Hello, sorry if this question is too heavy, you’re free to ignore it if you do not wish to answer or you can use DMs to answer privately. I was just curious, because a friend of mine told me you thought Bram Stoker was antisemitic. I was just wondering what led you to believe that?
I’ll answer this publicly because I keep forgetting how whitewashed “Dracula” has become in the public opinion thanks to social media.
The only issue I take with this ask is the wording. It’s not “me” who says so, the “Other” in “Dracula” being a metaphorical Jewish non-white immigrant coming to the East to conquer and infect the pure blood of innocent white British women with his disease is one (if not the most) popular interpretations of the novel, amongst scholars because of the historical context (late 19th century) in which the novel was written.
Daniel Pick, “Terrors of the night’: Dracula and ‘degeneration’ in the late nineteenth century” (1988): “The novel provided a metaphor for current political and sexual political discourses on morality and society, representing the price of selfish pursuits and criminal depravity. The family and the nation, it seemed to many, were beleaguered by syphilitics, alcoholics, cretins, the insane, the feeble-minded, prostitutes and a perceived 'alien invasion' of Jews from the east who, in the view of many alarmists, were feeding off and ‘poisoning’ the blood of the Londoner.”
Carol Margaret Davison, “Britain, Vampire Empire: Fin-de-Siècle Fears and Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (2004) : “One of the more important contributions to Dracula scholarship in recent years has been the examination of Bram Stoker's bloodthirsty Count as a stereotypical Jewish figure. […] Adapting Royce MacGillivray's claim that Stoker created in Dracula 'a myth comparable in vitality to that of the Wandering Jew, Faust, or Don Juan' (518), I would maintain that while the aristocratic figure of Count Dracula uniquely combines all three figures, he represents the apogee in the development of the vampiric Wandering Jew in British Gothic literature.”
Judith Halberstam and Jack Halberstam; “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's "Dracula’” (1993): “Dracula, I thought, with his peculiar physique, his parasitical desires, his aversion to the cross and to all the trappings of Christianity, his blood-sucking attacks, and his avaricious relation to money, resembled stereotypical anti-Semitic nineteenth-century representations of the Jew. Subsequent readings of the novel with attention to the connections in the narrative between blood and gold, race and sex, sexuality and ethnicity, confirmed my sense that the anti-Semite's Jew and Stoker's vampire bore more than a family resemblance. The connection I had made began to haunt me; I uncovered biographical material and discovered that Stoker was good friends with, and inspired by, Richard Burton, the author of a tract reviving the blood libel against Jews in Damascus. I read essays by Stoker in which he railed against degenerate writers for not being good Christians. My conclusions seemed sound, the vampire and the Jew were related, and monstrosity in the Gothic novel had much to do with the discourse of modern anti-Semitism.”
This is the height of Colonial Britain, with colonial tensions between European nations rising (and exploding in World War I). Rudyard Kipling “The White Man's Burden” (1898) was published one year after “Dracula”; where is stated the white man has the moral obligation and duty to civilize the “non-white barbarians”. Sort of how the “White British heroes” put an end to the “non-white Jewish immigrant” reign of terror in the novel.
Robert Eggers is aware of this, as he has discussed in interviews, explaining he had no interest in adapting any of this: “My works tend to be less intentionally politically charged, and that was also something that was not necessarily front of mind for me. I think there's a lot of criticism about "Dracula" and Murnau's film, about this Other from the East coming in. But that's not what excites me about the story.
I think that what ultimately rose to the top, as the theme or trope that was most compelling to me, was that of the demon-lover. In "Dracula," the book by Bram Stoker, the vampire is coming to England, seemingly, for world domination. Lucy and Mina are just convenient throats that happen to be around. But in this "Nosferatu," he's coming for Ellen. This love triangle that is similar to "Wuthering Heights," the novel, was more compelling to me than any political themes.”
By making his adaptation a strigoi lover folktale, where everything Orlok does is connected to Ellen herself (and not “world domination”), Eggers removed the antisemitic plot of the “Reverse Colonialism panic” subtext of the book.
