Nosferatu in Love
Jim Shepard
Faber & Faber pbk, 215 pgs, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)

Towering over six feet and blessed with a shock of red hair, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe was never destined to be one of life's also-rans. But success or even notoriety hardly beckoned with a name like that, and he duly shed it on a visit to the mountain resort of Murnau as a young man. He was accompanied on the trip by his fellow student and lover, Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele.

Scion of a wealthy German family, Hans was at least partially responsible for steering Murnau from the respectable path of family expectations and into indulging a passion for theatre, and eventually the fledging art of cinema. In the bohemian clubs of pre-WWI Berlin, wayward personalities and deep bonds were forged that eventually found desperate resonance in Hans' untimely death on the Eastern Front.

In this 'work of imagination', Jim Shepard supposes that it was this loss from which the director never fully recovered. A military pilot himself, the distraught Murnau fled the conflict. When we meet Murnau again it's in the planning for his most well known picture, the remarkable Nosferatu, Eine Symphone Des Grauens (1922) - a peak of silent cinema and one of the most poetic of all horror movies. Through imagined diary entries we track his career in pioneer film-making, and through the burden of guilt bequeathed by Hans' death, especially at the suggestion that his own infidelity might just have driven his lover to suicide.

Shepard's is a daring book in several respects. It's fiction not biography, and he has no compunction in imagining his way into Murnau's head, his narrative never burdened by slavish detail. Indeed, it prefers to isolate periods from this life rather than document every twist and turn. It's noticeable, for example, that Shepard doesn't even touch on what, for many, would be Murnau's masterpiece, Sunrise (1927). Instead we track nascent enthusiasm in Nosferatu, innovative technological excitements (he always wanted to make the camera move) on Der Letzte Mann (1924), and Murnau's South Seas adventure with documentarist Robert Flaherty, making what would be his final film (Tabu, 1931), following three mixed years in Hollywood,. He died later that year in a bizarre motoring accident near Monteray.

Shepard's novel is part fact, part fancy, but as a portrait of the artist as tortured young man, it makes for an ingenious and touching read. It's no accident that Max Schreck's skeletal vampiric icon graces the cover - Murnau's life, Shepard says, was one haunted with the same pity and horror as his creation:
He was a man of austere principals without principles. He was a man committed only to personal art whose life never saw the light of day… To try to remember where he'd entered the shadows, or where the shadows had entered him, was pointless.

As much a study of doomed love as it is a history of early film, Nosferatu In Love is a concise and beautifully rendered novel of passion and torment.