Postcard from Niederschönhausen

A few kilometres due north of the historic heart of Berlin you will find the neighbourhood of Niederschönhausen, where many of the streets surrounding the narrow Panke waterway and the salmon-coloured Baroque palace Schloss Schönhausen are named for writers. This drive-through pantheon remembers the likes of Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Mann, Boris Pasternak, Richard Dehmel and Leonhard Frank (a total wurst fest, as you will note). Hans Fallada was actually a resident, and the last street he lived on now bears his (original) name, Rudolf Ditzen.

Head down Ossietzkystrasse past Klaus Simon’s poignant statue of namesake journalist (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Carl von Ossietzky, take a left after the Panke and you come to the centrepiece of this ensemble – a looped road named for Russian writer Vladimir Mayakovsky. During the Cold War the Majakowskiring was a power base for the inner circle of the East German regime, home to Erich Honecker and other senior leaders, with accommodation for state guests in a white neo-classical villa as well as the Schloss (the purple GDR bathrooms are a particular treat). Slow Travel Berlin can tell you more about Niederschönhausen’s Politburo ghosts.

Majakowskiring was once split into Viktoriastrasse and Kronprinzenstrasse, but under the East German regime’s cultural policy, streets previously bearing the names of royalty and Prussian generals were renamed for writers. But curiously, two writers who not only lived and worked in the late 19th century on what would become Majakowskiring, but also created a revolution in German letters here, are entirely absent from the map: Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf.

Greater Berlin, showing Niederschönhausen north of the centre

Niederschönhausen, showing the location of Holz and Schlaf’s summer house

In the mid-1880s, Arno Holz was a writer with huge ambitions, one of a dynamic Berlin clique seeking new ways, not just in literature but – with the late arrival of bohemianism to the city – life itself. Holz tasted early critical success in 1885 with his verse collection Buch der Zeit (Book of Time). But even for a bohemian he was low on funds. Along with his material deprivation he was experiencing a grave creative crisis, and longing for a retreat. He was already lodging in Niederschönhausen, then a town outside of Berlin, when a moneyed acquaintance offered the use of his summer house just around the corner on Viktoriastrasse in 1887. He leapt at the chance.

There he started working on an autobiographical novel and pondering how to reshape literature in his own image (Holz was never burdened by modesty). At first the work was heavy going; Holz complained to a friend of his joyless routine – rise at 8:30, walk in the Schloss park, work, walk to Wedding to have lunch with his mother, work, a nap, then more work until midnight. The house was only intended for habitation in the warmer months so winter was particularly hard.

At the time Holz’s friend Johannes Schlaf was facing his own crisis, depressed about the imminent end of his studies, uncertain if his path lay in writing. In 1888 Holz invited Schlaf to live with him in Niederschönhausen and collaborate. Schlaf describes the bells tolling for the death of the first Kaiser just as they set to work. This not only puts a precise date stamp on the beginning of their collaboration – Wilhelm I died on 9 March 1888 – it also has huge symbolic resonance considering the two men were intent on overthrowing the old order and finding new forms to replace the literary orthodoxies of their day.

Former GDR guest house, Majakowskiring, adjacent to the site of Holz and Schlaf’s summer house

Holz was the dominant character, both personally and creatively, Schlaf a ‘willing and malleable ally,’ in the summation of scholar Raleigh Whitinger. Conditions in the summer house were now, if anything, worse; at one point Holz complained of having absolutely no money nor means of securing any, and nothing beyond a slice of bread and dripping for sustenance. Holz and Schlaf’s greatest indulgence seemed to be smoking, and their darkest moments struck whenever the tobacco ran out.

But: there was some alchemy in the combination of these two brooding malcontents that actually produced something akin to joy from these unpromising elements. Here between the palace and the Panke, Holz and Schlaf created a a humble yet convivial hideaway, a writer’s residency in semi-rural seclusion, a bohemian community of two. Their later conflict appeared pre-programmed, but Holz referred to their collaboration and cohabitation as a ‘precious idyll’ and even at the time Schlaf made the poignant, prophetic observation: ‘We know these are the happiest days’.

Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf

This quiet town on the edge of a heath was a long way from the smoky taverns and chronically overcrowded tenement apartments of central Berlin. But Holz and Schlaf were still regularly drawn – whether for work, for pleasure or for cheap meals – to the centre (it wasn’t walking distance, but walk the distance they would whenever they couldn’t afford the horse-drawn tram). This ambivalent relationship with the city was a typical bohemian trait. Think of the encampment of non-conformists in Montmartre at the time – semi-rural still, but in reach of central Paris. To the east of Berlin, writers and artists were starting to visit Friedrichshagen, and would soon establish a colony there.

Holz abandoned his novel and the two put their bold plans into action. Their first joint work was a closely observed story about a young woman fending off a sexual assault by her uncle, demonstrating not just their fearlessness in the face of taboo but also their alertness to female experience. What little this work owed to the literary conventions of the day was entirely swept away by their next venture. In January 1889 writer Gerhart Hauptmann came to visit them and they read him a new work, Papa Hamlet. This radical and unsettling work marked the explosive launch of Naturalism in Germany and foretold literary developments decades into the future.

Behold! The mighty Panke.

The title novella of Papa Hamlet depicts a bohemian existence clearly informed by the writers’ own experience, but their experiment offered nothing of the claustrophobic mania and constant imminence of disaster which haunt their odious protagonist Niels Thienwiebel and his little family. Before their bitter split they recalled both the hardship and the happiness of their sanctuary:

Our little ‘shack’ hung as airy as a bird’s nest in the middle of a wondrous winter landscape; from our desks, where we sat wrapped up to our noses in large red woollen blankets, we could walk out over a snowy patch of heath which was teeming with crows, study the most wondrously coloured sunsets every evening, but the winds blew on us from all sides through the poorly grouted little windows, and despite the forty fat coal bricks that we put into the stove every morning, our fingers were often so frozen that we were forced to temporarily stop our work for this reason alone. And sometimes we had to quit for completely different reasons. For example, when we returned from Berlin, where we always went for lunch – taking a whole hour, through ice and snow, because it was ‘cheaper’ there – we would crawl back into our little nest, still hungry …

Those red blankets, by the way, reappear in Papa Hamlet. This recollection appeared in an 1892 anthology which brought together their entire collaborative oeuvre, around 300 pages in total – the three parts of Papa Hamlet, the drama The Selicke Family, along with the ‘The Paper Passion’ and three other short stories. This lowered the slab on their experiment; by the time the anthology was published they had fallen out and gone their separate ways. Not only did they never reconcile, through their writing they exchanged barbs for decades, each disputing the other’s contribution to the works that appeared under their names. Holz and Schlaf were each troubled in their own ways, and neither seems to have ever recovered the productive contentment they found in Niederschönhausen.

A time-travelling Holz would find little change in the Schloss and the linden-shaded pathways of its elegant gardens where he would take his pre-coffee constitutional. And on the adjacent Panke – a waterway inconspicuous to the point of invisibility on its route through Berlin’s north – you can see what Holz and Schlaf saw, and understand its appeal. But Majakowskiring is an odd, slightly careworn place today; it clearly has some expensive real estate, yet its roadway has seen better days and its pavements are strangers to weeding. On the site of Holz and Schlaf’s summer house now stands a modern home surrounded by CCTV cameras. There is nothing here to suggest that on this spot, in the late 1880s, two querulous outsiders were already dragging German literature into the 20th century.

