Nosferatu: A Novel

INTRODUCTION

Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe was born to a family in the textile trade on December 28, 1888, in the Westphalian city of Bielefeld, in the farmlands of northwest Germany. At the age of eighteen, after receiving his Abitur, the angular and gawky Wilhelm went east to study philology at the University of Berlin, and at the Charlottenburg railway station met a finely freckled, barrel-chested classmate who yearned to become a poet. For Wilhelm, Jim Shepard writes, it was as if he’d caught his first glimpse of life’s splendor, which in its fullness always surrounded him, veiled from view and far off. With Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, the son of a wealthy Jewish banker, Wilhelm fell in love.

The soulmates went on to the University of Heidelberg where they studied art history and literature until the great director Max Reinhardt offered Wilhelm a place in his newly founded theater school in Berlin. There the young man established himself as a rather good actor and fledgling stage director, and fell into friendships with the lunatic poet, Else Lasker-Schüler, and with Walter Spiess, a painter who seemed to be committed to nothing in particular, to stand in an attitude of general hospitality to opportunities.

Shepard here suggests that Wilhelm jettisoned his family name—plump in German meaning just what it does in English and also carrying the added indignity of clumsy—after a Christmas idyll with Hans in a ski lodge at the Upper Bavarian spa of Murnau, where he assumed the village’s name as his own. They’d gone there in the hope of rededicating themselves to each other, but just a few years later while Murnau placidly submitted to a homosexual tryst with Spiess, afterward watching Hans’s contentment transformed into the damaged wariness of a child’s understanding that his loved ones weren’t motivated only by selflessness.

Soon after their country recklessly plunged into the Great War, Hans joined the infantry, and Murnau was called into the First Regiment of the Foot Guards at Potsdam, transferring into the Flying Corps after hearing that Hans was killed in the infantry trenches of the Russian front, identified only by his torso. Assigned to an observation squadron that flew flimsy, fabric-covered biplanes, Murnau crashed to earth several times before a final crash landing in Switzerland took him out of the war. Shepard suspects it was an act of desertion that was inspired almost wholly by his deep mourning for Hans. As Shepard movingly puts it, Hans was the anguish that pulled its plow through his sleep.

In the chaos of postwar Germany, the six-foot-four Murnau realizing there was little call for giants onstage … threw in his lot with motion pictures working, Shepard tells us, as a secretary, travel agent, still photographer, publicity writer, film cutter, title writer, handholder, and actor. After the war, Murnau writes, I bought a battered old view camera and tripod in a Charlottenburg junk shop and began shooting pictures of everything within range. Within the dozen years from 1919 to 1931, F. W. Murnau would direct more than twenty productions, including Nosferatu, the first and finest of the films based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as well as the justly celebrated and innovative movies Der Letzte Mann, Faust, Sunrise, and Tabu. At the age of forty-two he was an international star and widely considered one of the greatest film directors of the twentieth century. And then suddenly, in March 1931, F. W. Murnau freakishly died following a car accident on a winding road south of Santa Barbara.

Jim Shepard’s stunning, sympathetic, fictional biography of F. W. Murnau does not attempt to present the life of the film director in full, but in eight highly selective chapters that glimpse the man in various critical junctures in his development. And so of Murnau’s many films only the difficult projects of Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann, and Tabu are afforded extended treatment by Shepard, for emotional crisis is at the core of fictional narratives, and periods of stability and commitment, while good for the health, do not generate the fodder for plot.

Even for his intimates, Murnau was hard to get to know, for he was a cold, passive, sphinx-like introvert whose sense of humor was undernourished, who insisted his actors and crews call him Doctor, and who gave the impression of puritanical discretion and conservative rectitude, and yet hired a succession of houseboys from the South Seas for live-in sex. Somewhere along the line, Shepard writes, he’d evolved into a man of strong opinions and solitary meals.

Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror made Murnau famous, but as Shepard points out in his convincing, invented journal of the shoot—inspired by the journals of filmmakers as diverse as D. W. Griffiths, Karl Freund, and Jean Cocteau—the character of Nosferatu (a Slavic term for the undead) crystallizes Murnau’s own perception of himself as a lurking outsider who feeds on the lifesource of others. Else Lasker-Schüller here notes the similarities: ‘Have you noticed,’ she asked, ‘how many of your films have involved a couple jeopardized by a third figure who’s sinister, ambiguous, and male?’

More than most American fiction writers Jim Shepard has demonstrated an ardent and informed interest in the cinema, science, technology, warfare, and history. In an interview for Tin House magazine in 2003, I asked him why he was attracted to such material, and he answered that he thought it was because first of all, it’s a way of enlarging my contact with the world, and secondly because it’s a way of enlarging the arena of my autobiographical obsessions. It’s a way to fiddle with and expand what we might call the ground: that element in our work that proscribes all our choices. I guess I’m looking to complicate my memory, and complicate the categorical narrowness of my intellectual discipline.

