Strange Flowers

The first of many oddities in these pictures – granted, it is hard to choose – is arguably the tone. Why are these photos, with imagery that looks contemporary or certainly no more than 50 years old, rendered in antique sepia? But the when is no less perplexing than the who, the where and the why.

To begin with the when: they were in fact taken in 1924 by Minya Diéz-Dührkoop, and they show the “masks” – actually intricately constructed and dazzlingly inventive full-body costumes – made and worn by German dancers Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt for their own performances in the early 1920s. The photos may in fact be familiar to you from image-heavy websites that lift liberally from cultural history, big on the carnivalesque presentation of avant-garde groups gone by, their findings cursorily contextualised.

These are the only images of which we can say with some certainty that they depict Schulz and Holdt, and yet they find them entirely hidden to us – an occlusion emblematic of the mystery that has accrued to the story of the troubled pair: the “mask dancers”.

It is a story that begins in 1896 in the Spreewald, south of Berlin, with the birth of Lavinia Schulz. At just 16 she moves to Berlin seeking artistic advancement, and makes contact with Herwarth Walden, around the time of his divorce from Else Lasker-Schüler. At the apex of Expressionism, Walden is its prime catalyst, publishing, promoting, writing and exhibiting under the banner of “Sturm”. During World War One these activities extend to the stage with the launch of the “Sturmbühne”, where Lavinia finds work in the wardrobe department under director Lothar Schreyer. Their first collaboration is the short play Sancta Susanna by Expressionist playwright August Stramm, who has already fallen in battle. Schreyer’s production distils the uncompromising energies of Expressionism and the obscene violence of war, less than a month from its chaotic conclusion. A surviving sketch by Schulz, thought to be from this production, is testament to her considerable skills.

But Schreyer also saw Schulz as a performer – a lead, in fact. She appeared nude, or near nude (the record is unclear) in the titular role, a nun taking her role as a bride of Christ quite literally. There’s crucifix humping, sisters walled up behind the altar and a giant spider, and the whole thing ends with Susanna naked, unrepentant and horny with the other nuns raining down a chant of “SATANA!”. An “artistic revolution of the stage” in Schreyer’s estimation, it was performed to an audience largely made up of Sturm habitués. One reviewer wryly referred to it as a Stürmchen, but the “little storm” would swell into a tempest a few years later when the work became an opera in Paul Hindemith’s setting; the Catholic Women’s League prayed for three days in protest at the premiere (and it’s still making waves).

In the turmoil of the early Weimar Republic, Lothar Schreyer moved to Hamburg to establish the theatre troupe Kampfbühne, and he convinced Lavinia to join him. It was there that she met our other mask dancer, actor and dancer Walter Holdt, who was just 19 years old. Walter had done military service in World War One but not active duty, and returned with little to show but a pistol. The pair fell in love but their relationship proved intensely volatile; Schreyer spoke of “demonic” forces in Schulz’s life. They were expelled from the Kampfbühne (literally: combat stage) after physically assaulting one another during performances.

In 1920, Schulz and Holdt moved into a basement apartment together in the “Besenbinderhof” building, close to Hamburg’s main station and even closer to the city’s applied arts museum, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MK&G), which would play an important part in their life and afterlife. Desperately poor, they lived amid bare walls illumined by naked light bulbs, and slept in hammocks. They launched themselves as a dance duo, and it was evidently Lavinia’s idea that they perform in highly complex costumes of their own devising, the making of which consumed much of their energy and limited resources. As vegetarians they eschewed silk because it comes from an animal; in any case their budget extended only to recycled materials. The costumes weighed up to 40 kilos and were extremely uncomfortable to wear, even deliberately so, as it later appeared. For their performances, Lavinia invented a sophisticated system of choreographic notation. The pair subsumed their lives into their art, just as they renounced their personalities to disappear into type, in costumes that resembled robots, monsters, insects – anything but people. It was similar to the territory in which Valeska Gert operated at the time, her performance embracing grotesque archetypes and abstractions.

In 1921 Schulz and Holdt met young musician Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, and invited him to accompany their act and share their minimal basement quarters. That year brought the first of a number of performances in Hamburg’s Curio-Haus, which hosted artists’ balls that were a feature of the city’s avant-garde scene where costumes, décor, music and performance combined to create a Gesamtkunstwerk. In December of that year they performed in the MK&G, by which time they had married in secret, rejecting conventional bourgeois marriage as “tasteless”.

As Germany descended into the squalor and madness of hyperinflation, Schulz and Holdt‘s conditions worsened, exacerbated by Lavinia’s refusal to accept payment for their (rare) dance performances, which would have profaned the sacred value she attached to her art. “Spirit and money are two antagonistic poles, and when you sell things of the spirit for money, you have sold the spirit to the money and lost the spirit.” A promising film venture for which Lavinia created storyboards sadly went unrealised.

Lavinia was nothing if not intense. She described her life as “purgatory” and summarised the characteristics of her worldview as “deprivation, hunger, cold, Nordic landscapes with storm, ice and catastrophe”. This avid hunger for the elemental came with a deeply troubling edge. She rejected Christianity for its Jewish roots and described herself as “Aryan”, bemoaning the German people’s loss of “authentic racial character”.

This wasn’t as rare a view among her avant-garde set as one might assume; the Kampfbühne was suffused with nationalist sentiment, while the work of the pair’s associate, Expressionist painter Emil Nolde, was informed by racial hierarchies; he later attempted to ingratiate himself with the Nazis, but they had little use for a representative of “degenerate” art.

In 1923, Lavinia gave birth to son Hans Heinz, named in honour of their musician friend who had vacated the basement apartment to give the young family more space; Emil Nolde helped them out with the rent. Lavinia and Walter’s last known appearance took them back to Curio-Haus in February 1924, and brought them to the point of collapse. Back in their basement flat Walter descended into depression, barely able to leave his hammock, while Lavinia became paranoid and delusional. You’re probably thinking this can’t end well …

Having sacrificed their health and a degree of sanity for their art, a desperate act finally brought them renown beyond their avant-garde Hamburg milieu. On the morning of 18 June 1924, 100 years ago today, Lavinia shot her husband with his own service pistol, and then herself. Baby Hans was found between them, unharmed. Walter died instantly, Lavinia succumbed to her injuries in hospital the following day, and the tragedy attracted attention throughout Germany and beyond. Numerous people who knew the couple claimed to have expected just such a conclusion. Initially the two were buried together, but Walter’s family refused to have him lie beside his murderer, and had his body reinterred.

After a memorial event at the MK&G, the costumes were cast to the attic where they lay in trunks. They weren’t even included in the museum’s inventory, which at least prevented them from being found and destroyed in the Nazis’ purge of “degenerate” art. The trove remained forgotten until 1988 when Nils Jockel, a curator at the museum, rediscovered the trunks under dust and pigeon excreta and opened them to discover the extraordinary costumes along with sketches and other works by the pair. Researching further, Jockel discovered that his own grandfather, sculptor Richard Luksch (some of whose works are held by the museum) had written an article at the time in which he described Schulz and Holdt’s appearance at one of the artists’ balls.

Restorers were astonished by the skill with which the costumes were constructed as well as the elements that appeared designed to make performance even more difficult. It is assumed although unconfirmed that Lavinia must have had some training in costume design beyond her practical experience at the Sturmbühne. The refurbished costumes were exhibited at the museum the following year and thereafter became permanent exhibits, staged as a kind of static rite, a techno primordial revue.

In the early 1990s, a few years after the rediscovery, Nils Jockel was approached by an old man seeking information about Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt – it was Hans Heinz, their son. He had been brought up by his paternal grandparents and had only recently discovered the truth about his parents.

Replicas were made of the costumes (you can see them in action here) and brought to wider audiences at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Jockel, still preoccupied by Schulz and Holdt decades after he reintroduced them to the world, has recently released a novelisation of their story called Kellertänzer (Basement Dancers).

It is a tale with passages of menacing silence punctuated by shrill crescendi. While Holdt barely emerges from the shadows, Schulz’s legacy is highly equivocal – a radical, self-sacrificing artist beholden to reactionary racial phantasms, a woman sensitive to the plight of silkworms who murdered her own husband. The demise of the pair has long been characterised as a noble sacrifice for art, although with no suicide note and the fact that Walter Holdt appears to have been shot in his sleep, it is impossible to know what the intention was, and if that intention was shared. And perhaps “intention” is too lofty a concept in an impossible situation with only enough oxygen to sustain anguish.

Like the museum, the building in which Schulz and Holdt lived survived the Second World War. To reach it from the museum you pass a kind of corral that draws the neediest of the city’s underclass, a confronting contemporary reminder that whatever else we draw from this story it is an account of supreme deprivation. A plaque remembers the pair adjacent to a ramp that descends to the site of their psychodrama.

You’re probably in need of cheering up so I will leave you with some more images from the superb MK&G from my visit last month; among its treasures are an outstanding Jugendstil section and entire interiors from Rococo sitting rooms to the lysergic blast of Verner Panton’s visionary late ’60s canteen for Der Spiegel magazine.

Berlin is cold and dark, there’s snow on the ground and the supermarkets are full of Lebkuchen and testy shoppers, so … it must be time for Secret Satan! Here we go with our annual serving of books with boho/queer/decadent/surreal/occult themes, and hopefully some surprises. I’ve been doing this since 2017 and while I enjoy selecting the titles, it’s an idea that has grown out of all proportion; something once fun risks becoming gruelling and overlong (this is known as Series Five Arrested Development Syndrome, or SFADS). They’re also getting a little repetitive as I find myself exploring the same furrows, bound by the limitations of my own tastes. Plus, I’m out of touch with publishing schedule rhythms since my own modest endeavours in the field came to a close last year. So, fair warning: this may be the last Secret Satan. But hey! Let’s not bum this party out before it’s even started.

As ever, please consider buying from independent book retailers, from Bookshop.org, or the publishers themselves. I have also just got my first order from Asterism, a great initiative that brings together some of the most interesting small presses working today. More on that below.

