce, and increasingly aggressive rats emerged to feed on the dead. The absurdities of nighttime patrols led by officers into no-man’s-land provoked tormenting anxiety.

Even four years after the end of the conflict, many of the witnesses for the committee—a group that included as many recruiting agents, high-ranking officers, and men charged with the training of troops as physicians—raised the possibility of malingering and wondered about how class and social status affected the high incidence of shell shock. Some assured their readers that the condition could be prevented if future soldiers received better training. The savage lack of empathy aside, none of the committee’s witnesses denied its reality. Something terrible had been awakened in the human psyche by this new kind of war.

Unsurprisingly, physicians who had actually treated the condition provided the most detailed and empathetic accounts. J. I. C. Dunn, who served as a medical officer beginning in 1915, doubted that shell shock accounted for much of the war trauma of the men he treated. Moreover, while concussive shelling played its deadly role in creating unbearable anxiety, Dunn also noted the conditions of the trenches he personally experienced at the Ypres salient in 1915. Worry over the use of mustard and chlorine gas became chronic. Melting snow in the spring forced men to stand and crouch in trenches that had become little more than giant shell holes and filled with water (creating the condition of “trench foot” to further their misery). Moreover, despite official insistence that soldiers regularly rotated off the front lines, Dunn noted that his own division had been in the salient for fourteen months.¹⁶

These psychological conditions made the uncanny an almost daily reality for many veterans of the trenches. Their minds had been permanently “un-homed.” Martin Gilbert, one of the foremost historians of the Great War, remembered that he’d been warned by family members never to speak of the war to his uncle Irvine, who had fought at the Somme. This ban continued until his uncle’s death at the age of ninety-three. One of Gilbert’s first history teachers spoke frequently of the war to his young charges and would march in front of the classroom, broom over his shoulder, singing military airs. When the teacher published his memoir, Gilbert discovered that such seeming buffoonery hid the enormous suffering the man had endured and that he wrote about it with “great sensitivity.”¹⁷

Horror films, fiction, and art—creating for oneself the experience of the uncanny—offered one way to express, without overtly identifying with, the “war neuroses” that left a generation psychologically devastated. Certain aspects of shell shock seem closely followed by the art of horror across several media in the war’s aftermath. Soldiers’ experiences mirrored the feeling of the uncanny described by Freud and darkly illuminated in film and fiction.¹⁸

Soldiers testified to a mental state they experienced during the war that left them feeling like zombies, somewhere at an intersection point of nightmare, dream, and their own death. The 1922 War Office committee’s further investigation of so-called commotional shock, involving a shell exploding near you or a sap mine underneath you, proposed that such incidents could lead “to delirium or stupor; in some cases by automatism or fugue.” Physicians suggested, though much disagreement existed on this, that such an experience often created a “mental wound” that endured long after the experience, even after the end of the war. One French physician described his patients experiencing “mental confusion,” a term he preferred to what the soldiers themselves called “battle hypnosis.”¹⁹

The horror tradition replicated this fugue state over and over again. Cesare and Frankenstein both seem shell-shocked, as do their victims and creators. Freud, in “The Uncanny,” described the “uncanny effect of observing epileptic fits and manifestations of insanity.” He seems to have detected here, though he takes the idea no further, that the empty eyes of the shell-shocked man weren’t so empty after all; they reflected one’s own death.²⁰

We can understand this through the uncanny effect of some Japanese horror films, often themselves drawing on the trauma of a later war. Samara in Ringu (remade in America as The Ring, 2002) or the enraged dead in Ju-on (remade as The Grudge, 2004) depend on the unsettling movements of the starving ghosts who haunt their victims. Their limbs move in a way we don’t think limbs should. They crawl but also slither. Sometimes they skitter toward us, insectoid and reptilian. We shudder and wince because such images call into question the stability of our own bodies and their boundaries.²¹

The soldiers themselves told of experiences with phantasms that assaulted them on the battlefield and then came looking for them long after the war had ended. Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary, later to become the renowned German war memoir Storm of Steel, of leading his troops while in a detached, dreamlike state induced by shelling. He described his mind refusing to tell his body of “the curious fluttering and whooshing sounds over our heads.” This sense of chilling unreality increased at the sight of stretcher-­bearers on a village street. Jünger described them as “groups of dark figures” carrying “a blood-spattered form with a strangely contorted leg.” The scene increased his sense of delirium, “a queasy feeling of unreality . . . like a ghostly manifestation in broad daylight.”²²

The eerie nature of these visions point forward to the culture of horror born in film and fiction and backward to the Gothic tradition. British private Frank Richards remembered that some soldiers fell into a semiconscious state. In one instance from the early days of the war, a fellow infantryman pointed out “a fine castle” on the side of a French hillock, but Richards saw no castle. He wrote of the sightings of the Angel of Mons that certainly soldiers marching for hours into the night saw all sort of oddities: “Very nearly everyone was seeing things, we were all so dead beat.”²³

“You must become Caligari!” threatened the advertisements five years later, but it had already happened for many soldiers in the early months of the war. Looming castles haunted combatants before they reared against iron-gray skies in Nosferatu. They called to mind the haunted castles that many veterans had been raised on in fairy tales and Gothic novels, places of death and carnage that wrecked the illusion of immortality that the young always embrace.²⁴

Numerous reports of soldiers finding themselves in a hypnotic, and highly suggestible, state became common on the battlefield. Soldiers have, of course, feared combat since the beginnings of organized armies. But the Great War unleashed several kinds of new technology that collapsed the human psyche as well as sundered the body, technology perfectly inflected by the art of the uncanny.

The constant barrage of shelling, the steel patter of the Maxim guns, and the threat of gas choking and blinding soldiers made for the hypnotic, even mystical, state sometimes described. Walter Flex entitled his autobiographical work written in the trenches Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten (The Wanderer between the Two Worlds) to suggest how the experience of war made porous the boundary lines between reality and the world of dreams, the living and the dead. The book became a bestseller. Flex himself died on the eastern front in 1917.²⁵

In a letter to his wife written during the first weeks of the war, the German expressionist painter Franz Marc noted the strange feeling of unreality, as if he had already died. He described this experience in supernatural terms as “a spirit that hovers behind the battles, behind each bullet.” The result, he admitted, transformed “battles, wounds, movements” into a “mystical, unreal effect.” He knew already that this war had been like no other and as a painter noted that “it is unbelievable there were times in which war was represented by painting campfires, burning villages, galloping horsemen, . . . patrol riders and the like.” He would die a year and a half later at Verdun.²⁶

World War I shattered psyches and turned the landscape into what Murnau and Grau in Nosferatu, drawing on their own experiences, called “the land of phantoms.” The effect of shell shock and life in the trenches more generally has attracted much attention from historians, so much so that often the most obvious and terrifying effect of their experiences has gone unremarked. As Denis Winter writes in his history of British troops in the Great War, many soldiers described their encounter with corpses as the most horrifying aspect of their lives. He quotes one Tommy who spoke in tones that suggest the soldiers had come to regard the omnipresent corpses as holding no real meaning other than death itself:

Death lies about in all its forms. A limbless body here, the tunic fitting the swollen body like a glove. He may have wanted a tunic to fit him like that all his life—he gets it in death. A boy without a head like a rumjar without a label. A form fast turning green lying in a pool of grey-green gas vomit. Death in a thousand different masks.²⁷

No sentimentality and no words about love for the fatherland, the empire, the monarch, or the value of sacrifice. The dead mark nothing and, in this first war that followed the second industrial revolution, the headless body makes the young soldier think of an empty bottle missing its label, nameless and meaningless.

The soldier confronted Freud’s uncanny in its most blood-drenched form—the death doll and, perhaps most significantly, the double. Writing more than a decade after the war, another soldier remembered looking at corpses half buried by the muddy trenches and thinking that they seemed “emptied of life.” He then added, “A man dies and stiffens into something like a wooden dummy. . . . One forgets quickly. The mind is averted as well as the eyes. It reassures itself after the first cry: ‘It is I. No, it is not I. I shall not be like that.’”²⁸

The sense of a world filled with corpses, and all the nightmare images that attend such a sensibility, followed soldiers from the battlefield. The English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon found that the dead came for him even after he’d been sent to a London hospital to recuperate from a wound. In April 1917, he wrote of how he would spend the day talking to his compatriots about the war in catchphrases and clichés, conversations that seemed as irrelevant as speculations about the weather. But then, when night fell “and the ward is half shadow,” the reality of the war came back to him:

The horrors come creeping across the floor; the floor is littered with parcels of dead flesh and bones, faces glaring at the ceiling, faces turned to the floor, hands clutching neck or belly; a livid grinning face with bristly moustache peers at me over the edge of my bed, the hands clutching my sheets.²⁹

Sassoon’s experience of watching a horror film unfold before his eyes lasted much longer than the war itself for most veterans and indeed for their families. In “For the Duration,” the poet Ted Hughes wrote, years after his veteran father’s death, about the night terrors that threatened to destroy his childhood home:

I could hear you from my bedroom—

The whole hopelessness still going on,

No man’s land still crying and burning.

William Hughes had been part of the disastrous landing at Gallipoli, where his regiment spent months pinned down on the beach under Ottoman guns and, according to a medic who served there, “men had lost arms and legs, brains oozed out of shattered skulls, and lungs protruded out of riven chests; many had lost their faces and were, I think, unrecognizable to their friends.”³⁰

The terrors of the psyche broken by such conditions cannot be fully hidden. The trauma of the body certainly cannot. Historians Stéphane Audoin-­Rouzeau and Annette Becker point to specific medical advances—including better evacuation techniques, the use of anesthesia on the battlefield, X-rays, techniques that prevented gangrene and reduced the necessity of amputation—that appeared during the Great War. But, they note, the brutality of combat “counterbalanced” all these techniques. The effects of shrapnel, large-caliber shells, the steel spray of Maxim bullets, and poison gas combined to create a generation of disabled people.³¹

Catastrophic physical trauma conjoined with psychological trauma in the war’s aftermath. The war left over 20 million men wounded. Some of them, like Freud’s son, recovered quickly. Millions suffered for the rest of their lives. In France, where the toll of the wounded has been estimated at 1.1 million, the sheer number of the disabled forced the public to give special attention to men permanently disfigured by the war.

