F.W. Murnau, Director of the Nosferatu

Murnau is most well known for directing the first vampire film, but the German-born creator went on to make a number of influential films before his early death.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy,
it's October. I know it's kind of like the middleish
of October at this point. Yeah, so for anybody who's

(00:23):
worried that we haven't had a ton of Halloween content,
it's just kind of clumping all at the end, Whereas
in previous years it's kind of been like every other
one throughout the month. Just because of some scheduling needs,
It's ended up that our October stuff is all coming
out really in the back half of of October. Hopefully
that will be enough to tide people over. I know
it's hard to wait those extra two weeks. As someone

(00:46):
who celebrates Halloween virtually every day of the year, I
understand the topic that we're covering today is something I
have wanted to talk about for a really long time,
and that is F. W. Murnow. I make no secret
that I love No Sferratto as well as a lot
of his other work, but No Sharratto has a very
special place in my heart. See above re Halloween every day.

(01:08):
But Murnau's life is so much more than that one film,
and that's something actually happened fairly early in his film career,
so there's a lot that happened afterwards. And he was
truly an innovator in cinema and a visual storyteller whose
work is even today hotly debated for its merits and faults,
but its influence is felt uh in so many films

(01:30):
that you see today where the filmmakers were influenced by Murnau.
So you are still getting the benefit of his efforts,
whether you know it or not. Murnau was born Friedrich
Wilhelm plump in Belafeld, Germany, on December nine. His brother
Robert later described him, who went by his middle name

(01:50):
of Villehelm, by saying, quote from the very beginning, my
brother overflowed with imagination. Their family was well off. Their father,
Enrich Plumpa, had inherited a profitable textile business, which he
sold for a pretty tidy sum and then bought a
sprawling estate. The family's children would put on plays in

(02:11):
the garden, and that's where Wilhelm really fell in love
with the idea of theater. Yeah, apparently one of his sisters.
His mother was his father's second wife, and one of
his older sisters was initially like directing all of them
to do these plays, but he pretty quickly was like, no,
I want to make this stuff, but they're idyllic. Privileged
childhood was abruptly interrupted when Heinrich Plumpa sold the family

(02:35):
property and sunk all of his money into what turned
out to be a bad investment. They weren't destitute at
that point, but they did have a significant downgrade in
their lifestyle. But Wilhelm's love of putting on productions continued unabated,
and his brothers, who wanted to encourage his creativity despite
their father thinking that that was a waste of time,
actually built a little theater for him to put on

(02:58):
his shows, complete with lighting and moving scenery. Bill Him,
who was a voracious reader, was at the top of
his class in school. His father wanted him to go
on to become a professor, and to that end, he
attended university in Berlin, where he started working as an
actor under the name of Murnal. This new name was
in the hopes of his father not discovering what he

(03:20):
was doing. But bill Helm was tall about six ft
four and very easy to recognize. Soon, a family friend
spotted him in a performance and mentioned it to his parents.
Heinrich then cut his son off financially, but Murnal's grandfather
on his mother's side started sending him a monthly allowance
so he could stay in Berlin. Yeah, he was still

(03:41):
going to school. He hadn't shirked that part of this responsibility.
But he also apparently was living a rather lavish life,
which had caused some problems when his father was called
with these like huge debts that that he had amassed
kind of uh, putting only the finest furnishings in art
in his little apartment. But yeah, he he thought he
could just work as an actor on the side while

(04:02):
he also went to school. But after Berlin, Wilhelm went
on to school in Heidelberg, and there he studied literature, art,
history and philosophy. And it was also there, in nineteen
o eight that he connected with Max Reinhardt, Austrian born.
Reinhardt was a well known figure on the German theater scene,
and he was impressed by Wilhelm when he saw him
perform in a play that was put on by the university.