Our first book makes a smooth segue from my last post, which concerned the Munich villa of artist Franz Stuck. Secessions (eds. Ralph Gleis and Ursula Storch; no indication of translator) is the catalogue to an exhibition about the Secession movements in three cities, and their most emblematic representatives. The first was Munich in 1892 (Stuck) followed by Vienna (1897, Gustav Klimt), and finally Berlin (1898, Max Liebermann). Recreating these progressive breakthroughs in the sites of their inception (mostly; soz Munich), the exhibition recently wound up in Berlin and will continue next year in Vienna. And for more on the creative energies that made Vienna a leader in art and so many other areas, we have Richard Cockett’s Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World: “Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens.” As well as the fabled, familiar fin-de-siècle, Cockett’s study shows the innovations of the city continuing between the wars. And it is here that we locate Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase. Anita Berber in Wien 1922 (Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy. Anita Berber in Vienna 1922; ed. Magdalena Vuković). While only textually accessible to the German-speakers, this is a handsome, richly illustrated edition. It covers an episode that we looked at last year, when Anita Berber and dance partner Sebastian Droste upended the Austrian capital with scandal both onstage and off. It features numerous images for which the pair posed for the great Viennese photographer Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus), an honour they shared, improbably, with the last Empress of Austria. Zita became consort in the middle of World War One and died the year the Berlin Wall fell, by which time she “had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia”. That’s from Larry Wolff’s The Shadow of the Empress, in which the decline, fall and spectral afterlife of the Habsburgs is interwoven with the genesis of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. The libretto was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was a friend and keen supporter (along with his frustrated admirer Stefan George) of Leopold Andrian, grandson of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and member of the Young Vienna group. Andrian’s psyche was a battleground between his faith (Catholic) and orientation (gay), as reflected in his 1895 novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis, in which we share the thoughts of aristocrat Erwin, including his attraction to an impoverished former classmate. It is difficult to overstate the impact of this, one of the key German-language texts of this era, and I was shocked to discover it had never been published in English. Thanks, then, to Francesca Bugliani Knox for translating The Garden of Knowledge and to Studio Will Dutta for this beautiful hand-finished (limited) edition. This slender volume remained Andrian’s sole literary output, more or less; as the 20th century began he embarked on a career in diplomacy.

To be – as Leopold Andrian was – gay, European and aware in 1895 was to live with a vivid sense of peril, and it is another same-sex affair across class lines in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s trial that year that dominates Tom Crewe’s novel The New Life. It also makes the important point that when you enter conventional marriage as a cover for your sexuality, you’re actually ruining two lives. The titular anti-hero of Laura Lee’s Wilde Nights & Robber Barons: The Story of Marcel Schwabe was sent away to Australia during Wilde’s trial; he, too, had had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and was otherwise enmeshed in numerous schemes and scandals of the day, emerging as something of a swishy Flashman. Honestly, it’s a crazy story; try here for a primer. And naturally Wilde’s trial looms large in the reissued Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, the utterly essential study of the Yellow Decade; I rave at greater length about Matthew Sturgis’s 1995 book here. (Aside: a few years ago I caught an exhibition that included the actual calling card that kicked it all off, in which the Marquess of Queensberry denounced Oscar Wilde for “posing as a somdomite” (sic), although so indistinct was his enraged scrawl he might just as well have accused him of peeing in a submarine.) Meanwhile Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Past explores the often reactionary politics that dwelt within the heart of a movement that prided itself on its apolitical elevation from the concerns of the chattering classes. Alex Murray’s study reveals the quixotic ideologies of the likes of Swinburne, Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Machen, and the feverish jingoism of the two women writers who published under the name Michael Field.

More distaff Decadence in Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Joseph Bristow), which highlights the neglected work of writers like Amy Levy, Ella D’Arcy, Mabel Dearmer (a writer and illustrator who provides the outstanding cover image) along with changing male views of modern womanhood. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is a more accessible study with extensive thematic overlap. Author Jad Adams celebrates “pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease, and unwanted pregnancy” and notes that “A third of the writers of the Yellow Book, the outstanding literary and artistic journal which published in the middle years of the 1890s, were women.” Across the Channel we find the wonderful Rachilde, card-carrying cross-dresser (for real) whose works combine gender sedition, diabolic forces and a whole Index Librorum Prohibitorum of other outré themes. Available in English for the first time (translated by Brian Stableford), her gothic, supernatural novel The Princess of Darkness (1896) is “a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor”. Rachilde issued the book under a male pseudonym before reviewing it under her own name and, hilariously, trashing it. This brings us to her close companion Jean Lorrain. About a decade ago, I was lamenting that there was only one book by “Sodom’s ambassador to Paris” available in English, but now we have quite a selection, thanks in large part to Snuggly. The latest additions to their roster are his first book The Blood of the Gods (1882, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz), a proto-Decadent collection of stories in verse, and The Turkish Lady (no indication of translator). This is a trio of stories whose title tale (1898) was originally published with narrative photos in something like a fotonovela style. Rachilde and Lorrain were united not just by friendship and scandal – they were also both celebrity spokesmodels for Vin Mariani, a “tonic” wine reputed to aid productivity and wellbeing, a fact not unrelated to its high cocaine content. It enlivened the fun-de-siècle revels of everyone from the most disreputable bohemians to Pope Leo XIII. Yet another Vin Mariani shill was French writer Joséphin Péladan, who was also a self-proclaimed “sandwich man of the Beyond” and descendant of Assyrian kings. Son of Prometheus: The Life and World of Joséphin Péladan is the first major study in English of this singular figure who “authored over a hundred novels and monographs in an attempt to bring about the spiritual regeneration of society through mythopoetic art underpinned by esoteric thought.” Author Sasha Chaitow has written extensively on Péladan, and this volume also includes a foreword by Per Faxneld, who certainly knows his way around this field.

Faxneld is the editor, along with Johan Nilsson, of Satanism: A Reader, which reaches back to the mid-19th century in its survey of a phenomenon too often confused with the imbecilic mummery of devil worship. “Ranging from the esoteric to the anti-clerical, countercultural, and political, the texts span a wide variety of genres, from poetry and polemical religious tracts to ritual instructions and internet FAQ’s.” There is contemporary commentary to accompany these texts, which come from authors including Helena Blavatsky, history’s first self-proclaimed Satanist Stanisław Przybyszewski and – yes, you know he’s coming, there he is … he’s here! – Aleister Crowley. Here he is again trying to sneak in through the back door of a roman à clef, Ethel Archer’s The Hieroglyph. The author of The Book of Plain Cooking dishes up something considerably spicier in this, her sole novel which encompasses “her relationship with the magus Crowley and the various guises he took as poetic mentor, psychonaut, and mystical philosopher”. And Tobias Churton continues his impressively thorough survey of Crowley’s global adventures by detailing The Great Beast’s dark doings in the City of Light. Aleister Crowley in Paris finds Crowley joining the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order, proposing to Eileen Gray and staging “a demonstra­tion for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde’s tomb”. In Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States we rediscover Black Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph, a practitioner of the occult carnality that Crowley would later espouse (author Lara Langer Cohen offers an intriguing introduction to Randolph here). Our subterranean journey takes in “Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies”, with a consistent focus on the uses of space (space, of a different kind, is the place for Afrofuturism, a “lens used to imagine a more empowering future for the Black community through music, art, and speculative fiction.”) Around the same time we find the Oneida Community, one of the many competing sects in 19th-century upstate New York. In An Assassin in Utopia, Susan Wels relates the story of this idealistic society/sex cult and of one frustrated member, incel malcontent Charles Julius Guiteau (you know you’re an incel when you can’t get laid in a sex cult) – and a depressingly familiar pathway to violence, in this case the assassination of US President James Garfield.

Admirers of libidinal 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare are alerted to the reissue of the standard Spare biography by Phil Baker and A Bestiary of Austin Osman Spare, a slim edition accompanying an exhibition at the Viktor Wynd Museum in London (available at the discount price of £6.66, because of course) plus a new edition of Spare’s key text, The Book of Pleasure. The combination of words and images in which Spare sets out his esoteric philosophy is challenging; even Phil Baker calls it “almost unreadable by modern standards … vexing to read, like being told a boring dream”. Context always helps, and this edition comes with additional material including an afterword that analyses Spare’s “Sacred Alphabet”, which was in turn remarkably similar to a system of private signs devised by 19th-century French medium Hélène Smith. In Hélène Smith: Occultism and the Discovery of the Unconscious, Claudie Massicotte explores the life of a figure increasingly viewed in the context of outsider art rather than simply the credibility or otherwise of spiritualist practice. Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side details other women producing art across dimensions, “from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint […] and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun.”

The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (eds. Judith Noble, Tilly Craig and Victoria Ferentinou) is apparently “the first critical examination of her diverse legacy” (really? genuinely asking here; I thought there had been at least one but that could be the expired eggnog talking) in which contributors “explore themes of authorship and agency, Colquhoun’s drawing practice, her Celtic motifs, British Surrealism and alchemy.” Her American contemporary Paulina Peavy was a compelling figure and one I’ve been keen to explore further; she claimed her works were guided by a UFO who came to her during a séance, and she would paint wearing special masks for which she patented a face glue. Laura Whitcomb’s Paulina Peavy: Etherean Channeler is the first major work dedicated to this singular creative force, who early on espoused what she called “conscious surrealism”. The environments in which one of the great 20th century Surrealists lived and created in Britain, France, Spain and Mexico are the subject of Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, an intimate view from family member Joanna Moorhead, who previously penned a biography of Carrington. The artist’s close companion and collaborator Remedios Varo is the subject of a new academic study. Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (eds. Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq) explores “the integral relationship between Varo’s layered interests—in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science—and her beguiling technical approach to art making”. If nothing else, Varo is responsible for the artsiest pharmaceutical ads imaginable – her 1960s images for Bayer are representations of various maladies in an uncompromisingly occult style (please consult your alchemist if symptoms persist). But for some reason Leonora Carrington always forms a double act in my head with Dorothea Tanning; forthcoming book Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning covers the extraordinary sweep of the American artist’s life. Author Amy Lyford covers not just Tanning’s art but her endeavours in literature and film as well, in a career often filed under “Surrealism”, although she herself said “it disgusts me to be lumped in with all of these so-called Surrealist painters.”

Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable (ed. Jennifer R. Gross) is a major new study combining text and images from a polymath creator who is impossible to pin down to a medium or movement. Through her persona, connections and output, Mina Loy offers us numerous pathways. Here she is, for instance, alongside Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern by Lottie Whalen, “the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture.” That quartet features in the brief yet highly consequential story of the World War One-era journal The Blind Man which re-emerged recently in a rerun of the endless debate around authorship of the radical Dada work Fountain (Duchamp v. Freytag-Loringhoven, round 176). Emily Hage’s Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement examines The Blind Man and other publications, and a brief detour of these forking paths takes us to another study of the material legacy of Dada, The Dada Archivist: Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Berlin Dada by Stina Barchan. Following our thread back to Loy at the centre of the labyrinth and then groping back out into the darkness to a slightly menacing roar in the distance we come to Futurism & Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World (eds. Fabio Benzi and Renske Cohen Tervaert) which “examines for the first time the many interconnections between Futurism and other European avant-gardes as varied as the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Omega Workshops in Britain, Constructivism in Russia and Esprit Nouveau in France”. Loy was one of a surprising number of women who ventured into the unwelcoming terrain of Futurism. My favourite is probably the brilliant Valentine de Saint-Point, who came up with her own Futurist manifesto (which begins: “Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.” What’s not to love?). In Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism, Jennifer S. Griffiths introduces us to another woman artist who embraced the dynamism and optimism of early Futurism – not only tracing aircraft in flight on her canvases but flying herself in early two-seater planes. She broke with the Futurists as they moved closer to Mussolini and she was more or less wiped from the narrative of the movement. Because – surprise! – fascists ruin everything.

