Volker Pilgrim - the German author who was running from vampires

Volker Pilgrim, aka Max Melbo, in 2019.

A radical new theory about sleep disorders - why it is we sometimes feel robbed of sleep, and wake up feeling drained - has been mooted by one of the strangest authors to wander the Earth, a mysterious German exile in New Zealand, who died penniless last summer at the age of 79, spending his last days in a darkened room in a youth backpacker house in Ponsonby.

Volker Pilgrim had been a bestselling author in Germany. His first book in English has only just now been published posthumously and the title instantly takes you one step into the world of his mind - The Vampire Man: The Fourth Sleep Disorder.

Yes, vampires. It touched on one of his core beliefs and seems to have been a motive for his decision to leave Germany, change his name, cut off ties with his friends and family, and reinvent himself first in Sydney, then in Auckland. He was afraid of vampires. He was on the run from vampires. But they followed him to the other side of the world and resulted in his writing The Vampire Man. “This book,” he states, “was lived.”

I wrote at length about Pilgrim’s life and times last year (Premium content, as is always the case with vampire literature). The story began when I interviewed Campbell Smith, the very affable owner of Verandahs Parkside Lodge, the traveller’s hostel where Pilgrim came to rest. He formed a deep affection for his elderly guest and came across a book contract with a vanity publisher in New York. The Vampire Man is the result.

Verandahs Parkside Lodge on Hopetoun St, Freemans Bay. Photo / Michael Craig

Pilgrim’s self-proclaimed “No 1 fan” is Veit Stauffer in Zurich. I called him at his home and he said: “Pilgrim believed in vampirism, but not real with blood, but as a metaphor, as a kind of transmission from one person to the other. He had sleeping problems and had a sense that someone would put out his power during the night.”

It compelled Pilgrim to make an abrupt exit from Germany: “He had the idea that he must be as far away as possible, that nobody could find him,” Stauffer said.

Pilgrim’s oldest friend, German psychologist Ulfa von den Steinen (she married Pilgrim’s ex-boyfriend), was likewise ditched. I emailed her at her home in Berlin. She replied: “He felt he was being haunted by people who came close to him. He wrote a book about it, Der Vampirmann, the man persecuted by vampires. It is his personal story. This is why he cut relations with all his friends who knew him well personally, even with us and other close friends. He gave up living in a home of his own because the vampires might find him there, and he moved from one hostel to the next.”

Pilgrim maintained that exact living routine in Auckland. He lived as a wanderer in rags, bright-eyed and obviously tremendously likeable, making friends wherever he roamed at lodges and backpacker hostels across the isthmus. He was a man on the run from himself, from the demons inside his sleep. He explains why he chose an itinerant existence in The Vampire Man - alone, in one place, he was at risk; in a hostel, among other sleepers, he was protected. “I sleep outstandingly well in large hotels, where protective groups can form spontaneously.” He writes that he found the same salvation sleeping on a bus: “I regularly made long journeys in Australia at night. The driver plays the part of the good mother or father, making us drowsy at the onset with a couple of reassuring words of welcome, and steers us safely through the chaos of traffic to the desired destination...”

It was at times like this that I was unsure whether I was reading something merely really crazy or something resembling a literary masterpiece. Certainly, it was full of great writing, striking epigrams, insights delivered in unexpected detail. “Vampires lack something. They possess neither the peace of the dead nor the elan of the living. They are ghouls with a difference.” When he first suffered sleeplessness, the depth of his misery was tangible in the house where he lived: “A pall of corruption clung clammily to the walls. The fetid emanations even tainted my towel.”

To stay awake at night is to stay open. “Sleep,” he writes, with beautiful precision, “is an act of closing.”

Volker Pilgrim's book, which was published posthumously.

Anyway, vampires. He means them as a metaphor for people - always men - who rob other people - most often women - of sleep. They suck it out of them. In the Pilgrim paradigm, they are takers; their victims are donors. “My book is a radical feminist protest against the exploitation - by vampirical maleness - of femaleness.” As a gay man, who thought of himself as very feminine, Pilgrim had the kind of femaleness that was appealing to sleep vampires. “There is an energy transfer between a donor and a taker,” he writes. “The donor is pale and weak in the morning. The taker is red and strong. The donor starts to suffer, first with sleep disturbances, then with depression.”

