Chapter Four
Those people told us the war was over. That was a laugh. We ourselves are the war. . . . It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with an urge to destroy.
—FRIEDRICH WILHELM HEINZ, member of Hitler’s SA
Murderers among Us
Fritz Lang, internationally known following the success of Metropolis, premiered his shadow-drenched serial killer film M in 1931. The previous year had seen the Nazi Party begin to build a power base in the weakening parliament of the Weimar Republic. A second wave of economic depression had recently battered the country and in the September election the Nazis won 18 percent of the vote. This meant that, among the numerous and often divided political entities of Weimar, the Nazis became the second most powerful party in the Reichstag.1
M—Eine Stadt sucht einen Mördor (M—A City Looks for a Murderer) had not been Lang’s original title. He at first used the more evocative Murderer among Us. The slight title change came after Lang received a number of threatening letters and the head of the studio, Staaken, refused to allow the director to use the set for filming. Taken aback by public reaction and the manager’s vehement rejection of the production of the film, Lang at first thought that the dark subject matter, the reign of terror of a child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) with a somewhat ambiguous moral conclusion, caused the troubling response.
But the manager of Staaken knew only the title and not the plot. When Lang explained the story to him, the studio manager simply smiled and said, “Ah, I see.” A flash of black, white, and red on the man’s lapel revealed a swastika, marking him a member of the swelling Nazi ranks. The studio manager assumed that only a blatantly political film would take the title Murderer among Us at this moment in German history—thinking it referenced his very own party’s penchant for street violence and intimidation by the movement’s paramilitary arm, the Sturmabteilung (SA), or “Stormtroopers” (in reference to the assault troops of the trenches). Lang later frequently claimed that his political education began at this moment.2
Horror films after the Great War never strayed far from the terrors engendered by the conflict. But the philosophical and psychological chaos created by the conflict took many forms, some so powerful that the filmmakers themselves could not fully harness their effect and meaning. Nosferatu, in ways that went beyond the intentions of both Grau and Murnau, prepared the way for the tale of creatures from the outside who threatened, disturbed, and mauled—monsters that threatened the safe spaces Germany tried to create after 1918.
The shock of how the Great War had seemingly burst from nowhere to change the lives of millions forever can be seen in how the sinister invasion of the profane and deadly became the monster du jour between the wars. M appeared in the same year that, across the Atlantic, Universal Studios released both James Whale’s Frankenstein and Tod Browning’s Dracula. All three films told stories of white women, either as children or in the first bloom of youth, endangered by a monster from outside what the audience imagined as their secure world. Frankenstein and Dracula embodied, respectively, the horrors of the post-human monster and the threat from the supernatural. M prepared the way for the murderous maniac that became the horror film’s obsession in the 1970s.
Both Frankenstein and M feature the death of a small child as a central plot point. Dracula, like Lang’s masterpiece, featured a killer of innocents driven by inhuman urges. However, it’s impossible to imagine all these themes combined in a popular American horror film of the 1930s, particularly one that featured a fully human monster. British and American cinema did not explore this subject for another three decades. Even then, the themes of Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960) proved so controversial that it’s open for debate whether we can describe their first audiences as being ready for them.
Lang’s M, with its stark violence, certainly shocked Weimar moviegoers. Still, the postwar generation, soon to surrender itself to a criminal regime, seemed ready for the film’s bleak examination of their society even as they ignored its conclusions. Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert, a role that made him an international star, is the ancestor to Norman Bates in Psycho and “Buffalo Bill” in Silence of the Lambs. The film opens with children at play and a mother setting a table while she waits for the family to return. We first learn of Beckert through a wanted poster’s warning of a child murderer who remains at large. The killer’s features are unknown, so the placard represents him as a single grasping hand, talon-like and frighteningly skeletal, the claw of Nosferatu once again.
Beckert rises menacingly over the first victim, not unlike Nosferatu’s shadow of death, illness, and plague. His murderous shade appears as he whistles Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” an eerie tune drifting out of the most threatening dimensions of the land of faerie. The diegetic sound interweaves with the quiet film’s minimalist score and warns us of the maniac’s presence. This technique, conveying threat and an atmosphere of evil, has become a common motif in modern horror, employed frequently by Hitchcock while also used to great effect in classics such as Jaws (1975), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and the original Friday the 13th (1980).
The shadow of death menaces little Elsie Beckmann, whose mother we have seen waiting for her return from school. As Elsie playfully bounces a ball, Hans Beckert’s shadow speaks and asks if she would like a balloon. In a series of grim, spare shots, M conveys more horror than the most lurid violence could achieve. We see Elsie’s rubber ball abandoned in the grass. The balloon Beckert purchased twists on an electrical wire. The woman seen in previous frames setting the table continues to wait, increasingly anxious. She will wait forever.
A significant portion of the film’s second act becomes something along the lines of a strange police procedural, a genre that film critics have credited Lang with inventing. The police begin a massive search of the city of Berlin. They seek to discover Beckert’s identity using, for the first time onscreen, fingerprinting and handwriting analysis.
The criminal underworld joins the hunt for the murderer, giving M layers of meaning it would not have contained otherwise. Crime lords fear that the police dragnet will haul in some of their own operatives during the search, but they also find it pleasing to imagine that they act according to their own code of thieves. Child killing marks a moral boundary even for them, or at least this is what they tell themselves. They hire beggars, whom they apparently exploit regularly, to keep an eye on the children and on the lookout for Beckert.
The gangs of Berlin, not the police, are the first to catch the killer. After sadistically torturing night watchmen in office buildings where the killer might be hiding, they seize Beckert and hold a mock trial in a distillery. Lorre as Beckert gives a mad, impassioned speech that raises a number of troubling questions about the nature of law and morality. How can a mob lynch a child-killer without becoming like him, especially when his fictitious judge is already wanted for several counts of manslaughter? If it’s true that Lorre’s character suffers from insanity and cannot control his urges, how are the assassins, pimps, and safecrackers who actually revel in their crimes able to pass morally sound judgment? The police arrive and arrest both Beckert and the outlaw who captured him.
The intervention of regular law enforcement does not signal the reaffirmation of a simple moral order. The final scenes features the allegedly real trial of Beckert by the German judicial system that, Lang suggests, may have the same flaws as the kangaroo court of crime bosses. We do not hear the verdict leveled against Beckert. Instead, the film closes with Elsie Beckmann’s mother, the woman who prepared dinner while a maniac did unspeakable things to her child, rising to say that no penalty will bring back her daughter, or any of the other dead children. “One must watch the children,” she says as the screen fades to black. Out of the dark we hear her voice whisper an accusatory warning: “All of you.”
Nosferatu and Hans Beckert, their stories told almost a decade apart, are the two great monsters of postwar German horror. Both are seducers and murderers of innocence. Both films show us, if not sympathetic monsters, then monsters driven by urges they are unable to control. Both asked German audiences questions about their culture and the world the Great War had made. Murnau and Grau’s personal losses asked why a plague-bringer had been invited to a peaceful Germany, why greed and gain had raised the “cosmic vampire” to “suck the blood of millions.”
Lang’s encounter with violence led him to raise questions about the legitimacy of a murderous state. He took an extraordinary chance with his portrayal of Beckert. Phantom-like vampires are one thing, but the idea of the child killer, given clear pedophilic overtones in the film, represented the epitome of moral degeneracy in Weimar Germany. Moreover, fascist propaganda that urged Germans to question the moral state of their country had begun to seep into the culture at an alarming rate in 1931. Nazism has often been imagined as primarily a political movement that used defeat in the Great War to rally Germans to their cause. This is true. But Nazism also represented a Kulturkampf (culture war) in the early 1930s that warned how art itself, and particularly what one might find in either the cabaret or the Kino, could become a medium of moral disease, the weakening of true German virtue. M represented exactly the kind of film that enraged them—a film that asked questions about evil and forced the viewer to examine the mentality of the populist mob.
The transformation of the vampire’s victims into mesmerized death dolls and the recurrent motif in M of the killer doubled in the mirror’s reflection underscores the death obsessions at horror’s roots in the Great War. In the decades to come, Romero’s zombies moved dead-eyed and empty across the American landscape. The nearly interchangeable young victims in American slasher films exude a palpable emptiness. The void behind their beautiful young faces robs their bloody deaths of the kind of meaning we would normally attribute even to cinematic mortality. Even in the classic slasher films, the killer himself—Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees—seems a kind of waxen image, a walking void. If we learned that Halloween’s Michael contained nothing more than a mechanism of sand and clockwork, the logic of his drives, movements, and near invulnerability would actually make a terrifying logic.
Both Nosferatu and M reminded cinemagoers of das grosse Sterben of the Great War. But these terror tales also demanded that audiences think about how entire systems of death formed interlocking gears, a vast mechanism that hummed ominously beneath the more obvious stresses and strains of Germany’s cultural life like Moloch in the depths of Lang’s Metropolis. Nosferatu, like so many other vampires of both popular culture and folklore, awaited an invitation to come to Germany. The film shows some, like Knock, willing to welcome the great plague—until the climax of the film, when innocent Ellen offers herself as a feast, an invitation to death.
M made it appear as if Beckert’s mad perversions grew naturally from the unnatural social relations of a Germany on the brink. Lang’s numerous close-ups of Beckert (made more frightening by Peter Lorre’s signature pop-eyed expressions of insanity) show us a mind twisted by desires unfathomable even to the killer himself. Throughout the film, the camera zooms uncomfortably close to numerous tortured faces: police, parents, criminals, beggars, and even judges. Horror at the monster prowling the streets of Berlin touches on a deeper disgust, something so rotten that they, and the audience, have to focus it fully on Hans Beckert.
The whole country smelled of death.
A Fierce Joy
The failed Austrian artist who became the dictator of a new German Reich. Benito Mussolini, chest absurdly puffed out, looking cartoonish as he stands on a tank amid cheering crowds. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, its title misappropriated from Friedrich Nietzsche, showing the lockstep, jackbooted march of tens of thousands at the Führer’s command. Allied film footage of the liberation of the death camps showing starved survivors and corpses in mounds being buried by tractors, shoveling them into oblivion. Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs of Buchenwald, the most terrible of them unseen until 1960 because editors believed them too graphic for readers, but a few published in Life magazine in April 1945, with the people in them appearing “like living corpses.”3
All these images come to mind when we think of “fascism” or “the Nazis.” Nazis in particular have been the ultimate bad guys in our popular culture. They appear in undead form in a subgenre of films and video games. Their historical crimes have come to seem less real or perhaps examples of hyperrealism.
An enormous literature attempting to capture the reality of the fascist worldview that emerged after the Great War proves daunting to every scholar who encounters it. In contemporary America, we rightly ponder if we are slipping into the same temptations of that dark period of the twentieth century, given the rise of a fervid right-wing movement. We have to wonder if the presentation of Nazis as Disneyesque villains, the nemesis of Indiana Jones, the model for the Empire and the First Order in Star Wars, blunted our ability to recognize them in the “alt-right” or in the rhetoric that elected a president.
