What does the mermaid who wants to emancipate wish for?

Not necessarily what emancipated women would have expected: “Delicate feet, varnished toenails, smart shoes, a man who wears the pants, and finally air to breathe” wants Unda.

With the latter she should still share what emancipated two-legged women need.

Above all, Unda wants to get rid of the fishtail.

No longer be Fensch or Misch, i.e. human and fish at the same time and half, but: woman.

In return, she gives the redeeming kiss to the first person who comes along, who is crouching around on the beach: unfortunately, this is a drunk fisherman.

And just three bottles of rum later, Unda is breathing from full lungs.

But between patching the net and placating the drunken husband, he can hardly remember that there was once a free, beautiful life.

However, under water and with a tail.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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One of the not so obvious tricks in Kerstin Hensel's underwater fairy tale is that it is nourished by two traditional stories about mermaids and water spirits.

One is that of the romantic Undine, or little mermaid, who sacrifices the freedom of the sea for love and becomes a victim herself.

The other source is the Rusalka sagas from the Slavic-speaking world, of which Antonín Dvořák's opera "Rusalka" is probably the best-known adaptation.

Of these, however, Hensel only takes the name, apart from a few details: Rusalka.

After all, a girl can hardly be called more beautiful, especially not when she wears a magnificent blue fishtail.

Unless this mermaid princess with the light green hair isn't what the underwater world expects of her.

but a little stronger

While the fairy tale of Undine in the dreary life of a fisherman at the side of an alcoholic first turns absurd and Unda, the wife of the mermaid king Rochus, ekes out a more than dreary earthly existence as the price of self-realization, little Rusalka, her daughter, suffers for high heels and suspenders, under water the bullying of sea creatures who can't stand being different.

It is the father, King Rochus, who recognizes and names what she is: not a mermaid, but a mermaid.

Not princess, but princess rich.

Not Rusalka, but Rusalko.

At the age of eleven, Rusalko is clearly both, Nix and Nixe.

Are you then nothing?

Or rather everything?

Kerstin Hensel, born in 1961 in what was then Karl-Marx-Stadt, now Chemnitz, writer and professor of German verse and diction at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin for 20 years, takes on something special in every respect to tell about it how individuals free themselves from attributions.

Sounds bulky, but it's not at all.

Because Hensel, who whispers and cuddles Fensch and Misch, mermaid and princess, and introduces many language games more confidently and naturally into the world of older readers and younger listeners, uses a lot of visual and word jokes in her story.

It doesn't sound like a grandmother telling her grandchildren as a bedtime fairy tale.

On the cover is Hensel's thanks to her granddaughter Dshamilja, who gave her the idea for this story.

Which of the countless ideas that sometimes stretch children's fables to the point of being silly and still open up here a swell and there a sleeping shell in Rusalko's universe that may have been is not mentioned.

Perhaps it was also the child's wish to hear an old story freed from the gender clichés of the time it was written?

Mermaids have always been queer, because in between, as the Stuttgart Opera made clear in the 2021/22 season with a "Rusalka", which worked with lip-synched drag queens.

Hensel relates this otherness rather casually.

So "Rusalko" develops as a story that superficially has hearty fun with the story in which the wave god, consisting of water and anger, wants to dispute the kingdom of Rusalko's father.

In some places this is downright painfully too much of puns and new staff such as the cuddly seal Wubbel, the sentry rays in the sleeping sand and the sea flower Anemone, but no matter - "Rusalko" signals, even in the bright blue illustrations by Cornelia Seelmann, that it's absolutely fine is not to be mainstream.

And that wrong decisions don't have to be the end.

Because if it's not good yet, it's not the end yet.

That's why this mermaid story, unlike the classics, also has a happy ending - so much can be revealed.

Kerstin Hensel: "Rusalko".

An underwater fairy tale

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With pictures by Cornelia Seelmann.

Eulenspiegel Kinderbuchverlag, Berlin 2022. 40 p., hardcover, 18 euros.

From 6 years