Multiple Refractions, or Winning Movement out of Myth: Barbara Köhler's Poem Cycle ‘Elektra. Spiegelungen’

Abstract

AbstractBarbara Köhler's poem cycle ‘Elektra. Spiegelungen’ (written 1984–5, first published 1991) is the response of the female poet to Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (1977). The paper examines the relation between Müller's Ophelia/Elektra, who swears revenge while being bound into a wheelchair in the course of the final scene, and Köhler's multiple figure (‘die gestalt nähert sich wird körper verdoppelt verviel‐/facht eins in allen bildern neigt sie sich zu und fordert’, I), focusing in particular on the strategies with which the woman writer seeks to elicit movement from the potential entrapment in immobility of the female figure in the mirror‐images of male‐created myth. If iconoclasm is rejected as an option –‘und schlag ich dann treffe ich/dein gesicht und mein gesicht//zerfällt’, III – the multiple refractions created by the eight‐poem cycle nevertheless win a liberating movement from reductive mythical images of Woman (in contrast to Christa Wolf's re‐entrapment of her Kassandra figure in an alternative heroic narrative in her 1983 Erzählung), opening out into a utopian space –‘traum hinter dem irrgarten beginnt eine landschaft’, VIII – in the final poem in the cycle.