German – Page 3 – Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher

“The Black Spider”

Albert Bitzius (1797-1854) was a Swiss pastor and author, who is better known by his pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf. Gotthelf was a prolific writer whose novels and stories were based on the people of his village, Luetzelflueh, in the Bernese Emmental.

Albert Bitzius (Jeremias Gotthelf) circa 1844 — Albert Bitzius
(Jeremias Gotthelf)
circa 1844

Gotthelf is considered an important writer not only in Switzerland, but also as an important writer throughout the German-speaking world. Gotthelf’s works were primarily what we would today consider mainstream literature, but he did write one short novel that would be considered horror and for which he is renown: The Black Spider. Wikipedia notes:

The Black Spider is Gotthelf’s best known work. At first little noticed, the story is now considered by many critics to be among the masterworks of the German Biedermeier era and sensibility. Thomas Mann wrote of it in his The Genesis of Doctor Faustus that Gotthelf “often touched the Homeric” and that he admired The Black Spider “like no other piece of world literature.” [Thomas Mann quotation from One World Classics.]

The story can be read in the original German at Projekt Gutenberg DE. A good synopsis can be found at Wikipedia.

I read The Black Spider as an undergrad around 1979. It sticks in my mind to this day. Admittedly, I had to read the Wikipedia synopsis to recall all the details, but over the decades I can still picture the hunter/the devil kissing Christine on the cheek knowing something evil would come from that simple, slightly stinging kiss and then the outpouring of thousands of murderous spiders from that spot when she breaks her oath to him. Somehow I can still recall how I felt the loathsome horror of that moment for her, not as if it were happening to me, but almost as if it were happening to someone standing next to me, as if it were happening to someone I knew. Perhaps this is because I sympathized with her goal. Christine was trying to save her village, her friends, and her family from starvation and overwork at the hands of a merciless overlord. The only way she could do it was to try to outwit the devil at the risk of horrendous consequences if she failed…and she did fail. I think it was the nobility and selflessness of Christine’s altruism that still sticks with me emotionally after thirty years. The Russian author Anton Chekhov once advised writers to write with “sympathetic characters”; this is undoubtedly a terrific example of that principle.

The Black Spider by Franz Karl Basler-Kopp (1879-1937) — The Black Spider
by Franz Karl Basler-Kopp
(1879-1937)

One writing class I had several years ago advised to establish an “intellectual and emotional connection” between the audience and the subject. That has always proven to be excellent advice. In the case of “The Black Spider”, Gotthelf certainly established an emotional connection between Christine and myself. There have been times in my life, as in the lives of everyone else, when I have made sacrifices for the good of others (though of course not with the horrendous consequences that Christine suffers). Perhaps that is what enables us, the audience, to sympathize with Christine’s plight and to experience her torment vicariously.

Thinking back, it is with the characters with whom I have some type of shared experience, that I sympathize the most when something horrific happens to them. If we, as writers of horror, are to give our stories great emotional impact, then we have to develop characters that have their foundations in everyday experiences which our audiences can share. Lovecraft advised having average people as characters, because this made the supernatural appear truly supernatural. In “The Black Spider” all of Gotthelf’s characters are quite average, thus the supernatural events of the story strike home with great impact. Perhaps that is because we can visualize these events more clearly on some level as if we were watching them occur to our neighbors. Most of the characters in Stephen King’s writing seem to me to be quite average and we feel the same sympathy for their predicaments, because they are average..like us.

Sometimes, when I am reading an engrossing text in a quiet environment where I can fully concentrate on the text, I seem to almost slip into a nebulous world where I am experiencing the story as if I were in a lucid dream. With sympathetic characters like Christine, what little remains to separate myself from that dream world is shattered and I feel their sufferings much more acutely, as if they were happening to me, as if I were actually living the experience.

For me, being able to shatter that barrier between dream world and reality for my audience is part of the magic of writing. After all, isn’t magic the creation of illusion?

Thoughts? Comments?

Hanns Heinz Ewers: A First Impression

Hanns Heinz Ewers 1871-1943 — Hanns Heinz Ewers
1871-1943

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article (as of April 17, 2013) gives a good, very basic introduction to Hanns Ewers:

“Hanns Heinz Ewers (3 November 1871 in Düsseldorf – 12 June 1943 in Berlin) was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911).^[1]^[2]“

The article continues on to describe some of his literary achievements:

“This was followed in 1911 by Alraune, a reworking of the Frankenstein myth, in which Braun collaborates in creating a female homunculus or android by impregnating a prostitute with the semen from an executed murderer. The result is a young woman without morals, who commits numerous monstrous acts. Alraune was influenced by the ideas of the eugenics movement, especially the book Degeneration by Max Nordau.^[4] Alraune has been generally well received by historians of the horror genre; Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Alraune as “Ewers’ decadent masterwork”,^[2] Brian Stableford argues Alraune “deserves recognition as the most extreme of all “femme fatale” stories” ^[4] and E.F. Bleiler states the scenes in Alraune set in the Berlin underworld as among the best parts of the novel.^[3] The novel was filmed several times, most recently by Erich von Stroheim in 1952.

