Dracula: Die wahre Geschichte der Vampire

Count Dracula visits the Prunksaal in Vienna

The German documentary series Terra X on channel ZDF launched a new documentary on Dracula and vampires this evening, Dracula: Die wahre Geschichte der Vampire, which is currently available on the ZDF web site along with various information on vampire books a.o. Forensic scientist and vampire expert Mark Benecke as well as Dr. Clare Downham participate in this program that is partially narrated by Count Dracula himself as portrayed by actor Christian Baumann. The Count visits the archives in Vienna to examine the original Visum et Repertum, and we see Flückinger examine 'Arnold Paole' - even the apocryphal journey of Gerard van Swieten to Moravia is dramatized. Still, this is generally one of the best documentaries on the subject so far, including visits to Romania, London, and Vienna, where Dracula studies some of the 18th century literature on vampires in the Prunksaal next to the bust of van Swieten.

The documentary will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2014.

The Archbishop's Vampires

'If I were to permit myself to investigate the holy mysteries of divine Providence, I would say: why do these apparitions and tricks of the Devil only take place today in poor Moravia and northern Hungary, and not elsewhere in Spain, France and our Italy?'

The Dissertazione sopra i vampiri by the Archbishop of Trani, Giuseppe Davanzati, to my knowledge has never been translated in toto into any language, although it is relatively easy to come by an Italian copy. So you may have a hard time finding extracts and more than just cursory information in English. Montague Summers dedicated a couple of pages to Davanzati, but most of it is biographical information, and he is quick to dismiss the Archbishop’s conclusion.

Fortunately, Francesco Paolo de Ceglia of the University of Bari Aldo Moro in Italy (not far from Trani), the author of a.o. a book on Georg Ernst Stahl, has remedied the lack of information in English with his paper The Archbishop’s Vampires: Giuseppe Davanzati’s Dissertation and the reaction of “scientific” Italian Catholicism to the “Moravian events”, published in Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences vol. 61, no 166-167, Juin-Décembre 2011.

Written about 1739, when Davanzati heard of the Moravian episodes of posthumous magic from e.g. Cardinal Wolfgang Schrattenbach, Bishop of Olomouc from 1711 to 1738, the Dissertazione was published posthumously in 1774, long time after the initial vampire debates. Still, manuscript copies appear to have rapidly been spread and read shortly after it was written, even in the Netherlands.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the area under clerical jurisdiction of the Consistory in Olomouc saw several cases of what Karl Ferdinand von Schertz had coined magia posthuma, and in the 1730’s the interest in this kind of phenomenon had exploded with the news of the Serbian vampires. Some fifteen years later, Empress Maria Theresa aided by her physician, Gerard van Swieten, would take matters into her own hands, when news reached Vienna of how the Catholic authorities handled the instances of posthumous magic, no doubt further eroding the position of the Jesuits in the Austrian lands.

Davanzati, writes de Ceglia, 'was a man of that Catholic Aufklärung which, shaking off the visionary excesses of Baroque mysticism, was responsible for the classics of the Italian “anti-superstitious” school of thought. Concentrating, above all, on the theme of witches and celestial apparitions, these publications were circumscribing the space that, until that time, had been conceded, above all, to the action of the Devil, but in part to God as well, in this way drastically reducing the group of phenomena that tradition had considered preter- and supernatural. The imperative was to explain the phenomena through the laws of nature, without unnecessarily involving the Devil, as had, instead, been done until just a few decades prior.'

Believing in the invariability of the laws of nature, Davanzati was of the opinion that if vampires should exist, they could not be something new. Consequently, he identified vampires with ghosts, and even elves common to the mythology of Southern Italy. The Church accepted the existence of ghosts as souls from the Purgatory, but they were souls temporarily allowed by God to return and still under his jurisdiction. So from a theological point of view, ghosts were not allowed to carry out evil acts, for which reason vampires could not exist.

