Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 4: E. T. A. Hoffman’s Tale of Aurelia

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

The three works discussed in this series so far – Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s “Der Vampir” (1748), Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore” (1773) and Goethe’s “Die Braut von Korinth” (1797) – all belong to an antediluvian era in vampire literature: each one was published prior to 1819. Once that year rolled around, the genre would be changed forever.

The 1819 publication of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” cemented the position of vampirism as a literary theme. This British story began an international phenomenon, inspiring derivative works from the American satire “The Black Vampyre” (1819) to the unauthorised French sequel “Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires” (1820). Germany, too, was one of the countries influenced by Polidori’s work.

E. T. A. Hoffman responded to the vogue for vampires in Die Serapionsbrüder (The Serapion Brethren), a four-volume collection published between 1819 and 1821. This is an intricate assortment of nested stories framed as a conversation between a group of writerly friends – Ottmar, Theodor, Lothar, Cyprian, Vinzenz and Sylvester – who tell stories that they have composed or heard, in between discussions over literature past and present. One story that enters the conversation is Polidori’s “The Vampyre”.

The relevant portion of this work can be found in chapter 92. Nominally, this is part of the novella “Der Zusammenhang der Dinge” (“The Mutual Interdependence of Things”). However, in practice, the story in question – a vampire-free narrative concerning two aristocratic friends named Euchar and Ludwig – ends before the chapter is finished. After this, the book returns to its framing device as the assembled narrators discuss literature. The first topic is historical fiction; this leads them to the work of Sir Walter Scott; which leads them to the writing of another British author, Lord Byron; which, finally, leads them to the subject of vampires – as Byron was, at the time, wrongly believed to be the author of Polidori’s “The Vampyre”.

“His predominant tendency seems to be towards the gloomy, the mysterious and the terrible;” says Sylvester of Byron, “and his ‘Vampire’ [sic] I have avoided reading, for the bare idea of a vampire makes my blood run cold. So far as I understand the matter, a vampire is an animated corpse which sucks the blood of the living.” Lothar picks up the thread, citing a 1725 treatise by Lutheran pastor Michael Ranft on alleged vampire outbreaks (note that all quotations are taken from Alexander Ewing’s 1892 translation of Goethe’s text):

As regards vampirism–that you may see how well read I am in these matters–I will tell you the name of a delightful treatise in which you may study this dark subject. The complete title of this little book is ‘M. Michael Ranft (Deacon of Nebra). Treatise on the Mastication and Sucking of the Dead in their Graves; wherein the true nature and description of the Hungarian vampires and bloodsuckers is clearly set forth, and all previous writings on this subject are passed in review and subjected to criticism.’

This title in itself will convince you of the thoroughness of this treatise, and you will learn from it that a vampire is nothing other but an accursed creature who lets himself be buried as being dead, and then rises out of the grave and sucks people’s blood in their sleep. And those people become vampires in their turn. So that, according to the accounts received from Hungary and quoted by this magister, the inhabitants of whole villages become vampires of the most abominable description. To render those vampires harmless they must be dug out of their graves, a stake driven through their hearts, and their bodies burnt to ashes. Those horrible beings very often do not appear in their own proper forms, but en masque.

Lothar goes on to quote a letter written by an army officer named Sigismund Alexander Friedrich von Kottwitz concerning a supposed vampire attack:

‘In a village called Kinklina it chanced that two brothers were troubled by a vampire, so that one of them used to sit up by the other at night whilst he slept. The one who was watching used to see something like a dog opening the door, but this dog used to make off when he cried out at it. At last one night they both were asleep at the same time, and the vampire bit and sucked a place under the right ear of one of them, leaving a red mark. The man died of this in three days’ time. […] Inasmuch as they perceived, from the aforesaid circumstances, that this was unmistakably a vampire, they drove a stake through its heart, upon which it gave vent to a distinct gasp, emitting a considerable quantity of blood.’

The letter in question is authentic – Kottwitz wrote it in 1732 to a Leipzig doctor named Michael Ernst Ettmüller – although the version included by Hoffman is a corruption: as well as abridging Kottwitz’s anecdote, it changes the location of the incident from Kucklina to Kinklina.

Hoffman’s characters continue to discuss vampires. Sylvester dismisses the claims collected by Ranft as “absurd and even rather cack-brained” and regards vampirism itself as “one of the most horrible and terrible notions imaginable. I can conceive nothing more ghastlily repulsive to the mind.” Cyprian replies that such horrific subject matter has its place in literature:

Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror, and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?

Theodor concurs with these sentiments (as, indeed, have generations of horror writers since Hoffman). He cites Shakespeare as an author who put the horrific to good use, and proceeds to use Ludwig Tieck as a more recent example via his story “Leibeszauber” (which shall be covered later in this blog series):

The leading idea of that story cannot but make everybody’s blood run cold, and the end of it is full of the utmost fear and horror; but still the colours are blended so admirably that, in spite of all the terror and dismay, the mysterious magic charm so seizes upon us that we yield ourselves up to it without an effort to resist. How true is what Tieck puts in the mouth of his Manfred in answer to women’s objections to the element of the awe-inspiring in fiction.

The talk of horror and vampires leads Cyprian to recall “a ghastly story which I either heard or read a very long time ago”, told by an unnamed individual who insisted that it was true. Vincenz is intrigued, and bids Cyprian to “be as gloomy, as frightful, as terrible as the vampirish Lord Byron himself, though I know nothing about him, as I have never read a word of his writings.”

