NOTES
Foreword: Corpses in the Wasteland
1. Adam Lowenstein, “Films without a Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju,” Cinema Journal 37, no. 4 (Summer 1998), 37.
2. Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror 1764 to the Present (New York: Continuum Books, 2010), 2.
3. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European (London: Pushkin Press, 2009), 19. Quoted in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 147, 301.
4. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 14:287.
5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 84.
Chapter One: Symphony of Horror
1. David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004), 88.
2. Anton Kaes, in Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), suggests that Hutter seems much like a victim of shell shock. Kaes’s book provided me with some material for my reading of Weimar cinema, even when I disagree with his interpretations.
3. Victoria Nelson sees in E. T. A. Hoffman’s disturbing tales of automata the philosophical problem of the presence of souls in matter that had worried Descartes. She finds much the same concern in the work of Bruno Schulz and Giacomo Leopardi. See her book The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 64–73.
4. Rainer Maria Rilke, letter of October 4, 1914, in Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1914–1921, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1940), 18.
5. The exception to the happy ending is, of course, Mina’s polyamorous friend, Lucy Westenra, who falls victim to the vampire and gets a stake in the heart.
6. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 88.
7. Quoted in David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001), 50.
8. Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 14–18: Understanding the Great War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 169.
9. Ibid., 168.
10. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 199–226.
11. Austro-Hungarian document translated by Paul Barber in Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 5–9.
12. Skal, The Monster Show, 49–50.
13. Ibid.
14. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 55–57.
15. Grau’s relationship to the occult and Crowley discussed in Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll and the Wickedest Man in the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2014), 262.
16. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 92–93.
17. “War Losses (Africa),” International Encyclopedia of the First World War Online, encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_africa, accessed May 15, 2016.
18. Casualty counts are taken from Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 20–26.
19. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962). Eisner wrote an incredible book and gave it the perfect title. However, it influenced nothing that you read in these pages except to the degree that I generally had a negative reaction to Eisner’s conclusions, interesting and thoughtful as they sometimes seem at first.
20. John T. Soister, Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studios’ Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Films, 1929–1939 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1999), 7.
21. Jesse Stellato, ed., Not in Our Name: American Anti-War Speeches from 1846 to the Present (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012), 88.
22. Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 118.
23. Robert F. Hamilton and Holder H. Herwig, Decisions for War: 1914–1917 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211, 222; and 66th Congress, 1st Session, “Addresses of President Wilson,” Senate Documents (May–November 1919), 206.
24. Jennifer Wingate, “Over the Top: The Doughboy in World War I Memorials and Visual Culture,” American Art 19, no, 2 (Summer 2005), 28.
25. “The Bonus Army: How a Protest Led to the GI Bill,” NPR News, November 11, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/11/11/142224795/the-bonus-army-how-a-protest-led-to-the-gi-bill, accessed November 27, 2016.
26. Will Murray, “H. P. Lovecraft and the Pulp Magazine Tradition,” in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H .P. Lovecraft, eds. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011), 116–17, 124–25.
27. David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 97.
28. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), 32.
29. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 2003), 276. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek often translates Gramsci’s statement as “now is the time of monsters,” an interpretive translation he seems to have borrowed from a French translation of Gramsci’s work. See Ambrose Korn, Remember Mongo Beti (Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth University Press, 2003), 149.
30. Gerwarth, The Vanquished, 9, 10.
31. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (1919; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 149.
32. Maya Barzilai, Golem: Modern Wars and their Monsters (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 3–4.
33. Ibid., 4.
34. Ibid., 74.
35. Quoted in Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 34.
36. Ibid., 49.
37. Biographical material on Kafka comes from Reiner Stach’s definitive Kafka, 3 vols. (2005; repr. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2017). Interpretations are mine, and in fact I do not think that Stach would connect Kafka to the twentieth-century horror tradition.
38. Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 115.
39. Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, ed. Max Brod (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 231.
40. Edward Crankshaw, The Fall of the House of Habsburg (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 412.
41. Ibid., 300, 302.
42. Quoted in Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry and Holt Company, 1996), 45.
43. Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, 336.
44. Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 6.
45. Ibid., 10, 12.
46. See Arthur Drowning, Sealed with a Kiss: Klimt and the Fate of High Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction (Albuquerque, NM: Farrier Books, 2016). This, incidentally, is not a real publication. I’m just curious to know whether you are reading the endnotes.