(04:24):
He was so impressed in fact that he offered him
a place in his theater school with a full scholarship
if Murnau agreed to attend for a full six years.
In nineteen eleven, Murnau assisted Reinhart in the production of
a play called The Miracle, which was written by Karl Vomler.
He had been exploring directing and he realized that he
preferred that to acting. Also, this move to directing was

(04:47):
motivated by a certain practicality. He knew that being as
tall as he was would be a hindrance to being
cast in leading roles, but his height really made no
difference to working as a director. Yeah, he was so
distinctive looking that he was like, no one is going
to want to cast me from one show to another,
because I will just look like the same dude no
matter what I do. World War One, though, did put

(05:10):
a damper on art for mur Now for a little while.
Who served in the German military. He was first called
up as a footguard, and then he was promoted and
then became a company commander, and eventually he transferred to
the Air Force. And while flying with the German Air Force,
he crashed eight times, but he walked away every time
without any serious injuries, and after his last crash landing

(05:30):
in Switzerland, he was arrested and interned at Andermatt where
he used his time as a prisoner of war to
work on a film script and produce theater with his
fellow internees. According to fellow officer Major Wolfgang Schrump, every evening,
Murnau would recite a poem called The Pianist of Death
to the officers, and according to the same account, he

(05:50):
also carried a stick with him which was made out
of a propeller, which was full of bullet holes. He
was so influential that a lot of the men he
served with also started care being similar sticks, as sort
of a strange wartime fashion trend that Murnau had created.
While Murnau made it through the war seemingly unscathed, his
best friend Hans are in Bound Degla was killed at

(06:13):
the front, and that was a loss that Murnow grieved
really deeply. The loss of Hans was perhaps so difficult
because he had been one of the few people that
Murnau was actually close to. Even Berneu's family was often
kept at arm's lengths, particularly during the time that he
had changed his name and worked on his secret acting career.
There was a story about one of his brothers going

(06:34):
to the same place as him, but like telling his
friends and other people in the family like, oh, I can't,
I'm not allowed to look at at Villa like I can't,
I can't acknowledge that I related to him. But losing
his closest friend really seemed to catalyze a desire to
connect more deeply to his siblings and his family, which
he did in his early thirties. After the war ended,

(06:55):
Murnau didn't go back to the theater and steady shifted
his interest to film. He edited a few short films
for the German embassy. These were basically propaganda. In nineteen nineteen,
he founded his own film company with friends from his
time at the Reinhardt School. Under his company Murnout Vite
Voon gevel Shaft, he made the transition into directing long

(07:16):
form film. He did this when he directed The Boy
in Blue that was inspired by the seventeen seventy painting
The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. A copy of the
painting appears in the film, but the face in the
original was replaced with the face of the main character.
In nineteen twenty his story overlaps with a previous podcast subject,

(07:37):
Bella Lugosi. Murnaut directed Lugosi in an adaptation of the
Doctor Jekyline Mr. Hyde story that was originally published in
eighteen eighty six. Murnau's version, which was titled Janna's Face,
was a critical success, although like a lot of his work,
modern audiences have no access to it as it has
been lost. Almost half of his films were lost over
the years. Murnau's work in nineteen twenty two is what

(08:00):
has truly endured, though, and that's what's given the director
his longevity as a person of interest among horror fans especially.
It was then that he directed the cult classic Nosferatu.
Even if you don't know the film, odds are that
you have seen images from it. Count Orlock, who's the
vampire at the center of the plot, it's just an

(08:20):
unmistakable figure. This is what I'm going to confess to Holly,
that I've never seen this film all the way through,
but I immediately can call what count Orlock looks like
to mind, like and how he moves like. All of that,
I want to mind a big dramatic throwing of things
across the room, but I'll forgive you. Yeah, you're missing

(08:41):
out though, and I know, I know, there's just so
much media to consume. Um count Orlock is tall and thin,
with large pointy ears, heavy eyebrows, and long, pointy front teeth,
and he's one of cinema's oldest and most iconic villains
and serves as sort of a shorthand for a vampire.
Now and coming up, we'll talk about some of the

(09:01):
rumors around the making of Nose ferrat but first we're
going to pause for a word from one of our sponsors.
There have been so many rumors and stories surrounding the
making of the film Nose Ferrato since it was released,
in part due to some of the promotional materials that