Shepard wondered if many contemporary writers avoid historical material because they worry about the issue of authority, forgetting, perhaps, that that issue—the issue of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility—is always with us. Really: where do we get the authority to write from the point of view of anyone, other than ourselves? The whole project of literature is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?

In fact, some initial reviewers of Nosferatu were so unaware of the wide extent of Shepard’s imaginary constructions that various journal entries in the novel, letters to and from Hans, and other completely persuasive episodes that have such a deep feeling for the odd, disillusioned, decadent life in postwar Germany were assumed to be real historical documents, but those invented scenes were simply indebted to scrupulous research into the period.

On the one hand, Shepard told me, a historical novelist has the advantage of being given characters and a situation; on the other hand, you’re provided with all these constraints, as well. I think those fiction writers who deal with history the most effectively … have an understanding that (A) fiction about real events needs to respect the facts, and (B) as our politicians have taught us, facts are malleable things. The trick, I guess, is to do everything possible to honor A as you understand it, while taking full advantage of B to shape your material into something aesthetically beautiful.

Shepard edited Writers at the Movies, an anthology of film appreciations, he regularly contributes film criticism to the Sunday New York Times, he’s the film columnist for the Believer, and much of his teaching at Williams College is in hugely popular, large lecture classes on film genres and great directors. Shepard explained his keen interest in cinema by saying, "Like a lot of people of our generation, I grew up on movies. We watched movies all the time in my house, so I’m sure that kind of model had a fundamental effect on how I constructed narrative. There are all sorts of ways in which film has directly and indirectly showed itself in my fiction, besides Nosferatu. I remember conceiving the end of [my novel] Paper Doll, which involved the massive and catastrophic 8th Air Force attack on Schweinfurt, in cinematic terms: What would you see at this point? Where would the camera be placed for this? There’s a way in which film pushes you toward both the visual and the kinetic, as opposed to, say, the intricately expositional, or ruminative. At other times … film has given me not only my governing metaphors, but my protagonists."

Such is the case with Jim Shepard’s Nosferatu, a brilliant series of snapshots of a deeply flawed but seminal genius of the silent screen whose ambition it was to photograph thought.

—Ron Hansen

CHARLOTTENBURG, 1907

He first noted sleeplessness in his journal in May of 1907. That year he turned eighteen, passed his Abitur in Kassel, and moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg to study philology. There he got to know Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, who was first a schoolmate and then a soulmate. Their friendship made a poet out of Ehrenbaum-Degele, and a filmmaker out of Murnau.

Murnau was still at that point named Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe. He was a boy from the provinces. His friend’s mother was a well-known opera singer, and the father a wealthy banker. They lived in an oversized villa in the Grunewald. The family was passionately interested in culture, which was a sea change from what Wilhelm was used to at home.

Two years later, under the cover of darkness, he and his friend would travel south to an inn in the Upper Bavarian town of Murnau, where the next morning, in a sober, private ceremony, the student Wilhelm Plumpe would give up his cloddish surname and take the name with which he would become renowned.

But that August morning in 1907 he left his home with only his mother to part from. He was sick from nervous anticipation. He continually annoyed and comforted himself by rubbing his thumb over his fist. His mother told him to try to make friends at school. Begin over. And not to get the reputation of being quiet. Well-intended advice, but when the stars sang to the moon, he thought, then he’d be talkative and likeable.

His father’s only remark as he prepared to go was A black tie? Has there been the death of a stage actor?

His two older brothers, already resentful of the fuss and their mother’s agitation, declined to come down to see him off.

He rode the train east in a first-class compartment. His father had absolutely ruled out such an indulgence, and his mother had slipped him the extra money to change the fare. For most of the trip he rode under the insolent scrutiny of two immaculately dressed young men across the aisle. One featured a silk collar with an iridescent rose-and-copper tie, and spar-rock cuff links. Wilhelm was wearing his only suit. On either side of him were trunks too large for the baggage racks: the farmboy, in from the country with all his worldly possessions.

He managed his first hellos as a man of the world. The two young men responded with the thin smiles they might offer the mother of a harelipped infant. Wilhelm gave their expressions the benefit of the doubt and spent the rest of the trip empty-headed with self-conscious excitement. From time to time he peered through his windowpane at the sodden countryside, and through that wet glass he first viewed Berlin’s landscape of moraines.

His grand entrance to Charlottenburg involved having to wrestle his trunks off the passenger step of the lounge car. The immaculate fellow passengers had long since left. One trunk became wedged. He heard titters behind him. He sweated and pulled. His embarrassment increased. He felt he should have been wearing a straw hat and carrying chickens in a cage.

Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele was across the platform, watching from a bench. He looked comfortably situated. His compact valise sat parallel to his feet.

For Wilhelm it was as if he’d caught his first glimpse of life’s splendor, which in its fullness had always surrounded him, veiled from view and far off. He stared while extricating his trunks. The boy at whom he stared was finely freckled. He had a pleasant squint. He had shell-blue eyes, and the tolerant expression of someone watching a small animal attempt something inexplicable.

Behind Wilhelm an elderly woman finally asked if he needed assistance. Wilhelm forgot to speak, for looking at the boy on the bench.

Later he asked his new friend why he hadn’t helped.

Hans said he thought it was something he should manage by himself—first day and all that. He then asked why, if he had seemed so rude, Wilhelm had come over and introduced himself.

All this had transpired while they shared a hansom to school. Wilhelm, emboldened by his first day of adventure, had confided that he’d thought to himself, If you don’t talk to him now, you’ll only waste weeks trying to find him again. And so he had stacked his two trunks and lumbered over, teetering under the weight.

At a pub outside of the school grounds, his new friend asked the hansom to stop and wait. Inside, he bought them each a tumbler of milk. He seemed as unembarrassed in a foreign place as an Englishman.

He was barrel-chested. His cheekbones were broad, and the unlined quality of his face reminded Wilhelm of bread dough. His lower lip was prominent, as if he were undecided between deep thought and a tantrum.

He chatted about opera and the theater. Wilhelm felt as though they were picking up the thread of a conversation they’d already begun.

He watched his new friend surreptitiously. He could make out the shadow of his eyelashes. He watched him drink his milk. Within a half hour, he was trying to transmit looks in which he’d invested his heart and soul. Hans carried on with his conversation unfazed.

Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele wanted to know what the new arrival’s goals were in life. Intimidated, Wilhelm said, The theater. He had never vocalized that ambition before. He’d told his parents he intended to study philology.

He lapsed into embarrassed silence.

Hans volunteered that besides poetry, he had no specific dreams; he was still in the unencumbered good time of his youth. He turned his foot inward every so often in order to glance at his shoes, which evidently pleased him.

For the rest of the ride he held forth in a mini-lecture. They might be studying philology, he said, but their ultimate concern was art, which meant they should consider themselves artists. Berlin was open to innovation. The Secessionists had triumphed over the academicians; the galleries were supportive; the press willing to review new directions. Berliners were open-minded, difficult to please, skeptical and critical. In a nutshell, the city was an express, hurtling forward.

Periodically, Wilhelm nodded feebly.

Expressionism, for example, had originated in the provinces—small Bavarian towns, little seaside villages in Schleswig-Holstein—and yet when had the world come to hear of it? When those artists had traveled to Berlin!

The lecture continued later in Wilhelm’s room. Toward twilight, when Wilhelm noted that the administration had scheduled an orientation tea, Hans responded that he had called for another hansom. They were going to Berlin for an orientation of their own.

The hansom deposited them at a streetcar stop. The streetcar arrived in minutes. Following Hans onto it, Wilhelm remembered the way he’d planned to go into Berlin after a month or so of settling into school and working up his courage.

Had Hans been to Berlin before? Wilhelm asked. His family was from the Grunewald, Hans answered. Then, respecting either his friend’s embarrassment or excitement, he kept silent.

The streetcar rattled into the city center as the lamps were coming on. Along a row of bakeries, middle-aged men were hauling up their awnings and getting out their bicycles. The streetcar passed four-story homes flanked with ancient chestnut trees, and luxury hotels with names done up in electric lights—the Adlon, the Bristol, Horcher’s. Lunchrooms and beer and sausage emporiums. Bars for draymen and coal- and potato-dealers. It stopped opposite the Komische Oper, which featured a twin bill of Damnation: 1,000 Women! and Berlin Without a Blouse.

They disembarked on the Leipzigerstrasse near Thälmannplatz, neither of them speaking. Wilhelm noted the location as if he’d be following a trail of bread crumbs home.

In an antiquities shop, they saw a display of prehistoric bones of the sort dug up in Asiatic deserts, then they walked slowly down a long, dim arcade, reading posters in the half-light.

For dinner, Hans debated with himself: Austro-Hungarian, Czech, or Russian. He chose a Russian café that was a favorite of his mother’s, and there they stuffed themselves to the brim with cold eggplant slices in oil, miniature Siberian dumplings in broth, a pink lamb shashlik and, for dessert, kisel, an opaque fruit jell.

After dinner, Wilhelm’s host announced that they were going to the All-City Revue You’ve Gotta See It! After paying the check, he led Wilhelm on a winding ramble which terminated at a huge dirty cellar that Wilhelm’s father, Herr Plumpe, would have called a Low Place.

The crowd was bumptious and jovial. The first skit turned out to be a celebration of the new elevated trolley. Then some Hohenzollern statues somewhere were ridiculed in a kind of comic dumb-show. Then a female personification of the city sang I have the foibles of my youth, I’m still a young metropolis! And then a woman dressed as a cross between a sailor and a Catholic Cardinal—Claire Waldoff! Hans exclaimed as