Vampires and the Orient in Goethe's “Die Braut von Corinth”

In his poem “Die Braut von Corinth” (1797), Goethe introduces the figure of the vampire as an early agent of his concept of “Weltliteratur.” As such, his female vampire challenges critical assumptions of a cultural divide between Christian and “pagan” religions, vampire believers and non‐believers, and finally Western and Eastern literatures. Instead, Goethe's “Braut” offers herself as a specimen of literary and cultural hybridity in a textual format entertained by Goethe for its liminality and heterogeneity—that of the “Ballade.” As a genre of originality without origin, the “Ballade” features a, in Homi Bhabha's sense of the term, “traumatic” encounter with the unfathomable—the living dead, monstrous affection, and transcultural alterity—that can not be reconciled with one's own world view, but only endured. Once endured, however, the disparate starts to form alliances across boundaries that Goethe will later refer to as “Weltliteratur.”