This essay considers the return of the gothic through two historical periods in which it might appear to be out of place in cultural ideological terms. The first is the Biedermeierzeit, an epoch that overlapped with the culture of late romanticism but was fundamentally resistant to its more fantastic and darkly sensational aspects. The second is the Weimar Republic, a period under the sway of technological modernity and not, at face value, fertile ground for gothic haunting. In fact, the restoration culture of the Biedermeierzeit played host to some extraordinarily potent and subversive gothic fantasies, and a century later, in the first years of the Weimar Republic, these apparently anachronistic fantasies came back to life at a further historical remove from their origins. In the retro-fantasies of early Weimar film, we can see the face of late romantic literary fantasy as popular revenant, inhabiting the reconstructed world of the Biedermeierzeit through the projective (and also retrospective) possibilities of the new medium. Looking back toward the gothic fantasies of E. T. A. Hoffmann in particular, it is a face that carried the features, at once uncannily strange and familiar, of the doppelgänger.

In my 1996 study of the doppelgänger I followed a track from writing and visual art around the era of romanticism to modernism and early cinema in an argument that saw this paradigmatic figure of the gothic imagination as a compelling, serial revenant.