doppelganger

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A doppelganger (older also doppelganger ) is a person who looks like a certain other person in appearance so strong that it confusion of their identity can come. It can be a real person or an “appearance of one's own person” in the sense of a supernatural vision .

A doppelganger experience as hallucination may be a symptom of a mental illness, see autoscopy .

use

The German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm gives two definitions of the term:

  1. "Someone who you think could show himself at two different places at the same time";
  2. "Who is so similar to another that he is easily mistaken for him".

If the first definition is tied to a belief in some kind of transcendence , the supernatural or paranormal , the second variant forms, as it were, its naturalistic explanation.

The German word "Doppelganger" is also used in many other languages ​​(mostly in the forms doppelganger or doppelganger ), e.g. B. in English , French , Italian , Portuguese and Spanish , but also in Chinese , Japanese , Russian and Thai , attributed to the worldwide impact of German Romanticism . In English, the use of the German term is often associated with danger and threat and is often equated with evil twin , also in colloquial language (but often meant ironically ).

Distinction

In nature, doppelgangers occur in the form of identical twins and, more recently, as clones . However, they only have something to do with the literary and humanities motif of the doppelganger, since the questions about the identity of the individual do not arise here.

The concept of the doppelganger must be distinguished from the double . While the double represents the attempt to deliberately copy the external appearance of a person (also with the help of masks, etc.), a double is a person who by nature looks confusingly similar to another, so that it actually leads to doubts about his identity can come (which is not possible with a double).

  • Politicians and actors occasionally use doubles for security and time reasons, as was the case with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein . There is constant speculation about doubles of other politicians.
  • Doubles act as eye- catchers at events and "prominent guests" or in advertising films.
  • Stuntmen play physically dangerous scenes as doubles of an actor.
  • Body doubles jump z. B. also with nude scenes.

The motif of the doppelganger in literature, music and film

Richard Mansfield in the dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The interests of the arts in the doppelganger motif has philosophical and psychological backgrounds, such as the question of the reality and ontology of the individual and his identity . Art- theoretical questions also play a role here, such as the nature of artistic fiction , which seems particularly suited to “creating” doppelgangers.

Literature and classical music

The doppelganger motif was a common motif in the visual arts and literature, especially in the Romantic era and in the silent film era . In romanticism, the doppelganger is mostly associated with the loss of one's own identity and describes a central fear of bourgeois society. Well-known early examples can be found in the novels Siebenkäs (1796) by Jean Paul and Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815/16) by ETA Hoffmann as well as Franz Schubert's art song Der Doppelgänger from the song cycle Schwanengesang (1828), which is based on an untitled poem from Heinrich Heine Book of songs declined. In Jean Pauls Siebenkäs the term is defined in a supernaturalist way (“the doppelgangers, that's the name of the people who see themselves”) and associated with the uncanny . Hoffmann, on the other hand, already has the realistic and naturalistic analogues of the doppelganger motif ("and both, not just alike, no, one of the other doubles in face, grew, gestures, remained rooted in horror in the ground").

Edgar Allan Poe's story William Wilson (1839) addresses the individual's fear of self-loss on the basis of the doppelganger motif. In Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's oeuvre, the motif runs through a series of individual works: In the winter of 1841/42, the poem Das Spiegelbild was written ; In 1842 the famous crime story and milieu study Die Judenbuche appeared , and in 1844 the poem Doppelganger . The story by Edgar Allan Poe is similar to the novel Der Doppelganger by Fyodor Dostoyevsky , published in 1846 . In 1886 the novellas Ein Doppelganger by Theodor Storm and Der seltsame Fall des Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson . One of the most famous forms of the motif is The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890/91) by Oscar Wilde .

At the beginning of the 20th century, Franz Kafka took up the motif in several works. From the end of the 20th century u. a. the novel The White Fortress by Orhan Pamuk (1985) and the novel The Doppelganger by José Saramago (2002). In Herta Müller's narrative collage Travelers on One Leg (1989) , the traumatized protagonist Irene only recognizes another Irene in a photo of herself; in her poetological essays entitled The Devil Sits in the Mirror. How perception invents itself (1991), Müller deepened this topic. The star diaries (1957 to 1971) by the Polish author Stanisław Lem dealt with encounters of this kind among other things.

