German Life and Letters 57:1 January 2004

0016–8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

REVOICING SILENCED SIRENS: A CHANGING MOTIF IN WORKS BY

FRANZ KAFKA, FRANK WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER
ELIZABETH BOA
ABSTRACT

The 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 move-
ment. 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 pre-
vailing gender ideology. In both texts the Sirens lose their song, which is appropri-
ated 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.

In Dialektik der Aufklärung Horkeimer and Adorno take Odysseus’ encounter

with the Sirens as a model of humanity’s transcendence of nature and
myth, but at the cost of repression. The authors read the Odyssey as a narra-
tive of the birth of Western civilisation, but as the hero moves forwards out
of myth and into history his bonds symbolise the costs of progress:

Die Herrschaft des Menschen über sich selbst, die sein Selbst begründet, ist
virtuell allemal die Vernichtung des Subjekts, in dessen Dienst sie geschieht,
denn die beherrschte, unterdrückte und durch Selbsterhaltung aufgelöste
Substanz ist gar nicht anders als das Lebendige, als dessen Funktion die
Leistungen der Selbsterhaltung einzig sich bestimmen, eigentlich gerade
das, was erhalten werden soll.1

The Sirens episode is highly gendered: the male hero and the male collective
of labouring oarsmen who serve him sail on past female demons who

1
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, Frankfurt
a.M. 1988, p. 62.
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 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 9

embody ‘die beherrschte Substanz’ or ‘das Lebendige’. The Sirens are

the projected images of what the hero, bound to his mast, must repress
and leave behind. Writing of the Sirens as they appear in Dialektik der
Aufklärung, Inge Stephan comments:

Als Tier-Frau verkörpert die Sirene gerade die beiden Positionen – Tier und
Frau, die am negativsten in der Zivilisationsgeschichte belegt sind, zugleich
aber heimlich begehrt werden. Die Sirenen sind Schreck- und Wunschbilder
zugleich. Sie sind fratzenhaft verzerrte Revenants des Verdrängten, ihr
Gesang enthält eine doppelte Botschaft: Er erinnert an einen lustvollen
Zustand des noch Ungeschiedenen und der symbiotischen Einheit und
erregt zugleich den Schrecken, eben in diesen Zustand zurückzufallen.2

Dialektik der Aufklärung appeared in the 1940s and so follows on a long

history of mythologised images of the feminine in modernist literature and
in the visual arts. Many such images are of sirens and other water-women.3
These figures proliferated around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth
century, when masculine and feminine identity were hotly contested under
the impact of rapid social change and of the first feminist movement and
served ambiguously sometimes to re-confirm, but also sometimes to blur
the boundaries of sexual difference. For the water-women may evoke a
desired female other, but may also convey repressed aspects of the self,
longings which must be denied by the male agent if he is to fulfil his histor-
ical odyssey. In recent decades, feminist scholars have responded to such
mythologised figures of the feminine in the modernist canon in
diametrically opposite ways. Such figures may, it has been argued, unsettle
or deconstruct the binary oppositions of gender typology; the feminine
becomes detached from biological sex and is appropriated as a creative
principle by male artists and writers. Thus Julia Kristeva re-genders
Dionysus as the feminine semiotic, which she then discerns as a rhythmic
undertow beneath the Apollonian surface in the modernist canon.4 But
others see a re-inscription of ancient stereotypes, which may idealise
supposed feminine qualities but which denigrate actual women. Thus
Elaine Showalter warns that in men seeking escape from the rigid
construction of masculine roles ‘strongly anti-patriarchal sentiments could
coexist comfortably with misogyny, homophobia, and racism’.5 Christine
Battersby too is sceptical of Derrida’s claim that Nietzsche had decon-
structed gender polarities, so transforming the man-woman relationship:

2
Inge Stephan, Musen und Medusen. Mythos und Geschlecht in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Cologne
1997, p. 128.
3
On such motifs see Irmgard Roebling (ed.), Sehnsucht und Sirene, Vierzehn Abhandlungen zu
Wasserphantasien, Pfaffenweiler 1992, especially Ute Guzzoni, ‘Die Ausgrenzung des Anderen.
Versuch zu der Geschichte von Odysseus und den Sirenen’, pp. 5–34.
4
Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford 1986, p. 97.
5
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London 1992, p. 11.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
10 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