(09:23):
were released ahead of the movie. To drum up interest,
The magazine BN Film put out an issue just before
the film came out in that featured a story told
by production designer Alban Grau, in which Grau claims that
during the war he met a Serbian man who claimed
that his father had died without receiving the holy sacraments
and then wandered their village in vampire form. Grou who

(09:46):
was an occultist and also one of the people who
initiated this project, claimed to have seen documents detailing the
exhimation of the body, which showed no signs of decomposition,
and then Grou's Serbian friend told him that after the
body of his father was a zoomed, a steak was
driven through its heart and that the vampire died. So
this theoretically was the inspiration for No Farrato. According to

(10:08):
grow it was all based on this true story that
he had heard while during the war, and he claims
that nose ferrato was the Serbian word for vampire, although
the true etymology of that word is a lot hazier
than that. There's no exact known origin point. No Farrato
continues to have its own mythos as the first vampire film.
It's drawn a lot of interest in the century since

(10:30):
that it was made, but it was almost lost, just
like several of Murnal's other films. That's because the story
is a loose adaptation of brom Stoker's Dracula, and it
was made without the rights to that story, something that
is a non issue now because it's so old, but
was an issue at that time. Murnal's production company was
unable to secure the rights to it, but they went

(10:52):
ahead with the production anyway, changing a number of the elements,
and Florence Malcolm Stoker, who was Bram Stoker's widow, sued
over it. Yeah, they changed names of characters in the
location and it's, uh, it's a little bit different, but
there's enough there that it's pretty clearly if you had
read Dracula, you'd be like, this sure looks like a
lot like Dracula. Yeah, it's sort of like when you

(11:14):
go to buy Halloween costumes and there named something like
Magical School Student, and you know it's really Harry Potter, right.
My a recent one that I saw was Midweek, Um,
Angry Girl and it's supposed to be Wednesday, which to
me was very funny. By the time that the case

(11:34):
that uh, Florence Malcolm Stoker brought went to court, the
film company was already bankrupt. So much money had been
spent on publicity for nos f A too and on
staging a massive gala opening at the Berlin Zoo that
there was literally nothing left for the widow Stoker to
be awarded. Still, a German court did rule in her

(11:54):
favor and issued a verdict that all copies of the
film had to be destroyed. Of course, uh not to
thwart the law, but thankfully, in my opinion, that did
not happen. Prince of the film made their way to London,
where Florence Malcolm Stoker was able to block its screening
in and then to New York where it was viewed
by audiences in nineteen nine. And as with a lot

(12:17):
of Murnau's work, there are multiple different versions of the film,
and over the years, film fans and historians have worked
very hard, in some cases referring to the original shooting
script to untangle which of those versions is actually closest
to Murnau's original. As an aside, the film Shadow of
the Vampire, which unlike to sparazi I have seen, stars

(12:38):
Willem Dafoe as actor Max Shrek, who brought count Orlock
to life. It's a really fun movie and it plays
on the long running rumor that Shrek actually did practice
vampiresm during the filming of No Sparazzi, But to be
clear that is fiction. Were now is portrayed by John
Malkovich in a manner that suggests that the director was
just a driven autour only cared about capturing what he

(13:02):
saw as his vision without being concerned about anything or
anybody else. That is totally opposite of just about every
account of Monow as a director. Yeah, we're gonna read
something later that was was said at his uh funeral
that will kind of very clearly point out how how
differently he really really was portrayed in that film from

(13:24):
what he was like in real life. And while No
Sperato is probably the film he's most famous for today,
at least in sort of general audience circles, I think
if you get into cinephile circles, others come up pretty quickly.
But murn Now went on, as we said at the beginning,
to direct plenty of other films, and it was really
those films that put him on the map as a
director of note. With his contemporaries in Germany, in nineteen

(13:47):
Der Letztemann was released, and it was a breakthrough moment
in narrative cinema. While the title translates directly to the
Last Man, and it's English language release that was titled
The Last Laugh, it tells the story of the doorman
at a fancy hotel who, as he ages, is forced
into the lesser role of bathroom attendant. This transition is

(14:09):
significant and difficult for the main character because his identity
is totally tied up in his work as a doorman,
and this emotional fall mirrors the fall in his status
as a staff member in the hotel. There is almost
no dialogue in the Last Laugh. There's no audible dialogue
at all. This wasn't still in the silent film era,
so The Jazz Singer would not debut for another three years.

