ACTA HISTRIAE
30, 2022, 3
UDK/UDC 94(05) ISSN 1318-0185ACTA HISTRIAE 30, 2022, 3, pp. 565-756
UDK/UDC 94(05) 
Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko - Koper
Società storica del Litorale - Capodistria
ACTA HISTRIAE
30, 2022, 3
KOPER 2022
ISSN 1318-0185
e-ISSN 2591-1767
ACTA HISTRIAE • 30 • 2022 • 3
ISSN 1318-0185                UDK/UDC 94(05)             Letnik 30, leto 2022, številka 3
e-ISSN 2591-1767
Darko Darovec
Gorazd Bajc, Furio Bianco (IT), Stuart Carroll (UK), Angel Casals Martinez (ES), 
Alessandro Casellato (IT), Flavij Bonin, Dragica Čeč, Lovorka Čoralić (HR), 
Darko Darovec, Lucien Faggion (FR), Marco Fincardi (IT), Darko Friš, Aleš 
Maver, Borut Klabjan, John Martin (USA), Robert Matijašić (HR), Darja Mihelič, 
Edward Muir (USA), Žiga Oman, Jože Pirjevec, Egon Pelikan, Luciano Pezzolo (IT), 
Claudio Povolo (IT), Marijan Premović (MNE), Luca Rossetto (IT), Vida Rožac 
Darovec, Andrej Studen, Marta Verginella, Salvator Žitko
Urška Lampe, Gorazd Bajc, Lara Petra Skela, Marjan Horvat, Žiga Oman
Polona Tratnik
Petra Berlot
Urška Lampe (angl., slo.), Gorazd Bajc (it.), Lara Petra Skela (angl., slo.)
Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko - Koper / Società storica del Litorale - Capodistria© 
/ Inštitut IRRIS za raziskave, razvoj in strategije družbe, kulture in okolja / Institute IRRIS for 
Research, Development and Strategies of Society, Culture and Environment / Istituto IRRIS 
di ricerca, sviluppo e strategie della società, cultura e ambiente©
Zgodovinsko društvo za južno Primorsko, SI-6000, Koper-Capodistria, Garibaldijeva 
18 / Via Garibaldi 18, e-mail: actahistriae@gmail.com; https://zdjp.si/
Založništvo PADRE d.o.o.
300 izvodov/copie/copies
Javna agencija za raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije / Slovenian 
Research Agency, Mestna občina Koper
Ilustracija Zvonka Čoha k pravljici Ad lintverna, izrez / Illustration by Zvonko 
Čoh for the fairy tale Ad lintverna [About the Dragon], cutout / Illustrazione di 
Zvonko Čoh per la fiaba Ad lintverna [Del drago], ritaglio. Tratar, Lojze (2007): 
Tista od lintverna: slovenska ljudska pravljica. Zapisal Matičetov,
Milko, priredila Štefan, Anja. Ciciban, 8, 6–7.
Redakcija te številke je bila zaključena 30. septembra 2022.
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Picture on the cover:
Revija Acta Histriae je vključena v naslednje podatkovne baze / Gli articoli pubblicati in questa rivista sono inclusi nei seguenti indici di citazione 
/ Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in: CLARIVATE ANALYTICS (USA): Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), 
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Bibliographie der Zeitschriftenliteratur (GER); International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) (UK); Referativnyi Zhurnal Viniti 
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ACTA HISTRIAE • 30 • 2022 • 3
Volume 30, Koper 2022, issue 3
VSEBINA / INDICE GENERALE / CONTENTS
Polona Tratnik: Formation of the Fairy Tale Matrix of a Dragon Slayer .................
Formazione della matrice fiabesca dell’uccisore di draghi
Oblikovanje pravljične matrike ubijalca zmaja
Paul Crowther: The Zlatorog Tale and Slovenian National Identity .........................
Il racconto dello Zlatorog e l’identità nazionale slovena
Pripovedka o Zlatorogu in slovenska nacionalna identiteta
Marjan Horvat: Cognitive Matrices in Folktales and Contemporary 
Practices of Deliberation: From the Utilitarian Mindset of 
Mojca Pokrajculja to the Incomprehensible Laughter of the Bean .............................
Le matrici cognitive nei racconti popolari e nelle pratiche 
contemporanee di deliberazione: dalla logica della ragione 
utilitaristica di Mojca Pokrajculja al riso incomprensibile del fagiolo
Kognitivne matrice v slovenskih ljudskih pravljicah in sodobne 
prakse deliberacije: od utilitaristične misli Mojce Pokrajculje 
do nedoumljivega fižolčkovega smeha
Cirila Toplak: Tales in Social Practices of 
Nature Worshippers of Western Slovenia ....................................................................
I racconti nelle pratiche sociali dei naturalisti 
religiosi della Slovenia occidentale
»Pravce« v družbenih praksah naravovercev 
zahodne Slovenije
Mojca Ramšak: Medicine and Fairy Tales: Pohorje Fairy Tales 
as a Source about Diseases and Health ........................................................................