‘Nietzsche might have rhapsodically embraced the “feminine” element

within the male psyche [ . . . ]. But he retains membership of the Virility
School of Creativity.’6 When it comes to sexuality, such ambiguity between
subversion yet re-inscription of conventional stereotypes is especially sharp.
Intellectuals who favoured the sexual liberation of ‘Weib’, figured women
as fascinatingly dangerous demons, undines, melusines, sirens, or, follow-
ing Bachofen, as hetairas wandering the rushy marshlands between water
and land. But they were often indifferent or even opposed to the social
emancipation of ‘Frau’.7 However, since women cannot act as free sexual
beings if they are socially, economically and psychologically subject to the
male order of things, the sexual liberation of ‘Weib’ remained elusive:
demonically sexual ‘Weib’ is a chimera of the male imagination.
I want here to look at a particular moment in this discourse, namely a
shift from uncannily demonic figures towards travesty in two modernist
writers, Wedekind and Kafka. Both seem to me to be well aware that the
female demons are imaginary projections, yet to enjoy exploring the erotic
and narcissistic potential of these imaginary outgrowths. But whereas the
uncanny erotic force of the demonic feminine remains more marked in
Wedekind’s Lulu plays and in the figure of Leni in Der Proceß, a cynical or
parodic tendency increases in later work as the uncanny modulates into
travesty. This tendency to travesty reflects the authors’ increasing bad
conscience at their own collusion in a culture which was oppressive to
women, yet at the same time an inability to break fully free from the
prevailing gender ideology. Common to Kafka’s ‘Das Schweigen der
Sirenen’ (1917) and Wedekind’s Der Kammersänger (1899) is the silencing
of the Sirens.8 In both texts the Sirens lose their song, which is appropri-
ated to fuel the supposedly androgynous creativity of the male artist.
Barbara Köhler, by contrast, revoices the Sirens in her poem ‘(Sirenen 2)’,
published in 2000.
Wedekind’s Lulu retains an uncanny force in the sense defined by
Todorov, in that the spectator hesitates between a naturalistic reading
of Lulu as an actual woman exploited and finally murdered in a male-
dominated world and Lulu as a mirror of the male imaginary or a myth
become flesh.9 As a mythic figure Lulu shares with the Sirens a double
aspect of morbid horror and utopian promise. In Circe’s warning words
the Sirens ‘sit there in a meadow piled high with the mouldering skeletons
of men, whose withered skin still hangs upon their bones’; but their island
is later described by Odysseus as a flowery meadow and their song as high,

6
Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics, London 1989, pp. 177–8.
7
As Edward Timms puts it of Karl Kraus, he campaigned ‘on behalf of the sensuous liberation of
“Weib” and against the social emancipation of “Frau”’ – Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist. Culture and
Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna, New Haven, Conn. 1989, p. 350.
8
Since Wedekind’s play does not explicitly deploy Sirens as figures, the comparison is easier to draw
by looking first at Kafka’s Sirens.
9
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, Oxford 1977, pp. 155–6.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 11

clear and sweet.10 Lulu’s doubleness as death-dealing demon or innocent

spirit of nature likewise mirrors both the fears and the desires of men
bound by the laws governing patriarchal culture. The peculiar mood
comes from myth mingling with naturalism to subversive effect. But the
subversion is never complete; Lulu oscillates unsettlingly through to the
end when her death at the hands of Jack the Ripper can be seen as
the miserable culmination of women’s oppression under patriarchy or as a
monstrous coupling of demons. In Der Proceß Leni too hovers uncannily
between realism and myth. Her webbed fingers make her into a witch on
the margins of Christian culture or a soulless creature of the water. As she
kneels on Josef K.’s lap, kissing and biting his neck and head, she
resembles traditional depictions of the harpies as clawed birds with female
breasts. The Sirens too are clawed, hybrid bird-women. Leni’s peppery
smell is exotic, like the witches and nymphs in the Odyssey – Circe, Calypso,
the Sirens – who delay Odysseus on his way home to Ithaca. Despite
the subversive implication in both texts that these demonic women
are mirrors reflecting imaginary projections, the magic is never quite
dispelled.
Some classical sources say that the Sirens will cease to exist should
anyone hear their song and remain unmoved, for without their allure the
Sirens are nothing. Homer does not say what happened to the Sirens, but
Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that the encounter with cunning
Odysseus would mean their end because he hears but survives their magic.
Unlike Odysseus, the Argonauts remained unmoved and the Sirens cast
themselves down into the sea where they turned into submerged rocks. In
two later works by Kafka and Wedekind the Siren song loses its magic, the
Sirens are silenced and the uncanny gives way to travesty. In Kafka’s
re-working of the myth, the Sirens are clawed creatures who scarcely
emerge from the elements of sea, wind and rock. They are depicted
through erotically laden bodily details of twisting throats, eyes veiled in
tears, panting breath, half open mouths and wild hair.11 The man, cut off
from the elements in a human artifact, a boat, has large radiant eyes,
signalling spiritual composure, which the Sirens, forgetting their seductive
intent, gaze after yearningly. In Kafka’s text as in Dialektik der Aufklärung
the encounter between hero and demons evokes the dualisms of man and
nature, spirit and body, intellect and feeling, gendered in accord with
Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis in The Second Sex. Tied to his phallic mast, the
male hero embodies universal humanity set against the female Other. Both
parties are bound, though in different ways. The hero is in one way more
static, being physically bound to the mast, but the man-made vessel sails
on, driven by human labour-power and carrying forward the human