The Protestants, on the other hand, denying the existence of Purgatory, believed that ghosts, if not illusory, had to be the work of the Devil. Davanzati’s response to various theological counterarguments was to point out that vampires had apparently only been encountered in Moravia and Hungary, and not in Spain, France and Italy. Perhaps it was rather the work of priests taking advantage of the local populace’s fear that led people to believe in the excessive power of the Devil?

De Ceglia sums up Davanzati’s strategy, ‘much drier, more debonair and, above all, less gullible than Calmet’, briefly this way:

‘1) first of all, he “rationally” – that is, without making recourse to the authority of the conciliar decrees – minimised the Devil’s actual ability to influence nature and people, being nonetheless careful not to slip into the Pyrrhonism of Pierre Bayle or the radical Cartesianism of Balthasar Bekker. 2) The operation succeeded in temporarily identifying the vampire-ghosts as souls from Purgatory. Someone had already noticed that the belief in vampires prospered mostly in areas where the existence of the third realm of the afterlife was denied. Moreover, like souls from Purgatory, vampires could be interpreted as an intermediate state between saved and damned souls. It was nonetheless inexpedient to go on with this identification, dangerous from a theological point of view. 3) At this point, it was only necessary to prove that these apparitions had no goals of spiritual elevation to set aside their supernatural origin. 4) Once all this was done, the last obstacle to overcome was the naturalistic interpretation of the phenomenon:

“Anyone with a little common sense, so to speak, can clearly realise that the Devil plays no role in a story like that of these vampires; it is all a human creation, or at most a sort of tiresome illness, such as the plague, or some other epidemic disease.”’

As for the questions concerning the incorruptibility of corpses and whether a corpse is still alive, de Ceglia notes that ‘Davanzati was working in a period in which the Roman Church was redefining its ambivalent relationship with uncorrupted bodies,’ and compares the canonisations manual that was in use at the time of the incidents of posthumous magic in Moravia, Bishop Carlo Felice de Matta’s Novissimus de sanctorum canonizatione tractatus from 1678 with the later one by Prospero Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione (1734-8), which in its second edition also deals with vampires.

‘The chapter “De incorruptione” in the first handbook, gave credence to the most improbably tales,’ de Ceglia notes and sums up its views briefly: ‘a) a holy body is soft and flexible; b) nevertheless, it is important to pay attention to the Devil’s nasty jokes; c) as well as to the intimate vitality of the cadaver (whatever its origin may be),’ adding that: ‘All three of these positions were scaled down by the new “regulated devotion” of the 18th century.’

Ultimately it becomes a matter for the theologians to decide whether an uncorrupted corpse is in fact a miracle, as Davanzati states: ‘And although it would not be difficult for me to believe that said circumstance could be a purely natural thing in some cadavers, I demand it be a supernatural and miraculous thing in those servants of God whose moral virtues in heroic status have been proved as such by the Holy Mother Church and by the Sacred Roman Rota.’

Davanzati, however, admits the importance of the imagination as a real operative force that could produce effects outside the body of the imaginer, a kind of action at a distance. Vampires consequently are, in de Ceglia's words, 'the result of a collective suggestion, in which, however, the imagination of one person "effectively" acted on that of another, triggering a "spiritual epidemic".' This kind of argument surely could easily undermine the notion of true miracles, so Davanzati decided to subordinate medicine to theology:

‘From this it can be deduced that fear of the adversary is pointless, so by attributing so many almost miraculous operations to the imagination, damage is done to the virtue of real miracles and the canonisation of saints. The miracles of the latter will always be real miracles, each time, as previously said, when they happen concurrently with heroic virtues. When this is not the case, these same supposed miracles will always be considered the natural effects of fantasy.’

A miracle for Davanzati, as de Ceglia writes, ‘tautologically remained what theologically was decreed to be a miracle. The recognition of the efficient cause – natural vs. preter- and supernatural – depended on the individuation of the final cause: aetiology was subordinate to teleology (and theology). Vampires, in conclusion, were for him figments of the imagination, not because they were otherwise inexplicable from a scientific point of view, so much as because the miracle of their existence made no sense theologically. Nonetheless, had the foundations de fide of the reasoning been disowned, as was possible for the Protestants, the whole logical construction would have collapsed.’