It is not only women who are portrayed as the passive theatrical, cinematic or musical victims of their Svengalis. Male pop stars have also been cast as hopelessly hoodwinked by their Svengali managers. From The Beatles' Brian Epstein to Elvis' Colonel Parker, or Bob Dylan's Albert Grossman, for that matter, the image is always that of 'Svengali', namely of covert manipulation, insidious exploitation, a world divided between the passive and the active, the puppet and puppet-master. One cannot doubt the probability - often the incontrovertable fact - of grotesque advice and malign influence, as well as youthful naivety, financial or otherwise; the reality of double-dealing and the existence of self-interested ruses by promotors and agents is not in question. It may be the role of the historian, however, to point out that both such practices and their florid shaping narratives are less novel than we think, and that components of social reality and of fantasy are deeply, sometimes inextricably, intertwined. What is so intriguing is the endurance of the particular image of the cynical, colourful and strangely omnipotent musical manager, operating as a kind of bad surrogate parent, a malignant hypnotist rather than a real carer.
Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture by Daniel Pick
Book Description:
Svengali, the well-known character in the culture of the period that his name entered the dictionary as one who exerts a malign persuasiveness on another. This book explores the origins and impact of Svengali and his helplessly mesmerized female victim Trilby in an age already rife with discussions of race, influence, and the unconscious mind.
Daniel Pick points out that Svengali was a Jew as well as a dangerous hypnotist; his depiction struck a chord not only with pervasive nineteenth-century forebodings about irrational interpersonal forces and psychic contacts but also with prevalent anti-Semitic assumptions. He shows how Svengali became the quintessential dark hypnotist of the fin de siècle, whose image was recycled in pictures, drama, verse, and films. Pick not only discusses the work of mesmerists, hypnotists, and critics of entrancement but also relates tales of surrogate passion and psychological foreboding that feature opera singer Jenny Lind, composer Richard Wagner, politician Benjamin Disraeli, novelist Henry James, and others. The book identifies and illuminates a psychological and historical preoccupation-a cluster of Victorian ideas and images, fears and fantasies of psychic invasion and racial hypnosis that crystallized in the figure and phenomenon of Svengali.
Today, we live in an age of anxiety about ‘post-truth’ politics. ‘Fake news’, targeted messaging and seductive persuasion are rife. Digital technologies have created extraordinary new possibilities for the analysis of voter behaviour and also voter manipulation. But many of our contemporary concerns about the new dark arts of political persuasion and unconscious psychic life have a longer history. In the mid-20th century, psychologists’ curiosity and dismay about our susceptibility to manipulation and control crystallised. Their writings, though flawed and dated, still offer us food for thought in a new age of economic convulsion, population movement and toxic populist fervour. In the 1940s, Money-Kyrle was worried about the power of radio and other mass media to reveal and provoke our worst selves. In the 21st century, he would have been looking online.
Charlie Williams, Sarah Marks, Daniel Pick, Does mass media pave the way to fascism?
In his celebrated study From Caligari to Hitler (1947), Siegfried Kracauer probed Weimar film culture in search of evidence of the “psychological structures” that had allowed the Nazis to come to power. Claiming to find symptoms in this culture of widespread unconscious yearning for authoritarianism, he argued that screen tyrants like Caligari anticipated the actual tyrants who assumed political power in Germany in 1933. Kracauer’s fascinating yet highly problematic reading, subtitled A Psychological History of German Film, grew out of a study of Nazi propaganda that he completed in 1942 and that served as a contribution to the Allies’ psychological warfare campaign; it represents one facet of the broader recruitment of the human sciences in the conflict against National Socialism. Treating popular film as a “research medium” into “mass behavior,” Kracauer’s study participated in a larger project meant to produce knowledge of the enemy, and it fed into an emerging profile of “the Nazi mind” that stressed its fundamentally atavistic characteristics. As Daniel Pick has recently shown, a central exhibit in this profile was Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s long-time deputy. Following his solo flight to Scotland in the spring of 1941, Hess’s interest in homeopathic medicine, his habit of sleeping with a magnet over his bed, and his venting about the sinister experiments of “Jewish hypnotists,” all helped fuel an emerging narrative of National Socialism as a political phenomenon deeply rooted in antimodern belief systems.