There exists a welter of arcane arguments about the definition of fascism. It’s no exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of books, articles, and papers have been dedicated to the subject. Scholars have actually argued over whether or not we can define a movement as fascist if it does not use armbands. Although it’s essential to speak precisely about history, and to worry over the definitions we employ, historians may have obscured the most obvious characteristic of these movements that found large, enthusiastic audiences within months of the end of the Great War.
“Fascism resembles pornography,” the cultural historian Walter Laqueur writes, “in that it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to define it in an operational, legally valid way, but those with experience know it when they see it.” This is not a throwaway definition, a surrender to subjective feeling. Laqueur instead makes the point that fascism has a recognizable style, an actual aesthetic that especially “those with experience” can recognize. The damning of enemies as subhuman and monstrous, the theatrical violence (operatic even in the very real violence of the Italian Blackshirts or Hitler’s SA and later SS), in fact even the chosen uniforms and symbolism are meant to induce terror. Fascism fed on the loathsome carnage of the Great War for its meat and demanded that its adherents wallow in the same bloody offal.4
A different vision of horror than first proposed by Murnau, Gance, and Leni coagulates in the black beating heart of fascism. Movements emerged after the Great War that used the terrors associated with that war to find reasons for the immense suffering, to locate those reasons above all in a monstrous enemy. The style, a faddish, cool style at the time, adopted by these movements served as theater and indoctrination to stir mass public support for campaigns of unthinkable violence. People in the grip of fascism approved and applauded what they believed to be a campaign to destroy monsters.
Politics became horror in a way that contemporary critics of the dangerous new political movements of the 1920s and ’30s noticed. Walter Benjamin worried that fascism had become politics as art, or in his more difficult description “efforts to render politics aesthetic.” This means in essence that politics became for fascism a style and horror. Their own fears and the need to prompt others to become afraid constituted that style. Fascism did not give the workers or the landless rights. It did not change the economic power structure as communism aspired to do. It left, Benjamin pointed out, the workers and the lower middle class in exactly the position they had always been but now with a “chance to express themselves.” Fascism gave the average German permission to vent rage and pain onto marginalized groups, justified its adherents’ worst fears and most bitter hatreds, and urged them to act on them. The offer to let this political horror film play out became a poison running like mercury in much of Europe.5
The scars of the war midwifed the fascist impulse. These scars ran even deeper than shell shock, loss, and the terror suffered by civilians. The Great War marked the end of a mental world, an apocalypse of the paradigm of the proper workings of both life and death. Italy’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF), the first successful fascist party in Europe, reveled in this destruction and asserted that the wasteland gave them a place to build their iron fortress of fear. Europe’s “land of phantoms” offered a dead world where Nosferatu’s tower could rise. The despair of the world after the Great War allowed fascist theorists to claim they could create a new future on the bones of the past.
The murder dolls of the horror film are the totems of this emptiness. Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert spends much of his screen time in M looking into the silent pools of mirrors, staring at himself in shop windows as if peering into his own emptiness to find what he calls toward the end of the film “the fire, the voices, the torment” that drive him.
The right-wing movements that emerged in Europe after the Great War harnessed this torrent of fear. Many of them had their beginnings in an angry bitterness among veterans, a scouring terror they felt toward the world after 1918. The violence unleashed by the Freikorps against the Spartacist uprising continued after 1918. Some became mercenaries for right-wing nationalist causes in the bloody wars that erupted in eastern Europe after 1918. Many more found their way, like World War I veteran Adolf Hitler, into the National Socialist movement. Mussolini’s PNF had at its heart rural Italians who worried over the influence of socialism in the labor unions of the cities and Great War veterans unwilling to lay down their arms, organizing themselves into battalions and marching in what contemporaries described as “squadrons” of armed Blackshirts, beating up labor leaders, burning socialist presses to the ground, and bringing the war home with them like some curse they could not break.
The case of Italy, which fought alongside the Allied powers, reveals that you did not have to find yourself among the defeated to drink from fascism’s poisoned well. Italy had “won” its war but had also endured a disastrous and humiliating defeat in the Battle of Caporetto at the hands of Austro-Hungarian forces, backed by German stormtroopers that included a young Erwin Rommel. This defeat, which included a mass surrender of Italian troops, so haunted the country that the word “Caporetto” entered fascist vocabulary as a symbol of the decadence Italy must overcome.6
The immense suffering of civilians and soldiers, the way physical and psychological mutilation called into question conceptions of masculinity, and the burst of nationalist fervor that accompanied the 1914 declarations of war combined in making the conflict the diabolical cauldron for Europe’s political derangement. In describing the Italian situation, the historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce wrote in 1918, “Italy comes out of this war with a serious and deadly disease, with open sores.” The same could have been said of much of the continent.7
France, which suffered more casualties during the conflict than any nation other than Germany and the Russian Empire, also had fervent postwar fascist movements. The right-wing Action Française dated back to the turn of the century but had received special impetus after the beginning of the Great War. The Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire), active from 1927 to 1936, formed from groups of dispirited veterans. While they displayed certain aspects of a kind of textbook fascism (their paramilitary aesthetic above all), historians argue about whether or not they truly fit the mold, given the socialist tinge of some of their priorities. Still, a number of the country’s leaders of far right organizations ultimately collaborated with the Nazis in 1940 and readily took posts in the German puppet government known as Vichy France.8
Relatively small, though very influential groups appeared in Britain as well after Mussolini’s successful march on Rome. Until the late 1920s, the National Fascists in England had a fair number of aristocrats supporting them as either members or declared sympathizers. Many of the original founders looked to the ideals of the early-twentieth-century Boy Scout movement, of which they had been a part.9
Oswald Mosley’s New Party, formed in 1931, proved far more politically savvy. Heavily funded by old money, Mosley favored stripping Parliament of its prerogatives and centralizing the government into a “war cabinet” not dissimilar from the emergency powers a similar body exercised during the Great War. He began publishing the journal Action, which wrote admiringly of continental fascism. In 1932, with electoral success appearing unlikely, he united a number of far right groups called the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The group reached a membership of twenty thousand by 1939. Even beyond their numbers, the BUF had wide support until their proscription after the beginning of World War II.
The influence of British fascism appears in the silent sympathy King Edward VIII expressed toward Mosley’s efforts. He famously abdicated in 1936 under pressure from the royal family and Parliament following his marriage to American Wallis Simpson, herself a Nazi sympathizer. Thereafter, he became openly friendly to Hitler’s regime. The couple met with Hitler in 1937 and gave him the Nazi salute. Joining the British army as his social position required in 1939, Edward essentially abandoned his post in France in 1940 and gave interviews that, by any definition, offered “aid and comfort to the enemy” by arguing for peace with Germany. Winston Churchill gave the former king the governorship of the Bahamas in hopes he’d remain quiet. He did not; in fact, he spoke favorably of the Nazi regime into the 1950s.10
The United States proved far from immune from fascism’s promise. A number of far right organizations emerged during the interwar years, many of them born out of the postwar “Red Scare.” The Ku Klux Klan, revived in 1915 after its death during Reconstruction, grew two million strong, according to the most conservative estimates, with middle-class white men making up the majority of its membership. The governors of Indiana and Georgia joined, as did senators from Texas and Colorado.11
The Klan declined in the late 1920s (due in part to internal squabbles), but rightist sympathies held a powerful place in American life. After Mussolini seized power in 1922, Alvin Owsley, the national commander of the veterans’ organization the American Legion, praised the Italian dictator and urged Great War vets “to take things into their own hands—to fight the reds as the fascisti of Italy have fought them.” Leaders of American business and culture, including Henry Ford and Walt Disney, played footsie with fascist ideas and political organizations in this same era.12
All of these diverse movements across two continents are united in their use of horror as a lens through which to see the world. Fascism has often been described as an extreme form of nationalism, one in which devotion to the state intrudes into spheres of life once considered private and becomes, to use the word popularized by Hannah Arendt, “totalitarian.” This definition owes more to the nightmarish warnings of Orwell’s 1984 than to how fascism ever worked in practice. The movements that seized power in Germany and Italy, and that had wide influence in France, Britain, and even in the United States, proved much more seductive.
Nationalism calls forth armies. But the extreme nationalism of the kaiser’s Germany, or of Edwardian Britain, did not develop into a fascist state in the time of the Great War. Something more than a sense of national superiority and a centralized government labored in the shadowy rise of Mussolini and Hitler. Fascism needed horror in order for its leaders to bring these movements to unnatural life and take the reins of power.
The importance of terror to these new movements can be seen in how they often disdained the old idea of the nation-state. Fascism did not see the state as an end in itself and at times regarded it as antithetical to its own goals. Mussolini claimed that the state suffered from decay. He, or more correctly the speechwriters and philosophers he kept on the government dole, believed that democracy itself contained an essential weakness in the face of Bolshevism. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who lent intellectual respectability to Mussolini and the PNF, clearly delineated the ideas of “the state” and “the people.” He worried, in language that became mimetic in right-wing circles, over the “mechanical” nature of the liberal state (remember that Lovecraft frequently used such language). The nation-state represented a danger in that, since the French Revolution, it had been seen as a repository for what Gentile called “supposed rights.” Communism represented the monstrous state; fascism offered a “spiritual” alternative to the nation-state’s limitation, a spirituality of horror that embraced war as the natural urge of “the people.” Mussolini summed up this idea when he said that the state should act as nothing more than “the people on the march.”13
Mussolini seized power in 1922 when conservative elements in Italian society saw him as a bludgeon to use against the Communist and Socialist Democratic Party delegates, who held nearly half the seats in parliament, all selected in free elections. Gioacchino Volpe, a medieval historian, Great War veteran, and a fascist delegate in Italy’s parliament, wrote approvingly of how Mussolini had mocked the socialists as “failing at both collaboration and at revolution” while the fascists promised action . . . and demanded sacrifice.14
Mussolini promoted a cult of violence fully grounded in his own and his generation’s experience of combat. The horror of the Great War did not exist in his rhetoric, except in the form of Italy’s enemies. He described as “sublime” any violence visited on these monstrous threats. Against what he insistently saw as the febrile response of democracy to the danger of communism, Mussolini claimed the PNF sought “to infuse the liberal state with all the vitality [forza] of the new generation that had emerged victorious from the war.”15
Before the October 1922 march on Rome, the aspiring dictator proclaimed the violence of his infamous Blackshirts as “not the petty violence of individuals, occasional and often fruitless, but the grand, the beautiful, the inexorable violence of decisive moments.” For him, “the democratic habits of mind” meant only the “drab” and “gray,” while the fascists, in their worship of violence, would root out the corruption and transform the people into “warriors.” On October 31, Mussolini watched 100,000 Blackshirts march past him across the Villa Borghese.16
Hitler did much the same in Germany, claiming that the Weimar Republic had been so deeply implicated in Germany’s allegedly needless surrender in the Great War that it had always been weak, ineffective, and, in one of the Führer’s favorite metaphors, a monster. In fact, he said, the republic’s founding in Weimar in 1918 represented a “monstrous event” that gave birth to “a monster child.” Social democracy itself, reached toward tentatively by the new German constitution, appeared in Hitler’s malefic vision as “misbegotten” and a “a monstrosity of excrement and fire.”17
This talk of monstrous births, deadly effusions of fire and waste, and the horror of decay appeared in fascist rhetoric as a defense not of the state, but of “the people.” In Germany, Nazism used the specific term Volk (folk) to suggest the true Germany, “real Germans” (not so different from the phrase “real Americans” employed in contemporary rightist discourse). In one of the paradoxical claims of the fascist worldview, the folk are seen as racially and culturally superior to all outsiders and yet imagined, almost defined, as facing a deadly threat from these supposed inferiors.
