The Fountain of Undine

The mermaid fountain combines characters from the story of Undine, written by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque in 1811.  According to this fairy tale, Undine is born a mermaid, but is exchanged as a child for a human child by a river god.  She looks human while on land, but retains certain mermaid abilities.  She marries a human and thereby obtains an immortal soul.  She is an excellent wife, but a jealous human woman manages to turn Undine's husband against her.   Rejected by her husband, Undine returns to the sea and her mermaid family, but warns her husband that he must remain faithful to her or she will be honor-bound to kill him.   The husband fails to heed this warning and marries the other woman - after which Undine kills him despite her love for him.   That is the (extremely) condensed summary of the story, which ends in sorrow as most of these 'mermaid loves human' stories do.

The fountain was carved by Josef Valentin Kassin (1856–1931), a Carinthian-born sculptor trained at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Carl Kundmann. Kassin won the Academy's Rome Prize in 1885 for a bronze Samson and Delilah, funding five years of study in Italy before he settled permanently in Vienna. His other work includes the Seefahrer sculpture at the Neue Burg, a marble bust of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and funerary monuments at Vienna's Zentralfriedhof, including one for the actress Marie Geistinger."

Materials and Model

The model for the Undine mermaid statue was Mercédès Jellinek, after whom the Mercedes automobile brand was named.

Jellinek was about thirteen when Kassin modelled her likeness; her father, Emil Jellinek, had already named Daimler's new 35 hp automobile after her in 1901 and would take Jellinek-Mercedes as his own surname the same year the fountain was unveiled. Jellinek grew up to become an opera singer and, by her own account, never learned to drive.

The base of the fountain is made of sandstone, while the mermaid statue of Undine is made of Italian Carrara marble.   Kassin stated that the faces of the figures in the fountain were modeled  on Baden citizen's.