Doppelgänger

Main Page - Liber Monstrorum

Quote

The night is quiet, the streets are calm,
In this house my beloved once lived:
She has long since left the town,
But the house still stands, here in the same place.

A man stands there also and looks to the sky,
And wrings his hands overwhelmed by pain:
Upon seeing his face, I am terrified
The moon shows me my own form!

O you Doppelgänger! you pale comrade!
Why do you ape the pain of my love
Which tormented me upon this spot
So many a night, so long ago?

-- From Der Doppelgänger one of the six songs from Franz Schubert's Schwanengesang that sets words by Heinrich Heine for piano and tenor voice. It was written in 1828, the year of Schubert's death.

Definition

Doppelgänger, (German: “double goer”), in German folklore, a wraith or apparition of a living person, as distinguished from a ghost. The concept of the existence of a spirit double, an exact but usually invisible replica of every man, bird, or beast, is an ancient and widespread belief. To meet one’s double is a sign that one’s death is imminent. The doppelgänger became a popular symbol of horror literature, and the theme took on considerable complexity. In The Double (1846), by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, for example, a poor clerk, Golyadkin, driven to madness by poverty and unrequited love, beholds his own wraith, who succeeds in everything at which Golyadkin has failed. Finally the wraith succeeds in disposing of his original. An earlier, well-known story of a doppelgänger appears in the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels, 2 vol. (1815–16; “The Devil’s Elixir”), by the German writer of fantastic tales E.T.A. Hoffmann. -- Excerpt taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica

Doppelgänger in Fantasy & Science Fiction

Doppelgangers appear in a variety of science fiction and fantasy works, in which they are a type of shapeshifter that mimics a particular person or species for some typically nefarious reason.

A temporal doppelganger is any version of oneself one may meet during time travel. It is an exact likeness of one at a specific time in one's history (or future). Meetings with oneself may occur when one version of oneself travels backwards through the time-stream and encounters a younger version of oneself, or when two or more of the same person from different time-streams travel to the same moment in their futures.