Amrit Kaur knew it; Italian writer Livia Manera Sambuy went In Search of Amrit Kaur (translator Todd Portnowitz) after coming across a photo of the Indian royal with an intriguing caption. “It claims that the Punjabi princess sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year.” Not all of this will turn out to be true. Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn and Sylvia Townsend Warner knew it. They join other subjects electrified by the Spanish Civil War and the Republican cause in Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. And Peter Feuchen knew it. The Danish adventurer and committed anti-fascist is the subject of Reid Mitenbuler’s Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age. The extraordinary Irving Penn cover image shows Freuchen, alongside his wife Dagmar Cohn, in a fur coat made from a polar bear he killed in Greenland. Feuchen spent many years in Greenland and was deeply enmeshed in and respectful of Inuit culture. The white sheen of the island in maps, and its outsized scale in the Mercator projection has captured many an imagination. In advance of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s 1960s journey from Togo to the Arctic island we find another West African adventurer in Philippe Soupault’s slim novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle (translated by Justin Vicari). “Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, Soupault imagines his alter ego’s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.” Philippe Soupault is one of those names you often find in a conga line of between-the-wars luminaries without (if you’re anything like me) being able to definitively place them. This is in part explained by a dearth of texts available in English, so all credit to publisher Wakefield (who have also added to their impressive series of Marcel Schwob rediscoveries with the essay collection Spicilege, translated by Alex Andriesse). Moving from the Surrealist Soupault to the “counter-Surrealist” René Daumal, we alight upon an intriguing relaunch. Many years ago in Sydney, back in a time when you could stumble on a mystery without instantly googling it away, I found a second-hand book by Patti Smith in a tiny, unusual format with foil stamp lettering. I had recently discovered her music but didn’t even know she issued books, so the whole thing was an intriguing enigma, and the small object seemed charged with a magic that resided just beyond my conscious awareness. Only many years later did I piece it all together: this was one of a series of books by Hanuman, which began in 1986; the press operated out of the Hotel Chelsea in New York but had its small-format books printed in India. The short texts, which covered the counterculture past and present, are now being reissued. From the first series comes René Daumal’s The Lie of the Truth (trans: Philip Powrie), a feisty rumination on falsehood. As it happens, Patti Smith is a great admirer of Daumal and his “science of imaginary solutions”, in particular his master work Mount Analogue. In his own day, Daumal came into conflict with André Breton – usually a good indication of character.

René Crevel was similarly at odds with Breton; his sexuality couldn’t fail to provoke the homophobic pontiff of Surrealism. Crevel’s bizarre 1929 novel Are You All Crazy? (translated by Sue Boswell) takes us from bohemian Paris via Davos (where the tubercular Crevel sought treatment) before winding up in Berlin, where we encounter Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer – a grotesque parody of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Naturally you remember René Crevel from his habit of smoking opium in a submarine in Toulon with lesbian princess Violette Murat, and this brings us neatly to the brilliant photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, who captured Murat and others in the port city. Take a look at this delightful video in which she recalls hanging out with Jean Cocteau as he cruised sailors (and smoked opium). Her candid studies of this time are recorded in albums held by the Tate, a stupendous, cornucopious selection of between-the-wars bohos, raging queens and other Flowers favourites – Bunny Roger, Edward Burra (“Lady Bureaux”), Augustus John, Bryher, Kenneth Macpherson, Jimmie Daniels, Brian Howard, William Seabrook [breathes into paper bag]. The photographer’s own tale is finally told in Thoroughly Modern: The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer, and Her Brilliant Bohemian Friends by Sarah Knights. “Ker-Seymer was prefigurative in the way she lived her life as a bisexual woman and in her contempt for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Fiercely independent, for much of her life she rejected the idea of family, preferring her wide set of creative friends.” Then, naturally, she gave up photography and opened a laundrette and made a big success of it and I LOVE HER. More singular destinies in Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories which together support author Diarmuid Hester’s thesis that “places make us”. The journey includes destinations such as E. M. Forster’s Cambridge, Josephine Baker’s Paris, Claude Cahun’s Jersey and James Baldwin’s Provence. And not just places on a map, but the actual spaces in which their occupants lived out a freedom frequently denied them elsewhere. The evocation of queer space in Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (eds. Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang) has something decidedly current about it, from the bisexual lighting of the cover image to the confidence of the imagery within. “Laurencin’s feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Natalie Clifford Barney.” And in a new edition of Barney’s The One Who Is Legion we are confronted with a true anomaly of her oeuvre. It is her only novel, the only book she issued in English (rather than her preferred French) and her most consistent engagement with modernism. It concerns a suicide who returns as “a genderless being with no memory of a pervious life, she/he is merged with the One. […] Now in a noncorporeal state, A.D. is able to turn aside from carnality, becoming ‘legion’ – that is, part of everyone.” (Suzanne Rodriguez).

The writers and publishers issuing these rediscovered works and thoughtful reappraisals of the past are doing utterly commendable work, which is more vital than ever in the face of the cretinous trolls driving our exhausting culture wars. Three new books illuminate the history of drag, two covering New York (Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman and the first-person testimony of Craig Olsen’s P.S. Burn This Letter Please), plus Drag: A British History. The home of the panto dame has proved surprisingly hospitable to cross-dressing entertainers (not always, of course), and Jacob Bloomfield’s study locates drag as “an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture.” Jac Jemc’s inventive Empty Theatre novelises a familiar double act: the gothic burlesque of Empress Elisabeth (subject of a post earlier in the year – this is what I mean by furrows!) and the Wagnerian escapism of her cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria, living out his sexuality in the shadows of his fantasy castles. Another gay king reigns (in his own head, at least) over The Story of the Paper Crown (translator: Frank Garrett). Polish author Józef Czechowicz was better known as a poet, and has never been previously available in English. It is difficult to believe that this dazzlingly inventive book is 100 years old; in it we encounter “Henryk, a sensitive young man who, through philosophical debates, sex, religious visions, and febrile fantasies, undertakes a journey whose ultimate purpose is to come to terms with his homosexuality as well as to build a foundation for an authentic life.” This was an outcome sadly denied pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, who was arrested for cottaging and eventually broken by prison and drink. Less familiar than his canvases and drawings are his written works, including prose poems, correspondence, and a “one-act farce on the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle”, which are gathered in Collected Writings. This is another title from Snuggly, clearly Secret Satan’s MVP. Their books, plus the Czechowicz (publisher Sublunary), the Hanuman reissues and our old favourite Spurl, as well as numerous other interesting publishers are available through a new(-ish) joint initiative Asterism. You can order directly from their online bookstore – I recently got my first dispatch from them, and quicker than most suppliers in the US can manage. Their line-up offers a wide variety of inventive, sometimes challenging works from small presses with a sense of mission and passion. More than just a platform, this is a little model of hope, a reminder that individual expression can, indeed should co-exist with collective endeavour: we are alone, we are not alone.

To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900–1950 (eds. Mirjam Zadoff and Karolina Kühn) takes us to Germany, from the Wilhelmine era to the post-World War Two reconstruction period. Along with private individuals, this volume covers the equivocal records of pioneers such as Claire Waldoff, Elisàr von Kupffer, and Magnus Hirschfeld. The good doctor Hirschfeld appears again in Jeffrey Schneider’s Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany, which explores soldier fetishisation, “an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation.” It quotes from my edition of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, the first English translation from Hans Ostwald’s visionary “Metropolis Documents” series – one of the most comprehensive studies of urban experience ever undertaken. I have long been puzzled that there hasn’t been more interest in the Metropolis Documents so the appearance in English of another volume, Ten Life Histories (translated by Stephen Carruthers) is a welcome development. Wilhelm Hammer’s 1905 text examines the lives of Kontrollmädchen – prostitutes registered with the Berlin police – in a pathologising approach familiar from the author’s study of Berlin lesbians, the only one of Ostwald’s series to be banned. I realise early 20th-century German publishing conventions may not be a matter of unending fascination for all, but I was intrigued to see the arrival of Siegfried the Wrestler: The Wilhelmine World of a Colportage Novel. Kolportage was the name given to the door-to-door sale of books in instalments; originally this included all kinds of literature, but later tended toward less sophisticated fare which was considered morally questionable. Author Peter S. Fisher notes that in current scholarship, patronising dismissals by middle-class opponents of this “trash” form are easier to find than responses from their – often working-class – readers. German writer Klabund (Alfred Henschke) emerged from Munich bohemian circles; he had his own moral battles to fight, facing accusations of obscenity and lèse-majesté. Here the perennially ill author, who died in Davos in 1928, delivers something feverishly akin to the Czechowicz and Crevel works noted above (all three writers died in their thirties). Spook (1922; translated by Jonah Lubin) is a “hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state” and also features a magnate draining the blood of his son to gain eternal life (sorry! I’m getting mixed up – that was from the news).

“Pablo Picasso,” insisted Jonathan Richman, “was never called an asshole.” Author Claire Dederer might disagree; in Monsters she considers case studies including Richard Wagner, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen and Norman Mailer as she seeks to answer the eternal question – can you hate the artist and love the art? Picasso joins an eclectic cast including Mascha Kaléko, Gustaf Gründgens, Theodor Adorno, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller in Love in a Time of Hate (translated by Simon Pare). The format of Florian Illies’s latest book will be familiar to anyone who read the author’s 1913; it has the same dense simultaneity, the same acceleration toward doom, the same weighting toward German names. The text swoops down on a subject for a few paragraphs – sometimes just one – before shifting elsewhere, only to return pages or chapters later. But where 1913 walked us through a year before war, here we have a whole decade of rolling anticipation, focusing on the conjunctions of creative professionals in the shadow of the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the Third Reich. Nin and Miller also feature in Dirty Books by Barry Reay and Nina Attwood, the story of Obelisk Press and its evolution into the Olympia Press. Both outfits provided a kind of literary laundering service, taking the profits from erotica and putting it into challenging modernist works. “From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided.” The name Olympia Press, by the way, came from Édouard Manet’s scandalous 1860s canvas Olympia, which also inspired Michel Leiris’s 1981 The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, to which Tomoé Hill now responds in her debut, Songs for Olympia (another title available through Asterism). A response to a response may sound a little … removed. Yet this is a stimulating confrontation with Manet, Olympia (actually Victorine), Leiris, and her own biography, in a profoundly personal panel discussion entwined with memory, desire and scent: how would Victorine smell if she stepped out of her frame?

Thanks for reading; I hope you’ve found something special for yourself and/or the twisted sophisticates of your acquaintance.

On a brief yet eventful trip to Munich last month I saw an exhibition about Franziska zu Reventlow and other bohemian women of Wilhelmine Germany, bumped into Werner Herzog, accidentally got day drunk on a Monday, visited the palatial quarters of hyper-aesthete Alastair, and was awakened in the middle of the night by firefighters alerting me to a raging inferno a few metres from my hotel. The highlight, though, was my first visit to Villa Stuck.