10
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu, Harmondsworth 1991, pp. 180, 184.
11
The analysis here extends the discussion in my study, Kafka: Gender, Class and Race in the Letters and
Fictions, Oxford 1996, pp. 98–101.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
12 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

project which will change the face of the earth and man himself, whereas
the writhing female demons remain behind half immersed in the elements.
As Odysseus passes like a sun-god in his chariot the sirens strive to catch
the last pale reflection from his eyes, but whereas in the old cyclic fertility
myths the engendering sun is husband of the fertile sea, here no such
consummation occurs as the bound male subject moves out of nature into
his historic Odyssey. Apollonian Odysseus and the musically throbbing
choreic body of women remain sundered. The myth conveys how mascu-
line phallic-symbolic power is achieved through instinctual repression and
demonisation of the Other on whom the male subject projects his own
repressed desires, which then return as monsters to threaten him or as
submerged rocks in the unconscious on which the subject may founder.
Kafka adds a triple twist, however. First, Odysseus puts wax not in his
boatmen’s but in his own ears; second, the Sirens’ silence not their song is
the lure; and third, Odysseus knew all along that they were silent, hence
the whole exercise of binding himself and putting wax in his ears was a
deceptive performance. On the second twist, the Sirens are doubly
silenced: first by the wax in the hero’s ears so that within the story they do
not distract Odysseus from imagining their song, while at the level of the
text, in actually being silent, they do not distract the reader from enjoying
the visual spectacle they present. The double silencing marks a shift away
from female demons into the imagination of hero and reader. The
alluring song is inside the hero’s head; as he looks at the writhing bodies
he projects onto them their seductive song. Such a moment figures the
relation between Woman as silent Muse and the male artist from whose
sovereign imagination the song comes. But even their visual image disap-
pears from his gaze as Odysseus sails on past: when their silent writhings
and mouthings are at their most affecting he is no longer there to be
affected but follows his own inner visionary journey. Intent on the figures
in his mind, he does not see the Sirens. In the final twist, Odysseus knew all
along that the Sirens were silent and played out the whole illusory proced-
ure as a shield against them and the gods. Now, there is neither desire
nor repression, but only the cunning deception of a man impervious to
seduction, who puts on a show of resistance and turns the tables on the
demons. He seduces the female creatures, who are left behind lamenting
as he glides on across the sea, bound to a mast which is not so much phallic
as like a very large pencil or writing implement.
The coda unmasking cunning Odysseus and completing the transfer of
power from monsters to hero is narrated with some gusto by a covert narra-
tor. Like his hero, the narrator too is cunning and offers the reader the
subtle pleasure of the triple twist but also the sublime spectacle of the
Sirens’ writhing bodies which Odysseus does not see but which the reader
can safely enjoy because the monsters have no consciousness, as the narra-
tor reassuringly remarks, even though their bodies show forth the signs of
pain. Rather like men looking at pornography, the hypocrite lecteur can

© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 13

enjoy a spectacular female performance as well as identify with a hero, so

confirming his manhood twice over. But what of the poor monster woman
reader? Rather than impotently writhing and bereft of a voice and con-
sciousness, she is perhaps left more enlightened about the feminine in the
writing of the modernist masters and can recognise the performance
of femininity as a performance. The cunning complacency of Kafka’s
Odysseus adds a twist to Simone de Beauvoir’s picture of man who turns
woman into a mystery: ‘in the company of a living enigma man remains
alone – alone with his dreams, his hopes, his fears, his loves, his vanity. This
subjective game [ . . . ] is more attractive than an authentic relationship
with a human being.’12 ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’ shows an erotic deflec-
tion from desiring a woman to desiring to write about Woman and has
been seen as a line drawn under Kafka’s correspondence with Felice Bauer
and as marking the choice of literature over marriage, for it seems unlikely
that Kafka’s Odysseus is going back home to Penelope.13
A comparable cynical twist marks Wedekind’s play Der Kammersänger.
This shows a deflection from erotic desire for a woman to an economic
project: to sing about Woman under contract. The hero of Wedekind’s
play is the ‘Heldentenor’ Gerardo. In the closing act Helene, who is in
love with Gerardo, comes to his hotel room after a performance to
throw herself at his feet, but he is in a hurry as he has to catch a train to
Amsterdam where he is contracted to play Tristan the next night. Gerardo
kindly explains to Helene that her love is chimeric; she does not love the
singer but the projected image of Tristan or Siegmund. Gerardo thinks he
has brought Helene to reason when she suddenly draws a pistol from her
handbag and shoots herself. Horrified, Gerardo none the less dashes off
to catch his train, leaving the stage empty but for Helene’s bleeding
corpse.
The basic structure of man moving on past, leaving woman behind, is
the same as Odysseus and the Sirens, albeit speeded up to keep pace with
the hectic tempo of modern life. The scene shifts from a first half
dominated by Helene’s aria-like, passionate outpourings answered mono-
syllabically by Gerardo, to the second half where Gerardo reasons with her
at ever greater length reducing Helene almost to monosyllables, then
silence.14 Helene’s Siren-like features come out in the stage directions,
which portray the writhings of silenced emotion in terms not unlike how
Kafka’s Sirens appeared to Odysseus. First Kafka: ‘flüchtig sah er zuerst die
Wendungen ihrer Hälse, das Tiefatmen, die tränenvollen Augen, den

12
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Harmondsworth 1983, p. 286.
13
Detlev Kremer, Kafka. Die Erotik des Schreibens, Frankfurt a.M. 1989, pp. 13–14.
14
The shift is not unlike the closing duet/dialogue between the narrator and her male alter ego at the
end of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina which, musically surging on her side, prosaic on his, ends in the
silencing of the narrator. The closing sentence proclaims a murder, but the death can also be read
as a suicide for the most immediate suspect is the ‘masculine’ aspect of the narrator’s self who kills
her ‘feminine’ core.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
14 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

halbgeöffneten Mund.’15 And Wedekind’s stage directions: Helene ‘starrt

ihn an, wendet hilfeflehend die Augen umher, schaudert und ringt nach
Worten, sich an Herz und Kehle fassend: “mich würgt es hier, mich würgt
es hier.”’16 Kafka’s text continues: Odysseus ‘glaubte aber, dies gehöre zu
den Arien die ungehört um ihn erklangen.’ Similarly Wedekind’s hero
does not really hear Helene’s words, but like the cynical Odysseus, thinks
he is hearing a mere simulacrum or performance like his own perform-
ance of Tristan. But Helene attempts to put into action in real life the
subject position allocated to her as a female spectator of Wagnerian opera
who identifies with the passions sung on stage. The mise en abyme disturbs
the boundary between reality and representation as Helene tries to trans-
port a Liebestod across the footlights from art into life. The comic effect is
heightened by a hybrid mix of styles and correspondingly gendered roles,
Helene playing the heroine of melodrama, Gerardo evincing an anti-
heroic ‘neue Sachlichkeit’ avant la lettre. By Wedekind’s time the opera was
big business, as Gerardo, bound to his contract, demonstrates. (In this
respect he resembles Wotan, who is bound by the law of contract inscribed
in his spear, a prop of phallic aspect equivalent to Odysseus’ mast.) To use
Elisabeth Bronfen’s terms, Gerardo occupies ‘the masculine position of
preservation’ and Helene ‘the feminine position of excess’.17 Helene’s
failed Liebestod shows how the male project proceeds across a female
corpse, but it is also a monstrous act by Helene of paradoxical self-assertion
through demonstrative self-destruction. Emotional Helene retards but
cannot, however, finally hold back rational Gerardo in his market- and
railway-driven rush through time/space. Her end is not after all a Liebestod,
but that of a Siren who has failed to move her listener and ceases to be.
Yet for all the comic travesty of melodrama, the operatic appropriation
of her song from a silenced Siren leaves a bitter aftertaste. ‘Das Epos
schweigt darüber, was den Sängerinnen widerfährt, nachdem das Schiff
entschwunden ist. In der Tragödie aber müßte es ihre letzte Stunde
gewesen sein.’ At least so Horkheimer and Adorno conclude. Helene
enacts such a tragic outcome. ‘Seit der glücklich-mißglückten Begegnung
des Odysseus mit den Sirenen’, Horkheimer and Adorno continue, ‘sind
alle Lieder erkrankt, und die gesamte abendländische Musik laboriert an
dem Widersinn von Gesang und Zivilisation, der doch zugleich wieder die
bewegende Kraft der Kunstmusik abgibt.’18 Thus Helene chokes and gasps
‘mich würgt es, mich würgt es’, whereas the complacent tenor is the
masterly exponent of Wagnerian ‘Kunstmusik’ containing the rhythmically
surging, semiotic traces of the Sirens. Creative men require a sequence of

