Bringing the Uncanny Home
How fictional stories haunt the real world
The German for "the uncanny", "das Unheimliche", literally translates as "un-homely". A persistent theme in German literature since the era of Romanticism, the Uncanny does not refer to something explicitly scary or disturbing. Rather, it is something that used to be close and familiar, but has stopped being so.
How does a place become “unhomely”? Fiction has the power to transform the world around us. A place as it appears in a work of fiction is no longer the actual street, village, or city where people live. It is a product of the author’s imagination. There are stories in which ghosts pick out snacks in an organic grocery store. There are stories about how the city itself defines the body, and the body – the city, and how they become one. Sometimes, doorknobs come to life and mock a young man running through the city. There are stories about feeling a sinister presence walking home because you don’t look like your neighbors. And what about vivid memories of places you have never been to? Is a home that has been razed to the ground as a result of an airstrike still a home? In fiction, a real place can become unhomely in a myriad different ways. My fascination with this phenomenon is the reason why I pursued this project. I wanted to make made-up stories feel more real and more tangible by depicting real places that appear in fiction in my illustrations.
I believe that thorough, personal engagement with subject matter is vital for making art that is alive and meaningful and not just pretty to look at. It is especially important to pour real experiences, thoughts, and feelings into art in the present days, when pictures have been drastically de-valued because of their overabundance and instant availability, when an algorithm can convincingly imitate a painting. Art is an exchange between humans, and it doesn’t matter how powerful your artistic tools are if there is nothing worth saying.
I invite you to join me on this journey through literary Germany and nearby countries. Next time you visit a new place, be it a street next to your house that you've never walked on, or a city in another country, I encourage you to inquire not just about what really happened there, but what other people have imagined happening there, and maybe even come up with a story of your own.
Anya S.
This project was made possible by the Fulbright grant in 2023-2024 and executed in Jena, Germany, at Friedrich Schiller University.
P.S. For the quotes from books that have not been translated into English, I tried my best to capture the meaning, with no attempt to reproduce the literary style.
Fair-haired Eckbert
Ludwig Tieck
Castle Wernigerode, Harz highlands
"Alone in wood so gay,
Once more I stay;
None dare me slay,
The evil far away:
Ah, here I stay,
Alone in wood so gay."
- Ludwig Tieck, "Fair-haired Eckbert" (1797).
Translated by Thomas Carlyle.
The Polite Ghost
Sophie Albrecht
Oleška, near Prague
"But even in this nearly destroyed chapel she happened to cast glances which were not entirely dedicated to prayer. She made observations that let her fancy get ahead of her spirit. The thoughts of the past would grow livelier here, as well as the feeling of peace in which the rotting remains were sleeping. She would realize that even those who once shed tears over the dead in the chapel had stopped weeping long ago. Through these thoughts gleamed the inevitable day on which even she would retire from mourning."
- Sophie Albrecht, "The Polite Ghost" (1797).
Description
of a Struggle
Franz Kafka
Prague, Charles Bridge
"So I happily spread out my arms in order fully to enjoy the moon. And by making swimming movements with my weary arms it was easy for me to advance without pain or difficulty. To think that I had never tried this before! My head lay in the cool air and it was my right knee that flew best; I praised it by patting it."
- Franz Kafka, "Description of a Struggle" (1912). Translated by Tania and James Stern.
Bad Wolf
Nele Neuhaus
Königstein am Taunus
"The door opened, and she uttered a frightened cry when she saw the wolf. But then she had to laugh. It wasn't a real wolf after all; it was only Papa, who had put on a costume. How lovely it was that she was the only one to share this secret with Papa. Too bad she could never remember anything afterward."
- Nele Neuhaus, Bad Wolf (2014).
Translated by Steven T. Murray.
Three Streets
Yoko Tawada
Kollwitzstrasse, Berlin
"I'd heard that ghosts are not reflected in mirrors, but what about someone shopping with a ghost?"
