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Mein Vater, mein Vater

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.
— Bruno Bettelheim

I first heard “Der Erlkönig” at age five, at a vespers concert at a lakeside Chautauqua community where my family spent part of each summer. I heard it perched on my father’s lap, clinging to him not in fear but tiredness. It was mid-concert and though I loved music (my father was a choral director; my mother a violinist) I had grown sleepy and restless. To soothe me and keep me still he told me that the next performance was a scary story set to music. My interest piqued, he then narrated the song – quietly, so as not to disturb other concertgoers – as Schubert’s drama unfolded onstage. I distinctly remember the rhythmic piano triplets, the solemn German words, my father’s enfolding arms, and the eerie tale he whispered Erl-King-like in my ear.

Today these details burst with personal significance – that this was my first brush with Lieder no doubt impacted my later love of the form; that its subject was darkly fantastic resonates with a lifelong fascination with the weird and macabre. But each such insight is ultimately dwarfed by one unlikely yet irrefutable fact: I first heard this tale of a sensitive boy frightened to death in his father’s arms by a whispering figure while in the arms of my own whispering father.

The jumble of signifiers – father, son, arms, whisper, frighten, death – all of them book-ended by music and poetry, is for me as unsettling as the song.

“Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me!
For many a game I will play there with thee;
On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,
My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold.”

(Bowring)

Perhaps there’s solace to be found in the fact that the Erl-King, whatever he is, has a mother. Regardless, with his sepulchral voice now in the boy’s ear, the terrified child turns once more to his sole protector and ally. But his father focuses relentlessly on the task at hand: driving his horse to safety through the desolate wood. His son, he assures him, hears only “the sad wind that sighs through the withering leaves.” The boy’s recurrent cries of Mein Vater, mein Vater grow panicked and pitiful.

“Wilt go, then, dear infant, wilt go with me there?
My daughters shall tend thee with sisterly care.”

(Bowring)

“In the night my daughters their revelry keep,
They’ll rock you and dance you and sing you to sleep.”

(Zeydel)

That the Erl-King has daughters, presumably produced through conventional means, might further demystify him. Inexplicable phenomena, after all, frighten precisely because they’re unexplained. Fight-or-flight terror might recede to cooler-headed caution if the vague shapes of supernatural night gain focus in preternatural day. But Enlightenment rationalism is of little use in a Romantic nightmare. Once the Alder Tree King offers sensual pleasures in exchange for the boy’s – what exactly? Fealty, body, life, soul? – his characterization takes on newly menacing overtones, both sexual and satanic.

Now less a baleful spirit than an alluring Mephistopheles, he tempts the boy with beautiful things, maternal nurturing, and his daughters’ “sisterly care.” The latter enticement seems distinctly libidinous (“They’ll rock you” sounds lewd even for 1821). It’s the kind of randy coaxing to which a diabolical figure might subject a pre-adolescent boy – with no concern for exploiting his confused desires or damaging his young psyche. The father is unfazed; his son’s erotic glimpse of the Erl-King’s daughters is merely “the aged willows deceiving [his] sight.” But darker lusts emerge and the wraith’s language, at least, turns towards rape.

“I love you, your comeliness charms me, my boy!
And if you’re not willing, my force I’ll employ.”

(Zeydel)

What did I make of this as a child? I grasped neither nuance nor the full narrative from my father’s whispered commentary. I have no memory of any feminine presence in the story – just the father, the son, and the evil spirit in relentless pursuit. What profoundly impressed me (and likely burned the episode forever in my memory – partly as a physical sensation of nausea and panic I can still feel today) was that despite the father’s efforts to save him, the boy dies and is presumably “taken” by the Erl-King.

In child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s classic book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), he argues that parents risk harming their children if they reduce the threat found in fairy tales to make them less frightening. Such stories, Bettelheim believed, are valuable to healthy child development precisely because they are frightening – because through them a child learns that seemingly overwhelming adversaries like giants and witches and goblins (and all they symbolize in life) can in fact be defeated. Thus Jack outmaneuvers the giant, Hansel and Gretel outsmart the witch, and the miller’s daughter wins her freedom by tricking Rumpelstiltskin. To de-fang such villains, in Bettelheim’s view, was to remove the threat necessary to rally a child’s courage and will to survive.

“My father, my father, he seizes me fast,
For sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last.”

(Bowring)

To this thesis Bettelheim tagged a single proviso: that in order to learn such lessons a child must feel safe, and that what makes a child feel safe is knowing that all fairy tales start with “Once upon a time” and end with “They lived happily ever after.” My first encounter with “Der Erlkönig” broke this rule. While the presence of fairies, however malevolent, implied a Fairyland setting, the “scary story set to music” my father promised lacked the required denouement. In its place was an ending almost modern in its starkness: evil went unvanquished, the father’s efforts failed, the child hero perished.

Compounding my confusion was the blurring of identities between real and fictional characters: myself and the boy, both in our father’s arms; my father and the boy’s father, each entrusted with his son’s welfare; and the two whisperers in darkness – one, a father telling his son a ghost story; the other, a malevolent entity trying to snuff out a boy’s life and steal his soul forever.

None of this was the fault of “Der Erlkönig.” It’s a song, not a fairy tale, and while it draws from a common storehouse of themes and motifs, neither Goethe’s poem nor Schubert’s Lied were intended for the post-kindergarten, under-seven set.

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