I have always preferred musicals that do not take their plots too seriously. Give me Cats, where a crowd of cats sing and dance their way through a mysterious ritual to choose one cat to ascend and be reborn, or Tanz der Vampire, where a centuries-old vampire spends most of his existence starving himself, seduces a young and innocent woman, and finally gets to eat her for dinner. Once a musical accumulates too many characters, plotlines, and serious conflicts, my brain tends to go on strike.
There was a time when I was struggling to learn German and desperately looking for things in the language that I could actually enjoy. Germany was not always the easiest place for me to find something to obsess over, but German-language musical theatre turned out to be one of them. Football, classical music, and opera may be the more obvious things Germany is known for, but its musical theatre has also produced a surprising number of well-known shows. Elisabeth, Rebecca, and Tanz der Vampire, all written by Michael Kunze, are among them.
The emotional climax of Tanz der Vampire is arguably “Unstillbare Gier,” or “Insatiable Desire,” a solo sung by Count von Krolock in Act II. Krolock is an immortal vampire, and the song is essentially his meditation on the people he has desired and consumed over the centuries. He remembers them with something approaching the energy of a humanities major writing restaurant reviews, mourns a hunger and desire that can never be satisfied, and eventually concludes that there is no escape from any of it. What makes the song particularly strange is where it appears in the musical. Around this point in Act II, I would normally expect the big, memorable solo in which the central character undergoes some decisive inner change. They finally understand something, make a choice, find a new direction, or at least come out of the song seeing their life differently. “Defying Gravity” in Wicked is an obvious example. “Memory” in Cats serves a similar emotional purpose, and even “I Believe” in The Book of Mormon, for all its comedy, gives its protagonist a moment of conviction that drives him forward.
“Unstillbare Gier” does none of that. Krolock looks back on centuries of existence, examines his desires and suffering in considerable detail, and arrives at no solution whatsoever. Near the end, the idea is reduced to something brutally simple:
All hope is futile. The hunger never ends.
And that is basically it. Krolock has understood his condition perfectly, but understanding it changes nothing. He sings beautifully, the song ends, and he carries on exactly as before. I have no idea what they expected when they took this thing to Broadway, but putting something like this at the emotional climax probably did not make failure in the famously optimistic United States particularly difficult. There is something wonderfully German about a character spending an entire climactic solo examining his existence only to conclude that everything is terrible, nothing can be done about it, and tomorrow will presumably be terrible too. Tanz der Vampire went on to become a long-running success in the German-speaking world, which feels strangely appropriate.
“Why are Germans like this?” and its companion question, “Were Germans always like this?”, came up surprisingly often among immigrants I knew while living there. S, who had already been living in Germany for well over a decade, supported what I privately thought of as the “Germany was supposed to do better than this” hypothesis. His theory was that many Germans of our generation had grown up expecting the country to become even more prosperous and successful by the time they reached adulthood. They had been raised with a certain confidence about the future, only to discover that Germany had not become quite as magnificent as expected. The result, according to him, was a generation whose expectations and reality never quite managed to meet.
I had my own, considerably less serious theory: emotional deprivation. German children are encouraged to be independent from an early age, and a perfectly acceptable childhood dinner may consist of sliced raw carrots, raw bell peppers, and a piece of bread. Perhaps this naturally creates an insatiable longing for love and flavour. The real tragedy is that if you grow up without encountering anything better, you may never know exactly what is missing. You simply carry the mysterious emptiness with you into adulthood. Seen this way, perhaps “Unstillbare Gier” is not merely a vampire’s lament but an unexpectedly accurate piece of German cultural expression.
Then again, there may be a much simpler explanation for Count von Krolock’s suffering.
At some point, I heard that human blood contains surprisingly few calories. If a vampire burned anything close to the number of calories a human does, it would apparently need to drink an absurd amount of blood just to stay alive. That made me think about Tanz der Vampire again. These vampires seem to get about one human a year, and even then dozens of them share the meal. Worse, in this universe, the people they bite become vampires themselves. From a purely practical point of view, the food supply makes no sense. Every meal potentially creates another mouth to feed, and even if vampires can drink one another’s blood, they have not invented perpetual motion. Somewhere in the system, energy still has to be lost.
Ever since I heard that, I have found it much harder to take Krolock’s eternal suffering quite as seriously. Perhaps the unbearable hunger he sings about is not really the torment of immortality at all. Perhaps he is simply extremely hungry. After several centuries of Aristotle and Socrates, Count von Krolock might benefit from putting philosophy aside for a while and studying something more practical:
how to get enough to eat.