Revoicing Silenced Sirens: A Changing Motif in Works by Franz Kafka, Frank Wedekind and Barbara Köhler

AbstractThe episode of Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens in Horkheimer's and Adorno's Dialektik der Aufklärung follows on a long history of images of Sirens and other water‐women in modernist literature which proliferated around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when masculine and feminine roles were hotly contested under the impact of rapid social change and of the first feminist movement. At issue here is a shift in this discourse from uncannily demonic figures towards travesty in two modernist writers, Wedekind and Kafka. Whereas the uncanny erotic force of the demonic feminine remains strong in Wedekind's Lulu plays and in the figure of Leni in Der Proceß, a cynical or parodic tendency increases in later work. Common to Kafka's ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’ and Wedekind's Der Kammersänger is the silencing of the Sirens as the uncanny modulates into travesty, a shift reflecting the authors’ growing sense of their collusion in a culture which was oppressive to women, yet at the same time an inability to break free from the prevailing gender ideology. In both texts the Sirens lose their song, which is appropriated to fuel the supposedly androgynous creativity of the male artist. Barbara Köhler, by contrast, revoices the Sirens in her poem ‘(Sirenen 2)’. This achieves an interpenetrating and fluid unity which yet is controlled by the technology of print, by witty play on words and through a sophisticated game of intertextual allusion. ‘(Sirenen 2)’ offers an assured, eloquent revoicing of the Sirens for our time.