Bleiler notes “Both Alraune and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are remarkable for the emotion the author can arouse” and that Ewers’ writing is, at its best, “very effective”. However, Bleiler also argues Ewers’ work is marred by “annoying pretentiousness, vulgarity, and a very obtrusive and unpleasant author’s personality”.^[3]“

So far I have read only two of Ewers’ short stories: “The Spider”, described as his “most anthologized work”, and “Fairyland”. I will need to read more of his works to be able to speak with some degree of confidence that I know what I am talking about, but my first impression of Ewers’ works is one of disappointment.

I read both works in English (though I speak German with moderate fluency), and his command of composition, organization, language, clarity, and suspense are competent enough, but at least the stories noted above seem to fall apart at having a comprehensible denouement, and in the area of having good taste.

“The Spider” starts off well enough with a great opening paragraph that sets the stage for suspense:

“When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move
into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6),
three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the
window in that room on three successive Fridays.”

As the story develops, Bracquemont volunteers to work with the police in finding out why the three previous residents killed themselves by reporting what he sees during his stay. He records his observations in a diary. Over the next three or so weeks, Bracquemont begins observing a girl in another room across the street, who constantly spins at an old-fashioned spinning wheel. He begins to be attracted to her, he waves to her, they develop games to play over the distance (mimicking each other, etc.), he becomes infatuated with her, and obsession sets in all the while there are subtle hints of analogies between her and a female spider luring her mate to its death. I will not spoil the ending for you, if you want to read it (I read the version at Project Gutenberg Australia), but I will say that the story seemed rather drawn out and the ending was confusing with no real explanation as to why the story ends as it does. I suppose one could say it was “black magic”, as one critic noted, but there is nothing alluding to black magic anywhere previously in the story. The ending is sort of deus ex machina and very unsatisfying.

“Fairyland” is worse. It’s only virtue is that it is very short. It is the story of a cute little girl on a tramp steamer in Port-au-Prince who is the darling of the crew and who tells them of wonderful monsters she has seen ashore, monsters with enormous heads and limbs and scales. She offers to show them to the crew and the crew agrees to go along wondering what she has found. Not far from the docks, she shows them the local beggars who have enormous limbs from having contracted elephantiasis or scales from leprosy or a similar skin disease. While the crew is obviously overcome with disgust, the little girl prattles on about how cute the monsters are.

I am not one to berate anyone else over a lack of taste, but whoever published this deserved a good horsewhipping for deciding to put this atrocity in the public view. It is one of the more tasteless things I have ever seen. However, I will discourage anyone from reading it. After all, it is a matter of taste and we are dealing with matters of horror.

So far, Ewers is the one author of horror I have been most disappointed by. Still I will read at least a few more of his works before I solidify my opinion. At some point I may read Alraune only because it is his best known work, but from what I have seen of its reviews, it may be a struggle for me to wade through horrors which only the Marquis de Sade would appreciate.

Perhaps Ewers does deserve his accolades. I will only know by exploring his works further. So far though, I am not looking forward to the journey, which I make only out of intellectual curiosity.

There is one interesting sidelight about Ewers for fans of cinematic horror. One reviewer commented somewhere (I forget where) that Alraune was the original inspiration for genetically-mutated femme fatales like the alien in the Species trilogy.

Thoughts? Comments?

More on ETA Hoffmann

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann1776-1822 — Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
1776-1822

I am up late tonight and thought I would just throw together a few additional tidbits on one of the earliest masters of horror: ETA Hoffman.

Here is an interesting paragraph from The Literary Gothic:

24 January 1776 – 25 June 1822

You know the “Nutcracker” ballet, the one that every local ballet troupe is obligated to perform at Christmas? This isn’t the guy — Tchaikovsky wrote that music in the 1890s, using the translation by Alexander Dumas (pere) rather than Hoffmann’s original. But Hoffmann wrote the short story that lies behind it, and it’s a short story that’s very unlike the charmingly sentimental puffery that little kids get dragged to every December. Very unlike… Hoffmann, a brilliant music critic and respectable composer as well as writer, is one of the major figures of German Romanticism, and a powerful and disturbing writer — and disturbed, according to many; Sir Walter Scott, in his extended discussion of Hoffmann and literary supernaturalism, concludes that Hoffmann needs medical attention more than he needs literary criticism, and no less a student of dysfunctional minds (which I guess is just about everyone’s) than Sigmund Freud made Hoffman’s “The Sandman” the center of his essay on “The Uncanny.” Hoffmann, although strongly influenced by Gothic literature, is probably best regarded as a fantasist rather than a “Gothic” or “horror” writer, although Freud’s term is perhaps the most apt.

This link leads to a rather lengthy article on Hoffmann and German Romanticism at theliterarylink.com. I haven’t read it yet, but to a fan of German literature like myself, it looks fascinating. I hope to find time to read it soon.