La medicina e le fiabe: le fiabe del Pohorje come fonte di dati sulle malattie
Medicina in pravljice: pohorske pravljice kot vir o boleznih in zdravju
Anja Mlakar: Valuable Ancient Remnants and Superstitious 
Foolishness: Religiosity, Nationalism, and Enchantment in 
Slovenian Folklore of the 19th Century ........................................................................
Resti preziosi del passato e sciocchezze superstiziose: religiosità, 
nazionalismo e incanto nel folklore sloveno dell’Ottocento
Dragoceni ostanki preteklosti in vraževerne neumnosti: religioznost, 
nacionalizem in očaranost v slovenski folklori iz 19. stoletja.
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e-ISSN 2591-1767
655
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Članki, objavljeni v tej številki Acta Histriae, so nastali v okviru raziskovalnega 
projekta Družbene funkcije pravljic. Raziskavo je finančno podprla Javna agencija za 
raziskovalno dejavnost Republike Slovenije (ARRS, J6-1807).
Dubravka Zima: Social Functions of the Fairy Tale Collection 
Croatian Tales of Long Ago by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić ...............................................
Funzioni sociali della collezione di fiabe Racconti croati 
di un tempo lontano di Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić
Družbene funkcije zbirke pravljic Pripovedke iz davnine 
avtorice Ivane Brlić-Mažuranić
Cristina Fossaluzza: A Romantic Fairy Tale and Its Social Purpose in 
Times of War: The Woman without a Shadow by Hugo von Hofmannsthal ..............
Una fiaba romantica e il suo intento sociale in tempi di guerra: 
La donna senz’ombra di Hugo von Hofmannsthal 
Romantična pravljica in njen družbeni namen v času vojne: 
Ženska brez sence Huga von Hofmannsthala
OCENE
RECENSIONI
REVIEWS
Jakob Norberg: The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German 
Nationalism (Marjan Horvat) ....................................................................................
Panos Sophoulis: Banditry in the Medieval Balkans, 800–1500, New 
Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture (Marijan Premović) .........................
Federico Tenca Montini: La Jugoslavia e la questione di Trieste, 1945–1954 
Federico Tenca Montini: Trst ne damo! Jugoslavija i tršćansko 
pitanje 1945–1954 (Urška Lampe) .............................................................................
Zoltán Kövecses: Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory 
(Lihua Zhu & Qiu Yan) .............................................................................................
747
727
750
743
The articles published in this issue of Acta Histriae were arised from the research 
project: Social functions of fairy tales. This research was supported by Slovenian 
Research Agency (ARRS, J6-1807).
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A ROMANTIC FAIRY TALE AND ITS SOCIAL PURPOSE IN TIMES 
OF WAR: THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW BY HUGO VON 
HOFMANNSTHAL
Cristina FOSSALUZZA
Caʼ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies,
Palazzo Cosulich - Zattere, Dorsoduro 1405, 30123 Venezia, Italy
e-mail: cristina.fossaluzza@unive.it
ABSTRACT
The Woman without a Shadow is both the title of an opera resulting from the 
collaboration between Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the composer Richard Strauss 
in the three years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War, and 
that of a fairy tale in which the writer, from 1912 to 1919, reworked the subject of the 
libretto. With a specific focus on the second version, this essay sets out to describe 
how, beyond the complex symbolism of the formal structure (which initially makes 
one think of an artistic product finely crafted, but completely unrelated to historical 
reality), Hofmannsthal’s fairy tale is actually intimately connected to the cultural and 
‘social’ project developed by the author during the years of the First World War. It 
was this project that gave rise to the veritable ‘mythology of the social’ that lies at 
the heart of this fairy tale, in which Hofmannsthal revisits the very cornerstones of 
Romantic aesthetics and gives them a modern twist. 
Keywords: Fairy tale, Hofmannsthal, First World War, Romanticism, Metapoetics, Ae-
sthetics, Social Project, Cultural Renaissance, Myth
UNA FIABA ROMANTICA E IL SUO INTENTO SOCIALE IN TEMPI DI 
GUERRA: LA DONNA SENZ'OMBRA DI HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
SINTESI
La donna senz’ombra è sia il titolo di un’opera lirica nata dalla collaborazione 
fra Hugo von Hofmannsthal e il compositore Richard Strauss nei tre anni imme-
diatamente precedenti allo scoppio della Prima Guerra Mondiale, sia quello di 
una fiaba in cui lo scrittore, dal 1912 al 1919, rielabora l’argomento del libretto. 
Concentrandosi sulla specificità di questa seconda versione, il contributo intende 
delineare come, al di là della complessa simbologia della struttura formale (che 
inizialmente farebbe pensare a un prodotto artistico finemente elaborato ma del 
tutto astratto dalla realtà storica), la fiaba di Hofmannsthal riveli uno strettissi-
Received: 2022-08-22                            DOI 10.19233/AH.2022.31
ACTA HISTRIAE • 30 • 2022 • 3
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Cristina FOSSALUZZA: A ROMANTIC FAIRY TALE AND ITS SOCIAL PURPOSE IN TIMES OF WAR: ..., 727–740
mo legame con il progetto culturale e ‘sociale’ sviluppato dall’autore negli anni 
della Prima Guerra Mondiale. Da tale progetto si origina a una vera e propria 
‘mitologia del sociale’ che costituisce il nucleo di questa fiaba e nella quale 
Hofmannsthal riprende e riattualizza i cardini dell’estetica del Romanticismo.
