Waking the Dead: Medium as Therapist in Albert Talhoff and Mary Wigman's Totenmal

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of Albert Talhoff and Mary Wigman's poetry and dance spectacle, Totenmal (Call of the Dead 1930) with particular focus upon how the return of the dead soldier functions in the psychic healing of its postwar audience. Totenmal, whose use of mixed media classified it as a spectacle that played to the entire sensory field, functioned as a cathartic experience for its post-war audience, which was working through the mourning process. Sigmund Freud argues in his ‘Mourning and Melancholiarsquo; (‘Trauer und Melancholicrsquo; 1917) that the mourner must repetitiously return to the lost one until the mourner is able to accept the reality of the departed's death and begin the healing process. In Totenmal, the dead ominously appear both as disembodied voices offstage reading actual soldiers' letters and as shades that are conjured onto the stage, which both serve as a reminder for the living to remember the fallen. The psychic trauma of the mourning process is represented by the female chorus that is incapable of confronting these spirits from the other side. Reconciliation is only achieved by the medium character, played by Wigman, who is able both to summon the dead and to commune with them. My analysis of Totenmal will thus pay particular attention to the medium character. Mediumism was a common practice in Weimar Germany, and my discussion will explain this context by drawing on historical research regarding spiritualist practices of the day.