Hitler claimed that the state found its purpose only in acting as “the living organism of nationality.” In other words, Nazism saw the state as the organic protector of the true German and a weaponized system for the destruction of racial enemies. The German government, in a metaphor that would have appealed to the Nazis who drew inspiration from composer Richard Wagner’s operatic celebration of Nordic warriors, became a sword in the hand of the monster slayers.
These monster killers had a significant difference from the warriors of epic and fairy tale. What’s most striking, when examining the writings of fascist thinkers and the speeches of fascist leaders, is the degree to which sheer terror shaped their view of the world. Adolf Hitler himself admitted this on the eve of World War II when he asserted, “The people need wholesome fear. . . . They want someone to frighten them. The masses want that. They need something that will give them the thrill of horror.” The Nazi Party repeatedly used this language, and the people of Germany, along with fascist movements around the globe, felt they had grasped the secret of the world. The world held horror at its heart.18
This horror found expression in the monstrosity of the people’s enemies. In an article about fascism’s frequent use of Gothic themes, philosopher and historian Mark Neocleous notes that “one notices something rather odd” when reading Mein Kampf: “Hitler is really quite scared. In the opening chapters, Hitler is simply terrified.” Neocleous cites a number of examples of this, noting that Hitler found in social democracy an “infamous spiritual terror,” that trade unions represented for him “instruments of terror,” that Marxism moved against Hitler’s imagined Aryan superiority “in terrifying numbers,” and that he remembers his time as a day laborer in Vienna as a time of “terror at the place of employment,” as his allegedly degenerate fellow workers failed to take seriously the glory of the fatherland but instead drew German ideals “through the mud of a terrifying depth.”19
A historical cottage industry understandably exists to try to explain Hitler. There are even a gaggle of books and essays dedicated to the idea that one cannot, or even should not, analyze what the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim saw as his “demonic” eruption into history. If we are to discuss the meaning of Hitler, and I think we must, we have to consider how the dictator’s horror at the world, and his ability to communicate that horror, helps explain the rise of his regime. Friedrich Meinecke, a German historian who was an acquaintance of some of the German army officers who attempted to kill Hitler in the 1944 “July plot,” recalls an anecdote about Hitler being shown a pamphlet written for soldiers that encouraged them to put their confidence in both God and the Reich. “God?” Hitler reportedly said. “Terror is the best God.”20
Both Mussolini and Hitler successfully made a politics of horror out of both their own terror and the terror of their generation. The philosophical sources of Italian fascism decried peaceful existence between peoples as a meaningful goal, making war without limits or foreseeable end central to their creed. “War alone keys up all human energies to their maximum tension,” wrote the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile (in an essay credited to Mussolini himself), “and impresses the seal of nobility upon the people who have the courage to embrace it.” The terror of the enemy—the monster Bolshevism in fascist Italy—encouraged “self-sacrifice.” Fascism encouraged the embrace of death, for its adherents to see horror as sublime. German and Italian fascism had looked on the trauma of war and declared it a fierce joy.21
Monsters
Julius Streicher occupies an odd place in the world of Nazi propaganda. He actually managed to shock some of the most committed Nazis with his anti-Semitic claims and cartoons. Some of his colleagues in the Third Reich believed him mentally ill. A few in Hitler’s inner circle actually criticized some of his extreme portrayals of the Jews in the 1930s by suggesting they bordered on the pornographic, even as the same men laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.
Streicher seems to have been nothing more than a somewhat popular Bavarian elementary school teacher before 1914. He had grown up in a large Catholic family and married the local baker’s daughter. He later claimed that in childhood he had discovered that “the nature of the Jew was peculiar” when his parish priest terrified him with tales of the Jews plotting and carrying out the crucifixion of Jesus, a particular obsession of Christian anti-Semitism through the centuries (and not officially denied by the Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65).22
The Great War completed Streicher’s journey into horror, though he clearly shared the folkloric anti-Semitism common in central Europe for centuries. Streicher won the Iron Cross, received a battlefield promotion to lieutenant, and went to fight on the eastern front. Following the armistice, he seems to have been one of the many veterans who bought into the notion of Dolchstoss (stab in the back), which asserted that the Jews and Marxists who allegedly controlled German finance and media had ensured the German defeat. Generals of the German High Command, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, helped spread this idea with their attacks on “the Jewish press,” a notion that would obsess Streicher in the years to come. Streicher founded a right-wing paramilitary group after the Spartacist uprising and merged it with the Nazi Party in 1921.
Streicher began to publish Der Stürmer (The Stormtrooper), a Nazi propaganda paper, in 1923. His efforts also included the writing of children’s books that warned of Jewish influence. One, The Poison Mushroom, circulated widely in the 1930s after Hitler came to power. By 1940, Streicher had largely fallen from favor within the party hierarchy, yet his anti-Semitic propaganda continued to be read widely and encouraged the German people to actively participate in, or willfully turn a blind eye to, the death camps.
The title of the publication, Der Stürmer, echoed Streicher’s time in the trenches while also serving as a symbol of the violence fascism sought to inaugurate in a new German Reich. The images of Jews presented in the paper, published until the collapse of the Nazi regime, encouraged the German people to view them through the lens of monstrosity. Frequently, Streicher used images from horror fiction to make his point. Although the U.S. Holocaust Museum is technically correct in saying that Der Stürmer portrayed Jews and other ethnic groups as subhuman, it’s more accurate to see the paper as presenting those outside the mythic circle of Aryanism as inhuman, perhaps superhuman, monsters.
Images of Jews as demons, vampires, witches, serial murderers, and sometimes an amalgam of all of these nightmares became common in Der Stürmer’s propaganda cartoons. A 1930 image portrayed Judaism itself as a giant spider. Simply titled “Sucked Dry,” it claimed that Germany’s economic woes resulted from Jews feeding off the very vitals of the German self. An image in the July 1932 edition caricatured the Jew as Satan, ladling the German people fake news from a bubbling cauldron that read “the Jewish Press.”23
Monsters are often hybrid creatures. The vampire has a demonic soul joined to a human form or, in the case of Germany’s most well-known vampire, a dark emptiness embodied in a shell that barely passes for human. The monster proves all the more terrifying, induces the uncanny, when it combines some elements of the familiar with the utterly inhuman.
The Nazi propaganda machine created just such a hybrid monster for the German people to fear. Hitler described Jews, Slavs, and Communists as “the anti-man, the creature of another god . . . a creature outside of nature and alien to nature.” The Jews, he said, are the “amorphous monster” that hides in plain sight, appearing with a human face but waiting to pounce on the German soul and eviscerate it.
The political and ethnic horrors in the fascist imagination may seem to contradict one another, but they are precisely the hybrid horrors that the Nazis feared, and wished all Germans to fear. The Jews are not simply individuals; they are conglomerated into a monstrous “Jewish-Bolshevik World Conspiracy.” Sometimes the Nazis created even more baroque explosions of hyphenated terrors such as “Marxian-demoralizing-Liberal-Capitalistic” or a ridiculous portmanteau like “Jewish Financebolshevism.”24 The monster contained multitudes, and the confusing conflation of ideas, people, and systems that have nothing to do with one another was entirely purposeful. The Nazis did not use such language for analytical precision. They made monsters out of this mayhem of adjectives searching for frightening nouns.
This tendency has frequently appeared in right-wing discourse, including in recent American politics. The use of the nonsense term “Islamofascism” seeks to create a hybrid monster, not to explain the origins of terrorism. Barack Obama, during his eight years as president, found himself accused by the far right of being a secret Muslim, an atheist, and a socialist all at once—with the term “fascist” occasionally thrown in for good measure. Such accusations made no sense, since one cannot adhere to all these clashing worldviews at the same time. But the vocabulary of fascism does not seek to make sense. It expresses fear and seeks to induce terror in others while, above all, demanding people take action or simply agree that those in authority take action.
In Nazi Germany, the apogee of the use of horrors born of the Great War for propaganda appeared in the 1940 film The Eternal Jew. Produced even as the Schutzstaffel (SS) death squads began machine-gunning entire villages of Jews in eastern Europe and experimenting with “mobile killing units,” The Eternal Jew represented a declarative announcement to the German Volk of the need to fight the monstrous menace, to destroy the entire Jewish race. The film borrowed, or rather simply stole, elements of Germany’s haunted screen, drawing implicitly on the image of Nosferatu and explicitly from other films, to make its case for genocide.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, called German cinema “the vanguard of the military,” and in the case of The Eternal Jew he may have been correct. Much of the footage used in the film came from documentary material of the Nazi invasion of Poland, which began in September 1939, using the catastrophic conditions Polish Jews found themselves in as proof of their “unsanitary” nature. Thus, in a dark irony, a film that portrayed the Jews as monstrous invaders of the German fatherland took footage from the German blitzkrieg against Poland.
The use of footage from Poland allowed the film to claim that the unbathed, half-starved human beings who had been herded into the Warsaw ghetto represented the Jews in “their natural state,” warning the viewer that the “civilized Jews” they knew in Berlin offered a deceptive picture of their “oriental barbarism.” Like Nosferatu, the film implied, the monsters that invaded the German homeland came from the East, semihuman and lethal.25
The film claimed that the Jews brought plague, exactly like Murnau’s vampire. In perhaps the most notorious sequence of the film, the camera shows hordes of rats writhing over one another, swarming out of a sewer, while the narrator reminds the audience that rats carry disease. They are, he intones, “an insidious underground destruction—just like the Jews.” But, like the “amorphous monster” that Hitler always conjured, the Jews who, in the words of the film, “leave their nests” and come to Germany, “change their appearance.” Too many Germans, the film insists, have been fooled by the “parasites” that are draining the lifeblood of the German economy.26
A study of the film reveals how fascist imagery sought to create a pastiche monster, one that contained all possible expressions of horror and malice. In one shot the film claims that the Jews created pornography and spread it to the pure German young even as it rushes on to show an image of Albert Einstein, whom the film calls “the relativity Jew” who practiced “obscure pseudo-sciences.” This phrase perhaps evoked the Jewish alchemical tradition and the more generalized imagery of “the dark arts” that Paul Wegener’s Golem films had associated with Judaism. (The elderly Wegener aided this notion by taking part in Nazi propaganda films.) The film leaves Einstein and begins to offer a generalized condemnation of the “degeneracy of art,” condemning, among others, Charlie Chaplin, by incorrectly identifying him as Jewish.
Peter Lorre’s most famous scene from M appears in The Eternal Jew, his plea before the kangaroo court of Berlin’s crime lords in which he screams that he has no control over the impulse that burns within him. Lorre, who fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to a long career in Hollywood, symbolizes the Jews as inherently depraved monsters. Like all the film footage lifted for The Eternal Jew, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda simply ignored copyright laws. Lang, after a time in Paris, had also emigrated to the United States.
