NOSFERATU AND THE FIGURE OF ‘THE JEW’ IN THEWEIMAR GERMANY
Alex Karambelas, A11, Classics
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony
of Horror) was released in 1922. Nosferatuwas the first true vampire film and is now considered to
be both a landmark film in the history of the horror genre and a masterpiece of German
Expressionist cinema. Although ostensibly “an account of the Great Death in Wisborg” of 1838, the
story of Nosferatu is one which speaks to issues of its own time. In the figure of Nosferatu
especially, it is possible to see shadows of the visual and conceptual trends in Weimar era antiSemitism. Although the Nosferatu itself is not anti-Semitic, there are parallels between the character
of Nosferatu, who is the very essence of the malevolent, foreign ‘other,’ and the figure of the Jew in
anti-Semitic rhetoric.Nosferatu plays on the same cultural fears and utilizes the same techniques of
representation that underlie contemporary anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The depiction of Nosferatu’s journey west to Wisborg reflects the nationalist fear foreign
invasion element that was so pervasive in both pre-1914 and post warGermany. Nosferatu presses
on inexorably from the East, bringing with him the plague carried by his throng of rats.Upon his
arrival in the pristine German town of Wisborg, he immediately spreads disease and death
throughout the population. This narrative of invasion and subsequent infection is similar to
representations of the threat posed to Germany by ‘swarms’ of foreigners, in particular Eastern
Jews, in anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Between 1881 and 1914Germany experienced a dramatic influx of Eastern Jewish
immigrants, fleeing westward from pogroms and persecution.By 1910, the number of foreign Jews
living in Germany had risen from 15,000 in 1880 to over 78,000, with 70,000 of these from the 2
East.1
The beginning of this series of mass migrations in the late nineteenth century coincided
with the birth of organized political anti-Semitism in Germany.
Far less integrated than the German Jews, the Eastern Jews or Ostjudenwere highly visible for
their foreign ways and manners. Whereas the German Jews had attempted to assimilate both in
language and culture, the Eastern Jews spoke mainly Yiddish, retained their own style of dress, and
were more rigidly and overtly religious than their German counterparts. This distinctiveness made
the Ostjuden easy targets of extremistswho claimed that Germany was in danger of being overrun
by foreigners. The Eastern Jews came to represent a fundamentally alien and suspect element
growing within Germandom.
In 1879 the well-respected historian Heinrich von Treitschke warned of the dire threat that the Eastern Jewish immigrants posed to the national integrity of Germany. His reputation gave his work an aura of respectability that separated it from the ‘Jew baiting’ attacks of the extremists.3Using the vocabulary of invasion, Treitschke refers to the “alien people” who,“out of the inexhaustible Polish cradle, stream over oureastern border.”He explains the increasing hostility towards the Jews as a “natural reaction of
Germanic racial feeling against an alien element that has assumed all too large a space in our life.”4
A contemporary of Treitschke’s, Wilhelm Marr, writes in the same terms of a foreign onslaughtin
his 1879 book The Victory of Jewry over Germandom, referring to the “alien domination” of the Jews
throughout his work.5
Though momentarily halted by the outbreak of war in 1914, this focus on cultural invasion
came to prominence again with renewed force in the immediate post war period. Over the course
In the convergence of the beginnings of political anti-Semitism and the first of the migrations of the Eastern Jews, the Ostjude emerged as the central figure of nationalist
narratives of invasion.
