Day 2: more camera troubles. Drove off at nine in the morning. Spectacular trip. Stopped at a wine tavern, then continued off the main road to show Spiess the avenue of Caspar David Friedrich trees Grau showed me earlier. Pointed out to him as well the pitched waterfall Hutter will see from his room in the castle the night of the greatest danger. Every time I view the place it’s a revelation. Spiess astounded. The grottoes and clefts and riot of overhanging branches enclosed us within the sound and force of the cataract. We could see movement flitting above in the narrow and overgrown cliff faces. We were in a world where all was wonder, delicate and secret, and beside which all our clutter looked like a farce in bad taste. On the way home by a different route, I was talking to Spiess about the second inn, where Hutter is warned against proceeding to the castle, and round a bend all in one glance I recognized, down to the smallest detail, the exact setting I had resigned myself to having to build. Here were the windows for Hutter’s view of the frightened horses, the old shutters with the carved hex signs, the doors and boxed-in bed, the stone well, the apples piled in an oaken bucket, everything! The interiors as good as the exteriors, with this quality of the luminous strangeness of the ordinary shining through the walls.…

Spiess, too, is fascinated with the lore of vampires. He reads a number of Slavic languages, and has helped with the forbidding and disintegrating texts Galeen has pulled from the local libraries. We never have enough background material, and what we find always feels too vague. At night, sitting on my bed in my room, Spiess reports, his voice transforming the softest consonants into sounds that make my neck ache with desire. Among the Slavs it’s reported that one may strew ashes or salt around headstones in a cemetery to determine, by looking for footprints later, if any of the bodies are leaving their graves at night. If a grave is sunk in, or if a cross has taken a crooked position, the deceased has transformed himself. Often there is visible a hole in the grave from which the vampire emerges. And the Gypsies believe that if dogs are barking, no vampires are in the village, but if dogs are silent, then the vampires have come.

With this sort of story, everything, Wegener wrote when he was working on his Golem, depends on a certain flow in which the fantastic world of the past rejoins the world of the present. And yet how does one make judgments about emotional truth in such situations? Authenticity is a problem that remains unresolved in this country. Transylvania, with its evocative meaning (“beyond the forest”) seems appropriate as our setting: that place which can only be imagined. Europe’s unconscious.

Remember to flag sections to be excised for Querschnitt.