Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872) preceded Bram StokerÕs Dracula by 25 years and inspired the latter. My new project Carmilla places Le FanuÕs female vampire against the backdrop of historical conflict between the East and the West and finds the origin of the popular myth in racial and cultural fears that shaped our culture.

Having come to the U.S. in 1980 and observed expressions of xenophobia during the Òtrade war with Japan,Ó I have focused on the East-West conflict as the subject matter of my work in performance, installation and film. While researching my performance piece Tokyo Rose (1993-95), I learned that the phrase ÒYellow PerilÓ was first used by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1895.[1] This made me realize that there is an older, deeper fear of Òthe Orient,Ó an abstraction that stretches from Vienna to Tokyo, and which represents everything the Occident is not.

In the age of AIDS, the vampire has widely been accepted as a symbol of the Black Death, itself a result of EuropeÕs contact with its neighbors to the east and south. The fact that the modern vampiresÕ prototype is found in the folklore of the Balkans ÐÐ the geographical bridge between Asia and Europe ÐÐ led me to suspect that the ÒevilÓ had a human face after all. A meeting with a Transylvanian Saxon woman who was interned in a Soviet labor camp after WWII moved me to expand the definition of the East to include the Cold War period to the present.

Le FanuÕs protagonist prefers same-sex victims and pursues them with erotic fervor. The lesbian overtones of Carmilla heightened the characterÕs alien nature to its Victorian readers. I chose to focus on Carmilla over Dracula because her gender and sexuality made her a personification of ÒThe OtherÓ the West defined itself against. The Orient of my Carmilla is dark and feminine, continuing my exploration of the history and evolution of negative female figures that symbolize age-old fears of the foreign ÐÐ of which Tokyo Rose was one, as was Yoko Ono, the subject of my film The Heart of No Place (2009), as Òthe woman who broke up the Beatles.Ó

Black Death (bubonic plague) is now thought to have come from East Africa via Alexandria, devastating the 5th-century Roman Empire that had been ravaged by the Huns.[2] The Roman historiansÕ descriptions of them as Òprodigiously ugly and bentÓ and Òput men to flight by their terrifying appearancesÓ[3] could have inspired the term Untermenschen coined by American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) as an antithesis to NietzcheÕs Òsuper-manÓ[4] and adopted by the Nazis to specifically mean the Òhorde from the East.Ó Eighth-century Muslim conquests effectively surrounded Europe, and gave rise to Europe's self-identification ÐÐ a Frankish chronicler coined the term Europenses to describe Charles Martel's army who fought the Andalusian Muslims.[5] By the 11th century, the Crusader fanaticism and hatred of the Other was such that they practiced cannibalism on the inhabitants of MaÕarra, present-day Syria (1098).[6]

The Mongols followed; [7] Orders of knights formed during the Crusades continued to fight this new scourge, and the knightsÕ image as Òprotectors of Christendom,Ó merged with those of St. George and Archangel Michael, would resurface in the KaiserÕs vision of the ÒYellow Peril.Ó

Vlad III Dracul Òthe ImpalerÓ (1431-1476) ÐÐ the model for Bram StokerÕs Count Dracula ÐÐ was the prince of Wallachia and a military hero who fought Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople. His transformation to a bloodthirsty monster owes in part to Transylvanian Saxons who published luridly illustrated pamphlets about VladÕs favorite method of execution.[8] In StokerÕs novel, Dracula travels in a coffin filled with Transylvanian soil. Blood and soil (blut und boden, Òdescent and homelandÓ), one of the main tenets of the Nazi ideology, was fetishized by the Romanian fascist party Legion of Archangel Michael (later the Iron Guard), who are said to have drunk each otherÕs blood and carried sacks of Romanian soil around their necks.[9][10] After founder Cornelieu Zelea CodreanuÕs death in 1938, the Iron Guard marched with signs that read ÒCodreanu Present,Ó[11] and in 1940 exhumed his badly decomposed body for a grand funeral and reburial. Their allegiance to an undead leader calls to mind the vampire myth as well as the Christian belief in resurrection and life after death.[12] Their claiming of Archangel Michael as their patron saint aligns them with the medieval idea of a divinely enabled hero who would battle the evil dragon: Communists and Jews, regarded as enemies of the Romanian people.[13]