1
Steven Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The Eastern European Jew in German and German Jewish
Consciousness 1800-1923 (1982), 43
2
Aschheim, 34
3
Ibid., 42
4
Richard Levy, Antisemitism in the Modern World: An Anthology of Texts(1991), 72
5
Ibid., 843
of the war and in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its aftermath,the
population of Eastern Jews in Germany had increased again by 70,000.6
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The arrival of this second wave of an already stigmatized group of immigrants combined with the socioeconomic pressures of the period served to create a highly volatile situation. One of the most extreme demonstrations of the post war hostility towards the Ostjuden came in the form of the Scheunenviertel riots of November 1923. For two days, beginning on November 5th, thousands of rioters sacked homes, looted businesses, and attacked people on the street.The worst of the violence took place in the predominantly Eastern Jewish Scheunenviertel section of Berlin. Cries of “Raus mit den Ostjuden” (out with the Eastern Jews) were shouted by the rioters and anyone with ‘Semitic’ features was in danger of attack.7
The initial cause of riots, however, was not directly related to the issue of Eastern Jewish
immigration. The trigger appears to have been a rumor of price gouging on food by localJewish
shop owners. Such incidents were not entirely uncommon during the Great Inflation of the 1920s
when food shortages and povertywere endemic. Other such food riots (Lebensmittekrawalle) of
this period took on a similarly anti-Semitic tone and often simply degenerated into attacks on local
Jews.8So widespread was this feeling of resentment against the Eastern Jews,that in order to
curry favor among radical or nationalist elements at this time, one needed only to talk about
steaming the tide of Jewish immigrants or to demand the expulsion of the Ostjuden from Germany.
The leader of theBavarian People’s Party in Munich, Dr. Heim, played on this feelingwhen he
demanded the expulsion of “the 80,000 louse-ridden Ostjuden” in exchange for food deliveries to
The Scheunenviertel riots and the others like it were symptomatic of a resurgent hostility
towards Eastern Jews and an increased readiness among some to blame the disastrous economic
situation on the actions of ‘the Jews’.
6
Aschheim, 216
7
David Large, "'Out with the Ostjuden': The Scheunenviertel Riots in Berlin, November 1923." (2002), 124
8
Ibid., 1274
cities.9 Similarly, Gustav von Kahr gained wide popular support in Bavaria by ordering the
expulsion of more than one hundred supposedly ‘Eastern’ Jewish immigrantfamilies.
10
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Attendant with the perceived threat of inundation was the fear of cultural contamination.
The narrative of invasion and subsequent pollution is played out in Nosferatu, as the town of
Wisborg falls under the vampire’s control almost immediately after his arrival. The grim line of
coffins being carried down the streets and the cross marked doorways are a testament to the
infectious nature of his presence.Depictions of Germany’s future under the Jews in anti-Semitic
rhetoric parallel this story.The fact that many of these families had actually resided in the state for generations made no difference. What mattered was that the foreign element(or a suitable facsimile of such) be excised from the community. These events demonstrate a strong underlying fear in segments of Weimar society of what Marr had termed “alien domination.”Under Nosferatu’s “alien domination”, Wisborg and its inhabitants are irrevocably changed.Wisborg, once brimming with life and hope, is now a town of death and its people have all become mourners. So too, goes the nationalist warning, would Germany languish and rot from within under the rule of the Jews.With the anxiety concerning the ‘invasion’ of Germany by the Eastern Jews, also came a fear of cultural contamination by this new foreign element. In 1878 Richard Wagner wrote about what he saw as a troubling growth of Jewish influence in art and music. To describe this phenomenon and explain the popularity of Jewish art, Wagener coined the term Verjudung, meaning the ‘Judaization’ of culture. The end result of these trends, according to Wagner, would be the absorption of Germandom into Jewry.11
9
Ibid., 128
The foreign element, in Wagner’s narrative, transforms
and mutates its host from the inside.
10 Large, 139
11 Levy, 505
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Nosferatu achieves his domination through literal infection, yet again paralleling the figure
of the Jew in contemporary anti-Semitic representations. The viewer is shown the beginning of the
epidemic, as an unwary sailor empties out one of Nosferatu’s caskets on the dock.The earth inside
the coffin is teaming with rats which escape in all directions after biting the sailor on the foot.After
the plague has claimed all but two of the sailors on the ship, one of the surviving sailors attempts to
break open Nosferatu’s coffin in search of the source of the illness.Rats come streaming out of the
broken wood just before Nosferatu himself emerges. This juxtaposition of the invading Other in the
form of Nosferatu and the throng of plague rats is not unlike the anti-Semitic images of ‘swarms’ of
‘louse ridden’ Eastern Jews making their way into Germany.It is also strikingly similar to the age
old representations of ‘the Jew’ as a plague bearer.
