Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 11: Gustav Meyrink and the Land of the Time-Leeches

Nosferatu's Kindred header image, with shadow of Nosferatu

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

While Nosferatu was adapted from the work of an Anglo-Irish author, the horror cinema of Weimar Germany also found ample source material closer to home. A prime example is the bibliography of Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian-German writer whose debut novel Der Golem (which completed serialisation in 1914) was adapted into a trilogy of silent films. Telling the story of an animated clay statue, the Golem saga is closer to the Frankenstein archetype than to Dracula, but Meyrink did make his contributions to vampire literature.

Meyrink’s short story “J. H. Obereits Besuch bei den Zeit-Egeln” (literally, “J. H. Obereits visits the Time-Leeches”) was originally published in 1916. An English translation, “The Land of the Time-Leeches”, followed in 1920 and was plucked out of obscurity by Peter Haining for his 1995 anthology The Vampire Omnibus. The story later turned up in a 2018 anthology called The Tales of Nosferatu. The English title suggests a pulp science fiction yarn, which is misleading – although Meyrink did explore a more science-fictional form of vampire in his stories “Bologneser Tränen” (1903), “Die Pflanzen des Doktor Cinderella” (1905) and “Der Kardinal Napellus” (1913), all based around vampire-like plants.

The framing sequence in “The Land of the Time-Leeches” has a narrator describing the grave of their grandfather. It bears the inscription “VIVO” – “I live” – which the protagonist considers “a strange watchword for a tombstone”. The narrator goes on to recount finding a collection of their grandfather’s old notes, bound in a book cover with a phrase hinting that the enigmatic word VIVO had a special significance: “How shall man escape death if not by ceasing to wait and hope?”

Examining the notes, the narrator learns that their grandfather belonged to a group called the Philadelphians, which purported to have been founded in ancient Egypt by the mythical Hermes Trismegistus. Also mentioned in this document is a man named Johann Hermann Obereit of Runkel. Heading to Runkel to learn more, the protagonist is surprised to find Obereit still living. More than a century in age, he reveals that he is believed by the locals to have died in 1792, even having a tomb that bears this date, and is now passing himself off as his own descendent. When he is dead for good, he explains, a certain word will be added to his tomb: “VIVO.”

All of this turns out to be the set-up for a story narrated by Obereit, which deals with vampires – or Time-leeches, as Obereit refers to them:

‘I believed in what men call life, till blow after blow fell on me, I lost whatever one may value most on earth – my wife, my children – all. Then fate brought about my meeting with your grandfather. It was he who taught me to understand what our desires are, what waiting is, what expectation, what hope is; how they are interlocked with one another; how one may tear the mask off the faces of those ghostly vampires. We called them the Time-leeches; for like blood-suckers they drain from our hearts Time, the very sap of life.

Obereit speaks of an old doctrine, implicitly known to the biblical patriarchs who lived for centuries, that “reaches how to step over the threshold of death without losing consciousness.” A person who has mastered this practice comes to view existence in a very different manner: “He has gained a new self, and what till then seemed his self becomes henceforth a tool just as now our hands and feet are organs for us.”

The account narrated by Obereit shows him following the teachings of the still-unnamed grandfather until he is able to send his spirit forth from his body. During this experience, he sees a number of weird forms: a naked child with a third eye on its forehead and no genitalia; swollen, featherless birds with staring eyes; a giant fawn with a head like that of a pug. He deduces that the creatures he sees are the ordinarily-invisible doubles of animals that live on earth, and that they feed vampire-like upon their terrestrial counterparts:

‘If the mothers of young animals are shot off and their little ones waste and waste away longing in faith for their good until they die in the tortures of starvation, spectral doubles grow up in this accursed spirit-land, and like spiders suck up the life that trickles from the creatures of our world. The life-powers of all that thus wane away in vain hopes, become gross shapes and luxurious weeds in this Leech-land, the very soil of which is impregnated by the fattening breath of time spent in vain waiting and waiting.’

