SYMHC Classics: F.W. Murnau

This 2019 episode covers F.W. Murnau, 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. FW Murnou was born December twenty eighth, eighteen
eighty eight, or one hundred and thirty six years ago today,
so our episode on him is today's Saturday classic. This
is also spectacular timing because the new version of Nos
Farautu is freshly out, so I theoretically will have seen

(00:22):
it by the time this is out, but have not
seen it yet as we record, so I'm very excited.
This episode on Burnow originally came out on October twenty first,
twenty nineteen. Please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to

(00:48):
the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Hey, Tracy,
it's October. I know it's kind of like the middle
ish of October at this point. Yeah, So for anybody
who's 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, right just because of some scheduling needs,

(01:09):
it's ended up that our October stuff is all coming
out really in the back half of October. Hopefully that
will be enough to tide people over. I know it's
hard to wait those extra two weeks. I know, as
someone 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,

(01:32):
and that is F. W. Murnow. I make no secret
that I love No Sparatu as well as a lot
of his other work, but No Saratu has a very
special place in my heart. See above Halloween every day.
But Murdow's life is so much more than that one film,
and that's actually happened fairly early in his film career,
so there's a lot that happened afterwards. And he was

(01:54):
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 in so many films that
you see today where the filmmakers were influenced by Murnow,
So you are still getting the benefit of his efforts,
whether you know it or not. Mrnow was born Friedrich

(02:16):
Wilhelm Plump in Beilefeld, Germany, on December eighteen eighty nine.
His brother Robert later described him, who went by his
middle name of Wilhelm, by saying, quote from the very beginning,
my brother overflowed with imagination. Their family was well off.
Their father, Heinrich Plump, had inherited a profitable textile business,

(02:39):
which he sold for a pretty tidy sum and then
bought a sprawling estate. The family's children would put on
plays in 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

(03:01):
all of them to do these plays, but he pretty
quickly was like, no, I want to make this stuff.
But their idyllic, privileged childhood was abruptly interrupted when Heinrich
Pumpe sold the family 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

(03:22):
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 his shows, complete with lighting
and moving scenery. Wilhelm, who was a voracious reader, was
at the top of his class in school. His father

(03:43):
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 Mernow.
This new name was in the hopes of his father
not discovering what he was doing, but Wilhelm was tall,
about six foot for and very easy to recognize. Soon
a family friend spotted him in a performance and mentioned

(04:06):
it to his parents. Heinrich then cut his son off financially,
but Mernell's grandfather on his mother's side started sending him
a monthly allowance so he could stay in Berlin. Yeah,
he was still going to school. He hadn't shirked that
part of his responsibility. But he also apparently was living
a rather lavish life, which had caused some problems when

(04:26):
his father was called with these like huge debts that
he had amassed, kind of putting only the finest furnishings
in art in his little apartment. But yeah, he thought
he could just work as an actor on the side
while 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

(04:48):
oh 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.
He was so impressed, in fact, that he offered him
a place in his theater school with a full scholarship
if Urnow agreed to attend for a full six years.

(05:08):
In nineteen eleven, Murnow assisted rein Hart 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 motivated by a certain practicality. He knew that
being as tall as he was would be a hindrance

(05:30):
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 a damper on art for Murnow for a
little while, who served in the German military. He was

(05:50):
first called up as a foot guard, 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 eight times, but he walked away
every time without any serious injuries, and after his last
crash landing in Switzerland, he was arrested and interned at Andermot,
where he used his time as a prisoner of war

(06:12):
to work on a film script and produce theater with
his fellow internees. According to fellow officer Major wolfgung Schump,
every evening Mernow would recite a poem called the Pianist
of Death to the officers, and according to the same account,
he 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

(06:33):
he served with also started carrying similar sticks as sort
of a strange wartime fashion trend that Mernow had created.
While Mernow made it through the war seemingly unscathed, his
best friend, Hans Ernbaum Digila, was killed at the front,
and that was a loss that Mernow grieved really deeply.
The loss of Hans was perhaps so difficult because he

(06:55):
had been one of the few people that Mernow was
actually close to. Vernou's family was often kept at arm's length,
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 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

(07:15):
allowed to look at at villel 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, Burnout
didn't go back to the theater, and Steady shifted his
interest to film. He edited a few short films for

(07:37):
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 Burnout Vite
voongevel Shaft, he made the transition into directing long form film.
He did this when he directed The Boy in Blue
that was inspired by the seventeen seventy painting The Blue

(07:58):
Boy by Thomas Gane For 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,
Bella Lugosi. Murnow directed Lugosi in an adaptation of The
Doctor Jekyl and Mister Hyde's story that was originally published

(08:19):
in eighteen eighty six. Murnow's version, which was titled Jana's Faced,
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. Murnow's work in nineteen twenty two is what
has truly endured, though, and that's what's given the director
his longevity as a person of interest among horror fans especially.

