23 DIE NEBENSONNEN | THE MOCK SUNS

The most notorious of these apparitions in real life was the “Spectre of the Brocken,” the Brocken being the highest peak of the Harz Mountains, notorious haunt of witches and sprites, and memorialised as such in Goethe’s Faust. Wanderers on the mountain reported observing a vast and shadowy figure which would spookily move about and mimic their own gestures. Coleridge made two, unsuccessful, attempts to get a look at it in 1799. The phantom, still observable today, is in fact just that: a haze or mist or cloud whose constituent water droplets reflect images projected by the sun, swollen to enormous apparent size by tricks of perspective. The Spectre of the Brocken is, then, “but a reflex of yourself,” as de Quincey put it in his Suspiria de Profundis (1845), making paradoxical Romantic use of the scientific explanation by suggesting that “in uttering your secret feelings to him, you make this phantom the dark symbolic mirror for reflecting to the daylight what must be forever hidden.” This Doppelgänger (the title of one of Schubert’s most famous late songs, to a text by Heinrich Heine), this “Dark Interpreter,” mirrors and reveals our secret desires. Apparent objectivity is subjectivised: just like the mock suns, the Spectre of the Brocken may have a physical explanation grounded in optics and atmospheric science, but it retains its occult power as a subjective projection. Müller’s poem further reflects this porousness of the boundary between the objective and the subjective, the feeling and the unfeeling, the living and the unliving, by employing the so-called pathetic fallacy, in having the wanderer fancy that, unlike the girl, the mock suns did not want to leave him.