Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

Films can often become the expressive channel for the social, political, and cultural issues at work in a given time and place – we could think for example of Italian Neorealism and its role in providing a timely and faithful depiction of a country prostrated by twenty years of Fascist dictatorship and by the devastations of the war in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. From this point of view then, Nosferatu, along with many other of the films produced during the Weimar Republic and despite its apparent detachment from current events, can be doubtlessly interpreted as a vehicle to express the inner anxiety and unrest that were at work in Germany during the dramatic and unruly years that followed the end of the First World War. If we really want to fully understand the film then we also need to be able to orient ourselves around the political and historical events that were triggered by the defeat in the world conflict and that precipitated the social and political situation in the country. These occurrences also had a strong – and unexpectedly positive – impact over Germany’s cultural and cinematographic output that once unrestricted from the stuffy and backward climate of the old imperial order, became free to innovate and experiment with unprecedented enthusiasm.

The world war of 1914–1918 slaughtered and wiped away a whole generation of young Europeans and it caused overall the death on the battlefields of about 10 million soldiers. Germany lost 2 million men during the fighting and 4.2 million returned home shell-shocked or horribly wounded and disfigured. Historians tell us that about 19 per cent of the entire German male population were direct casualties of the war’s terrible violence. At the same time though, the war also triggered some direct or indirect drastic political changes in countries such as Russia – where the Tsarist regime was overthrown and replaced by a revolutionary government in 1917 – and Germany where Kaiser Wilhelm II and his government, pushed by a wave of revolts and strikes started by the sailors stationed in the port city of Kiel on 29 October 1918, were forced to step down on 9 November 1918 when the chancellorship was handed over to Friedrich Ebert, the secretary of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Soon after the Kaiser’s abdication the empire was replaced by the proclamation of the German Republic and the new government steered Germany’s political direction towards a more democratic course by approving a series of decrees establishing freedom of speech, press and religion, universal suffrage and by also granting an amnesty for political prisoners still detained in the Kaiser’s prisons. However, the first tentative steps of the new government were marred by political chaos and by the looming shadow of the peace treaty that was still being drafted by the victorious forces after Germany had signed the armistice in the French town of Compiègne on 11 November 1918. The winter months of 1918–1919 were a rollercoaster of events that saw Ebert working feverishly in the attempt of bringing together all the different forces that could have a say in the shaping up of Germany’s political future. Furthermore, the ghost of another Bolshevik revolution stirred real panic in many sectors of German society, and the newly-appointed Chancellor knew that only appropriate political tools, namely elections and a new constitution, could legitimate the new government in the eyes of those citizens who feared a radical turn towards Communism. For this reason, Ebert struck a series of deals and compromises with the military, the capitalist elites and the old sectors of highly placed civil servants. In the long run, these deals and the overall negotiating approach taken by the Ebert cabinet proved to be fateful since ‘once the sense of panic had passed, once officers, civilian officials, and capitalists felt the balance of power again shifting in their direction, they would look for other allies, which they found, ultimately, in the Nazi Party’ that finally seized political power in January 1933.⁴

On 19 January 1919, German citizens were called to the polls to elect a Constitutional Convention. The Social Democrats, together with the Catholic Centre and other conservative parties with whom they shared their pleas for hard work, discipline and order, received the majority of the votes and Philip Scheidemann, the SPD representative who had seized the chance to declare the birth of the German Republic on the very day of the Kaiser’s abdication, became the new Chancellor. After the elections, the Constitutional Convention retired to Weimar to draft the new constitution that, formally proclaimed on 11 August 1919, was sustained by liberal and democratic ideals that granted and protected basic liberties and social reforms. All this happened while radical Right and Left wing groups fought each other on the streets of all the major German cities.

The chaos that characterised German internal politics at the beginning of 1919 was to be made even worse by the release of the terms of the peace treaty that the victorious powers (Great Britain, United States, France, and Italy) were meanwhile drafting in Paris. Germany’s representatives were summoned to Paris at the end of April and had to wait, in a climate of continuous humiliation and hostility, until the 7th of May before they could have the details of the treaty that the Allies wished to impose on the defeated nation. Initial hopes for a peace with ‘no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages’ as ensured by American President Woodrow Wilson in a speech given in front of the American Congress in January 1918, were immediately crushed by the uncovering of the harsh reality of the treaty’s details. Germany was to lose over a seventh of its pre-war territory, drastically decrease the size of its army, dispose entirely of its air force, renounce all its colonies and pay a yet-undetermined sum of money and goods – that Germany would never be able to repay in full – in reparations for being the sole responsible of the war tragedy according to article 231 in the treaty, the so-called ‘war guilt clause’. Despite the outrage and the widespread protests back home, on 28 June 1919 two members of the German government officially ended the hostilities by signing the Versailles Treaty.