The story concerns one Count Hyppolitus, who has recently inherited the estate of his deceased father. While there, he is visited by a distant relative: an elderly Baroness whom his father hated without ever explaining why. The Baroness gives her own version of events, portraying herself as an unfortunate victim of prejudice, and introduces her daughter Aurelia. Hippolitus is captivated by the maiden, but made deeply uncomfortable by her mother:

[T]he words and the breath died away on his lips and his blood ran cold. For he felt his hand grasped as if in a vice by fingers cold and stiff as death, and the tall bony form of the Baroness, who was staring at him with eyes evidently deprived of the faculty of sight, seemed to him in its gay many tinted attire like some bedizened corpse.

The Count invites the pair to stay with him and comes to fall in love with Aurelia, eventually asking to marry her. She agrees, but the morning of the wedding day is hit by tragedy when the Baroness is found dead on the castle grounds. The event throws Aurelia into an emotionally-wrought state, grief for her dead mother fading into a strange anxiety over some inner secret. Finally, Aurelia confesses all, revealing that her late mother really was as evil as the Count’s late father had insisted.

She provides anecdotes about her youth: being shown the corpse of her father as a small child; as a teenager, being “filled with terror – nay, with an abhorrence of which she could not explain the reason to herself” at the sight of an enigmatic Baron who began paying family expenses; becoming trapped in an abusive family situation, the Baron manhandling both herself and her mother until finally being arrested; and finding herself unjustly punished by her mother, who blamed her for the family situation. Even after arriving at the Count’s castle, Aurelia’s mother continued to blame her, and the girl relates a grave threat that the Baroness passed on to her:

“You are my misfortune, horrible creature that you are! But in the midst of your imagined happiness vengeance will overtake you, if I should be carried away by a sudden death. In those tetanic spasms, which your birth cost me, the subtle craft of the devil—-”
Here Aurelia suddenly stopped. She threw herself upon her husband’s breast, and implored him to spare her the complete recital of what the Baroness had said to her in the delirium of her insanity.

Aurelia is unable to repeat the threat in full, but suffice to say that it left her terrified “that her mother would rise from her grave, and drag her from her husband’s arms into perdition.” After this, Aurelia begins acting strangely, showing reclusive tendencies, going for walks in the park alone and refusing to eat food. Her husband calls in a doctor, who discusses a possible psychological ailment:

“Moreover,” he said, “there are cases on record in which women have been led, by these strange, abnormal longings, to commit most terrible crimes. There was a certain blacksmith’s wife, who had such an irresistible longing for her husband’s flesh that, one night, when he came home the worse for liquor, she set upon him with a large knife, and cut him about so frightfully that he died in a few hours’ time.”
Scarcely had the doctor said these words, when the Countess fell back in her chair fainting, and was with much difficulty recovered from the succession of hysterical attacks which supervened. The doctor then saw that he had acted very thoughtlessly in alluding to such a frightful occurrence in the presence of a lady whose nervous system was in such a delicate condition.

The girl’s refusal to eat lasts for long enough to leave the doctor baffled as to how she is managing to survive. The Count then learns from a servant that his wife is in the habit of leaving the castle at midnight and returning only at daybreak; he then becomes convinced that she is drugging him to ensure that she can escape unnoticed. Is it possible that she is seeing another man – that she has inherited the adulterous habits of her late mother?

And so, the Count decides to look into the matter. One night, he avoids drinking the tea made for him by his wife, and spies on her as she sneaks out of the castle. He then follows her through the moonlight to a local churchyard until he arrives at a dreadful spectacle:

The Count ran quickly after her in through the gate of the burying-ground, which he found open. There, in the bright moonlight, he saw a circle of frightful, spectral-looking creatures. Old women, half naked, were cowering down upon the ground, and in the midst of them lay the corpse of a man, which they were tearing at with wolfish appetite.
Aurelia was amongst them.

His distress prevents him from returning immediately, but he eventually arrives back at the castle come daybreak to find his wife already returned. But he is unable to convince himself that the gruesome sight was just a dream, and confronts Aurelia:

“Accursed misbirth of hell! I understand your hatred of the food of mankind. You get your sustenance out of the burying-ground, damnable creature that you are!”
As soon as those words had passed his lips, the Countess flew at him, uttering a sound between a snarl and a howl, and bit him on the breast with the fury of a hyena. He dashed her from him on to the ground, raving fiercely as she was, and she gave up the ghost in the most terrible convulsions. The Count became a maniac.

And so concludes Cyprian’s narrative. His friend Lothar is impressed: “In comparison with this story of yours, vampirism is the merest children’s tale – a funny Christmas story, to be laughed at.” Theodor, meanwhile, expresses gratitude that Cyprian skimmed over some of the more gruesome details: “I remember very well having read this story in an old book, where everything was told with the most prolix enumeration of all the details; and the old woman’s atrocities in particular were set forth in all their minutiæ, truly con amore, so that the whole affair produced, and left behind it, a most repulsive impression, which it took a long while to get over.”

The tale that Hoffman puts into the mouth of Cyprian – which was later published as a self-contained piece under various titles including “Vampirismus” and “Aurelia” – is not, strictly speaking, a vampire story. For all of its Gothic trappings, it lacks even any literally supernatural events: the general implication is that Aurelia has been driven mad (the fact that she is joined by equally insane women in the final tableau suggests that Hoffman was drawing upon the notion of hysteria as a specifically female trait). Yet it still has a place in the vampire canon. As well as its similarities to Sheridan Le Fanu’s influential Carmilla – note that both stories feature a mysterious girl arriving at the protagonist’s property with her mother – the surrounding discussion included by Hoffman is a time capsule of how the vampire genre was viewed at the time.

Next: a look at some stories that faced translation issues as they migrated from Germany to the English-speaking world.