The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story

“What counted were manliness, energy, social work for the public good, rationalism, pragmatism. He was especially fond of the word pragmatism.”

Wojnicz fears his father’s influence while also fearing his father’s disappointment. His father’s proud and loud proclamations on a variety of subjects make this particularly pressing, particularly his father’s understanding of manliness. Wojnicz has been raised with a male identity by his father, even though he does not conform to his father’s traditional ideas about masculinity. Instead, his father has begun to emphasize pragmatism, trying to find a resolution for the way in which his own son challenges his notions of manliness.

“The liqueur set everyone’s thoughts on the right tracks, and the conversation turned quite naturally to the regular activities that Opitz organized for the patients each afternoon following their treatments.”

The Schwärmerei is used in an almost medicinal manner. Though the alcohol seems to have no physical effects on the patients beyond that of regular alcohol, the Schwärmerei does induce a certain type of mindset. The patients frequently indulge in Schwärmerei until it becomes their entire medical regime, replacing everything else with its intoxicating effects. The Schwärmerei makes them feel as though they are on the “right tracks” (42), whatever the right tracks may be.

“This place is cursed. There’s a strange acceptance of these deaths. It keeps recurring.”

Thilo shares his concern with Wojnicz that Görbersdorf is a cursed place. People keep dying here, but the subtle implication from Thilo is that the true curse is the way in which these deaths are accepted. Thilo is less concerned about the deaths, since people die all the time—he himself is dying. What strikes fear into Thilo is the blasé way in which people are prepared to accept death as a commonplace occurrence.

“Mieczysław appeared to take part in the game imposed on him but found a way of escaping it. A slight shift of the sights, imperceptible to others, thwarted the whole performance.”

Wojnicz’s approach to pheasant hunting foreshadows his fate in the village’s strange game. As an intersex person, the Tuntschi do not aim for him. Though he presents as male to those in the village, his sacrifice is rejected because he does not adhere to a strict gender binary. His gender identity is akin to pheasant distance; enough to fool those who he wishes to fool, but also a challenge to the entire performance of gender itself.

“The hillside on which his grand tomb had been built guarded Görbersdorf from the outside world and acted as an unofficial border between the savage forest and the civilized village.”

The sanatorium represents modernity while the forest represents the past. The grave of Dr. Brehmer guards this border, creating a dichotomy between the modern world of medicine and automobiles and the ancient world of death and the Tuntschi. The forest is considered savage; the human space is considered civilized. Yet this neat divide, as Wojnicz discovers, is not quite so stark. Instead, the savagery of the forest intrudes into the civilized village, and it is the men who live in the village who show themselves to be truly “savage.”

“Wojnicz’s class could easily be divided into four groups: Poles, Jews, Ukrainians and a mixed crowd including several Austrians, one Romanian, two Hungarians and three Transylvanian Germans. Mieczyś instinctively kept to the sidelines, as if he did not belong to any of these groups.”

For many years, Wojnicz has been in communities that operate according to strict divisions of identity. The class seemed easy to divide according to nationality, for example, though Wojnicz rejected such a classification even as a young man. He never felt himself as truly belonging to a group, but as somewhere between these identities. This rejection of national identity at a young age foreshadows the complexity of his gender identity, as revealed later in the novel.

“Lukas lived on the ground floor, in a glass-walled annex with a separate entrance. As a result, his status was a little higher, and certainly a bit distinct.”

Due to his alcohol problems, Lukas has been exorcized from the Kurhaus and sent back to Ortiz’s guesthouse. Even in the guesthouse, he creates a separate identity for himself by living in a small annex. This, he believes, gives him status as it physically distinguishes him from the other guests. When Wojnicz visits the annex later in the novel, he is unimpressed. This status is constructed purely in Lukas’s mind, giving him comfort and illustrating his inherent desire to create hierarchies (and then to ascend them).

“Wojnicz was too young to take a real interest in politics. What was happening inside him seemed far more intense than the world’s most dramatic political even.”

Wojnicz’s intersexuality is yet to be revealed in the narrative, yet his internal conflicts are so intense that he cannot bring himself to take an interest in international divisions and rivalries. Politics is the external manifestation of so many problems that Wojnicz feels deep within himself, from debates over identity to the fear of violence. His body is a secret battleground, one that preoccupies him so much that actual politics seem trivial by contrast.

