Comrade Shakespeare | Women's Destiny

Billionaire Taylor Swift, who not only enjoys immense popularity but is also, surprisingly, one of the most boring figures in contemporary pop music, has recently released a new album: "The Life of a Showgirl." The first single from the album is titled "The Fate of Ophelia." A predictable success.

For the music video, Swift portrays herself as Ophelia, as Friedrich Heyser painted her in oil on canvas around 1900: an enchantingly beautiful corpse in the water. Today, she hangs in the Wiesbaden Museum—where the Swifties, as the starlet's followers are called, now make pilgrimages. One might note with appreciation that someone is taking their civic education mission seriously and is finally sending the teenagers to the museum. But of course, even Taylor Swift doesn't know exactly what happened in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."

While the Danish prince, preoccupied with himself, drove the young woman to madness and ultimately to suicide, everything is different in the balla-balla pop world with its pink, feminist veneer. In the video, an almost unmanageable number of dancers move with broad grins, life preservers in hand. Many of the victims are familiar with the tragedy of Hamlet; Ophelia is the most famous, executed by a man she loved. "Hamlet" is not a fairy tale, but a depiction of a society teetering on the brink, including patriarchal horrors.

Taylor Swift provides the musically catchy (and somewhat soporific) counter-narrative: If only the right prince comes along, not the long-time student from Wittenberg, everything will be alright. He will save her from Ophelia's fate. That's apparently a man's job.

Swifties are now delighting in the speculation about which of Ms. Swift's exes was a chauvinistic Hamlet and whether her current lover might be a heroic anti-Hamlet. So, here, profundity is being claimed where the tabloids reign.

What else can one expect from this forewoman from the depths of the cultural industry? Her millions of fans consider her great political achievement to be her strong support for the election of Kamala Harris last year, after weeks of deliberation. In times when it's apparently a remarkable achievement not to have spoken out in favor of the misogynistic, semi-fascist leader of the United States of America, a shady melodrama like "The Fate of Ophelia" is already considered a feminist anthem.

It's to be feared that the star in the glittering outfit is currently enjoying greater popularity than the honorable William Shakespeare. So it's at least reassuring to know that Taylor Swift will be forgotten in 100 years, and "Hamlet" will still be performed. Without a happy ending, of course.