"I Am the Wolfman."

The Horror of Dehumanization

The photograph above is a still from the 1941 horror classic The Wolfman, starring Lon Chaney Jr. as the eponymous monster. This movie had a big impact on the image of the werewolf in American popular culture. So much so that its most iconic image graced a US postage stamp released more than half a century later.

The Wolf Man is much more than an entertaining monster flick. To understand why, we’ve got to consider its historical context and the life of its screenwriter, a man named Curt Siodmak.

When The Wolf Man was being written, and when it was in production, war was raging in Europe. Eight years earlier, Hitler had become Führer, and soon began implementing his expansionist ambitions, culminating in the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941. During this time, the Nazi war on Europe’s Jews rapidly progressed from persecution and the denial of civil rights to exterminationist violence. From October 1939 onwards, Jewish and Romani people were herded into ghettos as a prelude to being sent to extermination camps, and from the summer of 1941, Nazi death squads called Einsatzgruppen swept through Eastern Poland and into the Soviet Union in what became known as the “holocaust of bullets.”

Curt Siodmak was born in Dresden to Jewish parents, and worked as a journalist and film-maker. When Goebbels announced that German cinema would henceforth be cleansed of Jewish influence, and when Siodmak, who was also a novelist, was informed by the National Socialist Authors’ Union that his books would no longer be published in Germany, he realized that it was time to get out. After seeking refuge in France, Switzerland, and England, Siodmak ended up in the United States, which he described in the dedication of his autobiography The Wolf Man’s Maker as “the only country that told me ‘come in’ and not ‘get out.’” 

Curt Siodmak

As Adam Lowenstein writes in Horror Film and Otherness, “That feeling of being cut adrift, of traumatic Jewishness, haunted Siodmak for the rest of his life, even in America,” and that he “not only gave shape to the iconic form of the werewolf as we know it today, but forged that shape in the crucible of his own traumatic Jewishness.” In creating the wolf man, Siodmak offered moviegoers a coded account of the Jew as seen through Nazi eyes: a bloodthirsty beast in human form.

There are hints in the film. The first werewolf that appears in The Wolfman is a “Gypsy” (Roma) man—the other racialized group persecuted by the Nazis, and the mark of the werewolf is the pentagram, a substitute for the six-pointed Star of David, appropriated by the Nazis to mark Jewish people. 

These connections may seem far-fetched, but we do not have to speculate about subtle allusions to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany, and Siodmak’s own experience of being dehumanized as a monster. A year before his death at the age of 98, Siodmak told an interviewer: “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.” Pointing out that the movie’s protagonist is doomed by forces beyond his control, Siodmak continued, “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” (the screenplay was originally titled Destiny). These words illuminate the most famous lines of the film, a so-called Gypsy rhyme, actually composed by Siodmak: “Even a man who's pure in heart/And says his prayers at night/May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms/And the autumn moon is bright.”

We know from Siodmak’s own account that he did extensive research into werewolf lore before writing his screenplay. In doing this, he must have encountered H. Leyvik’s 1920 gut-wrenching narrative poem Der Volf: A Khronik (“The Wolf: A Chronicle”), which also grapples with the experience of being dehumanized and its traumatic aftermath. 

Leyvik was born in Belarus. He was arrested for revolutionary activities at the age of 18 in 1906, and was sentenced to four years’ hard labor in Siberia (he was forced to walk there, which took four months). He emigrated to the United States in 1913, where he worked as a wallpaper hanger in New York City while composing his finest poetic works.

Set somewhere in Eastern Europe , the poem begins when a Rabbi—called “the Rov”—regains consciousness and discovers that he laying on a pile of ashes in a shtetl that has been razed to the ground. He is the sole survivor of a pogrom (the bodies of all the others were reduced to ashes). He tries to pray but cannot remember the words, and then “A stream surged up from the pit of his stomach; . . . It stopped in his tight, grieving heart.”

H. Leyvik

Walking west, into the forest, in his unbearable grief and trauma, he is transformed into a howling wolf. “And as if all his innards wanted to rip from his belly, / A third stream spurted up to his throat . . . And a wild roaring burst through the forest, / A louder and louder howling.”

And it was a mixture of baying and bellowing
And a drawn-out screeching and a stormy roaring,
And in every change in the howling, a challenge was hidden,
An appeal and, more than anything, a prayer.
And more than anything, the prayer terrified all hearts,
Because it recalled a human weeping.

Meanwhile, Jews gather at the site of the ruined village, to rebuild it and, in particular, rebuild the synagogue. Terrified of the nightly howling, they pray loudly, to drown it out. One day, the Rov enters the synagogue in human form, blames the congregation for rebuilding it, and says that he wants them to kill him, which they refuse to do. Then, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the Rov enters the synagogue in lupine form, attacks the prayer leader and the synagogue, and is fatally injured (like the Wolfman, who is killed by his own father at the film’s climax). Before drawing his last breath, the Rov returns to human form, and says, “I’m fine now, very fine, do not cry.”

In another poem, The Holy Poem, Leyvik reveals that he, like Siodmak, is the werewolf.

With my holy poem
Clenched between my teeth
From my wolf cave—my hole, my home—
I go out and I roam
From street to street:
As a wolf with a wretched bone
Clenched between his teeth alone.
There is prey enough in the street
to sate a wolven hate,
and sweet
is the humid blood that drips
from flesh, but sweeter still
is the dry dust settling
down on jammed lips.

The low art of The Wolfman and the high art of The Wolf are both precious testimony about the experience of being treated as less than human: the rage, the terror, the guilt, the grief, the pain, the self-loathing, and the longing of liberation—even the liberation through death—from the destiny that has befallen one.