The first Armistice Day celebration in 1919 placed amputees, men with catastrophic facio-dental injuries, and those blinded by gas and shell fragments at the front of the parade. This induced a haunting for those in the crowd who found the display out of touch with a victory celebration. It’s well to recall that many who cheered the men bore their own psychic and physical wounds from the war. The scene seemed a strange enactment of the return of the dead in J’accuse.

The number of facial injuries in France led to the creation of a veterans’ organization in the 1920s called the Union des Gueules Cassées (Union of Broken Faces or, more literally, Union of Broken Mugs). Five thousand strong, the group received significant coverage by the French press, including photographs of some of the membership appearing in the popular magazine L’illustration.

The description of the men, however, reads as less than empathetic, suggesting only the horror they invoked. The article calls them “a hideous sight” and invites us to consider faces that have undergone “sinister hollowing from bullets, the pulverizing from grenades, the stabbing from bayonets or daggers.” The piece concludes by capturing the spirit of the uncanny the wounded veteran inspired, calling them “the monsters whose lot is worse than death.”³²

In Germany, men physically scarred by the war made the streets of Berlin seem a haunted place to the Soviet diplomat Ilya Ehrenburg in the fall of 1921. He saw the evidence of the recent “catastrophe” everywhere but also noted that the war had become the ghost at the feast, visible and yet purposefully hidden. The “artificial limbs of war-cripples did not creak, empty sleeves were pinned up with safety-pins. Men whose faces had been scorched by flame-throwers wore large black spectacles. The lost war took care to camouflage itself as it roamed the streets.”³³

Massacres

Soldiers did not suffer alone, and to understand the popularity of horror in the years following the war, it’s essential to grasp the evils wrought on noncombatants. The war inflicted the same psychological and physical wounds on civilian populations. Nurses, ambulance drivers, and battlefield physicians experienced shell shock, as did millions of civilians caught near, or almost literally in the middle of, the war in Europe, Africa, and western Asia.

In many dark corners of the war, the fate of civilians proved worse than that of the combatants. Although cloaked in the language of propaganda, especially the British use of the “German atrocities” in Belgium as a reason to enter the war, investigations by medical and legal authorities during the conflict and historians’ subsequent research show that war crimes did occur on a mind-numbing scale between 1914 and 1918. Unfortunately, soldiers from both the Allied forces and the Central Powers targeted civilians, even if more evidence exists for the inhuman acts of the latter. We can account for this fact in part due to the Central Powers successfully invading and occupying Allied territory (at least in Europe) such that civilians became targets of opportunity.³⁴

Rape, an act of extreme violence generally ignored when calculating the human cost of war, occurred on a massive scale in the global conflict. A German-Swiss criminology professor, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, visited Serbia in the fall of 1914 to carry out an intensive investigation of battlefield atrocities. The politics of the moment certainly shaped his findings, but it’s worth noting that Reiss went beyond eyewitness accounts, investigating sites of atrocities and even determining the expenditure of bullets. He gathered and compared both Austro-Hungarian and Serbian reports. He found a living horror.³⁵

Even in these early months, as Hapsburg armies began their advance into Serbia, gang rapes that included other forms of torture and often ended in disembowelment became common practices among invading troops. At least one young Serbian woman, Reiss discovered, had been raped by as many as forty soldiers, who then cut out her genitals. Many of the women not murdered had been otherwise tortured and then blinded. In a grisly irony, the Balkan conflict of 1991–1999 saw a virulently nationalistic and embittered Serbia use its armed forces to carry out precisely the same kind of terror inflicted in the Great War against ethnic minorities inside the nation’s allegedly historic borders.

The aftermath of war often finds traditional military historians, and the nation-states whose nostalgic interests they serve, using something along the lines of the argument “a few bad apples” in discussing such atrocities. Consider the more recent case of U.S. reaction to the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which close to five hundred civilians died at the hands of American soldiers, many of the women raped, in an all-day slaughter that troops had to take a lunch break to finish. Though the antiwar movement pointed to the massacre as one more reason to get out of Vietnam, polls found a frightening number of Americans who “were not bothered” by the story. Nixon’s decision to unilaterally change platoon commander Lieutenant William Calley Jr.’s twenty-two-year sentence to a three-year sentence under house arrest caused a ripple of disapproval but not the kind of public outcry that might be expected.³⁶

We now know that American war crimes in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia occurred on a massive and systemic scale. Nick Turse’s examination of American policy in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves, reveals that the American military adopted a “managerial approach” to warfare that produced an entire “system of suffering.” The very conception of “free fire zones” was intended to maximize a body count that by definition included noncombatants.³⁷

Reiss concluded that something similarly diabolical had been at work in Serbia. These acts of evil did not simply occur, Reiss suggested, in some explosive fit of combat-induced savagery by a few bad sorts among the conscripts. He believed they had been “governed by a system.” This “collective sadism” constituted not simply a psychological phenomenon but a state policy of “extermination.”³⁸

German forces repeated similar crimes in Belgium. The occupation itself transformed one-fourth of the tiny nation’s population into refugees. A less well-known fact concerns the use of Belgian and French civilians in labor camps, many of them taken as prisoners to Germany itself as slaves to the war effort. German soldiers massacred hundreds of civilians, including the elderly and the very young, in the Belgian towns of Dinant and Leuven in 1914 because they believed (wrongly) that they had been fired upon by francs-tireurs (free shooters, or partisans).³⁹

Although Allied forces never occupied Germany during the Great War, civilians still experienced enormous suffering due to specific Allied policy in the months following the 1918 armistice. British naval supremacy, and Germany’s global isolation, ensured that a blockade in the North Sea cut the empire off from essential foodstuffs. The blockade continued after the armistice in order to wring more and increasingly humiliating concessions out of the defeated Central Powers. A famine ensued that caused the deaths of three-quarters of a million German civilians.⁴⁰

A naval blockade may seem far removed from the slicing of bayonets and the mutilation carried out in the other torture chambers of the war. But the cold, bureaucratic decision men made to allow widespread starvation in order to humiliate the foe and ensure the expansion of empire represents the savagery of the state and the people who make its machinery run, what Hannah Arendt later called “the banality of evil” that became a feature of the inhumanity of the twentieth century.

Death and Sentimentality

The atmosphere of horror became palpable, and the Western world increasingly became drenched in the atmosphere of the uncanny. The beginnings of both modern art and the modern horror film are inexplicable without the experience of trenches and trauma. Both sought not psychological catharsis, but something much more pointed and political. J’accuse became a paradigm of the need to produce horror, the need to scream a demand that the memory of the war’s horror not disappear.

Artists allied with filmmakers, and increasingly they actually became filmmakers, in order to shatter the illusions of the audience, to make them see the horror of millions of deaths. The audience for these new kinds of works often immersed themselves in the shadows that lurked on canvas and screen. The suffering of tens of millions made the new culture of horror intensely recognizable.

The desire seems to have been to rip off the veil of sentimentality. Given what both soldiers and civilians experienced in the war’s combat zones, the need to destroy sentiment seems at odds with what had to have been the already prevailing mood of cynicism. How could anyone hang on to any of the values of the world before 1914?

We can perhaps better grasp the need to produce horror if we consider how even current attitudes about the Great War reveal a need to forget that accompanies the need to commemorate. Or, perhaps more pungently, how the passage of time quickly allows sentiment to cloud the memory of the war. The symbol of the poppy—beauty growing on the graves, a short-lived bloom that represented the war generation—had been suggested by Canadian physician John McCrae’s essentially martial 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields.” The poem speaks in the voice of the dead, but rather than calling into question the meaning of their own deaths, the poet evokes death to demand more sacrifice: “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch.” Paul Fussell described the poem as both “vicious” and “stupid.”⁴¹

Fussell’s informed opinion aside, the symbol of the poppy appeared in most of the Great War’s centennial celebrations in 2014. Now it dominates British memory of the war, an often weepy mixture of nostalgia and cultural conservatism not so different from the cauldron of conflicted emotion that led to Brexit and that, in relation to the Great War, shades into a kind of poppy-­porn version of the conflict. A visit to contemporary Ieper (Ypres) confirms this: the Belgian town, part of the ghastly Ypres salient, has acquired a theme-park atmosphere, an annexed outpost of the British tourism industry on the continent. Not only do souvenir shops hawking poppy-themed shirts, coffee mugs, and shot glasses line the street leading to Menin Gate—the “east gate” through which tens of thousands of English and Indian troops passed to their deaths—but you can purchase chocolate Tommy helmets and wolf them down, presumably not thinking too much about what an empty helmet means. The town has become crowded with faux British pubs serving toasties and shepherd’s pie while making the town one of the few places in Belgium where it’s hard to find decent beer.

It was not surprising to discover that Flanders and Ypres itself had long been critiqued for commercializing the war. However, I did not expect to learn that the effort to commodify the conflict had occurred so quickly and had affected veterans and their families who returned to the deadly salient. A German veteran, Gerhard Schinke, found himself nearly assaulted in 1927 by locals trying to sell him rusted helmets and rifles. Christopher Isherwood, whose father had died at the salient in 1915, looked bitterly on what he found there in 1935. In his diary, Isherwood wrote that the town had indeed, in the words of a poem, become “‘forever England’ . . . the England of sordid little tea shops, souvenirs, and touts.”⁴²

Perhaps the feeling that by “touring” you can find some kind of authentic experience of the past may be the false premise at work, even for those of us who think we are not part of the commemoration industry. The notion that a contemporary visitor, including a historian, can bicycle the paths around Ypres, view the region’s graveyards and collapsed trenches, and reflect on the appalling crime against human beings that occurred there itself reeks of war tourism. Still, one encounters museums and restaurants that remain shocking in their insouciant vulgarity. A “British pub” attached to the Hooge Crater Museum (one of the many points in the trenches both sides sap-mined) serves a beer called “The Wipers Times,” a tribute that’s really the commodification of the British soldiers’ experience. The name references the satirical title of newspapers produced by the soldiers themselves, men who had begun calling Ypres “Wipers” out of sheer confusion over the pronunciation until it became a much-used joke about one of the most terrible places in the world between 1914 and 1918.⁴³

Horror as representation of the world threw down a gauntlet to efforts to remember the war sentimentally, to apply outworn conceptions of patriotism to the ugliness of what had happened. Art critic Maurice Nadeau described the surrealist movement as an effort to crack apart “the thick carapace of centuries of culture—life pure, naked, raw, lacerated,” art that sought to undermine any kind of war commemoration that forgot the pile of corpses. Surrealism forced the viewer to connect, even if by an indirect route, the horror of the trenches with the horror of their own deaths and of the world.⁴⁴

Perhaps the surrealists failed in the long run. But there’s unquestionably something deeply significant about how quickly authors, poets, and even composers joined painters on the world’s dark carnival ride. American composer Aaron Copland, somewhat surprisingly given his reputation for soaring orchestral suites like Appalachian Spring, produced a one-act ballet, Grohg (1922–25), born out of his obsession with Nosferatu. It’s only loosely based on the film and, rather than using vampire mythology, concerns a necromancer with the power to reanimate corpses. Copland drew his inspiration not only from Murnau but also from his reading of Freud and what he called the era’s “taste for the bizarre.”⁴⁵

“Dada Means Nothing”

The taste for the bizarre had begun as an antiwar protest before disillusion and suffering turned men and women who experienced the war toward the borderlands of nightmare. A group of painters, poets, photographers, collage artists, and sculptors congregated in Zurich in 1914 as the Dada movement, the art of anti-art. Dadaists sought to unsettle the viewer, give them a vertiginous sense of their world. In this way, they reproduced the borders of the wasteland where the constant din and danger of war made the world unreal. They reimagined the soldiers’ hypnotic state of horror, their “battle hypnosis,” in the trenches and put it on canvas.

Artists who allied themselves with Dada consciously chose the confusing name. Some authorities claim it’s a reference to the French word for “hobbyhorse,” suggestive of the playfulness of the enterprise. More likely, it calls to mind a kind of nonsense babbling, da-da-da-de-de-da. A typical Dadaist project might involve a collage that included newsprint, a photo of soldiers marching off to war, and a painting of a tricycle. None of it made sense because the world had ceased making sense.

German author Hugo Ball became the titular leader of the movement, but, like most artistic enterprises academics label a “movement,” Dadaism remained loosely organized at best. Ball moved to Zurich, in neutral Switzerland, at the beginning of World War I with the singer and performance artist Emmy Hennings. Together they shocked the city’s deeply embedded bourgeois conceptions with both their art and the unconventionality of their relationship.

Both Hennings and Ball had their sensibilities shattered by the slaughter of the Great War. The latter wrote in 1915:

I had no love for the death’s-head hussars

Nor for the mortars with girl’s names on them,

And when at last the glorious days arrived

I unobtrusively went on my way.

In February of that year, Ball gathered together a group of artists in a cabaret he and Hennings had purchased in a seedy part of town and renamed the Cabaret Voltaire. At the first meeting, Ball read a manifesto, a favorite pastime among intellectuals of the day. The group agreed on its basic principles even though they soon would split into factions and argue endlessly, and rather paradoxically, about the meaning of Dada.

All agreed that they cared little for the public’s need to understand their work. They consciously sought to short-circuit rationality in the belief that this forced their audience to see the world differently. Europeans, especially the principal combatants in the current conflict, believed themselves heirs of the Enlightenment tradition of reason and bearers of civilization. Perhaps reason itself, or at least the presumption of rationality, had been at fault?

Hans Arp (also known as Jean Arp), one of the first of the group that huddled with Hennings and Ball at Cabaret Voltaire, later told the German painter Hans Richter that the group had been “revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War.” This sense of revulsion had an oddly optimistic side in its perhaps naïve belief that art could “cure the madness of the age.”⁴⁶ We know, with the benefit of unfortunate experience, that it did not.

By the end of the war, the Romanian-born author Tristan Tzara—who in his 1918 “manifesto” wrote “Dada Means Nothing”—emerged as probably the most well-known of the Dadaists because of his popular plays, poems, and essays. It’s a sign of the fluidity of the movement, and the necessity of fluidity of nomenclature when talking about art in this era, that when one of the first of the major Dada exhibitions appeared in 1920, it included work by the German veteran Otto Dix, often classed by art historians as an expressionist or a surrealist.

Dix actually did represent something very different from the original intent of Dada, in part because he wanted his meaning made clear—horribly and irredeemably clear. His images became inhuman and monstrous. Christopher Bram’s novel Gods and Monsters (originally published in 1995 as Father of Frankenstein) features James Whale, the director of the 1931 film Frankenstein, sexually fetishizing the idea of the gas mask. The “inhuman” look of the mask enthralls Whale and, it’s suggested, provides the inspiration for his design of his Monster, an image much more industrial than the description Mary Shelley gives of her creature.

Consciously or not, Bram’s description resonates perfectly with a new artistic vision that emerged from World War I of the inhuman combined with the human, or perhaps the human being dissolved in the savagery of nature. In fact, the gas mask as symbol of death became a kind of totem for artist-veterans such as Dix. Georges Limbour, a French poet who counted himself one of the Paris surrealists in the 1920s, described the gas mask as “the only authentic modern mask.” Its image had taken the place of ritual uses of the mask in earlier civilizations. A mass-produced image of death rather than a sacred object, the gas mask made the wearer appear to have a mutilated human face with insect-like eyes suggestive of the animal world.⁴⁷

Otto Dix produced this effect in his first major work after having the experience of surviving almost every major action on the western front. In a cycle of prints and etchings published in 1924 as Der Krieg (The War), human beings are hidden by gas masks or ripped apart to lie in a pile of corpses. His etching “Storm Troops Advancing under Gas Attack” presents figures hidden behind their gas masks, each looking like a Halloween pumpkin carved with sinister features. It’s almost as if the human beings inside them have become these masks, another kind of death doll. Rather than rendering them as heroes of imperial Germany under attack, Dix gives the storm troopers (and, as a veteran, by extension himself) a monstrous aspect, hands curled like talons around rifles and hand grenades.

Dix created images in which the battlefield itself became a Gothic, haunted castle. His “Collapsed Trench” features a soldier who perhaps crouches for safety or perhaps has become a corpse. Over him hang what a quick glance suggests are pieces of cloth but on closer inspection appear as a vulture and a skeleton, perhaps even the Reaper himself. Another print, “Crater Field Near Dontrien Lit by Flares,” shows no-man’s-land as literally a place where no human being could imagine being, a wasteland and perhaps a postapocalyptic one.

Dix often turned the human form into a kind of monstrosity even when it did not wear a mask or wield weapons. In “Front Line Soldier in Brussels,” he has a soldier on leave standing in a demonic gloom while around him parade sex workers who, the etching suggests, are charging more than he can afford. The women are voluptuous and dressed in expensive clothes, drawn in purposeful contrast to the soldier’s own garb.

Dix here showed a tendency, also found in Gance’s J’accuse, to forget the immense suffering of civilians. Prostitution became as significant a venture as it always does in wartime, though the sex workers themselves saw little of the profits. Most, along with frequently becoming the victims of homicidal violence from men recently in combat, lived in extreme poverty. Importantly, in Dix’s etching the soldier appears as no simple victim: he strikes the viewer as looking predatory, his ratlike face leering out of the shadows while the women pass, a down-at-the-heels Nosferatu robbed of his victims.

The German, and soon international, public who viewed Dix’s sketches in 1924 may have been most struck by the simply titled “Skull.” The fleshless human skull crawls with worms and, in context, alludes to the numerous skeletal body parts discovered in the trenches beginning in 1919. It obviously symbolized death, but in the cycle Der Krieg it brought together grotesqueries that had never precisely intersected before.

Skulls frequently appeared in Renaissance and baroque religious paintings as memento mori, reminding viewers that they were mortal and, in the context of Christian theology, that death gave their temporal choices an eternal meaning. Ossuaries across Europe displayed skulls in this context, one famous Austrian example featuring skulls painted in festive colors suggestive of the hope of resurrection.

However, the growth of religious skepticism made the skull and the skeleton an image of death outside of the Christian worldview, perhaps most famously in Van Gogh’s Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette (1886). The world of entertainment used the macabre in the magic lantern show and the phantasmagoria, frequently featuring dancing skeletons along with coffins and bloody daggers in the night.

