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Pursuit of theBy CLYDE FARNSWORTHTHE PLACE to begin, I suppose, is with' the Fernsehen, as television iscalled in Germany, and the recent TV premiere of “Dracula,” the 1932 Hollywood movie based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel of vampirism, a premiere which I watched with much fascination in a Nuernberg hotel room.By a strange coincidence, Stoker was very much on my mind, for I had spent the day, and many days before that, searching for the Iron Virgin, or die Eiserne Jungfrau, a medieval torture device that figures prominently inanother of Stoker’s stories.It was, in part, my lifelong curiosity about Stoker that started me on myperegrinations to the Romanian province of Transylvania — the very heart of Dracula country! — and to Germany in pursuit of the Iron Virgin, a coffin-like box lined with spikes and blades and shaped like a woman that is probably as cruel and fiendish an instrument as manhas ever created.As I watched the German-language version of “Dracula” on television, Icould not prevent my mind from flashing back to the circumstances in which I first saw it, many years ago when the American neighborhood movies were double-billing Dracula Lugosi and Boris Frankenstein, a great summer time substitute for air conditioning, and offering bingo and free dishes besides. To me, Dracula was a color triumph for Bela Lugosi. The late Hungarian actor’s fleshy lips seemed to gleam recliy-wetly throughout the black-and-white film.I had read “Dracula” years earlierwhile a cub reporter in Lima, Ohio. Indeed, I was in the middle of Jonathan Harker’s massive m struggle with the undead Count Dracula when, in the line of duty, I was exposed one night to the bloody sight of a madman being bundled away in a police strait-jacket to keep him from gnawing his own arms and shoulders. I can’t remember what turned him on — prohibition booze, maybe — and I never saw him again, but that young maniac joined Dracula and the count’s blood-sucking sisters in my dreams for nights to come.HE STOKER tale in which dieEiserne Jungfrau appears, however, is called “The Squaw,” and it relates how a cat — a super-cat! — gets its revengeon an America some assist fromIf the evidence be taken at face was standing ontourist with a grue the Virgin.in Stoker’s story can value, the Iron Virgin an upper floor of a tower in Nuernberg at the turn of thecentury, reigning over a morbid collection of medieval memorabilia.There is other evidence to suggest that the Iron Virgin was once as much a part of the city’s scene as little pork sausages, Hansel and Gretel architecture, toys, clocks, Hans Sachs, “Die Meister-singer,” and gingerbread, though she has been mysteriously missing since the end of World War II.A 1902 Baedeker, for example, describing the Pentagonal Tower in Nuernberg’s old imperial castle, notes, “The tower contains a torture chamber with the ‘Iron Virgin,’ a hollow figure with iron spikes in the interior, into which a victim was thrust. . . .” In Baedeker guidebooks, stars are used to emphasize outstanding points of interest, but somehow the Virgin went unstarred.There are various stories about the disappearance of the Virgin. The most prevalent holds that in 1945 she was taken by American soldiers from the borabed-ruined Nuernberg tower and shipped to Chicago, of all places, for reasons criminally mysterious. But inSunday, October 4, 1970contemporary Nuernberg, the story most often heard—so much so that it seems like the official Nuernberg line— is that the Iron Virgin never even existed, or at least not in that city.“There is no Iron Virgin—and there never was,” the buxom proprietress of a postcard stand at the railway station stoutly decreed when I inquired about a picture of the vanished torture device.“But a great deal has been written about it,” I insisted.“I say nothing has been written— nothing truthful,” she said. “Go ask the Verkehrsverein at the other end of the station.”Minutes later in the indicated tourist office:“Fraulein, I’m an American journalist seeking information about the Iron Virgin of Nuernberg.”“The what? I never heard of such a thing.”But there were two elderly Nuernberg-ers, a man and woman waiting at the counter for tourist brochures, who contradicted the young woman. They had not only heard about die Eiserne Jungfrau but also had seen her—it—in their youth.“It was of cast iron and had spikes inside,” said the woman. “I saw it in the Burg before the war. I was just a young girl. How did it look? Grausam— horrible!”The man revealed that Nuernberg’s ingenious little workshops used to turnout small cast-metal copies of the Jungfrau, but the toy virgins seem to have gone the way of the postcards and the original itself, having disappeared completely from Nuernberg,T LEAST, though, I had found someone who would testify to the existence of the Virgin. I was to find other evidence, both written and spoken, but always accompanied by certain reservations.Newspaper files for 1936, for instance, the third year of Hitlerian rule in Germany, disclose an announcement by the Nuernberg city council which somehow echoes the official line today, with modifications: The Iron Virgin was to have her spikes drawn, and, moreover,they had never tasted blood. The announcement said: “Scientific research has at last discovered that the IronVirgin was never used, for such methods are not and never were in accord with the German instinct for justice.”These lines are not in harmony with the ample proof we have of later terror and violence under the Nazi regime. Nuernberg was the rankest center of the Nazi mystique, repeatedly the torch-lit, floodlit scene of Nazi festivals, birthplace of the infamous Nuernberg laws which sent millions of Jews into flight or into gas chambers and crematoria. Nuernberg's unsavory reputation during the Hitlerian 30s and 40s figures in the Allied choice of the city as the setting for the war crimes trials in which 118 Germans were sentenced to prison and 24 others condemned to hang.This may help to explain why some relics of ancient cruelty, which so many other cities hold in quaintly amused regard and place on public display, are verbotea in Nuernberg—especially so in the case of the Iron Virgin. When she cannot be denied, she is downgraded as an innocuous fraud.In a special edition of a German monthly, one writer noted that the “famous” Iron Virgin, “once the symbol of{Continued on Page IV)?• jr 1 ••• . •• • V* 't .i Vmm • *,• •• * •i. *.Old drawing of Nuernberg torture chamber with Iron Virgin at rear.THE STARS AND STRIPESPage III
Newspaper Details
European Stars and Stripes
Darmstadt, Hesse, DE
Sun, Oct 04, 1970
Page 37
Full Page
Clipped by
Gary P.
IL, USA 29 Jun 2023
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Allgemeine Kirchen Zeitung
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