Movie

The motif of the doppelganger was also widely used in films , including German Expressionist films and film noir . In Alfred Hitchcock's film The Invisible Third (USA, 1959), the protagonist Roger Thornhill becomes the victim of a secret operation by the CIA and, against his will, gradually slips into the role of a non-existent secret agent who becomes his doppelganger. There was a similar confusion between the script for The Man Who Knew Too Much (GB, 1934; remake from 1956 , USA) and the 39 steps (GB, 1935) based on the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan and Eine Lady disappears (GB, 1938).

More recently, the science fiction genre has offered the possibility of artificially created people ( androids ), people who can change their appearance ( shapeshifters ), and those who live in a computer world ( virtual reality ), as in films such as Westworld (USA, 1973) or the children's film The Electronic Double (USSR, 1979).

Another occurrence

mythology

In many cultures and religions, doppelganger-like beings play an important role as shadows . In the form of a protective deity, it is considered an image of humans in the form of plants or animals. Man and God are strongly connected here. So in the West African religion of the Akan and in the Central American Aztec culture ( Nagual ).

psychology

In psychoanalysis and psychology , the concept of the doppelganger usually has negative connotations. Sigmund Freud speaks of the doppelganger as the “repressed part of the ego”. CG Jung speaks of the "dark doppelganger" or "shadow" . Jung took the latter term from mythology.

Anyone who has the rare Capgras syndrome believes that someone from the close family circle has been replaced by a doppelganger. In dissociative identity disorder , a person has multiple identities, but they do not experience themselves as doppelgangers and do not present themselves as such to others.

Esoteric

An intensive preoccupation with doppelganger motifs took place in esotericism , in spiritualism and in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy , which had an impact on the ideas of neo-romanticism and early science fiction .

In radiesthesia (also known as “geopathology”) the doppelganger (also bioplasmic body, fluidal body or etheric body) is considered to be an energetic manifestation of the human being that perceives illnesses before they become measurable.

Secret services

The Ministry for State Security of the GDR ("Stasi") created ten thousand doubles for espionage purposes. The passports of West Germans traveling in or (in transit) through the GDR were copied, had them forged in forgery workshops and photos and signatures of spies (of similar age and similar size) were incorporated into the forged documents. The ARD television magazine Kontraste made this practice public in early 2012. Even the identity of a member of the Bundestag was stolen in this way.

See also

literature

  • Gerald Bär: The motif of the doppelganger as a split fantasy in literature and in German silent films. Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, NY 2005, ISBN 978-90-420-1874-7 .
  • Ingrid Fichtner (Ed.): Doppelganger. Of endless varieties of a phenomenon (= facets of literature , volume 7). Haupt, Bern, Stuttgart and Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-258-06000-2 .
  • Christof Forder: I eclipses. Doppelganger in literature since 1800 . Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-476-45209-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b doppelganger . In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm : German Dictionary . Hirzel, Leipzig 1854–1961 ( woerterbuchnetz.de , University of Trier).
  2. ↑ Ursula Hermann et al .: The German dictionary . Lexicographical Institute, Munich 1985, p. 279.
  3. ^ Entry "Doppelganger", in: Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon . Volume 5. Sixth edition, Leipzig 1906, p. 125 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b c Gerald Bär, The motif of the doppelganger as a split fantasy in literature and in German silent films , Rodopi, Amsterdam 2005.
  5. ↑ Quoted from Doppelganger . In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm : German Dictionary . Hirzel, Leipzig 1854–1961 ( woerterbuchnetz.de , University of Trier).
  6. ^ ETA Hoffmann: Schriften 11, 59, quoted from Doppelganger . In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm : German Dictionary . Hirzel, Leipzig 1854–1961 ( woerterbuchnetz.de , University of Trier).
  7. ↑ Cf. the editor's comment on Annette von Droste-Hülshoff: Complete works in two volumes, edited by Bodo Plachta and Winfried Woesler. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-618-62000-4 , ISBN 3-618-62005-5 .
  8. ↑ Rudolf Steiner: The "electronic double" and the development of computer technology. A summary of lectures given in November 1917 , edited by Andreas Neider . Futurum Verlag, Basel 2012.
  9. ↑ Contrasts 2012

Web links

Wiktionary: Doppelganger  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations