Nosferatu film still.

Nosferatu turns 100: The undying anxieties of capitalist decay

That it is possible to compare the anxieties of interwar Germany to our own speaks to the crises which produce them.

Individuals perceiving a piece of art will often seek out its meaning, but what makes an artistic creation truly timeless is its ability to be understood in different ways by audiences with unique experiences and living in distinct cultural, political, and historical contexts. In this way, art, be it a painting, a work of literature, or a film, is an inherently dialectical phenomenon. Rather than something static, its meaning becomes dynamic, rich, and varied, representing an original synthesis of ideas with each engagement. The meaning we take from this engagement represents more than a unilateral expression of information conveyed in a straight line, and instead becomes a collaboration between the audience and the artist. While Nosferatu the vampyre might remain unchanged in a century of immortality, the timelessness of Nosferatu the film is possible precisely due to the changes in society and the fresh blood of new audiences drawing their own parallels and interpretations with each viewer, and even each viewing. This is what ultimately defines a classic. 

First released in March of 1922, Nosferatu, Symphony of the Night, directed by F. W. Murnau, was a silent horror film from the German expressionist movement which peaked during the Weimar period following WWI and lasted into the early 1930s. Despite attempts to have the film destroyed by Bram Stoker’s heirs due to its blatant copying of Dracula, the film would ultimately become an iconic classic in its own right, with its lead played by Max Schreck, Count Orlok, recognizable by many even a century on. While Nosferatu is no doubt Murnau’s most famous film, even attaining a cult following over the years, his other works have received less attention and his career unfortunately ended rather early, when he died following a car accident in 1931 at just 42 years old. 

In 1920, Murnau had directed an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, given the title The Head of Janus. It is perhaps ironic that this film featured actor Bela Lugosi, who would a decade later become best known for his eponymous role in the 1931 American rendition of Dracula. Lugosi had found himself in Germany, having recently escaped from Hungary, where he had founded the National Trade Union of Actors, the first film actors’ union in the world, and where he had taken an active part in the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Following the installation of Miklós Horthy’s dictatorship with the support of the imperialist powers, Lugosi’s political activity marked him as a prime target for the brutal white terror that accompanied it.

In terms of technique, Nosferatu is historically significant for its early uses of montage. While prolific today, montage — a method of juxtaposing sequences to convey symbolic meaning — was only just beginning to come into use during the 1920s. The groundbreaking technique’s rise in popularity has its roots in the October Revolution, and the revolution in culture and the arts that came alongside it carried by the Soviet avant-garde. Soviet director and film theorist Lev Kuleshov’s work is generally considered to be the basis for montage theory in cinema, which would be put into practice most famously during this period by his student, Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s films include Battleship Potemkin, October: Ten Days That Shook the World, Alexander Nevsky, and many others. Eisenstein argued that “the essence of cinema does not lie in the images, but in the relation between the images!’’ This relation was not simply a connection or linkage for Eisenstein, but rather a conflict of opposing images, ideas, and emotions which the filmmaker united in dialectical synthesis. The usage of this technique in Nosferatu thus links Murnau to the revolution in cinema made possible by the proletarian triumph of 1917. 

While several characters and plot elements were removed, a number of the themes and metaphors prominent in Stoker’s Dracula remained present in Murnau’s film adaptation. One of these, common throughout many vampire stories, is that of “the other.” This “other” can stand in for a variety of outsiders in the conscious and subconscious minds of the audience, and some have suggested that, particularly in the minds of interwar Germans, Count Orlok might have resembled a Jewish caricature. Some of Orlok’s features, such as his long nose, or what some have described as a ratlike appearance are comparable to Jewish stereotypes that characterized anti-Semitic representations during this period. Add in Orlok’s wealth and purchasing of German properties, and furthermore his association with contagion and disease, and this argument becomes even more plausible. Others however have argued that Murnau, being gay, would not likely have been quick to punch downwards or fall into stereotyping and such negative depictions of other groups facing prejudice. There is certainly little evidence to suggest otherwise. Nevertheless, Nosferatu clearly touched on certain societal anxieties held by many of its viewers at the time, particularly a hostile infiltration by an outsider. Many Germans would have held such fears in the wake of World War I, whether or not the link was intended as explicitly anti-Semitic or whether Murnau was cognizant of the underlying sources of these fears. 

Often passed over in dominant Western liberal narratives of Hitler’s rise to power were the fears that the Nazis similarly preyed on and fuelled towards the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe. In Hitler’s theory of Judeo-Bolshevism, the Nazi conceptualization of Jew, communist, and Slav frequently become entangled and in many cases more or less interchangeable. In fact, the first uses of gas in the extermination of human populations during the Holocaust were not on Jews, but on Red Army prisoners of war on the Eastern front. In pseudoscientific Nazi race theory, Slavs were yet another lesser race of untermensche, or sub-humans, who, having been contaminated by Asiatic blood, were inferior to the Aryan Europeans of the Third Reich and to other Western European peoples. It is this inherent “inferiority” that had led Slavs, like Jews, to seek to overturn the “natural order” in which the strong triumph and the weak serve or perish and to instead to take up the “unnatural” idea of communism, based on principles of equality and egalitarianism. The Jewish “contagion” or “virus” was “discovered” by Nazi scientists to be the source of this madness that caused the weak to revolt against strong, the slaves against the masters — a line of thinking that Italian philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo outlines in significant detail in his writings. As Losurdo reveals, however, this same language was in use throughout the imperialist countries during this period and can hardly be said to originate with the Nazis. 

Coming from the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, it is not inconceivable that Orlok might have been seen by some of the film’s viewers as representative of these “Eastern hordes” that menaced the imaginations of increasing numbers of Germans following World War I. This particular trope dovetails neatly with the “stab in the back” mythology, according to which Germany had lost the war due to a betrayal by unpatriotic socialists, communists, and of course Jews, who sabotaged the war effort in no small part due to foreign ideas imported from Russia and the October Revolution. 

While the film horrified audiences in its time, what is far more terrifying is the resonance that such themes might find in certain audiences today. During the pandemic, Sinophobia and racist attacks increased dramatically in Canada and the United States. While some of this might be attributed to Donald Trump and other right-wing commentators’ linkage of the COVID-19 virus to China, anti-Chinese rhetoric has a long history in the West, which has only intensified with China’s ascent to the status of world power. Many 19th- and 20th-century Asian caricatures produced by imperial powers employ the same tropes and imagery of rodents, uncleanliness, and contagion that appear in Nazi propaganda meant to appeal to Germans — a similarity quite uncoincidental. If the film had been released in 2022, the foreign infiltrator from the East bringing plague and disease into society could very well be interpreted by some as a metaphor for China. In the last federal election, many Canadian politicians raised the issue of “foreign buyers,” deflecting blame for skyrocketing housing costs on wealthy outsiders, with China again bearing the brunt of these xenophobic attacks. 

What is the meaning Marxists can take from all this? Perhaps there is a reason that parallels may be drawn between the fears and socioeconomic anxieties in Murnau’s time and ours beyond pure coincidence. Fears rooted in xenophobia, financial instability, scarce housing, in death by sickness and disease — the similarities are in fact quite remarkable. That it is possible to compare the anxieties of interwar Germany and those present in 21st century Canada speaks to the origins of these anxieties, the crises which produce them, and the ruling classes’ methods of scapegoating, which have changed little in the course of a century. 

There is a vampire in our midst. An undead corpse that, even as it rots, refuses to die. But according to Marx, its name is neither Orlok, nor Dracula, but capital. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Capitalism is the source of economic insecurity and rising costs of housing, not “foreign buyers.” Capitalism, similarly, is the reason we have been unable to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, a plague perpetuated by our own desperately underfunded healthcare system and the prioritization of profit before people. A virus, moreover, not brought here by China any more than by Count Orlok himself.

Even in Murnau’s time, Lenin had already recognised in capitalist stagnation and decay the monster of imperialism and what would soon become known as fascism, the horrifying sequel to unchecked scapegoating, xenophobia, and racism. But this monster too can be defeated, and like Orlok only with the dawn — the dawn of the revolution and a brilliant red sunrise that illuminates and exposes the real source of suffering in our society: the parasitic capitalist class. Unlike the sunrise we expect each day, however, an end to the long dark night of capitalism is neither inevitable nor guaranteed. It is completely dependent on the human factor — on our ability to unite, organize, and to bring about the conditions necessary to facilitate another Red October in this century.