Witch-hunting

Readers residing in or visiting Switzerland, may wish to go to Chateau Chillon, famous for its literary connections, to attend the exhibition Witch-hunting in the Pays de Vaud, from the 15th to the 17th centuries.

'The Pays de Vaud was the site of major witch-hunts between the 15th and the 17th centuries. During this period, there were more than 2'000 death sentences!

On a larger scale, Switzerland within the current borders if the time holds not only the record for the longest-lasting repression of witchcraft but also for the largest number of people persecuted fro this crime, in relation to the population. In almost three centuries, 5,000 people were accused and 3,500 of them were put to death, mainly by fire, with 60 - 70% being women.

Chillon Castle was an important detention centre for individuals suspected of witchcraft, either when awaiting trail or carrying out their sentence. During the term of the Bernese bailiff, Nicolas de Watteville, from 1595 to 1601, some forty-odd people were executed at Chillon, La Tour-de-Peilz and Vevey. And 27 more in 1613! Their Excellencies of Bern noted «with regret and sadness» «the extent to which the negation of God and submission to the evil spirit was growing among our subjects in the Romand (French-speaking) country».


Given these facts, the renowned Vaudois fortress is an apt location for this exhibition. Based on documents primarily related to Chillon, then to the region (Riviera-Vaud-Western Switzerland), the exhibition highlights this little known facet of Vaudois history.

The purpose of the museography and the catalogue is not to make people shudder – although shudder one does when contemplating the terrible suffering the poor souls had to undergo. Through texts and images, the exhibition illustrates a portrait of simple madness, madness that at times leads to making pacts with the Devil and, on the other side of the coin, the madness of the inquisitors who could consider a hollow tooth housing for an impure spirit!'

Accompanying the exhibition, a series of films is screened by the Swiss cinemateque Sorciers and sorcières au cinéma, which includes several well-known films somehow related to the subject, even featuring Mario Bava's vampire film, La Maschera del Demonio.

Not included is Otakar Vávra's Czech Kladivo na carodejnice from 1970. Known in English as The Witches' Hammer and in German as Hexenjagd, it is the interesting and at the same time unpleasant story of the witch hunter Heinrich Franz Boblig's infamous persecution of supposed witches in Groß-Ullersdorf (Velké Losiny) in Northern Moravia in the 1680's. Worth watching in its own right, and no doubt the persecution resembles the paranoia people may have experienced on that side of the Iron Curtain, the film is also interesting because it is set in the vicinity of the areas where incidents of magia posthuma were encountered (and only a few years before von Schertz published his book on the subject). So you may imagine that some of the persons involved may at other times have heard of or dealt with corpses suspected of harming the living...

The film is available on DVD in Germany and in the USA, but it can currently be watched in toto on youtube with English subtitles.

Vampertione infecta

I have always found it strange how various 'black metal' bands take up names and quotes from all sorts of literature on e.g. vampires and posthumous magic for their band names and song titles, cf. this post. According to the Wikipedia entry on Black Metal,

'The most common and founding lyrical theme is opposition to Christianity and other organized religions. As part of this, many artists write lyrics that could be seen to promote atheism, antitheism, paganism or Satanism. The hostility of many secular or pagan black metal artists is in some way linked to the Christianization of their countries. Other oft-explored themes are depression, nihilism, misanthropy, death and other dark topics. However, over time, many black metal artists have begun to focus more on topics like the seasons (particularly winter), nature, mythology, folklore, philosophy and fantasy.'

Certainly not to my own taste in music and aesthetics, it is curious to find that sometimes searches on the internet directly lead to web sites about black metal bands. One such search concerned the phrase 'vampertione infecta', which has been used as a song title by Italian metal band Riul Doamnei. The phrase is probably mainly known to people with a special interest in Moravian magia posthuma, as it supposedly appears in an 18th century parish register of deaths in Moravia or the North East of present day Czech Republic.