One of the oldest houses on Majakowskiring

The site of Holz & Schlaf’s summer house

Majakowskiring, formerly Viktoriastrasse

Schloss Schönhausen

The gardens of Schloss Schönhausen

Approaching Majakowskiring

The Panke

Drei Frauen

A group of sculptures by Carin Kreuzberg

Dorfkirche Pankow

Carl von Ossietzky

Klaus Simon’s sculpture of the writer on the street also named for him.

---

Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf (translated by James J. Conway) will be published in English for the first time on 18 October 2021. More information here.

Naturalism: dispatches from the gutter

The next Rixdorf Editions title is Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, due out in October. Originally published in 1889, it is a work that rewards examination from numerous different perspectives – as a mirror to the authors’ bohemian subculture, as a premonition of Postmodernism, or as an example of the surprisingly rich tradition of pseudo-translation. But let’s start by zooming out with some literary history context and examining Holz and Schlaf’s works as key examples of Naturalism. In particular, I want to show the transformation that the movement underwent as it arrived in Germany, a process in which Papa Hamlet was pivotal.

Naturalism is frequently misunderstood. First, the term is often used interchangeably with Realism, the movement from which it emerged (and in truth the demarcations are at times unclear). Second, the designation of ‘Naturalism’, referring to a particular style in a specific period, is also sometimes mistaken for small-‘n’ naturalism, as applied to means of expression – acting styles, filmmaking, visual arts – which appear to forego artifice. And third, the reception of specifically German Naturalism is dominated by a handful of works, particularly the heavy-handed dramas of Gerhart Hauptmann, which belie the richness and experimentation of the wider movement.

Arno Holz

For much of the second half of the 19th century, Realism was the predominant form of serious literature in Germany (and much of the rest of Europe). After the 1848 pan-European revolts, Realist writers like Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller and Adalbert Stifter rejected explicitly political concerns and the tempestuous subjectivity of Romanticism in favour of works which depicted life with a degree of impartiality. But there were limits; writers tended to stick to the bourgeois milieu of their readers, reluctant to shock them with psychological extremes, sexual license or the lives of the underclass.

Industrialisation and in particular urbanisation, which pressed different societal groups into confronting proximity, made it harder to overlook shocking disparities in living conditions, the ways in which both nature and nurture influenced character and social standing, or the rapidly changing status of women. Beginning around 1880, European writers otherwise classed as Realists – such as Émile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henrik Ibsen – started admitting these vexed elements into their writing. This new engagement with uncomfortable realities, partly inspired by the objectivity inherent in the study of natural sciences, was termed ‘Naturalism’.

German writer Arno Holz followed these foreign developments avidly, but he came to feel that even the panoramic social novels of Émile Zola didn’t go far enough. He distilled his conception of literature into a succinct formula: art = nature - x, and he believed that the nearer x was to zero the better. That is, creative works should reflect reality as closely as possible. He was intent on capturing real lives, and especially human speech patterns, with all their repetition, disruption and hesitation, with coarse, colloquial forms, and with the distinct regional dialects and sociolects which persisted in unified Germany. The minute attention to speech patterns reflected the influence of emerging mechanical recording devices. In contrast to Realist writers, who often kept their characters on mute during whole pages filled with descriptive text, Holz believed dialogue was the engine of literature.

Johannes Schlaf

Along with Johannes Schlaf, Gerhart Hauptmann, John Henry Mackay and brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart, Holz was a member of the Berlin literary group ‘Durch!’ (Through!). It was a name that reflected the dynamism of the age. Their 1886 manifesto contained statements like ‘Our highest artistic ideal is no longer antiquity, but modernity’ and ‘Modern writing should depict people with flesh and blood with all their passions in pitiless truth.’ But for the members of Durch!, these ideas went beyond the page, and they experimented with new forms of living, forming Berlin’s first major bohemian community. There was considerable cross-over between Naturalism and anarchist groups, as well as early advocates for gay rights. The movement also found an outpost in Munich, where Michael Georg Conrad established the influential journal Die Gesellschaft (Society) and the literary group ‘Society for Modern Living’ to further Naturalist ideals.

Arno Holz first met Johannes Schlaf, then an unpublished writer, in the mid-1880s and in 1889 the pair issued the first German book to incorporate these new ideas: Papa Hamlet (although initially credited to ‘Bjarne P. Holmsen’, an invented Norwegian writer). It signalled the arrival of Naturalism in Germany, but arguably went even further than its foreign reference points. Its crudity, its fragmentary exposition and its exploration of the darkest human impulses shocked contemporaries, although some, such as Gerhart Hauptmann, saw its potential for opening up new means of expression. That same year Hauptmann dedicated his breakthrough play Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise) to ‘Holmsen’; to circumvent censorship, it was performed for subscription-only audiences at the Freie Bühne, a theatre closely associated with the Naturalists. This was also the venue for the first production of Die Familie Selicke (The Selicke Family, 1890), Holz and Schlaf’s sole play, a radical break with dramatic convention which attracted praise from the likes of Theodor Fontane.

As well as censorship, the Naturalists’ frank treatment of subjects like crime, poverty and prostitution brought them enemies in high places – the highest office in the land, in fact. In 1894, when Berlin’s prestigious Deutsches Theater decided to stage Hauptmann’s Die Weber (The Weavers), a raw account of an uprising in Silesia, Kaiser Wilhelm II was so incensed that he cancelled his box at the theatre and ordered his coat of arms removed from the auditorium.

But what did these plays offer the people who did see them? Were they anything more than a vicarious opportunity for the bourgeoisie to peer into the lives of the underclass, to enjoy the frisson of slumming, to still their nostalgie de la boue? Did these works actually bring change to the lives of the people they depicted? These questions are at the heart of later criticism of the movement. Bertolt Brecht, for one, felt that the Naturalists had presented the squalor of the working class as immutable, a law of nature, something he described as ‘criminal’.

Gerhart Hauptmann

Hauptmann’s plays remain the most widely known examples of German Naturalism to this day, but they aren’t the whole story. The best Naturalist works were bursting with energy and invention, and Holz and Schlaf represented the capacity for vigorous experimentation that dwelt within the movement. As well as Papa Hamlet, their collaboration produced works like ‘The Paper Passion’ (included in our edition). Set in a Berlin tenement, its spoken sections – at times astonishingly vulgar – are largely in Berlinerisch, making it one of the first examples of serious literature rendered in the metrolect. In ‘The Paper Passion’ Holz and Schlaf’s radical rethinking of means extends to the very typesetting, with spoken passages printed in a larger font, descriptive text reduced to something like stage directions.

Naturalist writers like Richard Dehmel, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Anna Croissant-Rust fused previously discrete forms; witness the latter’s uncompromisingly alien 1893 title Prose Poems (included with our edition of Death). Her friend Oskar Panizza took Naturalism to the edge of rational thought – and beyond. Other Naturalist writers produced short, sharp sketches which defied categorisation, or collage-style narratives which mimicked the tumult of impressions offered by busy city streets. Among the innovative techniques that emerged from the movement was Sekundenstil (a term first coined in connection with Papa Hamlet), which rendered scenes in real-time analogue, second by second. Naturalist writers were dismantling the familiar infrastructure of literature and exploring the occluded recesses of the human psyche in ways we more readily associate with Modernism.

