Continuing the series that celebrates the centenary of Nosferatu with an overview of German vampire literature.
When exploring German vampire literature from an anglophone perspective, it is hard to avoid the issue that will plague any such cross-language discussion: the amount of writing that has never been translated at all, or else has been distorted during its translation.
One example of the latter is a story that made its English debut in 1823 as part of the anthology Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations Volume 1, where it appeared under the title “Wake Not the Dead”. This anthology regrettably failed to identify any of its contributing authors, instead describing its contents as “legends… gathered from various sources”, implying that they were all public-domain folktales. However, the book’s preface does include a short list of German authors, amongst them Ludwig Tieck. This appears to be the source of an assumption – one that goes back at least as far as the 1967 paperback anthology A Feast of Blood, which reprinted the story – that “Wake Not the Dead” was written by Tieck. However, the assumption is incorrect: Tieck was not the author.
Another common misconception is that the story was originally published in 1800. Where this idea came form is unclear, although books from the 1980s and 1990s such as Brian Frost’s The Monster With a Thousand Faces (1989) and Clive Leatherdale’s Dracula: The Novel & the Legend (1993) give “Wake Not the Dead” a publication year of “circa 1800” – likely no more than a rough guess meaning “some point before 1823, when the English translation was published.” Whatever their origins, the two errors stuck, and various sources were still touting “Wake Not the Dead” as an 1800 story by Ludwig Tieck well into the twenty-first century.
In reality, the story was written by an author named Ernst Raupach, and it was originally published in the January 1823 issue of Minerva under the title “Laßt die Todten ruhen” (a more literal translation of which would be “Let the Dead Rest”).
Ernst Raupach’s “Laßt die Todten ruhen” (1823)
The story concerns Walter, a nobleman from Burgandy who mourns the loss of his wife Brunhilda. He married a woman named Swanhilda and had two children by her, but he finds her less beautiful and so less satisfying (“her eye beamed eloquently, but it was with the milder radiance of a star, transquilizing to tenderness rather than exciting to warmth”). He finds himself visiting Brunhilda’s grave at night, asking her a question: “Wilt thou sleep forever?”
One night he chances to meet a sorcerer, who has visited the graveyard to gather “such herbs as grow only from the earth wherein the dead repose”. Walter pleads for the magician to resurrect Brunhilda; although the sorcerer professes to be amoral (“for me there exists not good nor evil, since my will is always the same”) he warns Walter to reconsider this request. Three times Walter meets the sorcerer, and each time the latter gives the same reply: “Wake not the dead.” Finally, however, the magician relents, and conducts a spell to resurrect Brunhilda:
The old man now drew a circle round the grave, all the while muttering words of enchantment. Immediately the storm began to howl among the tops of the trees; owls flapped their wings, and uttered their low voice of omen; the stars hid their mild, beaming aspect, that they might not behold so unholy and impious a spectacle; the stone then rolled from the grave with a hollow sound, leaving a free passage for the inhabitant of that dreadful tenement. The sorcerer scattered into the yawning earth, roots and herbs of most magic power, and of most penetrating odour, so that the worms crawling forth from the earth congregated together, and raised themselves in a fiery column over the grave: while rushing wind burst from the earth, scattering the mould before it, until at length the coffin lay uncovered. The moonbeams fell on it, and the lid burst open with a tremendous sound. Upon this the sorcerer poured upon it some blood from out of a human skull, exclaiming at the same time, “Drink, sleeper, of this warm stream, that thy heart may again beat within thy bosom.”
The sorcerer then disappears, leaving Walter alone with both the revived Brunhilda and a black horse prepared to be ridden. In what seems like nothing so much as a gender-swapped reworking of Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore”, Walter mounts the horse with Brunhilda and departs home: “he spurred on across the wild, towards the mountains, as furiously as if pursued by the shadows of the dead, hastening to recover from him their sister.” They arrive at a remote castle where the only person who knows of their presence is an elderly servant “on whom Walter imposed secrecy by the severest threats.” Brunhilda requests to Walter that they stay there “until I can endure the light, and until thou canst look upon me without trembling”.
They spend weeks at the castle, during which Brunhilda loses her deathly pallor but exhibits strange behaviour, constantly talking about the afterlife and refusing to let Walter embrace her. Walter then returns to his old home and pressures Swanhilda to leave, so that he can invite Brunhilda in and pass her off as a different woman who coincidentally resembles his first wife. The servants see through this story, however, and realise that Brunhilda has been resurrected by dark magic. They are right to fear her, as her survival depends upon drinking human blood:
It was necessary that a magic draught should animate the dull current in her veins and awaken her to the glow of life and the flame of love–a potion of abomination–one not even to be named without a curse–human blood, imbibed whilst yet warm, from the veins of youth. This was the hellish drink for which she thirsted: possessing no sympathy with the purer feelings of humanity; deriving no enjoyment from aught that interests in life and occupies its varied hours; her existence was a mere blank, unless when in the arms of her paramour husband, and therefore was it that she craved incessantly after the horrible draught.