For the intellectuals and politicians of the post-unification period in Italy, there remained a running contradiction between the achievement of nationhood, and the social realities of division and fragmentation, the myriad cultures and sub-cultures, separate languages, customs, economies, worlds in which Italy was constituted and threatened. Here lay the efficacy of Lombroso's social evolutionary model: it brought all those contradictory social processes together into an apparent discursive unity. [...] Crime, hysteria, superstition, parasitism, insanity, atavism, prostitution, crowds, peasantry and brigands became the circulating figures of disorder in a language which sought altogether to stave off metaphor. But these figures were never of course unmediated "objects". The naivety, but also the force, of this positivism lay in its attempt to deny the presence of metaphor, to imagine that by caging its shadowy images within rigid, visible taxonomies, subversion could be staved off from civil and political society. Presences designed as subversive were thus ritually conjured in order to be objectified and denounced: exorcised in language and exorcised from power.
The discursive construction of subject and other in the human sciences cannot be posed only in terms of the contrast, West/East, White/Black. Social evolution and degeneration formed two sides of a later-nineteenth-century ideology, turning between an idea fiction of unity and a dread of cultural, national, racial disintegration. "Dégénérescence" had its resonances in the apocalyptic visions of socialism, conservatism, liberalism. But the term did not simply constitute a rhetorical 'instrument' on behalf of certain professional or political interests. [...]
[...] Ribot declared in 1875 that 'the person, the ego, the thinking subject, assumed as a perfect unity, is but a theoretic conception. It is an ideal which the individual approaches as he rises in the scale of being, but to which he never attains.' Despite such perceptions, doctors from Morel to Lombroso to Maudsley, did write from the seemingly unruffled position of the perfectly unified thinking subject. Degeneration, with its putatively vitiating and fragmenting effect on the will of the sufferer, was at once universalised as the potential fate of all and, paradoxically, particularised as the condition of the other.
[...]
One weakness of the Foucauldian power/knowledge model, which informs much recent discussion of the nineteenth-century human sciences, from anthropology to criminology to medial-psychiatry, is that by focussing on the presumed strategic effects of certain shifts in the perception of say, crime, madness, race and sexuality, it often underplays the internal textual struggle, the work of representation needed to achieve the illusion of unity, of singular power and mastery. One needs to address simultaneously the 'force' of a felt crisis of powerlessness in certain texts and ideologies, the complex transformation of social anxiety and political fear into seemingly self-possessed imperious and 'imperialist' discourse.
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c. 1848-1918
"Pacifist opposition to the war frequently sought to challenge the differentiation of 'us' and 'them' in terms of 'Prussianism.' War critics insisted that a condition of barbarous militarism existed on both sides. As the suffragist and pacifist Helena Swanwick put it:
'We British have invented the name of 'Prussianism' for a doctrine which we are finding very ugly and hateful. But we should not forget that it is the very doctrine with which our British Anti-Suffragists have made us very familiar during the past ten years and which has been enunciated even by the Prime Minister.'
All the great states, she observed, are 'Prussian' in so far as they are organised on a militarist basis. In a male-dominated world ('Men make wars, not women') conflict is generated by a combination of traditional conception of honour, the pursuit of material gan, the drive of vested interests, love of domination and what is often called glory, fear, indolence of mind, pugnacity, love of hazard and adventure, and disgust with the drabness of daily life.
Norman Angell also noted the 'Prussianism' of the British Empire, that is to say, its triumph through strength, war, conquest, guile, mastery and so on. He observed the curious double standard whereby Germany's anthem was deemed sinister, but not 'Rule Britannia'. Furthermore, Bernhardi's war-glorifying works in spirit whilst, for instance, Spenser Wilkinson, the Professor of Military History at Oxford, could, with impunity, brazenly proclaim Britain's imperial mission of world domination.
Indeed, as the war proceeded, observed Angell, the problem of distinguishing the antagonists became ever more difficult, propagandist rationales ever more threadbare, since war of itself produced, as it were, a 'Prussianisation' of everyday life in all parties:
'We may be fighting for democracy, freedom, parliamentary government, against despotism, government by a military caste, and restraint of free speech; yet, if we are to wage the war efficiently, our government must be autocratic, free speech must be suspended, and the military order must have arbitrary power.'"
- Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. pp. 150-151