At least, so Christian d'Elvert claimed when writing about vampires and posthumous magic in 1859, see e.g. Die Wiedergänger von Bärn/Mähren 1662-1740 or this recent entry on Rob Brautigam's Shroudeater site, quoting an entry from the parish register of Bärn, present day Moravsky Beroun:

'Anno 1725 den 28. Februar ist Anna des seligen Andreas Berge, gewesene Ehewirtin verschieden, ihres Alters 48 Jahr, hat keine Ruhe in der Erden gehabt, Vampertione infecta, und ist letztlich verbrannt worden.'

In English: A.D. 1725 on February 28, Anna, the widow of the blessed Andreas Berge, deceased at the age of 48. She found no peace in the earth, Vampertione infecta, and was finally cremated.

Klaus Hamberger notes the word 'Vampertione' when commenting on the incident in his Mortuus non mordet: 'Das Fremdwort in der Eintragung zum 28. 2. 1725 verweist gleichwohl auf einen bemerkenswerten Bruch.' (p. 77) So I have always been somewhat intrigued by the term, and when I had the chance, I looked for it in the original (as shown below), and - to my eyes - there is no trace of the infection!

So, one might wonder how those two Latin words ended up among d'Elvert's otherwise reasonably reliable passages from the parish register. Just as one may wonder what 'Vampertione' was supposed to mean.

At face value this is clearly an example of the burning of a corpse suspected of posthumous magic that appears to have been relatively common in those parts during the 17th and 18th centuries. The entry in the parish register contains no description of how people determined that she should have found no rest in the grave. For that reason it seems farfetched to talk of a vampire per se. Still, as we know, the term 'vampire' was quickly linked to various kinds of revenants and (supposedly) uncorrupted corpses. For that reason, Gregor Wolny had no qualms using the term when mentioning the examples of posthumous magic in Bärn in his Die Markgraffschaft Mähren topographisch, statistisch und historisch geshildert from 1839, as shown in the excerpt at the bottom of this post.

Looking at the reproduction of the text above, even as shown here, I think you can see that there is a difference in the shade of the ink from the first to the last sentence, but the style of writing looks similar. Clearly, the last sentence was added later, as one would expect. Unfortunately, we know nothing of what happened in between, only that it apparently did not involve 'Vampertione infecta' ...


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De sagis magisque posthumis

For some years tranquil peace ruled in Moravia, but then ...

As Google Books put more and more books online, one can get to check up on some more references, and I recently noticed the Moraviæ historia politica et ecclesiastica from 1787 by Adolf Pilarz and František Adolf Moravec, i.e. a political and church history of Moravia. In the third part of the book, Pilarz and Moravetz note that after The War of the Austrian Succession, peace ruled in Moravia, and the area flourished for some years. However ... two kinds of superstitions infested Moravia, one of them being what 'the Hungarians call Vampires'. More precisely, Moravetz writes: 'de sagis magisque posthumis, quos Hungari passim Vampyros vocant,' which links posthumous witches and magicians with vampires.

The authors call this superstition an ancient (vetustus) error which has moved from the East (Oriens) to Poland, Hungary and Moravia, and defines it is a common belief that corpses of witches and magicians buried in cemetries return animated by a demon to suck the blood of the living. And, as we would expect, this belief is related to the find of cadavers full of blood and incorrupted (sanguine plena, atque incorrupta), although these signs can be explained through natural means.

Pilarz and Moravetz  then refer to a specific case, the well-known incident dated December 22 1754 concerning a woman of Polish background, Rosina Polakin, whose body was hardly corrupted after thirty days, and consequently cremated along with a number of other corpses. Baron and court physician van Swieten, however, refuted the belief, and Empress Maria Theresia in 1755 ordered these acts of superstition to be stopped.

Martin Zeiller's original account of the revenant who left his shroud

Anyone interested in vampires and revenants will have noticed that certain tales or reports are repeated again and again in the literature, sometimes in a number of variations that may even be presented as occurring at different locations. One of these stories was mentioned in a post a couple of months on shrouds, but at the time I was unable to cite the original. I refer to the story of a revenant who left his shroud when leaving his grave, which was the inspiration for Goethe's Totentanz. It was, as far as I know, originally recounted in Martin Zeiller's comments to his German translation of Francois de Rosset's Les histoires tragiques de notre temps. I have recently had access to two editions of Zeiller's Theatrum tragicum, the earliest being the fourth edition published in Tübingen in 1634.