By 1920, the idea of ‘racial’ contamination had risen to prominence in anti-Semitic theories.
The mixing of inferior Jewish stock with German, it was claimed, would result in a general
weakening of the German people and be the ultimate downfall of the nation. Pseudo-biological
theories of race rose to prominence and came to inform the worst of anti-Semitic thought in the
inter-war era. The nineteenth century notion of cultural contamination was thus medicalized and
pathologized. Various racist novels, of this period addressed the issue of the mixing of the races.
Artur Dinter’s 1919 bestselling novel, The Sin Against Blood, describes in lurid detail the horrific
consequences of miscegenation between a German woman and a Jewish man. According to Dinter’s
novel, the corruption of blood that would result from such a union would last forever.
Like Nosferatu, ‘the Jew’ of anti-Semitic thought spread through contagion but unlike an
illness which strikes blindly, he did so with malicious intent.With the rise of National Socialism, the
notion of ‘blood purity’ would take on a new significance. In his first known piece of political
writing, a letter on the “Jewish Question” from 1919, Adolf Hitler defines ‘the Jew’ strictly in terms
of race, rather than religion.
_________________________________________
He goes on to employ the metaphor of disease, describing the Jew as “the racial tuberculosis of the nations.”12
The notion of parasitism was a central theme throughout much of the anti-Semitic discourse
of the inter-war years.With the outbreak of war in 1914 the image of this national parasite took on
a distinctly more sinister cast as the ‘life’ of the Germanywas put on the line. Despite the fact that
some 100,000 Jewish soldiers served in the German military during the First World War, rumors of
Jewish war profiteering and avoidance of duty ran rampant through the German population.
The figure of the Jew at this point had become a malevolent virus; something that feeds on the life of purer races not out of animal instinct but rather with some sinister motivation.13
This popular idea of Jewish betrayalwas given an air of legitimacy when in 1916 the
German Military High Command commissioned a Judenzählung or Jewish census, in order to
investigate the relative proportions of Jews and non-Jews at the front lines.In this way, Jews were painted as leeches who avoided danger and fed off the nation while it bled as
countless Germans were dying at the front.14 The results of this census, which proved these accusations to be false, were suppressed until after the end of the war. In the absence of any official outcome, anti-Semitic demagogues were free to assert their own conclusions. In 1919 Alfred Roth wrote his own analysis of Jewish participation in the war effortunder the pseudonym of Otto Armin, claiming thathe based his findings on the leaked results of the Judenzählung.15
12 Robert Wistrich, Demonizing the Other: Antisemitism, Racism, and Xenophobia. (1999), 50
He concluded that the vast majority of Jews had used some influence in thewar
ministry to receive medical discharges and assignments to non-combat positions.These allegations
later served as the foundation for the often repeated charge that the Jews had abandoned Germany
in this time of need.
