1.2 / Villains: Nosferatu, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, and the Timeliness of Terror
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu — Eine Symphonie des Grauens).
A tale of two monsters…
In 1922, a pair of diabolical creatures arrived on German movie screens. What can the vampire Count Orlok and the supercriminal Dr. Mabuse teach us about the fears and fantasies lurking in the Weimar imagination?
Nosferatu and Mabuse are available for free on YouTube.
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Images
Podcasts have their limits, especially podcasts about a medium as visual as film. Below are some images that may enrich your experience with this episode.
Director F.W. Murnau.
From Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre.
Murnau’s use of landscapes in Nosferatu shows the influence of the paintings of 19th-century German Romanticism, including Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Die Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) by Caspar David Friedrich.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000) imagines that Orlok was played by an actual vampire.
Weimar-era antisemitic cartoon equating Jews with vampires.
Nosferatu is explicitly employed in this propaganda from the fascist British National Party decrying the 2013 arrest of ultranationalist Greek politician Nikolaus Michaloliakos.
The Martyrdom of St. Simon of Trento for Jewish Ritual from 2020 (!!!), by antisemitic artist Giovanni Gasparro. The painting portrays the blood libel, or the false (and ridiculous) accusation that Jews murder Christian children as part of their religious practice. Gasparro has shown his work at the hyper-prestigious Venice Biennial and exhibited his work in Catholic churches in Italy.
The stab-in-the-back myth, or Dolchstoßlegende, as depicted on an Austrian postcard from 1919.
The disguised face of Dr. Mabuse superimposed over the stock exchange he just threw into chaos.
During the height of the hyperinflation, the German mark was worth so little that people needed wheelbarrows full of cash to make simple purchases.
Children playing with the near-worthless currency.
In George Grosz’s 1927 watercolor Circe, the artist shows a porcine man in fashionable clothes hiring the services of a sex worker. The title alludes to the mythological Greek enchantress who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs.
In a meta-moment, Dr. Mabuse dismisses Expressionist art as nothing more than a “game.”
For German audiences in 1922, Mabuse and his henchman’s urban warfare against the authorities evoked the political violence that followed the collapse of the monarchy just four years earlier.