47. Philipp Gutbrod, Otto Dix: The Art of Life (Ostfildern, Germany: Jatje Cantz Verlag, 2010), 34.
48. David J. Skal provided inspiration for closely examining this idea with the connections he drew between modernist art and the first horror films. See, especially, The Monster Show, 48, 54–55.
49. Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, eds. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965), 1:230.
50. H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to James Morton, eds. David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011), 215.
51. Lovecraft’s description of the cosmos as “black seas of infinity” comes from the well-known opening of his most famous tale, “The Call of Cthulhu,” Weird Tales, February 1928. In a letter to James Morton, he admitted that his own racial and cultural prejudices had the quality of illusion; he also insisted he would hold on to them. See Lovecraft, Letters to James F. Morton, 195.
52. Lovecraft, Letters to James Morton, 22, 322–26.
53. Details about James Whale, though not my interpretation of his work, come from the only standard biography of him: James Curtis, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
54. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 98–100.
Chapter Two: Waxworks
1. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Morning, 15.
2. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 117.
3. Spencer Ackerman, “Army Disaster Prep Now Includes Tips from the Zombie Apocalypse,” Wired, April 4, 2013.
4. Heather Hendershot, “Lessons from the Undead: How Film and TV Zombies Teach Us about War,” Flow Journal, January 26, 2006, www.flowjournal.org/2006/01/lessons-from-the-undead-how-film-and-tv-zombies-teach-us-about-war, accessed December 27, 2016.
5. Quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (1968; repr. London: Columbus Books, 1989), 533.
6. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 11.
7. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 74.
8. Christopher Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).
9. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 18.
10. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 107.
11. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 88.
12. “‘Frankenstein’: THR’s 1931 Review,” digitized for The Hollywood Reporter online, November 15, 2014, www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/frankenstein-thrs-1931-review-749292, accessed May 28, 2017.
13. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 74.
14. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30–31.
15. This phenomenon is most fully explored in Joanna Ebenstein, The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death and the Ecstatic (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016).
16. Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 32, 53.
17. Ibid., 108.
18. For a complete history of this phenomenon, see Mel Gordon, Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror (New York: Amok Press, 1988).
19. Skal, The Monster Show, 58.
20. Marinetti quoted in Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 160, 161.
21. Gorky and Murnau quoted in Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 125.
22. Human cavalry deaths may have been slightly lower than infantry deaths on the western front owing to military commanders discovering the general uselessness of mounted units as shock troops. Cavalry deaths remained high on the more open frontiers on the eastern front and in the Middle East and East Africa, where Allied forces and the Central Powers used mounted units in a much more traditional and deadly manner. See “Cavalry, WWI,” in The Oxford Companion to Military History, ed. Richard Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 188.
23. Elizabeth Bruno Schulz, The Corpse at My Door: Thoughts on Mitteleuropa and the Vampire. (Cocoa Beach, FL: Garden Rumor Books, 2012). See especially 19, 46. As with note 46, there is no such book.
24. Jason Sanders, “Carl Theodor Dreyer,” Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, archive.bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/dreyer, accessed February 14, 2017.
25. Dreyer on the set of Vampyr, quoted in W. K. Everson, Classics of the Horror Film (New York: Citadel Press, 1974), 63.
26. Fritz Arno Wagner, “I Believe in the Sound Film,” Film Art 3, no. 8 (1936): 12.
27. “Vampyr: Case Studies,” www.difarchiv.deutsches-filminstitut.de/collate/collate_sp/se/se_05a06.html, accessed January 22, 2017.
28. Skal, The Monster Show, 44.
29. Ibid., 45, 46.
30. “Tod Browning’s Varied Career,” Louisville-Herald Post, February 27, 1921.
31. David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (New York: Faber and Faber, 1993), 65.
32. Michael F. Blake, A Thousand Faces: Lon Chaney’s Unique Artistry in Motion Pictures (Lanham, MD; Vestal Press, 1995).
33. Ibid., 167.
34. See Skal, Monster Show, 70.
35. Jacques W. Maliniak, Sculpture in the Living: Rebuilding the Face and Form by Plastic Surgery (New York: Romaine Pierson, 1934), 30.