13 Matthew Stibbe, Germany, 1914-1933: Politics, Society, and Culture. (2010), 152
14Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (2009), 74
15DonaldNiewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (1980), 477
___________________________
Imagery portraying the parasitic Jew had existed since the nineteenth century but in the
aftermath of the First World War, this type of depiction reached new heights of popularity.16
The rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi tabloid, Der Stümer, often featured cartoonswhich compared Jews to
vermin and pests.A 1928 cartoon by Philip Ruprecht titled “The Flea” depicts a grotesquely
stereotypical Jew crushing a flea. In the caption the flea laments, “I’m finished off and he’s allowed
to live, the Jew, even though he’s the bigger bloodsucker of us two.”17 Another cartoon also in Der
Stümer bears the caption “Sucked Dry” and shows a gigantic spider with the Star of David on its
back, sucking the life from young men trapped in its web.18
Der Stümer and other anti-Semitic publications played heavily on the image of the Jew as a
“bloodsucker” even more so than as a generic parasite. The visceral reaction that the depiction of
blood drinking evoked would have been well suited to the overall tone of such publications. These
depictions also tappedinto a centuries old tradition,which associated the figure of the demonic Jew
and this vampiric behavior.According to the so-called blood libel, Jewish ritual dictated that they
use the blood of a Christian child to make matzoth for Passover.While accusations of this sortwere
outlawed in the Weimar Republic, the blood libel was still a popular subject among the most
sensationalist elements of the anti-Semitic press.Der Stürmerwas particularly prolific on the
subject and found numerous ways around this lawduring theWeimar era.19
Although comparisons of the Jew to a number of different parasites were widely used in the
anti-Semitic press, it seems evident that the figure of the vampire in particular held some for appeal
for these writers that the image of the leech did not. The identification of ‘the Jew’ with the vampire
was not confined to the pages of the tabloid press. In The Sin Against BloodArtur Dinter uses the
same metaphor, writing “if the German people do not succeed to throw off and exterminate the
Jewish vampire which it nursed with its heart’s blood… then it will die in the not too distant
16 Burrin, "Nazi Antisemitism: Animalization and Demonization." (1999), 226
17Dennis Showalter, Little Man, What Now? Der Stürmerin the Weimar Republic. (1982), 65
18 Showalter, 63
19 Showalter, 1048
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Just as Nosferatu’s plague begins to spread, the film cuts to the Professor who is giving a
lecture on the properties of carnivorous plants. “Like a vampire, no?” he says as a Venus fly trap
snaps shut on its prey. Immediately after this statement, the film cuts away again this time to
Knock, the estate agent. A title card tells the viewer that he is already “under the spell” of Nosferatu
and then the viewer is shown Knock, as he descends into total madness in the asylum. At this point,
the film returns to the Professor who has moved on to another vampiric organism, a “polyp with
tentacles”, which he describes as “transparent, almost ethereal… little more than a phantom.” The
objects ofthe Professor’s study are reflections of the dual nature of Nosferatu himself.
While a common parasite may indeed feed off of and eventually kill its victim, it does so
out of base instinct. A vampire on the other hand feeds off of the living for the purpose of increasing
his own power. The vampire has the capacity for malicious intent that a leech does not. So too is
the Jew of anti-Semitic creation defined by his willful desire to destroy his host. Also like the
vampire, the figure ofthe Jew is able to pursue this goal with almost supernatural abilities.
Like the Venus fly trap, he can feed off his prey physically and directly. However, Nosferatu
can also become something far more insidious.He is able to control Knock from far afield through
some far reaching means of influence not unlike the phantom-like tentacles of the polyp.When
Nosferatu attempts to attack Hutter during his last night at the castle, the viewer sees the looming
shadow of Nosferatu creeping over Hutter’s unconscious form rather than the vampire himself.
Earlier in the film The Book of Vampires had warned of Nosferatu “beware that his shadow does not
engulf you like a daemonic nightmare.” Nosferatu can become an intangible yet lethal forcewhich
can control almost everything around him. This notion of a nebulous threat with tentacles of
control everywhere is almost a perfect reflection of the vision of the supposed world Jewish
conspiracy in anti-Semitic rhetoric of the post war period.20
_______________________________
Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. (2009), 1129
Both figures, that of Nosferatu as the shadow and that of the international Jew, play on the
same types of basic fears. They are both meant to represent limitless, unseen power. Like the power
of Nosferatu which could extend beyond nations to control his agent, Knock, the influence of ‘the
Jew’ was thought to permeate every level of society, all over the world. Dark allusions to the Jewish
control over the press, banks, and even the government were standard fare for anti-Semitic
publications throughout the inter war period.
As was demonstrated in the Scheunenviertel riots, there was a feeling among some that the
social and economic problems of the Weimar Republic were somehow connected to the
machinations of the Jews. A similar strain of paranoid thinking can be seen in the relatively
widespread belief that the Jews, as a group, had shown their true colors and abandoned Germany
during the war. The idea that this was accomplished through some influence in the war ministry
shows the beginnings of a Jewish conspiracy theory. In the wake of Germany’s shocking defeat, this
vague notion of a conspiracy took on definite form.