Commenting on the first story in Rosset's book, Zeiller adds a number of stories about the Devil's works, among them a few concerning spectres and apparitions of the dead. He notes that the learned have differing opinions on the nature of these apparitions, but that his concern is not to discuss whether they are indeed the deceased people or merely the Devil's deceit. His concern is but to a few of the stories of these apparitions. Among them are the omnipresent stories of the shepherd from Blov and the 'witch' from Levin as told by Wenzel Hajek in his Böhmische Chronica. Continuing from the last of these stories, Zeiller writes:

'Fast ein gleiche Geschicht has sich vor ettlichen Jaren zu Eywanschitz in Mähren (wie ish solche Anno 1617. und 18. zu unterschiedlichen malen von glaubwürdigen Burgern allda habe erzehlen hören / mir auch der Ort ist gewiesen) begeben / in deme / dem ansehen nach / ein ehrlicher Burger daselbst auff den Kirchhof in der Statt ist begraben worden / welcher stets bey der Nacht auffgestanden ist / und ettliche umbgebracht hat : seinen Sterbküttel liesse er allzeit bey dem Grab ligen / und wann er sich wider niderlegte / so zoge er den Sterbküttel wider an. Einsmals aber / da er also vom Grab hinweg gienge / und die Wächter auff dem Kirchenthurn solches ersahen / haben sie ihme den Sterbküttel unter dessen hinweg getragen : als er nun wider zum Grab kame / und seinen Küttel nicht fande / ruffte er den Wächtern / sie sollen ihme den Küttel geben / oder er wolle sie alle erwürgen : welches sie haben thun müssen : hernach aber wurde er vom Hängcker außgegraben / und zu Stucken zerhawen / da hörete das Ubel auff / und da er auß dem Grab genommen worden / sagte er : sie hätten es jetzt wol recht getroffen : sonsten / weil sein Weib auch gestorben / und zu ihme gelegt worden war / wolten sie beede die halbe Staat umbgebracht haben. Der Hängcker zoge ihm auß dem Maul einen langen grossen Schleyer / welchen er seinem Weib vom Kopff hinweg gessen hatte / den selben hat der Nachrichter dem beystehendem Volck gezeigt / und gesagt : schawet / wie der Schelm so geizig gewesen.'

So this is probably the oldest known version of this story which not only inspired Goethe, but also later on turned up in Le Fanu's Carmilla , as a story from Breslau and, probably, most notably in the 'vampire' story from Liebava in Moravia in Calmet's Traité. Zeiller's original does not differ much from the retelling in Der höllische Proteus which I quoted in my post on the subject, but portions of the story are left out or changed in various versions.

Zeiller travelled in various parts of the German territories. In 1650 he authored an interesting topographical work on Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, Topographia Bohemiae, Moraviae et Silesiae, which also contains information on Eywanschitz (today called Ivančice or Eibenschütz) and other locations of interest. Under Lewin/Levin, Zeiller once again tells the tale of the witch. He is, however, not certain that Hajek actually refers to the same Lewin, as the passage below shows.

Reading von Schertz

Most of you probably have not had the chance to read a book by Carl Ferdinand von Schertz, but now it is possible on Google Books. OK, you may not be particularly interested in the subject of the book, but here is a chance to get a feel for the man and his interests besides the subject of the book that he is best known for, Magia Posthuma.

Mährisches Landes-Wappen published in Nuremberg in 1699, i.e. prior to Magia Posthuma, is a book on Moravian coats of arms with considerations on e.g. the etymology and spelling of the name of Moravia (which takes it name from the Morava River).

Heraldry may not be your subject, but you may wonder if that little portrait on the title page could bear any semblance to that of the author? Looking at other books from the same publisher or printer might answer that question.

