Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 3: Goethe and The Bride of Corinth

Nosferatu's Kindred header image, with shadow of Nosferatu

Continuing a series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.

It bears restating that Heinrich August Ossenfelder was ahead of his time in using the vampire reports of recent decades as source material for his poem “Der Vampir” in 1748. As evidence of this, we need only look at the absence of poets following suit through the remainder of the century. Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore” of 1773 would become a reference point for vampire literature but did not itself involve vampires. Then, near the end of the century, we find Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem “Die Braut von Korinth” (“The Bride of Corinth”). This is more direct in its usage of the vampire theme, but it does not draw inspiration from the vampires of eighteenth-century Serbia. Instead, it uses a motif that may have been more familiar to a classically-educated readership of the period: the vampire-like beings of ancient Greece.

The poem’s narrative is set during the Christianisation of Greece and deals with the aftermath of a marriage being arranged between a young man from Athens and a maiden from Corinth. After the marriage was scheduled, the family of the bride converted to Christianity while the groom clung to his pre-Christian faith. Despite this, the Athenian heads to Corinth in the hopes of meeting his bride for the first time and proceeding with the wedding. He arrives at his destination and is greeted well by the maiden’s family; but he does not meet his bride until she visits him at night, clad in a white veil and robe with a black and gold band.

Still from the 1922 film Nosferatu. Greta Schröder in a white dressing gown, looking scared.
The Bride of Corinth was far from the last white-clad maiden in vampire literature: Greta Schröder in Nosferatu.

The girl is surprised to see that the house has a visitor, and is apparently not privy to the household goings-on: “Ach! so hält man mich in meiner Klause!” (“Oh! That’s how they keep me in my cell!”). She moves to depart, but the Athenian pleads for her to linger, observing that she is “für Schrecken blaß” — pale with fright. He invokes his pagan gods, first Ceres and Bacchus (referring to the bread and wine laid out earlier in the narrative) and finally the god of love: “Und du bringst den Amor liebes Kind” (“and you bring Cupid, dear child”).

The maiden reacts poorly to these invocations, stressing that “der alten Götter bunt Gewimmel” (“the colourful swarm of the old gods”) have been driven out of the house, and in their place “ein Heiland wird am Kreutz verehrt” (“a saviour is worshipped on the cross”). She calls all of this a “kranken Wahn” (sick delusion) and laments that she has lost touch with the Freuden — the delights and joys — of her old life. She suggests that he marry her sister instead, but he refuses. They eventually agree to trade gifts: the maiden gives the Athenian a gold chain; he offers her a silver bowl, but she rejects this in favour of a lock of his hair.

Upon the arrival of die dumpfe Geisterstunde (the dull witching hour) the maiden partakes of the wine: “Gierig schlürfte sie mit blassem Munde/Nun den dunkel blutgefärbten Wein” (“She greedily sipped with her pale mouth/the dark, blood-coloured wine”) but ignores the bread. “[B]erührst du meine Glieder,” she asks. “Fühlst du schaudernd was ich dir verheelt” (“Do you touch my limbs? Do you shudder at what I have revealed to you?”). “Wie der Schnee so weiß,” she continues. “Aber kalt wie Eis Ist das Liebchen, das du dir erwählt” (“As white as the snow, but as cold as ice is your chosen love”). The Athenian, however, insists that he would still love her “Wärst du selbst mir aus dem Grab gesandt” (“were you sent to me from the grave”). And so they embrace and kiss: “Gierig saugt sie seines Mundes Flammen” (“Greedily she sucks the flames of his mouth”). This particular verse ends on an ominous note: “Seine Liebeswuth/Wärmt ihr starres Blut/Doch es schlägt kein Herz in ihrer Brust” (“His passion for love/Warms her stiff blood/But no heart beats in her breast”).

A cock-crow marks daybreak, and the maiden says that she has to depart. Meanwhile, her mother has been outside, listening to the sounds of intermingled joy and lamentation, and barges in. She sees her daughter rising from the bed Wie mit Geists Gewalt (with the power of a ghost). Imagery of death and burial comes to the fore during this confrontation between mother and daughter. The maiden describes herself as being “ins Leichentuch/Daß ihr früh mich in das Grab gebracht” (“in the shroud in which you brought me prematurely to the grave”) and remarks that “die Erde kühlt die Liebe nicht” (“the earth does not cool love”).

The images move from death to vampirism: “Aus dem Grabe werd ich ausgetrieben/Noch zu suchen das vermißte Gut,”,says the maiden; “Noch den schon verlohrnen Mann zu lieben/Und zu saugen seines Herzens Blut” (“Out of the grave have I been cast, searching still for the lost goodness, to love still the main who has been lost, and to suck the blood of his heart”). In the final verse, the maiden begs her mother for a funeral pyre, so that she can meet the old gods.

Goethe’s narrative is open to interpretation. The maiden’s preoccupation with the grave can be read as the psychological ramifications of her family having abandoned the old faith of wine, food and love for a strange new religion based on death and resurrection. In terms of source material, however, he appears to have been drawing from more literally-minded tales of deathly brides.

Most notably, “Die Braut von Korinth” has similarities to an ancient Greek narrative in which a young man named Machates encounters the revenant of his deceased bride Philinnion. This connection is pointed out in William Thomas Brande’s 1842 Dictionary of Science, Literature & Art:

VAMPIRE. A bloodsucking spectre; the object of superstitious dread among various nations of Europe. The belief in vampires, i.e., in persons returning to the earth after death and burial, not as ghosts, but in actual corporeal substance, and sucking the blood of living men, appears to have prevailed in classical times. The Empusae, Lamiae, and Lemures were species of vampires. One of the most detailed stories of vampires is the tale of Machates and Philinnion which Goethe has made the foundation of his poem of the Bride of Corinth: in which the dead bride of a young man visits him at night, and withers him by her embrace. But in modern Europe, the populations among which vampire superstitions have prevailed appear to be of Slavonic descent.