In owner and creator Franz Stuck (later Franz von Stuck) we encounter the peculiarly German figure of the Malerfürst, or “artist prince”, who emerged in the late 19th century, a time when a bestselling work about Rembrandt was helping to stoke interest in the lives of artists and their role in society. Berlin had one Malerfürst – Max Liebermann – but it is testament to the fertile cultural ground of Munich that the city had several to choose from, dominated by a key trio in which Stuck was joined by Friedrich August von Kaulbach and Franz von Lenbach. The Malerfürst combined an expansive public persona, patronage by crowned heads and/or the veneration of the educated middle class, refined elevation from unruly bohemianism, and a flow of commissions which allowed for a lifestyle of conspicuous grandeur.

A miller’s son (like Rembrandt), Stuck was an unlikely candidate for artistic royalty. But early on he demonstrated superb drawing skills, which he soon put to provocative ends; there was a consistent emphasis on the erotic and demonic in his work, and he produced caricatures for Simplicissimus, a belligerent organ which discomfited the Wilhelmine establishment. He also provided illustrations for avant-garde journal PAN, including the cover of the first issue, and for Jugend, which gave its name to Jugendstil, the Austro-Germanic response to Art Nouveau which had its origin in Munich.

For the Bavarian capital was not just a major centre of art education and a key source of reproductions that brought art lovers throughout the world closer to works stretching back to antiquity. It was also a dynamic hub of contemporary arts and letters, and key to this development was the benign regency of Prince Luitpold. He took a keen interest in his artist subjects, although his habit of turning up unannounced for early morning studio visits found more than one sleep-befuddled artist greeting the Prince Regent in their pyjamas. Luitpold also represented a check on the conservative clerical influence which otherwise prevailed in Catholic Bavaria, and a buffer from the imperial authorities. He was the relief teacher of Bavaria; the assigned teacher (his nephew, King Otto) was mentally incapacitated, while the principal (Kaiser Wilhelm) was a remote, unloved, Prussian overlord. And as some of us will remember from high school, a relief teacher will usually let you get away with a lot.

Still, Luitpold had imperial cultural policy to uphold, and in 1891 he established a foundation to champion the kind of bombastic, historicist art beloved of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The following year, a group of dissident artists responded by creating an association that formalised their rejection of officially mandated styles and their embrace of Impressionism, Symbolism and other contemporary movements. This was the Munich Secession, which pre-dated the better-known Viennese and Berlin equivalents by several years (in fact it survives to the present day, its progress interrupted only by the Nazi era).

Franz Stuck was instrumental in both the establishment of the Munich Secession and its branding. His image of Pallas Athene in profile became the movement’s icon, while his lascivious Symbolist canvas Die Sünde (Sin) was the breakout star of the Secession’s first exhibition, in 1893. The archetypically fin-de-siècle image of an unabashed, unclothed femme fatale snuggling up with a serpent was actually a portrait of Stuck’s lover Anna Maria Brandmaier, a café waitress, with whom he later had an illegitimate daughter. While Luitpold refused a request to open that first exhibition, it says much for his open-mindedness that he did in fact attend a preview and ended up buying four works. Within a few years, depictions of the Prince Regent were included as a frontispiece of each Secession catalogue.

Stuck was the only one of the Munich Malerfürst trio in the Secession; there was no place for Lenbach’s portraits of the great and good or Kaulbach’s flattering studies of society women. But like them (and Max Liebermann, who resided in suitably palatial quarters adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate) he fulfilled the Malerfürst ideal by establishing a grand structure that was at once august residence, semi-public studio, and expression of his new social standing. It was built shortly after Stuck’s marriage to Mary Lindpaintner – a rich American widow of another Munich artist – and evidently at her urging.

Reminders of the Munich art world’s princely patron are inescapable as you approach Villa Stuck. It is located on prestigious Prinzregentenstrasse, and to reach it from the centre you cross a bridge that is also named for him (Luitpoldbrücke), spanning a stretch of the River Isar so shallow that the ducks seemed to be scraping their feet on the gravel bed. You then mount a steep curve (more fun to cycle down than up) which encircles a terrace yet again named for Luitpold upon which rests a column topped by an “angel of peace” commissioned by the prince’s artistic foundation.

On this suitably elevated position, the villa is a serene white and gold presence on a narrow yet busily trafficked stretch of Prinzregentenstraße. At the time this was the easternmost structure on the street, in a district that was still almost rural. Sadly the poplars around the house which once lent it a Böcklin-esque allure are now reduced in size and number. While the forms largely evoke a classicism that might have pleased Luitpold’s philhellene father Ludwig I, the building’s claim to an enveloping totality is typical of Jugendstil (even if actual Jugendstil motifs are scant). Unlike Kaulbach and Lenbach, who both turned to architect Gabriel Seidl for their villas, Stuck insisted on designing everything in his house, from the overall volumes to the subtlest detail of interior decoration. As a sign outside proclaims, Villa Stuck is a Gesamtkunstwerk. It emerged in 1897/98, making it an exact contemporary of the radical Fotoatelier Elvira, which was taking form just beyond the western end of Prinzregentenstraße; creator August Endell – also a self-taught architect – took a similarly compendious approach to his project.

A monument to oneself garlanded with classical statuary might seem a little, well, new money, but it was Stuck’s talent, his clarity of vision and the consistency of his obsessions that prevented it from becoming simply a monstrous Skopje-esque temple of ego. Once inside the vestibule, it soon becomes apparent that the embrace of classicism extends beyond the Apollonian ideal suggested by the exterior; with multiple depictions of Pan and other impish deities, the Dionysian flipside is well represented. In the Pompeiian luxuriance of the music room, hand-painted by Stuck and boasting a celestial canopy, wife Mary would give recitals.

This gives on to what for me is the true highlight of the house – the reception room. Ingress into this space is a profoundly sensual experience, a submission to a warm crepuscular caress; as I entered an involuntary oh my God escaped from my lips at a volume sufficient to alarm a fellow visitor. The seductive glow comes not just from the gold mosaic and antique mirrors but also a row of low-wattage light bulbs; Villa Stuck was one of the first private residences in Munich to be wired for electricity (Stuck and his wife were also keen photographers and among the city’s first car drivers). It feels like a Byzantine speakeasy, or the ritual chamber of a cult you actually wouldn’t mind being brainwashed into.

Time went by and I was reluctant to tear myself away but I spied BOOKS in a curtained, vaulted passageway, suggesting the holy arcana you might find behind a Greek Orthodox iconostasis. There is a dream collection of turn-of-the-century authors here, with works by Panizza, Schnitzler, Maeterlinck, Bierbaum (who penned a biography of Stuck), George, Scheerbart, Meyrink, Bahr and Wilde (along with around a dozen Yellow Book compendiums). I fantasised about returning to the reception room with a selection and ordering up something potent as I reclined. Instead I headed onto the rooms facing the garden, now cool and serene exhibition spaces, stripped of their opulence by wartime damage. There are more Pans, and Stuck’s first large-scale canvas, The Guardian of Paradise (1889), a self-portrait of the hot young artist with added wings.

While Villa Stuck is dominated by classical and biblical subjects and variations on classical, Byzantine and Renaissance motifs, it is only when you take the stairs to Stuck’s studio and look up at the vaulted ceiling that you discover the sole Jugendstil motifs in the house. The stylised vegetal forms in gold against white introduce a lightness otherwise absent from the villa. Heaviness – marble, tapestries, coffered ceiling – returns in the princely first-floor studio. It is a space familiar from another self-portrait in which the artist appears in profile. It shows him working on a nude, but what we can’t see is a version of his notorious 1893 canvas Die Sünde, with Stuck’s former lover enthroned in glory atop an altar in a corner of the studio. The variant here was produced in 1906, a cruder version than the original which may reflect the change in Stuck’s relationship to the subject.

Stuck and his wife were unable to have children, and in 1904 they sought the Prince Regent’s help in securing legal adoption of the artist’s illegitimate daughter, knowing that their status and wealth would trump the mother’s rightful claim. Did the Stucks feel Anna Maria’s eyes boring through them from on high as they retreated to their chambers of an evening? I like to think so. Luitpold bestowed further favour two years later when he ennobled Stuck, who was henceforth known as Franz von Stuck. Proving that this kind of shit can really go to your head, in 1913 Stuck welcomed a torchlight parade to mark his 50th birthday, when he also hosted a grand banquet in his studio, both events captured in smudgy, evocative studies by the artist.

The small, serene garden extends the themes of the interior, although the strict lines and statuary lend it something of the graveyard. The harmony of the original villa, which is handsomely proportioned yet not exactly colossal, was marred somewhat by the addition of a studio extension during World War One, whose minimal interiors looked ahead to the modern white cube ideal.

Overall, Villa Stuck is a lot more fun than the other Malerfürst digs (there’s a literal altar to sin!). Like other great artists’ residences of the time, such as Moreau’s Paris studio and Fernand Khnopff’s Brussels house, Stuck’s temple offers a potent evocation of the time in which it emerged. To visit Villa Stuck is to grind up uncut 1900 and snort it in great fat lines and while I realise this is a nightmare trip for some, I can’t get enough.

I know, I know.

I know.

It’s been a long time. I was already feeling guilty about my lengthy absence and then there was this mention in the Guardian which has brought a lot of new readers. Which is nice, but I also felt I owed it to them, and even more so to the patient long-haulers to – finally! – come up with something fresh.

This, then, is inspired by my summer reading; on holiday I finally read E. F. Benson’s hilariously camp sextet of “Mapp and Lucia” novels from start to finish. Switching between the fir-fringed Messel green lakes of Mecklenburg before me and the gossip-slicked lanes of Benson’s imagination was a highly agreeable way to pass the time. And in search for the inspiration behind his tales I return to a rubric I started some time ago in which I explore the real-life models for fictional characters – “Doubles”. Here we discover a personality so potent that only in diluted form could she pass as fiction.

