German Ophelia Poems 1940 - 2000

This paper examines how a myth whose origin is English, theatrical and seventeenth-century is re-written in a tradition which is German, lyric and twentieth-century. For Ophelia figures proliferate throughout twentieth-century German poetry and are not confined to the Expressionist era of Heym’s, Benn’s and Brecht’s drowned females. Poets use the gaps around Shakespeare’s Ophelia for speculation on her drowning, mental disorder and erotic beauty. Her meaning as a dead woman is contested anew at different times in the century, especially in terms of sexual violence and political murder. Decades of speechlessness end in the 1980s with Ophelia voiced as the lyric ‘ich’ in texts by female poets.