Otto Dix’s “Skull” offered the world something much more disturbing. His verminous skull looks like the skulls associated with Gothic horror while at the same time reminding viewers of the elements of trench life that few wanted to speak of and most sought to forget. Corpses had gone unburied in piles, sometimes gnawed to the bone by rats grown fat on the true spoils of war. Corpses attracted so many vermin of all kinds that, at least after gas masks had been widely issued, soldiers wrote of occasionally hoping the enemy might lob a few chlorine shells their way and exterminate the rats and lice. Thus, “Skull” captures this world of horror and intersects with Nosferatu’s land of phantoms, the trudging corpses of J’accuse whose flesh hangs on their bones, and, in less than a decade, the comedies of death his fellow veteran James Whale produced. Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) would build one of its most horrific, yet oddly comic, moments around just such a skull.

All of these different images of the war ripped the body from the world of immortality, denying the possibility of resurrection held by the religious worldview, whether specifically Christian or spiritualist. The body became the corpse. Abel Gance’s shambling horrors and Frankenstein’s Monster, blasphemies of both nature and theology, offered the only return from the land of the dead. Distortions of the body, monstrous hybrids of human and animal, mocked the resurrection of the body. Meditation on trauma, mutilation, and death had quickly become an essential part of entertainment and the arts.

Death had a fandom.

Horror for the Moralist

Dix had created an art taken directly from no-man’s-land. His paintings and drawings proved controversial even in the early 1920s, and Dix welcomed the controversy. As he continued to experiment with images of death and dismemberment, he described himself as creating “new things” that would “cause nervous shock to the faint of heart; horror for the moralist.”⁴⁸

André Breton also took his experience of war, his time among those driven to insanity by the violence, both to make an art of death and to act as an impresario for a generation of artists who, like Dix, had been irrevocably shaken by the war. He called this movement surrealism, and it became the conduit for terrible visions in the 1920s and ’30s, often drawing from and contributing directly to the horrific on the movie screen. Their work continues to influence contemporary horrors from the slashers of Wes Craven to the grotesque fictions of Thomas Ligotti and David Lynch.

André Breton set himself up as the leader of the new multimedia movement, later earning the moniker “the Black Pope” of surrealism. Breton sought to define the movement in his Manifesto of 1924. The essay praised Freud and described the world of dream as the place of creative fecundity for any artist.

The Black Pope seemed to consider battle hypnosis, the twilight land of the dead, as the well of creativity for the surrealist movement. Breton believed that artists experienced “the waking state” as “a phenomenon of interference.” The borderlands of dream and nightmare offered the visionary artist access to the historical moment as much as their own consciousness.⁴⁹

Given the Gothic tenor of so much surrealist work—its morbidity and willingness to wallow in body horror—it’s no surprise that Breton illustrates what he means by reference to the most popular terror novel of the eighteenth century, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Sensationalist and bizarre, containing murder, sexual depravity, and pacts with the devil, the book shocked and obsessed readers in 1796. Its ending, in which demons tear apart the lascivious, homicidal monk, earns praise from Breton as “a paragon of precision and innocent grandeur.”

What could Breton mean by such a claim? He’s trolling his readers a bit while also, like so many impresarios of the art of horror, inviting us into the sideshow, seating us comfortably in the car for the dark carnival ride before he scares us out of our skin. He’s also making a point about the 1920s, that time after the Great War when Antonio Gramsci’s “morbid symptoms” had begun to appear, and a time that made the marvelous gore of The Monk seem a fantasia while also giving its supernatural horrors a special status in registering the moment’s real-world brutalities.⁵⁰

Surrealism and its wide popularity represented more than a mood in the world of aesthetics, separated from daily life and experienced only in the cool quiet of museums or in “manifestos” debated among intellectuals. Breton himself became something of a continent-wide celebrity, having an incredibly successful tour with his collaborator Paul Éluard in 1935. In Prague, capital of a newly established and democratic Czechoslovakia since 1918, crowds received the pair like rock stars. Flyers plastered the city screaming “Breton in Prague!” For two nights in a row, he lectured to a crowd of seven hundred people who came to listen to a rather obscure talk on aesthetic theory.⁵¹

People across the social and cultural spectrum saw in the surrealist movement something very different from what we conceive of today as the parochial world of “the arts.” The new movement voiced a collective cry of pain in the war’s aftermath, an attempt, interwoven into the fabric of the first horror films, to deal with monstrous impossibilities suddenly become real. Surrealist artworks, like film and literature, registered the horror of the times by breaking down the walls between waking life and nightmare. Like Lon Chaney, they distorted and mutilated the body.

The connection between the horror film, war neurosis, and the art of nightmare appeared in more than a similarity of themes. Surrealism embraced film, particularly horror film, as offering a form of art that in some respects recalled the dream state. Nosferatu became a special favorite among surrealists and their followers, both for its willingness to play with the line between dream and waking, what Breton called the “surreality” that collapses the dream into waking life. More important, the film’s absurdist construction of the body of the monster—an animalistic face and talons atop a grossly distended body—proved irresistible to surrealist artists and their legions of young followers. They disrupted screenings by yelling lines they had memorized from the intertitles, not unlike, David J. Skal has noted, delirious fans who “decades later would attend The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”⁵²

The body of the vampire and his victims seemed to many of the first generation of surrealists every body left on the Great War’s meaningless battlefield or physically traumatized by combat. German painter Max Ernst best defines the exploration of the body tormented by war, his canvases exploding in all the bright, harsh colors of rage and pain. He, like so many of those who created the new vision of horror, had direct experience of the slaughter.

Ernst, like Breton, began his career studying to join the psychiatric profession and engaging with the emerging movement of psychoanalysis. Although he studied both art history and philosophy at university, he read much of Freud’s prewar work and returned to him after 1918. While he studied medicine, Ernst visited psychiatric hospitals as an observer.⁵³

Raised in a strict Catholic household, Ernst spent much of his life provoking outrage among people with a bourgeois sensibility. His numerous affairs and marriages seem a kind of performance art of a piece with his frequent artistic sallies against middle-class virtue. (It would likely delight him to learn that some of the more experimental, occasionally inaccessible indie rock bands of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries such as the Mars Volta and Mission of Burma have paid homage to his work.) The relationship of his painting to the macabre might have pleased him even more, given his interests in the themes of distorted bodies, human savagery, death, and horrific manifestations of the dead.

Thin and handsome, with incredibly piercing eyes, Ernst made friends, and lovers, rather easily. He managed this despite a temperament that ran to the morbid even before his experiences in the Great War. One of the most influential and enduring of these friendships began in 1914 when he met Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada. A friendship with German expressionist painter August Macke made it possible for Ernst to have his first gallery show in Berlin immediately before the outbreak of the war.

Ernst later became very close to the surrealist poet Paul Éluard in the 1920s and began an affair with the poet’s wife that eventually so depressed Éluard that he left the pair to themselves and moved for a time to Vietnam. Éluard remained friends with Ernst despite this romantic drama, the unconventionality of which had at first made the situation acceptable to him. In 1939, Éluard used his influence to get Ernst out of a French detainee camp for “undesirable foreigners.”

No other experience of his strange and adventurous life, however, compared to what happened to Ernst in the Great War. “On the first of August 1914, M[ax] E[rnst] died,” he later wrote. “He was resurrected on the eleventh of November 1918.” The theme of death and reanimation came to him early, fascinating him around the time that H. P. Lovecraft acquired a similar obsession that resulted in tales like “The Tomb,” “Herbert West—Reanimator,” and “Cool Air,” as well as the short novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Ernst once tried to explain his own interest in the return of the dead and his obsession with terrifying avian imagery by connecting them with an odd childhood experience in which he discovered his pet bird, Loplop, dead and, at precisely the same moment, his father burst into the room to announce the birth of his baby sister. Perhaps of more importance, however, Ernst’s own biography became a peculiar series of metaphorical deaths, each followed by a Freudian resurrection. Time and again he found himself faced with near-certain extermination, then rescued, and then once more threatened with death, only to have his circumstances dramatically change and grant him yet another resurrection.

His first death and reanimation began with his early days on the western front. He spent much of the opening months of the war with an artillery unit, but, through extraordinary luck, his commanding officer had studied art history and recognized Ernst’s name from a Paris exhibition. Ernst left the trenches and joined the officer’s staff, drafting maps.

In yet another turn of fortune, this one for the ill, another officer saw some of the paintings Ernst had prepared for an upcoming antiwar exhibition and ordered him back to the front as punishment. Ernst managed to survive the 1918 spring offensives, injured not by the enemy but by a mule kick and the recoil of a gun.

The end of the war found Ernst not only deeply traumatized by what he had seen but also isolated by the war’s outcome. In 1922, virtually trapped in Cologne, he falsified papers so that he could repair to Paris. He abandoned his first wife and child in the process.

Almost immediately after the war, Ernst began to depict monstrosity in his work. Many of his post-1918 paintings combine human, animal, and machine in novel ways. (These paintings influenced a number of later artists, such as H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter whose “biomechanical” visions inspired the set and creature design for Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror film, Alien.)

Painted while Ernst was attempting to find a way out of Germany (and his first marriage), Celebes (1921) illustrates how his vision of horror had been shaped on the western front. A giant mechanical beast, elephantine but without any features recognizably organic, moves ponderously across a dead landscape while a leaden sky hangs heavy on the horizon. More disturbing than the creature that seems a living machine, the headless body of a woman flails in the foreground. The thing sliding across that empty no-man’s-land has apparently decapitated her.

Viewers who first saw Celebes found themselves deeply disturbed by the image, reportedly often gasping outright. The painting invoked the industrial nature of combat on a landscape destroyed by constant, unending shelling. But the violated headless body may have caused the most disquiet, another one of the postwar period’s death dolls, Benjamin’s image of the fragile human body, alone on a landscape of death.

Bodies shorn of their heads represented nothing particularly new on canvas. Painters had been using headless bodies in devotional art, or simply paintings that made use of a religious subject, since the Middle Ages. Saints martyred by beheading often carried their heads about in these images, on canvases, in frescoes, and in stained-glass windows. Artists had repeatedly depicted the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger since the medieval period.

However, Ernst had done something much more uncanny in painting simply a headless body. This was no saint in glory but rather a victim of the modern world, mutilated and helpless. Ruthlessly ripped out of the context of religious faith, the body became an empty husk, soulless in a fashion that would have troubled the cheerful rationalism that people brought with them from the nineteenth century as much as it offended the most devoutly religious.

Ernst remained in Paris throughout much of the 1920s, developing a technique he called frottage, in which etchings are made from rubbing the canvas with objects of varied textures. This achieved a rough but mechanistic look that Ernst used for his series Natural History, a set of paintings that create a decidedly unnatural history. His 1927 “Forest and Dove” contains an almost childish-looking drawing of a bird, another incarnation of Loplop perhaps, against a dark forest. Ernst admitted that the image recalled his own early fear of the woods and notions of the “haunted forest.” This imagery, important for fairy tales and horror films, takes on an even more disturbing tenor in “Forest and Dove,” as the trees have the look of gears, perhaps drill bits, penetrating the sky. His youthful fears are with us, but they have passed through the fire of war. We are back with him on the mechanized battlefield.

Ernst’s interest in the macabre even appears in what many art historians refer to as his “collage novels” but that are perhaps best understood as some of the first graphic novels. Ernst attempted this form in 1929, but it did not come to fruition until 1934 with Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness).⁵⁴

The collages of Une semaine evoke anything but kindness. Ernst grouped the images, with no obvious relationship to one another, dividing them into chapters denominated by a day of the week. The book contains no narrative or explanatory text besides a few quotes from Breton. None of them are especially revealing. There’s no meaning other than the effort to conjure terror, itself a meaningful exercise as the 1930s grew ever more menacing.

Monstrous hybrids work black magic against human bodies on every page of Une semaine. A lion-headed bureaucrat, officious and angry, chases a young woman. Two beastly faced figures hold a man and a woman captive in a train car. The creatures have strapped the nearly nude woman to a mechanism of torture, a cousin of all the technology of the Great War and of Kafka’s infernal engine from “In the Penal Colony.”

One image that sums up the terror-driven theme of the work might once again prompt us to think of Giger’s designs for Alien or the work of H. P. Lovecraft: A vicious avian figure with a human form rips at the head of a classical nude. Beneath them, a creature part bird, part reptile, part something that bundles gibbering insanity with an all-too-disturbing naturalism perches on top of a corpse, the eyes wide with the mad horror of his final moment. A scaly tentacle penetrates the corpse’s throat for reasons that are, lucky for us, left unexplained.

The unsettling, undeniably erotic and necrotic aspects of many of the collage prints in Une semaine bring a special intensity to the horror, a point that has been the subject of all manner of Freudian and post-Freudian analyses. These academic analyses sometimes miss the simple fact that the fascination with sex and death are two of our great obsessions. Melding together the morbid and the lascivious produces mental frictions of unremitting intensity. Horror auteurs, from Albin Grau to John Carpenter, have understood that coitus and murder are boon companions, their relationship primeval.

Nudes, usually women, fill Une semaine. Ernst made sure that he blended any image that might incite desire with the macabre. A woman on a midnight rendezvous with her lover watches somnolently (Is she responsible?) as he contorts into an owl-faced monstrosity from whose visage begins to emerge something that’s part erect penis and part cobra. A voluptuous nude woman lies on a tombstone carved with a skull (in case we miss the message), while avian monsters prepare to assault her. Another woman lies trapped beneath a skeletal spine that claps her against a bed turned vertical, her face a mask of terror. Numerous eyes wink at us on the bony appendage.

Ernst had been visiting with friends in fascist Italy when he produced Une semaine de bonté. In a flurry of activity, he put the work together in three weeks, each print a collage from popular magazines, advertisements, and various ephemera, the joints of the images made invisible during the process of printing. The nature of the book, indeed the fevered rage in which Ernst produced it, recalled his experience of the reprehensible during his time in the kaiser’s army, a period in his life that now seemed darkly illumined by Adolf Hitler’s recent appointment as chancellor of Germany and his rapid consolidation of dictatorial powers.

Many of the surrealists, even if they had little or no contact with the Great War, still picked up on the macabre attitude of the times, what Aaron Copland called a “taste for the bizarre.” Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington claimed that “everything happened after I was born.”⁵⁵ She entered the world in Lancashire, England, on April 6, 1917, the day the United States entered the Great War. The years leading from that conflict to World War II, all the years of violence and death in between and that followed, irrevocably shaped her vision.

Carrington was an accomplished painter, but, like many female artists of the era, she has most often been referenced in relation to the male artist who shared her bed. In her case, she’s frequently described simply as Max Ernst’s mistress (or one of them). However, her personal and artistic independence is clear to anyone who looks. Although certainly influenced by Ernst, and by surrealism more generally, her paintings portray her own vision of the terrible times and her place in them. The painting The Meal of Lord Candlestick (1938), for example, managed not only to mock her father and her Catholic upbringing but also to distort the human form into frightening shapes.

Her painting of Ernst in 1939, simply labeled Max Ernst, imagined an elderly, misshapen man in a winterscape. At the time, he was forty-six and she had just turned twenty, but she paints him as much older and more decrepit, another version of Lord Candlestick. In a self-portrait painted in 1937–38, Carrington gives herself wild hair sprouting from her thin form. Her right hand raises itself in a motion that could be writing, painting, or showing us that she’s shaking uncontrollably.

After the French released Ernst from his detainment in 1939, he was then captured by the Germans, who considered his art degenerate; he escaped and fled to America, leaving the young Carrington behind. Soon she began to seem unstable to almost everyone who knew her. In fact, her tendency to say off-kilter things, including that only the family fox terrier had been present at her birth since her “mother was away at the time,” attracted the wrong kind of attention. Odd and even outlandish behavior, a pattern that brought the Dalís of the world fame and admiration, got Carrington sent to an asylum. Kathryn Davis writes in an introduction to Carrington’s short stories that she “lost her mind,” but in this period women did not necessarily have to suffer from a major mental illness for family and friends to institutionalize them. In fact, husbands and fathers could lock women away in the “snake pits” (as they became known) for anything from alleged alcohol abuse to “promiscuous” behavior.⁵⁶

Compared with her paintings, which have garnered admittedly limited interest, Carrington’s equally interesting short stories—many of them fairy tales in which things go horribly wrong—have been even more obscure. But in fact, her paintings and stories form a cohesive set of personal and collective surrealist myths, reflections of the horrors that followed the Great War. In her tales, women dressed down to their skin and then stripped to their very skeletons. Her story “Pigeon, Fly!” might have been written by Kafka if he’d used fairy-tale imagery. In it, an androgynous figure visits a nameless female protagonist and demands that she entrust all her talents to their emissary. The protagonist is then taken into a dark forest where a sheep-faced creature tells her to paint what she sees. She sees a coffin rise out of the ground, opening to reveal a corpse whose beauty is unspoiled. The woman begins to paint, and as she furiously sketches the face of the lovely dead, she realizes she has made a self-portrait.

Other of Carrington’s tales use the era’s grotesqueries to a distinctly political end: they are what can only be described as feminist horror fiction. “The Oval Lady,” for example, features a teenage girl begging her father not to destroy her beloved Tartar, a painted hobbyhorse that seems, in the logic of a Carrington tale, to somehow be alive. Her father does destroy the magical creature. Lord Candlestick, Carrington’s favored image of male violence, poisoned all around him.

Carrington also wrote a novel based on the appalling nature of life in a midcentury asylum. Sometimes described as her “memoir,” Down Below (1944) represents a kind of fictionalized autobiography. Reading it feels like taking a walk through a hall of funhouse mirrors. It became part of a floodtide of literature that has made the idea of the “haunted asylum” one of the more common tropes in contemporary horror.

During the war, a young girl who eventually went by the name Dora Maar lived in Argentina with her father, Joseph Markovitch, an architect commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian embassy in Buenos Aires. His work gained him a medal from the emperor himself. (It was, though, just one of many handed out by Franz Josef, who, like his predecessors, loved to give medals. Hapsburg army officers walked about weighted down with them during the war.) After the imperial lands fragmented, making the emperor’s medal nothing but a relic and hopes for commissions nothing more than ashes, Dora’s father wanted to stay in Argentina. Dora, however, longed to live in Paris, and the family moved there in 1926, apparently due in part to her wishes. The young woman, nineteen at the time, took up the study of photography.

Although most frequently described as the “mistress and muse to Pablo Picasso,” Dora Maar was herself a photographer, painter, and poet whose work displayed a combination of vitality and morbidity. She once did a shoot for fashion designer and illustrator Christian Beard that portrayed him as a disembodied head, almost as if he had been guillotined but continued to live. One critic wrote of the images that Maar made Beard appear like the head of “John the Baptist on a silver platter.” In the early 1930s she shared a studio with Pierre Kefer, the set photographer for Jean Epstein’s film The Fall of the House of Usher (1928).

Maar’s political activities overshadowed her photography when she threw her energies into France’s Popular Front in the 1930s, an alliance of the antifascist left. She continued with photography and painting as well. She had a longtime affair with Picasso, who sought to force her to imitate his own cubist style very closely. Her relationship with him had a deleterious effect on her own career and legacy.

Paintings and photographs of Maar are easier to find than her own work. She often inspired artists to take her undeniable beauty combined with what one admirer called “her disturbing stare” and transform her into a death’s head, a meditation on morbidity. In Leonor Fini’s famous 1936 photograph, she poses like a wide-eyed corpse surrounded by the accoutrements of contemporary fashion that throw disturbing shadows all around her. She would provide both inspiration and some fairly direct instruction to longtime paramour Picasso when he sought to bring the monsters of war to life.