36. Edwin H. Simmons, “Leathernecks at Soissons,” Naval History, December 2005.
37. Stone and Kuznick, Untold History of the United States, 18.
38. Letter, H. P. Lovecraft to Lillian D. Clark, September 18, 1925, quoted in S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft and the Films of His Day,” in Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 45.
39. “The Crime of the Century” first appeared in October 1915; published in Collected Essays: H. P. Lovecraft, vol. 5: Autobiography and Miscellany, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2006), 13–14.
40. H. P. Lovecraft, “Dagon,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 6.
41. H. P. Lovecraft, “Herbert West—Reanimator,” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 34, 59.
42. Ibid., 70–73.
43. S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft and Weird Tales,” in Primal Sources: Essays on H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 20–28.
44. Victoria Nelson, Gothicka (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 46.
45. Arthur Machen, The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 9, 10. Book digitized by Google in 2007 from the library of Harvard University.
46. Gilbert, The First World War, 58.
47. Ibid., 20.
48. Patrick McGilligan engages in some needless speculation regarding this episode in Fritz Lang, 77–81.
49. Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 325–59.
50. Nelson, Secret Life of Puppets, 12–13.
51. Derek Sayer, the cultural historian of Prague, concludes that the conversation perhaps occurred but that this is probably an unreliable account. See Sayer’s Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 79–80.
52. The quote appears in full and without critical commentary in Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Magic Prague (New York: Picador, 1994), 125. See also Mark Harman, “Kafka’s Unreliable Friend,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2008, www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/10/23/kafkas-unreliable-friend.
Chapter Three: Nightmare Bodies
1. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 371.
2. Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 275.
3. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Freud Reader), 584–88.
4. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 51.
5. Ibid., 148.
6. If it’s not yet night, wait. When your home grows quiet, maybe so quiet that the silence begins to seem like a sound, perform the ritual in a mirror. Try this alone and see what happens. Dare friends to try it with you and see what happens. Is the experience different? If you feel nothing, then you have to wonder why not, don’t you? The same ritual terrifies other people of all ages. By the way, scholars of modern folklore call what you are doing “legend tripping.” See Bill Ellis, Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 112–41.
7. Freud, The Uncanny, 135.
8. K. K. MacDorman and H. Ishiguro, “The Uncanny Advantage of Using Androids in Social and Cognitive Science Research,” Interaction Studies 7, no. 3 (2006): 297–337.
9. Hélène Cixous makes this point in “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘uncanny’),” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 525–48, 619–45.
10. Freud, The Uncanny, 124.
11. Ibid., 150.
12. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 271.
13. John Scotland explores the Canadian case. See “Soldier Suicide After the Great War: A First Look,” activehistory.ca/2014/03/soldier-suicide-after-the-great-war-a-first-look/#2, accessed June 2, 2016. See also John Weaver, A Sadly Troubled History: The Meaning of Suicide in the Modern Age (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University, 2009).
14. Quoted in Gilbert, The First World War, 61.
15. Great Britain, War Office, Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into “Shell-Shock” (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1922; special edition published by the Imperial War Museum, 2004).
16. Ibid., 63–65.
17. Gilbert, The First World War, xv, xvi.
18. Great Britain, War Office, Report of the War Office Committee of Inquiry, 20.
19. Ibid.
20. Freud, The Uncanny, 135.
21. Ibid.
22. Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016), 6, 7.
23. Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (1933: repr. Cardigan, Wales: Parthian Books, 2016).
24. Frank Richards quoted in Gilbert, The First World War, 58.
25. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 92.
26. Ibid., 81.
27. Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1978), 132.
28. Ibid.
29. Quoted in David Williams, Media, Memory and the First World War (Montreal; McGill-Queens University Press, 2009), 145.
30. Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays, eds., World War I and the Cultures of Modernity (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 136, 149.
31. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 24, 25.
32. Translated by Sidra Stich in Anxious Visions: Surrealist Art (Berkeley: University of California Press and New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 27.
33. Quoted in Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 254.
34. Two books are recommended that examine the propaganda around the “German atrocities” while also looking fairly at the reality of actual atrocity taking place on the ground: Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (New York: Cornell University, 2005), and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).
35. Bastian Matteo Scianna, “Reporting Atrocities: Archibald Reiss in Serbia, 1914–1918,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 25, no. 4 (2012): 596–617.
36. Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (New York: Viking Press, 2003), 243–44.
37. Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Picador Press, 2013), 41–51, 62.