The Machates-Philinnion narrative was included by Phlegon in his Mirabilia (known in English as On Marvels or The Book of Marvels). While the text is incomplete, the surviving fragment opens with a clearly recognisable parallel to Goethe’s scene in which the bride’s mother enters the room – only, in Phlegon’s telling, it is the household nurse who realises that Philinnion has returned from the dead and is visiting Machates at night. When Philinnion’s parents hear of this they decide to keep watch for her the following night; however, the girl is outraged by this violation of her privacy, and drops dead. Here is the story’s climax, as translated by William Hansen:

Night came on and now it was the hour when Philinnion was accustomed to come to him. The household kept watch wanting to know of her arrival. She entered at the usual time and sat down on the bed. Makhates pretended that nothing was wrong, since he wished to investigate the whole incredible matter to find out if the girl he was consorting with, who took care to come to him at the same hour, was actually dead. As she ate and drank with him, he simply could not believe what the others had told him, and he supposed that some grave-robbers had dug into the tomb and sold the clothes and gold to her father. But in his wish to learn exactly what the case was, he secretly sent his slaves to summon Demostratos and Kharito.

They came quickly. When they first saw her they were speechless and panic-stricken by the amazing sight, but after that they cried aloud and embraced their daughter. Then Philinnion said to them: ‘Mother and father, how unfairly you have grudged my being with the guest for three days in my father’s house, since I have caused no one any pain. For this reason, on account of your meddling, you shall grieve all over again, and I shall return to the place appointed for me. For it was not without divine will that I came here.’ Immediately upon speaking these words she was dead, and her body lay stretched visibly on the bed.

Phlegon’s narrative concludes with the cremation of Philinnion’s body, accompanied by sacrifices to deities of the Greek underworld – the notion that Philinnion’s family were Christians is Goethe’s invention. A shorter, but at least complete version of the narrative was later included by the Roman writer Procus in his Platonis Rem Publican Commentarii (again translated by William Hansen):

The daughter of the Amphipolitans Demostratos and Charito, [Philinnion] died as a newly-wed. Her husband had been Krateros. In the sixth month after her death she returned to life and for many nights in a row secretly consorted with a young man, Makhates, because of her love for him. He had come to Demostratos from his native city of Pella. She was detected and died again after proclaiming that what she had done was done in accord with the will of the Khthonion (Underworld) Gods. Her corpse was seen by everyone as it lay in state in her father’s house. In their disbelief at what had happened the members of her family went to the place that had earlier received her body, dug the place up and found it to be empty.

But while Philinnion rose from the dead, she does not share a vampire’s habit of drinking blood – unlike Goethe’s bride, she shows no interest in the Herzens Blut of her lover. In adding this element, Goethe may have been drawing upon another ancient Greek text: Philostratus’ biography of the philosopher Apollonius of Tyana describes a Corinthian bride who turns out to be a monster with a fondness for blood. The relevant narrative begins with a young philosopher named Menippus meeting a beautiful and mysterious woman (all excerpts are from Edward Berwick’s English translation of 1809):

As the story goes, a figure met him, when alone on the road to Cenchrea, which had the look of a woman, who took him by the hand, and avowed a tender passion for him. She said, she was a Phenician, but at present dwelt in one of the suburbs of Corinth, which she named, where, added she, if you come, you shall hear me sing, and shall drink such wine as you never drank of before.

Menippus succumbs to this temptation (“for though he loved philosophy much, he loved Venus more”) and pays regular visits to her home, “without the slightest suspicion of her being a spectre.” Eventually, the two arrange to marry; but Apollonius, an older and rather wiser philosopher, is skeptical. He arrives at the wedding and compares the gold, silver and food on show to the gardens of Tantalus, said to exist in the underworld. Moreover, he declares, the bride of Menippus is herself a supernatural being:

As are the gardens in Homer, so is all you see here — all shew, and no reality. And that you may know the truth of what I say, your intended wife is one of the Empusae, who pass under the names of Lamiae and Larvae. They are little affected by the passion of love, and are fond of nothing but flesh, and that human; for by their attentions they attract all whom they wish to devour.

With this revelation, the entire wedding feast vanishes into nothingness, and the Empusa admits all:

Whereupon the phantom appearing as if in tears, begged not to be tormented, nor forced to make a confession. But Apollonius was peremptory, and said she should not stir till she confessed what she was. She then owned herself to be an Empusa, who had pampered Menippus with rich dainties, for the express purpose of devouring him; adding, that it was her custom to feed on young and beautiful bodies, for the sake of the pure blood in them.

In writing his poem “Der Vampir”, Heinrich August Ossenfelder adopted the figure of the vampire as a metaphor for sexual predation. Goethe, meanwhile, knew that there was already a body of folklore – that of Greece – that contained images of lovers who turn out to be the risen corpses or blood-draining spectres. In their own different ways, however, the menacing man of Ossenfelder and the sanguinary waif of Goethe were both forerunners to the character types found in later vampire literature.


Next: the eighteenth century gives way to the nineteenth, and Germany’s vampires spread from poetry to prose.

Series Navigation<< Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 2: Gottfried August Bürger and LenoreNosferatu’s Kindred, Part 4: E. T. A. Hoffman’s Tale of Aurelia >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

One thought on “Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 3: Goethe and The Bride of Corinth

  1. This is very comprehensive. Went down a kind of extremely endearing loophole when the bride of corinth was mentioned in miss Mary pask, which I’m reading right now. :),

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