“Nonsense, carnage, wit, and melancholy”

When talking about surrealism as a response to the Great War, intertwined with the horror film, most people recognize only the name of Salvador Dalí. His fame, and thus the familiarity of his images, has certainly overtaken an earlier reputation he had as master of the grotesque. It has also provided him cover for indefensible political positions, generally unknown to those who decorate their rooms with posters of his painting Persistence of Memory (popularly known as “the one with the watches”—a joke H. P. Lovecraft actually made about Dalí’s work). His style influenced the pop art movement and, to a certain degree, comic art. Part genius and part con artist, he succeeded at a level of personal showmanship never achieved by André Breton, who is little known today.

Born in Spain in 1904, Dalí began painting at age six. Spain remained neutral during the Great War and, in any case, Dalí would have been too young to fight had the troubled country entered the conflict. At university, he engaged in radical left-wing politics, authorities briefly imprisoning him for taking part in a student riot. He would be kicked out of school for refusing to take final examinations. He thought the “incompetency” of the faculty made them superfluous.

This youthful radicalism attracted him to Paris, where he fell under Breton and Éluard’s influence. Wastelands, art historian Sidra Stich points out, played a defining role in Dalí’s earliest popular works. She finds in them the “the sense of the hauntingly empty no-man’s-land and the covert, putrefied conditions of the trenches.”

Perhaps. Dalí’s wastelands are enigmatic, but they are hardly empty. Floating images and impossible elevations give the viewer a vertiginous experience. His human figures, though not always distorted, are tiny in comparison to the sometimes monstrous objects that live in his worlds. In a 1933 painting, the ominously titled The Dream Approaches, the only trace of humanity appears in a minuscule figure on a dead if brightly colored landscape. The androgynous figure faces a wasted and glaringly illuminated landscape partially covered in a death shroud. A tower rears in the distance, seamless and smooth save for one portal set too high for human entrance. We are back again at Nosferatu’s tower in the land of phantoms, with Walter Benjamin’s fragile human figure in the wasteland.

Dalí attained his popularity for images that are intriguing and perhaps less overtly grotesque than those of some of his colleagues. However, a viewing of Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), a film project that emerged from a collaboration with the then unknown Luis Buñuel, transforms any viewer’s understanding of Dalí’s work.

“Seventeen minutes of nonsense, carnage, wit, and melancholy” is how film scholar Rob Stone has described the project. The unsettling images, coming one right after another and refusing to establish a narrative, are a nightmare landscape offering the viewer a new, explicit version of the wasteland.⁵⁷

The film sought to accomplish the defined task of surrealism and the task the horror film had set for itself: that of forcing audiences into a confrontation with reality by an uncathartic encounter with fantasy. The film’s images of bodily mutilation, the infamous slicing of the woman’s eye being the most frequently and viscerally remembered, are unwelcome reminders that mutilated bodies are buried under the subflooring of the twentieth century.

Buñuel claimed, with much hyperbole, that at the 1929 Paris premiere of Un chien andalou he stood at the back of the theater with rocks in his pockets, planning to defend himself. He fully expected that the audience might violently reject the film’s gruesome imagery and fundamental irrationality. He needn’t have worried. The audience greeted the end of the film with applause, and Buñuel and Dalí found themselves admitted into the surrealist Montparnasse café culture at the behest of André Breton himself.

Here surrealism and horror meet their paradox. The attempt to explode the expectations of the audience has often been met with cheers, with the enthusiasm of the crowd that the practitioner of the grotesque seeks in some fashion to alienate.

Buñuel continued to produce films, many of them classifiable as absurdist horror, particularly The Exterminating Angel (1962). He remained little known until the 1950s. Meanwhile, Dalí’s absurd mustache, clownish personality, and ability to monetize his work effectively in America go far in explaining his continued popularity. Ironically, Dalí’s career and worldview took him to places much darker than those where many of his colleagues went.

Surrealism sought to become an art of the people rather than the preserve of elites. However, cinema quickly became the most patronized entertainment in the world and, over the next several decades, even the most popular of the arts, popular in every sense of the word, soon became relegated to museum spaces.

Indeed, by midcentury “modern art,” a catchall term that took in everything from expressionism to surrealism to cubism, had become the very definition of highbrow and aspiring middlebrow taste. Many readers likely imagine academics, precocious students, and the wealthy as the primary patrons of art in the twenty-first century. However, Jay Winter, the historian of World War I in popular memory, has pointed out that surrealist themes would not have seemed especially esoteric to early audiences. Indeed, Winter writes, “images of shattered forms and landscapes were all too mundane for millions of ex-soldiers.”⁵⁸

In fact, even art that stuck with realist conventions began to look like visits to hell. Great Britain’s Imperial War Museum holds a set of etchings by Percy Delf Smith that used medieval themes to portray what he experienced as a gunner with the Royal Marines on the Somme. His Dance of Death series shows, among other representations of corpses in barren wastes, a striking image titled “Death Awed.” In it, a traditional representation of the Reaper stands humbled before the myriad butcheries of the war. British painter Paul Nash, no surrealist, created image after image of the Ypres salient as a blasted moonscape, empty but more undead than dead, a landscape of dismembered trees consuming and digesting itself in shadow.

These are representations that, like so much of surrealism, most everyone who lived through the Great War could grasp without an art history degree. They embodied their fears and experiences. Heavily influenced by French communism, Breton would have been horrified that the oft-repeated cliché “I don’t get modern art” has become more a statement of taste registering class status than confusion about form and meaning.

Surrealist artists loved film, another form they rightly saw as appealing to the masses, since for them cinema essentially re-created the dream life of human beings. Over and again film, and specifically the much-derided horror film, created nightmare worlds in conjunction with the new aesthetic movements of the postwar era. The earliest surrealists likely would have been pleased that their outré experiments continue to have a profound influence on how millions see the world through the “disreputable” horror genre.

The first horror films depended on surrealism and related movements. Albin Grau had been a painter and architect before he became a cinematographer. Hans Janowitz’s vision for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari borrowed from early surrealist efforts of his fellow Czech Alfred Kubin. Paul Leni’s work as an expressionist painter shaped the contorted visions in Waxworks and the two horror films he produced for Universal. James Whale had been influenced by the German expressionist painters and later used his skills to expand his role from director to designer of sets and, in partnership with Jack Pierce, makeup. Looking back forty years after the first release of J’accuse, Abel Gance put his work alongside surrealist art that, to his mind, “sought to liberate the ordinary from its servitude.”⁵⁹

Body horror on canvas had transferred definitively to film stock. The surrealist nightmare of wastelands and tortured bodies became part of the imagination of people who would never consider visiting a museum.

Metropolis

“Death to the machines!”

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) features the female android Maria shouting this line in front of the oppressed workers soon after a titillating sequence in a nightclub where the elite (“the upper ten thousand”) have gathered even as the nightmare city moves irrevocably toward violent revolution. The android dances seductively and the men turn wolfish; indeed in a dreamlike collage the crowd lusting hungrily for the mechanical puppet become mirrored reflections of countless, covetous eyes. Their desire for her becomes so violent they do violence to one another, dueling and murdering in her name and for her attention.

The android then speaks to the workers, calling for death and chaos. Death to the machines! Her cries echo the scrawl of street graffiti that fascinated Lang: “Berlin, stop! Come to your senses. You’re dancing with death.”

Lang’s film remains a cryptic mishmash of European politics and anxiety in the Great War’s shadow. In some respects, it’s the first example in cinematic history of the city of horror that has become standard in dystopian or postapocalyptic films. Not unlike Frankenstein in the 1930s, Metropolis became one of the most censored, and thus recut and heavily edited, films of the era. This made a story that already seemed to some audiences a fascist fairy tale and to others a parable of Marxist revolution even more confusing. As censors chopped up Lang’s movie with real fervor, it became simply a perplexing science fiction yarn.

Based on a novel by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, Metropolis tells of a city of the future whose technological marvels and comforts rest on the back of an army of laborers “in the depths.” These men, numbers instead of names, very literally turn the gigantic wheels of industry for the elite who live in the towering complexes aboveground.

A female prophet named Maria preaches to the workers a message of human brotherhood in one of the film’s many nods to religious symbolism. This idea, though containing the seeds of religious feeling, actually has nothing whatsoever to do with economic equality in the story Lang and Harbou tell. Maria is no Marx, but rather a new Francis of Assisi for the industrial age, calling for the sentiment of fraternal feeling rather than for class struggle.

Unwittingly, the prophet becomes the dark inspiration for the inventor Rotwang, the twentieth century’s original mad scientist. His laboratory, an absurdly shaped premodern cottage set inexplicably in the midst of the gleaming city of the future, features a pentagram on the door. The scene in the laboratory, particularly the operating table and what appears to be electricity (but may actually represent a more occult energy), decisively influenced James Whale four years later when he designed Dr. Frankenstein’s workshop.

Rotwang appears in Metropolis to have even darker motives than Dr. Frankenstein’s obsession with finding the boundaries of life and death. He builds a robot version of Maria and hopes it will bring chaos to the city. The false Maria, the android, sows discord everywhere, leading the workers to smash the machines that keep the city running. Here the plot becomes increasingly hard to follow, even in the version Lang wanted the world to see. Does Rotwang simply want to bring chaos? Is it an opportunity to prevent reform by forcing a violent revolution with false, mechanical Maria, a revolution the ruling class will have to destroy? Here, as in much of Lang’s film, viewers will find themselves baffled in the attempt to tease out a single political message.

