Gradiva. Der übersetzte Name und sein Abbild

Abstract

Gradiva – the translated name and its visual representation. – The name Gradiva appears first in a short novel which the German author Wilhelm Jensen published in 1903. It became famous because Sigmund Freud analyzed Jensen’s novella in his study Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (1907). In this story the young archaeologist Norbert Hanold is obsessed by a classical relief representing a young woman walking in a special, elegant way. Therefore he calls her Gradiva (she who advances). The young woman appears to him in dreams when Vesuvius is about to erupt in Pompeii, and he feels he has to visit this ancient Italian site. Here the same phantasmagorical figure appears to him. At first he believes her to be the incarnation of the ancient Gradiva, but later he realizes that she is not the reincarnation of a Pompeiian maiden, but his living childhood girlfriend. – The aim of this paper is to show that it is not a physical likeness between the archeologist’s girlfriend and the ancient relief which lies at the root of Hanold’s delusion, as Freud asserts, or a fetichist obsession, as his followers claim, but the surname of his girlfriend: Gradiva is a translation of her repressed surname Bertgang, and the ancient relief is the visual representation of this name. – The final paragraph of this paper shows the significance which Gradiva attained for the Surrealist movement, whose members declared her to be their “muse”.