The use of Lang’s work without his permission shouldn’t surprise us. The idea of the Nazi propaganda machine giving thought to “fair use” seems more than ridiculous. On the other hand, using Lorre’s image to advertise the film to the German public does seem odd. The Jewish actor, having clearly seen the direction his country had taken, escaped Germany in 1933, two years before the Nuremberg Laws—excluding Jews from citizenship and prohibiting them from marrying or having sexual relationships with “citizens of German or kindred blood”—took effect. Yet, in 1940, his image appeared prominently in at least one of the publicity posters for The Eternal Jew, almost as if he were a recognizable “star” associated with the film. His scenes from M are cut for maximum effect, portraying him as monstrous and insane and leaving out how the film indicts society more generally. Lorre the actor blends with Lorre the degenerate character, who in turn blends with Lorre the actual Jewish man forced to leave Germany for his safety. Yet he’s also a celebrity in the film the Propaganda Ministry sought to promote to the German people using the wattage of his star power.
A speech by Hitler and a march by the SS conclude the film, the Führer promising “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, had his units watch the film as they headed east to carry out mass murder. Nazi youth organizations screened The Eternal Jew, and it appeared at local Kinos, where it had a poor box office performance, although word-of-mouth tales of the film made many Germans feel as though they had seen it and led them to speak of it in such terms.
Did the horror tradition born out of the Great War make such propaganda, and the atrocities it symbolized, possible? Siegfried Kracauer’s gloomy interpretation had been that film aggravated something in the very nature of the German people, making them predisposed to Nazism. The films that had appeared since the Great War, he claimed in From Caligari to Hitler, reflected these dark proclivities.
Is there anything to this claim? Kracauer, much like other German intellectuals in exile such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, had been commissioned during wartime to write a book that would help U.S. leaders better understand their enemy. Most of his comrades were associated with an intellectual movement called the Frankfurt School, named because their privately funded research institute had been in the city of Frankfurt (before they had been forced to flee the Nazis). Many of them wrote academic studies during the war years for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the history of strange bedfellows, communist intellectuals writing analyses for the very agencies that would soon hunt them must take pride of place.
The New York Times claimed that Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler represented “a refugee’s revenge.” This goes too far, but the book certainly had a polemical purpose. When Kracauer concludes that the emergence of Hitler’s regime represented Germany playing out “what had been anticipated by her cinema from the very beginning,” we’re witnessing a keen mind writing war propaganda rather than thinking about the different meanings that audiences gave to the films they watched or, certainly, what the films’ directors, set designers, script writers, and actors may have intended.27
The horror film, at least, might seem to some readers to have fed the dark impulses of Nazism just as Kracauer claimed. Doesn’t the Nazi use of images of horror suggest that there’s something protofascist about the horror film itself? Nosferatu has been arraigned by some contemporary film historians as anti-Semitic, even though there’s no evidence that Murnau and Grau intended it as a comment on racial purity or that the first audiences received it in this way. The film might seem the ultimate tale of the foreign invader or a threat within the social body. However, it’s tendentious to claim that Grau, Murnau, or Galeen wanted to signal audiences, even by inference, that the vampire represented the Jewish people. Grau spoke frequently and often about the meaning of the film and never made reference to anything but the war providing the dread that shadowed the film, the “cosmic vampire” that murdered millions. Murnau had died in the United States before Hitler’s rise. The Third Reich forced both Galeen and Grau into exile; Grau fled to Switzerland after the Nazi Party proscribed his occult interests. Anti-Semitism acted only as a deeply buried subtext that could be read into, not out of, the film. No one tried to do so until the Nazi mythos successfully harnessed central Europe’s centuries-old traditions of pogroms and blood libels against the Jewish people.28
Kracauer himself wrote only briefly about Nosferatu and did not focus specifically on indicting it for anti-Semitism. Instead, he described the character of Nosferatu as a tyrant and wrote, “The German imagination . . . always gravitated toward such figures in this period.” Otherwise thoughtful online articles about the history of horror still make use of Kracauer’s simplistic reading of such films.29
The determined scholar even found a way to blame films banned by the Nazis for the catastrophe of the 1930s. Regarding Lang’s film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (discussed later in this chapter), Kracauer claimed that even if it had been released in Germany, the character of Mabuse only served to show the Nazis’ “demonic irresistibility.” In contradiction with himself, Kracauer insisted that the German people were too insensitive to pick up on Lang’s social commentary anyway. Kracauer tied himself in knots in order to maintain the appearance of consistency. “This anti-Nazi film betrays the power of the Nazi spirit over minds insufficiently equipped to counter its peculiar fascination,” he irascibly insisted.30
Fascism did borrow fragmentary images from the tradition of horror born of the Great War. The haunted screen rising from the trenches introduced images that, when removed from their context, gave a very public face to the Nazi obsession with monsters. This comes as no surprise since, in Germany, the Nazis used popular styles ranging from children’s books to radio shows to catchy jingles to inculcate the German people with their message. This provided left-wing thinkers with plenty of reason to ponder the menace of kitsch, what its silly sentimentality and sensationalism might mask. Kracauer and his colleagues worried not only about the horror film but also about all of what they called “mass culture.” In fact, after the war they wondered aloud if the vapidity of their adopted home’s pop culture also lent itself to fascism. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote of the “culture industry” of American capitalism in which “automobiles, bombs, and films” all served the same purpose.31
It’s easy to understand how these scholar-émigrés came to feel as they did. By the time Kracauer wrote From Caligari to Hitler, he vehemently believed that German popular culture had enabled the country to goose-step into its doom. In his eyes, all film, all mass entertainment, represented a playground for fascism. But given his and his colleagues’ experience, the terror that drove them to flee, who can blame them if in their minds it was always about to become January 1933 again? Since those dark times, hasn’t it become every human being’s responsibility to see the world in this way?
I think so, while also being certain that Kracauer was often just wrong. Didn’t the Nazis’ decision to show fragments, clips, stolen bits and pieces of the haunted screen betray the fact that the horror film had an uneasy relationship to their worldview? They could show only a moment from Lang’s M, and only then if The Eternal Jew’s authoritative narrator interpreted it for the audience. The same can be said for the rats that look very much like the vermin that rush into Wisborg along with Murnau’s vampire. It’s an image the Nazis had to plunder from a larger story, one terrifying moment from Weimar’s “kingdom of shadows” that would have made, in 1922, millions think of the trenches, the rats, dysentery, and the dead. Great War veterans like Murnau and Grau had looked at their life in the trenches as being not unlike the lives of vermin and held on to the desire that human beings never again face such horror. Nosferatu stood as a terrible monument exactly as Grau said he hoped it would, a reminder that the war had been a “cosmic vampire” and that millions had died of this monstrous plague.
The Nazi propaganda machine needed the people of Germany to feel a horror of the outsider, the monster. But the very ambiguity of monsters frightened the propagandists themselves. Nazi efforts to control the haunted screen, and limit its political possibilities, are the best argument that horror held contradictory impulses, that it made an eerie static noise out of which whispered voices saying all manner of sinister things—some true, some not—all of them warnings and portents. Monsters.
The Invitation
Not long before he fled Germany, Fritz Lang found himself invited to the office of Joseph Goebbels, head of the Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda, which oversaw the effort to reshape politics by changing culture. The new department had seized control of the film industry within weeks of Hitler’s assuming power. In the early spring of 1933, Lang had produced The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and, for good reason, assumed he might be in significant trouble.32
Testament represented a follow-up to Lang’s 1922 film, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. The earlier film strongly resembled The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari but pushed further into the realms of horror and social satire than Caligari had been willing to go. Mabuse is a crime lord who rules a secret empire of depravity, and, unlike Caligari, he’s no delusion. In Lang’s original conception, Mabuse heads a hierarchy of thieves and counterfeiters and has the ability to mesmerize the public prosecutor with unexplained mental powers.
The world of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler seems much like the dark fairy-tale Germany in which Cesare walks. The film ends with Mabuse descending into madness while hiding in a cellar from the police, who have finally cornered him. He experiences the waking nightmare frequently described by veterans, a kind of shell shock in which angry ghosts huddle around him, threatening and accusing.
Lang believed the film had been so successful because it captured Germany in the early 1920s, the Great War having left the nation in a state that combined sorrow and chaos. Publicity material for Dr. Mabuse the Gambler portrayed the story of the criminal underworld in apocalyptic terms: “Mankind, swept about and trampled down in the wake of war and revolutions, takes revenge for years of anguish by indulging in lusts . . . and by passively or actively surrendering to crime.”33
The Nazis would have had little problem with the picture of society presented in Mabuse the Gambler, at least on a simplistic level. Thea von Harbou had scripted the film, as she had done with most of Lang’s work. As with his masterpiece, Metropolis (1927), some elements of at least protofascist thinking made their way into the final production.
However, Lang constructed in Testament, as with M, a particularly complex horror tale involving madness, mesmerism, and, in a Lovecraftian turn, a powerful, forbidden text that both drove the reader mad and unleashed supernatural powers of evil on the world. Picking up with Mabuse ten years after his capture, the criminal mastermind scribbles away at a manifesto of crime in his asylum. Like the dread Necronomicon of Lovecraft’s tales or the cursed videotape of The Ring, anyone who hears the words and images contained in the book goes mad and enters a world of death and horror.
Outside the asylum, the followers of “the Leader” are making use of his book to build “the empire of crime” that Mabuse’s writings describe. Portrayed as a vast network of terrorists, they act as a kind of bureaucracy of evil. Mabuse’s cultists receive orders like those that come from Kafka’s “control agencies” with their “inner and outer offices.” They work on their sinister projects as “Division 5” or “Division 9.” Most terrible of all, feared even by the rest of Mabuse’s small army, is “Section 2-B,” whose members act as enforcers. Contemporary Germans, had they been able to see the film, would have almost certainly connected “Section 2-B” with the Nazis’ SA, the feared predecessor of the SS.
After his alleged death (it’s not entirely clear that Mabuse does or even can die), Mabuse possesses his psychoanalyst, Dr. Baum, in a ghostly sequence in which an extreme close-up reveals the madness and the power in the gaze of Mabuse. Baum raves about the need to “extinguish humanity” through “terror and horror” so that a new world can emerge, a criminal Reich.
Mabuse uses his possession of Baum (Twin Peaks fans watching Mabuse will automatically think of the terrifying powers of BOB) to circulate his ideas beyond death, along with the new technologies of voice recording. Mabuse gives specific, practical instructions about how to undermine the social order. But, at its heart, his manifesto proclaims a philosophy of terror. Human beings must be made to feel horror until their minds are shivered to bits. The empire of crime, a phrase that the specter of Mabuse repeats like a fetish, will emerge from the chaos. In perhaps the most famous passage of the madman’s proclamation, Mabuse exclaims:
When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.
Lang had gone even further and made some fairly specific allusions to Hitler. Mabuse writing his manifesto in the asylum seemed to parody Hitler working on Mein Kampf during his short prison term in 1924. More important, the slogans and the ideas behind it seemed borrowed from the Nazi conception of the world. Hitler asserted that the people want to know the “thrill of horror,” and Mabuse offers them precisely this sumptuous madness, the delights of anarchic savagery. On a landscape of horror, not unlike the nightmare world of Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep” or Eliot’s Waste Land, the “empire of crime” had its nativity.