Anna Croissant-Rust

Naturally these radical, jagged works were no more welcome to conservative critics than Hauptmann’s dramas of proletarian misery. In any case the reign of Naturalism was relatively brief and non-exclusive. It ran in parallel with late Realism, and in 1891 – just two years after Papa Hamlet and Before Sunrise – writer and critic Hermann Bahr was already talking about ‘Overcoming Naturalism’, the title of one of his most famous essays. The movement was soon eclipsed by a complex set of inter-connected styles – Symbolism, Decadence, Neo-Romanticism – summarised in Germany under the French loan term ‘Fin de siècle’, with Expressionism looming beyond the horizon of the new century, waiting to claim the attentions of Germany’s avant-garde. In 1901 Wilhelm II gave a speech in which he took aim at ‘gutter art’, widely assumed to include Naturalism, but by then it was already history.

---

Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf (translated by James J. Conway) will be published in English for the first time on 18 October 2021. More information here.

The Countess

Franziska zu Reventlow was born 150 years ago today in Husum, on Germany’s North Sea coast. Her story – aristocrat born in luxury who ran away from her family to dwell among the ragged bohemians and live a life of daring, free love and independence before dying young in exile – is irresistible. She was captured in numerous contemporary and retrospective accounts and also appeared lightly fictionalised in a number of prose works – including her own, such as The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe, which I translated in 2017.

One of the most interesting profiles of the Countess comes to us from the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, published as a newspaper article in 1928 then collected in his memoirs in 1931. While fragmentary, it is particularly valuable because Mühsam, uniquely, knew Reventlow in all three major stations of her life – Lübeck, Munich and Ascona, Switzerland. Mühsam was born in Berlin but like Reventlow, he moved to Lübeck with his family in infancy. Like her, too, he gravitated to bohemian Munich in the closing years of the 19th century. And, like her and a number of other idealistic refuseniks from Germany and beyond he ended up in Ascona prior to World War One. Hermann Hesse, Hugo Ball, Isadora Duncan, Paul Klee, Mary Wigman and Max Weber were all in Ascona and its proto-hippy ‘Monte Verità’ colony at one time or other. One of the most eccentric figures of this community features, briefly, in Mühsam’s text – Otto Gross, the pro-matriarchy, polyamorous neo-pagan bohemian, coke addict, anarchist, psychiatrist cum psychiatry patient. And it was in Ascona and through Gross that Mühsam, as he relates, was instrumental in the absurd episode of Reventlow’s second marriage, which she fictionalised in her novel Der Geldkomplex (The Money Complex).

Mühsam was serving time in prison for pacifist agitation when Reventlow died, in the last summer of World War One. Less than a year later, in 1919, he was involved in the extraordinary ‘Räterepublik’, when a group of writers and utopians established a socialist government in Bavaria (see Volker Weidermann’s Dreamers for more). It lasted only a few weeks but earned Mühsam a much longer prison sentence; he was finally released in the 1924 amnesty which also put Adolf Hitler back on the streets.

As a Jewish anarchist who had been instrumental in a left-wing takeover, Mühsam was high on the Nazis’ hit list when they came to power in January 1933. The Reichstag fire the following month signalled a new intensity in persecution of the new regime’s enemies; the parliament building was literally still smouldering when Mühsam was arrested. Over months he was subjected to horrific torture and finally executed in July 1934.

---

Erich Mühsam

The Countess

translated by James J. Conway

As children we had been neighbours. But in Lübeck, Franziska zu Reventlow was no more a playmate of mine than her brothers. We knew each other by sight, I knew that the old count had been in Schleswig’s Landdrost until the Prussians deposed him in 1864. It was said that he remained entirely Danish in disposition and withdrew to non-Prussian Lübeck in protest against the annexation of Schleswig-Holstein. But this may all be small town gossip. In any case, I remember that such things were said of Count Reventlow. The Countess, his daughter, never confirmed it to me; nor did I ever ask her anything of the sort. Anyone interested in the family history of the Reventlows should read the Countess’s autobiographical novel Ellen Olestjerne, a book which incidentally she did not enjoy being reminded of; ‘sentimental rubbish,’ she called her début.

The young Franziska zu Reventlow

From my high school days I very clearly remember the dazzlingly beautiful blonde seminarian whom they used to refer to then as ‘Komtesse Reventlow’. She walked the same route to school as me, so I saw her every day and greeted her politely – whether out of an early suscepitiblity to feminine charms – the Countess was, after all, several years older than me – or out of respect for her fine, noble name, which critical experience had not yet driven out of my fifteen-year-old self, I can no longer say. What is certain is that the admiration was entirely one-sided and it was only about twelve years later that I finally confessed the puerile sentiments of distant veneration to their object.

Café Luitpold, Munich

I don’t remember exactly how our acquaintance came about in Café Luitpold in Munich; I probably sat down with friends of hers and she joined them, or it may have been the other way round, that Maya or someone else who appeared in the Countess’s diaries dragged me to her table. Our shared home town provided material for all sorts of amusing reflections, and I believe it was at our very first meeting that the Countess told me that those of us from Lübeck who were scattered across the fields of literature, art, and bohemia were the subject of anxious conversation at an evening hosted by the mayor of our town. Thomas Mann had grievously offended Lübeck’s decency with Buddenbrooks, Heinrich Mann with Professor Unrat, Fritz Behn was not yet a professor and, he too the offspring of a senatorial family, had thrown himself into the poor man’s art of sculpture, and even Reventlow, a countess, was the mother of an illegitimate child, and I not only wrote highly immoral poetry, but was also a propagandist for anarchism and had preoccupied the police and the public prosecutor – it was a lot all at once, and His Magnificence, as the Countess had heard from an ear witness, was most concerned by this woeful state of affairs; shaking his head sadly he said: ‘That they all should be from Lübeck – what must the people in the Reich think of us!’

The young Erich Mühsam

As for the Countess, it was of absolutely no account to her what people in the Reich, people in Lübeck, and especially people of the caste from which she came might think. She went her way and lived as it suited her and as she believed she owed to her life’s work. This life’s work, however, was focused almost entirely on caring for and bringing up her child. Among all the rich qualities that distinguished Franziska zu Reventlow, her wondrous courage in facing life despite eternal illness, eternal misfortune and agonising poverty, the way she subjected her words and deeds solely to the laws of her own moral conscience as a matter of course, unconcerned about conventions and social prejudices, the energy for work which enabled her to do simple sewing work one day, glass paintings the next, and in between precious translations from French and to write her superior, humorous, stylistically excellent novels – among all these virtues, the woman’s spiritual stability rested entirely on her motherly love. Admittedly, she was far too hungry for life and artistically animated not to surrender to the whims of her sensual desires without hesitation, with a character that was far too cheerful not to disregard the vexatious misery of existence with incomparable ease, exuberance even. But she drew her inner happiness solely from the riches she gained from the growth, from the physical and mental prosperity of her child, her Bubi. It is only from her diaries that one learns the pain to which the high-spirited heart of this mother was subject, what turmoil of longing every brief separation from the child aroused in her. I believe that the amicable favour the Countess showed me through all the years of our acquaintance was essentially a reflection of the joy that working with children inspires in me and which earns me the trust of all children. The friendship that tired little Rolf extended to me was shared by his mother and I fulfilled the role of father confessor in her many hardships and worries, as witnessed by numerous letters which I keep which reach back to 1907.