Walter is too doting a husband to notice as the residents of his land either perish or flee. Eventually, Brunhilda is forced to prey upon her own family members. After taking the lives of her stepchildren, she turns to Walter:
She now began to fix her blood-thirsty lips on Walter’s breast, when cast into a profound sleep by the odour of her violet breath he reclined beside her quite unconscious of his impending fate: yet soon did his vital powers begin to decay; and many a grey hair peeped through his raven locks.
There is hope, however. During one of his hunting trips, Walter sees “a bird of strange appearance” fly off, causing a rose-coloured twig to fall to the ground. He picks up the twig and, noticing its sweet scent, decides to taste it; but the flavour turns out to be bitter and he throws the twig away. This twig, as it happens, is a counterpart to the garlic later popularized by Bram Stoker as a means of warding away vampires; its positioning in the story implies that it is some sort of divine gift – even the combination of a sweet scent and a bitter taste recalls the book eaten by John in Revelation (“it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey”). The twig has made Walter immune to the soporific effects of Brunhilda’s breath, and so he wakes up during her next attack:
Yet hardly had he fallen asleep, ere a pungent smarting pain disturbed him from his dreams; and. opening his eyes, he discerned, by the gloomy rays of a lamp, that glimmered in the apartment what for some moments transfixed him quite aghast, for it was Brunhilda, drawing with her lips, the warm blood from his bosom. The wild cry of horror which at length escaped him, terrified Brunhilda, whose mouth was besmeared with the warm blood. “Monster!” exclaimed he, springing from the couch, “is it thus that you love me?”
Plagued by guilt, Walter flees his household; he spends night after night in caves or crannies, yet Brunhilda returns to him each time he falls asleep. Finally, he meets the sorcerer, who advises him on how to finally slay Brunhilda: “pierce her bosom with a sharpened dagger, which I will furnish thee with; at the same time renounce her memory forever, swearing never to think of her intentionally, and that, if thou dost involuntarily, thou wilt repeat the curse.”
Walter reluctantly goes through with this and stabs Brunhilda. Once seemingly free of the revenant, he falls in love with a mysterious stranger who physically resembles Swinhilda. The two marry, and as his new wife has reminded him, he is yet young enough to beget more children. For a period, it looks as though Walter – like Job – will have his lost family replaced. But there is a twist ending, and the marriage ends in tragedy:
At length Walter, heated with wine and love, conducted his bride into the nuptial chamber: but, oh! horror! scarcely had he clasped her in his arms ere she transformed herself into a monstrous serpent, which entwining him in its horrid folds, crushed him to death. Flames crackled on every side of the apartment; in a few minutes after, the whole castle was enveloped in a blaze that consumed it entirely: while, as the walls fell in with a tremendous crash, a voice exclaimed aloud–“Wake not the dead!”
Ernst Raupach’s tale is significant in that, although it postdates John Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, it shows no sign of having been influenced by that story. Besides its partial similarities to “Lenore” and the Biblical narrative of Job mentioned above – and, perhaps, elements of the Elizabeth Bathroy legend – it evokes the more gruesome fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, rather than Polidori’s work. At the same time, however, its narrative of a dead woman returning from the grave to drink blood before being stabbed through the heart unmistakably marks it as part of the vampire genre. In other words, Raupach’s tale can be read as part of a German vampire tradition running parallel to England’s Polidori.
Ludwig Tieck’s “Leibeszauber” (1812)
While Ludwig Tieck was not the author behind “Wake Not the Dead”, he was responsible for a vampire-adjacent story entitled “Leibeszauber”. This was originally published in his 1812 collection Phantasus and deemed significant enough by E. T. A. Hoffman to be mentioned in Die Serapionsbrüder. It was later translated into English “Love-Magic: Some Centuries Ago” in 1826 and “The Lovecharm” in 1831; all excerpts in this post are from the 1831 version.
Opening against the backdrop of a carnival, Tieck’s story concerns two characters – melancholy, introverted Emilius and excitable, extroverted Roderick – who are close friends despite their opposite natures. “Heyday, my friend, what a drowned puppy of a face!” remarks Roderick when he bumps into his dour acquaintance. “Is this the way to look in the carnival?” He invites Emilius to join him in a masked ball, but the latter scoffs at this “incomprehensible frivolousness”:
“Somebody has said, that to a deaf person who cannot hear the music a party of dancers must look like so many patients for a madhouse: but to my mind this detestable music itself, this twirling and whirling and pirouetting of half a dozen notes, each treading on its own heels, in those odious tunes, which ram themselves into our memory, nay, I might say, mix themselves up with our very blood, so that one cannot get rid of the taint for many a woful day after […] From my very childhood these tunes have made me unhappy, and have often all but driven me out of my senses. They are to me the ghosts and spectres and furies in the world of sound, and they come and buz round my head, and grin at me with horrid laughter.”
Emilius happens to be in love with a young woman, despite not even knowing her name, and decides to attend the masked ball after all in the hopes of meeting her. Later, while about town at night, Emilius catches sight of “an old woman of the uttermost hideousness”. So ugly is thisi scarlet-clad woman that, at first, he wonders if she is wearing a carnival mask before realising that “the old brown wrinkled face was one of Nature’s ploughing, and no mimic exaggeration.” He watches as the woman – named Alexia – meets with two men, and from their conversation learns that she is a witch with a line in love-charms.
Emilius goes on to attend the ball, but can find no sign of his sought-after woman; he dismisses the possibility of her being disguised, as he cannot accept the idea of such a beautiful face hidden beneath an ugly mask. He eventually catches sight of her and is appalled to see her accompanied by the ugly old woman, Alexia: “The beauteous maiden followed her, pale, stiff; her lovely bosom was all bared, but her whole form was like a marble statue.” Between the two is a little girl, and the scene grows more horrible still as Alexia kills the child, prompting a serpent to drink the spilt blood:
Then the old woman growled, and pulled out a long knife, and drew it across the white neck of the child. Here something crawled forth from behind that they seemed not to perceive, or it must have struck them with the same thrilling terrour as Emilius. A serpent curled its loathsome neck, scale after scale, lengthening and still lengthening, out of the darkness, and stoopt down over the child, whose lifeless limbs hung from the old woman’s arms: its black tongue lickt up the spirting red blood, and a green sparkling eye shot over into the eye, and brain, and heart of Emilius, who instantly dropt on the ground. He was senseless when found by Roderick some hours after.
The story then skips forward in time to Emilius’ wedding-day. We learn that the shock of witnessing the child’s murder caused him to lose his memory. He later became reunited with the mysterious young woman but, having no recollection of her involvement with the child’s death, he again fell in love with her, the two finally becoming engaged. He spends much of his wedding day in another dour mood, partly a result of witnessing the poverty around him and contemplating his own privilege.
Finally, as the ceremony approaches, he catches sight of the witch Alexia and his memories of the little girl’s murder return to him. Knowing now that his bride was involved, he attacks her with a knife:
Suddenly a piercing shriek burst from one of the rooms, and forth into the bloodred glow of the sunset rusht the pale bride, in a short white frock, about which wreaths of flowers were dangling, with her lovely bosom all naked, and her rich locks streaming through the air. As though mad, with rolling eyes and wrencht face, she darted along the gallery, and blinded by terrour could find neither door nor staircase; and immediately after dasht Emilius in chase of her, with the sparkling Turkish dagger in his high-uplifted hand.
The wedding-guests – wearing ugly masks, at Roderick’s direction – look on in horror as Emilius stabs his bride to death. When Alexia tries to subdue him, he leaps from on high and the two perish together.
Tieck’s story sometimes turns up in overviews of vampire literature, presumably because of the short passage in which the serpent (implied to be a demon summoned by Alexia) drinks the blood of the murdered child. While this is a somewhat arbitrary connection, the tale does have a thematic resemblence to a considerable amount of later vampire literature in its repeated contrasts between the beautiful and the grotesque. The ugly witch first appears beneath a marble statue of the Virgin Mary; the climactic wedding has guests wearing hideous carnival masks; and the lovely maiden turns out to be complicit in the gruesome murder of a child.
A similar contrast would become central to vampire literature, where images of blood-drinking and corpse-staking are offset by figures of beauty – sometimes victims, but at least as often vampires.
Lost without translation
Whatever confusion may exist about their authorship, both “Laßt die Todten ruhen” and “Leibeszauber” are at least available in English. The same cannot be said of many other vampire stories from nineteenth-century Germany. Montague Summers lists a few in The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928):
In Germany sensational fiction was long largely influenced by Polidori, and we have such romances as Zschokke’s Der tote Gast, Spindler’s Der Vampyr und seine Braut, Theodor Hildebrand’s Der Vampyr, oder die Totenbraut. Edwin Bauer’s roman à clef the clever Der Baron Vampyr, which was published at Leipzig in 1846, hardly concerns as here, whilst Ewald August König’s sensational Ein moderner Vampyr, which appeared in 1883, or Franz Hirsch’s Moderne Vampyr, 1873, productions which only use in their titles the word “Vampire” to attract,–one might say, to ensnare attention, are in this connexion no more deserving of consideration than mere chap-books and pedlar’s penny-ware such as Morelli’s Der Vampyr, and Dr. Seltzam’s pornographic Die Vampyre der Residenz.
Given that all of these works will now be out of copyright, perhaps it is only a matter of time before some enterprising publisher makes an effort – as Black Coat Press and Brian Stableford did with various French vampire novels – to finally produce English-language editions.
Next: How German theatre adapted an English vampire.