15
Franz Kafka, ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’, in Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger
Hermes, Frankfurt a.M. 1996, pp. 351–2 (here p. 352).
16
Frank Wedekind, Der Kammersänger, in Werke (Kritische Studienausgabe, 4), ed. Elke Austermühl,
Darmstadt 1994, p. 40.
17
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic, Manchester 1992, p. 368.
18
Horkheimer and Adorno, p. 67.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 15

women to reignite inspiration. But as Elisabeth Bronfen suggests, ‘the poet

must choose between a corporeally present woman and the muse’.19 Thus
the ultimate incorporation of the eternal muse is the corpse of the mortal
beloved. As a pistol shot replaces Isolde’s rhapsodic aria and the hero
dashes off to catch his train, Helene’s attempt to reappropriate and live
out the mythic feminine to the extent of dying a mythic ‘Liebestod’ found-
ers. For Muse and Sirens alike really inhabit the male artist’s head: the
woman must be silent or dead lest she retard the man on his creative jour-
ney. Kafka’s letters to Felice confirm Bronfen’s thesis, for they make quite
explicit that Kafka can only write if the woman is absent or at least asleep in
another room, certainly not twittering away like a bird-woman and distract-
ing the author from his inner dream-life.20
Odysseus standing upright and singular, bound to his phallic mast,
conveys masculine bounded identity as achieved through repression in
contrast to the plural sirens (and to the labouring collective of oarsmen, but
that is another story of alienated labour which neither Wedekind nor Kafka
takes up). The episode shows the male subject of history and the female
principle of nature; or male becoming and female being. The recourse to
travesty by Wedekind and Kafka unsettles but it does not overthrow the
sexual discourse of the age, with its binary oppositions of heroic, rational
masculinity and sensuous, irrational, excessive femininity. Kafka’s Sirens are
silenced; Wedekind’s heroine bows out even more drastically. In Das Schloß
Kafka allows the women to speak at length, in the case of Pepi at excessive
length. But their speech is less eloquent than Amalia’s silence. That Kafka
largely refrains from putting words in the mouth of the most rebellious
character in Das Schloß suggests a proper hesitation in claiming to speak for
women in revolt against the patriarchy. The silence of the Sirens is in one
way no bad thing, then, if it reflects increasing awareness on the part of
male intellectuals that the mythic feminine was an alienated projection of
the repressed. But it does still leave the female voice unheard.
Against this history of the figure, I want now to look at how Barbara
Köhler revoices the silenced Sirens. Comparison with Kafka is apposite
in that Köhler used a sentence from ‘Das Schweigen der Sirenen’ as the
motto in introducing an exhibition of 1998 in Neuss called DIE DRITTE
PERSON, suggesting that Kafka’s sketch may have been a catalyst also for
her poem, ‘(Sirenen 2)’. The exhibition consisted of one room with video
displays made by Köhler’s fellow artist Anje Wiese and a room entitled ‘DIE
DRITTE PERSON. Sprachraum’ which displayed texts by Köhler etched on
glass plates and then hung in such a way that the etched words were only

19
Bronfen, p. 362.
20
See, for example, Franz Kafka, Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit,
Frankfurt a.M. 1976, p. 250, where Kafka imagines the life Felice would lead as his wife, forbidden
entry to the cellar, the secret room where he sits shut away writing. The underlying implication is the
writer as Bluebeard.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
16 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

visible in certain lights, but the shadows of the sentences cast on the wall
were always visible. Köhler’s introductory talk associates Odysseus looking at
the Sirens with an observer looking at a cinema, television or video screen:

Odysseus ist ihr gefesselter Zuschauer und Zuhörer, ein festgestellter Leib
sieht und hört er das Unbegreifliche, das Unerreichbare, das Fernste aus der
Nähe, die Leiber bewegen sich für ihn wie Bilder, movies, ihre Stimmen
erklingen: eine Television-Audio, könnte Odysseus sagen, spräch er Latein:
Video.21

