The Men Who Knew Too Much: Reading Goethe's "Erlkönig" in Light of Hitchcock

Abstract:There are a number of resonances between Goethe's ballad "Erlkönig" and Hitchcock's 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Most strikingly, the father figures in these works can both be understood as having "too much" knowledge. Drawing on the work of René Girard, this article accounts for such resonances by showing that both the film and the poem trace a set of relations between knowledge, ritual, and violence. While, in both works, the knowledge of these fathers prevents a ritual from taking shape, without the outlet of ritual, violent tensions only build. In the poem, this leads to the death of a child, whereas the film obviates a similar catastrophe by subtly allowing ritual to resurface.