Here is a link to the text of “The Sandman“, one’s of Hoffmann’s most famous works. Litgothic.com says about it:

“The classic — and widely anthologized — tale of a boy and his automaton — and, according to Freud, who discusses this work in his essay “The Uncanny,” castration anxiety. Automata, by the way, were a happening phenomenon in the C19 — check out Edgar Allan Poe‘s “Maelzel’s Chess Player” and Hoffmann’s own “Automata” for other Gothic-tradition examples; for a general discussion of automata, check out The Automata Gallery or this History of Automata.”

Here is a link to the goodreads.com article on Hoffmann. And from there here are two interesting quotes from Hoffmann:

“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?” ETA Hoffmann

“There are… otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.”
― E.T.A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions Brüder: Gesammelte Erzählungen Und Märchen In Vier Bänden

Another link to another lengthy article on Hoffmann, but this one deals with Hoffmann’s treatment of “the uncanny”.

Another interesting summary of Hoffmann’s talent, this one from nndb.com:

“Hoffmann is one of the master novelists of the Romantic movement in Germany. He combined with a humor that reminds us of Jean Paul the warm sympathy for the artist’s standpoint towards life, which was enunciated by early Romantic leaders like Tieck and Wackenroder; but he was superior to all in the almost clairvoyant powers of his imagination. His works abound in grotesque and gruesome scenes — in this respect they mark a descent from the high ideals of the Romantic school; the gruesome was only one outlet for Hoffmann’s genius, and even here the secret of his power lay not in his choice of subjects, but in the wonderfully vivid and realistic presentation of them. Every line he wrote leaves the impression behind it that it expresses something felt or experienced; every scene, vision or character he described seems to have been real and living to him. It is this realism, in the best sense of the word, that made him the great artist he was, and gave him so extraordinary a power over his contemporaries.”

That’s it for tonight. I am off to the land of dreams.

Okay…just one more addendum to German Horror

I saw another really cool post on the photos of the German Horror Writers Circle that I just had to share. The book cover above is of the novel “Meeting with Skinner” by Harald A. Weissen posted on Facebook on May 7, 2010. The accompanying summary reads:

“Imagine, that everything great that has occurred in the world since the beginning of time has been steered from a control room – discoveries, wars, political reversals, poverty, and prosperity.

Imagine that a single person has been sitting in this control room for several decades and the fortunes of the human collective has been influenced at his own discretion.

Imagine that the next person in this room is crazy.

The search for the control room draws together a traumatised young woman by the name of Laika, Elendes Biest, and Skinner , the last illusionist.”

I just think it’s an awesome post and a fascinating concept. The artwork is great too.

Thoughts? Comments?

Addendum to Post on German Horror

I have been exploring German horror on the web since my last post, particularly the photos of the German Horror Writers Circle on Facebook, where I found this really beautiful, really cool cover that I just had to share. The post is by Nina Horvath and says “Cover zu ‘Die Schattenuhr’, erstellt von Mark Freier nach einem Werk von Zdzisław Beksiński” (Cover to ‘The Clock of Shadows’, published by Mark Freier after a work by Zdzisław Beksiński). At the very top of the page, “Die Bizarre Welt des Edgar Allen Poe” translates to “The Bizarre World of Edgar Allen Poe”. One thing I have already learned about horror in Germany is that American horror is very popular over there–in particular Lovecraft and Poe.

German Horror (Deutsche Horrorfilme und Horrorliteratur)

I was checking my blog stats today and found out that two recent views came from Germany. I was a German major in college and therefore I begin to be curious about what is happening today in the horror genre for both German movies and literature, since I unfortunately know little about either.

I did a quick search on Google for “German horror” and found this interesting article on IMDb. I did another search for “German horror fiction” and “German horror literature” and found almost nothing of interest. I searched for “German horror writers” and found the German Horror Writers Circle on Facebook, which I might use as a starting point for further investigations. Later, I may search in German, but today I confined my inquiries to what is available in English due to a lack of time inflicted by other pressing matters.

I have to admit I have read very little modern German literature compared to German lit of the 19th century, that I am woefully unfamiliar with most modern German writers, and that I am completely unfamiliar with modern German horror writers. I know that in the distant past, Germany and other German-speaking lands have produced excellent writers of horror such as E.T.A. Hoffmann (see my post about Hoffmann) and Jeremias Gotthelf (“The Black Spider”, 1842). Given the dearth of information readily available on modern German horror (at least on Google), I think the IMDb article mentioned above may have a point that because of German history since 1933, Germany may have (understandably) lost its taste for horror. I find that unfortunate, because now that my curiosity about German horror has been aroused, I would love to read some first-rate German horror or at least see one or two first-rate German horror films from the last decade or two.

Therefore, my question for you in this blog is: if you are familiar with German horror, what films or books do you recommend as introductions to the world of German horror?