The Treaty of Versailles specified that a Reparation Commission would be set up in 1921 with the aim to evaluate Germany’s resources and establish the final reparation figure – that eventually resulted in the request of 132 billion gold marks. In the meantime, though, Germany was still expected to pay over 20 billion marks made up of gold, commodities, goods, etc. as an initial compensation. The burdens imposed by the peace treaty gradually brought the unsteady German economy to a situation of financial chaos. Repaying the Allies with commodities caused the development of domestic shortages that subsequently triggered an unstoppable rise in the prices of all sorts of goods. The predictable result of this situation was a rampaging hyperinflation that finally saw the German mark sink from 50,000 to one dollar at the beginning of 1923 to around 6 billion to the dollar by the end of that same year. The preponderance of people inevitably suffered from this situation: soup kitchens, worsening living standards, and extensive unemployment accompanied the images of German citizens carrying wheelbarrows full of money to buy a pair of shoes or a loaf of bread. The suffering however, was not equally shared by all strata of German society: the big industrial conglomerates benefited from the inflation that encouraged export while at the same time discouraging import; German goods could be sold cheaply abroad and even internally, rather than saving, people tended to spend money as long as it was still worth something thus keeping production going.

The German cinematic industry benefited from this state of affairs for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike other goods, films were readily available and people flocked to film theatres throughout the inflationary period. Furthermore, German production companies profited from the financial impossibility of importing films from abroad, an impossibility that was further strengthened by the ban on foreign film imports that had been established back in 1916 and that was to last until the very end of December 1920. Finally, foreign countries, especially those in South America and Eastern Europe, whilst not being able to afford costly Hollywood movies, could easily buy the much cheaper films arriving from Germany. The combination of these diverse factors boosted the productivity and also the sheer number of German producing companies that went from twenty-five in 1914 to about three hundred in 1921, a number that included one-off diminutive companies – very much like Albin Grau’s Prana film – and giants such as the Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft, better known as UFA. The expansion and strengthening of the German cinematographic industry was not just a consequence of the financial circumstances of the post-war years but also benefited from the fact that, despite political and economic uncertainty, the Germany of the 1920s was a decidedly ‘mass’ society. The majority of its population lived in urban areas where they would conduct lives revolving around the workplace and the marketplace and in which the guarantee of receiving at least a minimal level of public education was virtually universal. The combination of these social changes with the technological innovations made from the end of the 1890s onwards made Weimar ‘a cacophony of sounds, a dazzle of images’.⁵ It may sound surreal that a society in the grips of rampant inflation and violent political rivalries could be at the same time so creative and produce so much in artistic and cinematographic terms. This apparent contradiction though adds another layer of interest to the films produced during those chaotic years – their metaphors and visual conundrums providing a fascinating if at times hard to decipher insight into those tumultuous events. In Ian Roberts’ words: ‘Weimar society created the ideal breeding-ground for an art form based fundamentally upon the illusion of reality’.⁶

But what kind of films did Germany produce and export during the Weimar years? Roughly speaking, we could divide German cinematic output into three large genres. The first of these was the so-called spectacle film which concentrated on the re-enactment of epic or historical events that involved impressive sets and frequent crowd scenes – all things that could be easily afforded during the inflationary period when studio back lots and extras could be hired at exceptionally low wages. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the Kammerspiel film, chamber-dramas revolving around few characters and events and often filmed on a limited number of different sets. However, the most famous and largely influential German films of the period are those falling under the umbrella term of Expressionism, a diverse and multi-faceted label that despite internal shifts and differences, presents a series of recognisable characteristics such as the utilisation of stylised sets, the unrealistic style of the acting performances and the suggestive use of lights and shadows.

Before becoming a cinematographic style, Expressionism was a well-established and recognisable tendency already present in German theatre and painting where it had started at the very beginning of the twentieth century as another modernist movement attempting to react against the predominance of realism in the arts. Two painting movements in particular are at the basis of what will later be recognised as Expressionism: Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) and Die Brücke (The Bridge). Franz Marc, Wassily Kandisky and Gabriele Münter founded Der Blaue Reiter in Munich in 1911 while Die Brücke, founded in 1906 and based in Dresden, grouped together a number of artists and intellectuals such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