“This means that a woman can only develop and retain her identity within the sphere of a man. It is he who gives a framework to her identity.”

Wojnicz listens to the other guests debate female identity in their pompous fashion. Each of them, from their male perspective, claims to have the greatest insight into the nuances of the female perspective, particularly as it contrasts with the male equivalent. Wojnicz, an intersex person, does not challenge them. To Wojnicz, the debate seems particularly mundane and meaningless, especially as it moves him no closer to answering his own complex questions of identity. Wojnicz does not understand his own identity, male or female, so these men’s assertions seem particularly absurd.

“How can you be treated the modern way if you refuse to uncover your own arse?”

Dr. Semperweiss has a particularly blunt bedside manner. He cannot comprehend why Wojnicz may not want to undress before the doctor. Since he cannot comprehend this hesitation, Wojnicz feels vindicated that there is no way the doctor can understand the complexity of his condition. The bluntness is a further validation of Wojnicz’s shyness, suggesting that the doctor is not ready to discuss the complicated matter in a serious manner.

“Before entering the forest, they fortified themselves with a few swigs of Schwärmerei from a bottle Opitz suddenly pulled from his bosom, and at once they were filled with excitement, because they discovered that there at the edge of the woods they were standing right in the middle of a patch of wonderful yellow chanterelles.”

The men are dependent on the forgetful, melancholic drunkenness caused by the Schwärmerei. They swig it whenever they can, to the point that Opitz has a bottle hidden about his person. They are as drunk on forgetting as they are on the alcohol itself, having grown dependent on its capacity to ease the tension between town and forest, between the known and the unknowable as they venture out beyond the pale.

“Because men’s desire was so strong that it could destroy them, they had to have a means of relief. Anyone should understand this and find it normal.”

Opitz explains the Tuntschi as a natural product of male desire. Any man, he reasons, would be possessed of the same sexual urges and would thus inherently understand the need to make a puppet from wood and moss to relieve these urges. Since Wojnicz is not beholden to the same idea of maleness, however, he does not feel these urges. To him, the Tuntschi remain alien and strange, yet Opitz fails to notice that Wojnicz does not conform to his expectations.

“I was brought up in the spirit of rationalism to believe there’s always an explanation for the strangest things.”

Wojnicz learns that Frommer is investigating the mysterious deaths in the local community. He positions himself as a discipline of rationalism, somewhat akin to a student of the positions taken up during the nightly debates in the guesthouse. Yet his interest in rationalism is informed by his intersex identity. Wojnicz does not yet adhere to rationalism; he is desperate to believe that there can be a rational explanation for everything, including his own identity. Rationalism comes so easily to him because he wants a rational explanation for who he is, an identity that many people cannot rationally comprehend.

“Their hats obstructed him in the street—he snorted at the thought of this annoying aesthetic ostentation, which he compared to the way chimpanzees and other primates displayed their sexual organs.”

August and Lukas want everyone to believe that they are intellectual people, yet so much of their debate devolves into personal grievances and subjective viewpoints. As he tries to justify prejudice against women, for example, Lukas can only point to minor annoyances about their headwear. He develops a pseudo-scientific justification for this, but he begins and ends his rationality with petty grievances. His status as an intellectual is undermined by his inability to justify his beliefs in an intellectual fashion.

“And so it went—first a declamation by August, then another tirade about the collapse of civilization from Lukas, followed by some incomprehensible allusions made by Frommer, until the disputants’ tongues were slowed by the effect of Schwärmerei and once again they were all overcome by a sort of thickening feeling, which made it hard to move because of weakness or disinclination.”

The Schwärmerei has a narcotic effect on the guests. They settle into their familiar patterns, seemingly unable to break free from their routine because of their dependence on the liqueur. They never understand one another or alter their points of view. Rather, the Schwärmerei allows them to sink into a comforting forgetfulness and ignore the world around them. They become addicted to this ineffective unknowing, this deliberate drunken ignorance, just as the people of the town have done.