38. Reiss quoted at length in Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 46–48.
39. Ibid., 57–61.
40. David A. Janicki, “The British Blockade During World War I: The Weapon of Deprivation,” Inquiries Journal 6, no. 6 (2014): 1–5. Although well attested, it’s notable that the Imperial War Museum does not mention the British blockade lasting into the armistice period in many of its published materials. See Paul Cornish, “What You Need to Know about the British Naval Blockade of the First World War,” Imperial War Museum website, January 8, 2018, www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-british-naval-blockade-of-the-first-world-war.
41. Quoted in Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, eds., The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War (London: Constable Press, 2007), 56.
42. Mackaman and Mays, World War I and the Cultures of Modernity, 158.
43. Remember their sacrifice though, you know, and what’s so bad about making a euro or two? Amirite?
44. Quoted in Stich, Anxious Visions, 14.
45. Quoted in Skal, The Monster Show, 54.
46. Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 25.
47. Quoted in Stich, Anxious Visions, 62.
48. Gutbrod, Otto Dix, 44.
49. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 12.
50. Ibid., 14, 15.
51. Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century, 13–14.
52. Skal, The Monster Show, 54.
53. See Werner Spies, Max Ernst: Life and Work (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006).
54. Max Ernst, Une semaine de bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976).
55. Quoted in Kathryn Davis, “Introduction,” in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (St. Louis, MO: The Dorothy Project, 2017), i.
56. Ibid., ii, iv.
57. Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, eds., The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 24.
58. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 143.
59. Ibid.
60. McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 126–27.
61. Ibid., 132–33.
62. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925–1930 (New York: Harvest Books, 1981), 331.
63. Lovecraft, Letters to James F. Morton, 404.
64. Ibid., 197.
65. Ibid.
66. Kafka, Diaries, 406–7.
67. Franz Kafka, The Castle (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 65.
68. Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka?: 99 Finds (New York: New Directions Books, 2016), 279–81.
Chapter Four: Fascism and Horror
1. Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 137.
2. McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 153.
3. Ben Cosgrove, “Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, 1945,” Time, October 10, 2013, time.com/3638432/behind-the-picture-the-liberation-of-buchenwald-april1945, accessed September 11, 2017.
4. Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6. It’s a sign of how much historians worry this controversy that I find this a compelling remark and am convinced by much of the book while profoundly disagreeing with some of its most important conclusions.
5. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 241.
6. Gerwarth, The Vanquished, 42.
7. Ibid., 156–57.
8. Robert Soucy, French Fascisms: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
9. Martin Pugh, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”: Fascists and Fascism between the Wars (London: Pimlico Press, 2006), 51.
10. Although some of the conclusions are debatable, the evidence offered in Andrew Morton’s 17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis and the Biggest Cover-Up in History (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016) is not.
11. Joshua Rothman, “When Bigotry Paraded in the Streets,” The Atlantic, December 4, 2016.
12. George Seides, Facts and Fascism (New York: In Fact, 1943), 109–10.
13. Giovanni Gentile, “Foundations and Doctrines of Fascism,” in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 50, 65. The latter quotation comes from a second part of this essay, in which Gentile seems to take short quotes from Mussolini’s speeches, likely streamlining them for print.
14. See Gioacchino Volpe, “Excerpt from ‘History of the Fascist Movement’ (1932),” in Schnapp, A Primer of Italian Fascism, 19–45.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Ibid., 33, 39.
17. Mark Neocleous, “Gothic Fascism,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 2, (April 2005): 133–49. Neocleous is the closest student of what he calls the “Gothic language of fascism.”
18. Hitler quoted in ibid., 147.
19. Ibid., 133.
20. Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe: The Social and Historical Influences Which Led to the Rise and Ruin of Hitler and Germany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 81.
21. Gentile, “Foundations and Doctrines of Fascism”, 53.
22. Biographical details on Streicher come from Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Books, 2001).
23. These and related images can be found in the German Propaganda Archive at Calvin College under the heading “Caricatures from Der Stürmer, 1927–1932.” Randall Bytwerk has been the primary overseer of this project, which has amassed Nazi propaganda materials for scholars.
24. Quoted in Neocleous, “Gothic Fascism,” 135.
25. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 141.
26. The entire film appears on YouTube, www.google.com/search?q=the+eternal+jew+youtube&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8, accessed June 4, 2016.
27. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 272.
28. Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, 109–13.
29. Ibid., 79.
30. Ibid., 250.
31. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 95. See more generally 94–172.
32. McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 175–80. The author explains the various versions of the story about Lang and Goebbels, although it seems the important details are rather consistent and I’ve given the bare-bones account here.
33. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 53–54.
34. “Fritz Lang Interview,” For Example, 1968, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYk0qzqqjmQ, accessed June 2, 2016.
35. “Fritz Lang Interviewed by William Friedkin, 1974,” Open Culture, www.openculture.com/2015/04/fritz-lang-tells-the-riveting-story-of-the-day-he-met-joseph-goebbels.html, accessed October 1, 2016.
36. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 248.
37. There’s no controversy in noting Bannon’s appreciation for such ideas. He has quoted Evola in significant speeches to traditionalist groups in the Vatican, and Breitbart News (which Bannon once ran) sees Evola as the godfather of the alt-right. See Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” New York Times, February 10, 2017. In March 2016, Breitbart ran an article praising Evola as major intellectual influence on their movement; see Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Breitbart, March 29, 2016, www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right. In typical its fashion, Breitbart then ran an article on April 19, 2017, denying that Bannon and the alt-right had any connections to Evola and calling the article in the New York Times and a similar Newsweek story “fake news”; see Thomas D. Williams, “Fake News! Newsweek Continues War on Steve Bannon by Inventing Russia ‘Ties,’” Breitbart, April 19, 2017, www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/19/newsweek-war-on-steve-bannon-inventing-russia-ties.
38. Christa Bandmann and Joe Hembus, “Westfront 1918,” in Klassiker des Deutschen Tonfilms, 1930–1960 (Munich: Goldmann Publishing, 1980), 19–21.
39. See Fredric Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002). The Nazi Party sometimes used the more specific term “art bolshevism” or “music bolshevism.”
40. I will give one example, as we hear the term used so frequently and it can be easily found online. See Gerald Warner, “For the First Time in History ‘Conservatives’ Are at the Forefront of the Cultural Revolution,” Breitbart, February 2, 2004, www.breitbart.com/london/2015/02/04/for-the-first-time-in-history-conservatives-are-at-the-forefront-of-the-cultural-revolution. You can not only see what attracts the alt-right to this idea but also find conspiratorial ravings about the secret influence of the Frankfurt School over American popular and academic culture. This is a bizarre claim, given that movement’s actual attitude toward mass culture, which can be read by anyone who would like to learn about its adherents and their work. I’d add that, in the academic world, I wish more scholars read Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, particularly my fellow academics who teach in our university’s deep-pocketed schools of business. In general, readers will feel they need a shower after understanding the origin of the term “cultural Marxism” and seeing how it’s used online.
41. Quoted in Linda F. McGreevy, Bitter Witness: Otto Dix and the Great War (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001), 352.
42. Gutbrod, Otto Dix, 76.
43. Ibid.
44. McGreevy, Bitter Witness, 371.
45. Quoted in Gutbrod, Otto Dix, 77.
46. On Céline’s place in French literary history, see Alan Riding, “Céline: The Genius and the Villain,” New York Times, June 29, 2011. Riding’s book And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Knopf, 2010) remains essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this era.
47. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph Manheim (1932; repr. New York, New Directions Books, 2006), 25
48. Ibid., 45–47.
49. Ibid., 34.
50. Kim Willsher, “Céline: French Literary Genius or Repellant Anti-Semite? A New Film Rekindles an Old Conflict,” The Guardian, March 12, 2016.
51. Jacques Benoist-Méchin, À l’épreuve du temps: Souvenirs (1989–1993; repr. Paris: Perrin, 2011).
52. Céline, Journey to the End of Night, 5.
53. Ibid., 9.
54. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1925; repr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). See chapter 5 for this and other examples.
55. See the painting and its description at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte website, www.museoreinasofia.es/en/collection/artwork/enigma-hitler.
56. Wayne Andrews, The Surrealist Parade (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1990), 111.
57. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 237.
58. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
59. Trey Taylor, “The Secret History of Salvador Dalí’s Disney Film,” Dazed, August 18, 2016, www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/32490/1/the-secret-history-of-salvador-dali-s-disney-film, accessed March 17, 2017. Walt Disney’s relationship to the Bund and to Nazi ideas more generally is controversial. One of his most respected biographers, Neal Gabler, in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Vintage Press, 2007), has suggested that he was not personally an anti-Semite but “allowed himself” to become associated with anti-Semitic organizations. Others have noted that Disney employed Jews, but they have not taken seriously one of those employees, animator Art Babbit, who claims that Disney attended meetings of the Bund with his lawyer Gunther Lessing. On Babbit, see Ryan Beitler, “Walt the Quasi-Nazi: The Fascist History of Disney Is Still Influencing American Life,” Paste, June 16, 2017; www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/06/walt-the-quasi-nazi-the-fascist-history-of-disney.html, accessed October 12, 2017. No one seems to disagree that Disney had sympathy for fascism and that he had some connections to Nazis and their organizations; there seems only to be disagreement on the degree of his involvement and an odd parsing of how he “really” felt as opposed to what he did.
60. None of these facts are contested, and in fact a book detailing Dalí’s support for fascism appeared twenty years ago. See Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí (New York: Faber and Faber, 1998).
61. George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,” in All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, comp. George Packer (New York: Mariner Books, 2008), 117.
62. Arthur Machen, The Terror (1917; repr. Columbia, SC: Amazon Printing Services, 2017), 14.
63. Ibid., 17, 23.
64. Ibid., 57, 78.
65. Ibid., 94.
66. Lovecraft, Letters to James F. Morton, 324.
67. The legendary fantasy and speculative fiction writer Michael Moorcock (praised by Peter Bebergal as the “anti-Tolkien”) detailed Campbell and his coterie’s reactionary agenda in his infamous essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” Anarchist Review 4 (1978).
68. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the website Muckrock (see www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi-file-on-isaac-asimov-8300) yielded the relevant documents.
69. Robert E. Howard, “The God in the Bowl,” in The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003), 42.
70. A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, 2 vols., eds., S. T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burk (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2009), I:501, II:895, 918.
71. H. P. Lovecraft, Letters to Alfred Galpin, eds. S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2003), 114.
72. Ibid., 166.
73. Lovecraft, Letters to James F. Morton, 22, 323.
74. A Means to Freedom II:676–77.
75. Ibid., II:547.
76. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy; The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, 1933 (London: Forgotten Books, 2017), 16, 20. A year after the rise of Hitler, Eliot worried over the world being “worm-eaten with Liberalism”; see p. 13. The most nuanced discussion of this issue appears in Benjamin Ivry, “T. S. Eliot’s On-Again, Off-Again Anti-Semitism,” The Forward, September 16, 2011, forward.com/culture/books/142722/ts-eliots-on-again-off-again-anti-semitism, accessed January 13, 2013.
77. Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius: 1922, Modernism Year One. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 362, 363. Jackson writes defensively of Eliot, using the defense of “Well, lots of people back in the day held racist and anti-Semitic views, so why pick on Eliot?” (This defense has soured into a worn-out apologia in the case of Lovecraft.) He absurdly indicts second-wave feminism for some of the criticism of the “great man of letters.” He writes, for example, “Since the advent of feminism from the 1960s onwards, it has also become fashionable to paint Eliot as the villain in the story of Tom and Viv,’” as if somehow Eliot’s treatment of his wife had been fine before because it had largely been passed over. Incidentally, in a book published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux with blurbs from the Guardian, it’s odd to present oneself as an outsider defending unfashionable ideas. Jackson follows his apology for Eliot by expressing disappointment that Cats has been so popular.
78. Ibid., 366.
Chapter Five: Universal Monsters
1. Ernest Thesiger, Practically True (London: William Heinemann, 1927), 112.
2. Ibid., 117–19.
3. Xabier Irujo, Gernica 1937: The Market Day Massacre (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2015).
4. John Richardson, “A Different Guernica,” New York Review of Books, May 12, 2016.
5. A full discussion of the Laemmles and the business they built appears in John T. Soister, Of Gods and Monsters: A Critical Guide to Universal Studio’s Science Fiction, Horror, and Mystery Films, 1929–1939 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 1999), 5–11.
6. This description comes from Curtis, James Whale, 111–12.
7. Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, 14–18, 179–94.
8. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 148–49.
9. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 55.