In 1999, I visited Berlin artist Susken Rosenthal at her parentsÕ home near Stuttgart. Without this encounter, I would have set my story in Styria (Southern Austria) as is Le FanuÕs Carmilla. I learned that RosenthalÕs parents are Transylvanian Saxons (ethnic Germans), and that her mother had been deported to a Soviet labor camp at the end of WWII ÐÐ upon her release in 1947, the 5'8" woman weighed 83 lbs. According to author Robert D. Kaplan, it was part of a mass extermination plan that killed 50% of deportees.[14] [15] These Saxons had come to Transylvania in the 1200s, and by the 20th century comprised the middle class in Transylvania, much like the Jews in the rest of Romania. The family had just visited her hometown of Sibiu; one of the photos from the trip was of a fortified church in which the whole village took refuge during Mongol then Turkish and Tatar raids well into the 18th century.[16]

I am admittedly a casual observer, brought up outside of either Christian or Muslim traditions. But to me there seems a lot of the East in Eastern Europe: the arabesquelike patterns that adorn the interior of Matthias Church in Budapest (named after DraculaÕs contemporary, King Matthias of Hungary) or the mournful tonalities of Bulgarian folk songs. These do not seem to be souvenirs of hated conquerors but like distant memories that seep out of the ground. On what might be a gradual merging between the East and the West, an artificial line seems to have been imposed, by differences in religion and ideology. It might be these elements of the Orient in the European ÒselfÓ that cause the dread, and they might have, under persistent threats of invasion and conquest, manifested themselves as monsters. And how are we to know that we are no longer under the spell of these same fears that gave birth to the mythical monster? All one has to do is to observe the reactions of our fellow citizens to the economic ascendancy of China, to the alleged "socialist" bent of the Obama administration, or to the plan for a new mosque at Ground Zero.

ÐÐ Rika Ohara, Fall 2012

Research Images:



Kaiser Wilhelm II

Kaiser's dream of "Yellow Peril"

Icon of Archangel Michael stolen from Hagia
Sophia, Constantinople, by the Fourth Crusade,
now at the Treasury of San Marco, Venice

Athénée Palace Bucharest ca. 1914

Athénée Palace after its 1937 "Art Deco" facelift

Athénée Palace lobby today
"In the summer of 1940 the Athene Palace was the
last cosmopolitan stage on which the post-World
War Europe and the New Order made a joint
appearance." ÐÐ R.G. Waldeck, Athene Palace (1942)

Athénée Palace lobby today
"Only, at the Athene Palace, a glamorous setting in
the traditional style of European Grand Hotels, the
cast of post-World War Europe and the cast of the
New Order, all-star casts both, still had equal billing
and the play itself was full of suspense." ÐÐ Waldeck

Countess R.G. Waldeck, author of Athene
Palace
: "I enjoy the reaction of well-bred Nazis
when I tell them I'm Jewish."

Clare Hollingworth, the first to report the invasion of Poland.
"She carried a pearl-handled revolver in her handbag, laughed in the
faces of Rumanian policemen and Gestapo agents alike, was always
trying to go places where people told her she was not supposed to go."
ÐÐ Robert St. John, from Foreign Correspondent (1957)

September 1, 1939, Daily Telegraph

Robert St. John,
author of Foreign
Correspondent
(1957)

Maria Tanase, the "Voice of Romania" whose
recordings were burnt by the Iron Guard-dominated
fascist government in 1940
Lt. Col. John P. Ratay
Lt. Colonel John Paul Ratay (U.S.), Waldeck's
"favorite military attaché"
King Carol II of Romania
King Carol II was forced to abdicate and flee
the country with his mistress in 1940.