Parole chiave: fiaba, Hofmannsthal, Prima Guerra Mondiale, romanticismo, 
metapoetica, estetica, progetto sociale, rinascimento culturale, mito
THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW: A FAIRY TALE 
BETWEEN HISTORY AND MYTH
The Woman without a Shadow is actually the title of two works of art: an 
opera in three acts by the composer Richard Strauss with a libretto by Hugo von 
Hofmannsthal, which was written in the three years preceding the outbreak of 
the First World War, and premiered at the Vienna State Opera on 10 October 
1919, and a prose work by Hofmannsthal written between 1912 al 1919, in which 
the subject of the libretto was reworked as a fairytale (on the genesis of The 
Woman without a Shadow, cf. Hofmannsthal, 1975, 270–282). As Hofmannsthal 
said himself in a letter to the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz, the two 
versions of The Woman without a Shadow should be seen as two completely 
separate chapters in his artistic production. In fact, he believed that compared 
to the libretto, the prose version had “inexhaustible significance, leading into 
the deepest depth”, and that despite the greater difficulty involved in its crea-
tion, it was a much more refined work from the aesthetic point of view (cf. 
Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 127). In his opinion, then, the fundamental 
difference between the two versions regarded not so much the variations in the 
storyline, but specific differences in form and style. Indeed, while the opera 
presents a Baroque scenario based on illusion and trompe-l’oeil, the prose ver-
sion has to do without the elaborate facade of an operatic production which 
takes inspiration from seventeenth century stage scenarios: it takes on the “more 
severe” compact form of the myth (Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 127). This 
is all the more significant if we consider that the choice of using the form of 
the fairytale combined with the myth was made in 1917, at the height of the 
First World War, when the questions being posed by history were of impelling 
urgency, and at a time central to the development of Hofmannsthal’s ‘cultural 
politics’ (in fact, just a few years later, he would oversee the first edition of the 
great Salzburg Festival) (cf. Wolf, 2014). 
It is no coincidence that in the very same letter to Pannwitz mentioned above, 
Hofmannsthal makes the connection between his own fairytale and the Roman-
tic prose tradition, and in particular the fairytale Undine (1811) by the novelist 
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and playwright Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (cf. Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 
1994, 127)1. Inspired by the work of the Renaissance physician and occultist, 
Paracelsus, Fouqué’s tale tells the story of a water nymph, a creature neither 
divine nor human, able to take on human form but unable to gain a soul except 
by marrying a human being. Through her marriage to the knight Huldbrand von 
Ringstetten, Fouqué’s Undine succeeds in gaining a soul, but along with this 
comes all the suffering connected to a mortal existence: the tribulations of a 
hostile world and the pain caused by her husband’s infidelity, which eventually 
leads her to drown him in her own tears and return to the water, her primary 
element. Although it does not have the same tragic ending as Fouqué’s tale2, 
Hofmannsthal’s story has much in common with Fouqué’s: in fact, his woman 
without a shadow, the daughter of Keikobad, king of the spirit realm, is also a 
hybrid creature, both elemental and supernatural, a fairy who can change shape 
and take on animal form. She, too, falls in love with a mortal, the emperor of the 
south-eastern isles, and becomes his wife, whereupon she leaves the enchanted 
kingdom of her birth; like Undine, she too is attracted by the world of mortals. 
However, while the symbol at the heart of the romantic novella is the soul, it 
is the shadow which is central to the twentieth century fairytale. This motif is 
not unknown to German Romanticism (think of Chamisso’s Peter Schlehmil, 
for example), but in Hofmannsthal it symbolizes a new theme, rich in meaning, 
namely motherhood. In fact, Hofmannsthal’s empress must give birth within 
twelve months of her marriage to the emperor in order to avoid her husband be-
ing turned to stone and in order for herself to become truly human. This change 
from Fouque’s material, as we shall see in more detail in the second part of this 
article, is anything but marginal in Hofmannsthal’s reworking, also because 
it has significant implications from the poetological point of view. Indeed, in 
the wake of the Romantic tradition, Hofmannsthal’s tale can also be seen as a 
metareflection on the structure and function of poetry. This helps to explain 
the complexity of its form, which the writer himself pointed out in a letter to 
Rudolf Borchardt dated 7 July 1917. In it, he described the fairytale as the most 
difficult work he had ever written (cf. Hofmannsthal, 1975, 418). But apart from 
the enormous complexity of its symbolic structure, the difficulty involved in 
1 Hofmannsthal was familiar with Fouqué’s fairytale and greatly admired it: in 1912, he included 
it in the anthology of German storytellers (Deutsche Erzähler) which he had edited for the 
publishers Insel Verlag. On the other sources he made use of, cf. Hofmannsthal, 1975, 273-282. 
