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.