Reventlow and son Rolf (‘Bubi’)

In the letters there is much talk of the ‘good Lord’. Under this umbrella term the Countess collected everything that made her life bitter: illness, debts, misfortune of all kinds; and I have scarcely known anyone so incessantly pursued by misfortune as this woman, who truly deserved every joy, possessed to the point of genius as she was by the ability to enjoy and utilise happiness. I think wistfully how she sat in her room for weeks, hundreds of glasses all around her, decorating them with painted landscapes of Oberammergau, the theatre, the most touching scenes of the Passion of Christ and other pious things. She had come up with the idea of ​​relieving her hardship by selling souvenirs at Oberammergau where the Passion Play was imminent. She did in fact go there, sitting in a wooden booth in front of the theatre from morning to evening, waiting for the American millionaires who would buy her glasses. But it rained the whole time, and besides, the souvenirs were far too cheap for rich people to buy. So she came back to Schwabing with almost the whole stock and increased debt. The Countess could no longer stand the sight of the glasses which had been completely devalued by painting, so she decided to drown them in all their splendour. She hired a boat in the Englischer Garten, rowed to the middle of the Kleinhesseloher See and was about to launch the massive package with the Passion glasses overboard when a park attendant appeared and yelled at her that dropping objects in the lake was forbidden, with a high penalty. The fact that she could not even carry out the death sentence on the souvenirs crushed the poor Countess even more than the whole failure of Oberammergau.

Reventlow in Munich

In my publication ‘Ascona. A Brochure’ I dealt extensively with one of the most peculiar personalities who enlivened the beautiful landscape there on Lake Maggiore. He was a Baltic baron named Rechenberg, a huge fellow who had lived a bold sailor’s life all over the world and as a gold panner in the Urals, had completely lost his hearing on some adventure or other and stood out from the abstinent vegetarians in particular because he devoured enormous amounts of meat at every meal and was constantly drunk. This man dearly loved an Italian washerwoman who, however, wished to have nothing to do with the deaf drunkard because she lived quite happily with her husband. Rechenberg had a wealthy father who still lived in his native Courland and he was constantly calculating how he would change his life when he eventually came into his inheritance, which he estimated at around two hundred thousand marks.

Alexander von Rechenberg-Linten

In the last years of her time in Munich, Countess Reventlow’s circle of friends included the psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Gross and the economist Professor Edgar Jaffé, who later became finance minister in Eisner’s revolutionary government. Gross wanted to help the Countess, in his ingenious and fascinating way, by having her view all of her worries and suffering as the effect of mental complexes and thereby dissolve them; Jaffé offered her a position as private secretary. She fluctuated, back and forth, between the strong impressions of psychoanalysis, which she ironised most humorously, as well as the prospect of maintaining a stable existence on the one hand, and on the other an offer to take up a position as a cashier at an art exhibition in Paris that would to some extent slake her thirst for experience. In the end she decided to go to Paris. During this time – around the autumn of 1910 – a friend of mine arrived in Munich from Ascona and told me the following: the father of Baron Rechenberg had just set up in Ascona and wished to see his son married. This apparently gave Rechenberg junior the idea of helping the beloved washerwoman, as he could not have her, by making her little daughter his heir. Under Russian law, if he died unwed his father’s inheritance would pass to his siblings after his death. But if he were married, he would have testamentary disposition. So Rechenberg apparently wanted him to ask me whether I knew a woman who might like to enter into a fictitious marriage contract with him. As soon as he took over the inheritance, she would receive half of the property immediately, but could not make any claims on the other half, which would be reserved for the washerwoman’s child. Naturally there would be no further obligations arising from the marriage.

When I heard the proposal, I immediately cried: ‘The Countess!’ I had said goodbye to her that morning because she was going to leave for Paris the next day. I rushed to her apartment immediately and left her a note stating that she had to come and see me. She came in the evening.

Monte Verità

‘You know what, Countess,’ I said, ‘you’re going to be a baroness.’ – ‘You must be crazy,’ she replied, and then I explained the story to her. ‘What’s the chap’s name?’ she asked after a moment’s thought, and then said: ‘Rechenberg is very practical. I won’t even need to re-stitch the monograms on my handkerchiefs.’ She instructed me to investigate the legal situation under Russian law, to get in direct contact with the Courlander and to do everything that might further the cause. She left, and I went to work, glad of the chance to help the most precious woman I knew out of poverty and failure once and for all, while at the same time creating a comfortable future for a poor Italian child of the proletariat and gladdening the heart of the well-meaning drunkard.

Erich Mühsam

It may suffice to know that the marriage actually took place. The Countess described the ceremony in the church at Locarno in a charming letter; she appeared in a beach dress, her husband in a sailor’s uniform, and her father-in-law in a frock coat and top hat; he had no idea that the whole thing was a farce and was overjoyed that his failure of a son had even been bagged a real Countess. By the time he found out what was behind the marriage, it was too late.

Then – I think it was in 1912 – I received a card stating that the inheritance was due. ‘I hope the harvest isn’t bad.’ Well, there were long proceedings and finally not hundreds of thousands, but around four thousand francs, still a fabulous sum for the Countess.

Mühsam (r.) and bohemian friends in Ascona.

What happened next the happy heiress herself hinted at in her sumptuous novel The Money Complex. In a letter to me in which she reported the episode, she complained merely of her own folly in the fact that for the first time in her life she had done something that was perfectly, correctly bourgeois, namely, handing the money over to a bank. She went to Nice with a small sum. From there she quoted from an alarming telegram, and when she arrived in Locarno, the bank, one of the most important Swiss institutions, had just collapsed and the entire inheritance had gone to the devil. ‘There doesn’t seem to have been a blessing attached to the money,’ she said ruefully in her letter to me, but at the same time felt the whole story was very much in keeping.

Reventlow in Ascona, shortly before the First World War

After that I only saw the Countess once, when the war was already under way. Her marriage made her a Russian and therefore an ‘enemy alien’. Now she came to me and complained that her boy, who was sixteen at the time, wanted to sign up. ‘He thinks the war is Cowboys and Indians,’ she said disconsolately. Fortunately her Bubi wasn’t accepted at the time, and when he was conscripted two years later the brave Countess outdid herself in maternal love by bringing him to safety at her own risk. How that transpired, however, does not belong in my memoirs, least of all apolitical memoirs.

Rolf, Franziska zu Reventlow

In the summer of 1918, when I was interned in Traunstein, I received the news that Franziska zu Reventlow had died. It was hard to believe. This dead woman I greet with deep admiration. Except for her name, nothing about her was undermined by the mustiness of the past. Her life, her vision, her thinking were directed towards the future; she was someone who knew the meaning of freedom, a person without prejudice, without fetters of tradition, with no diffidence before the philistinism of her surroundings. And she was a joyful person whose joy came from the most profound gravity of character. When she laughed, her mouth and her whole face laughed, and it was a pleasure to behold. But her eyes, her large, deep blue eyes, remained grave and immobile amid her laughing features. The Countess was a beautiful woman, with radiant physical appeal, and her heart was filled with the longing for a beautiful, free human existence.

---

‘The Countess’ by Erich Mühsam was first published in German as ‘Die Gräfin’ in the Vossische Zeitung, Berlin, no. 295, 24 June 1928; first book publication in Unpolitische Erinnnerungen by Offizin Haag-Drugulin, Leipzig, in 1931.

This translation © 2021 James J. Conway

Unimagined delight: August Endell 150

Architect, designer and theorist August Endell was born in Berlin 150 years ago today. In 2018 I translated and published his major text, The Beauty of the Metropolis, Endell’s love-letter to Berlin and to cities in general. Originally published in 1908, this visionary essay presented readers with new ways of looking at the urban environment. Also included in this edition were six articles that Endell wrote for the journal Die neue Gesellschaft in 1905 which show him arriving at the theses in his main work through meticulous observation and profound reflection.