(08:44):
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, is just an
unmistakable figure. This is when 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 Orloc looks like

(09:06):
to mine, 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 out,
though I know, I know, there's just so much media
to consume. Count Orloc is tall and thin, with large
pointy ears, heavy eyebrows, and long, pointy front teeth, and

(09:29):
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 rumors
around the making of No Speratu, but first we're gonna
pause for a word from one of our sponsors. There

(09:53):
have been so many rumors and stories surrounding the making
of the film No Speratu since it was released, in
part due to some of the promotional materials that were
released ahead of the movie. To drum up interest, the
magazine Bunu Unfilm put out an issue just before the
film came out in nineteen twenty two that featured a
story told by production designer Alban Grau, in which Grau

(10:14):
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. Grau,
who was an occultist and also one of the people
who initiated this project, claimed to have seen documents detailing
the exhumation of the body, which showed no signs of decomposition,

(10:34):
and then Grau's Serbian friend told him that after the
body of his father was exhumed, a steak was driven
through its heart and that the vampire died. So this
theoretically was the inspiration for Nosferatu. According to Grau, it
was all based on this true story that he had
heard while during the war, and he claimed that no
s ferratu was the Serbian word for vampire, although the

(10:55):
true etymology of that word is a lot hazier than that.
There's no exact news origin point. Nosparatu continues to have
its own mythos as the first vampire film. It's drawn
a lot of interest in the century since that it
was made, but it was almost lost, just like several
of Mernow's other films. That's because the story is a

(11:16):
loose adaptation of bram 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. Mernow's production company was unable to
secure the rights to it, but they went ahead with
the production anyway, changing a number of the elements, and
Florence Balcolm Stoker, who was bram Stoker's widow, sued over it. Yeah,

(11:40):
they changed names of characters in the location, and it's
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,
shear looks like a lot like Dracula. Yeah, it's sort
of like when you go to buy Halloween costumes and
they are named something like Magical School Student, and you
know it's really Harry Potter. Right. A recent one that

(12:03):
I saw was Midweek Angry Girl and it's supposed to
be Wednesday, which to me was very funny. By the
time that the case that Florence Balcomstoker brought went to court,
the film company was already bankrupt. So much money had
been spent on publicity for nos Faratu and on staging

(12:24):
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 favor and issued
a verdict that all copies of the film had to
be destroyed, of course, 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 Balcomstoker was

(12:46):
able to block its screening in nineteen twenty five, and
then to New York, where it was viewed by audiences
in nineteen twenty nine. And as with a lot of
Murnow'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

(13:08):
to Murnow's original. As an aside the film Shadow of
the Vampire, which, unlike tas Sperazzi I have seen, stars
Williem 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
vampirism during the filming of Nosperazu, but to be clear,

(13:31):
that is fiction. Mernow is portrayed by John Malkovich in
a manner that suggests that the director was just a
driven auteur who only cared about capturing what he saw
as his vision without being concerned about anything or anybody else.
That is totally opposite of just about every account of
Mernow as a director. Yeah, we're gonna read something later

(13:53):
that was was said at his funeral that will kind
of very clearly point out how differently he really really
was portrayed in that film from what he was like
in real life. And while Nosharatu is probably the film
he's most famous for today, at least in sort of
general audience circles, I think if you get into cinophile circles,

(14:13):
others come up pretty quickly. But Mernow 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 twenty four, Der Lets demnn was released,
and it was a breakthrough moment in narrative cinema. While
the title translates directly to the Last Man in its

(14:35):
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 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

(14:56):
the fall and 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 was still in
the silent film era, so The Jazz Singer would not
debut for another three years. But there is also only
a single title card in all of Murnow's nineteen twenty
four film, which runs seventy seven minutes. The entire story

(15:17):
is told through pantomime and the use of shadow light
and another artist creative skill. The Last Laugh gained Mernow
a lot of attention, in part because of the work
of cinematographer Carl Freund in service to Marnew's vision. Unlike
most of the films of the time that were shot
on sound stages from an audience perspective, almost like you

(15:38):
were 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 moviegoers of the nineteen
twenties weren't really accustomed to. Today, there are dollies and
rigs that are specifically made to make the cameras agile,

(15:59):
but Freud had to really improvise to find ways to
get his shots and to meet Brnow's demands because Mernow
really felt like the film needed to be more dynamic. Yeah,
Frend did everything from attaching cameras to bicycles to strapping
a camera to his waist, and for one scene he
wore the camera on his waist and he crossed the
set wearing a pair of roller skates with the camera

