The word doppelganger was really into the spotlight last week with the story of two bearded men, who look quite a like, meeting on a flight and even more – sitting next to each other!
Some might consider the encounter as a good faith while for others it would be the worst news of a lifetime as according to the German folklore where the word derives from, meeting one’s double is a sign that one’s death is destined in the near future.
Doppelganger or doppelgänger is a German loanword, consisting of the two substantives Doppel (double) and Gänger (walker or goer) and literally translating as a “double goer”.
And it started its way from the belief in the existence of a spirit double, an exact but usually invisible replica of every man or animal, an evil twin.
The word is believed to had been coined by the German novelist Jean Paul in his romantic novel Siebenkäs (1796), where the main character in an attempt to break an unhappy marriage and find the love of his life, consults a friend, who, in reality, is his alter ego or Doppelgänger.
The English language firstly welcomed the localised translation of the original term – double ganger, which was firstly used in print in 1830, in Walter Scott’s Letters on demonology and witchcraft as a synonym of the word fetch (the apparition, double, or wraith of a living person).
In the early and mid 19th century, the doppelganger became a popular symbol of horror literature, and the theme took on considerable complexity. Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixir and Dostoyevsky’s The Double were some of the major examples. But it was the publishing, in 1848, of one of the best selling books on paranormal phenomena, The Night-Side of Nature by Catheline Crowe (writing on the supernatural, influenced by German authors) which helped make the German word well-known.
In 1850s, a collection of folklore proverbs by Michael Aislabie Denham which contained a long list of mythical creatures and bogies, based on the 1584, Discoverie of Witchcraft; included the dopplegangers:
“What a happiness this must have been….. to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals; when the whole earth was so overrun with …..Hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes ……….and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost.”
Nowadays, when our villages are not haunted by ghosts and when we have hard enough time fighting with ourselves, we had quite abolished the hunt for our evil twins and the word is used in a general sense to describe any person who physically or even behaviourally resembles another one. And there is a web project to help us in our hunt for our doppelganger or doppelgangers. The original German word has the same form for singular and plural, but its English version is more flexible and allows us to go for a plural, and does not limit us in our search for numeorus dopplegangers. At Twin Strangers everyone can upload a photo of himself and wait for replies from look-alikes from around the world.