Among those most often mentioned are Mozart’s Magic Flute and Goethe’s Faust. Pannwitz 
was just as interested as Hofmannsthal in Fouqué’s story: he had already begun to write an epic 
poem based on the Undine theme years earlier. Indeed, before a meeting with Pannwitz which 
took place in the October of 1917, Hofmannsthal asked him to bring a transcription of his Un-
dine, from which he could then take notes for The Woman without a Shadow, cf. Hofmannsthal, 
Pannwitz, 1994, 127 and Hofmannsthal, 1975, 437 sq. On Pannwitz’s Undine, cf. also the criti-
cal edition (Pannwitz, 1999).
2 It is worth pointing out, for instance, that in Fouqué’s Undine the marriage ends in tragedy, whereas 
in Hofmannsthal’s fairytale, as we shall see, marriage is given a positive connotation.
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writing The Woman without a Shadow also arose from the connection with its 
social function, in that moment of crisis that was the First World War. Though at 
first glance its elaborate, encrypted ‘wrappings’ might make one think that the 
author was trying to escape the present by means of literature, it is undeniable 
that The Woman without a Shadow is actually closely connected to the time 
it was written in. It is an expression of the “social” project which had been 
maturing in Hofmannsthal’s mind throughout the war years. In that sense, and 
paradoxically, the fairytale is a committed piece of writing precisely because 
it was conceived of as a conscious stand against the culture and society of the 
time. In a letter dated 23 August 1919, to the Austrian journalist and intel-
lectual, Berta Zuckerkandl, written immediately after a stay in Ferleiten (an 
Alpine village close to the peak of the Großglockner in Austria, during which 
time he wrote the last three chapters of the fairytale), Hofmannsthal stressed the 
element of social criticism implicit in The Woman without a Shadow:
In Ferleiten I spent fifteen hours a day on my own, it’s twenty-five days since 
I even saw a newspaper. You’ll understand that I rediscovered myself, that 
the “fairytale” is finished, that true reality has emerged triumphant over 
futility, over so-called reality (Hofmannsthal, 1975, 424).
The contrast between “true reality” and “futility” described here makes it 
clear that the author is convinced that the ‘primary’ world of poetry is superior 
to the ‘secondary’ one of reality, and that, particularly in a time of crisis, the 
former can make its presence felt in the latter in order to bring about social 
and cultural change. This assertion of the dominance of poetry over the other 
spheres of reality can be traced back to positions of cultural criticism sustained 
by that generation of Romantics who came to the fore between the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, during that time of great political instability which 
was the French Revolution (cfr. among others Behler, 1989). By preaching 
the exclusive dominance of poetry, Hofmannsthal not only echoes the radical 
aesthetics of the romantics, but also their ‘Kulturkritik’.
In that sense, The Woman without a Shadow is inextricable linked to the First 
World War, a moment in history when its author began to believe that it would 
finally be possible to bring about that “revaluation of all values” described 
by Nietzsche, in order to arrive at a new cultural renaissance. That explains 
why, in a letter to Raoul Auernheimer dated 22 October 1919, Hofmannsthal 
describes his fairytale as “a poetic fragment difficult to interpret, deeply 
rooted in the individual, intimately hostile to our own era” (Hofmannsthal, 
1975, 424). With these words, the writer is emphasizing the complexity of 
his tale, in its formal structure and symbology its fragmentary nature and 
psychological dimension (characteristics typical of Romantic literature) and 
at the same time, the extent to which its intention was to make a statement 
against the spirit of the times. 
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METAPOETICS AND THE ‘MYTHOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL’
Organized symbolically into seven chapters, The Woman without a Shadow is 
constructed on two levels, which reproduce the two classic conceptual dimensions to 
be found in Romanticism, namely ‘spirit’ and ‘life’ (on the links between the fairytale 
and Romantic Kunstreligion, cf. Fossaluzza, 2012). In the narrative language adopted 
here, the supernatural realm of Keikobad represents the spirit, while the dyers’ humble 
village symbolizes life. Between these two symbolic extremes we find the kingdom 
in the middle, the place of synthesis: the emperor’s blue palace, or in other words, the 
sphere of poetry and art3. To show the fundamental symbolic importance of this ‘third 
place’, the fairytale begins right here, in the emperor’s palace, where the empress is 
also in residence. By now, she has left her father’s spirit realm and has been married 
for nearly twelve months. Nothing spoils her happiness; only her nurse is aware of 
the threat hanging over her if she does not succeed in obtaining a shadow, and with it, 
motherhood. For the twelfth time in a year, a messenger from the realm of the ‘spirit’ 
comes to the blue palace to ask the nurse whether the empress is with child and for the 
twelfth time, the nurse says she is not. The emperor has gone looking for his favourite 
falcon, which he himself chased away in a moment of anger, and he plans to stay away 
for three days. Everything leads us to think that the empress will lose her last chance to 
gain a human shadow and that she is doomed. But the emperor’s falcon returns to save 
the situation, bringing the empress her long-lost talisman. There she reads the inscribed 
message which reveals the terrible fate that threatens her own happiness and that of her 
husband: “I myself shall be his death, because I walk on earth and cast no shadow!” 