Goebbels would have none of it. He banned The Testament of Dr. Mabuse before it could even be released.
In an interview for the German talk show Zum Beispiel in the 1960s, Lang related the story of attending a dinner at Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof soon after completing the film. Goebbels praised Lang’s early work, and then, glass raised to the assembled guests, the slightly tipsy propaganda chief announced, “But today I had to ban a film in Germany. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.” He let the announcement hang in the air, a chilly threat. Lang knew he was in deep trouble, and an invitation to the propaganda minister’s office shortly after the awkward dinner seemingly confirmed it.34
Goebbels’s purpose for summoning Lang, despite what the director might have reasonably feared, was not to berate, threaten, or perhaps even arrest him. Instead, the invitation had a sinister, indeed a Mabuse-like, intent behind it.
Lang’s account of his visit to Goebbels’s office sounds like the experience of Kafka’s K. in The Castle. Speaking in 1974 with William Friedkin (who had just released The Exorcist), Lang remembered appearing at the ministry and being roughly greeted by Nazi guards who told him to walk down a long corridor and turn left down another corridor to find the propaganda minister’s office. Lang followed their instructions only to find himself at another desk manned by yet more armed and uniformed Nazi loyalists who for their part instructed him to walk down a series of long corridors. Lang remembered this happened three times before he arrived at a large doorway, where a polite figure asked him to wait a moment.35
Ushered into a cavernous office, Lang saw that Goebbels sat at an enormous desk at the very end of the long room. It was “disagreeable,” he told Friedkin. But to his surprise the Reichsminister greeted him effusively. In one version of the story Lang told, Goebbels did not mention the film at all. In another, he simply said that it could not be shown because of the ambiguous ending. Instead, he praised Metropolis and claimed that the Führer loved Lang’s work. To Lang’s shock, Goebbels asked him to become head of the propaganda ministry’s film department. Fritz Lang would become censor in chief for the Nazi state.
Lang agreed, he told Friedkin, although he mentioned to Goebbels that his grandparents on his mother’s side were Jewish, two years before the Nuremberg Laws would have made such an admission lethal. Goebbels laughed and said, “Mr. Lang, we decide who is Aryan.” Perspiring heavily, as he’d been doing throughout the interview, Lang thanked him and spoke of his pleasure at being offered such an honor. Goebbels then spoke at length of how Hitler believed Lang would create the “National Socialist epic,” while Lang, watching a clock on a tower visible through the enormous office window, made a plan to leave Germany on the midnight train.
Lang’s biographers disagree about when precisely the director fled Germany, but certainly within a matter of months he had left for Paris. Moreover, he had been planning this move for a long time, having sequestered funds in a French bank and smuggled a print of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse across the border. His exile marked his final break with his wife, Thea von Harbou. They had fallen out over the political climate after the making of M. Harbou worked in the Nazi motion picture industry in the 1930s, though, as we will see, the extent of her collaboration remains a matter of dispute.
Theaters briefly screened Testament in Budapest in April 1933, and the New York City premiere occurred in 1943, while American troops engaged German forces in North Africa. At that time, Lang claimed that his tale of possession and horror offered “an allegory to show Hitler’s processes of terrorism. Slogans and doctrines of the Third Reich have been put into the mouths of criminals in the film. Thus I hoped to expose the Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything that is precious to a people.”36 The film did not appear in Germany until 1951.
Kracauer, who had befriended Lang after his exile, wrote that such a heroic reading by Lang of his own efforts “smacks of hindsight.” Perhaps. But The Testament of Dr. Mabuse did become the film that forced Lang to flee his home and Europe itself. If he read too much into his own tale of maniacal horror, it must be said that Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister had done the same, had recognized how it successfully mimicked the regime and even told its greatest secret: the Nazis sought to terrify and destroy so that they could fill the vacuum with terror. Lang had made a horror film about politics in response to the Nazi effort to make politics into a horror film.
Lang told Friedkin that he met with Siegfried Kracauer many times after he emigrated to the United States. He expressed shock at what he found when he read Kracauer’s book. It was, he said, an “untrue book.” People in the German film industry, especially “Mr. Murnau,” did not capitulate to the spirit of fascism. Lang insisted that, with the exception of “one or two films” that he did not name, the haunted screen of Weimar sought to show social evils, to portray what the world had become after the Great War.
Friedkin asked during the course of the interview why his films had shown an interest in degradation and the criminal. The true murderers, Lang told Friedkin, always interested him because they looked so normal. He suggested that this is precisely why he chose not to show the violence of the child molester in M, the full extent of Peter Lorre’s madness. The audience’s own imagination could conjure the horrors of the murderer. In this way, he said, viewers became “collaborators” with the horror of M. An extremity of violence allowed them to distance themselves, to fail to understand the message of Lorre staring at his double in the mirror. They needed to see that their very normalcy made them very much like the terrors that exuded from Hans Beckert. They needed to see themselves implicated in the crime rather than watch a monster movie.
M’s viewers, many of whom would shout “Sieg Heil!” at gigantic rallies in the years ahead, would have to collude with the horror if they wanted to truly understand it. When the time came to decide whether to collaborate with true evil or not, the German people faltered. Some refused. Others openly embraced the Third Reich. Almost all, however, actively or passively participated in the maintenance of the Nazi regime.
Arts of Horror
The art of horror immunized many of its practitioners from becoming collaborators with the terror of the real world. Experimental art after the Great War had put the horror of the mangled corpse on full display. The absurdly twisted bodies of Max Ernst and the sinister images of Otto Dix made the corpse ever present. Surrealism had become an art of horror, a meditation on the wounded and ruined human form.
The new world of fascism had no place for art that presented war as horror, the state as terrorist, and killing as inhuman and monstrous. In the fascist worldview, the war could be remembered only as a series of courageous acts, men of steel charging forth into the hard rain of shells and machine gun fire. In their eyes, the sublimity of the war effort had been undercut only by the lurking monsters at home: weak-willed politicians and disloyal civilians, the Jews running the whole show. In Nazi folklore, the iron men of the trenches had been “stabbed in the back” by the degenerate and the malicious, above all by that imagined secret clique of Juden who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Otto Dix stubbornly insisted on depicting the malicious cancer the war had been. Immediately after the rise of Nazism, he painted the giant canvas Flanders, in some ways his definitive statement on the war, completing the terrifying visions he had etched in his 1924 series, Der Krieg. Dix worked on the piece between 1934 and 1936, while the Nazi Party fully consolidated its power, passed the Nuremberg Laws, and began the first steps toward the Holocaust. Flanders portrays a blasted and ruined French countryside. Phantom-like figures huddle in quivering lumps behind shattered rock that appears unworldly and impossibly proportioned. The central large figure, a German soldier who may be a corpse, leans against a stark stump of a tree, a figure simultaneously pathetic and monstrous. A dead comrade sinks beside him into the miasma.
The Nazis also wanted the Great War portrayed as a sort of horror story, but not one that indicted the conflict itself, particularly at a moment when Hitler had begun to transform German industry into a vast war-making machine. Dix’s bravery went beyond his Bosch-like representation of the war by dedicating the painting to the French socialist Henri Barbusse, who had published the acclaimed antiwar novel Le feu (Under Fire) in 1916. The book used fragmentary narrative and images of pointless and inhuman suffering to portray the daily horrors of the war in Flanders’s fields, not unlike Dix’s work making use of a splinter image of the war’s reality to communicate the totality of its casual brutality.
The Nazis saw real danger in work like Dix’s. Steve Bannon, part of the inner circle of Donald J. Trump during the first year of the administration and an admitted admirer of Italian fascist thinkers, once said, “Politics is downstream from culture.” This idea, prominent in Mussolini’s Italy, apparently came to Bannon from his reading of fascist philosopher Julius Evola. The fascist societies forged in both Italy and Germany took this idea seriously, believing that culture actually trumped politics in touching the most affective elements of human life. Politics must become art; art must not comment on politics.37
Goebbels’s concern with establishing firm control over Fritz Lang and the German film industry provides a striking example of this effort to shape political life by reshaping culture. The Nazi Party’s attempt to assert control over art offers another example. The death dolls of surrealism, the empty-eyed victims of shell shock, and the blasted landscapes had to be replaced by the kitschy posters of Nazi propaganda, an image of modern war as glorious rather than an engine for the mass production of corpses. The Nazi propaganda machine wanted its people to feel only a specific kind of horror: a terror of the outsider, the labor union, the Slav, the Jew, the Communist, the foreigner, all lurking in the shadows, waiting to pounce on German innocence.
The Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda targeted literature and art even as it pursued control over film. Any publications using the imagery or language of horror to portray the Great War went out of print; some copies were publicly burned. The Reich suppressed German author Ernst Johannsen’s 1929 novel, Four Infantrymen, which portrayed tanks rolling over shattered German dead. The novel had described a young shell-shocked lieutenant who hallucinated images of a “death’s head.” The Nazis themselves repurposed this image for their own brand of horror, making the death’s head the symbol of their most elite SS units. They could not allow the symbol to represent the horror of the war they glorified. Famed German director G. W. Pabst used the novel as the basis of his film Westfront: 1918, which the Nazis also banned, Goebbels calling it an exercise in “cowardly defeatism.”38
Dix, along with other artists who portrayed the haunted landscape of war, had been under attack by local conservative councils since the 1920s. Hitler’s new regime increased the pressure as early as 1933, displaying the work of Dix and others as examples of “cultural Bolshevism.”39
If the Nazi term “cultural Bolshevism” sounds familiar, it’s because the American alt-right makes frequent use of a version of it. Breitbart News uses the phrase “cultural Marxism” for anything they find objectionable. It’s been applied to diverse cultural attitudes and historical movements ranging from vegetarianism to the sexual revolution to challenging theoretical ideas you will meet only if you take an advanced course in literary criticism. But, as in all conspiratorial thinking, all these strands are connected, and if you deny the connection, you are part of the conspiracy. Such thinking has been a component of fascism since the Great War.40
In their war on “cultural Bolshevism,” Nazi propagandists described the artists who sought to portray the monsters of the Great War as monstrous themselves. The new Reich used metaphors of disease, infection, and abnormality to describe the work of all modernist painters. Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi art critic in the 1930s, claimed that mestizo (mixed-race) sources polluted the art of Weimar and had produced “bastard excrescences.” This bizarre, and bizarrely racist, art criticism used the language of the weird tale, language not out of place in a Lovecraft story, to characterize modernist art.41
The Nazis removed Dix from his teaching position in 1933. He had been undermined in part by fellow faculty members who rushed to join the Nazi Party en masse. Richard Müller, the head of the Dresden Art Academy and once Dix’s teacher, actually led the charge to have Dix removed from his post. Müller serves as a representative of every crabbed and cringing academician, a combination of arrogance, insecurity, and eagerness to please the powers that be. Müller may or may not have been a committed Nazi, but he certainly despised the international success his former student attained. He even penned an editorial for Dresden’s Nazi-controlled paper in September 1933 in which he lamented that Dix had been able to “expose the youth for years and years to his poisonous influence.” Worse, Müller joined his Nazi colleagues at the academy in circulating the rumor (possibly true) that many of Dix’s students had joined the German Communist Party, leading to their harassment and in some cases arrest. Soon after, Dix found museums unwilling to exhibit his work and agents unwilling to sell it.42
Indeed, in Nazi Germany his art continued to appear only in exhibitions meant to show the “degenerate nature” of Weimar modernism in place of what the Nazis called “clean realism.” The vicious Müller organized just such an exhibition in Dresden’s New Town Hall the year he ensured the end of Dix’s teaching career. Nuremberg also held such an exhibit in 1933 called The Chamber of Art Horrors, paradoxically speaking a truth about the verity and power of the works on display. The most famous of such exhibitions appeared in Munich in 1937, a hateful repudiation of the work of some of Germany’s greatest artists, with particular focus on those who had sought to depict the true horror of the Great War. After this display of “degenerate art,” the Nazis destroyed about 260 Dix paintings in museums throughout the country.43
Unlike most artists proscribed by the regime, Dix managed to survive in Germany even after losing his academic position. He worked on Flanders in secret while creating increasingly allegorical compositions that expressed his disdain for the Third Reich and reminded his fellow Germans of the horror of the Great War, the true meaning of the death’s head. For a few years, international acclaim and a group of influential supporters prevented him from being arrested, much to the exasperation of some. In his Gestapo file, the Nazi commandant of Saxony scribbled in frustration, “This swine is still alive?”44
Dix could have emigrated to America after his dismissal from the academy in 1933. He had a small network of friends in New York City, where his work had been much admired. Instead, he and his family retreated to the German countryside to live in a ruined castle owned by the cash-poor but property-rich family of Dix’s wife. He painted landscapes but also worked on allegorical images containing an inescapable message of confrontational horror. His painting Seven Deadly Sins presents yet another nightmare landscape of the trenches, where monstrous figures run riot in a chaos of baroque symbolism. A corpse in a skeleton costume exposes its heart, blackened to a crisp, and, bearing a scythe, forms something like a swastika. In front of him is Envy, a frowning and needy infant who wears the face of Adolf Hitler, complete with inkblot mustache. Gluttony gives the Nazi salute. In the background, the empty dead land has been torn apart with an inscription, a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: “The Wasteland grows, woe to him who hides the wasteland within!”