Presented as the embodiment of Rotwang’s own diseased mind, the mechanical Maria carries out a program of utter chaos. It’s very possible that “the false Maria” may have been modeled on Rosa Luxemburg, the Communist theoretician who had worked for revolution in Germany (though certainly not with a Luddite “Kill the machines” agenda) and been murdered by the Freikorps. Whatever her origin in Harbou and Lang’s imagination, she, like her inventor, represents monstrosity, and the film concludes with a confusing message in which capitalist and worker (called, respectively, “the brain” and “the hand”) agree that they need “the heart” to mediate between them. Sentimentalism—indeed emotion of a kitschy variety, according to the film’s critics in the 1920s and since—brings an end to class conflict.⁶⁰

A combination of political and commercial concerns led to the infamous cuts in the film. Many of the epics of the 1920s and ’30s (there are, of course, important exceptions) had a running time of seventy to eighty minutes, and so distributors worried whether or not an audience would sit through two and a half hours. More important, the growing power of various nationalist movements in Germany, including the Nazi Party, made the production company, UFA, anxious that it might be accused of helping create Communist propaganda simply by presenting a film that took the plight of the worker seriously. This worry remained even if the ending suggested that workers would find the solution simply in feeling better about things. The United States had begun to leave behind the Red Scare and moved culturally, and soon politically, to the left. In that climate, the explicit rebuke of class struggle in the film made it seem like propaganda for the right. Thea von Harbou, later to have a minor role in the Nazi regime’s film industry, probably intended just such a message. So the American cut, an expansive one that took out at least an hour of running time, made it a fairly simply story of workers in revolt against the bosses.⁶¹

For our purposes in exploring horror, the politics of Lang’s film matter much less than how he successfully used the era’s nightmares, making the film into what can only be described as Gothic science fiction. Metropolis, in whatever version an audience saw it in the late 1920s, resonated primarily for its use of one of the period’s most memorable death dolls, the false Maria, the human being imagined as machine in much the same way the art of the era worried over how the Great War had created a giant technological horror. If the film has a heart, it’s not the cloying ending. Instead, it’s the hallucinatory moment when Freders, the son of the robber baron who rules the city, sees the great machine that runs Metropolis as Moloch, a deity from the Hebrew Bible that demanded the sacrifice of children. In Metropolis, the monstrous god swallows whole generations of workers, a reminder of how the war had been itself an industrial process that consumed and demanded more. Moloch the machine tortures a entire class, just as the device in ­Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” makes an individual body writhe in pain and despair. Moloch is Golem and Frankenstein’s Monster on a rampage; it is also the machine gun, the tank, poison gas, the biplane, the U-boat, and the enormous artillery gun hurling shell after shell after shell into the trenches.

Freders himself embodies some aspects of Lang’s own experience of the consuming horror of the war. Clearly Lang had come back wrong from the front, his tendency to interpersonal cruelty best symbolized by the pistol-­waving that led to rumors after his first wife’s suicide. In Metropolis, seeing the android Maria creates a series of “phantom dreams” for the young man: he relives his encounter with the mechanical creature in a moment that shows us the inside of his tortured mind as a landscape of shells exploding. Like Hutter in Nosferatu, he becomes passive and takes to his bed. Prostrated by the experience of meeting the empty death doll, he hallucinates images of the Reaper swinging his scythe with abandon.

This, more than the confusing mélange of political ideas the film introduces in its original two-and-a-half-hour running time, remained with audiences. Throughout his life, Lang remained infuriated at how the film had been cut, expressing bitter anger about it even in interviews in the early 1970s.

Joseph Goebbels quite enjoyed the version screened in Berlin.

“The Hollow Men”

T. S. Eliot, poet of nightmare cities like Lang’s, watched from the sidelines as the disaster of the postwar years unfolded. A bitter conservatism took hold of him, a philosophical despair evident in The Waste Land further soured by both his gloomy personal life and his reactionary political influences.

Eliot’s marriage continued to degenerate. He and Vivienne Haigh-Wood simply had not known each other very well, and it’s actually difficult to imagine a pair more fundamentally unsuited. Eliot, even at age twenty-­six, had the demeanor of a stuffy old man with a fairly severe case of sexual repression thrown in for good measure. Eliot told his friend Conrad Aiken that he had gotten married to lose his virginity. He apparently lacked the imagination to find another way to accomplish the task.

Haigh-Wood fully embraced the liberated spirit and attitudes of the age. She smoked in public and danced to jazz, activities Eliot seems to have sniffed at uncomfortably. Surprisingly, some of the more disorienting moments in The Waste Land employed jazz-like rhythms that caused a distinct split over the poem’s value when it first appeared. The weird syncopations seemed out of step with the classical allusions, and this in some ways may have been part of Eliot’s point. He wanted to express disdain for the modern age, to describe the cacophony he thought he saw across the tea table when he looked at his own wife.

Her influence, possibly negative, on his poetry aside, few of Eliot’s friends and admirers cared for her. Virginia Woolf called her “a bag of ferrets” around Eliot’s neck. If it’s a canard that Haigh-Wood slept with Russell during her own honeymoon, she certainly began an affair with the famous mathematician and essayist soon thereafter. Eliot remained unhappy and, we must remember, so did she.⁶²

Eliot suffered from more than the unhappiness of a bad match. His 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” while brief in comparison to The Waste Land, has at least as many ghosts of the Great War shambling about in it. The dead inhabit it as spirits that still roam the empty places, “the dead land . . . cactus land.” Corpses shuffle about in echo chambers of memory that are themselves filled with death dolls, the empty husks that so many feared the war had revealed as the true story of the human experience.

The poem opens with snatches of speech heard in crowded streets that chills the reader to the bone. “Mistah Kurtz—he dead / A penny for the Old Guy.” Eliot evokes Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the man who saw mass slaughter and became the living, or rather the dying, embodiment of Europe in its grave. Kurtz had looked into the heart of things and seen only horror.

“A penny for the Old Guy” echoes the traditional cry of British children on Guy Fawkes Day. In American culture it reads a bit like “Trick or treat?” its implicit threat defanged by time and frequent use. In the case of Guy Fawkes Day, it accompanies the burning of a stuffed effigy, a true hollow man set on fire.

Eliot has also taken us among the dead immediately with a reference to the bribe for the ferryman, Charon’s obol it had been called in classical sources, the coin placed on the eyes or in the mouth of the corpse so it could cross to the land of the dead. Classic horror fans are likely to think of that strange, allusive moment in The Exorcist over a half century later when a homeless man whose demeanor suggests death and decay startles Father Karras on a lonely subway platform with the sudden croaking plea, “Could you help an old altar boy, Father? I’m Cat’lick.” The demon later utters the same phrase in the claustrophobia of the possessed girl’s bedroom. A penny for the Old Guy, a coin for the dead.

Eliot steers much more quickly away from the street vernacular that took up much of The Waste Land and becomes the oracular witness to the twentieth century. He summons up the voices of those not lucky enough to have died but instead live in the purgatory of “the hollow men” and “the stuffed men” whose very emptiness prevents them from passing to “death’s other kingdom.” Eliot suggests with this phrase that the 1920s had been a kingdom of the dead, the terror of the underworld made fully manifest in the Great War’s aftermath.

Eliot’s despairing poem, the famous last lines predicting that the end of the world would come as a kind of anticlimax to the torment that had already occurred (“Not with a bang but a whimper”), offers the war as evidence of a much greater horror. The dry and crackling voices that ask not to be remembered as “lost violent souls” but as “hollow men” sound like they cry out from the trenches, creatures that have become something more terrible than ghosts. They are ghouls caught in the half-light between this world of death and death’s true kingdom.

Eliot hints at something even more obscene. What if the hollow corpse is, like the effigy of “the Old Guy,” nothing more than the thing about to burn to ash? In Part III of the poem, hands reach out in a plea for help from “the dead land” but are only “The supplication of a dead man’s hand / Under the twinkle of a fading star.” Parched, cracked lips can try to kiss or attempt to pray, but in both cases they find only “broken stone” and not lovers or gods. We are in Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep,” the void of the crawling chaos with “charnel winds” blowing chill across dead skies.

Cthulhu Rises

In “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), the minds of artists and those of people the tale’s author regarded as racially inferior are especially susceptible to the vision and intimations of the rise of Cthulhu, a gigantic Great Old One that sleeps in a city of the dead sunken beneath the waves that may, if the stars are right, emerge from the depths to destroy the human future.

Lovecraft divided his tale into four sections, each involving the examination of mounting evidence of a worldwide “cult of Cthulhu.” In the story’s opening section, “The Horror in Clay,” an artist described as “a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect” pays a visit to Professor Angell, an authority on ancient languages. The aesthete had begun dreaming of “great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths,” and from his dreams he’d sculpted a bas-relief inscribed with glyphs he cannot himself understand. He begins to visit the professor regularly to tell him more of his dreams of dead cities where the chant to Cthulhu and his sunken city endlessly drones.

We learn from Lovecraft’s tale that “artists and poets” the world over had experienced hallucinatory night terrors in which the dead city makes an appearance. These terrible visions would lead an artist named Ardois-­Bonnot, whom Lovecraft describes as “a fantastic painter” (which in context meant a painter of the weird, rather than a very good one), to create “a blasphemous dream landscape” that frightened all who saw it.

“Ardois-Bonnot” may have been a scrambled allusion to “André Breton.” How did the isolated writer keep up with such edgy developments? Never fulfilling his dream of traveling to Europe, Lovecraft became one of the twentieth century’s greatest autodidacts and most prolific correspondents. He used both talents to soak up knowledge about everything from physics to modern poetry to world politics. Modern art interested him deeply—as “The Call of Cthulhu,” “Pickman’s Model,” and other works show—perhaps because he saw it as a symptom of “the decline of the West.” It’s also easy to see some of the indescribable monstrosities of Lovecraft’s fiction in the impossible hybrid horrors of surrealism.

