The Slavic connection in Luchino Visconti’s ‘German trilogy’: Dostoevskian demonism as German apocalypse in The Damned

Abstract

For decades, critics have viewed Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), the first instalment in his famous German trilogy, simply as a (melo)dramatic depiction of Nazism’s rise, conceived in the director’s characteristic anthropomorphic vein. With Nazism cast as a lethal and sexually perverse phenomenon rooted in the previous generation’s foibles and weaknesses, the film’s hitherto ignored debt to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (1872), however, directs viewers to a more comprehensive insight embedded in the film, namely that history repeats itself, and not obligatorily according to Marx’s famous formulation of the iteration as farce. Indeed, the murderous violence of Russia’s nihilism captured by Dostoevsky expands in Visconti’s film to a national apocalypse that belongs to one of history’s most tragic narratives. Cinematic taxonomy, however, has no category to accommodate Visconti’s original engagement with Dostoevsky’s text, for it falls neither within the established conventions of adaptation nor of intertexts.