(16:22):
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
tone and the world of the character in the film instantly.
I think, living in the era of go pro footage,

(16:43):
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 when Murnow is first like, we need to
follow this smoke up this this set, and they're like, okay, wait,
we got to walk up the stairs, and how he

(17:04):
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 next thing were so big that
they didn't even think about like just having to hold

(17:24):
the camera after the last laugh. Mernow 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 Moliere's Tartuffe,
which debuted in nineteen twenty five. His next film was
another literary adaptation. That one was Faust, Twitch, debuted in

(17:47):
nineteen twenty six. Throughout the mid nineteen twenties, Mernow 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
United States. One of Murnow's requests was that he be
allowed to take his crew with him, and that was

(18:09):
something that Fox agreed to. Murnow's first project under his
contract was a nineteen twenty seven 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 in every place. You might hear it anywhere,
at any time. For whatever the sun rises and sets

(18:30):
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, tells the story of a married man who
has an affair and his lover suggests that he kill
his wife so that he can leave behind his old
life and start a new life in the city with

(18:51):
her and the man that is all he is named
as is played by George O'Brien, and he's unable to
follow through on this plan, and instead he reconciles with
his wife. There are a lot of shots in this
film that are considered like the first of their kind.
There's one where the two of them are on a
trolley car kind of passing from a more rural suburban

(19:14):
setting into a city setting that's considered super important. 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 nineteen twenty nine, and it was in
the now defunct category of Unique and Artistic Picture. Janet

(19:34):
Gaynor also won Best Actress that year. She was nominated
in three different roles, including her work on Sunrise, Seventh Heaven,
and Street Angel. Sunrise won 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, but Sunrise just did not draw viewers,

(19:57):
and the ticket sales on it were really disappointing. Despite
all of the accolades that the film garnered, Fox decided
that Mernow was going to have less freedom on future projects.
Four Devils came out in nineteen twenty eight. It told
the story of four orphans who were raised by a
clown and became a high wire circus act. This is
one of Murnow's films which has not survived. Yeah, that's

(20:20):
sometimes when you talk to film people, it's definitely mentioned
as sort of a holy Grail film. They everybody hopes
that one day we will find this film because it
does when you read treatments of it and script pieces
sound very very interesting. Our Daily Bread premiered in nineteen
twenty nine. This film also came out under a different title,
which was City Girl, and Mernow, still being pretty highly

(20:42):
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 silent version, because most
most versions we would see today are re edited back

(21:04):
to what people believe was Murnow's initial vision. Naturally, that
kind of tampering with his work was not something that
Mernow was happy about at all, and an effort to
regain his artistic freedom, he formed a partnership with Robert Flaherty.
The two combined their efforts to start their own production company.
But this was kind of an odd pairing. Murnow was

(21:24):
known for his fictional work and that was where his
heart really was as a filmmaker. But Flerty, 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 Mernow and Flerty took on as their
first collaboration in just a moment. But first we're going
to hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff
you missed in history class going. Mrnow and Flerty's first

(21:54):
and only project together was a film called Taboo that's
spelled Tabu. It was shot on location in the South Pacific,
primarily on Bora, Bora and Tahiti. But whereas Flaherty thought
that they were making a documentary about Polynesian culture, Mernow
saw the documentary aspects of the production as a backdrop
for a fictional story that he wanted to tell. The

(22:15):
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 that people sometimes
like to debate. Mernow continued as he desired crafting a
love story set in the tropics. He cast local Islanders
in the two lead roles of lovers whose desire to

(22:37):
be together is at odds with their cultural rules. Mernow
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 and that 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

(22:58):
release of Taboo, Mernow, 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 projects together. On the
morning of March eleventh, nineteen thirty one, Mernow stopped by
the home of his friend, actress and screenwriter Salka Vitel,

(23:18):
to pick up some sandwiches for the car ride up
to Carmel del Monte, where his meeting was going to
take place. Mernow was riding in a hired car, which
he planned to take with him by ship to Germany,
and he was traveling with a 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

(23:40):
what happened next, but a little less than twenty miles
outside of Santa Barbara, the car Mernow and the other
two men were traveling in skidded off the road and
down an embankment. According to the news story that ran
in The New York Times, the car rolled twice on
its thirty foot drop and then it landed on its
Roof Mernow frack his skull in the accident and died

(24:02):
the next day. 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 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

(24:24):
that prediction. Yeah, he thought booking this longer cruise was
his way around what the fortune teller had told him.
So it was one of those sort of creepy coincidences
that the fact that he died on the much shortened
drive portion of his trip just adds to the mystique
of the whole thing. But this is also an issue

(24:45):
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 Slckovertel, won by a man who was in
a car by behind him. There is also testimony given
by Freeman because Mernow's mother tried to sue the company

