Doppelgänger

z#1958

It is not just a matter of the constituent discovering his being constituted. On this level, Romanticism had already posed the problem and had tried to solve it with the help of concepts of doubling – for instance with the magic world of Doubles, mirrors and masks. And still Gotthard Günther had asked in exactly this sense for the you-subjectivity and thus aroused the interest of the sociologist Schelsky. {Luhmann 1991 #24491D: 62}

"The emerging doubt about the possibility of individuality becomes clearly palpable in the motif of the doppelganger in Romanticism. The motif itself does not come out of the blue; it feeds on many sources. Already in very ancient beliefs the soul is imagined as a kind of 'double' of the ego, as an 'alter ego' avant la lettre." {Fuchs 05.10.2009 #7D: 133} / //TODO Check page number!

In Romanticism, the doppelganger is usually associated with the loss of one's own identity and therefore describes a central fear of bourgeois society. Well-known early examples include the novel Siebenkäs (1796) by Jean Paul, the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil's Elixirs) by E. T. A. Hoffmann from 1815/16, and the art song Der Doppelgänger (The Double) by Franz Schubert from 1828. In the 19th century, the fear of de-individualization based on the doppelgänger motif is also dealt with. The poem Das Spiegelbild (The Mirror Image) by Annette von Droste-Hülshoff was written in the winter of 1841/42, the famous crime story and milieu study Die Judenbuche (The Jewish Book) was published in 1842, and her poem Doppeltgänger (Doppelgänger) in 1844.[5] The short story Ein Doppelgänger (A Double) by Theodor Storm was published in 1886. The novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson from 1886 and The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde from 1890/91 are among the most famous elaborations. At the beginning of the 20th century, Franz Kafka is an important representative of this theme. From the end of the 20th century, the novel The White Fortress by Orhan Pamuk from 1985, the narrative collage Traveler on One Leg (1989) by Herta Müller, where the traumatized protagonist Irene recognizes only another Irene in a photograph of herself, and Müller's poetological essays entitled The Devil Sits in the Mirror. Wie Wahrnehmung sich erfindet (How Perception Invents Itself) from 1991. The figure is also thematically central in José Saramago's novel Der Doppelgänger (The Double) from 2002.

Recently, this motif has again been increasingly used in film: artificially generated persons (Androids), persons who can change their appearance (shape-shifters), and those who live in a computer world. In the past, especially common in German expressionism and film noir. {Wikipedia Oct 07, 2014 #23660D}