German 354

In our week 6 discussion, we transitioned from Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s story of “Undine", which was written in 1811, to the story of “The Little Mermaid”, written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1836. The two stories relate to each other through their similar plot lines and views of water people. They have complementary desires to fall in love with a human and marry them to access an immortal soul. Tragically, the water people do not obtain their happy ending with the mortal that they love. However, in Anderson’s story, there is no possibility of a happy ending for the mermaid that loves a human, and she must kill the mortal in order to save herself. The way that the mermaid takes on this terrible situation is one of the main differences between the two authors’ stories. Undine moves from the water sphere to the domestic sphere to marry the human that she loves to obtain an immortal soul then goes back into water after discovering she will not be with him. The only way to save herself is to kill the man she loves. This also applies to Andersen’s story but the outcome is different. Fouqué’s story ends with the undine following through with the murder because of her greater connection with nature. But Andersen’s mermaid does not go through with the task and turns to sea foam, with the children of air and a perpetual desire to connect with humans. We focused on the concept of nature in these stories and how they contradict each other in their definitions of it. Fouqué’s idea of nature is seen as dangerous because the spheres stay disconnected, yet Andersen sees it as non-threatening because of the way of re-domesticating the soul. In the following week of our class, the concept of enlightenment is grasped by Immanuel Kant in his article published in 1784, “What is Enlightenment?”, which relates to the little mermaid desiring to be married to a human in order to have an immortal soul, or to become enlightened.