Yet another Czech 'vampire' found

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Javier Arries points out to me that there are in fact no less than two recent archaeological finds that may document beliefs in revenants. Apart from the find in Hradék nad Nisou, a more recent one was done in Modrá, known in German as Neudorf, located in Moravia in the South Eastern part of the Czech Republic. You can find more information on the history of Modrá here.

The news about this find is, unfortunately, not available in English, but here is the Czech news story dated May 4 2010: 'V Modré objevili archeologové hrob tzv. vampýra', an interview with the archaeologist Miroslav Vaškových, so here the word vampire, and not upir, is actually used. From what I can gather, the indications of revenant belief includes that the corpse was prevented by stones from exiting the tomb, and that the skull should have been crushed on purpose.

Flea market finds

Yesterday I went to a local flea market and came back home with a book of manuscripts from Carl Th. Dreyer's Vampyr and three other of his movies, as well as a 1963 Atlas zur Weltgeschichte. All for the price of approximately 2 Euros.

Below I have scanned two maps from the latter book, and you can click on them to view them in more detail.

The first scan is of a map of Hungary after the wars with the Ottomans. At the bottom is the extent of occupied areas between 1717 and 1739, including the areas of Serbia of particular interest to this blog. The Southern border, cf. earlier posts like this, this, and this, is here shown a few kilometers south of the Zapadna Morava and Krusevac (Kruschewatz).

To the East in Siebenbürgen (Transylvania) you find several places known from Stoker's Dracula, like Bistritz, and to the West is Steiermark (Styria) the scene of Le Fanu's Carmilla. Here is also Krain, the subject of Johann Weichard von Valvasor's Die Ehre des Hertzogthums Crain.

To the North West is Vienna and the Southern part of Mähren (Moravia). And North of Serbia Banat Temesvar, also the scene of some instances of vampirism in the 18th century. So there is really a lot of interesting locations and information shown in this map.

The second one is a map of Vienna ca. 1800. Much easier to take in than a map of modern day Vienna.

Vampyrismus v kulturních dejinách Evropy

Giuseppe Maiello, whom I mentioned in a recent post, published a book in 2004 called Vampyrismus v kulturních dejinách Evropy (Vampirism in the cultural history of Europe). As it's written in the Czech language, I can only look at names, references and more or less guess at parts of the text, which is certainly useful for me, but isn't quite enough to really estimate the qualities of the book as a whole. It does, however, look like a really nice book, and fortunately Maiello is much more focused on the historical aspects of vampirism, i.e. e.g. the 18th century debates, than the usual mixture of Stoker, Vlad Tepes, Bathory etc. found in so many books. So I will be carefully studying the text and literature list, in particular for material concerning Moravian magia posthuma.

1755

The above shot is from the opening of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006), where Empress Maria Theresa (Marianne Faithfull) admonishes the future queen of France (Kirsten Dunst). Marie Antoinette was born on November 2 1755, i.e. almost a year after the empress got concerned with magia posthuma and sent a couple of court physicians to investigate a Moravian case that had astounded Vienna.

Certainly, the court in France was ahead of the Austrian court with respect to witchcraft and related matters that Maria Theresa had to concern herself with - aided by a certain Gerhard van Swieten. The movie, of course, has nothing to do with those matters, and takes off in 1770 when Marie is handed over to the French.

Those who enjoy that sort of thing should check out the November 5 1755 edition of the Wienerisches Diarium to read how the birth of the future Marie Antoinette was reported: "... Gegen halb 8. Uhr sodann wurden wir mit der höchst-erfreulichen Nachricht beglücket, daß Höchst-gedacht Ihre Majestät eine gesunde und Wolgestaltete Erz-herzogin, GOtt sey Dank! glücklich zur Welt geboren. ...'

