An exploratory cultural and theoretical history of mermaids

In this radio essay, Romina Achatz explores the cultural,
philosophical, and literary history of mermaids, undines, and
sirens. Beginning with ancient and medieval myths, including the
writings of Paracelsus, she traces how water-bound,
feminine-coded figures were once understood as embodiments of
nature, transformation, and the emergence of the soul. The essay
then examines how, within European traditions, these figures
gradually become tied to narratives of love, possession, and
projection. Through literary works such as Undine geht by
Ingeborg Bachmann, Achatz reflects on the loss of voice,
autonomy, and subjectivity, showing how the transition from water
to land marks a shift into silence, dependency, and
objectification. At the same time, the radio essay opens a
queer-feminist and poststructuralist perspective: returning to
the water becomes an act of resistance and self-assertion.
Underwater, identity dissolves into multiplicity, fluidity, and
affect — a space beyond fixed roles and normative concepts of
love. Drawing on thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Maurice
Blanchot, and Franz Kafka, sirens are reimagined not as seductive
figures, but as forces, events, and interruptions that
destabilize language and meaning. The essay also connects these
ideas to global mythologies, including Mami Wata and Oshun, where
water beings appear as powerful, sovereign entities rather than
passive objects. In dialogue with voices such as Anaïs Nin and
Audre Lorde and bell hooks the essay situates these figures
within broader questions of creativity, voice, and resistance.
Finally, Achatz reflects on the ecological and political urgency
of these myths today. In the context of climate crisis,
displacement, and ongoing violence, the figure of the mermaid
becomes an allegory for the fragile relationship between humans
and nature — and a call to return to depth, to imagination, and
to forms of life that resist domination. The radio essay unfolds
as a poetic and analytical journey into the oceanic — an
invitation to listen differently, to embrace uncertainty, and to
rediscover the creative forces that lie beneath the surface.