According to legend, vampires can't get into our homes unless they're invited. I wonder, sometimes, if our society's begun writing up the invitations.

Vampirism is an enduring metaphor, and it's worth our consideration. To understand what the metaphor refers to, let's take a look at two of the most striking examples of vampire cinema: FW Murnau's 1922 German expressionist horror film Nosferatu and E Elias Mehrige's 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire , a fictional account of Nosferatu's production.

Nosferatu loosely translates Bram Stoker's Dracula into a German context. Unable to acquire the rights to Stoker's work, Murnau simply made a few alterations to the storyline and changed the vampire's name to Count Orlock, played by Max Shreck. Orlock is the exact image of the vampire of Eastern European legend. Undeath isn't romanticized in this film; Orlock doesn't have a hint of Bela's elegance or Lestat's eroticism. This count is a walking cadaver, a fitting general for his army of plague-bearing rats.

In Shadow of the Vampire , Murnau is portrayed as a visionary psychopath. Max Shreck turns out to be an actual vampire, pretending for the sake of cast and crew that he's a character actor so immersed in his role that he maintains it even when the camera stops rolling. We learn that Murnau discovered this monster in the Eastern European wilderness, and promised him the throat of the female lead in return for his co-operation. Murnau thinks he can control this often pitiful demon, but he's mistaken. As pathetic as the vampire is, he's also driven by a cannibalistic hunger. Once unleashed, he can't be restrained.

The imagery in Shadow of the Vampire reveals an important subtext. Murnau often wears pitch-black goggles; if the eyes are the windows of the soul, then Murnau's is a bottomless pit. The director has a rendezvous with the vampire in just such a pit, implying that Shreck reflects a horror residing within Murnau's psyche. In other scenes, the camera lingers on a locomotive crossing the European countryside, reminding us of the trains that fed Dachau and Auschwitz. This subtext suggests that the movie isn't really about a director who summons an uncontrollable monster from the depths of Europe; it's about a people who summoned an uncontrollable nightmlare from the depths of their own minds.

Whereas the overt text is fiction, the subtext is literally true. In the decades leading to World War Two, something terrible was called forth from its hiding place within the German zeitgeist. After all, the Holocaust must have existed in the German soul before being unleashed upon the Jewish body. This went beyond anti-Semitism. Like all forms of hatred, anti-Semitism is fuelled by deep-seated fear, pain, and anger—in short, by psychological trauma. It's easy to speculate about this trauma's origins. Germans endured as much as anyone else in the trenches of World War I, and their suffering was compounded by the humiliating and economically devastating terms of the post-war peace. Added to these factors, however, is one that's too often overlooked. To understand the Holocaust, we have to consider the effects of the widespread abuse of German children.

Alice Miller, author of For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), argues convincingly that child abuse was rampant in German families by 1900. Germans were already known for their unusually harsh parenting practices, but these practices became far harsher under the influence of such pedagogues as Dr Daniel Gottlieb Moritz Schreber, whose tracts flooded the region during the mid-nineteenth century. A strict authoritarian, Schreber taught parents to break their children's spirits immediately after birth. For example, he instructed them to physically punish babies for crying, assuring parents that "such a procedure is only necessary once, or at most twice, and then one is the master of the child for all time. From then on, one look, one single threatening gesture will suffice to subjugate the child."

Through the teachings of such men as Schreber, entire generations of German children were deprived of any sense of love and safety. Their hearts were broken before their legs could walk. This left them exceptionally vulnerable to the psychological consequences of war and national impoverishment. In addition to this, remember that industrialization had only recently taken hold in Prussia and Austria. This compounded the collective traumas of the German people; it also provided the means to express those traumas on an unprecedented scale. There were no systems of public health care, income assistance, family support, or child protection to soothe the suffering of the German people.

By the time Nosferatu was produced their inner world must have been unspeakably desolate. Since this was a mental mutilation, it expressed itself through the cultural products of the German mind, taking shape in the halls of power as readily as in the houses of cinema. Because they were raised to despise weakness, Germans refused to even acknowledge, much less examine, their emotional injuries. Thus, they were probably unaware of the ethical significance of their actions; the cultural machinery of the Holocaust arranged itself on a largely unconscious level. Just as a simple algorithm generates the infinitely complex patterns of the Mandlebrot Set, the unrecognized and unarticulated psychological pain of the German people generated the intricate preconditions necessary for the creation of the death camps.

Vampirism is the perfect metaphor for this process. Trauma is a kind of death-in-life. The workings of the traumatized mind are fragmented and deregulated, preventing complex functions like happiness and empathy from coalescing. It intensifies the hunger for love, but blocks any healthy expression of this need, encouraging the development of sadomasochistic obsessions. Like vampirism, trauma has plague-like qualities. If those who suffer trauma aren't healed, they can become its carriers, compulsively inflicting the same cruelty upon others that was once inflicted upon them. The more innocent the victim, and the more grievous the cruelty, the more likely it is that the infection will take hold. If left unchecked, trauma can bring down whole societies as surely as the Black Death spread by Nosferatu's rats.

The institutions of the welfare state that were erected in Western nations following World War II tempered their people's traumas. These institutions have been our societies' front lines of defense against both trauma and the fascism it generates. We should remember this as conservatives, both in British Columbia and elsewhere, dismantle our social safety nets, encourage a return to authoritarian child-rearing practices, celebrate unrestrained marketplace savagery, and entangle us in the vast economic networks of the USA's military-industrial complex. In doing so, they may well be opening a coffin that should stay forever closed.

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