Lovecraft certainly knew the surrealists’ work, specifically writing now and again to correspondents about Dalí. His persistent conservatism made him cautious of what he saw as “the practitioners of that school [giving] their subconscious expressions too much automatic leeway.” However, he also saw the relationship of what he called the surrealists’ “nightmare landscapes” to his own work. He wrote to his friend James Morton of a correspondence he found between the work of surrealism and horror, both interested in “mad or daemon-haunted artists.”⁶³

“The Call of Cthulhu” features not only “daemon-haunted” artists but also a vision of monstrosity that owed much to the apocalyptic feeling of the times in which he wrote. The planet had seemingly lurched off its axis during the Great War, and Lovecraft’s vision of a world hastening toward its destruction made the changes the war had wrought all the more disturbing to him.

Lovecraft’s imagined past reflects the need of most varieties of conservatism for a golden age, something worth conserving. T. S. Eliot took a seemingly more sophisticated but equally blinkered view of history. He valorized a period of uncertain time in the “high medieval” era when Christian civilization allegedly subsumed and transmuted the best of the classical age. Lovecraft’s golden age constituted the era of British Empire before about 1783. He always saw the American Revolution as a gigantic blunder.

Unlike many conservatives, however, Lovecraft had the intellectual perspicuity to see the illusory nature of his worldview; he understood that he had lashed himself to the mast of a belief amid howling chaos. In an argument via correspondence, Lovecraft admitted to his socially progressive friend James Morton, “The eighteenth century is my illusion, as all mankind is yours—but I don’t believe in mine any more than I do in yours!”⁶⁴

Lovecraft’s idea that human beings create traditions for themselves in order to make the world livable echoes throughout his fiction but perhaps nowhere more than in “The Call of Cthulhu.” The opening passage does not evoke the eponymous tentacled terror, but instead achieves what can only be described as philosophical terror. What Lovecraft saw as the modern world’s “attitude of alarm, pain, disgust, retreat” caused him to seek to incite the cosmic horror his best tales achieved. “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” the story begins, suggesting that we are lucky in what we do not know. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”⁶⁵

When we finally meet the tale’s titular monster, it’s truthfully a bit ­underwhelming—a giant octopoid dragon, Godzilla with tentacles. And yet he’s a monster raised from the depths in the aftermath of the Great War, and he has become part of the iconography of popular culture. The bas-relief from the tale has been endlessly reproduced; Cthulhu himself has inspired a proliferation of tentacles among artists; and versions of the monster decorate hundreds of T-shirts and coffee mugs, even inspiring thousands of tattoos.

The meaning of the monster doesn’t inhere in the creature itself. Although the slow unraveling of the tale leads us to expect something truly obscene, when Lovecraft finally allows his most famous horror to rise, it almost immediately sinks back down into a watery sleep after a rather minor human intervention, a clumsy element in Lovecraft’s otherwise brilliant tale. The real fright comes when the narrator of the story tells us, “I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.” The despair in the tale does not come from the character seeing a large amphibious dragon. The terrible secret of Cthulhu, the secret of universal death that haunted most minds in some way after 1918, represents the true chilling nature of the story’s appeal.

What had survived in the aftermath of the Great War seemed to Lovecraft a kind of epilogue to human experience. He, unlike his nemesis T. S. Eliot, had significant admiration for Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Decline of the West (1918, 1922). He accepted the notion that every civilization dies in a cyclical fashion but that the possibility of a final apocalypse set in motion by the Great War threatened to bring an end to this cycle and close off the possibility of a human future.

“Who knows the end?” says Lovecraft’s nearly suicidal narrator at the end of “The Call of Cthulhu.” “Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”

“Cthulhu” calls to mind the tale “Dagon,” written in 1917, in which Lovecraft spoke of “nameless things” that may “rise above the billows” to destroy “puny, war-exhausted mankind.” We sense with Lovecraft, and the entire generation that followed the Great War, that a war-exhausted humanity had decided, through the structures it created and the political apathy that reigned, to relinquish its claim to existence. When we consider the decisions made in the last century, the stars have been right for Cthulhu’s “deadly light” to reveal a truly post-human future.

The Castle

Franz Kafka died in 1924, his breath gone, his lungs rotted to incapacity, and blood spewing out of every cough. Pulmonary tuberculosis in the early 1920s essentially meant a slow suffocation. He drowned by degrees.

The final two years of his life had, in many respects, been the most eventful. He met a woman named Dora Diamant, who became the last dim flame of his rather anguished love life. This last connection had not been his most important. Five years before, in 1919, he first corresponded with Milena Jesenská-Pollak. She became his editor and also his infatuation, her own writing, politics, and apparently deeply inciting personality making her a much greater force in his life, as his Diaries seem to suggest, than longtime lovers such as his fiancée Felice Bauer.

Jesenská fell in love, at first, with Kafka’s writing. They met after she wrote to him from her home in Vienna, asking permission to translate ­Kafka’s published work into Czech. Her admiration for his writing and the romantic feelings she developed are obvious, but it’s unknown whether she returned his ardor at the same fever pitch. In any case, a rather serious barrier to Kafka’s hopes presented itself in the form of Jesenská’s husband, a minor Vienna literary critic.

After it became clear in 1920 that Jesenská would not leave her husband for him, Kafka apparently took the initiative in ending their relationship. They had a desultory correspondence in 1922–23. He last saw her in May of the same year. However, he had given all his past diaries to Jesenská, which for the very private Kafka was a rather extreme act that underscores his feelings for her.

Six months later, Kafka met Dora Diamant. Although theirs was certainly a romantic entanglement, she primarily played the role of Kafka’s caretaker when he made the enormous step of leaving Prague to live with her in Berlin during the autumn of 1923.

While his health worsened, his writing reached fever pitch in its oddity and terror. Following his death, his friend Max Brod called the final years perhaps his most productive and creative period. Kafka wrote The Castle between January and September 1922. We know from his diary (which he had resumed in 1920) that he experienced “something like a breakdown” during a month he’d spent in a hotel in a Czech mountain town—the shadows of the world, the loss of Jesenská, and his own health trapping him in bleak isolation. Writing, however, offered him “a leap out of murderer’s row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.”⁶⁶

His work provided him with a way of looking at history from the outside, not only his dreadful personal history, which he knew would soon come to a close, but also that of the early twentieth century. While other artists and intellectuals threw up their hands or raged in various ways against the new mechanized order of things, Kafka showed more concern for what becomes of the human being, the plight of victims of the new kinds of societies being built and indeed of the universe itself. His work exhibits the reverse of Lovecraft’s concerns; his places are abstract, but his characters are memorable in their confusion and pain. The cosmic order may be uncaring, and human beings’ systematic efforts to control it futile, but Kafka asked for compassion rather than bitterness in the face of all that outraged the human body and mind.

The Castle completed Kafka’s work, providing the reader a summation of horror and alienation. He gave us a protagonist with whom we cannot help but identify: K., the land surveyor, who, in simply trying to complete his work, finds himself in a maze of contradiction and marginalization. He waits to receive an audience in the castle while insistently being reminded by a series of puppet-like personages, “You are not of the village, you are not of the castle.”

Worse, the castle, often “oddly dark” at the wrong time of day, summons for the reader simultaneous images of Gothic terror and the irrational malevolence of modernity’s maze. K. must contend with forces called simply “control agencies” that are described to him but that he cannot contact, in order to make his way to the unreachable castle. Indeed, in an often unremarked supernatural element in the novella, he struggles to walk toward the physical spot of the castle, to regain reality while it shifts around and underneath him, and the physical structure itself becomes a phantasmagoria, receding into the distance every time he appears to have reached it.⁶⁷

Meanwhile, in a horror that seems prescient given our age of data mining, “outer offices” and “inner offices” of an undescribed nature are employing numerous functionaries to work toward the compilation of files on him, all for undisclosed purposes. In such descriptions, he presages the zany horrors of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or the intensely morbid oddities of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Terrible forces grind away in silence and secrecy, calling into question the very substance of the human being.

A warm distance exists between Kafka and the nihilist horror that emerged on canvas, screen, and page after 1918. He might have agreed with Lovecraft’s estimation of the indifference of the cosmos to human experience. Unlike Lovecraft, however, Kafka did not place himself on the side of the universe. “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial tell tales of torturous destruction of the human psyche and the human body, but we are never allowed to forget that it’s human beings who are destroyed. At the same time, nearly impossibly, Kafka forces on us a paradox of feeling both empathy and disgust for the soulless bureaucrat obsessed with the machinery he’s charged with maintaining—so utterly obsessed, in fact, that he makes a decision revolting in its insane logic, a horrific choice that could only have been made in our era, the era that opened with the guns in 1914.

Jesenská wrote Kafka’s obituary in June 1924, almost immediately upon hearing of his death. She called him “a recluse, a wise man who recoiled from life.” But, she claimed, even as he drew back from the world, he acted as “an artist possessed of such a scrupulous conscience that he remained vigilant even when others, the deaf, felt themselves secure.”⁶⁸

Kafka’s great love could have been writing about herself. Her own vigilance led Jesenská, an active Communist, to write against the rise of fascism and then take a role in the resistance against the Nazis. The Gestapo arrested and imprisoned her in 1939, first in Prague and later in Ravensbrück, where she died from kidney failure exacerbated by torture. The Nazis also murdered Kafka’s three sisters. They killed Ottla, certainly one of the three most important people in his mental geography, in Auschwitz in 1942. The writer had written his last words almost two decades before.

The dark shape at the heart of history that made Kafka, as Jesenská put it, recoil from life, even as he remained its vigilant witness, bloomed bloody into the modern world.