(2015) The Grave-Robbery of F.W. Murnau’s Skull | Stahnsdorf, Germany - video Dailymotion

Vivi Spinel

Disaster Transbian episode 21

Transcript

00:01Are you ready to tell him?

00:22Well, it's not so much Weimar, I don't care much about that,

00:25but the young German filmmakers in the 60s

00:30had no father generations with whom we could connect.

00:35They were either in exile or they perished in concentration camps

00:40or they sided with the Nazi ideology

00:45and created films for the Third Reich.

00:50So we had no one who would somehow build a bridge to German film culture.

00:59So it was more the generation of the grandfathers

01:03that was important for us or in particular for me.

01:07And since I did Nosferatu as an homage to Murnau,

01:12I felt like having reached solid ground,

01:16like crossing a river with murky waters and treacherous eddies.

01:21And all of a sudden there was a feeling of being safe.

01:26And of course there was this kind of deficit.

01:31Nosferatu probably was my 20th film.

01:36Maybe, it's hard for me to count,

01:39but it was not one of the very early ones.

01:45As its caretaker, Olaf Ehlefeldt,

01:58had come to know Stansdorf's Southwest Cemetery

02:02as a place where very little was likely to change overnight.

02:06For decades, he had diligently tended its graves,

02:11planting bulbs in spring, cutting the long grass in summer,

02:16and sweeping away the rust red leaves come autumn.

02:20In all that time, the Masonic landscape had remained utterly static.

02:26Indeed, Elifel was pretty convinced that these rows of tombs

02:31would continue to cast the same shadows until he himself was no longer living.

02:38That is, until one July morning in 2015,

02:42when he wandered into the cemetery to find one of its grandest crypts desecrated.

02:48He looked into the pit and saw a coffin with its lid prized open.

02:54Inside lay the skeletal remains of one of Germany's greatest silent filmmakers,

03:00F.W. Murnau.

03:03As the musty stench rose to greet him,

03:07Ehlefeldt turned away, wrist pressed against his nose and mouth.

03:12But when he peered down a second time,

03:15he noticed something quite strange.

03:17Murnau was missing his skull.

03:23Murnau died, not in Germany, but in California,

03:26where he had managed to escape the Weimar Republic

03:29and established himself as one of the leading lights of Hollywood's golden age.

03:33On March 10th, 1931, just a week before the release of his film,

03:39Tabu, a story of the South Seas,

03:41Murnau was driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in a rented Packard touring car.

03:47As his valet, Iliazar, navigated the pair along the winding coastline,

03:53the director alerted him to a truck that had unexpectedly veered onto the wrong lane.

03:59Swerving to avoid the vehicle, Iliazar hit an embankment,

04:03causing the car to overturn and throw the occupants onto the road.

04:07Murnau died the next day having sustained severe head injuries.

04:12After a service at the Hollywood Lutheran Church on March 19th,

04:17Murnau's body was shipped over, Dracula style, to Germany,

04:21where he was buried in a cemetery twelve miles south of Berlin.

04:25Robert J. Flaherty, Emile Jannings, and Fritz Long all attended the second ceremony,

04:31while Greta Garbo stayed in Hollywood and commissioned Murnau's death mask,

04:36which she kept on her desk until she too passed away.

04:41For nearly eighty years, the director's body lay beneath the soil,

04:45while his tomb became a site of a cult pilgrimage.

04:49Murnau was, of course, responsible for crafting one of the earliest and most influential horror films of all time.

04:56You may not have seen Nosferatu 1922, but you've certainly seen photos of its spindle-fingered protagonist, Count Orlok,

05:06played so wonderfully by Max Schreck.

05:09Today, the infamous Dracula adaptation still attracts hordes of devoted fans,

05:14many of whom visit Murnau's grave to pay tribute to the man who brought vampires to the silver screen.

05:21But according to Olaf Ehlefeldt, it wasn't a group of film buffs who raided Murnau's tomb that night in 2015.

05:28After informing the authorities, the caretaker inspected the grave a third time.

05:33On the ground, he found traces of candle wax, leading him to assert that Murnau's skull was stolen by Satanists,

05:41who had used it to perform some candlelit ritual under the cover of darkness.

05:47Nearly eight years later, that skull is still missing.

05:52TIEFER

05:57TIEFER

05:58TIEFER

06:00TIEFER

06:03Lotion

06:21Good to see you with me.

06:51Good to see you.

(2015) The Grave-Robbery of F.W. Murnau’s Skull | Stahnsdorf, Germany

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