Wilhelm Müller’s Leiermann, Elfriede Jelinek’s Leierfrau, and Radical Repetition

Abstract

ABSTRACT Wilhelm Müller’s 1824 cycle Die Winterreise, and particularly its final poem ‘Der Leiermann’, are often read as nihilistic expressions of a Romantic death wish. The wanderer moves into a state of eternal alienation, symbolized by the icy landscape where he will forever rehearse his songs of loneliness and despair to the much-maligned music of the outcast hurdy-gurdy man, who has in turn been read as a harbinger of death. This article argues that such readings overlook the radically critical mode taken up by the wanderer when he stops his journey, dismissing a Romantic aesthetics of forwards striving in favour of a (paradoxically) new aesthetics of repetition. The subversive potential of this act is revealed in Elfriede Jelinek’s 2011 play Winterreise, in which a hurdy-gurdy woman challenges a modern culture obsessed with novelty by stubbornly refusing to move. By rereading Müller’s ‘Der Leiermann’ in dialogue with Jelinek’s experimental reworking, we can recognize how both works reject the chimerical lure of the future for the sake of deliberate attention to the present moment. Müller’s poem is not, then, the nadir of a self-destructive Romanticism, but an innovative escape from its logical end.