Energy transfers, sleep vampirism, fetid towels - he lived an extreme life of the mind. He went there. He had his own truthiness. I was aware that taking an interest in his book was not dissimilar to the grave sin of platforming someone with alternative ideas (Pilgrim was reluctant to get vaccinated for Covid), and who had a distrust of scientific fact (“The medical profession sticks sleep sufferers in a Sleep Clinic, continually tries out medicaments on them, and usually returns them to their misery as incurable”). Medicaments!

But the further I sought comment, the more I thought Pilgrim was only as crazy as some of the medical professionals I interviewed.

Actually, the first person I spoke with was a vampire author. Noelle McCarthy won the best first book of nonfiction prize at the recent Ockham national book awards for her memoir Grand, which includes a long, fascinating detour into her obsession with Dracula. The fascination endures: she is right now working on her next book, entirely about her obsession with Dracula.

She said: “I’m looking at the fact that I was 14 when I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula and wasn’t able to stop thinking about it, and it was even greater than that, like it sort of animated my life, and how I saw men and women, and sex, and romance, and so I am looking at how it shaped my life and like how it came with me, alongside me, because when you’re an addict, and you’re in those dark places, feeling like you’ve had company the whole way along or maybe something guiding you through that, it’s interesting to trace it back, and the thing was even when I stopped drinking and got sober, I still had that obsession of going into a bookshop and seeing it and having to pick it up.”

Volker Pilgrim aka Max Melbo in 1970s on the occasion of the first performance of his opera, Rathenau.

Somewhere about midway through this eloquent 132-word sentence I marked her down as being as crazy as Volker Pilgrim. But I mean this as a compliment; McCarthy has a restless intelligence, an openness to strange notions, an ability to make connections where the rest of us only see space. When I first put Pilgrim’s theorem to her, she said: “Woah.” She quickly recovered, and said, “I’m not an expert on vampires, I just spend a lot of time thinking about them. And this idea he has of the vampire as an energy taker - it absolutely tracks. The powerful thing about the vampire is the force of will he is able to exert. The whole way through Dracula, people never know whether they are asleep or whether they are dreaming or whether it really happened. It gives everything this strange, confused, erotic energy because they just don’t know. So yeah. Energy taking - that’s very much the field of the vampire. "

I read out a passage from The Vampire Man where Pilgrim describes energy taking as a kind of “tapping”, and she said, “Tapping’s great. Tapping’s what you do to a tree, when you’re getting the maple syrup out.”

I felt touched that she was being so agreeable with Pilgrim’s ideas. He had lived his last years as an outsider; his fame in Germany had long since been a thing of the past, and his last major work, an epic three-volume investigation into Hitler’s psychopathy, was dismissed as a three-volume waste of time, the imaginings of a crank. He loved New Zealand. People in New Zealand loved him. And now, posthumously, his ideas were being treated with respect.

McCarthy said: “It sounds to me like he is saying you can live your whole life with this tapping into you, which would be horrible... He’s talking about a bloodless assault, isn’t he? Lots of people in Dracula talk about not feeling right the day after, you know, they’re heavy, they’re bloodless, and they’re tired, and there’s a weightiness to it.”

It was time to direct the interviews to the dark arts of psychiatry.

There really is a field called sleep medicine. I spoke with four people in the field on the subject of Pilgrim’s sleep disorder theory. I expected resistance, dismissal, mockery; there was a level of that, but there was also an acceptance that because sleep itself is so mysterious, so secretive, that even the notion of energy transfer was something that had to be at least entertained.

Dan Ford is a sleep psychologist and founder of The Better Sleep Clinic in Auckland. He was quite open to Pilgrim’s speculations.

He said: “When you step back and look at it, this guy is a literary person, and he’s actually written a kind of a description of how it feels to suffer from insomnia. Fatigue is the most common problem with insomnia. So it doesn’t sound out of the ballpark in the sense that it probably does feel like somebody is sucking your energy.”

We talked about sleep stats (the global population rate for clinical insomnia is around 10-15 per cent) and rest stats (seven hours of sleep is ideal; “too long is worse than too short”). He came out with zingers: “Sleepiness [is] just a psychological process in your body, just like feeling hungry.” And: “Most insomniacs are actually asleep.” Best of all: “You have to stay awake to fall asleep.”