(14:30):
But there is also only a single title card in
all of mr film, which runs seventy seven minutes. The
entire story is told through pantomime and the use of
shadow light and another artist creative skill. The Last Laugh
gained Brenw a lot of attention, in part because of
the work of cinematographer Carl Freund in service to Bronow's vision.

(14:53):
Unlike most of the films of the time that were
shot on sound stages from an audience perspective, almost like
you viewing a play, the Last Man traveled through the
set to mimic walking the streets of the city. The
main character's point of view is captured and shared with
the audience, and that's something that movie goers of the
nine twenties weren't really accustomed to Today there are dollies

(15:15):
and rigs that are specifically made to make the cameras agile.
But Freund had to really improvise to find ways to
get his shots and to meet Murnal's demands because Urnal
really felt like the film needed to be more dynamic. Yeah,
Freund did everything from attaching cameras to bicycles to strapping
a camera to his waist, and for one scene he

(15:37):
wore the camera on his waist and he crossed the
set wearing a pair of roller skates with the camera
rolling to create the illusion of drunkenness for the audience.
And for the film's opening shot, he was on a
bicycle as it traveled on an improvised elevator going down
and then essentially he pedaled out into a hotel lobby set,
so it drew the audience into the motion and the

(15:58):
tone in the world of the care during the film instantly.
I think, living in the era of go pro footage,
it's easy to forget that, like people had to work
out how to make cameras move this way. Yeah, there's
a really great story that one of his colleagues tells
about how um when mur Now is first like, we
need to follow this smoke up this this set, and

(16:19):
they're like, um, okay, wait, we got to walk up
the stairs, and how he realized later that they had
already assumed that they could figure out how to carry
the camera. They were just like, but how will we
get up the stairs? Like they had no problem getting
over that idea of taking it off the tripod, but
the next part was just like the logistics of the

(16:41):
next thing were so big that they didn't even think about,
like just having to hold the camera after the last laugh.
Mur Now was known as the great impressionist in German
film circles. He took that reputation and used it to
turn out a very sumptuous and extravagant film. Next that
was an adaptation of Muliere's Tartuffe, which debuted in His

(17:04):
next film was another literary adaptation. That one was Faust,
which debuted in Throughout the mid nineteen twenties, Murnau had
become quite a big name in German cinema, and it
was not long before Hollywood took notice. After the release
of Faust, Fox Film Corporation offered the director a contract
to move to California and start making films in the

(17:25):
United States. One of Murnau's requests was that he be
allowed to take his crew with him, and that was
something that Fox agreed to. Murnau's first project under his
contract was a picture called Sunrise, A Song of two Humans.
It opens with title cards that read, quote, this song
of the man and his wife is of no place

(17:45):
in every place. You might hear it anywhere, at any time.
For whatever. The sun rises and sets in the city's
turmoil or under the open sky on the farm. Life
is much the same, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet. The film,
which is considered a masterpiece by a lot of people, uh,
tells the story of a married man who has an
affair and his lover suggests that he kill his wife

(18:08):
so that he can leave behind his old life and
start a new life in the city with her and
the man that is all he is named as is
played by Georgio Brien, and he's unable to follow through
on this plan, and instead he reconciles with his wife. Um.
There are a lot of shots in this film that
are considered like the first of their kind. Um there's

(18:29):
one where the two of them are on a trolley car,
kind of passing from a more rural suburban setting into
a city setting that's considered super important. Um. The wife
in this movie was played by Janet Gaynor. Sunrise was
and still is a critical success. It went on to
win an award at the first Academy Awards that was
held in and it was in the now defunct category

(18:52):
of Unique and Artistic Picture. Janet Gaynor also won Best
Actress that year. She was nominated in three front roles,
including her work on Sunrise, Seventh Heaven, and Street Angel.
Sunrise one for cinematography and was also nominated for Art
Direction and that all sounds like Sunrise was a big,
big hit, but not so much with audiences. Critics loved it,