Shockingly, Dix survived the war even though he faced terrifying persecution. After the factory worker and carpenter Georg Elser failed to assassinate Hitler and other Nazi leaders with a homemade bomb in November 1939, Dix became one of the many prominent antifascists arrested. The Gestapo interrogated Dix, held him for two weeks, and then somewhat miraculously released him. In March 1945, the Wehrmacht drafted the fifty-four-year-old artist even though the war was drawing to a close. Dix promptly allowed the Allies to capture him and spent a year in a prisoner-of-war camp, a harrowing experience that resulted in a self-portrait as a prisoner.
In an interview after World War II, Dix was asked why he had not taken the opportunity to go to the United States before the war, a country he had always expressed a fascination with. Dix laughed. “To America!” he exclaimed. “There I already saw the ghost of the Daughters of the American Revolution commanding how art should be made.”45
Collaborators
French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline knocked about in his youth working for delivery services and jewelry shops. He hated his middle-class parents and apparently joined the French army in 1912 to spite them. He participated in the first Ypres campaign in 1914, was wounded in the arm (not the head, a lie he later perpetuated), and received a medal for bravery. After the war, he went to what was then British Cameroons (a region of Africa now part of Nigeria), took a job there, and lost it. He returned to France, where he became first a doctor and then for a time France’s most celebrated writer.
Eventually, Céline became one of the most hated men in postwar France, now more or less repudiated by the French literary establishment. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Today right-wing nationalists, who have seized real estate in France’s public square much like they have in the United States, are predictably attempting to defend and regenerate his reputation.46
The Nazis’ attempts to silence the output of artists, directors, and writers with a vision of horror born in the Great War proved largely successful between 1933 and 1945. Otto Dix worked bravely but in obscurity. Max Ernst and André Breton faced capture and fled. Leonora Carrington, after her institutionalization, went to live in the States and then in Mexico.
Fascism’s tale of history moved by brute force attracted a few of those who saw in the Great War a new kind of horror rising. They cheered from the sidelines on behalf of Mussolini and Hitler, while throwing their support behind homegrown versions of the fascist impulse. When the opportunity presented itself, they threw in their lot with these dictators and their movements.
The case of Céline offers one of the more troubling examples. Céline’s masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night, immediately received deserved accolades. Many saw in it the definitive French response to the Great War and its aftermath when it first appeared in 1932. The semiautobiographical novel—whose protagonist, Ferdinand, is an obvious avatar of Céline himself—rejects any sentimental view of the war and confronts its readers with not only the folly of the trenches but also their irremediable horror. Céline understood that the war had ripped open more than human flesh; it had shattered the worldview that made human flesh seem more than itself.
What he called “the monstrous enterprise” that opened in August 1914 had a “nocturnal aspect” that forced every soldier to wonder if he had walked into purgatory, some dark alternate reality where amid shot and shell he now lived between life and death. Death’s companionship became constant, “so close to our noses that we couldn’t see anything else.”47
The human body as a corpse waiting to be made, a theme appearing on film and canvas throughout the 1920s and ’30s, obsessed Céline. The war created for him a profound distrust of the body’s stability, and the novel overflows with viscera, gutted bowels, the stench of death, and the general nastiness of a war being waged by men who had been “duped to the entrails by a gang of vicious lunatics.” The lesson that Céline takes from the war is that human beings are bags of meat, their desires not even interesting enough to write tragedies about. They are, in a favorite term of his, “crummy,” and deserve their often bloody and ridiculous deaths. Bodies are not only disgusting; they carry within them a stupid consciousness and allow themselves to become something worse than corpses—zombies marching on a journey to nowhere, to the end of night.
The Great War made even sexual pleasure into an exercise in body horror for Céline. The portrayal of sex that made the novel much talked about has a repugnant quality. Lola, who believes deeply in the war and finds herself horrified that Ferdinand understands neither patriotism nor courage, provides him with the same pleasures he could receive from an automaton. She’s portrayed not as an object of intense desire but only as a willing body that Ferdinand convinces can lose weight by having more sex. Notably, all conventional descriptions of the beauty of a beloved are ignored, and she becomes another one of the era’s death dolls, empty-eyed and spouting patriotic phrases. Ultimately, she’s like a corpse dissected for the author’s pleasure rather than an object of love, or even particularly avid lust.48
There’s a sense in which Journey to the End of the Night constitutes a sort of comedy about death in the same way that James Whale used the idea for his Hollywood-produced horror films. It’s perhaps more accurate to see it as a comedy about the body dying, a comedy of corpses, since nothing could be further from the novel’s dark spirit than to think in terms of “death” as a magnificent final act. The mysterious figure of Robinson, who convinces Ferdinand to desert not once but twice, runs from the battlefield only to see his captain dying: “Bleeding all over and rolling his eyes. . . . He was through. . . . ‘Mama! Mama!’ he was sniveling, all the while dying and pissing blood. . . . ‘Shut up!’ I tell him. ‘Mama! Mama! Fuck your mama!’” The crude heartlessness of Robinson passes for a kind of wisdom in the wasteland of corpses that Céline describes.49
Céline’s political right turn in the mid-1930s—if the nearly insane hatred he displayed for Jews and Communists falls into the category of the political rather than the psychiatric—has today obscured the terrifying genius of his novel. Perhaps it should. He openly advocated for a French alliance with Nazi Germany against the USSR. He wrote three anti-Semitic screeds, Trifles for a Massacre (1937), The School of Corpses (1938), and The Fine Mess (1941), which excoriated the Jews in such virulent language that the Nazi minister of propaganda in occupied France believed them counterproductive in their “brutal obscenities.” Occupying Nazi generals called the language of the tracts “vicious, brutal slang” even if they agreed with the overall sentiment the author expressed.50
A firm believer in the fascist conspiratorial view of history as a sinister carnival of amorphous monsters, Céline called for the extermination of “non-Aryans” and their communist allies on a much larger scale than even the Nazi regime imagined. So unhinged did he become that, as the war turned against fascism in 1944, he speculated at a dinner with the German ambassador to the Vichy government that Hitler had been murdered and replaced with “a Jewish double.”51
What had become of Céline? Did the horror that he saw and the nightmare his writing evoked lead him inevitably into fascism’s embrace? Certainly this did not become the case for Dix, Ernst, Murnau, Lang, or Whale. They experienced the same terror of the trenches, in fact apparently much more of it than Céline did, and created a vision of a haunted world that told unbearable truths without descending into a mad chaos of cruelty, without making other human beings into monsters.
The art of the nightmare, as the fascists well knew, has proven highly unmalleable. Filmmakers, artists, and writers who created the world of horror after the Great War had their audiences and patrons screaming with nightmares of the corpse, the double, the thing that looks back at you in the mirror. But, like Lang in M, they forced the audience to stare into the mirror along with the murderers and the murdered, to refuse sentimentality and look deeper into the void that had made millions of corpses.
Céline and his fellow fascists throughout the postwar era savagely smashed the mirror. The distorted image of the world they saw had fragments of truth, fragments they wielded like weapons. To ask what happened to Céline is as much as to ask what happened to the 1930s. The answer can be found only in the crude tendency, one the Great War itself encouraged, to choose chaos over clarity, to allow the emotions engendered by abstract ideas to exclude moral reasoning. In other words, to fall for the same scam Céline himself once warned about in Journey to the End of the Night.
There’s certainly some pathos in the man who could write with bitter hilarity of wartime authoritarianism and then himself become entranced by authoritarians. Céline had mocked the officer or politician who could give the troops what he called “the big spiel” while they readied to charge across no-man’s-land:
“You no good swine! We’re at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We’re going to board them and cut their livers out! . . . All together now! Let’s hear you shout . . . ‘Long live country No. 1!’ The man who shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop!”52
Yet he seemed to be hoping for “a medal and a lollipop” when he joined fascism’s absurd parade. “You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex . . . ,” Céline says in Journey. “And there I was, caught up into a mass flight into collective murder, into the fiery furnace. . . . Something had come from the depths and this is what happened.” Perhaps after his brief time in the trenches, he somehow remained something of horror’s virgin. Céline became so entranced by the act of violence that he could not ask about its meaning. He accepted the cruel logic of unexplained carnage.53
Something had come from the depths of Céline and an entire generation. The war that educated Céline gave him the same horror as it gave Breton, Ernst, Dix, Whale, Murnau, and Lang. But the inner madness of fascism urged its believer to take joy in the horror. Hitler would write in Mein Kampf that, in Flanders, “horror replaced the romance of battle” but also described a grim “ecstasy,” the will sharpened by the “eternal battles” of the conflict. Only the weak, “those who could not stand up under the storm,” had been “broken” by the war.54
You did not, however, have to spend time in the trenches to believe this hokum or to profit from it. The case of Salvador Dalí in some ways offers an even more reprehensible example than that of Céline, if for no other reason than Dalí’s reputation has never suffered any particular damage for his nearly lifelong collaboration with fascism. Moreover, though he seems to have supported Hitler and other fascist leaders with glee, much of his perennial dalliance with dictators can be explained by his own mercenary motives rather than anything like a comprehensive worldview or even that part of the consciousness broken inside of Céline and millions of others.