A collection of books by Volker Pilgrim.

And then we had this exchange. I asked, “What are the main causes of sleep disorders?”

He said: “Any stress - but actually we don’t tend to pay a lot of attention to the trigger in sleep medicine.”

I asked: “Why don’t you examine the trigger?”

He said: “There are people with chronic insomnia that started 20 years ago. A classic one is a mum will say, ‘I first had sleep problems after my second child was born.’ I say to them, ‘Okay so how old are they?’ And they say, ‘Oh they’re 20 now.’ So it’s irrelevant, right, that was the trigger. What we’ve got to know is what’s keeping it going.”

I said: “You keep wandering away from the trigger. The trigger could be as Pilgrim says, that someone is stealing your sleep. But to you, that would be just something on your list of irrelevancies.”

He laughed, and said: “It could be like he says. In theory, it could be anything.”

I said: “Sleep itself is a mystery Isn’t it?”

This is when he came out with, “Most insomniacs are actually asleep.” He continued, “People say to me, ‘I was awake all night.’ I say, ‘Were you pacing up and down, or lying in bed?’ And nine times out of 10 they say, ‘Lying in bed.’

“They probably drifted into a very light sleep. I try not to deny my clients’ experience but I put it out there. You have no perception of time when you are asleep. Our experience of sleep is hard to penetrate, because we’re asleep.”

I said: “Sleep is a great unknowingness.”

He said: “We know the brain is doing a lot of stuff. There’s lots going on. It’s in active state. And we have more and more neuro-imaging and a better understanding of the physical side. But the metaphysical side is pretty open,” he laughed again, “and it brings us back to Mr Pilgrim.”

It always came back to Mr Pilgrim, throughout three more interviews with people in the field of - such a prissy, Victorian-sounding term - sleep medicine. True, none of them actually agreed with a word he wrote. The beautifully-spoken Dr Alex Bartle, director of the Sleep Well Clinic in Christchurch, who has presented important research at the important World Federation of Sleep Research 5th International Congress in Valencia, beautifully repudiated Pilgrim’s theorem, thus: “There’s a lot known about sleep nowadays and I’ve not come across any being or thing that’s removed it.”

Wellington clinical psychologist Dr Bronwyn Sweeney, honorary associate of the Sleep/Wake Research Centre at Massey University, whose particular interest is sleep in pregnancy, had a lovely, gentle manner, and said sweetly, “I mean it’s on the edge of the reality of what I subscribe to.”

And Justine Camp in Dunedin, who has led the te ao Māori stream of inquiry within a University of Otago sleep wellness project that was awarded $1.7 million, ejected Pilgrim from any Māori mythology: “There is no correlation between the idea around vampirism and any of our culture.”

Volker Pilgrim (second right) at a party in the 1970s.

Equally, though, a common theme was an acceptance that came down to Pilgrim’s guess being as good as theirs: sleep exists in a state beyond reason, beyond the known. Dr Bartle said of The Vampire Man: “It’s like something from the Middle Ages. For thousands of years, we’ve made up stories about things largely because we haven’t understood them. Making up stories about vampire man almost makes sense.”

I asked: “Do your insomnia patients describe sleeplessness as feeling drained?”

He said: “Oh yes, absolutely. Feeling drained is a good analogy. An insomnia patient I saw this morning was in tears because they just weren’t sleeping enough and just totally exhausted and drained, and not being able to think properly.”

I asked: “Have any of your patients ever said, ‘Look, Doctor, I think someone is doing this to me?’”

He said: “Never has said anyone said someone is draining or taking away their sleep. Not ever. No.”

I asked Dr Sweeney if she would have liked to meet Pilgrim to discuss his ideas in The Vampire Man, or if she would have dismissed him. She said: “I would not have dismissed him. I’m always intrigued by how people conceptualise sleep. It doesn’t mean I subscribe to that stuff but I’m very curious.

“Fundamentally, there is no unified answer as to why we sleep. We’ve got lots of hypotheses, but there are many more questions than answers about sleep. We’re still learning. It still holds a lot of mystery.”