[Philip Burne-Jones] and I once stayed together at the home of that astonishing and stimulating woman Miss Marie Corelli, at Stratford-on-Avon, of which she knew herself to be the social and intellectual queen, but sometimes had reason to regret republican tendencies among her subjects. […] It is not, however, as an author that I celebrate her, but because she lived, furiously and excitedly, in a bellicose romance of her own devising, which she was persuaded was real. […] She came down as we were breakfasting and upbraided us for our laziness in not being up earlier, declaring that she had done two hours’ writing already … Here there was a moment’s awkwardness, for her devoted companion, Miss Vyver, who lived with her, imprudently began: “Oh Marie, you were fast asleep an hour ago, when — ” but a glance silenced her. […] Then one of us remembered that summer time began that day, and she told us that there was no summer time in her house. “God’s time,” she observed, “is good enough for me” […] She gave us some delicious hock to drink, and told us that King Edward had recommended it to her when she lunched with him at Marienbad. At her worst I confess that she was rather a snob and liked to bring in the names of the exalted ones of the earth whom she had known. […] She sent me out in her motor to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and the garden of Old Place, and when I returned, she had cut a bouquet of Madonna lilies, and we went to the church where Shakespeare was buried, and she laid them with a curtsey on his tomb. […] Phil was not feeling very well that day, and by the time we reached home he was completely exhausted. Miss Corelli made him lie down on a sofa in the drawing-room and administered warm brandy and water in a teaspoon, with words of encouragement in baby language: “Now ickle droppie more,” she coaxed him, “and then a snooze till dinner-time, and as bright as a button again …” […] She spoke with pity and disdain of the gossipy mischief-makers of Stratford who were always caballing against her, but assured me that they were as impotent as the critics to disturb her serenity, whereas she was really a very pugnacious woman, and loved a good scrap.  

– E. F. Benson, Final Edition

Whatever she did – and really she did an incredible deal – she did it with all the might of her dramatic perception, did it in fact with such earnestness that she had no time to have an eye to the gallery at all, she simply contemplated herself and her own vigorous accomplishment. When she played the piano as she frequently did, (reserving an hour for practice every day), she cared not in the smallest degree for what anybody who passed down the road outside her house might be thinking of the roulades that poured from her open window: she was simply Emmeline Lucas, absorbed in glorious Bach or dainty Scarlatti, or noble Beethoven. […] Just as the painter Rubens amused himself with being the ambassador to the Court of St. James – a sufficient career in itself for most busy men – so Mrs Lucas amused herself, in the intervals of her pursuit of Art for Art’s sake, with being not only an ambassador but a monarch. Riseholme might perhaps according to the crude materialism of maps, be included in the kingdom of Great Britain, but in a more real and inward sense it formed a complete kingdom of its own, and its queen was undoubtedly Mrs Lucas, who ruled it with a secure autocracy pleasant to contemplate at a time when thrones were toppling, and imperial crowns whirling like dead leaves down the autumn winds. The ruler of Riseholme, happier than he of Russia, had no need to fear the finger of Bolshevism writing on the wall, for there was not in the whole of that vat which seethed so pleasantly with culture, one bubble of revolutionary ferment. […] Here, as was only right and proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare’s garden, and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was Ophelia’s border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a lunatic asylum. […] As long as she directed the life of Riseholme, took the lead in its culture and entertainment, and was the undisputed fountain-head of all its inspirations, and from time to time refreshed her memory as to the utter inferiority of London she wanted nothing more.

– E. F. Benson, Queen Lucia

English author Marie Corelli is interesting for all kinds of reasons, not least as a parable of perishable fame. Now little more than a curio and certainly little read, from the 1880s to the 1920s she enjoyed sales figures that dwarfed those of now unshakably canonical writers from the same period. Much of her own persona was fictional; she was “perhaps the most accomplished liar in literature” according to biographer Brian Masters. She falsified her age by decades and claimed descent from the (childless) composer, Arcangelo Corelli; she was in fact Mary Mackay, illegitimate daughter of a Scottish poet and his maid. Nonetheless, Queen Victoria herself, and an astonishing number of her subjects, devoured Corelli’s books which offered a “heaving blend of overheated romance, vitalist metaphysics, and occultism, with plentiful hints of clairvoyance, reincarnation, mesmerism, Egyptian mysticism, and mysterious psychic powers and traditions” (Steven Connor). Even the modish perversities of Decadence found their way into her oeuvre, although never without a moralising codicil. And then there are the true oddities like Corelli’s high-concept 1910 novella The Devil’s Motor, in which hand-lettered text appears on pages bearing faux scorch marks between covers scented with motor oil. This book was illustrated by an unrequited crush of Corelli’s, a married man who – somehow! – remained impervious to her entreaties in baby talk.

And baby talk is one of the numerous traits shared by the two women in the passages above, which, you will note, are by the same person. The first, from the 1940 memoirs of E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson, records his pre-World War One visit to Corelli in the company of Philip Burne-Jones, son of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward. The second is drawn from the opening of Queen Lucia, which was published in 1920 as the first of six books by Benson that featured Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (universally known as Lucia) – the “Mapp and Lucia” novels. Spanning the between-the-wars period, they first introduce the two women in their separate spheres of influence – Lucia in Riseholme, based loosely on the Cotswolds village of Broadway, and Mapp in Tilling, a 1:1 scale copy of Rye, East Sussex. Then, after Lucia loses her first husband (the reader barely notices; “Peppino” is neither use nor ornament), she is transplanted to Mapp’s dominion where Benson has the two women battle for social supremacy of the town. Masterful comedies of manners, they revel in the hypocrisy, subterfuge and self-importance of the idle haute bourgeoisie.

While Benson befriended Corelli, he also nursed an ironic appreciation of her more risible moments, which were legion, all documented in a scrapbook of cuttings he called the “Book of Fearfuljoy”. She was clearly still on his mind when he came to pen what would prove the most enduring works of a remarkably extensive bibliography, which dwarfed even Corelli’s impressive output. His Lucia resembles Corelli in numerous ways. She is similarly devoted to Shakespeare, and as well as beds of the Bard’s blooms she has rooms named for Hamlet and Othello in an Elizabethan house overlooking a tributary of the river Avon. Both women “played the piano with pitiless sincerity” in the words of Brian Masters; a Lucian trademark is performing the (relatively simple) first movement of the “Moonlight Sonata” before breaking off in reverential reverie without playing the two remaining (and more difficult) movements. Corelli’s evidently sexless union with lifelong companion Bertha Vyver finds its counterpart in the emphatically sexless union of Lucia and Georgie, her “gentleman-in-waiting” (“Not an obtrusively masculine sort of person,” in Benson’s immortal description). Corelli claimed knowledge of Italian based on a few words; Lucia and Georgie make the most of the very little Italian they know and dread exposure for that which they do not. These very specific qualities conform to a larger pattern that Corelli and Lucia share – of perpetual dissemblance, thundering pretension, and a veneer of exalted refinement masking a will of steel.

But Lucia does not have a monopoly on the Corellian qualities distributed throughout the books. As Benson himself noted of his author friend, “In a work of fiction a character like hers would appear preposterous; the least critical readers would reject it as fantastically unreal.” So rather than availing himself of the liberties offered by artifice to heighten Corelli’s idiosyncrasies, he in fact disperses them to make them plausible as fiction. Corelli, for example, had as little French as Italian, but pretended otherwise; Benson has Mapp slipping compulsively into schoolgirl French after her honeymoon in “Monte”. Corelli was convicted of food-hoarding during World War One; perhaps deciding that this was too unsympathetic a transgression to attribute to Lucia, Benson pins it on the mean-minded Mapp whose illegal stockpiling of Bovril, corned beef and dried apricots is gleefully exposed. The town’s Birmingham-born priest insists on expressing himself in Scots, which may be a tribute to Corelli’s Scottish heritage, while her eccentric refusal to recognise daylight saving time is shared by the entire Tilling circle.

Few of the major characters in either Tilling or Riseholme seem to labour at anything, no one has children and everyone has servants, leaving them plenty of time for plotting, prevarication and passing fads, including cycling, yoga and stock market speculation. Their merest doings, of consummate inconsequence beyond their self-enclosed circles, are utterly consuming to the protagonists. Spirited lesbian artist Irene Coles, Lucia’s faithful janissary, is one of the few who lives a half-way authentic, productive life, but even she is drawn into the manoeuvres of her brothers and sisters in arms (here the most trivial social conflicts are expressed in martial terms).

Brian Masters, who wrote biographies of both Benson and Corelli, notes that the older woman felt genuine warmth for Benson, only to be mocked behind her back. But there was clearly affection in the mockery (and Benson was certainly more indulgent of her foibles than Mark Twain, who called her “the most offensive sham, inside and out, that misrepresents and satirises the human race today”.) The third book in Benson’s series, Lucia in London (1927), finds the heroine adopted as a camp diva by a group of admirers who are captivated by her outrageous pretensions and shameless social climbing. These are the self-styled “Luciaphils”, and with growing warmth for his creation, Benson implicitly enlists the reader in their ranks. In Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel, author Robert F. Kiernan points to Lucia’s “affectations that never fool anyone, the extraordinary expenditure of energy upon evanescent goals, and the willingness to risk all her dramatic effects upon a momentary inspiration,” along with her “ability to render the trivialities of life intense for others.” All of this serves to delight the receptive observer (or reader), and perhaps significantly, this turn in sympathies comes in the first instalment of the series written after Corelli’s death in 1924 (and if she had an opinion of the first two it went unrecorded).

As the series wears on, Lucia comes increasingly to resemble her creator. Her London bolthole, inherited from Peppino’s late, spasmodically lamented aunt, was actually once inhabited by Benson himself. And the Queen Anne house in Tilling (Rye) initially occupied by Mapp, then Lucia, was also Benson’s real-life home, which he had first visited as a guest of a previous resident – Henry James. In fact James was something of a family friend, and had offered the young Benson veiled feedback on his first manuscript. He appears to have retained affection for the younger writer; when Benson called on him and found him absent, James responded with a letter that reads like self-parody: “Please believe I would have surrounded your advent with every circumstance of welcome had I been here” (the man couldn’t even write a “sorry I missed you!” note that sounds recognisably human).

Lamb House (“Mallards” in the books) featured a Garden Room with a bay window from where Benson imagined the intrigues of Tilling’s querulous denizens; it is here that Mapp spies and plots, and it is here that Lucia plays the grand piano (“with pitiless sincerity”) during her cultural divertissements. And the resemblances between creator and creation multiply. Lucia becomes Mayor of Tilling, just as Benson assumed the mayoralty of Rye; they share a surprisingly progressive platform. She profits handsomely from the stock market and becomes a generous benefactor to the town, as did he (when the town’s church organ is refurbished at her expense, Lucia naturally relaunches it with the “Moonlight Sonata”). Her eventual marriage to Georgie, scrupulously unconsummated, solemnises one of literature’s great bonds of sensibility between a straight woman and a gay man; their shared aversion to carnality, which plays as high camp rather than prudery, was in accord with Benson’s own.

For while Benson represented England in figure skating and pined over handsome young men, he recoiled at the prospect of physical intimacy. He was one of six children, “none of whom ever had heterosexual intercourse, as far as we can tell; certainly none of them ever married,” as Simon Goldhill relates in his book A Very Queer Family Indeed. The four who survived to adulthood were all highly prolific writers, their passions evidently reserved for the written word (“graphomania” is Goldhill’s diagnosis). Older brother Arthur Christopher wrote the words to “Land of Hope and Glory”, while younger brother Robert Hugh was best known for the prophetic dystopian novel Lord of the World. A convert to Catholicism, he entered the priesthood, facilitated Ronald Firbank’s own coming out to Rome, and collaborated briefly with Baron Corvo (like Firbank, the two are previous “Doubles” alumni, with tit for tat romans à clef). The fact that their father, Edward White Benson, was an Archbishop of Canterbury made all this especially scandalous. And it is through Benson senior that we arrive at another Henry James connection: E. W. gave James the inspiration for what would later be The Turn of the Screw. James wrote the novella in London after he had taken out a lease on Lamb House, and in part it captures his projections of the home that awaited him.