Humans, as well as animals, have these invisible leeches. Obereit’s spirit body comes to a town, where he sees beings “staggering about swollen into spongy monsters with huge bellies, bulging eyes and cheeks puffed with fat”. These exist alongside humanity as “the vampires – their own demonic selves that devoted their Life and their Time.” In a satirical note, Obereit sees a bank promoting a lottery in which all tickets win first prize; exiting the building is a crowd of gold-carrying creatures, “phantoms in fat and jelly of all who waste their lives on earth in the insatiable hunger for a gambler’s gains.” He also sees the beings worshipping a god in a passage that has an unfortunate touch of cultural prejudice, the four-armed and animal-headed deity seeming like a parody of the Hindu pantheon:

‘I entered a vast hall; it seemed like a colossal temple whose columns reached the sky. There, on a throne of coagulated blood, sat a monstrous four-armed figure. Its body was human but its head a brute’s – hyaena-like, with foam-flecked jaws and snout. It was the war-god of the still savage superstitious nations who offer it their prayers for victory over their foes.’

Obereit flees the building and arrives at a splendid palace. The sight is familiar to him, as though the palace were a product of his imagination – and sure enough, the doorplate bears his own name. He is shocked by what he sees within:

‘Inside I saw myself clad in purple sitting at a table groaning with luxuries and waited on by thousands of fair women slaves. Immediately I recognized them as the women who had pleased my senses in life, though most of them but as a passing moment’s whim.
‘A feeling of indescribable hatred filled me when I realized that this foul double of mine had wallowed and revelled here in lust and luxury my whole life; that it was I myself who had called him into being and lavished riches on him by the outflow of the magic power of my own self, drained from me by the vain hopes and lusts and expectations of my soul.
‘With terror I saw that my whole life had been spent in waiting and in waiting only – as it were an unstaunchable bleeding death; that the time left me for feeling the present amounted to only a few hours.’

The sight leads him to contemplate human existence. He realises that human beings “are forms made out of Time – bodies that seem to be matter, but are no more than coagulated Time.” The beings that he sees, embodiments of material pursuits, are parasites that drain precious time from humanity. He concludes that he must “fight unto the death with every weapon against those phantoms that suck our life away like vampires.”

“The Land of the Time-Leeches” is one of the stories that makes the genre of weird fiction live up to its name. It occasionally shows signs of heading in the direction of mere convention only to take a prompt diversion somewhere far stranger. The basic device of a narrator having an out-of-body-experience and observing a new plane of reality superimposed over the mundane recalls two lesser-known stories by H. G. Wells, “The Plattner Story” (1896) and “The Stolen Body” (1898). The element of satire and moral commentary, meanwhile, has something of John Bunyan about it. Towards its end it threatens to descend into obviousness, the vampires embodying greed and other human vices, but Meyrink turns out to reach a rather subtler conclusion than this. The end of the story has Obereik outlining his philosophy to the narrator:

‘You must put the axe to the root. Become as an automaton in this world, as one dead though seemingly alive. Never reach out after a tempting fruit, if there is to be the shortest waiting for it. Do not stir a hand; and all will fall ripe into your lap. At the beginning, and for long perchance, it may be like a wandering through desert plains void of all consolation; but suddenly there will be a brightness round you and you will see all things – beautiful and ugly – in a new and unexpected splendour. Then will there be no more “importance” and “unimportance” for you; every event will be equally “important” and “unimportant.”’

During the two centuries before Nosferatu was released, German authors conjured up a varied menagerie of vampires. Across this series we have seen the spurned lover of Heinrich August Ossenfelder; the reaper-like soldier-boy of Gottfried August Bürger; the Grecian bride of Goethe; the obsessed she-ghoul of Hoffman; the cautionary figure of Ernst Raupach; the Byronic vampires of German stage; the proto-Dracula of Karl von Wachsmann; Heinrich Heine’s undead Helen of Troy; the Wildean character of George Sylvester Viereck; the ghostly countess of Franz Hartmann; and, as we have seen, Gustav Meyrink’s extradimensional, time-stealing, semi-allegorical vampires.

Not all of these bear much resemblance to Nosferatu’s Count Orlok, and Meyrink’s vampires are amongst those furthest removed. Yet, the author may well have had an indirect influence upon the iconic vampire of Weimar cinema.

As noted earlier, Meyrink’s novel Der Golem was successfully adapted for film. But the novel’s illustrations by artist Hugo Steiner-Prag have little bearing on the stocky, lumbering figure shown onscreen. Instead, the Golem was depicted as an eerie, ghost-like entity, bald-headed and formed like the play of shadow and light.

The Steiner-Prag rendition of Meyrink’s Golem, it has to be said, bears a distinct resemblance to the vampire in Nosferatu

Series Navigation<< Nosferatu’s Kindred, Part 10: The Authenticated Vampire Story of Franz Hartmann
Advertisements
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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Close
Menu
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com