(19:16):
but Sunrise just did not draw viewers, and the ticket
sales on it were really disappointing. Despite all of the
accolades that the film garnered, Fox decided that Murnow was
going to have less freedom on future projects. Four Devils
Came Out in It told the story of four orphans
who were raised by a clown and became a high
wire circus act. This is one of Burnow's films which

(19:38):
has not survived. Yeah, that's uh. Sometimes when you talk
to film people, it's definitely mentioned as sort of a
holy Grail film, like they everybody hopes that one day
we will find this film, because it does when you
read treatments of it in script pieces sound very very interesting.
Our Daily Bread premiered in nine. This film also came

(19:59):
out under a front title, which was City Girl, and Murnow,
still being pretty highly supervised by the studio, did not
have complete control over this project, and additional scenes were
added at the last minute by the studio so that
there could be some audio dialogue in the film to
take advantage of the audience's interest in talkies. If you
see it today, you're probably going to see an all

(20:20):
silent version because most um most versions we would see
today are re edited back to what people believe was
was Murnau's initial vision. Naturally, that kind of tampering with
his work was not something that Murnau was happy about
at all, and an effort to regain his artistic freedom,
he formed a partnership with Robert Flaherty. The two combined

(20:40):
their efforts to start their own production company, but this
was kind of an odd pairing. Murnau was known for
his fictional work, and that was where his heart really
was as a filmmaker. But Flaherty, on the other hand,
was a documentarian, so working on films together put them
at odds. And we're going to talk about the project
that Murnaux and Flaherty took on as their first colle
oberation in just a moment. But first we're going to

(21:02):
hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you
missed in history class going. Murnow and Flaherty's first and
only project together was a film called Taboo that's spelled
t a b U. It was shot on location in
the South Pacific, primarily on Bora, Bora and Tahiti. But

(21:25):
whereas Flaherty thought that they were making a documentary about
Polynesian culture, mur Now saw the documentary aspects of the
production as a backdrop for a fictional story that he
wanted to tell. The collaboration aspect of this film quickly ended.
Flaherty left the project pretty early on, although his name
does appear in the credits as a co director. How
much either of them influenced this film is another thing

(21:47):
that people sometimes like to debate. Murnow continued, as he
desired crafting a love story set in the tropics. He
cast local Islanders and the two lead roles of lovers
whose desire to be together is at odds with their
cultural rules. Mr Now fell so in love with Tahiti
that he built himself a home there. His mother later
wrote that he had always been fascinated with the South Seas,

(22:09):
and going there to make Taboo was the culmination of
a lifelong dream. He planned to make more movies there
after Taboo was released, and in the time that was
leading up to the release of Taboo, Murnow, who had
traveled back to California, had planned to visit his mother,
and before he left for Germany, he planned to have
a creative meeting with author William Morris about some potential

(22:30):
projects together. On the morning of March eleven one, mur
Now stopped by the home of his friend, actress and
screenwriter Salka Virtel to pick up some sandwiches for the
car ride up to Carmel del Monte, where his meeting
was going to take place. Mur Now was riding in
a hired car, which he planned to take with him
by ship to Germany, and he was traveling with a

(22:50):
chauffeur for the California drive named John Freeland, as well
as a much younger man, Garcia Stevenson, who the director
had hired to be his valet and driver in Germany.
There are different accounts of what happened next, but a
little less than twenty miles outside of Santa Barbara, the
car Murnau and the other two men were traveling in
skidded off the road and down an embankment. According to

(23:12):
the news story that ran in the New York Times,
the car rolled twice on its thirty ft drop and
then it landed on its roof. Murnow fractured his skull
in the accident and died the next day, and the
in a bit of an unsettling coincidence, Murnaut had told
friends that he had consulted a fortune teller before starting
his journey, and this fortune teller told him that he

(23:34):
would die in a car on this trip. He had
thought about taking a ship from California all the way
to Europe instead of driving to New York to cross
the Atlantic, and he thought that would thwart that prediction. Yeah,
he thought booking this longer cruise was his way around
what fortune teller had told him, So it was Um
one of those sort of creepy coincidences that the fact