What struck me when I first read The Beauty of the Metropolis and these articles was their force of prophecy, describing a way of seizing aesthetic ownership of our surroundings that felt extraordinarily contemporary. Lyrical and insightful, his words expressed thoughts I had harboured about the city, about belonging, about an engagement with culture and habitat that transcended nationhood. To mark Endell’s sesquicentenary I want to go even further back to two similarly oracular articles (plus a snippet), originally published either side of the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1897, August Endell was living in Munich, then Germany’s hub for avant-garde arts and letters, and was best known for a work of outspoken art criticism he had issued the year before, Um die Schönheit (On Beauty). In it Endell held that ‘those who learn to give in to their visual impressions completely, without associations, without secondary objects of any kind, those who just once feel the emotional impact of forms and colours, will find them to be an inexhaustible source of extraordinary, unimagined pleasure.’ Endell set out his primary aesthetic theories which remained remarkably consistent throughout his career, and attracted praise from the likes of Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Endell was in touch with the most progressive currents of Munich through his friends Anita Augspurg and Sophia Goudstikker, partners in business and life who ran a photo studio (the first solely female-owned business in Germany) from where they also operated a salon. For the November 1897 edition of Munich-based journal Dekorative Kunst (Decorative Art), Endell wrote ‘Freude an der Form’ (Joy in Form), a momentous text that made the case for abstraction in art – ‘forms that mean nothing and represent nothing and remind us of nothing’ – before artists themselves. He also equated this new art with music, the kind of association Wassily Kandinsky would apply when he actually made the first works acknowledged as non-figurative art on the eve of World War One, with titles referencing ‘compositions’ and ‘variations’ (even earlier abstract works by the likes of Hilma af Klint were not recognised at the time). Kandinsky, it should be noted, was active in the same bohemian Munich circles as Endell; in the late 1890s they lived on the same street in Schwabing, the city’s alternative centre of the time, and it is probable yet not conclusively proven that they knew each other.

‘Joy in Form’ was actually the opener of a three-part series under the rubric ‘Formenschönheit und decorative Kunst’ (Beauty of Forms and Decorative Art), which explains the inconclusive conclusion. The two other parts of the series were similarly ahead of their time, addressing ‘the straight line’ and ‘linear structures’ respectively. Endell then distilled his thoughts on this coming art into a highly potent dose – just one paragraph, under the heading ‘Formkunst’ (Art of Forms) stuck at the end of the March 1898 edition of Dekorative Kunst like an afterthought. Endell’s theories were still just theories, but not for long.

We catch up with Endell again in 1902, after he has returned to Berlin with bride Else Plötz (who later found cult renown as the ‘Dada Baroness’, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven). He has been very busy in the intervening years. He has left Munich behind, but also left it with a hugely radical structure, the most conspicuous and contested example of the new style known as Jugendstil – a refurbishment of the photo studio owned by his friends Augspurg and Goudstikker, the Fotoatelier Elvira. Its façade boasts a striking design resembling a dragon, a wave, or – nothing; art historian Erich Franz calls it ‘the first abstract work in art history’. Endell has also designed a sanatorium on the island of Föhr and the Buntes Theater in Berlin, writhing with the vegetal forms which were his specialty. In each case Endell insists on designing everything, including wall fixtures and furnishings, right down to individual door handles, in line with Jugendstil’s conception of itself as an all-enveloping solution to the built environment.

But the style was not widely adopted, and never threatened to unseat historicism as the dominant mode of public and private architecture in Germany. This was not just something in the air – it was a top-down command from Kaiser Wilhelm II himself, who loathed modern forms and was never shy of intervening in the cultural life of his subjects. Art and architecture, he held, had been perfected in the past, so all that was left for the creative professional was to combine these inherited forms in new ways; seeking to replace them, on the other hand, was ‘hubris’. Endell, who disdained historicism with comparable zeal, targeted the big guy himself in an open letter in February 1902.

Shortly after this, Endell turned his thoughts to ‘Originalität und Tradition’ (Originality and Tradition) for the journal Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration (German Art and Decoration). His piece was illustrated with his designs for the Buntes Theater and items of furniture, amid numerous other examples of high-end Jugendstil in the issue. In his article Endell renews his attack on historicism and defends modern currents in art and culture; the astute contemporary reader may have picked up on the reference to ‘hubris’ and other callbacks to the Kaiser’s pronouncements. But Endell also considers how new styles might be codified and communicated to create a new tradition that would replace vacuous pastiche.

Here, before Walter Gropius had even begun studying architecture, Endell calls for a fearless embrace of new forms, rejection of unreflective national pathos, an approach to design that reflects its age. He advocates a fusion of art, design and architecture stripped of mystical reverence, ‘concentration on forms and colours’, and a means of defining, refining, and consolidating new creative principles and transmitting them to the next generation. These are all qualities that the Bauhaus would come to embody almost two decades later. Endell comes close to ‘form follows function’ (the maxim coined by architect Louis Sullivan in 1896) but pulls away, unable to relinquish the inspiration of nature in ornament, refusing to see it as ‘brute barbarism’ – almost ten years before Adolf Loos equated ornament with crime. Yet here, as in his writings at the close of the previous century, he advocates a radical reduction and reassessment of means.

Two years later, Endell opened his own small ‘Formschule’ out of his apartment in Berlin, where he also wrote The Beauty of the Metropolis. By the time the First World War broke out Endell had enriched his city with a hotel, a racetrack and a design for the main courtyard of the Hackesche Höfe, which showed the growing concision of his design vocabulary. During the war, when the art and design school in Weimar was looking for a new director, August Endell was on the short list. Yet the job went to Walter Gropius, who transformed the school into the Bauhaus and sparked an aesthetic revolution in the young Weimar Republic and the entire world under principles which, even if they weren’t aware of it, had been proposed by August Endell.

Endell, meanwhile was granted directorship of a similar institution in Breslau (Wrocław) but, with his ever-fragile health declining further, he retired to Berlin, where he died in 1925.

---

August Endell

Joy in Form

translated by James J. Conway

In the increasingly vehement demand for a new style in architecture and applied arts, for a new, unique and autonomous means of decoration, we hear discordant voices of warning from cautious individuals who, from the lofty height of their mature experience and their perception, elucidated and deepened by extensive historical studies, smile pityingly at the foolish doings of the young and are always willing to show the public the one true path. They teach us that there can be no new forms, that all possibilities have been exhausted in the styles of the past, that all art consists in the use of all these forms with individual nuances. Yes, they even sell us the pitiful eclecticism of the last few decades as the new style.

To those who know, this want of courage seems merely ridiculous. Because they clearly see that we are not only at the beginning of a new stylistic period, but also at the beginning of the development of a completely new art; art with forms that mean nothing and represent nothing and remind us of nothing, which stir our souls as deeply, as strongly, as only music can do with sound.

The barbarian hates our music; it takes culture and education to enjoy them. And the joy of form must be attained; you must learn to see it, to immerse yourself in the form. We have to discover our eyes. It is true that people have long unconsciously delighted in form, its development can be clearly traced in the history of the visual arts, but it is not yet a permanent, captive possession. Painters have taught us much; but their primary goal was always colour, and wherever they looked for form, they mostly looked for the intellectually characteristic through an exact reproduction of its object, not the aesthetically characteristic which nature seldom offers in the dimensions a painter requires, and only accidentally.

