Short Fiction

First published in Becoming Nosferatu | April 2025

Written with Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

5th June 1991

Schöneberg, Berlin

Dear Brigitte Helm,

I know you are a private person. I know you don’t give interviews to the press, and no longer wish to discuss your acting career at all. It is “a matter of indifference” to you, according to what I’ve read. The last thing you want is a letter from a stranger.

But I am writing to you as I believe you are the only woman alive who might understand me: my name is Alraune and I have no soul.

I don’t know if I was named for your film; I never knew my mother. In fact I remember nothing until I turned fourteen. Lying in the orphanage – white sheets, bright lights – I was trying to stop my own heart. I clutched at my chest, casting fistfuls of shadows. I swear I could feel the muscle pumping in my hands.

Only when I saw your movie on a battered print did I understand that what I’d done was primitive witchcraft. I saw your Alraune, born without a soul to a father of mandrake root, try to kill a man with shadows, too.

My mother might’ve named me after the novel ‘Alraune’ instead of your movie, I suppose, or its earlier adaptation, now lost. How is a film lost? It’s not easy to make a film. Dozens of actors, crew members in the hundreds, weeks of shooting. I suppose some people were paid and some memories made. It doesn’t seem like enough.

You were so wonderful in ‘Metropolis’. That close-up of the robot’s face becoming your own. Staring at the camera as if daring it to blink. Why did you retire so young? You’d been acting since you were twelve years old. How do you manage, once having had so many eyes on you, now having so few?

Like you, I am beautiful. What Americans would call “eye candy”. I think that when men only see your outside, nothing beneath, eventually you turn to stone. In ‘Metropolis’, you wore a steel skin. I read that Fritz Lang demanded you were always inside it, even for scenes when there was no need for you to be, even when it was uncomfortable and unsafe. Is that true?

When I told men that I was no longer interested in their affections they’d beg, and whine, and then grow vicious. They’d tell me I was empty inside. A hollow thing. No heart for the shadows to grasp.

I don’t feel things as deeply as others do. I know this. When I watch ‘Alraune’ – and I have watched it many times, as many as I could – I know that the animal circus should strike me as cruel. Instead, I find myself wondering if they could understand that they’d live on screen for another sixty years, and if that would’ve been worth their suffering.

There’s only one thing I’ve ever truly wanted. I want to have a baby.

You have four children. I hope they came easily. I have no illusions about motherhood. I don’t think its strange alchemy would redeem me. I worry about my reasons, too. The men knew how to hurt me because they could see the truth: like my namesake, I don’t have a soul. Would a child do instead?

But then I think that my mother only gave me a name. I can do better than that.

I was told to keep it a secret. People still harbour strong feelings about “test-tube babies” and “playing god”, they said. I explained that I had no one to tell.

I thought of your ‘Alraune’ as I walked into the clinic. My science fiction experiment began. Weeks as an inpatient with a dozen other women. White sheets, bright lights, like the orphanage. Eggs had to be collected exactly twenty-six hours after ovulation which sometimes meant the doctors were getting out of bed to harvest them. We all knew they’d be angry in the middle of the night. No eye contact, just rough fingers and cold metal and the occasional sharp pain.

Now I am home, waiting to find out if there’s something alive inside of me, and telling my secrets to a movie star I’ve never met. Because ‘Alraune’ must’ve meant something to you. You made the movie twice, after all, the second time with sound. (When they first pressed record, did you want to scream?) I feel as though you were reaching through time and trying to tell me something. Your wide eyes, looking back at me, staring at the screen.

What I see is that you’re empty, too. Maybe that’s why you drove so fast, and were in so many accidents – because you didn’t care if you lived or died. I read that you went to jail and Hitler himself intervened to set you free. I can’t imagine how that felt.

I hope I’m wrong, and that you are happy in retirement. I hope that what I’ve written makes no sense to you at all. But if it does, if it rings true – could you tell me that it gets better? That ‘Alraune’ won’t just keep being told, in woman after woman? Your movie has a happy ending when other versions of the story don’t. I wish I found it more convincing.

Yours,

Alraune.

Read the rest in Becoming Nosferatu: Stories Inspired by Silent German Horror.