(Hofmannsthal, 1993, 7). Her “deadly fear” and the unspeakable “desire to save her 
beloved” (cit.) lead the young woman to attempt a desperate remedy, and try to find a 
shadow in the world of mortals. This marks the beginning of the empress’s adventures 
in the ‘inferior sphere’ of ‘life’, a place until that moment completely alien to her:
“Lead to the man whose shadow is for sale, that I may buy it. I shall kiss his feet.”
“Mad child,” cried the nurse, “do you know what you are saying? Do you not 
shudder at them even in your dreams, though you barely know them? And know 
– you want to live among them! To deal with them – speech for speech, breath 
for breath? To return their glances? To cringe to their malice? To fawn on their 
baseness? To serve them? For that’s what it amounts to. Don’t you dread it?”
“I want a shadow!” cried the empress. “Let us go down that I may serve one of them to 
gain a shadow. Where is the house, bring me to it! I wish it!” (Hofmannsthal, 1993, 9).
3 As regards the literary tradition concerning the symbolic relationship between the aesthetic sphere 
and the colour blue (or sky blue) which recurs throughout Hofmannsthal’s fairytale, we should recall 
the blue flower image in Novalis’s mythical romance, Heinrich von Ofterdingen. On the connections 
between Novalis’s romance and Hofmannsthal’s fairytale, cf. Endres, 2000, 332 sq.
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Obviously, the place where the empress must go in search of motherhood is 
the village of the dyers, amid ‘life’. But for the inhabitants of the kingdom of 
Keikobad, this means demeaning oneself to the level of a horrid, vulgar world, 
which, as emerges in the quotation above, appears to be dominated by a grim 
materiality4.
Unravelling the story’s complex symbolic network, what the reader is faced 
with is an allegory of its author’s poetics: the village of the dyers is a metaphor 
of ‘life’ but also a metaphor of a warped5, corruptible society, which either out of 
greed or vanity, is willing to bow down before the alienating principles of money. 
Whereas the empress represents aesthetics, having been born in the ‘spirit’ realm 
and now residing in a beautiful palace in the ‘kingdom in the middle’. She is the 
personification of art, which, so as not to disappear into the sterile hardness of 
stone, must achieve fertility by making a painful pact with ‘life’.
Through the use of this symbology, in The Woman without a Shadow Hof-
mannsthal proposes an allegory which is at the same time poetic and social (cf. 
also Mayer, 1993). In fact, the writer presents two levels of interpretation which 
are interconnected and interdependent: at the poetic level, he uses allegory to 
express the philosophical basis of his aesthetics focusing on three categories of 
Romantic origin: ‘spirit’, ‘art’ and ‘life’; at the social level, on the other hand, he 
conjures up an ideal society based on two symbolic poles, namely ‘aristocracy’ 
and ‘people’. While the philosophical dimension of ‘aesthetics’ equates in social 
terms with ‘aristocracy’ and that of ‘life’ with ‘the people’, the transcendental 
level of the ‘spirit’ is only indirectly social, because it can only become visible in 
a fragmentary, symbolic form, and namely through art. It is no coincidence that 
the kingdom of Keikobad is always kept in the background and only becomes 
a place of action in the most intensely symbolic moment of the fairytale: the 
seventh and final chapter.
The second and third chapters of the fairytale are set in the humble village 
of the dyers, where the empress is trying to find the way to obtain the “water of 
life”6 (Hofmannsthal, 1975, 110), and are focused on the seduction and corrup-
tion of the dyer’s wife by the wily nurse, while the fourth chapter (particularly 
significant and totally absent in the libretto of the opera), takes us back to the 
‘kingdom in the middle’ to show us the encounter between the emperor and his 
seven “unborn children” (die Ungeborenen). As we know, the final version of this 
4 By way of example, see how ill at ease the empress felt as soon as she arrived in the dyers’ village: “Bravely 
she wanted to pass near them, but her legs were paralyzed by the terror in her heart. Every hand that moved 
seemed to reach for her; abhorrent were so many mouths so close. The pitiless, covetous and yet, it seemed 
to her, terrified glances from so many faces gathered in her breast. She saw the nurse looking around for 
her. She wanted to follow but almost went under in a tangle of men.” (Hofmannsthal, 1993, 11).
5 The three brothers of Barak the dyer are the clearest metaphor for the deformed nature of this society: the 
one-eyed man, the one-armed man, and the hunchback.
6 The leitmotiv of water (or golden water) as a symbol of life recurs throughout Hofmannsthal’s tale, as well 
as in the various versions of Undine (including those of Paracelsus, Fouqué and Pannwitz).
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chapter was completed between November 1917 and January 1918. It was greatly 
influenced by the conversations Hofmannsthal had with Pannwitz between 11 and 
13 October 1917 in Baroness Gabriele von Oppenheimer’s villa Ramgut, not far 
from Bad Aussee in the Austrian region of Styria. There, the two writers met to 
have intense discussions about various aspects of The Woman without a Shadow7. 
Hofmannsthal considered Pannwitz (together with Eberhard von Bodenhausen) 
one of the people who gave him the greatest motivation to write his fairytale8, 
particularly because of Pannwitz’s assistance in the difficult drafting of the fourth 
chapter9, a role that Pannwitz himself described in his essay of December 1919, 
Hofmannsthals Erzählung ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’10.
Located symbolically exactly at the centre of the fairytale, the fourth chapter 
represents an eloquent allegory of the sphere lying mid-way between ‘spirit’ and 
‘life’, namely the world of art. Bringing together ‘life’, ‘spirit’ and ‘aesthetics’, 
the fourth chapter is thus the first point in the story in which the author provides 
a true metapoetic reflection based on these three conceptual pillars. In this sense, 
the “unborn children” who do not yet know the temporal dimension11, represent 
“Platonic ideas” (Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 592), but at the same time are 
allegories of potential works of art still waiting to be created. In the fourth chap-
ter, then, the allegory of procreation within marriage presented in the first three 
chapters becomes an allegory of artistic production, in a parallel most fittingly 
expressed in the beautiful metapoetic carpet woven by the “unborn” maiden:
The girl had knelt down at the head of the table. She spread the carpet and 
invited him to sit down on it. The tapestry was beneath his feet; flowers fused 
into animals, from the beautiful vines hunters and lovers emerged, falcons 
floated above like drifting flowers, all embraced one another, all were en-
tangled with each other. The entire work was immeasurably magnificent. But a 
coolness, which reached to his hips, seemed to raise from the weave.
7 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Pannwitz dated 21 October 1917 (Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 136) and 
Hofmannsthal, 1975, 271 sq. In October 1917, Hofmannsthal read some excerpts from his fourth chapter to 
Pannwitz, cf. the letter of 28 January, 1918 (Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 199).
8 Cf. the letter of 31 October 1919 to Dora von Bodenhausen (Hofmannsthal, 1975, 425).
9 Another crucial issue about which Hofmannsthal turned to Pannwitz for help was the figure of Efrit, the 
hybrid creature used by the nurse to seduce the dyer’s wife in the fourth chapter. In July 1918, the depic-
tion of Efrit was causing the author so many problems that he asked Pannwitz for advice and then actually 
stopped writing the fairytale until the June of 1919. Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letters of 3 and 4 August 1918, 
Hofmannsthal & Pannwitz, 1994, 253 sq.
10 Hofmannsthal’s Fairytale, The Woman without a Shadow, cf. Hofmannsthal, Pannwitz, 1994, 588-
594. The essay was published in the Munich journal, Der neue Merkur. It was Hofmannsthal 
himself, who was enthusiastic about Pannwitz writing an essay about his fairytale, who suggested 
it should be published in that journal (which he thought had a readership suited to his cultural 
aims) and contacted the editor Ephraim Frisch (cf. the letter of 6 November 1919, Hofmannsthal 
& Pannwitz, 1994, 418 sq.).
11 “Time?” said the girl and looked at him with a confused expression. “We do not understand time, but it is 
our whole desire to get to know time and to become subject to it!” (Hofmannsthal, 1993, 44). 
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“How did you succeed in conceiving this work with such perfection?”
He turned to the girl, who had humbly retreated a few steps.
The girl immediately lowered her gaze, but she answered without hesitation. 
“When I weave I separate beauty from matter; all which entices the senses and 
lures them to madness and decay I leave out.”
The emperor gazed at her. “How do you go about it?” […]
“[…] I do not see what is, nor what is not, but that which is eternal, and weave 
accordingly” (Hofmannsthal, 1993, 41).
This passage constitutes an extraordinary piece of aesthetic theory and 
literature about literature and it is difficult to find a clearer expression of 
Hofmannsthal’s poetics12. In fact, it is a narrative version of Hofmannsthal’s 
neoromantic aesthetics, in which the “unborn” maiden’s weaving is an allegory 
for an aesthetic paradigm built on a precious, intricate network of signs which 
becomes a kind of poetics that has abandoned the principle of imitatio, and lost 
all direct contact with the world of ‘phenomena’. Just like the maiden’s weaving 
in Hofmannsthal’s fairytale, in the author’s aesthetics, every one of the knots that 
make up the network of signs becomes a signifier freed from its meaning. It cre-
ates infinite new meanings with other signifiers, and tranforms itself into a sign 
abstracted from its object, in order to become part of a symbolic tapestry with a 
parallel meaning to the one informing phenomenological reality. This aesthetics 
is an expression (though still fragmentary) of a trascendency no longer totally 
accessible rationally, and becomes the exclusive dimension of a world completely 
transformed into poetry, which no longer recognizes any difference between ‘art’ 
and ‘life’. 