- Yoko Tawada, "Three Streets" (2022). Translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
The Golden Flower Pot
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Dresden
"He stood there, and was looking at the large fine bronze knocker; but now when, as the last stroke tingled through the air with a loud clang from the steeple clock of the Kreuzkirche, or Church of the Cross, he lifted his hand to grasp this same knocker, the metal visage twisted itself with a horrid rolling of its blue-gleaming eyes, into a grinning smile. Alas, it was the Applewoman of the Schwarzthor!"
- E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Flower Pot (1819).
Ada's Room
Sharon Dodua Otoo
Berlin
"Images are what constitutes the difference between those who have never been born and those who have passed away. Even if the deceased are no longer to be seen in photos or drawings, and are no longer to be encountered through stories, it comforts them to know that the lives of their loved ones go on. The dead have images. Those who have not yet lived are still waiting for them."
- Sharon Dodua Otoo,
Adas Raum (2021).
Men for Sale
Friedrich Radszuweit
Berlin
"No one understands you - no one, because your love is so puzzling. [...] We manage to comprehend that which afflicts and torments us, and pay no attention to the state of mind of the "Other," who has to carry burden alone"
-Friedrich Radszuweit, Men for Sale (1931).
"When discussing urban "topographic symbolism," Roland Barthes writes that buildings located in a city's center "embody" a community's core values: "Spirituality (churches), power (offices), money (banks), goods (department stores), language (agoras, cafes, promenades) [...]. To go to the center of town means to encounter social 'truth'; to take part in the incredible richness of 'reality' " (47)."
- Prickett, David James (2005): Defining Identity via Homosexual Spaces: Locating the Male Homosexual
in Weimar Berlin
The Hypnotist, or Nowhere as Happy as in my Own Head
Jakob Hein
Lower Oder Valley
"She simply could not do otherwise. In her head, she had already gone on this trip so many times, refined the details, perfected the route, that Paris was simply pouring out of her. The circumstance that the trip had never happened and was not likely to happen in the next 40 or so years did not make it any easier."
- Jakob Hein, Der Hypnotiseur (2022).
The Sorcerer's Apprentice: The Krabat song cycle
ASP
Schwarzkollm
"Crouched lies the mill in the valley,
Lurking around, looking for her prey.
A crack in space and time,
Many a poor thing has she swallowed."
- ASP, "The Devil's Mill" (2008).
Lake-ghosts
Ilse Aichinger
Podersdorf am See
"Over the summer, one either does not pay much attention to them or considers them to be of his own kind. And those who leave the lake when the summer is gone by would never recognize them. They first begin to show themselves clearer around autumn. Only he who arrives a little later or lingers a little longer could tell them apart. He who no longer knows himself, whether he is still one of the guests, or already one of the ghosts." - Ilse Aichinger, "Seegeister" (1953).
Return to Frankfurt
Marie Luise Kaschnitz
Frankfurt am Main
"Tell, how it began.
How she looked upon you
With her extinguished eyes
The city?
And what said the mouth,
This ragged mouth,
Awakening, what said the mouth?"
- Marie Luise Kaschnitz, "Return to Frankfurt" (1947).
Djinns
Fatma Aydemir
Karlsruhe
"Maybe being afraid of djinns means not understanding completely what a djinn is. Is that not so with death? The vague, the uncertain, the dark, that which scares people because it is not palpable, because they must flesh it out with their own imagination, and nothing is more merciless than one’s own imagination. […] Is it perhaps simply easier to worry about djinns rather than Nazis? Since both are creatures, which exist among us and remain invisible until a catastrophe happens and their existence becomes undeniable, as when Sevda’s house was burning."
- Fatma Aydemir, Dschinns (2022).
The Flower Bomb
Mahesh Motiramani
Munich
"Streets and houses were overflowing with flowers in the matter of hours. The citizens were sinking knee-deep in the sea of lilies, daffodils, gladioluses, carnations, dahlias, daisies, and thornless roses of all colors. In the narrower streets the flower splendor was even reaching up to people’s necks."