The painter of dead landscapes filled with twisted human forms and the coproducer of Un chien andalou seemingly represents the epitome of fascist conceptions of “degenerate art.” Dalí did, in many respects, but his protectors in Francisco Franco’s Spain proved willing to overlook his art in return for his acquiescence. Born in Catalonia, Dalí made sure to remove himself from Spain to France at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He left Paris when the Nazis arrived, uncertain of what might become of him, given that his earliest participation in the surrealist movement yielded him a bevy of friends on the left. He likely had little to fear. Most of them, including Breton, had long broken with Dalí because of his fascination with and praise for Hitler.
Indeed, Breton, still known as the Black Pope of surrealism, had formally banished Dalí from the surrealist movement at a meeting held at Breton’s famed apartment on the rue Fontane. The reason for the Spanish artist’s excommunication: “glorification of Hitlerian Fascism.” Dalí’s 1939 painting The Enigma of Hitler and comments he had made since 1933 on the Jews and fascism more generally had pushed Breton to the limit. Perhaps not surprisingly, the national museum in Madrid that exhibits the painting, Museo Reina Sophia, suggests that the surrealists ended their connection with him because they had “never been comfortable with the brazen way in which Salvador Dalí exhibited his sexual obsessions in public.” But their reasons had a bit more specificity, given the difficulty in finding a surrealist who sought to repress sexual desire. What truly infuriated and disgusted them was Dalí’s tendency to express erotic attachments to Nazism and Hitler himself.55
The idea of a gaggle of surrealists joining together in a synod to formally declare Dalí a heretic may seem ludicrous—until you look into what Dalí said and did with much of the remainder of his long life. He praised Hitler as “the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire; the gratuitous act par excellence that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the surrealists.” In February 1939, on the eve of the war that buried much more than Hitler in history’s rubble, Dalí insisted that the basic trouble confronting the world was racial and that all the white races banding together to reduce all the “colored people to slavery” offered the only solution.56
This possibly calculated outrageousness aside, Breton and other surrealists had often been angered by Dalí’s desire to monetize modern art, a movement Walter Benjamin believed, in its origins, had “attached much less importance to the sales value of their work that to its usefulness for contemplative immersion.” Breton made up an anagram for his former friend: “Avida Dollars” (ávida, in Spanish, meaning “eager for”). Obviously some jealousy at Dalí’s ability to find a “sales value” for his painting so effectively may have influenced their views. But the impossible-to-quantify concept of envy aside, there’s little doubt that Dalí went further than any of his compatriots in seeking to derive financial benefit from his work and flaunting perhaps the most central tenet of the surrealists: confronting the self-satisfied with the horror story of the twentieth century.57
Dalí found great success in the United States, where his paintings appeared in popular shows at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery. Many aspiring American aesthetes viewed Dalí as an accessible surrealist, his paintings offering an opportunity for cowboy American capitalists to show off their interest in the avant-garde. Collectors considered his art an investment in both cultural and financial capital. The California plastics manufacturer Reynolds Morris footed the bill for Dalí’s expensive and elegant American excursions and eventually built a museum for his vast Dalí collection in St. Petersburg, Florida.58
Dalí even collaborated with Walt Disney in 1946 on a short animated feature called Destino, which was darker than anything else the Disney company ever produced. Dalí’s imagination conjured one of his characteristic desertscapes, which appears as kin to Eliot’s waste land of shattered images. Against this background, a beautiful woman gazes into faces that melt, hot and waxen, to reveal nothingness. Disney funded the project, although the film eventually became too expensive for the pop-culture entrepreneur, who found himself deeply in debt for several years after World War II. He ended production on the project, although it did come to fruition in 2003 (long after the deaths of Disney and Dalí) under the tutelage of French animator Dominique Monféry.
Walt Disney called Dalí “a real swell guy” and, as his own nephew Roy E. Disney has suggested, their mutual love of self-promotion helped bring them together. More may have been at work in their friendship. Disney had powerful anticommunist sympathies, ginned up by an intense fight with his own animators, who attempted to unionize in 1941. His anticommunism drew him far to the right, and there’s strong, though not conclusive, evidence that, while never joining, he attended meetings of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that operated in the United States until the beginning of World War II.59
Fascist Italy feted Dalí as well. Maintaining ties in the United States even during the war, he played some role in the firing of his old collaborator Luis Buñuel from the Museum of Modern Art, convincing powerful conservative figures such as Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York to brand Buñuel “an atheist and a communist.” After World War II, Dalí made his home in his native Spain, where he openly supported the fascist regime of Franco, whom Mussolini and Hitler had placed in power, saying that the dictator had freed Spain of “destructive forces.” On his frequent visits to New York, Dalí made a point of telling the press that he prayed at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for the success of Franco.60
George Orwell, reviewing in 1944 one of the many “autobiographies” Dalí would produce over his lifetime (this one titled The Secret Autobiography of Salvador Dalí), wrote that “one ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and disgusting human being.”61
The Terror
Arthur Machen had never been able to gain anything like literary fame. “The Bowmen” looked for a time like a turning point in his career. He attracted the attention of a number of literary figures, and many of his earlier stories did come back into print. Machen could have decided to turn hack and churn out a bevy of patriotic ghost stories. Instead, belligerently out of step with reader interest, he wrote an abstruse novel, The Great Return (1915), about the Holy Grail and what happens when it finds its way to a small Welsh village. He would follow this up with more tales, and expository writing, on the Grail legend in the 1920s, generating almost no interest among readers who had liked his story about warrior-spirits socking it to the Huns.
When Machen did return to the theme of the Great War, he did it very much on his own terms. His 1917 novella, The Terror, to my mind his best tale written after the 1890s, told a war story no one wanted to hear. England faced an unexplained horror, one that indicted the war itself.
Machen opened the novella by describing how 1914 generated a lethal kind of excitement, “the thrill of horror and doom that seemed at once incredible and certain.” The daily reading of the news by the people of England might make us think about our own reading of the latest obscenities: we are sometimes fascinated and sometimes so horrified we glance quickly at the notifications on our phones and then try to put them out of our minds (until we feel compelled to look again). Rumors abound, scattered bits and pieces of news are shared, delusion and fear spread.
In Machen’s story, the explosion of a munitions plant in “a northern district” garners scant attention until a rumor spreads that the dead had their “faces bitten off.” The narrator of the tale begins to investigate other such strange occurrences, and his collection of newspaper clippings takes him to the Welsh village of Meirion. Like Wegener’s Golem and Lang’s M, Machen’s tale contains a scene that seems to foreshadow perhaps the most terrible moment in Whale’s Frankenstein: “It began with the tale of a little child who wandered out into the lanes to pick flowers one sunny afternoon, and never came back to the cottage on the hill.”62
The girl disappears, her body not found. Some suppose that she fell from the high cliffs. But then a father and son are found beaten to death. A doctor driving his coach along the main highway comes across the bodies of an entire family, “their skulls battered seemingly by some heavy instrument.” The death toll mounts, news comes of similar occurrences happening across the country. Many become convinced that it’s the work of “concealed German agents.” The press fails to make connections between the events. Some take this lack of information to mean that the government has covered up a wide-ranging conspiracy of foreign saboteurs.63
One of the villagers doubts the wild theories of Germans striking from underground rat holes but confesses bafflement about the numerous strange deaths: “People were being killed in an inscrutable manner by some inscrutable means, day after day, no one asked ‘why’ and ‘how’; and there seemed no answer.” The narrator can only explain it in the language of collective terror, the language used to describe the war itself. People died, people continued to die by new and strange methods, and no one knew why. The survivors of the massacres, or the people who find the bodies, are like the shell-shocked, deeply damaged by the war: “They were like people who had seen something so awful that they had gone mad.”64
The reasons for the terror are both mundane and horrible in their implications: animals have caused the deaths, yet there is more to it than that. A lesser writer would have handled the ending badly, maybe ludicrously. She or he would tell us that an escaped circus animal had savaged the victims and somehow blew up a munitions plant. Maybe German agents had unleashed some dangerous circus animals (undoubtedly these beasts would have come “from Africa”). Machen does something subtler, and it’s some rather high-octane nightmare fuel not unlike the inexplicable savagery of Alfred Hitchcock’s avian terrors in The Birds.
It’s not that an animal, or a group of them, has been tearing humans apart. Nature itself, in all its primal power, has risen against humanity. The gentlest animals, known for offering their undeserved friendship to us, have gone mad because of the hatred and fear of the Great War. The conflict itself has become a virulent poison to them. In a somewhat controversial claim for 1917, perhaps an unlikely one for Machen the romantic monarchist, “the fury of the whole world at war, the great passion of death that seems driving all humanity to destruction” has “infected” even the animal world with “rage and wrath and ravening.” Our war, in which we used our technological prowess to practice sadism unknown among the most predatory animals, deranged the course of nature itself and caused it to turn against us.65
Machen never wrote anything again that contained the unsettling power of The Terror. He went back to writing, still without generating much public interest, about the Grail. After the nationalist fantasy of “The Bowmen” (which he actually mocks in The Terror), he’d made a definitive statement about the war and its obscene meaning. The conclusions seemingly frightened even him. Meanwhile, Machen’s contemporaries continued to create tales of the weird, often responding to the times but often badly misreading them.
Race and the Weird Tale
H. P. Lovecraft hated his marriage and hated New York City. He left both behind in 1926, though he remained ostensibly married to Sonia Greene until 1929. He insisted he felt exhilarated by his return to Providence, Rhode Island. He had already expressed his horror of the alien and the immigrant in tales written during the New York period, including “He” and “The Horror at Red Hook.” He never ceased to regard his unhappy time in New York City in racist terms. In June 1933, he wrote to his longtime friend James Morton that, “A hideous example of what Hitler is honestly—if crudely—trying to prevent is the stinking Manhattan pest zone!”66
Horror in the United States, at least until 1931 and Universal Studio’s release of Dracula and Frankenstein, continued to have its primary outlet in the pulp magazines. Weird Tales became the conduit for most of this material. The magazine, the only one of its kind until the 1930s, published the work of Lovecraft and other notables such as Clark Ashton Smith, whose artwork and short fiction reveals the links between surrealism and horror. This group also included Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian.
What some had begun to call “scientific fiction” appeared in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction, later published as the hugely popular Analog magazine. Campbell’s magazine, and the stories he wrote, generally dealt with intergalactic wars and visits to alien landscapes. Horror frequently played some role in these stories, however, and Campbell’s novella Who Goes There? (1938) became the inspiration for the classic Howard Hawks sci-fi/horror film The Thing from Another World (1951), which in turn influenced another horror classic, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982).