There is no doubt that the fourth chapter of the tale is inspired by the aesthetic 
theories of Romanticism: is an allegory of Romantic poetics and of a world com-
pletely turned into poetry on the basis of these theories (cf. Baioni, 1999; Lava-
getto, 2002 for the premises of these poetics). The fact is, however, that at this 
point, the aesthetic experiment illustrated in the central chapter of Hofmannsthal’s 
fairytale ends in failure, with the emperor turning to stone. The attempted fusion 
of ‘life’ and ‘spirit’ in art is unsuccessful, the “unborn children” are unable to find 
a way into life and remain in that sphere which precedes existence. The temporary 
failure of the aesthetic experiment represented in the middle of the fairytale (a 
failure underscored by the empress’s absence) is no mere coincidence. Indeed, the 
unsuccessful fusion can be ascribed to the emperor’s inability to respond to his 
children’s needs: on three occasions, he fails to hear their calls (Hofmannsthal, 
1975, 145, 149, 157), on three more occasions, he ignores their desperate pleas 
(Hofmannsthal, 1975, 156 sq.) and in the end, having lost all these opportunities, 
all that remains to him is to lock himself up in an egoism whose aridness is 
magnificently represented by the solitary stone statue with which the chapter 
12 On Hofmannsthal’s poetics since the early work cf. Streim, 1996.
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concludes. This frigid image of death leaves no doubt as to the ‘moral’ of this epi-
sode: narcissism is not enough to create art, just as individualism is not enough to 
save marriage as the basic unit of the community. For the author, in a completely 
romanticized world, poetic synthesis must also be social synthesis, and can only 
take place in presence of a real ethical choice that goes beyond the personal needs 
and wishes of the individual and thus even of the artist himself.
After this failure, the fifth and sixth chapters take leave of the emperor’s 
realm and take us back to the world of ordinary people, in which the dyer’s wife, 
bewitched by supernatural forces, performs an action which is just as selfish as 
that of the emperor: she gives up her shadow to the nurse for good, sacrificing her 
marriage and her “unborn children” to her own vanity and greed. Only at the very 
end, in the seventh chapter, do we finally see the miracle that will bring about 
the fusion between ‘spirit’ and ‘life’, and this will happen thanks to the altruistic 
choice of the empress. Indeed, while the nurse represents some kind of “demonic 
animal” (Hofmannsthal, Pannwitz, 1994, 591), impervious to any kind of human-
ity and able to forget the dyers very quickly13, the character of the empress has 
enough ethical substance to feel a sense of guilt and compassion for them:
“Let us go, you before me,” called the empress, “and find them again, even if 
they have been dragged away by spirits and are a thousand miles from their 
house. For we have become thieves and murderers to them, and all the blood 
from our veins is not enough to make good what we have done to them.”
The nurse cowered to the side and could not sustain the gaze of her mistress. 
She was afraid that the empress would swoop down upon her like a bird and 
step on her with the soles of her gleaming feet, so dreadful was the anger on 
her face (Hofmannsthal, 1993, 77).
The sole desire of the repentant empress is to repair the damage caused to the 
dyer and his family. But in line with the classic structure of fairytales, the test 
that the young woman has to overcome in order to make up for the consequences 
of her actions in the sphere of ordinary mortals requires a level of goodness that 
is almost superhuman: she must choose whether to drink the golden water from 
a goblet, thereby obtaining motherhood and bringing her beloved emperor back 
to life, or let the dyer’s wife keep her shadow (thereby enabling her to become a 
mother) but having herself to sacrifice any idea of children and love:
Their chill penetrated her inmost being and paralyzed her. She could not take a 
single step, neither forwards nor backwards. She could do nothing but drink and 
win the shadow, or spill the cup. She felt herself destroyed and withdrew into 
13 In a letter to Pannwitz dated 4 August 1918, Hofmannsthal describes the nurse thus: “[...] nothing 
which is human can touch her, in this sphere she is chemically invulnerable [...]”, cf. Hofmannsthal & 
Pannwitz, 1994, 254.
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herself. From her own diamond depths words rose clearly, as if sung at a great 
distance – she had only to repeat them. Without hesitation, she spoke. 
“I am beholden to you, Barak!” she said, and stretching the arm with the 
cup straight before her, she emptied the cup at the feet of the cloaked figure 
(Hofmannsthal, 1993, 90).
14 Other figurines by Alfred Roller depicting, among others, the emperor, the empress, the dyers and the mes-
senger can be found in the digital database of the Vienna Theatermuseum at the following links: https://www.
theatermuseum.at/de/object/681706/, https://www.theatermuseum.at/de/object/681716/, https://www.theat-
ermuseum.at/de/object/681722/, https://www.theatermuseum.at/de/object/681723/, https://www.theatermu-
seum.at/de/object/681724/, https://www.theatermuseum.at/de/object/681736/, https://www.theatermuseum.
at/de/object/681737/, https://www.theatermuseum.at/de/object/681739/ (last access: 2022-09-03).
Fig. 1: Alfred Roller Kostümfigurine: Die Frau 
ohne Schatten. Blatt 12. Die Amme (The nurse, 
costume figurine by Alfred Roller for the opera 
„Die Frau ohne Schatten“, 1919). KHM-
Museumsverband, Theatermuseum Wien14.
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By making the altruistic choice to sacrifice her marriage and her children 
in order to repair the damage done to the dyer’s family, the empress passes 
the test and is rewarded by unexpectedly obtaining what she thought was 
lost. It is only by making this agonizing ethical choice that the young woman 
succeeds in turning around the situation and working a miracle. She obtains 
motherhood, brings her husband back to life and achieves that synthesis 
which seemed imminent but did not materialize in the fourth chapter: that 
fusion between the vital impulse which the empress had encountered in 
the sphere of ordinary mortals (without which her world would be frozen 
into a motionless, lifeless image), and the nobility of spirit typical of the 
superior sphere from which she comes, without which life would be no more 
than blind animal instinct. With this act of ‘renunciation’, Hofmannsthal’s 
empress provides the perfect allegorical representation of the process of 
artistic creation, which, in the author’s opinion, must take place between the 
two conceptual poles of ‘life’ and ‘spirit’ and must always entail an ethical 
choice.