If we wish to understand and measure formal beauty, we must learn to view it in isolation. It is to the details that we must direct our attention, to the shape of a tree root, to the base of a leaf, the stem, to the structure of tree bark, the lines forming the turbid foam on the shores of a lake. We must not glide carelessly over the forms, we must follow them closely with our eyes, witness every bend, every curve, every expansion, every contraction, in short every change in form. Because we only see precisely with one point in our field of vision, and only what we can see clearly can affect our emotions. But when we see in this way, a new, hitherto unknown world of enormous richness arises before us. It awakens a thousand moods in us. New sensations all the time with new nuances, unexpected transitions. Nature seems alive and we now understand that there really are such things as grieving trees and mischievously malicious branches, chaste grasses and terrifying flowers. Admittedly, not everything exerts such an impression, there is no lack of the dull, insignificant and ineffectual, but the watchful eye will perceive everywhere, in every field, forms of wondrous stimuli that shake our entire soul.

This is the power of form over our mind, a direct immediate effect with no intercessory links, certainly not the consequence of anthropomorphism, or personification. When we speak of a grieving tree, we by no means think of the tree as a living being that mourns, we merely believe that it arouses the sensation of grieving in us. Or if we say a fir tree is striving upwards, we are not investing it with a soul; expressing the occurrence of ‘striving’ merely makes it easier for the mind of the listener to generate the successively emerging image of the upright. These are simply linguistic stopgaps to replace the lack of words and to more readily evoke vivid perception.

Nor is it memory that gives forms their significance for our emotions. A circle may bring to mind the ring, and thus fidelity and eternity, but it can just as easily evoke bondage, serfdom and slavery, and so the circle arouses first one, then another sensation in us. But such sensations have as little significance for the art of forms as the memories that an individual associates with the notes of a flute have in music.

Also, one needn’t believe that the unconscious idea of the essence of an object only appears meaningful to us in its form. However, there is a certain parallelism between essence and appearance. A big tree seems strong to us, and it is. But it appears so to us long before we know its true strength. And form and inner being do not always correspond. An angry man often looks amusing enough and a hollow tree just as strong as a healthy one, stronger, even, and more colossal with its torn bark. The path does not lead from essence to appearance, no, it’s the reverse – the appearance offers us initial insight into the essence. We transfer the impression created by the form to the inner being of the object and, through the above-mentioned parallelism, we are usually correct. Think for instance of the instinctive fear felt by animals and children. The form immediately arouses the sensation, there is no intervening psychological event of which we are aware. And unconscious events explain everything and precisely for that reason – nothing.

‘But then how do we explain the sensation of form?’ – it is the ones who have never experienced it who ask this the loudest. I could answer, but this is not the place for that; you can enjoy music without knowing how chords and chord progressions are able to rouse us so powerfully. However, in order to calm the sceptics and make it easier for them to enter the world of forms, I will attempt to describe the effects of sensation in their formal elements and compositions and at least suggest a psychological explanation, to the extent that one may do so without lengthy discussion.

---

August Endell

Art of Forms

translated by James J. Conway

There is an art which nobody seems to know about yet: the art of forms, which stirs people’s souls solely through forms that do not resemble anything known, that do not represent or symbolise anything, which operate through freely found forms like music through free sounds. But people don’t wish to know about it, they cannot enjoy that which their intellect fails to understand, and so they invented programme music, which means something, and programme decoration, which resembles something, to prove their right to exist. And yet there will come a time when monuments will rise up in parks and public places that are neither people nor animals, fantastical forms which will transport people to intoxicating rapture and unimagined delight.

---

August Endell

Originality and Tradition

translated by James J. Conway

The advocates of newer artistic endeavours stand accused, ad nauseam, of disregarding all traditions, of seeking to start from scratch with no models whatsoever, of looking down on all past artistic practice with contempt, and refusing to profit from past experience as a matter of principle. Over and over we hear that art and proficiency existed before our times and that to ostentatiously set oneself above these past treasures is a ridiculous craving for originality, arrogance and boundless hubris. Well, the evil moderns are not as bad as all that, but it cannot be denied that they in fact have made it their ambition to invent the forms they use themselves, although not by assembling them from books or even with the help of photographs or casts. But is that really so outrageous? We would readily mock a poet, a composer, a painter or sculptor if he were naive enough to copy existing art works in whole or in part and then issue them as his own. In architecture, however, not only are we to allow this, it is to be the only possible form of artistic work. Admittedly, work in architecture and the applied arts more often leads to the use of alien forms than other areas; partly because the need for such work is infinitely large by comparison, and also because truly original artists are as rare here as anywhere else.

Added to this is the technical difficulty and the high cost of execution, which greatly restrict if not nullify the opportunities for trying out case by case, and it stands to reason that once someone has found the artistic solution for overcoming a technical difficulty – for instance in a door lintel or a vault – others will readily follow in the same direction. And so there is indeed a greater stability of forms in architecture than in other arts. That is why we only speak of styles, in the true sense, in architecture and applied arts. But closer inspection reveals this stability to be merely illusory, and in times of vibrant artistic spirit, innumerable variations can be found within a given style. We know, for example, that in the mid-19th century the lone master carpenter would make it his ambition to give each new customer a new shape of chair. This was an entirely healthy form of applied arts and one could never seriously object to this kind of re-creation; it is in the nature of things. But it is not here that the moderns direct their polemic, but against the hideous, ‘scientifically precise’ imitation of old stylistic forms. For the reproduction will seldom be precise and the want of love in the creation will scarcely escape the attentive eye. There is a difference between giving of your own and stealing something else. Stealing is not a creative activity. But even if ‘the perfected means of the present day’ should render the imitation precise, this still leaves the incongruity between the stolen and the self-fashioned, because unfortunately in earlier times they were not kind enough to build model houses and cupboards that reflected the needs of their grandchildren. And so we are left with no alternative but to at least design the form of our rooms and their sequence ourselves. Our external life alone differs in a thousand ways from the life before us, through our changed relations with each other, our commercial life and not least the lighting we have developed. Even more important are the completely distinct social stratification, the unique pace of our life and the fundamentally different balance to our life and our happiness.

All of this requires individual expression and truly it is better to be awkward and clumsy in expressing your own longings and desires than to feign artistry with stolen forms or to erect ostentatious buildings which, through their mendacity, are suited only to revealing the saddest qualities of our time. So there’s nothing for it, we really do need new forms.

In the past they responded by claiming that all forms were exhausted and that it was simply impossible to create anything new. No one would dare say that now. But the erstwhile devotees of these ideas declare simplicity, elegantly unadorned, to be the only worthwhile goal worth striving for. Ornament is secondary, brute barbarism even. Sadly the heralds of this doctrine offer little that is pleasing, and that little is stolen from the Biedermeier style, from the English and from the Americans. Naturally, the smooth angularity of these forms in combination with fine materials is astonishing. But after a while one senses this blasé scepticism, essentially too cowardly to live and to create, to be a sterile aberration. Inventing simple forms is not at all easy, and such forms cannot be the inception but only the fruit of long and intensive endeavour. First we have to learn to operate through complicated structures until we are sure enough to express a lot even with simple means. Of course, the supporters of that direction accuse the newer style of gimmickry and obtrusion. It is quite clear that every new thing that was created without models and on the basis of principles that had never before been followed is surprising in its effect, quite apart from any artistic element. The unfamiliar is simply conspicuous, and the viewer lacks all prerequisites and criteria by which to judge the congruity of the individual piece, since the very aim is newness by principle, and this principle is neither recognised nor acknowledged. But it is a rather disdainful tactic to interpret this fact as a base craving for admiration on the part of the new. Naturally every artist wishes to be noticed, but one must not forget that it also takes a little courage to apply a new, alien principle as a statute for one’s own work when no one can judge the effect in advance and everything is called into question; artistic reputation – not to mention material subsistence. For the rest, however, we don’t always need to conflate these questions with moral considerations right from the start.