Benson’s own residency of the house saw him assume a position of unassailable prestige, and he welcomed Queen Mary herself as a visitor. And through tireless social climbing Lucia eventually shares the rare air of duchesses and princesses. This almost proves her undoing in the last novel Trouble for Lucia (1939), although she is not bowed for long. The eternally frustrated Mapp, meanwhile, embodies the banal agonies of English failure, like a garden party Alan Partridge. She always comes second; it is for euphony alone that the sextet is named “Mapp and Lucia”. Queen Lucia strafes her foes with fusilades of politesse and is magnanimous in inevitable victory; a lingering token of Benson’s affection for her real-life model, perhaps. In a series spanning two decades she grows in generosity but not self-knowledge, instead maintaining utter fidelity to falsity, to the “bellicose romance of her own devising”. As Luciaphils we can only applaud.

Near the conclusion of the last book we are introduced to author Susan Leg, who writes under an Italian pseudonym (“Rudolph da Vinci”) and is planning to capture the social life of Tilling in fiction. This preposterous chronicler is effectively a hybrid of Benson and Corelli, and Lucia is naturally on the alert: “We don’t want best-sellers to write up our cultured vivid life here.” With their elegist already at work, it is impossible to imagine these characters continuing; the conditions that promoted their eccentricities are slipping away, the age of an upper middle class attended by servants never to return. In any case, the question of their destiny was rendered academic by Benson’s death on the last day of February in the leap year of 1940 (a fate you can imagine him assigning to one of his characters). And a few months later, brutal reality stole upon the site of Mapp and Lucia’s fictional war exercises when the Garden Room of Lamb House fell victim to a bombing raid. Lucia’s piano was silenced forever more.

Is there such a thing as being too avant-garde? If history punishes those who come too late, as Mikhail Gorbachev insisted, is it any kinder to those who come too early? Can an individual be so far ahead of prevailing movements that their innovation is rendered invisible and roundly ignored?

That appears to be the fate of the mystifyingly underappreciated German 20th-century creative force Valeska Gert, who foresaw or pre-empted performance art, video art, conceptual art; happenings, punk, musique concrète; contemporary dance, object theatre and all manner of confronting stage practices. Time and time again throughout her mercurial career, Gert advanced into new theatres of war and was already beyond the horizon in search of fresh battles by the time others reached the territory she had scoped out, leaving latecomers to fancy themselves the vanguard.

On 19 April 1923, for example, she outlined her vision of the future stage for a Berlin newspaper, but she could just as well be describing things you could see in a gallery or auditorium in the city right now, today, tonight. “In the future,” she proclaimed, “there will be two types of theatre: purely technical theatre and purely human theatre.” The technical theatre, in Gert’s conception, is a realm of “mystical visions” in which “there is no place for the actor”. “Large, heavy blocks dropping slowly from the ceiling in a steady rhythm, rising, falling. Disappearing. On a screen at the back of the stage a cinematographic apparatus paints black waves divided by red vertical lines.”

The “human theatre”, on the other hand, unfolds “without decoration of any kind, against curtains, without props. The imagination of the actor must be so evocative that even without props the audience knows what is intended.” The human theatre is no place for artifice, “no stuck-on beards, no drawn-on wrinkles”, with costumes replaced by smocks in block colours. “The actor on this stage must be trained to feel, profoundly and intensely, and to transmit these feelings simply, with no hint of posing or false pathos in the form of voice, face or body.”

For Gert, this “future” was … the very next day. On 20 April 1923, 100 years ago today, Gert brought her conception of both technical and human theatre to life in Berlin’s Tribüne theatre. But the primary vehicle for her radical rethinking of theatrical means may seem surprising at first. It was a work written over 30 years earlier which evoked the perfumed perversities of a vanished era: Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.

Salome was a 1st century BC Jewish princess, verified by historical record. But ever since her fictionalised, uncredited début in the Gospel of Matthew – and the sexed-up version of this dossier by Flavius Josephus – in which she staged her fateful routine and collected the head of John the Baptist as her gruesome royalties, she has inspired artists, writers and performers. She was a particular favourite of Renaissance painters; like the figure of Saint Sebastian, Salome offered them a way of investing high-minded, even “spiritual” works with eroticism and violence.

Salome assumed new vitality in the second half of the 19th century, when her dissolution rhymed with the preoccupations of French practitioners of Symbolism and Decadence and their admirers. A remarkable chain of influence sets out from Stéphane Mallarmé’s epic verse Hérodiade, begun in the early 1870s, which appears to have been at least one of the inspirations for Gustave Moreau’s 1876 painting Salome Dancing before Herod, which was paraphrased in J. K. Huysmans’s novel 1884 A rebours, which influenced Wilde’s 1891 play Salomé, which became the basis for Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera which influenced Franz von Stuck’s 1906 painting … and on and on, with dozens of off-shoots and tributaries. German-speaking Europe was particularly susceptible to Salomania (although it is said that Kaiser Wilhelm II himself insisted that for the Dresden premiere of Strauss’s opera, the night sky backdrop must feature the Star of Bethlehem ablaze).

There is a common denominator to all these creators, and it is hard to avoid the impression of men desiring and damning Salome over and over again, casting her as a new Eve (in the words of Wilde’s Iokanaan: “By woman came evil into the world”). Her tale was taken as a parable of female treachery rather than subpar male governance. Yet it was Herod, ruling with his dick, who ordered the death of the prophet. In art, on stage, women themselves were generally confined to embodying Salome, in the strictest sense, by either performing the role or sitting as models for graphic representations. But in the late 19th century, they also started crafting settings in which the biblical figure assumed new life.

Naturally the role was irresistible to dancers; the first in the modern era to take the veil(s) was the dazzlingly innovative Loie Fuller, in 1895. And unlike other Decadent themes, Salome forfeited none of her electric allure as the 20th century began, becoming a popular turn as performers tested the limits of the acceptable on stage. Anita Berber was, unsurprisingly, drawn to the role, so too the scandalous nude performer Adorée Villany who not only danced but recited text from Wilde’s play at the same time, and committed her act to film in Germany in 1906. Canadian dancer Maud Allan was perhaps the most notorious stage Salomé of her era. A lesbian linked to the British Prime Minister’s wife, she was damned for her “obscenity” and accused of spying, becoming the focus of a culture war that may strike contemporary observers as oddly familiar. That there was an actual war going on at the same time (first, world) only served to heighten sensitivities.

A Salome/Salomé act was easy to slip into a revue programme as a spicy burlesque interlude, but a far more ambitious version premiered just a few weeks before Gert’s production, when Alla Nazimova presented her silent film adaptation of Wilde’s play. Recreating Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustrations for the 1894 edition, it represented both a labour of love and – after withering reviews – the premature end of her career. Yet Salome picked herself up and danced on; in fact, on 20 April 1923, Gert’s show wasn’t even the only production of Wilde’s play on view in Berlin that evening. Across town, the venerable Deutsches Theater hosted the Moscow Kamerny Theatre’s large-scale Constructivist-influenced production of Salomé (for even more examples of Salome/Salomé lore, take a look at John Coulthart’s comprehensive archive).

Despite a handful of dramatic roles, in 1923 Gert was best known as a dancer, but her art was an unclassifiable unicum, constantly changing yet remarkably consistent. As a schoolgirl in Wilhelmine Berlin, Gert shocked teachers and classmates with her white powdered face, bright red lips and anarchic behaviour. This is how she appears in her first (surviving) film, an uncredited part in 1918 film The Seeds of Life, from which her intense, impudent vitality bursts through grainy film stock and reaches through time. Her turn in the film reprises her 1916 stage debut, the soft opening of the Weimar performance tradition. From the beginning, in whatever form it took, her act involved her being entirely, wilfully, uncompromisingly Valeska Gert. In her last feature film 60 years later, Volker Schlöndorff’s 1976 Coup de Grâce, she is still garishly made up, still vital, still unparalleled.

At the outset of the Weimar Republic, Gert proclaimed: “The old world is rotten, it’s creaking at every joint” (knackt in allen Fugen). “I want to help destroy it. I believe in the new life. I want to help build it.” But why Salomé? “Wilde used to say that Salomé was a mirror in which everyone could see himself,” wrote Robbie Ross in a foreword to the play. Might an era not also find its likeness therein? Chaotic, hyperinflated Berlin of the early 1920s felt like an antechamber of apocalypse; the time was out of joint (aus den Fugen geraten) as it was in Claudius’s Denmark and Herod’s Judea, with their royal courts steeped in incest and corruption. Under the Babylonian conditions of the new Germany, strange new prophets – the “Inflation Saints” – issued dire prophecies from their prison cells, while wax-whiskered Herods leered at painted Salomes in varieté theatres throughout the capital. Born barely a kilometre from Alexanderplatz, Gert had absorbed the entire fever and wretchedness of the city into her art; neither she nor her fellow Berliners had an appetite for Beardsleyan exoticism.

“Uproar was my element, I wanted to get people moving, the more they roared, the bolder I became.” The whole era had lost its head, and Gert’s time, it seemed, had come. Her production of Salomé was based on the German translation – also the basis for Strauss’s opera – by the remarkable Hedwig Lachmann, a writer and translator prominent in bohemian circles who fell in love with her (married) anarchist husband when he wrote her letters from jail. Not that Gert kept many of the words. “There was too much in it that I didn’t need. […] I had to get rid of all the unrealistic speech that always makes me melancholic in the theatre. I wanted intense life and a thousand colours.”

Gert took the title role, one Jewish dancer playing another. Perhaps the root of Salome’s timeless appeal for artists is that she shows art as having undeniable (if appalling) consequences. Gert’s production provided a stark, sacral setting for Wilde’s play, with a black backdrop, bright white light and garishly coloured smocks. The performance was accompanied by women shrieking offstage and multi-talent Walter Ruttmann – more on him later – drawing tortured sounds from a cello. In a 1921 article, Gert shared her proto-punk musical vision: “the songs have no text and only a primitive melody. You bellow your pain, exult in your joy … in a simple, rough form”. On another occasion she anticipated musique concrète by calling for a “metropolitan march” which would incorporate aeroplane noises, bickering women and stomping feet.