"On a Thursday in August, around 6 p. m., an explosion resounded in the Southern part of Munich, and the ugliest high-rise of the city took off like a rocket and left the Earth with a fire trail."
"Angered by the disturbance, Frieder got up and went to the door. He had barely opened it when his eyes nearly popped out of his head. A hotel was standing there! Hotel Astoria with its dazzling white façade."
- Mahesh Motiramani, The Flower Bomb (2004).
The Heath-Man
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff
Havixbeck (Münsterland)
"You children, don’t lie among the grasses!
See how the white smoke fills the flower-bells
Where the bee just sat. Shyly looks the rabbit from the bush,
The Heath-man rises!"
- Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, "The Heath-Man" (1841/1842).
The Bremen Space Musicians Land on Planet Bremen as Extraterrestrials
Nora Becker Alvarez
Bremen
"The dead are born again, while butterflies undergo their metamorphosis... World-famous fairy tales endure in memory at the same time as new ones are being written..."
"No-one knows where the four Bremen Town Musicians were for so long after their happy life in the robbers' house, or what they were doing, until one day they crossed the invisible frontiers of the hidden realm and returned by wondrous paths to their once-familiar haunts..."
- Nora Becker Alvarez, The Bremen Space Musicians Land on Planet Bremen as Extraterrestrials (2003).
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Königstein
Karlsruhe
Frankfurt
Munich
Havixbeck
Bremen
Wernigerode
Oleška
Jena
Berlin
Schwedt
Dresden
Schwarzkollm
Prague
Podersdorf am See
The fact that this is an independent project rather than a “regular” book illustration job offered me a considerable degree of creative freedom. Some images in this collection are exact representations of scenes from the stories they illustrate, and others use the story as the starting point, but add, reimagine, or extrapolate, or attempt to achieve the same aesthetic effect as the text without referencing it directly. My main goal was to portray real places in interesting and creative ways.
The project is an exercise in translation between the two artistic media: text and image. The job of an illustrator is, first and foremost, to create exciting and engaging pictures. To achieve that, it is necessary to approach the text critically, and to carefully choose what elements to portray, without taking things literally.
In the illustration to “Krabat”, a song cycle inspired by a folk tale about a boy who becomes an apprentice to a dark sorcerer living at a secluded mill, I did not want to show the protagonist, the evil wizard, or boys turning into ravens, all iconic images that have already been depicted by many brilliant artists. Rather, I wondered what it would be like if the mill itself was a living entity that subtly combines the traits of every character in the story.
Simply showing a grinning doorknob in the illustration to Hoffmann’s “The Golden Flower-pot” would not have produced a very impactful image. The author is not concerning himself with a doorknob as such, but rather with the emotional state of the absent-minded student who is driven crazy by seeing ordinary things in his environment change and transform into something malicious. I wanted to maximize that effect and show various elements of the city that can be seen today come to life and overwhelm the protagonist. Although there isn’t a specific place in text that the image references, it remains a faithful visualization.
There are nevertheless cases in which taking things literally can result in an exciting visual. Poetry in particular often offers an illustrator lots of vivid imagery. In the cycle of poems “Return to Frankfurt”, sun reflections on water are compared to spots on a dress. I took that comparison a step further: if the river has a dress, then a river can be personified as a human figure. The human figure acts as an embodiment of the city, and a parallel is drawn between destruction of buildings and bodily wounds.
Short stories of Mahesh Mortiramani are full of whimsical visuals. The author is especially fond of “playing” with buildings in his writing: they walk around and talk to people, take off like rockets, sail like ships. Rather than visualizing a transformation happening in a specific text, I chose to play with a famous Munich landmark in a similar way, bringing both the New Town Hall and the animal sculptures nearby to life to achieve a similar aesthetic effect.
