Listening for Reconciliation: Gendered Truths about Death and Mädchen from Dorfman and Polanski to Kathia Rock

Listening for Reconciliation: Gendered Truths about Death and Mädchen from Dorfman and Polanski to Kathia Rock Susan Ingram Memento mori gained popularity in high and late Medieval Europe as populations were ravaged by plagues and pestilence of all kinds. Communicating the Latin admonishment to “remember that you must die,” allegorical motifs such as skulls and skeletons, and genres such as the Danse Macabre, emerged to convince Christians that because of the necessity of death, they should prepare themselves to meet their Maker. Both early literary and pictorial examples emphasized that death felled even the most privileged: in Heinrich von Melk’s Von des Todes gehügende (Memento mori, written around 1150), for example, the lesson of the vanitas of riches is visited upon a king’s son (Haubrichs 65), while in the famous Danse Macabre mural cycle painted “in 1424–25 on the walls of one of the charnel houses in the parish cemetery of Les Saints Innocents in Paris, which appears to have been the origin of all later artistic examples of a medieval motif that has proved to be as inspirational as no other from this period” (Freytag xxi), the king is depicted dually “as both a victim of death amidst the ranks of the living and as a worm-eaten corpse” (Oosterwijk 131). There is no question that death served as an inspiration to authors and playwrights in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Oosterwijk and Knöll 4). The question was rather how it should be portrayed. In “Dance of Death” plays, death appeared “not as the destroyer, but as the messenger of God summoning men [sic] to the world beyond the grave, a conception familiar both to the Holy Bible and to the ancient poets” (Herbermann and Williamson). Given this implicit gendering, it is perhaps not surprising that in the German-speaking realm, the motif that took off tempered the fear of death with eroticism. Sixteenth-century male artists such as Hans Baldung, Hans Burgkmaier, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, Hans Schwarz, and Barthel Beham seem to have found solace in depicting an erotically charged relationship between two figures, one a skeletal male [End Page 288] and the other a voluptuous young female, whose naked body glistened as white as the paints allowed. These depictions passed into literature with Matthias Claudius’s poem “Der Tod und das Mädchen,” in which a frightened maiden asks Death to pass her by, to which Death tries to console her: Das Mädchen: Vorüber! Ach vorüber!/Geh wilder Knochenmann!/Ich bin noch jung, geh Lieber!/Und rühre mich nicht an. Der Tod: Gib deine Hand, du schön und zart Gebild!/Bin Freund, und komme nicht, zu strafen:/Sei gutes Muts! Ich bin nicht wild,/Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen. (Claudius)1 Claudius’s poem resonated with Franz Schubert, who first set it to music as a lied in 1817 and then returned to it as his health was deteriorating seven years later, four years before his premature death at age 31.2 Schubert’s String Quartet #14 in D minor has come to be associated with the “Death and the Maiden” motif thanks in no small part to Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 play and Roman Polanski’s 1994 adaptation of it. In the afterword to the English translation of the play, Dorfman describes it as “a dramatic situation” about “[a] man whose car breaks down on the motorway” and “is given a lift home by a friendly stranger,” whose voice the man’s wife thinks is that of the torturer who some years before raped her, repeatedly, to the strains of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” and so she “decides to put him on trial” (Dorfman, Death and the Maiden 57; emphasis mine). My focus in this contribution is a pivotal shift that the “Death and the Maiden” motif underwent with the waning of modernity at the turn of this past millennium, and how a subtle but decolonizing shift in representations of the relationship of death and young women can be illuminated through an analysis that puts Dorfman’s play and Polanski’s adaptation in dialogue with “Terre de nos aïeux,” a...

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