10. Curtis, James Whale, 180.
11. Ibid., 151–52.
12. Soister makes this claim in Of Gods and Monsters, 118, 119. However, there’s reason to distrust Soister’s account, in part because, in contrast to everyone who actually knew and worked with Whale, he seemingly hates the director. Soister gives Whale no credit for Frankenstein’s success and, in an unfortunate phrase given Whale’s sexual identity, calls him “bitchy and egotistical” (116).
13. Curtis, James Whale, 135.
14. Ibid., 155.
15. A very rough print has been available on DVD from Kino for some time; a fully restored Blu-ray print appeared in October 2017.
16. Bela G. Lugosi, “Bela,” in Roy Milano, Monsters: A Celebration of the Classics from Universal Studios, ed. Jennifer Osborne (New York: Del Rey Books, 2006), 38.
17. Skal quotes Bakacs in The Monster Show, 180. Normally very circumspect with regard to such issues, Skal describes Lugosi as “feigning concussion-caused insanity.”
18. Ulmer quoted in Skal, The Monster Show, 178.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., 173–74.
21. Curtis, James Whale, 239
22. Ibid., 316–17.
23. H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, ed. S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 293.
24. Ibid., 332–33.
25. S. T. Joshi, I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2013), 2:970–73.
26. Jackson, in Constellation of Genius, 366–69, recites the dreary details of Pound’s fate, occasionally giving him a bit more sympathy than he deserves. He seems to forgive Pound much for “the literary miracle of 1922” (p. 369) to which he sees the poet acting as demiurge.
27. Richard Stanley, “Pan’s People,” The Guardian, October 29, 2004, www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/30/featuresreviews.guardianreview24, accessed September 15, 2017.
28. Skal, The Monster Show, 215.
Afterword: The Age of Horror
1. The description of the final days of the Batista regime taken primarily from T. C. English’s riveting Havana Nocturne (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 292–95.
2. Stone and Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, 311, 312.
3. Robert S. McNamara, Blundering into Disaster: Surviving the First Century of the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 10. This is an ironic title given that eight years later McNamara admitted that he helped the United States blunder into disaster by escalating the intervention in Vietnam. See R. W. Apple Jr., “McNamara Recalls, and Regrets, Vietnam,” New York Times, April 9, 1995.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 28–30.
5. Ibid., 50.
6. Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower: America’s Foreign Policy after the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 14.
7. These statistics come from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. See “The Terrorism Statistics Every American Needs to Hear,” Global Research, March 21, 2018, www.globalresearch.ca/the-terrorism-statistics-every-american-needs-to-hear/5382818, accessed November 10, 2017.
8. See Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 117–23.
9. Christian G. Appy makes these points, with slightly different emphasis, in American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016); see especially 232–37, 251–61.
10. The formal alliance of the United States and Saudi Arabia dates to 1933. American oil companies, most prominently Chevron, played a decisive role in the relationship. The repression in Saudi Arabia owes much to the kingdom’s origin, an agreement struck between the Saud dynasty and descendants of Sheik Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab, founder of the extremely conservative Wahhabist School of Sunni legal interpretation. Al-Qaeda’s ideology grew directly from Wahhabism. See the official history of this relationship at the Council on Foreign Relations website, www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-saudi-relations?gclid=CjwKCAiAu4nRBRBKEiwANms5W4X4RBFeu4KPKBF0IoEKHnnnoC7_drfxKf0-BGu-UHC9xUhAYpM7OxoCMBYQAvD_BwE, accessed December 1, 2017.
11. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 494–95.
12. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), 1, 3.
13. W. Scott Poole, In the Mountains of Madness: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of H. P. Lovecraft (Berkley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2016), 206–12. A recent study based on more than one million articles and papers on JSTOR found that male academics cite themselves 56 percent more often than their female colleagues do. See Christopher Ingraham, “New Study Finds That Men Are Often Their Own Favorite Expert on Any Given Subject,” Washington Post, August 1, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/01/new-study-finds-that-men-are-often-their-own-favorite-experts-on-any-given-subject/, accessed August 10, 2016.
14. McGilligan, Fritz Lang, 330.
15. Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 2.
16. Greg Garrett, Living with the Living Dead: The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 43.
17. Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (London: Verso Press, 2016), 213.
18. See Hannah Arendt, “Introduction,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 18.
19. Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss, 219.
20. Curtis, James Whale, 381.