Justine Camp, with her sleep research that took into consideration Māori ideas of maramataka (the Māori lunar calendar) and pūrākau (myths), saw virtue in Pilgrim’s belief that we slept better in communal groups. She talked about the benefits of traditional marae sleeping versus the postcolonial model of sleeping in separate spaces, “which doesn’t bring a sense of connection and togetherness”.

And the interview took an unexpected turn.

She was talking about the challenges of improving sleep, and said, “But it’s a really hard thing to do. Like I actually have insomnia. I always have.”

A sleep researcher with insomnia! She said, “I think I’m a bit of an introvert and an overthinker. I often struggle to wind down so I’ve found that Harry Potter is really good. You kind of think it’s not going to be because it’s so exciting, but I find I can shut my mind down. I also use magnesium, and I’ve had to get CBD prescribed because I don’t want to get addicted to sleeping pills.”

She meant medicinal cannabidiol, extracted from cannabis. I said, “Is it effective?”

She said: “It’s very much like a sleeping pill. I can go to sleep but I can’t stay asleep. What the CBD does is it extends my sleep from two hours to four until I get my first wake. The doctor said it’s probably as good as it’s going to get for me. I can get up to five, but just not every night.”

I asked: “Is that a concern?”

She said: “No, I think I’ve adjusted well. I understand that I’ll never get seven hours’ sleep. I function on four. That’s just my lot.”

A sleep researcher with insomnia, taking CBD to go to sleep - but I had still to meet a medical professional whose craziness resembled the brilliant craziness of Volker Pilgrim. Dr Bronwen Sweeney said: “You have to talk to Tony Fernando.”

Dr Tony Fernando is a sleep and insomnia specialist at Practice 92 in Mt Eden. Like everyone in sleep medicine, he practises cognitive behaviour therapy and dispenses medicaments - when I first saw him, he was on the phone prescribing a benzodiazepine sedative. But he is like no one else in sleep medicine.

Sometimes he would drop his voice to a whisper and speak like Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, when Kurtz described the heart of darkness: “Oh my god. I have patients who are phobic of sleep because of their horrible nightmares.” Later, he said: “And then there is idiopathic hypersomnia, the opposite to insomnia - these are people who are constantly asleep. It’s rare but I see enough that I won’t consider it super rare. The worst case I saw was a Starship patient who was sleeping a total of 23 hours. It’s horrible. Horrible.”

He also talked about a case of demonic possession in sleep, where an exorcist was called. So, yeah, the notion that Pilgrim formed his theory of a vampiric sleep disorder was within Dr Tony’s realms of the possible. And besides, it wasn’t merely an abstract supposition. The insomniacs, the hypersomniacs, the Starship patient awake for only one hour of the day, Dr Bartle’s patient in tears, Justine Camp toking on CBD just to get two more hours of sleep, Pilgrim thinking someone was robbing his energy (“a nocturnal disturbance”) - they were all in need, all in distress.

Sleep can be beautiful. Sleep can also exist as a terror for people who become, rightly, afraid of the dark. “Sleep,” Pilgrim wrote, in another moment where his mind wandered into the shadowlands of genius and torment, “is a persecution unit”.

Dr Tony liked the sound of that. It’s the reality of many of his patients - sleep as persecution, as a draining. Sleep, ultimately, as something unknowable, as one of the two great mysteries of life.

I said to Dr Tony: “Is sleep the closest frontier to the unknown lands of death?”

He said: “I don’t know.”

I asked: “What do you make of the central thesis of The Vampire Man?”

He said: “I haven’t read anything in the scientific literature about energy transfer. It’s a novel idea. But I know a patient who lives alone, in the bush, no one around them, and they have very, very bad insomnia. So an energy transfer with what? Another being? Who would be the vampire? I don’t know. And so the concept of energy transfer - I’ve never heard of it. But I can’t dismiss it. I’m pretty open to open all sorts of bizarre things.”

I wish I had met Volker Pilgrim. He was a wonderful writer and everyone who did know him remarked on his gentle nature, his ability to make people feel good. Dr Tony was a lot like that. After he told his story about his recent holiday in Jerusalem, embedding himself with people who had ultra-orthodox views that were completely inimical to his own, I said, “You went underground.”

He said: “Yeah. I’m crazy.”

I said: “You’re crazy, man.”

“Crazy,” he said. He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.