“Do you think any of us would have chosen to shut ourselves away in this damp, tragic valley, where Dr. Brehmer has built this expensive modern prison for us? And for many others…”

For the first time, Dr. Semperweiss suggests that the sanatorium is more of a prison that a medical facility. Though the sanatorium is presented to the world as a health resort for the wealthy, it serves the nefarious purpose of providing sacrifices to the supernatural forces that lurk in the forest. Dr. Brehmer, the sanatorium’s creator, is not a benevolent figure, even though he is venerated as one.

“He burst into effusive laughter, and in the process his face lost its features entirely.”

The innkeeper tells Wojnicz that the meal is made from rabbits who have been deliberately terrified to death so as to imbue their hearts with a particular taste. As he explains this, he bursts into laughter and his face begins to lose its features. The story about killing the rabbits, from Wojnicz’s perspective, is inhumane. As the innkeeper laughs at this story, he loses his humanity in front of Wojnicz. He is rendered an unrecognizable, unhuman figure due to the callousness with which he treats life.

“But gradually he was abandoning that long-ago place inside himself, and increasingly often he felt that it had happened not to him but to someone else, someone called Mieczyś Wojnicz from Lwów.”

Wojnicz’s experiences intensify his sense of alienation. When he thinks of himself now, it is like he is considering an entirely separate person, as though he has become unmoored from Wojnicz and is observing him from a detached distance. In effect, he is becoming more and more like the omniscient narrator, finding himself more closely allied to the strange presence in the forest than the despicable people who surround him in so-called civilization. Mieczyś Wojnicz from Lwów is a relic of that civilization, now something separate to Wojnicz himself.

“Thilo was lying in bed with his eyes closed. He looked greatly changed to Wojnicz, no longer a young man, but as if devoid of age or gender.”

As Thilo lays dying in his bed, his carefully constructed identity begins to crumble. Wojnicz, in this moment, feels an intense empathy toward Thilo, as Thilo now similarly has become separated from traditional concepts such as gender. Thilo may not be intersex, but Wojnicz’s sudden empathy for the obfuscated gender of the dying man is the closest he comes to understanding love. In this moment, Wojnicz loves Thilo because his identity most closely resembles Wojnicz’s own.

“You see, Herr—Fräulein—You see.”

Dr. Semperweiss learns that Wojnicz is intersex and, in doing so, demonstrates the linguistic complexity of addressing such a person. Wojnicz’s struggles to understand identity are reflected in the novel’s foremost medical professional flitting back and forth between gendered addresses. He does not know whether to address Wojnicz as a man or a woman, showing how the German language lacks the nuance to comprehend someone like Wojnicz.

“And it’d be better if I died here. I hope that will happen. It’ll relieve everyone, especially my father. That’s why he sent me here. So that I’d die.”

Wojnicz has reached the nadir of his despair. He now voices his greatest fear: that he was not sent to the sanatorium to get better, but as a convenient way for him to die. His father, he realizes, wishes that he could simply die of tuberculosis rather than continue to live as an intersex person. The intersex matter is simply too complicated and nuanced for January Wojnicz, so he would rather sacrifice his son on the altar of gender normalcy. This realization—of his father’s willingness to sacrifice his son—foreshadows the villagers’ willingness to sacrifice Wojnicz in the name of perpetuating their current arrangement.

“The uterus clenches like a fist, but the member swells with blood.”

Wojnicz experiences a moment of physical self-actualization. In this moment, his uterus and his penis become active, motivated by the same sudden surge of emotion. The uterus, the expression of Wojnicz’s femininity, clenches like a fist, while his penis “swells with blood” (288). This present-tense expression of emotional urgency expresses the divide between male and female, united in a single body. Wojnicz feels both, at the same time, and begins to better understand himself.

“He felt plural, multiple, multifaceted, compound and complicated like a coral reef, like a mushroom spawn whose actual existence is located underground.”

Wojnicz understands his intersex identity as not limited to a single identity. He is male and female at the same time; he is multifaceted. Tellingly, the points of reference that come to his mind are coral reefs and mushroom spawns. These are natural expressions of plurality, separate from the socially constructed world of gender expectations. Wojnicz understands identity as a natural phenomenon rather than something alien or wrong, as he has been told his entire life.