Indeed, we should recall that the fusion which comes about in the seventh 
chapter, significantly sealed by the “symbols and verses which praised the eter-
nal mystery of the chain of being that links all things on earth” (Hofmannsthal, 
1993, 94) that appear on the empress’s talisman at the end of the fairytale, is not 
just a poetical allegory: it is a social allegory too, as the author himself pointed 
out in his collection of notes Ad me ipsum: “‘The Woman without a Shadow”: 
Triumph of the allomatic. Allegory of the social”15. For him, in fact, the comple-
tion of the process of artistic creation coincides with social fulfilment through 
marriage, which for Hofmannsthal is not primarily a bourgeois institution, but 
a religious sacrament and poetical allegory. 
In conclusion, then, apart from the complex symbology in the formal struc-
ture of The Woman without a Shadow, which might make us think initially of 
an artistic creation finely wrought but completely removed from its historical 
context – a beautiful arabesque produced in the enchanted solitude of an ivory 
tower, Hofmannsthal’s fairytale is actually closely connected to the social and 
cultural project developed by its author during the years of the First World 
War. In his letter of 14 november 1919 to Marie Luise Voigt (the future wife 
of Rudolf Borchardt), Hofmannsthal once again uses the image of the tapestry 
to be found in the fourth chapter in order to give a clear explanation of the 
connection between his fairytale and the war: “Together with today’s letter, 
I am sending you the ‘fairytale’, the story of the woman without a shadow 
which I wove like a craftsman in the course of all those dark years of the 
war, embroidering or sewing into it many intuitions, hopes and fantasies” 
(Hofmannsthal, 1975, 427).
15 Hofmannsthal, 1980, 603. As used by Hofmannsthal, the neologism “allomatic” (from the Greek “ἄλλος”: 
other) is synonymous with “social”, or “ethical”.
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The war too, then, is interwoven with the numerous symbolic knots that make 
up the warp and weft of Hofmannsthal’s fairytale. He himself appears to have 
been well aware of the role played by history in his work, when he added a note 
in 1921 to the Ad me ipsum collection: “Without the actions and the suffering 
of individuals, no myth can be born. And so it was necessary that the events of 
1914 onwards should take place, in order for those struggles to be reshaped into 
myth” (Hofmannsthal, 1980, 617)16. In the interconnection between history and 
myth described in these lines17, it was the war that provided the background for 
the neoromantic fairytale The Woman without a Shadow. As we have tried to show 
here, this was how Hofmannsthal came to create a specific cultural project which 
produced a fully-fledged ‘mythology of the social’.
16 Where not otherwise indicated, English translations of quoted passages are by Judy Moss, whom I would 
like to thank for translating this article into English. 
17 On Hofmannsthal’s understanding of myth in his early work, cf. for example Eder, 2013, 9–54. On his later 
concept of the mythical and of the super-historical (das Überhistorische), starting with the First World War up 
to the later Turm-Dramas, cf. the detailed introduction and the first chapter in Mionskowski, 2015, 13–152.
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ROMANTIČNA PRAVLJICA IN NJEN DRUŽBENI NAMEN V ČASU VOJNE: 
ŽENSKA BREZ SENCE HUGA VON HOFMANNSTHALA
Cristina FOSSALUZZA
Univerza Caʼ Foscari v Benetkah, Oddelek za jezikoslovje in primerjalne kulturne študije, 
Palazzo Cosulich - Zattere, Dorsoduro 1405, 30123 Benetke, Italija
e-mail: cristina.fossaluzza@unive.it
POVZETEK
Ženska brez sence je naslov opere, ki je nastala kot plod sodelovanja med knji-
ževnikom Hugom von Hofmannsthalom in skladateljem Richardom Straussom v treh 
letih neposredno pred izbruhom prve svetovne vojne, in hkrati tudi naslov pravljice, 
ki jo je Hofmannsthal med letoma 1912 in 1919 priredil za libreto. V prispevku, ki se 
posebej osredotoča na poznejšo različico pravljice, skuša avtorica prikazati, kako je 
ta, če odmislimo kompleksno simboliko njene formalne strukture (ki sprva sugerira 
skrbno oblikovan, a od zgodovinske stvarnosti povsem ločen umetniški izdelek), v 
resnici tesno povezana s kulturnim in »družbenim« projektom, ki ga je Hofmann-
sthal razvijal v času prve svetovne vojne. Iz tega projekta je izšla prava »mitologija 
družbenega«, ki tvori jedro omenjene pravljice, v kateri se Hofmannsthal vrača k 
osnovam romantične estetike in jih reinterpretira v modernejšem duhu. 
Ključne besede: pravljica, Hofmannsthal, 1. svetovna vojna, romantika, metapoetika, 
estetika, družbeni projekt, kulturna renesansa, mit
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