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Session 4b: Monsters Political
Chair: Peter Remington

Anarchist as Monster in Fin-de-Siecle Europe
Elun Gabriel
Department of History, Saint Lawrence University, Canton, NY , United States of America

In an 1894 pamphlet titled Anarchism and Its Cure, the pseudonymous author Emanuel described “rabid beasts and poisonous reptiles in the shapes of men, who call themselves ‘anarchists,’ seeking by means of violence to bend the world to their personal desires.” Five years later, a professor of criminal law in Bonn described anarchists as “rapacious beasts in the shape of men.” The figure of the monstrous anarchist, common at the end of the nineteenth century, distilled Europeans’ fears of political radicalism, biological degeneration, and common criminality. In this paper, I will describe the production of this image in the popular imagination—through newspapers, popular fiction, and “expert” accounts—and examine the social and political work that it performed in explaining political radicalism for late-nineteenth-century audiences.
Two interconnected narratives about the anarchist monster’s origins articulated Europeans’ fears about the dangers menacing their society. One perspective presented the anarchist as biologically defective. In the words of Cesare Lombroso, the pioneer of criminal anthropology, "the most active advocates of this anarchist idea are. . . for the most part either criminals or insane, or sometimes both together." By reading the physiognomies of famous anarchists, Lombroso descried an unusually high rate of men he classified as “born criminals.” The other interpretive framework linked anarchist monstrousness to a specifically Russian form of degeneration. In this telling, anarchism, a philosophical doctrine invented by French and German thinkers, had been infected by an Eastern thirst for blood: the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, wrote one author, “pressed the dagger and the dynamite bomb into the hand of anarchism, inspiring it with the sinister fanatical lust for destruction and murder which continues to burn today and which has made anarchism into a nightmare abhorred by the entire world.” Like the fictional monster Dracula, the anarchist embodied fears that an eastern European corruption had come to haunt the West.
The construction of the anarchist as monster obliterated the option of understanding anarchist acts as rational or political, substituting dread of the alien and unknown for an analysis of the social context that gave rise to anarchism.

One Face For Multiple Enemies: The Bolshevik Monster
Kristen Backer
Indiana University, United States of America

The Bolshevik monster, snarling and lumbering, armed with weapons crude and modern, leaving only misery and destruction in his path, was a frequently used image in German visual propaganda of the First and Second World Wars. He was both a simian giant, devastating cities with a single footfall or swing of his hammer, and a skulking, skeletal fiend guilty of more personal, insidious crimes, but in each case easily identifiable as representing the communist menace by his red cloak or shaggy red pelt, or, in some cases, by hands, arms, and torso bathed in blood.
Such figurations of the Soviet enemy by German artists are not, in and of themselves, particularly noteworthy; vilification of the enemy was a frequently and obviously effectively used technique of propaganda artists on all sides in both World Wars. Examination of the sources from which German artists drew to create the Bolshevik monster reveals, however, that the red beast embodied more than simply the threat of communism. Ironically, perhaps most directly influential were derogatory personifications of Germany created in World War I. In a 1917 poster encouraging U.S. Army enlistment, H.R. Hopps portrayed Germany as a cudgel-wielding, drooling ape, a “Mad Brute” who threatened the safety and sanctity of America ’s women and children, and posters from other Allied nations regularly depicted “the Hun” as subhuman or bestial. Rather than simply turning the image of the beast back on its creators, however, German artists imbued the creature with a complex iconography that alluded to multiple groups feared or despised under German official policy. By the time German propaganda policy came under the auspices of Joseph Goebbels and National Socialism, the Bolshevik monster had come to represent not only the perceived twin threat of Jews and communism, but also, my paper will demonstrate, the threat of encroaching American culture.

It's Morning In America: The Lost Boys as a Musical Metaphor for the Religious Right and the Death of the Vampire
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

The Lost Boys (1987) is an effective and diverse discourse in how 1980s vampires act as portals for societal dysfunction. This film, above any other 1980s vampiric representation, explores the roles of teenagers as dysfunctional outcasts due to the breakdown of the home. While the stylisation of the film and the accompanying soundtrack can be framed as merely a zeitgeist of the culture, it is also an interesting narrative into the subliminal negative feelings that were present in the 1980s in relation to the lost adolescents of the time. The use of particular songs in the film relies heavily on the notion of being ‘lost’ and being ‘saved’ as a religious narrative. The songs illustrate, with alarming clarity, that the only redemption from the increasing problems brought about by the children of the hippy generation is one of religious salvation. These songs, Cry Little Sister, Lost in the Shadows (The Lost Boys) and I Still Believe are included at critical moments in the film’s narrative to underline this argument. What is most striking about this new narrative of 1980s Undeath is that the Lost Boys are without a sense of joy or power in being vampires. The film highlights that this maybe due to the fact that the only joy derived from Undeath, or literal resurrection, is through religious belonging rather than cultural outcasts, which the vampires featured in the film clearly are. These vampires represent the darker side of the era that was coined by Ronal Reagan as the “Morning in America”. This dark element in society, representing drug use, sexual deviancy and familial breakdown is the underbelly of 1980s America. This film, despite being a chic representation of 1980s culture, attempts to steer the lost generation of the 1980s, in its musical and ideological narrative, back to Reagan’s ideologue and permits the vampire, in monstrous fashion, to die without remorse.

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