Thus the communicative situation in the Odyssey of presence in the same

space and time of singers and listener, shifts to that of a third person
watching a chimeric spectacle. Odysseus’s bonds now symbolise the
subjection of the observer facing the modern media: the past participle
‘festgestellt’ conveys the passive condition of the spectator who, unlike
Homer’s Odysseus, has not chosen his bonds but is manoeuvred and
manipulated into his bound position by the spectacle. In Dialektik der Auf-
klärung, Horkheimer and Adorno attack what they call ‘Kulturindustrie’:
cinematic spectacle, so they argue, subjects the observer and renders him
socially passive.22 In his essay on the mass ornament, Kracauer too empha-
sises the passivity of the mesmerised observers fixed in a subject position
determined by the spectacle of chorus girls.23 Thus the wanderer who at
the very dawn of Western Civilisation once heard and saw the Sirens may
end up as a couch potato watching video or television. But Köhler’s essay
continues with a sequence of witty reconfigurations of the mythic roles,
which change according to the medium of representation, and in the end
offers a more liberating perspective for both genders than do the critical
theorists. In the exhibition, the medium is glass. Glass is a spatial medium,
whether as a mirror reflecting a space or as transparent glass allowing
visual passage between two spaces. The voice too is a spatial medium,
Köhler notes, whereas image and writing belong on the flat surface. Thus:
‘Wird Glas zum Trägermedium für Schrift entsteht etwas Chimärisches,
eine seltsame Kreuzung [ . . . ] In diesem Raum gewinnt auch die Schrift
etwas seltsam Körperhaftes [ . . . ].’24 It is made clear, Köhler explains,

21
Barbara Köhler, ‘DIE DRITTE PERSON’, in Wittgensteins Nichte. Vermischte Schriften. Mixed Media,
Frankfurt a.M. 1999, pp. 125–37 (here pp. 130–1). On Köhler’s experimentation with texts and
space, see Anthonya Visser, ‘Bild-Sprache: Barbara Köhlers Texte für öffentliche Räume’, in Entgegen-
kommen: Dialogues with Barbara Köhler (German Monitor 48), ed. Georgina Paul and Helmut Schmitz,
Amsterdam/Atlanta, Ga. 2000, pp. 195–213.
22
Horkheimer and Adorno, pp. 128–76.
23
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Das Ornament der Masse’, in Das Ornament der Masse. Essays, Frankfurt a.M.
1963, pp. 50–63; the spectators in their serried rows form together with the chorus girls on the stage
an integral part of the mass ornament which the essayist is watching on screen in the cinema, as
Molly Fleischer brings out in ‘The Gaze of the Flaneur in Siegfried Kracauer’s “Das Ornament der
Masse”’, GLL, 54 (2001),10–24 (here 12–13).
24
Köhler, DIE DRITTE PERSON, pp. 134–5.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 17

that the handwritten sentences etched on the glass plates issue from two
first-person feminine subjects who together create a plural first person
addressing a plural ‘Sie’. Thus the Sirens’ voices (a spatial medium)
appear as handwriting, a medium involving the physical inscription of
words on a flat surface, but here inscribed in the spatial medium of glass
and shadowed on the wall, so evoking a double transference: first of words
from voices to script, but anticipating too the transformation of hand-
writing into published print which yet retains the shadow of handwritten
words, they in turn bearing traces of voices. The writer of words is not
necessarily the author and Köhler espouses the theory that Homer may
have been plural and, whether singular or plural, wove into the Odyssey
many oral sources. ‘Sie’, the readers of words on glass and shadows on
walls, are distinguished neither as male nor as female: if the texts are read
aloud, this second-person plural ‘Sie’ can also be the third person ‘sie’, the
collective addressees or readers of the two female subjects inscribed in
the etched texts. In all these ways, Köher’s talk and the exhibition subvert
the sharp distinction between singular Odysseus and plural Sirens to
suggest the co-existence in writing of the plural voices of the author as sub-
ject, but of an embodied subject always in dialogue with others. In the
penultimate section of the talk, Köhler returns to the glass video screen to
comment on the inaccessibility of the person in front of the camera to the
person in front of the screen and the power of the former to functionalise
the latter and hence ‘die einfache Fesselung des Odysseus zum double bind
zu entwickeln’.25 But in the last paragraph, she unbinds Odysseus from the
necessity of being a man. He becomes instead the third person, addressed
as an ungendered plural ‘Sie’ by the chimeric dual female voice etched in
glass:

Der Held ist nicht länger einer, wenn die Komparsinnen seiner Abenteuer
auftreten als Autorin und Aktrice in eigner Regie, sich das Wort nehmen und
ihn bei demselben, das gleiche Wort, das in ihrem Munde und ihrer Hand-
schrift, durch ihren anderen Leib ein anderes wird. Gerade wo Sie Odysseus
am nächsten sind, wissen Sie nichts mehr von ihm.26

As Kafka has his triple twist, so here too the pronouns shift in meaning
in the last sentence which at once appropriates the authoritative posi-
tion of third-person narrator and addresses a singular or plural you or
they who is/are male or female. More generous than Kafka and
Wedekind, who travesty yet still retain the sharply contrasted figures of
singular hero and plural demons, Köhler’s close liberates men and
women from the mythic roles in that satisfyingly assured dismissal of
Odysseus as beyond notice.