The performers were almost motionless and, for Gert, “the movements that came through nonetheless were now truthful, and a new form of dance.” Like her terse dance routines in which she embodied vice, death and anxiety, this was part of her tireless quest for the elemental. “Art is not for me. I don’t need what others have already made. I need the primary matter” (Urstoff). She disdained Expressionism (“kitsch!”) as much as the new Ausdruckstanz, the expressive dance form represented by Mary Wigman, but one rendered without (facial) expressions – something that was hugely important to Gert’s performance.

She insisted that her style should not be confused with realism; instead, she sought alienation (Brecht, unsurprisingly, was an admirer). “The distinction lies in the fact that all extraneous feeling and expression is omitted, and that the performance solemnises emotion with fervour and the concentration of all powers.” Her production confronted the audience with its own (blood)lust by denying it. For the fabled dance Gert remained in her smock with not a veil in sight (it was Wilde’s version of the story that had introduced the “seven veils”). Instead it was stagecraft, vapid illusion that was stripped, and what was revealed was not undulating flesh but the Urstoff. Similarly, the audience had to imagine the wages of her sin; one of two stills of the performance by photographer Suse Byk’s shows Gert tenderly caressing an imaginary head (in stark contrast, Swedish soprano Olive Fremstad was so committed to vérité that she prepared for the 1907 US premiere of Strauss’s Salome by going to a morgue and holding a severed head in her hands).

This was the Berlin of Brecht, Piscator and Reinhardt but still, Gert’s unprecedented, utterly radical approach exerted a disruptive power – even before it reached audiences. Actress Helene Weigel, later the legend of the Berliner Ensemble, was originally engaged but begged off, fearful for her reputation. Gert believed artists should constantly tear down and start anew, and disdained those unwilling to venture their cultural capital. For her new human theatre, Gert was prepared to risk everything.

But what of the “technical theatre” that she foresaw? That came in a film work presented on the same bill. Its creator was Walter Ruttmann, a multi-talent who provided the cello accompaniment to Salomé. Ruttmann later made Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis and even later assisted Leni Riefenstahl after coming to an uncomfortable accommodation with the Nazis.

Opus 2, the film Ruttmann presented on the night, was made up of thousands of hand-painted images, cinema stripped of everything but colour, form and motion (“nothing to do with the handmade Expressionist trickery currently appearing in cinemas and theatres,” in the words of Gert, always eager to trash the prevailing unorthodoxies of her time). Ruttmann was the first abstract filmmaker, an ideal complement to Gert’s abstract theatre. But if the critical view of Ruttmann’s film was disappointing (“certainly very amusing, nothing more”), Valeska Gert’s revolutionary Salomé came off even worse – it was “an embarrassing failure” in the words of the Berliner Tageblatt, the outlet that had run her visionary article.

The Tribüne was born of the riotous creative energies of the early Weimar Republic and Gert was there from the beginning, appearing just days after the theatre launched in September 1919, playing a skeleton in the premiere of Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung. A few weeks later the theatre hosted one of the largest stage gatherings of Berlin’s Dadaists, including John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz and Johannes Baader. It’s not known if Gert was in attendance, but she had a brief association with Dada if only because the movement offered the greatest possible scope for her anarchic performance. Earlier in the year she had spontaneously appeared at another Dada event (in the venue where Bowie would later produce his Berlin trilogy), dancing with a bunch of asparagus she had just bought at a market. Decades later she described this, not without justification, as an early happening.

The modestly sized Tribüne was located on the long route that starts at the site of the old royal seat, the Stadtschloss, then proceeds along Unter den Linden and through the Tiergarten. It appears just as the route turns off toward another palace, Schloss Charlottenburg; its outsized verdigris dome is visible from the site of the theatre. Originally built at the close of the 17th century, its first occupant was Queen Sophie Charlotte. There the Prussian queen established a Musenhof, a “court of muses” where philosophers, performers and revellers were always welcome (not so the queen’s ill-favoured husband, King Friedrich I).

Like the Schloss, the Tribüne and its setting was associated with remarkable women. The building that hosted the theatre was erected during World War One, designed by Emilie Winkelmann, Germany’s first independent woman architect, and now bears the name of its benefactor, early feminist Ottilie von Hansemann. It offered the first accommodation in Germany reserved for female students, who had only recently been granted permission to study at their country’s universities; the theatre occupied a former hall of the student housing. Else Lasker-Schüler read poetry and prose in the the newly repurposed venue in late 1919, and Marlene Dietrich performed here in the 1920s. Having emerged unscathed from World War Two, within weeks of the end of hostilities the theatre hosted a revue moderated by Hildegard Knef. And in the 1960s the great Austrian actress Tilla Durieux (a one-time Salomé) reprised her performances of the 1920s there.

The site of Valeska Gert’s revolutionary production is still standing, although no longer functioning as a theatre. This leaves a pair of performance stills and a handful of bad reviews as the primary legacy of the evening. But at least some recognised the standard of the vanguard as it thundered by. As Futurist poet Ruggero Vasari proclaimed at the time: “Modern theatre begins here.”

Over the years I have written numerous times about the inexhaustibly fascinating life of Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898) – a.k.a. Sis(s)i – and its heady amalgam of eccentricity, disaster, glamour, beauty and melancholy. Whenever I do, I get angry comments from Sissi stans who scan the net for narratives that stray from their vision of the suffering Habsburg Madonna. There is no question that the Austrian Empress was shadowed by tragedy, as I have acknowledged, and it is impossible to understand her life without recognising the depression that pursued and frequently overtook her. But God forbid you should disturb these devotees’ image of Our Lady of Sorrows riding side-saddle through a vale of tears by suggesting that – misfortune notwithstanding – Sissi was just really goddam weird, a morbid, capricious, drug-addicted, tattooed narcissist; a high-strung, high-maintenance neurological high-wire act with a generous production budget.

While I never relish messages from Sissi’s self-appointed standard-bearers, I genuinely wonder what they make of the current profusion of Elisabethan offerings, in particular three current German-language screen productions with international reach (plus a recent series by German broadcaster RTL and a new English-language book, Empty Theatre by Jac Jemc). All of them take significant liberties with both the historical account and the popular image of Sissi established by Romy Schneider in a trilogy of Wirtschaftswunder-era films beloved of German-speaking Europe to this day. The last 12 months have given us Netflix series The Empress (showrunner Katharina Eyssen), and the feature films Corsage (director Marie Kreutzer), and Sisi & I (director Frauke Finsterwalder), which just premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Each of them occupies a restricted time span, representing the beginning, middle and end of Sissi’s reign, respectively.

The Empress arguably hews closest to the sanctified image. Devrim Lingnau persuasively embodies the headstrong teenage Bavarian princess who, having previously been left largely to her own devices, finds herself ill-equipped for married life let alone the unimaginable pressure of being imperial consort. This is very much a costume period drama and while its locations are not the historical settings, they are lavish enough that, as with The Crown, they competently maintain the illusion. The series concentrates on Sissi’s troubled onboarding at court and, like the 1950s trilogy, appoints Franz Joseph’s mother as the villain. So far so faithful, but this depiction also comes with departures from historical fact that contrast sharply with this evident quest for authenticity.

Witness, for example, the mutual passion between Sissi and Franz Joseph in the series, a romantic indulgence at odds with historical reality. We also find a confected episode of ill-fated Archduke Maximilian scheming to take over his brother’s empire and his wife, and an invented lady-in-waiting with revolutionary sympathies who gains the empress’s trust. Sissi’s interest in the underclass jars with the record, so too her engagement in realpolitik (beyond a genuine sympathy for Hungarian liberation). Like the recent Netflix series about Freud, The Empress freely embellishes widely known figures and events that arguably offer drama enough in themselves. Here, after six hours we are still only a few months into Elisabeth’s marriage; a further series is mooted, so will they follow The Crown by swapping out the leads and advancing through the decades?

If you’re impatient for the years of darkness and disquiet to come, two current films may satisfy your curiousity. They bear striking similarities; both are pan-European arthouse co-productions with women directors which foreground previously occluded episodes of the historical narrative. They both use modern music and other anachronisms, rejecting the conventions of period drama and toying with the idea of authenticity itself without proposing alternative histories as such. Each avails itself liberally of the drugs, tattoos, morbidity, narcissism and caprice supplied by an intimate reading of the subject’s life. Each makes much of Sissi’s devotion to her work-outs and beauty treatments, her eating disorder and public fainting, and contains a pivotal scene where the empress cuts her legendarily long hair. Each of them leans into the Diana connection by depicting Sissi’s (documented) visit with the princess’s ancestors at Althorp, where she enjoys breathless horse races and an enigmatic affair with a local.

Corsage was first to cinemas. Sissi, as portrayed by Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), is adrift; her relationships with her husband, children and servants are all conducted at arm’s length. Her only kindred spirit appears to be her cousin Ludwig II, and even there she misreads his affections. As she turns 40 a tactless doctor informs her that this is the life expectancy for a working-class woman of the time. In fact the increasingly spectral Sissi appears to be engineering her own disappearance, clearing her schedule, outsourcing her public appearances to a veiled lady-in-waiting and grooming a railway official’s wife to serve as her husband’s mistress.

While some settings are accurate (Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace), elsewhere Corsage is provocatively ahistorical, unfolding in locations that are clearly, ostentatiously not what they purport to be. “Althorp” appears amid manifestly central European mountains, rather than the barely rolling hills of Northamptonshire I know from visits to my in-laws. Meanwhile the rough, backstage aesthetic of some interior scenes reminded me of the first time I visited Versailles. I was struck by the contrast between the labyrinthine, unadorned passageways and the sumptuous state rooms; passing from one to another felt like stepping out on stage. Corsage suggests that it is in the wings that we should locate the true personae of its subjects rather than their upholstered public avatars. Of course, this and the thin crowd scenes might simply reflect a limited budget. But this asceticism and the numerous post-dated features also seem driven by a kind of belligerence which dares us to take issue, urging us to abandon our preconceptions of historical drama. Strikingly, glass appears prominently in these anachronistic elements – light fixtures, eyewear, windows, doors, camera lenses, syringes – suggesting that we must look through these (literally) transparent distractions to find inner verities.

Visiting a psychiatric institution, Sissi bonds briefly with an inconsolable woman who, like her, has lost a daughter in infancy, yet otherwise the empress appears to be driven by morbid curiosity rather than any profound connection with the downtrodden among her subjects; “the lion doesn’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep” as she avers. But there is little for us to hold on to. While audiences are surely sophisticated enough not to require every female lead to be likable or relatable, this is main character syndrome to excess, to the exclusion of all else, an exceptionalism that eclipses anything by which a mortal being might be expected to construct a liveable existence.