As clearly visible in paintings such as Girl with a Cat II by Franz Marc (1912) and Potsdamer Platz (1914) by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner both movements were characterised by a preference for bright and unnatural colours that through the avoidance of nuances and realism outlined cartoonlike human and animal figures often surrounded by elongated and distorted natural or urban landscapes used to express a sense of isolation or to convey the dehumanisation brought about by urban life. Both artistic movements exercised a strong influence on Expressionist cinema in general and their impact is also clearly visible in Nosferatu where in the dramatic views of Wisborg stricken by the plague or in Ellen’s solitary watches on the beach

Expressionist theatre of the early twentieth century shared similar preoccupations with painters such as Marc and Kirchner. The plays by authors like Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were characterised by distorted and unrealistic performances during which the actors would move around the highly stylised sets in a jerky manner, shouting and gesturing broadly. The aim here was to express inner feelings in the most dramatic and extreme of ways. By the time then that Expressionism made its transition to cinema – a date traditionally marked by the release of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari in February 1920 – German audiences immediately recognised as familiar some of the characteristics that featured so prominently in the film.

What do we exactly think of when we think about Expressionist cinema? This question is less obvious than what it may appear at first because the very definition of Expressionist cinema has long been questioned and debated. A restricted definition would only include those films that followed the stylistic traits of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari and that preserved a close link to Expressionist theatre in their mise-en-scène. However, between 1920 and 1927 – the years that roughly bracket cinematic Expressionism – Germany produced and released about two dozen films that presented at least some of the features that can be retraced in Robert Wiene’s film. This broader definition is certainly more useful and productive since it allows us to work on a much wider sample of works: film historian Kristin Thompson in her 1981 study on Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible proposes a definition of cinematic Expressionism that can encompass with a good degree of approximation all the possible stylistic variations falling under the Expressionist label. In her words then, Expressionism is:

If we then take ‘composition’ as the key defining word, it becomes easy to see that, despite diversified emphases and styles, all the films that can be regarded one way or another as Expressionist placed the utmost importance not so much on the editing aspect – that tended to be based on continuity and classic techniques such as crosscutting and shot/reverse shot – or on the camerawork – that although often employing extreme angles also made large use of straight-on and eye level shots – but on individual images that tried to blend the different elements into a sort of moving tableaux around which the eye of the spectator is free to roam in order to take in all of its composing elements. The sets – normally reconstructed in the studio but with some notable exceptions like Nosferatu – often merged with the actors thus creating a single compositional unit that was further enriched by the distinctive use of geometric elements such as lines and shapes – think for example of the recurrent arch motive employed by Murnau in Nosferatu or about the crooked and oppressive lines that constitute the preponderance of Caligari’s sets – and by the attention placed on chiaroscuro lighting that added another layer of distortion and exaggeration to the often nightmarish quality of these films. Costumes and the acting style were equally part of this wider approach to composition: when Conrad Veidt walks along the crooked sets of Caligari he becomes part of them. Likewise in Nosferatu the identification between the character of Count Orlok and his isolated lair is so ingrained in the narrative that the film’s last image, after the vampire’s death, is that of his solitary castle lying in ruins: the destruction of the Count’s body translates directly into the destruction of his dwelling.

However, not all Expressionist films managed to achieve this ideal fusion of sets, lights, costumes and acting behaviour into a perfectly contained composition. Some film historians (see, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson) have underlined how this blend often only worked at intervals. The excessive emphasis on the single shot and on the creation of a tableau seamlessly blending the various elements inevitably clashed at times with the inner nature of the motion picture itself where movement – or, in other words, the advancement of the plot – is an essential part for the success of any narrative film. This contrast between mise-en-scène and narrative progression often caused the action to proceed very much like the actors on the set, in fits and jolting movements rather than in a smooth manner. Despite these alternating results, the films produced during the years of the Weimar Republic also tended to revolve around a common series of specific narrative concerns that reflected some troubling aspects of Weimar’s public life and that were subsequently translated onto the screen in the various and differing ways we have just outlined. In his book on German Expressionism, Ian Roberts provides an overview of these thematic concerns by underlining for instance an interest in the depiction of the world as a liminal space between fantasy and reality and the frequent preference for stories focusing on a sense of threat towards individuals, couples, or society – just like the threat posed by Count Orlok in Nosferatu – two aspects that appear to be particularly important throughout the chronological arch of Weimar cinema. Other important themes – not directly touched in Nosferatu but equally important for an overall appreciation of German cinema of the 1920s – are the depiction of a dystopian futuristic society (e.g. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927), an attention for stories inspired by traditional German folklore and mythology (e.g. Die Nibelungen again by Fritz Lang and realised in 1924), and, especially towards the end of the Weimar Republic, a focus on a more realistic depiction of society (e.g. G.W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, 1928).