25
Ibid., p. 136.
26
Ibid., pp. 136–7.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
18 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

(Sirenen 2)

Ich sei 'Ich bin': ein Zeichen
das klingt springt/Himmel und
Hölle/entzwei gebrochnes Wort
mein Teil verschwiegen bin ich
Gleiche ihm die Verglichene er
kennt sich nicht im andern das
verdingte Zeichen das bedeutet
wird das zu deuten scheint ihm
Antwort was in Frage steht was
er zu stellen sucht fixiert es
fesselt ihn das Unbegreifliche
vor Augen hört er es klingt es
singt Zweistimmiges zwitschert
es Gezwitter von Frau & Vögeln
sieht er sich gesehen gesungen
gespiegelt undeutliches Doppel
im halben Vogelblick im andern
Auge die Andere die Gleiche In
differenz Interferenzen gehört
mit bloßem Ohr ein Singsang An
klang Echo & Durchdringung wer
will das auseinanderhalten was
kommt aus seinen Händen den ge
bundenen hat er sich in Gewalt
gegeben den tauben Ohren seines
gleichen die Stricke schneiden
das eigene Fleisch es schmerzt
ihn seh ich weiß was Schmerzen
sind auszuhalten ist eine Wahl
der Qual mit Namen »Ich« & mehr
als eins bin ich selbander DIE
(»Sirenen« nennt er es) ICH
BIN MIR GLEICH die Fremde ist mein
Double mein Teil sie hält mich
aus halt ich sie weiß ich mich
zu lassen was hält ist Abstand
& ich halte ihn lieber als daß
ich flöge auf dieses Angebinde
: Held in Seilen verstrickt in
eigenen Worten die den Leib ent
eignen die Geste binden an die
Täuschung ist Absicht verlangt
verstopfte Ohren die den Augen
nicht traun gehorchen ihm aufs
Wort Vertraun was will er mehr
hören & sein als seinesgleichen
verglichen unterscheiden & als
Einer nicht unter anderem Herr
der Rede hat er das Sagen über
redet & verschweigt das Singen
Klingen springende Stimmen die
keine Antwort stehen lassen de
finiert er dividiert Ich nenne
trenne mich: Charybdis. Skylla.

The title, ‘(Sirenen 2)’, does not signal a second poem on the topic, but
rather the doubleness of the bracketed lyric subject in contrast to the
singular hero bound to the mast.27 The poem offers a meditation on identity
and difference as mediated in language and turns the tables on Odysseus,
as the Siren’s/Sirens’ plural voice assumes the position of the subject, as
‘Gleiche’ or self-same, whereas for Odysseus the Siren is ‘die Verglichene’.
She is a cipher for the Other(s) and is pluralised as a species, not a subject,
against which he compares and so defines his singular identity. The Sirens

27
Peter Waterhouse, Ulrike Draesner and Barbara Köhler, : to change the subject. Waterhouse: DIE
ÜBERSETZUNG DER WORTE IN SPRACHE; Draesner: TWIN SPIN Sonette von Shakespeare. Radi-
kalübersetzungen. Köhler: NIEMANDS FRAU Gesänge zur Odyssee (Göttinger Sudelblätter), ed. Heinz
Ludwig Arnold, Göttingen 2000, pp. 48–9. I am grateful to Wallstein Verlag for their kind permission
to reprint ‘(Sirenen 2)’.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER 19

