Bestiarium Judaicum by Geller Jay;

Author:Geller, Jay; [Geller, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2017-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 16. The mark of the beast. Curt Siodmak’s pastiche of the Cloisters Apocalypse’s illuminated folio of Rev. 13:16–18. Reproduced in Philip Riley, The Wolf Man, 12. Reprinted by courtesy of Philip Riley.

Siodmak’s Wolf Man is neither the uncaging of the beast lurking beneath our civilized veneer nor its modern, psychoanalytically informed variant: the monster that emerges once the restraints produced by the subjection of human animal desires to repression and suppression by cultural practices and institutions have been lifted.87 Although being turned into a werewolf is often labeled a curse, Siodmak repeatedly states that Larry has not been cursed because of any evil or immoral act on his part or on the part of his ancestors. Instead Siodmak sees his transformation as a matter of “Destiny,” as he had once entitled his screenplay.88 In various autobiographical writings fifty years later, he emphasizes the role of “harmatia” (sic), which he characterizes as an intrinsic tragic flaw that “we all have . . . in us, and suffer in life’s mishaps and pain, without having been guilty of any misdeed.”89 Nor is Larry’s transformation a consequence of his pursuing self-aggrandizement and making some Faustian bargain. Quite the opposite: He is bitten by a werewolf while trying to save Gwen’s friend. Once bitten, he repeatedly attempts to protect others from the werewolf. He gives Gwen a protective amulet and his father the walking stick; he also tries to leave town, even though he would thereby forfeit his birthright. Unlike the other Universal Studios’ monsters, Larry is a tragic figure who evokes the sympathy of the audiences throughout the film.

Based upon this summary there would appear to be no possible connection between Siodmak, the Wolf Man, and Judentum aside from the accident of the writer’s own destiny. When he tells an interviewer shortly before his death (in 2000) that

I am the Wolf Man. I was forced into a fate I didn’t want: to be a Jew in Germany. I would not have chosen that as my fate. The swastika represents the moon. When the moon comes up, the man doesn’t want to murder, but he knows he cannot escape it, the Wolf Man destiny. Something happens that you know is going to happen, but you cannot escape it, like being sent to a concentration camp.90

Siodmak is probably sharing a screen memory rather than a memory of the screen—given, as noted previously, blooming wolfbane and not the full moon occasions the lupine transformation in the original film. That is, rather than recalling the identifications and intentions of a thirty-nine-year-old screenwriter having just been given an assignment consisting of a title for a screenplay, “The Wolf Man,” and a deadline, this is more likely a post hoc testament to a life that had spanned the twentieth century. By identifying himself with his most famous creation and drawing upon the near coincidence of his pinnacle of personal achievement, The Wolf Man, with Europe’s fall into the abyss that was the Shoah, he transforms himself into the exemplary German Jewish refugee.

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