I brought secondary literature into this project as an additional source of artistic inspiration. The article by Sara Luly titled “Polite Hauntings: Same-Sex Eroticism in Sophie Albrecht’s Das höfliche Gespenst” argues that this novel “employs Gothic motifs to explore queer identity and female same-sex eroticism”. Illustration, as a medium principally different from text, offered me an opportunity to reference this interpretation while achieving the primary goal of providing the reader with a visual representation of the novel. The article “Defining Identity via Homosexual Spaces: Locating the Male Homosexual in Weimar Berlin” by David James Prickett gave me the idea of literally showing how the city becomes a person’s body rather than depicting a scene from the novel Men for Sale.
The most important aspect of this project is, of course, the fact that I resolved to personally visit the location where the literary works take place. That undertaking presented many challenges and opportunities. Most stories clearly state their location. With some, however, it was necessary to do extra research. “Fair-haired Eckbert” takes place “in a region in Harz mountains”. I researched many castles in Harz, looking for the one that would be best to situate this story at. It couldn’t be a castle that’s contemporary to Tieck, because “Eckbert” is a fairy tale-like story supposed to take place long time ago. It also couldn’t be an ancient ruin because the castle in the story serves as a home to the protagonist. Through this selection I ended up choosing the castle Wernigerode for my illustration.
Although I always made sure to thoroughly research the location before visiting and aimed to have some rough ideas of what the illustration might end up looking like, the most exciting part was not knowing what exactly I will find. In Frankfurt, I came across the city’s history museum, which featured photographs and models showing the aftermath of the Second World War, which became the subject of my illustration. My visit to Kollwitzstraße in Berlin coincided with a weekend market. In “Three Streets”, Yoko Tawada paints an idyllic picture of a wealthy neighborhood with many young families, and the market allowed me to experience that to an even greater extent than the story’s protagonist.
By visiting Schwarzkollm and walking through “The Devil’s Mill”, I was able to see many everyday objects, such as tools, clothes, and interior décor, that I later incorporated into the illustration. The nightmare faces in the illustration to “The Fair-haired Eckbert” directly reference interior decorations from the castle Wernigerode. Similar references to a location, such as a specific architectural detail or a particular type of plant that grows there, may seem minor, but are very important in evoking the sense of the place being real and not just a convincing approximation using images from Google. Sometimes, my illustration skills even served a trivial purpose: in places where taking photos was not allowed, I could simply sketch what I needed and use it later.
The illustration to Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle” includes a visual allusion to Signal, an annual event in Prague during which various electronic visuals are projected onto historic buildings. Through such elements, my project firmly situates itself here and now. It includes literary works from different time periods, but brings them into conversation with the world of the present. It was interesting to see what is still there, and what no longer exists or has changed. Many locations around Dresden that are mentioned by Hoffmann were destroyed in World War II. The heathlands that are a prominent theme in the poetry of Anette von Droste-Hülshoff have been destroyed by agriculture. The places in my illustrations will doubtlessly no longer look familiar in a century or two.
By personally visiting each location, I made sure I had the most comprehensive and complete information about them. Simply Googling “Munich”, “Berlin”, “Frankfurt” will at best provide a handful of pictures of major landmarks, which are usually not sufficient for creating an interesting and thoughtful illustration. It is impossible to feel the character of a place and to find what about it represents the story best without personal experience.
The short story by E. T. A. Hoffmann titled “The Sandman” (1816) is considered to be the first classical example of the Uncanny in literature. I tasked myself with finding instances of the same phenomenon in works of literature beyond the Romantic era. I thought of the Uncanny in a broad sense and did not limit my selection to the stories where something explicitly supernatural takes place. The main requirement was that the Uncanny as it appears in a piece of literature is place-dependent. As it would have been impossible to analyze every single relevant written piece of the last 200 years within the project timeframe, I do not claim that the selection is comprised of the absolute best specimen of the literary phenomenon. I do believe that the selection presented here engages with the subject matter in an interesting and unique manner and touches on a wide variety of themes.