(25:08):
that he had rented the car from, and in one account,
Mernow himself was driving. In others, it was Mernow's valet,
Garcia Stevenson, who was underage. He was a teenager who
was at the wheel. Stories began to circulate in Hollywood
that Mernow and Stevenson had been engaged in a sexual
act in the front seat while the chauffeur, Freeman, slept
in the back when the accident had happened. Because all

(25:29):
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 is talked about in large question marks. Nobody really
knows what caused this accident. Were the other two men
also killed in it? They were not okay. Freeman and
Garcia both survived. As I said, Freeman gave an account
during the investigation. Garcia, I didn't see anything that listed

(25:52):
a clear account from him, so I'm not entirely sure
what happened there. Even the accounts of where Marnau was
to meet the boat that would take him down to
the Panama Canal 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

(26:14):
Murnau's sudden death of very seedy and unpleasant association. Only
eleven people attended the funeral that was held for him
in Los Angeles, Yeah, with some of his collaborators, a
couple of actors he had worked with, a couple of
his very close friends. After Murnow's body was transported to Germany,
which took considerable effort and paperwork, there was another service
held there and filmmaker Fritz Lange gave a eulogy, which

(26:36):
was described by art director Robert Hurlth. This is also
interesting because Fritz Lang was considered something of a competitor
to Murnow. But according to hurl Quote, he Fritz described
Murnow striding into the studio. All was good tempered, smiling, affably,
able by his mere presence to kindle enthusiasm. He seemed

(26:57):
like some great aristocrat interesting himself in the Senate. I'm
a 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 and thorough worker. Behind
his gaiety was an indefatigable energy that was nonetheless there
because he liked to hide it. Taboo was released on

(27:18):
schedule just a week after Murnou's death. It wasn't a
box office success. Mernou was finally buried in Stansdorf Cemetery
outside of Berlin. Even the burial 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. A German film periodical published a counter

(27:41):
to that rumor, stating that the delay in putting Murnau's
coffin in the ground was because of the chapel not
being completed. After Murnow's sudden death, his family came to
know a whole new side of the director. His brother Robert,
traveled to Tahiti to deal with Murnow'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,

(28:03):
which was a stark contrast to the warm greeting that
all of the other disembarking travelers had received. Allegedly, the
home that Mernow had built there 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 Mernow had brought his death upon
himself and viewed anyone associated with him as carrying the

(28:27):
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 had really loved his brother.
Whether that is true or not, we do not know.
Robert definitely made an effort to present sort of a
whitewashed version of Murnow after his death. For example, there

(28:47):
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 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.
Vehemently denied that anything of the type could happen. This
is sort of the trick with Murnow is that there
are a lot of people involved with a stake in
his story that want to tell it very different ways

(29:09):
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 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,

(29:30):
and it is. It's one of those tricky things. We
talk about it on the show a lot when someone
is not maybe publicly out as homosexual. On the one hand,
they are 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 Murnow's case,

(29:52):
like I said, it's tricky because different people involved in
his life tell his story very very differently. Yeah. So
there's certainly some degree of evidence to suggest that he
was in fact homosexual, but in the very protected enclave
of Hollywood, so and also a place where there were
lots of rumors. Yeah, I feel like we've talked about

(30:13):
other figures whose the 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 it is today, Like we had more
documentation of their relationships and what their life was like
than this particular aspect of his life. Yeah. In nineteen
sixty six, the FW Murnow Foundation was established to preserve

(30:37):
Germany's film history. This foundation maintains and evaluates and manages
German films quote for the promotion of German film culture
and film art. Yeah. They also do a lot of
work to contextualize, for example, films that were made during
the Third Reich and just kind of trace how film
has developed in Germany over the years. And in a
final chapter that makes mernow the perfect subject for one

(31:00):
of our October episodes. He became a headline again in
twenty fifteen, as Murnow's work, and particularly nos Feratu, 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 of twenty fifteen, the
coffin was found opened and Murnow's skull was gone. Who

(31:22):
stole it remains a mystery. There was candle wax left
the scene, which led authorities to speculate that it might
have been quote some sort of occult practice. I can
think of various non occult reasons for there to have
been handle wax there. But regardless, the skull remains at large. Yeah,
we don't know where it is. And his tomb, the
cemetery that he was buried in, is in a forest

(31:45):
outside of Berlin. He is buried between two family members,
his brother and his father, and 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 tomb and his burial place was desecrated
in this way. We have no idea where that skull is.

(32:07):
Maybe somedays someone will come forward with it, or a
family member will pass and they will discover that they
were hiding it all along. We don't know. Yeah, maybe
it will be found with his films. We can only
hope that's clearly jesting on my part. Thanks so much

(32:27):
for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to
send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at
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