Vampirism from a colonial pespective

According to the web site of the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, Prof. Dr. Thomas Bohn is currently teaching a seminar on the cultural history of the vampire. The seminar started on October 17th and continues to February 5th 2008. The description of the seminar e.g. says that vampires

"were stylized as an expression of a barbarous world from which civilised Europe could be demarcated. At the same time the phrase 'vampirism' worked as an imperial category. It was primarily aimed at the border areas of the empires that stood up against each other in Central Europe. While the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries proceeded from the West to the East of the continent, the posthumous staking and burning of vampires on the contrary spread from the East to the West. From a colonial perspective vampirism could be interpreted as an invasion of primitive forces and connected with slavophobic thoughts. On this background the home of the vampire displaced itself from Serbia and Hungary over Moravia and Silesia to Poland and Lithuania."

I find it a bit difficult to understand the localities mentioned in this displacement, because quite a number of Moravian and Silesian cases of Magia Posthuma antedate the Serbian vampire cases of the 18th Century. However, here is the original description of the seminar:

"Prof. Dr. Thomas Bohn

Kulturgeschichte der Vampire 3-stündig, Di 15-18 Uhr, Amalienstr. 52, R. 507 5.OG

Der Glaube an den „lebenden Leichnam“ ist ein universales Phänomen. Während in der mitteleuropäischen Variante sogenannte Nachzehrer ihre Angehörigen durch Sympathie ins Grab locken, werden in der südosteuropäischen Version Verwandte vermeintlicher Blutsauger der ewigen Verdammnis ausgesetzt. Die Vampire verdanken ihre Popularität der Aufklärung. Sie wurden zum Ausdruck einer barbarischen Welt stilisiert, von der sich das zivilisierte Europa abgrenzen konnte. Gleichzeitig fungierte das Schlagwort „Vampirismus“ als imperiale Kategorie. Es wurde bevorzugt auf die Grenzgebiete der Vielvölkerreiche bezogen, die sich in der Mitte Europas gegenüberstanden. Hatte sich die Hexenverfolgung im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert allmählich vom Westen in den Osten des Kontinents ausgedehnt, so schien sich im Gegenzug die posthume Pfählung und Verbrennung von Vampiren im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert von Osten nach Westen zu verbreiten. Aus kolonialer Perspektive ließ sich der Vampirismus daher als Invasion primitiver Kräfte deuten und mit slavophoben Sentenzen verbinden. Vor diesem Hintergrund verschob sich die Heimat der Vampire in westlichen Diskursen allmählich von Serbien und Ungarn über Mähren und Schlesien nach Polen und Litauen.

Literatur: Hamberger, Klaus (Hrsg.): Mortuus non mordet. Dokumente zum Vampirismus, 1689-1791. Wien 1992; Sturm, Dieter/Klaus Völker (Hrsg.): Von denen Vampiren und Menschensaugern. Dichtungen und Dokumente. 4. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main 2003; Thomas Schürmann: Nachzehrerglauben in Mitteleuropa. Marburg 1990; Peter Mario Kreuter: Der Vampirglaube in Südosteuropa. Studien zur Genese, Bedeutung und Funktion. Rumänien und der Balkanraum. Berlin 2001.

Bohn recently talked about "Der Dracula-Mythos" - Osteuropäischer Volksglaube und westeuropäische Klischees ("The Dracula Myth" - East European Folklore and West European Clichés) as an introduction to the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula that was shown as part of a series of symposia, workshops and conferences on Romania called donumenta in Regensburg

Bohn has also taught on the subject of Dracula - Mythos oder Wirklichkeit? (Dracula - Myth or Reality?) at the Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena, and in 2008 he will be in charge of a seminar on Vlad Tepes „Dracula“ - Tyrann oder Volkstribun? (Vlad Tepes "Dracula" - Tyrant or tribune of the people?)

Theories and Myths of Evil and Vampires

"This is a book about evil. More precisely, it is a book about human evil, and its central question is whether there can be a secular conception of evil, whether that idea can tell us anything about the human condition, explain anything about what human beings do, in the absence of its more familiar territory of the supernatural and the demonic. In seeking to understand human evil it asks the question whether evil exists at all, and one possible answer I take very seriously is that it does not."