For at least some of these pulp writers and editors, fascism proved a fascination and a temptation. Lovecraft’s correspondence reveals fulsome praise for fascism throughout his adult life and a better understanding of how his politics changed toward the end of his life. Robert E. Howard’s heroes of sword and sorcery battling supernatural horrors are almost parodies of the fascist Übermensch. Campbell maintained a lifelong commitment to ultra-right-wing causes. A distinctly fascist cast appeared in much of the fiction published in his magazine, particularly in his emphasis on “alien” outsiders and praise for the racially pure tough guys who fight them. Acclaimed fantasy author Michael Moorcock famously assailed the work that appeared in Analog and related the tale of how Campbell responded to the 1965 Watts riots by suggesting that the event represented the natural outcome of the emancipation of enslaved people, whom Campbell called “worker bees.” They rioted, he insisted, because they had become “leaderless” without their masters.67
Certainly not all horror writers felt drawn to fascism and its virulently racist tendencies after the Great War. A rather large number actually went very far to the left in their politics during the 1930s. Frank Belknap Long, a contributor to Weird Tales and a protégé of Lovecraft’s, joined the Communist Party USA and, in so doing, gave his mentor much distress. A number of early science fiction writers had ties to left-wing groups, some of which worked closely with the CPUSA. In fact, these connections led to an FBI investigation of famed sci-fi author Isaac Asimov (best known for I, Robot and the Foundation series), whom agents close to J. Edgar Hoover believed had spied for the Soviet Union.68
Moreover, the influential writers and editors of horror certainly didn’t corner the market when it came to fascist sympathies. In the United States, as the example of Walt Disney shows, support for Mussolini and Hitler’s program gained significant support from powerful friends and fellow travelers. Certainly no mass movement toward fascism emerged in Depression-era America, but interest in the European right’s message sometimes shaded into praise for fascist ideals and open support for Europe’s most successful fascist dictatorships. Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest in the Detroit area but also one of the most popular radio personalities in America during the 1930s, ranted against the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, claiming it had been hived with secret communists. In 1938, Coughlin became allied with the highly anti-Semitic Christian Front and, in the early years of World War II, parroted Nazi propaganda.
The maestros of pulp horror did, however, have at their disposal something other supporters of fascism did not. The emergence of horror as a cultural phenomenon gave them the ability to create convincingly lived-in worlds of heroes and monsters. Too often their fiction celebrated the Manichaean fantasies of fascism, underpinned by their own worldviews.
Robert E. Howard had a limited interest in international politics, though he certainly had a deep emotional and aesthetic investment in imagining race as the key to history. One of his earliest Conan tales, “The God in the Bowl,” imagines his barbarian hero coming in contact with the decadent corruptions of urban civilization and proving himself superior to them. He appears as a racialized superman from the beginning as a guardsman takes note of his “broad shoulders, massive chest, and heavy arms,” set off by “a pair of dangerously blue eyes.”69
His racism often reveals itself in his fiction, but Howard, unlike Lovecraft, had little use for the continental dictators no matter how frequently he sounded a bit like them in the virtues he praised. He saw in figures like Mussolini a threat to what he claimed as his primary value: “individual liberty.” During their long correspondence, Howard criticized Lovecraft for his support of the Italian dictator, commenting that Mussolini gave him a “sickening and nauseating feeling.” Howard also saw behind the rank hypocrisy of Il Duce’s 1935 justification for the invasion of Ethiopia. Some of his final correspondence to Lovecraft castigated his Providence correspondent for his “sympathies for the Fascists” and called Mussolini a “damned rogue.”70
Lovecraft had a deeply racialized view of history that always led him to praise the “Britannick” or, more generally, “Nordic” peoples as the master race. In a circular letter to several correspondents in October 1921, he described himself as “kin to the giant chalk white conquerors of the cursed effeminate Celts . . . the son of Odin” and, in a line that could have appeared in Giovanni Gentile’s work, noted that “as I grow older I respect art the less and power the more.”71
Lovecraft openly praised FDR during the 1930s, and much has been made of his utter admiration for the new president. His support for the New Deal certainly appears like a radical political turn for someone who admitted that he had once favored “the concentration of [economic] resources in a few hands, in the interest of a stable hereditary culture.” A closer took at Lovecraft’s attitude, however, suggests that he did not experience a turn to the left, but rather a deeper appreciation for, and perhaps understanding of, the promises of fascism. He feared that the Great Depression had revealed an “unemployable” population that if not “fed and amused . . . will dangerously revolt.” He “deem[ed] both democracy and communism fallacious for western civilization” and expressed a preference for “a kind of fascism.” He elsewhere called his ideal political program “a fascistic socialism.”72
Lovecraft first wrote admiringly of Mussolini at the time of Il Duce’s rise to power. He expressed his pride in being “a reactionary,” given that he saw “the rise of democratic ideals as a sign of cultural old age and decay.” He sometimes seems to have found Hitler personally ludicrous, but faintly mocking his mustache—his “lip-blot” he called it—constituted the far limits of his criticism. However, when it came to saving “Aryan” cultural traditions he declared himself “a red hot Nazi” until and if Hitler’s Germany went to war with Great Britain. This, of course, doesn’t speak well of him either. Lovecraft shared the Nazis’ own lack of desire to fight England, a struggle they accepted as a necessary step toward their desire to seize Lebensraum (living space) from the Slavic Untermenschen (subhumans) and crush monstrous Bolshevism to the east. Lovecraft had no reservation concerning these goals.73
A letter to Howard in the fall of 1933 reveals Lovecraft’s willingness to view Nazism as perhaps a useful, if at times extreme, measure to stave off decadence. He asserts that “the naïve ethnology of the Jew-baiting circus” and “the destruction of books” are foreign to the tastes of America and much of western Europe. “However,” he continued, “it remains to be seen whether these peculiar differences represent unmitigated evils.” Lovecraft admitted he would forgive Hitler much, “even that moustache,” if he could prevent a “collapse into communism.”74
Both Lovecraft and Howard suffered from the delusions of warrior dreams. Neither had participated in the Great War, but both fetishized combat. In the passage where Lovecraft declares himself “kin to the chalk white giant conquerors,” he laments that he never attended West Point to pursue a military career. Howard had been too young for the Great War, but, given his obsession with bloodshed, battle, and barbarism, he would have likely attempted to join the doughboys. The end of his teenage years found him pursuing a rigorous regimen of boxing, weight lifting, and wood chopping. He transformed himself from a skinny, bookish kid into the burly physical specimen he idealized in his fiction. In a 1933 letter to Lovecraft, he sounds too much like the fascist dictators he despised when he praised “the original Aryan type” of the barbarian who took pleasure in “the slashing and mangling of human organisms.”75
Lovecraft’s vituperative racism appeared in both his correspondence and his tales. Although he seems pathological at times, we would fail to take Lovecraft seriously if we confined his notions about race to the realm of psychology and personal experience. He had, from his reading, developed a systemic philosophical view of the world that understood history as a story of decline and fall. Rot and decay came to higher cultures, described by him as the “culture streams” of Aryan, Nordic, or Anglo-Saxon peoples, when an infestation of an “alien element” occurred.
Lovecraft made himself into a perpetual motion machine of reactionary ideas. He may have morbidly pondered how human feeling and action meant less than nothing on a cosmic scale. But as he floundered in his racist imaginings and horror tales of ruin and rot, his despair perfectly embodied what those with a fascist mind-set sought to inculcate: they understood how often despair and obedience are lethal allies.
“The Waste Land Grows”
T. S. Eliot, unlike Lovecraft, sought to escape his nihilism in conservative religious faith. Many, perhaps most, of the era’s artists, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and poets took a hard left turn in their politics in the 1920s and ’30s. If they despaired of the next world, they chose a revolutionary optimism in response to this one.
The poet of the dead lands took a different course. His conversion to Anglicanism came in 1927. In the same year, he applied for and received British citizenship. The boy from St. Louis, Missouri, began calling himself a “royalist.” His comments on this have often been noted, but the absurdity of it has been too frequently ignored. He had declared his allegiance to a crown that represented pageantry rather than power, a symbol that oversaw a dying imperial regime. Eliot’s conversions of religion and nationality read like the empty gestures of his hollow men, the wounded generation of the Great War. Prayers and kisses meet only broken stone.
A few years later, upon being offered a prestigious professorship at Harvard, Eliot took the opportunity to separate himself from his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Her own story darkens considerably at this time. She nurtured rage of various kinds toward Eliot, once interrupting one of his public readings while, bizarrely, wearing a uniform of a British fascist organization. In 1938, her brother committed her to the Stoke Newington Asylum, where she died in 1947.
Eliot’s right turn took him into the morass of 1930s anti-Semitism. His 1934 series of essays After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy worried over the role of Jews in the Western world, particularly those who had left behind their traditional faith. He sounds like Lovecraft when he tells his Virginia audience (the essays had originally been a 1933 series of lectures at the University of Virginia) that “the chances for the re-establishment of native culture are perhaps better here than in New England. You are farther away from New York; you have been less industrialized and invaded by foreign races.”76
Defenders of Eliot’s politics, and there are many, often note that he allowed this book, as Kevin Jackson puts it, “to fall out of print.” Jackson claims Eliot reached this decision because he became “uncomfortable with the tenor of some of its passages.” This is as much to say that the rise of Nazism made such views impolitic.77
He did not go as far, at least in his public persona, as did his mentor and friend Ezra Pound. Pound frequently wrote of his own horror at the Great War. He pursued an inquiry into its causes that took a much more political and economic turn than Eliot’s poetic vision of calamity. Like many on the left, Pound decided that capitalism had been the root of the war. Unlike the hundreds of thousands who found in this a reason to join the Communist Party or one of the proliferating socialist parties in western Europe and the United States, he concluded that the Jews represented the capitalist class. Pound fell rather quickly into the embrace of fascism.
Pound moved to Italy with both his wife, Dorothy, and his paramour, the concert violinist Olga Rudge, in 1924. Both women became pregnant around the same time. Pound farmed out his child with Olga to a poor Italian family. Pound’s wife’s child became Omar Pound. Sending Omar to live in London with Dorothy’s mother, Pound declined to see the young man until he turned twelve, and then only briefly. Meanwhile, he became utterly entranced with Mussolini as the new avatar of modernity, a way to escape the abattoir of the Great War.
All of this—probably no spoiler alerts needed—ended badly for Ezra Pound. Pound met Mussolini in 1933 and giddily explained his Cantos, a cycle of poems essentially impossible for nonspecialists to understand, with their obscure allusions and passages in Mandarin. Mussolini responded to Pound’s description during the brief meeting by saying that it was divertente (amusing), yet the curt dismissal of his life’s work overjoyed Pound: he took it as approval from a man he thought embodied the spirit of the age. He soon began writing puff pieces for Mussolini and for Oswald Mosley’s fascist, highly anti-Semitic journal Action in Britain.78
Pound commits himself ever more fully to fascism in the years to come. In his poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound had famously written of soldiers during the Great War: “There died a myriad . . . For an old bitch gone in the teeth / For a botched civilization.” He fell in love with the horror of decay and bought into the tale of terror chanted by fascism’s bards.
But, as had been the case since the dark heart of the Great War itself, other artists told their monster tales to caution and warn about the dangers of looking too long into the abyss. These artists saw the original root of the word “monster” (the Latin monstrum, meaning “omen” or “portent”) and sought to put them on screen and page as signs of wonder, marvels—portents of danger.