5 - Vampirism, the Writing Cure, and Realpolitik: Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Summary

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English poet John Stagg (1770–1823) set the stage for a Romantic ballad with the following historical reminder:

The story of the Vampyre is founded on an opinion or report which prevailed in Hungary, and several parts of Germany, towards the beginning of the last century: — It was then asserted, that, in several places, dead persons had been known to leave their graves, and, by night, to revisit the habitations of their friends. …

Decades later, Charlotte Brontë had not forgotten, either. In Jane Eyre (1847), when the heroine discovers Bertha Mason — the famous “madwoman in the attic” — she struggles in vain to describe the “fearful and ghastly” apparition. Finally, as if she has been trying to avoid speaking the unspeakable, Jane breaks down: “Shall I tell you of what it reminded me? […] Of the foul German spectre — the Vampyre.” At the end of the century, Bram Stoker's Dracula associated vampires with “Germany” both geographically and linguistically. Tellingly, Jonathan Harker's travel companion takes leave of him as the undead Count arrives by whispering words from Gottfried August Bürger's eighteenth-century ballad “Lenore”: “die Todten reiten schnell” (the dead travel fast).

The preceding chapters have returned again and again to an imaginary Germany, for the most part coextensive with the Austrian Empire in decline, teeming with the restless undead.