Thus Phillip Cole of Middlesex University opens the first chapter of his 2006 book The Myth of Evil (Edinburg Univ. Press), and interestingly one of many themes in the book is vampirism, which is particularly dealt with (along with witchcraft) in the fourth chapter on Communities of Fear (pp. 77-94). As he writes, "The point of studying these historical events is to develop a political philosophy of evil, an awareness of how it has been used to marginalise and oppress. If we can make no philosophical or psychological sense of evil, it may be that this political sense is all there is." (p. 77)

Cole is inspired by what Rousseau wrote about vampires, or rather by what Christopher Frayling writes about Rousseau:

"The point he [Rousseau] made about them [vampires] was that however little so-called 'attested histories' instructed us about the status of vampires, they revealed much about the nature of authority in civilized society." (Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, p. 33)

Cole writes of the witch hunts and the vampire cases:

"I will suggest that we can draw general patterns about the nature of power in 'civilised' society from these two great panics in European history, and the most important element is the centrality of fear in constituting the identity of political communities. Rather than political communities forming themselves around shared identities, they are formed through the exploitation by political authorities of social fears and insecurities, by focusing those fears upon some threatening 'evil' figure - the vampire, the witch, the Jew, the migrant, the asylum seeker, the Gypsy, the 'Islamicist' terrorist - and claiming to protect the 'genuine' members from these deviant and dangerous threats. Political communities are constituted by an irrational horror of imaginary monsters. In this process, those who seek to hold or gain power do not only create the threatening figure, they also create the community itself, or a particular form of it, with themselves at its centre. The witch craze, the vampire epidemics, and, I will argue in the final chapter of this book, our present panics over such phenomena as immigration and terrorism are exactly parallel. What is especially terrifying about the vampire and the witch is their ambiguity - their ability to be among us without detection, and, in the case of the vampire, their ability to pass across borders undetected. They are the enemy within, and therefore, a source of intense fear and panic, which can be exploited in the pursuit of political power." (p. 81)


Whereas it is quite obvious that those fearing vampires usually went to the authorities to deal with actual cases of vampires and Magia Posthuma, the authorities generally neither instigated nor approved of the belief in vampires. This was the case with the Habsburg military surgeons, and this seems to have been the case with many cases of Magia Posthuma in e.g. Moravia and Silesia. That is, the notion that the authorities themselves deliberately sought to control or even suppress the populace by the belief in vampires and Magia Posthuma, is based on little or no historical evidence.

One proponent of this theory is Gabriel Ronay who in a chapter called Vampire Trials in his 1972 book The Dracula Myth wrote:

"The Inquistion, the Roman Church's instrument for dealing with schismatics and the like, was already in decline, the witch-hunt in the Protestant territories was slowly abating and heresy had lost much of the social dread attached to it. A vigorously pursued and dogmatically justified campaign against the widely feared vampires, however, offered a useful lever with which to re-establish the Catholic Church's dominant position and reassert its spiritual influence in the mixed border areas. With the motive clearly established, there can be little doubt as to whom the hunting down and prosecution of alleged un-dead vampires benefited. The psychological weapon furnished by the nature of the accusations was exploited to the maximum effect to belabour the Orthodox rite Church. The trials also provided a legal forum to discredit the fellow congregationalists of alleged vampires who, in the recorded cases in Hungary's southern border areas, were Slovenes, Serbs or other aliens." (p. 27)

Certainly, revenants played an important role in debates in e.g. the 17th century, but I find it hard to recognize Ronay's description of "a vigorously pursued and dogmatically justified campaign against the widely feared vampires" when reading material from e.g. the original vampire cases. The authorities generally regarded vampires as superstition and generally had no reason to encourage the belief, in fact, they tried to discourage it. Ronay's idea of a "campaign" is probably very appealing to the modern reader, because it is easy to grasp, but a theory should also be based on source material, and in my opinion it is hard to find documentation for Ronay's "campaign".

Cole is perhaps slightly more sophisticated and his analysis in some ways more interesting, but it is based on very little source material and even includes material on the fictional vampire! Regarding "the vampire phenomenon", he mentions that "historical scholarship here is much inferior to the work on the witch trials."(p. 86) And this lack of knowledge of the historical background is probably why his analysis of the vampire cases is not quite convincing.