(23:56):
that he died on the much shortened drive portion of
his up uh just adds to the mystique of the
whole thing. But this is also an issue that involves
a lot of rumors, because rumors began to swirl immediately
as to what exactly had happened to cause this accident,
and there are multiple different accounts, some by his friend
Um salko Vertel, one by a man who was in

(24:20):
a car behind him. Uh. There is also testimony given
by Freeman because Uh Murnau's mother tried to sue the
company that he had rented the car from, and in
one account, Murnau himself was driving. In others, it was
Murnow's valet, Garcia Stevenson, who was underage. He was a
teenager who was at the wheel. Stories began to circulate

(24:40):
in Hollywood that Murnaux and Stevenson had been engaged in
a sexual act in the front seat while the chaufeur Freeman,
slept in the back when the accident had happened. Because
all of the men had been thrown from the car
as it had tumbled to its final landing position. Nothing
was clear, and gossip ran rampant. This is still a
thing that has talked about in large question marks. Nobody
really knows what caused this accident where the other two

(25:02):
men also killed in it. They were not okay. Uh
Freeman and Garcia both survived. As I said, Freeman gave
an account during the investigation. Uh. Garcia, I didn't see
anything that that listed a clear account from him. Uh,
So I'm not entirely sure what happened there. Even the
accounts of where mer Now was headed to meet the
boat that would take him down to the Panama Canal

(25:23):
and then across the Atlantic were at odds with each other.
One version stated he was headed to San Francisco, another
claimed he was going to San Diego after the visit
with Morris. All these rumors gave Burnow's sudden death a
very seedy and unpleasant association. Only eleven people attended the
funeral that was held for him in Los Angeles. Yeah
it with some of his collaborators, a couple of actors

(25:44):
he had worked with, a couple of his very close friends.
After Murnau's body was transported to Germany, which took considerable effort,
and paperwork. There was another service held there and filmmaker
Fritz Lang gave a eulogy, which was described by art
director Robert Hurleth. This also interesting because Fritz Lang was
considered something of a competitor to Murnau, but according to

(26:07):
her quote, he Fritz described Murnau striding into the studio,
always good tempered, smiling, affably, able by his mere presence
to kindle enthusiasm. He seemed like some great aristocrat, interesting
himself in the cinema, partly out of curiosity and partly
by way of amusement, which was in fact what a
lot of people believed. In reality, he was a tireless

(26:29):
and thorough worker. Behind his gayety was an indefatigable energy
that was nonetheless there because he liked to hide it.
Taboo was released on schedule just a week after Murnow's death.
It wasn't a box office success. Mur Now was finally
buried in Stansdorff Cemetery outside of Berlin. Even the burial

(26:49):
became a source of gossip, as stories started to circulate
that the director's coffin was unburied in a seller because
there wasn't any money to have it interred at. German
film periodical published a counter to that rumor, stating that
the delay in putting Murnau's coffin in the ground was
because of the chapel not being completed. After Murnau's sudden death,

(27:11):
his family came to know a whole new side of
the director. His brother Robert traveled to Tahiti to deal
with Murnau's property in his business there, and in Robert's account,
he said that when he arrived at the port, the
locals essentially ignored him, which was a stark contrast to
the warm greeting that all of the other disembarking travelers
had received. Allegedly, the home that Murnau had built there

(27:33):
was on the sacred soil of ancient temples, something that
he had been warned would bring him misfortune, and in
his brother Robert's explanation, the locals believed that Murnau had
brought his death upon himself and viewed anyone associated with
him as carrying the curse as well. Eventually, Robert said
that he was able to win over the people of
Tahiti and that they confided in him that they have

(27:54):
had really loved his brother, whether that is true or not,
We do not know. Uh. Robert definitely made an effort
to present sort of a whitewashed version of Murnau after
his death. For example, there there had been a lot
of rumors and a lot of discussion that he had
been a homosexual. There's some theories that that's why he