are that which he is not or which he must repress in order to achieve

masculine identity. The poem turns the tables by then evoking Odysseus in
bonds as he is refracted and split under the double or divided gaze of the
hybrid bird/women. Köhler plays here on the unsettling effect of a bird’s
eyes, which can divide the field of vision into two separate sectors. The
poem shows Odysseus suffering from the pain of bonds which prevent
gestures and of deafness which silences singing. Odysseus as the hero of
Western Civilisation needs to define, to separate, to categorise, to divide.
The Sirens by contrast are two yet one. As Köhler notes in DIE DRITTE
PERSON, Homer always ascribes one voice to plural Sirens: their song is
not discursive and so not subject to interruption; the listener must either
enter into it and merge with the singers, or he must pass by. When the
Argonauts remain deaf to their song, the Sirens cast themselves down into
the sea and turn into submerged rocks. Were Odysseus, the singular one
who compares and divides and categorises, to divide the double Sirens they
will turn into Scylla and Charybdis. Thus Köhler’s poem closes on a darkly
comic warning: the refusal of recognition of sameness in the other and
otherness in the self produces monsters which threaten, like Scylla and
Charybdis, to swallow or to drown the self. The assertion of phallic singu-
larity, the mast to which Odysseus is bound in the pursuit of mastery over
monologic speech, silences song.
But the poem does not just issue warnings; it revoices the Sirens in the
double movement of ambiguous syntactic relationships in which words look
two ways, so allowing a glimpse of a sirenic language. The first few lines
convey densely impacted meanings: they evoke the setting of identity and
difference, the shift from song to the separate words in language, the
encounter of the hero who identifies himself through his difference from
the Sirens, the seeker who would fix meaning but is himself bound by song
become incomprehensible. Man’s pursuit of mastery over the animal/
female Other gives birth to the binary opposition of/Heaven and Hell/,
prefigured in Homer’s flowery meadow and bone-strewn isle of the dead,
the realm of ‘Schreck- und Wunschbilder zugleich’, which is here shown, by
enclosure in slashes, to be the selfsame place despite the difference.28 The
meanings interlock through link words with more than one grammatical
function. Thus ‘entzwei’ may be the separable prefix of ‘springt’ or of
‘gebrochenes’; ‘mein Teil’ may follow on ‘entzwei gebrochenes Wort’ or it
may belong with ‘verschwiegen’. Should it be: ‘Was er zu stellen sucht, fixi-
ert es’? No: ‘Es fesselt ihn das Unbegreifliche.’ That ‘es’ operates twice over
underlines how the very effort to fix and differentiate creates the incompre-
hensible which binds and cuts into the flesh. Such syntactical ambiguity,
‘apo koinon’ or double grammar, belongs within the second of Empson’s
seven types of ambiguity: ‘the device is used [ . . . ] to give an interpenetrating
and, as it were, fluid unity, in which phrases will go either with the sentence

28
Stephan, loc. cit.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.
20 A CHANGING MOTIF IN KAFKA, WEDEKIND AND BARBARA KÖHLER

before or after and there is no break in the movement of thought.’29 Rather

than phrases, here the ambiguity penetrates down to words, and into words,
so that boundaries both between and within sentences are hard to fix, an
effect intensified by radical enjambment which divides words and shifts a
colon from the word on which it depends to the beginning of the next line.
But the displaced colon, the frequent use of ampersands, the layout of the
lines in justified columns, the brackets in the title, the capitalisation of
‘Einer’, the play with ich or Ich, all purely elements of a printed text, also
signal the appropriation of the printed medium and the ability to manipu-
late words, just as the liquid onomatopoeia and the flowing effect produced
by lack of punctuation convey the traces of sirenic song within the printed
text. The poem is hybrid in its mix of the lyrical with the technology of
print, especially those ampersands. It mixes flow with awkward blockages
which interfere like submerged rocks beneath the waves:

[ . . . ] & als
Einer nicht unter anderem Herr
der Rede hat er das Sagen über
redet & verschweigt das Singen
Klingen springende Stimmen die
keine Antwort stehen lassen de
finiert er dividiert Ich nenne
trenne mich: Charybdis. Skylla.

The capitalisation of ‘Ich’ which looks back to the opening, and the fright-
ening appearance of that period between Charybdis and Skylla, the first in
the whole poem, together suggest an assertion of subjecthood and a com-
mand over the medium of print which will brook no denial by the ‘Herr
der Rede’. Yet the internal rhyming and onomatopeia of ‘Singen/Klingen
springende Stimmen’ preserve traces of sirenic tones.30 ‘It is clear’,
Empson wrote of a passage from Macbeth, ‘that ambiguity, not of word but
of grammar, cannot be brought to this pitch without chaos and must in
general be used to produce a different effect.’31 Köhler’s poem achieves an
interpenetrating and fluid unity and any threat of chaos is firmly control-
led within the technology of print, by the witty play on words and through
a sophisticated game of intertextual allusion. Here is neither anxiety
of influence nor a return of the repressed in the shape of pre-linguistic
babble but an assured, eloquent revoicing, in print, of Sirens for our time.

29
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Harmondsworth 1961, p. 50.
30
On the complexities of the personal pronouns in Köhler’s poetry see Karen Leeder, ‘Two-Way
Mirrors: Construing the Possibilities of the First Person Singular in Barbara Köhler’s Poetry’, in Paul
and Schmitz (eds), pp. 63–90.
31
Empson, p. 50.
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.