The so-called “stab in the back” myth, or Dolchstosslegende, blamed Germany’s military
defeat on the treachery and profiteering ofthe Jews within Germany and abroad. The exact nature
of this imagined conspiracy varied in different versions of the myth, but there were several
common features which were repeated in the anti-Semitic press for years to come. Proponents of
this fiction claimed that international Jewry had sabotaged the economic stability of Germany
through their influence over the stock market and banks. From the home front,Jewish Bolsheviks
and revolutionaries had destroyed morale through their control of the press.In this narrative, the
world Jewry had worked its influence abroad to foment a global alliance against Germany while the
internal Jewish community worked to sabotage the ‘undefeated’ German army.21
The popularity of the Dolchstosslegende was not limited to the rank and file of the army or
the pages of Der Stürmer. In his testimony to the constitutional assembly’s investigative committee
21 on the war in November of 1919, General Paul von Hindenburg stated that the “secret, intentional
mutilation of the fleet and army” began early on in the war and had undermined their best military
efforts.22
____________________________
Entire books were devoted to exploring the ways in which the collapse of Germany during
the war could have been orchestrated by this Jewish conspiracy. Two very influential works of this
sort, Accounts to be Settled by Germany with the Jews attributed to the pseudonym ‘Wilhelm Meister’
and World Freemasonry, World Revolution, World Republic: an investigation into the origin and final
aims of the World War by Dr. F. Wichtl sought to show that an international “Judeo-Masonic”
conspiracy had been the real driving force behind the First World War itself and the architect of
Germany’s defeat.
This politically expedient fiction was propagated by extremists and adopted by large
portions of the general population, who saw in it an easy explanation for Germany’s shocking
defeat. According to this narrative, rather than being the loser of a global conflict,Germany had
been the victim of betrayal from within.
23
These sorts of conspiracy theories were given more credibility after the Protocols of the
Elders of Zionwas published in Germany in 1920. The Protocols, which was later proven to be a
blatantforgery, purported to describe a plan for Jewish world domination. In the wake of the
Russian revolution and Germany’s defeat, people who might have dismissed the Protocols before
the war were much more receptive to the notion of a global conspiracy. This much is attested to at
least by the sales figures for the German edition of the Protocols.They simultaneously freed Germany from the guilt of any wrong doing and provided an external excuse for its defeat.24
One of the most unsettling aspects of Nosferatu is his seemingly limitless ability to avoid
detection. Once inside Wisborg, Nosferatu goes unobserved by all except Ellen. Even Hutter, who by
In Germany there was a growing belief that an unseen force of global proportions was at work, bent on the destruction of the nation.
22 Anton Kaes, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. (1994), 15
23Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion. (1967), 145
24 Cohn, 15111
___________________________
We now must know what he is, appears unable to see the cause behind the “great death” in the town.
Nosferatu’s presence is manifested only through the destruction and terror which the vampire
brings with him. His method of domination, epidemic plague, evokes a similar kind of fear. It is an
imperceptible killer which spreads, crossing the boundaries of nations and peoples effortlessly. The
imagined international Jewish conspiracy represents the same type of threat as the amorphous,
spectral “malevolent shadow” of Nosferatu.Both are informed by an underlying fear of the invisible
yet all powerful enemy.In anti-Semitic narratives the influence of ‘the Jew’, like Nosferatu’s plague,
spreads throughout society, undetected until it is too late.
Like the figure of ‘the Jew’ as created by the anti-Semitic thinkers, the vampire is a flexible
concept, on to which all manner of societal fears can be placed. The Jewish community in Germany,
while never perhaps accepted, had been assimilated. Amid the exigencies of war, the shame defeat,
and the extreme economic distress of the post war years, pre-existing anti-Semitic sentiments
became radicalized. The Jews were no longer seen merely as a vaguely suspect minority but rather
as an internal enemy. The figure of the vampire, which represented that which is sinister and
parasitic, provided a ready allegory for the anti-Semite’s notion of ‘the Jew’. The vampire was the
embodiment of everything foreign, corrosive, and frightening. In this way, the figure of Nosferatu
serves as something of a mirror for the fears and anxieties of Weimar society.
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