Of course, the moderns will often fail, exposing them to the ridicule of older colleagues. This results from the enormous difficulties in seeking your own salvation on a new pathway. We lack all support and, above all, every tradition. Because in reality the matter is this: it was not the moderns who destroyed tradition; tradition was destroyed by the conscious copyists of the 19th century, by the imitators of the Hellenic and the Renaissance, the Gothic and the other historical schools. This is because formulae for assembling new buildings in endless variations from drawing templates, photographs and casts really have nothing in common with artistic tradition; there is only one tradition for the artist and that is the tradition of artistic creation. One must see in person how an artist overcomes problems and obstacles. Only through such direct transferral can artistic sensibility and artistic proficiency be passed down from generation to generation and develop over time to ever greater richness, greater sharpness and surety. The passing down of rules and laws of craft, a perfect, precise, detailed handicraft tradition; for art is craft, a highly complex craft, yes, but one that by all means can be taught and learned through teaching. We must emphasise this, particularly nowadays, when time and again art is raised to the heavens as a mystical achievement, as a miracle and – despised, a view that has caused the most grievous damage to our entire artistic life. Art is nothing but work; it requires nothing more than a complete, detailed knowledge of the artistic effect; it demands unconditional, passionate devotion and awe. But it is not the product of erratic genius or even of unexpected ‘moods’. You can always tell dilettantes by their need for mood.

Certainly, learning arts and crafts is made far more difficult by the fact that we have no traditional rules and laws, and it must therefore be our most earnest endeavour to gain them and to ensure their general dissemination. This should first include a precise description of the tools and methods for studying nature, for seeking inspiration from past and foreign cultures, and above all a systematic knowledge of forms and colours. And naturally no more generalised phrases, not even the aesthetic phrases repeated ad nauseam about ‘construction’, about ‘simplicity’, about ‘material authenticity’, about ‘practicality’, the golden ratio or similarly fine things. Also no doctrines of male or female art, of the representation of ideals or the embodiment of historical ideas or even of the cosmos itself and the creation of the world. Instead we need clear, sober answers to the questions that the work presents to us. How you make a line hard, how you make it soft, calm, noble, smooth, elegant, how you make an ornament appear lighter and how you make it heavy. How heavy elements can be brought into harmony with each other. How you transform a vertical orientation into a horizontal orientation. How you make an outward protruding ornament float in the opposite direction. How you enrich a line, how you branch it out, how you arrange a bundle of lines, how far you can go in detail without negating the overall effect, and so on. In short, sure training of the eye for the effects of shape and colour. Only systematic practice and rigorous training will lead us there. Of course, initially we moderns can only pass on our own experience.

---

‘Joy in Form’ by August Endell was originally published in German as ‘Die Freude an der Form’, part of the series ‘Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst’ (Beauty of Form and Decorative Art) in Dekorative Kunst, vol. 1, no. 2 (2 November 1897); ‘Art of Forms’ by August Endell was originally published in German as ‘Formkunst’ in Dekorative Kunst, vol. 1, no. 6 (6 March 1898). ‘Originality and Tradition’ by August Endell was originally published in German as ‘Originalität und Tradition’ in Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, vol. 9, no. 6 (March 1902).

These translations © 2021 James J. Conway

Free, proud and alone: remembering Elsa Asenijeff

The name Elsa Asenijeff may be fleetingly familiar to readers of Rixdorf Editions titles, having turned up as an example of radical Wilhelmine culture referenced in the respective afterwords for Berlin’s Third Sex, Death, We Women Have no Fatherland and The Nights of Tino of Baghdad. But her name and the books to which it was attached barely muster a footnote in German-language literary history despite her searingly original writing. Her likeness, on the other hand, is far more recognisable, peering from numerous depictions by her partner of many years, artist Max Klinger. Elsa Asenijeff died eighty years ago today in circumstances that remain contested, and this feels like a good time to shift the focus to one of early 20th-century Germany’s most fascinating figures.

Elsa Maria Packeny was born in Vienna in 1867. Following a comfortable upbringing and a good education by the standard for girls at the time, she pursued one of the few options available to intellectually ambitious women of her day – training as a teacher. In 1890 she married Bulgarian diplomat Ivan Nestoroff and the first issue of the largely unhappy union, son Asen, was born the following year, but died in infancy.

Elsa Nestoroff, as she still was, went to Leipzig in 1895 in hopes of studying; as a foreigner she was tolerated at a time when German women couldn’t study in their own country’s universities, although she needed her husband’s permission even to attend philosophy and economics lectures as a guest, banished to the back row. In 1896 she issued her first book – Ist das die Liebe? (Is This Love?), a collection of ‘little psychological tales and observations’ – under a pseudonym which recalled her first-born: Elsa Asenijeff. Meanwhile she bore another son, Theophil Heraklit Nestoroff, who would later become a composer and first violinist for the Vienna Philharmonic.

Elsa Asenijeff and son Theophil

In 1898, Asenijeff – now separated from her husband – attended a function in Leipzig at which, the legend goes, she repelled an over-insistent Frank Wedekind with a dagger she kept secreted in her clothes. At this same event she attracted the eye of Max Klinger who asked her to model for him, and she soon embarked upon the liaison for which she is best remembered. From a wealthy family, Klinger was already an established and successful painter and sculptor who exerted a particular influence on younger artists, and was later viewed as a key link between Symbolism and Surrealism.

That same year Asenijeff issued Sehnsucht (Longing), a collection of fragmentary, quixotic vignettes with titles like ‘Hallucination’, ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘Priestess of Pain’, populated by unnamed figures prey to unchecked emotions. Like many avant-garde German-language writers of her generation, Asenijeff was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, but here she fearlessly moves through a spectrum of sensations with a tortured intensity which reaches beyond the styles of its time and instead looks ahead to the 20th century.

Also appearing in 1898 was Aufruhr der Weiber und das Dritte Geschlecht (Uprising of Women and the Third Sex), a book-length essay which captured Asenijeff’s idiosyncratic views on the place of women in society. While she believed in women’s right to vote and to study, her particular brand of feminism found fault with the methods if not the aims of the emancipation movement of the time and highlighted differences between men and women that appear irreconcilable.

As the 20th century dawned, it wasn’t just Berlin and Munich which supported alternative lifestyles and progressive cultural production. Düsseldorf, for instance, hosted a vibrant community of outsiders. And Leipzig, a hugely important centre for publishing, gave rise to a bohemian subculture at the centre of which stood the brazenly unmarried couple: Max Klinger and Elsa Asenijeff.

Asenijeff was the face and body of numerous Klinger works of this time, and even accompanied the artist on a trip to the Pyrenees to select marble that would be fashioned into her likeness. But she was never simply a mute companion to drape picturesquely over the furniture; her intellect could not be contained by the role of muse. Klinger, who comes off poorly in any account of Asenijeff’s life, held out the prospect of marriage but in deference to his conservative family he was wary of formalising their relationship. By the time Asenijeff divorced Nestoroff in 1901, she had already had a daughter to Klinger, Desirée.