Elena "Magda" Lepescu, Carol's Jewish mistress

Helen of Greece, wife of Carol II
and mother of Mihai

Carol with Prince Mihai after the former's
first exile in Paris with Lupescu

Court Minister Ernest Urdareanu, blamed
along with Lupescu for much of the corruption

Carol married Lupescu in their second exile.

Ferdinand I, Carol's father, collected
El Grecos.

Cornenliu Zelea
Codreanu
, founder of
the Iron Guard

Codreanu (with his wife) in Romanian folk costume

Horia Sima, the Iron Guard leader after
Codreanu's death in 1938

Former Premier Nikolae Iorga,
"Goethean Man of Romania" and a victim of
the Iron Guard's Jilava Massacre (1940)

A Bucharest synagogue, 1941

Henry Morgenthau Sr., U.S. Ambassador to
Turkey (1913-16) and a witness to the Armenian
Genocide (1915)

Henry Morgenthau Jr., U.S. Secretary of the
Treasury (1934-45), who proposed starving
Germany back to the Stone Age.

Berlin 1945

"Rubble Women" (Trümmerfrauen) who
rebuilt Germany

East Berlin, November 4, 1989





Notes:

[1] ÒHe had a revelation of Oriental hordes overwhelming Europe and made a sketch of his vision: a Buddha riding upon a dragon above ruined cities. The caption read: ÔDie Gelbe Gefahr! [yellow peril!]Õ Several copies were made and presented to royal relatives all over Europe as well as every embassy in Berlin.Ó ÐÐ John Toland, The Rising Sun: The decline and fall of the Japanese Empire 1936-1945, 1970, Random House, p. 69

[2] William Rosen, JustinianÕs Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe, 2007, Viking, pp.194-197

[3] ÒThe Huns, says Ammianus, were Ôso prodigiously ugly and bent that they might be taken for two-legged animals or the figures crudely carved from stumps, which are seen on the parapets of bridgesÉ Jordanes develops the theme. They caused excessive panic, he says, by the terror of their faces; they put men to flight by their Ôterrifying appearance, which inspired fear because of its swarthiness, and they had, if I may call it so, a sort of shapeless lump, not a head.Ó ÐÐ E.A. Thompson, The Huns paperback edition, 1999, London: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., p.56 (originally published by Oxford University Press, 1948); also see The Original Untermenschen

[4]The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man, (pamphlet) 1922

[5] ÒIn calling the victors at Poitiers ÔEuropensesÕ for the first time, Isidore PacensisÕ neologism introducedÉ a meta-category to replace the lost, lamented civitas romanum.Ó ÐÐ David Levering Lewis, GodÕs Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215, 2008, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p.172

[6] Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 1984, New York: Schocken Books, pp.38-39; also see The Cannibal of Ma'arrat

[7] At the siege of Caffa in Crimea in 1346, the Mongol army of Jani Beg, (khan, r. 1342-1357) catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city wall. (Mark Wheelis, University of California at Davis, http://www.medscape.com; http://www.cdc.gov)

[8] Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula, 1972, New York: Galahad Books, pp.110-114 (illustrations: p.106 and p.116)

[9] Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, 1993, New York: Vintage Books edition, (1994), xlvi

[10] Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, trans. By Peter Heinegg, 1990, Columbia University Press, p.140

[11] Kaplan, p.96

[12] Having possibly served as a model for Nicolae CeausescuÕs aspirations to a personality cult, Codreanu today is again a popular figure, voted 22nd in a television poll for 100 greatest Romanians in 2006 (Wikipedia). Ceausescu himself placed 11th, above Vlad III ÒTepesÓ Dracul at the 12th.

[13] Ioanid, p.98, p.105, p.158

[14] Kaplan, p.172

[15] The number of the deportees is estimated as 27,000 by hungarianhistory.com; Òapproximately 30,000Ó by sibiweb.de and 26,000 according to geneologienetz.de.

[16] ÒThe last Turco-Tatar raid didnÕt get as far as most of its predecessors, but it had taken place as recently as 1788; and in the vast period between 1241 and 1788, smaller raids by the Tatars and other marauding bands had been endemic.Ó ÐÐ Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water, 1986, New York Review Books, p.169