(28:15):
was so eager to take the job in Hollywood, it
was going to be a less restrictive culture than it
was in Germany at the time. Robert vehemently denied that
anything of the type could happen. This is sort of
the trick with Murnau is that there are a lot
of people involved with a stake in his story that
want to tell it very different ways and paint him
very differently. Yeah, you'll like, you'll see him on a
lot of lists of like early gay film pioneers and

(28:37):
that type of stuff, like those types of more celebratory lists.
But then there's other like this whole story of potentially
building a house on a sacred site like that has
its own connotations. Yes, for sure, and it is. It's
one of those tricky things. We talked about it on
the show a lot. When someone is not maybe publicly
out as homosexual, On the one hand, they they are

(29:02):
entitled to their own privacy even after death. On the other,
I understand the desire for representation and for people to
be able to see that this has always been part
of our history. And in Murno's case, like I said,
it's tricky because different people involved in his life tell
his story very, very differently. Yeah, so there is certainly
some degree of evidence to suggest that that he was

(29:24):
in fact homosexual, but in the very protected enclave of Hollywood.
So and also a place where there were lots of rumors. Um.
I feel like we've talked about other figures who's um
whose relationships are a lot more clear and even like
even if they were living in a time before that
was such a clearly established identity in the way that

(29:44):
it is today, like we had more documentation of their
relationships and what their life was like than this particular
aspect of his life. In nineteen sixties six, the fw
Murnal Foundation was established to preserve Germany's film history. This
foundation and maintains and evaluates and manages German films quote
for the promotion of German film culture and film art. Yeah,

(30:06):
they also do a lot of work to contextualize, for example,
films that were made during the Third Reich UH and
just kind of trace how film has developed in Germany
over the years. And in a final chapter that makes
Murnau the perfect subject for one of our October episodes.
He became a headline again in t as Murnau's work

(30:27):
and particularly No Staratu had gained a cult following in
the second half of the twentieth century. His tomb began
to be not just visited but broken into. Then in July,
the coffin was found opened and Murnow's skull was gone.
Who stole it remains a mystery. There was candlewax left
at the scene, which led authorities to speculate that it

(30:48):
might have been quote some sort of occult practice. I
can think of various non occult reasons for there to
have been candlewax there, But regardless, the skull remains at large. Uh.
We don't know where it is and his tomb, the
cemetery that he was buried in, is in a forest
outside of Berlin. He is buried between two family members,

(31:10):
his his brother and his father and um it's it's
one of those places where a lot of notable people
in German history have been buried, and it's considered really
a huge cultural loss that his his tomb and his
burial place was desecrated in this way. We have no
idea where that skull is. Maybe some days someone will
come forward with it, or a family member will pass

(31:32):
and they will discover that they were hiding it all along.
We don't know. Maybe it will be found with his films.
We can only hope. Um. That's clearly jesting on my part.
Do you have a listener mail for us? I do,
and it's Halloween themed. Uh. This is from our listener, Hannah,
and she sent us a postcard. She writes, Dear Holly

(31:53):
and Tracy, I was passing through Denver International Airport and
I came across this exhibit called Haunted Colorado. I'm looking
forward to attending your live show in Denver this month
and thought you would want to check out this exhibit
as you travel through. It's outside security on the bridge
between the main terminal and the A terminal. I love
your show. My family and I can't wait to see you. Hannah.
We can't wait to see you either. This is a

(32:13):
good time to remind people that we're about to go
on tour um. We will be in Denver and Chicago
here at the end of October, and then we will
do Austin, Dallas and Houston in mid November. So if
you are interested in coming to any of those shows,
please do. You can check out our website Missed in
History dot com and go to the link This is
Live Shows for more information and to get tickets. We

(32:35):
hope to see you there because I'm excited the uh.
The October shows will be HALLOWEENI themed. Uh So, Hannah,
thank you so much for sending us this postcard. I
am one percent going to try to check that out
when I come through the airport. UH. If you would
like to write to us, you can do so at
History podcast at house works dot com. You can also

(32:55):
find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History,
and our website is Missed in his Street dot com.
We suggest that you subscribe to the show. It's great
for us and it will make life easy for you.
Automatic downloads UH you can do that on the I
R Radio app, at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(33:19):
production of I Heart Radios. How stuff works for more
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