Max Klinger: Elsa Asenijeff in Evening Dress, c. 1903/04

In 1902 Asenijeff issued perhaps her best-known work, Tagebuchblätter einer Emanicipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman), which drew an admiring letter from Else Lasker-Schüler. Strongly autobiographical, its Viennese central character ‘Irene’ is freshly divorced and studying in Leipzig; a female friend commits suicide after an unhappy affair with an artist. Asenijeff directs her full fury at the fixed gender roles offered by society at the time; not just the patriarchy of the bourgeoisie but also the romantic delusions of the bohemian circles in which she moved. Again the vigour and subjectivity of her vision were more suggestive of the future than anything of the past, an impression reinforced by the pre-Expressionist vehemence of Der Kuss der Maja (Maja’s Kiss), a fiction collection issued the following year. This included ‘Der Tod der schönen Hetäre’ (‘The Death of the Fair Hetaera’), translated below, a mythic tale that foretold the change in fortunes of her later life with striking prescience. Here the hetaera and poetess evidently represent the dual aspects of her public persona – artist’s courtesan and independent writer, the mute muse and the eloquent advocate.

Asenijeff enjoyed a brief period of relative renown prior to World War One, when her works were anthologised and set to music. Following a study of her lover’s Beethoven memorial Asenijeff entered into a true collaboration of her words and Klinger’s images in Epithalamia (1907). In 1913 she appeared in Das Kinobuch alongside Else Lasker-Schüler and other exponents of Expressionism. Two episodic verse collections, Die neue Scheherezade (The New Sheherazade) and Hohelied an den Ungennanten (Song of Songs to the Unnamed) consolidated her status in the emerging movement, and she offered inspiration to younger Leipzig writers.

Max Klinger: Belta vince (Beauty conquers), ex libris for Elsa Asenijeff

The last quarter-century of Elsa Asenijeff’s life makes difficult if inconclusive reading. In 1917 a relatively minor debt brought her in contact with the law, and Klinger withdrew from their long-standing if unofficial arrangement. Having constantly refused to extend the security of matrimony to her, in 1919 he married a model 36 years his junior. The following year, Asenijeff – poor, isolated, socially outcast – was declared legally incapacitated on highly tenuous grounds. Klinger died the same year and with no assistance forthcoming from her own family Asenijeff remained institutionalised for much of the rest of her life.

It is thanks to years of assiduous research by Leipzig writer Rita Jorek that we know anything of her later years. It appears that Asenijeff was simply an inconvenience, and her angry protestations of mental fitness were taken as confirmation of her ‘condition’, while the few friends who may have been able to help were kept from seeing her. Asenijeff’s last published work Aufschrei (Outcry, 1922) was a bitter reckoning with the world and the men who brought so much destruction to it.

In the ensuing years Asenijeff was shuffled from institution to institution. In 1933 she was transferred to a ‘Corrective Facility for Antisocial and Work-Shy Adults’, falling into one of the categories marked out for persecution under the Third Reich. On 5 April 1941 Elsa Asenijeff died, officially of pneumonia, but it is thought she may have been a victim of the Nazi euthanasia programme.

A plaque adorning one of Asenijeff’s residences in Leipzig, erected through Rita Jorek’s advocacy, contains lines from Die neue Scheherazade:

And I wish to be free, proud and alone
To bear my life upright
And to be my own destiny … !

---

Elsa Asenijeff

The Death of the Fair Hetaera

translated by James J. Conway

The fair hetaera lived by the passionate desires of men.

Nobody ever told her to take up the dishonourable profession, rather her blood chose it just as decisively as another, born in filth, saves herself in loving fidelity for her one true love.

She loved no one but knew how to inspire love in others.

Her thoughts never transcended the earthly realm. For she believed that the most beautiful thing is a woman’s body with its thousand ever-changing movements. And she found no end of delight in the beautifully domed siblings upon which she gazed in the mirror.

But as she was otherwise proud by nature she by no means gave herself to anyone who crossed her path, rather she chose whoever pleased her and it was a mark of favour that she would allow him to fulfil her desires.

So it was that she outshone the richest queen; her feet trod not sands but pearls, her countenance was reflected in diamonds.

Kingly coronets from anointed places flocked around her smile. Yet smiling was all she did (for she knew it became her), and she believed that men were only there at all to worship the body of woman. For what other use might there be for them?

But one day Death, whose ribs contained no flesh, stood in her room as cold-hearted as an hourglass.

Quite business-like and with great proficiency, he simply cut the threads of her life, paying no mind to her resistance.

When her loved ones came to her in the morning she was dead.

Who would have thought it! Instead of fulfilling pleasant dreams of bliss there lay a body upon which decay was writing its bright runes.

And as violently as they once loved her, they now fled from her.

But as she had passed her life frivolously, lavishing her bounty on each day with no fear for the next, there was nothing with which to pay the gravedigger or the coffin-maker.

Therefore it well nigh transpired that she, once so adored, was not borne to the dark furrow where all life’s pathways converge. And no servant of the Lord could be found to accompany the last retinue of the now blameless body.

Then the pale, chaste poetess passed by.

‘You, look here,’ the bystanders called to her. ‘You have imagination – give us slander for the sinner!’

But the child’s eyes of the poetess shone with clemency: ‘May your errors be forgiven and the wrongs of the dead buried.’

After this she went out, cleaned the dead body, weeping that such beauty should pass, and when it was night she bore her out of the city on her powerful, slender shoulders. For she was poor, as poets are, and could not pay the gravedigger. She lay the dead woman under the lilac bushes on the hillside, loosed her sumptuous brown curls and lay them like soft silks around her body. Then she shook the lilac bushes above until the whole corpse was covered in blooms. After picking the leaves off and gently throwing them away, finally she stirred up the soil and trickled it over the dead woman.

She then planned to wait until the stars were ablaze to keep vigil, as is the custom. But she was tired after her arduous labours and as the balmy evening wafted over her she fell asleep.

But then it seemed to her as though she had only now awoken.

And as though the dead woman were gently striding blue meadows with flickering blossoms aglow. But these blossoms were the stars that she had once so admired from below. She flew by them like a timid desire.

Finally they had flown across the blue realm of Heaven to Mother Mary. The angels grew restive and pressed the tips of their wings before their faces.

But the beautiful dead woman grew larger and her proud head reared up into invisibility. Her eyes flinched not as the swarm of prosecutors, dark bats in sombre fluttering cloaks, screeched around her countenance.

Yet there seemed so much guilt and error about her, so many condemned to death and misfortune for her sake, that the blackness of it blocked out the sun.

But she comprehended none of this, for the meaning of words were always alien to her, and she merely gazed at her outstretched foot and playfully extended her toes.

Now they deliberated: she was to be bound to the heaviest shooting star and thus cast down into Hell.

Then the poetess stepped forward. ‘Who are you, I know you not,’ said the Queen of the Stars. ‘Oh, but I know You, dear Mary, sweet mother!’

It was not as the bats had averred. It was only the wicked and the weak, superfluous even unto themselves, who perished for her sake. The worthy, however, grew strong by her and their defiance liberated itself from hers and was part of her good works. All this she did in her own manner but she, too, could only be ruthless to weeds and beneficial to the flourishing.

The poetess now saw that the Lady Mary had grown pensive, and mischievously she quickly added: ‘Sweet Mother Mary, take her among your pure ones so that she may improve. And when the angels see her beauty they will be more deeply touched by the lot of humanity and pray more fervently for the unwitting sins of our weakness.’

The gentle Lady Mary could no longer contain herself. Tears poured down her noble, merciful face. She touched not the dead woman, taking instead the poetess in her forgiving arms yet speaking unto the other: it is forgotten and forgiven. Come here to my left hand, because at the right sit the mothers who drew their last breath with the new-born’s cry.

---

‘The Death of the Fair Hetaera’ by Elsa Asenijeff was first published in German as ‘Der Tod der schönen Hetäre’ in Der Kuss der Maja, issued by the Seemann-Verlag, Leipzig, in 1903.

This translation © 2021 James J. Conway