If Corsage presents a solipsistic drifter consumed by her own psychodrama, Sisi & I – as the title suggests – is essentially a two-hander, shot on 16 mm to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Here we see Sissi (Susanne Wolff) through the eyes of her lady-in-waiting Countess Irma Sztáray (Sandra Hüller, the embodiment of vexed dissatisfaction in Toni Erdmann). Her function is to keep pace with the restless empress, to accompany her as she stalks the landscape for hours at a time; this all squares with the record and even Irma’s seasickness is rooted in reality. As she arrives at Sissi’s idyllic, matriarchal island court (Malta standing in for Corfu) she is subjected to an entrance exam that is at once boot camp and hazing ritual. The most obvious anachronisms here are sartorial; the first image of the film is a corset, but on Corfu it is only gossipy gay Archduke Ludwig Viktor who appears to actually wear them (his drag theatricals ring true, but by this time real-life Sissi had fallen out with her brother-in-law). Long-dead, the other light-loafered Ludwig (II) here appears in spirit only, with a prophetic warning.

Scripted by the director and her husband Christian Kracht (author of Imperium in which he fictionalised Wilhelmine stowaway August Engelhardt), Sisi & I is primarily about friendship between women. But the bond depicted here comes with an enormous imbalance of power, subject to the whims of its manipulative senior partner; at one point Sissi insists that they embark for Algiers (Malta again) because she wants to try a local ice cream. Early on there is a suggestion of The Favourite, as the newcomer supplants a previous lady-in-waiting in the empress’s affections, but with Sissi bestowing and withdrawing her favour like the warmth of the sun, the abusive relationship of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant seems a more apt comparison. The film is a notionally queer reading yet admirably disinterested in examining the point at which relations may have transgressed the limits of passionate female friendships in the moral codes of the time. “Shame,” pronounces Sissi, “is for the bourgeoisie.”

Diet is central once again, with Sissi subsisting largely on thin soup and purging her occasional blow-outs. At one point she is more or less force-fed by her mother (what a treat to see Angela Winkler again!). Sissi’s relentless physical exertion, her beauty routine, her eating disorder were evidently driven less by vanity than a need to reclaim the agency cruelly wrested from her in the early years of her marriage. Sissi’s assassination is extensively foreshadowed throughout the film; when it comes it differs from the known facts in crucial details (no spoilers!). I wasn’t even sure if what I was seeing was deliberate; days later I still don’t know what to make of this scene.

The concurrence and extensive thematic overlap of the two films positively compel comparison. In both cases, variances with the record are conscious authorial choices that draw out some higher truth of the characters (in contrast with the fabrications of The Empress, which appear designed to keep fickle streaming audiences engaged at all costs). To sit scowling in the dark with a pen and pad noting solecisms – like one of my angry correspondents might do – is to misread the directors’ intentions entirely. The comparison between Sissi and Diana that both films evoke (also extensively explored in Andrew Sinclair’s 1998 book Death by Fame) is illuminating. For it is not just their unhappy marital relations, clashes with courtiers, eating disorders, depression and violent death that the two women share, but also the way their respective images have transformed in the public imagination. Most of us can contextualise the artistic swerves of a film like Spencer because, whether we’re actively interested or not, we have absorbed years of inside reports alongside the public record. We expect to see a portrayal that disrupts the sanctified image, otherwise – why bother?

But despite the presence of actors recognisable to monoplex-goers the world over, the public and private Elisabeth remains an Austro-German phenomenon – for now. Sisi & I and Corsage are both end-products of a process of (over-)familiarisation which most English-speakers, say, haven’t experienced; few of us grew up watching Romy Schneider’s portrayal every Christmas, like many Germans have. These new treatments seek to provide rich, subtle shading to selected parts of a portrait that most international audiences don’t even recognise in outline.

For my part, I found Sisi & I the more convincing of the two. Naturally I can’t say with certainty what Sissi was like (and in a Q&A session after the Berlinale screening, director Frauke Finsterwalder said she banned her actors from reading biographies of the empress). But drawing on my assumptions I felt Susanne Wolff better captured Sissi’s restlessness, caprice and neurosis, but just as importantly the crippling depression that engulfed much of her latter life. While Vicky Krieps’s empress radiates sadness, it is melancholy without rigour; it is difficult to imagine this wry, loose-limbed Sissi embarking on a punishing trek.

In either case, stans, you’re probably not going to like what you see in these films, but you know what? You can just ignore them (and me). The lioness is sleeping, the sheep are free to dream whatever they want.

Here in Berlin the first snows have been and gone, the first Advent candle is lit and the kitchen smells like Plätzchen. Into this wholesome scene strides a familiar hoofed figure, laden with a sack of books specially selected to appeal to a Strange Flowers sensibility … Satan and his little imps have been extra busy this year; leave a glass of absinthe out and hope you get at least one of these titles under your sickly spruce.

We open with the eagerly awaited biography of Joseph Roth, Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight, which I picked up last month in Winchester (where I also managed to walk straight past Jane Austen’s grave in the magnificent cathedral; too busy looking up). Thanks to extensive coverage it seems the great Austrian author is finally gaining the status in the English-speaking book world he deserves. Roth is among my very favourite authors and one I usually reserve for the colder months, so I am looking forward to finally reading this over the holidays. And if you’re new to Joseph Roth yet curious we have a brace of newly reissued translations, including the devastating Job (translated by Dorothy Thompson, all others here translated by Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the reportage of What I Saw and The Hotel Years, The Radetzky March – often cited as his masterpiece – and its follow-up The Emperor’s Tomb. If pressed this might well be my pick of the Roths; I actually forgot to breathe the first time I read the piano scene, while the conclusion is an electrifying collaboration between Roth the novelist and Roth the reporter, incorporating the annexation of Austria in real time.

Roth’s first book was the extraordinarily prescient The Spider’s Web (1923), most likely the first novel to mention Hitler. That same year brought a tale that drew on the same anxieties, but which is now best remembered as a children’s film. Two new English editions of Austrian author Felix Salten’s Bambi (translated by Jack Zipes and Damion Searls respectively) show us the even darker themes behind a tale that has already traumatised millions of children. It can be read as both an allegory of antisemitism, “or a critique of humankind’s assault on nature,” as Maddie Crum writes, adding: “But why not both?”. Salten was both Jewish and a hunter, by the way. A fellow member of the early 20th-century Viennese avant-garde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is the subject of Walter Kappacher’s novel Palace of Flies (translated by Georg Bauer). No longer the precocious twink of Austrian letters, the middle-aged Hofmannsthal is holed up in a provincial hotel “plagued by feelings of loneliness and failure that echo in a buzz of inner monologues, imaginary conversations and nostalgic memories of relationships with glittering cultural figures”. This tension also haunts the stories of Johannes Urzidil collected in House of the Nine Devils (translated by David Burnett) in which “… the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists.”

In the provocatively subtitled The Last Inward Man, Lesley Chamberlain finds in Prague-born Rainer Maria Rilke a writer who “sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty” (Chamberlain’s vital Nietzsche in Turin has also been reissued). Still on an Austro-Hungarian vibe, we have Opium and Other Stories (translated by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers) by Géza Csáth, “a Hungarian psychiatrist, one of Freud’s first followers, as well as a music critic and opium addict. In 1919, at the age of 31, he killed his wife and then committed suicide, just one year after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire.” We can’t move on without dropping in on the most fascinating figure of that construct’s demise – Sis(s)i, Empress Elisabeth – recent subject of two feature films plus a Netflix series. The latter also comes as a historical novel, The Empress by Gigi Griffis, which concentrates on Sissi’s first few months at the Viennese court. Fictional licence adds a pivotal lady-in-waiting, an attempted palace coup by the Emperor’s ill-fated brother Maximilian, and a degree of romance that the real imperial couple seem not to have shared. But it also captures the real Sissi’s rebellious spirit and her conflict with courtiers, particularly her mother-in-law. Later Sissi kept her distance from the court; Stefan Haderer falls Under the Spell of a Myth as he traces the steps of the Empress in Greece, including her Corfiot hidey hole named for Achilles.

Like Sissi, the Austrian women in Sophia Haydock’s debut The Flames – models in Egon Schiele’s canvases – are fixed as images. “None of these women is quite what they seem. Fierce, passionate and determined, they want to defy convention and forge their own path. But their lives are set on a collision course when they become entangled with the controversial young artist Egon Schiele whose work – and private life – are sending shockwaves through Vienna’s elite.” There are more muses unmuted in Ruth Millington’s Muse: Uncovering the Hidden Figures Behind Art History’s Masterpieces, tackling the myth of the “passive, powerless model (usually young, attractive, and female) at the mercy of an influential and older male artist”. The role of muse was one proffered to, and roundly rejected by German-born Surrealist Meret Oppenheim. Drawing from her extensive career, My Album “assembles photos, objects, notes, and brief texts, as well as ideas and concepts for artworks, and offers very personal insights into Oppenheim’s private life and thought.” Her most famous object – Object, a fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon – was displayed at the famous 1936 Surrealist exhibition in London, which brings us to The British Surrealists. Desmond Morris’s study takes us from “the unpredictability of Francis Bacon to the rebelliousness of Leonora Carrington, from the beguiling Eileen Agar to the ‘brilliant’ Ceri Richard” (meanwhile Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics offers sylvan Surrealism from uncommon gardeners whose creations were anything but common or garden). The evidently inexhaustible well of Surrealism has inspired two recent shows. At Potsdam’s Museum Barberini – which hit headlines recently after a climate activist thoughtfully shared their lunch with one of the gallery’s Monets – Surrealism and Magic revisits the movement’s representatives “who cultivated the traditional image of the artist’s persona as a magician, seer, and alchemist”. Meanwhile Surrealism Beyond Borders “traces Surrealism’s influence and legacy from the 1920s to the late 1970s in places as geographically diverse as Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, Romania, Syria, Thailand, and Turkey”; this comes from the exhibition shown at the Tate in London and the Met in New York.

Who – might you guess – was the first woman to enjoy a solo retrospective at the Met? The somewhat surprising answer is the subject of Florine Stettheimer: A Biography by Barbara Bloemink. “During her first 40 years in Europe, Florine Stettheimer studied academic painting and was aware of all the earliest modernist styles ahead of most American artists. Returning to New York, she and her sisters led an acclaimed Salon for major avant-garde cultural figures including Marcel Duchamp, the Stieglitz circle, poets, dancers, writers, etc. She showed her innovative paintings in over 46 of the most important museum exhibitions and Salons, wrote poetry, designed unique furniture and gained international fame for her sets and costumes for avant-garde opera.” It was Duchamp, by the way, who organised that (posthumous) retrospective, and two new books explore the outset of Duchamp’s New York activities during World War One. Ruth Brandon’s Spellbound by Marcel explores the love triangle of Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood, while Corinne Taunay’s Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York (translated by Doug Skinner) describes the revolutionary art that emerged at the same time.

Two recent books cover the life and career of Jewish-Austrian artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who studied under cultish mystic Johannes Itten in Vienna before moving with him in 1919 to a new school in Germany called the Bauhaus, where among many other things she created a poster to celebrate Else Lasker-Schüler’s reading at the school. More of her images come to us in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Works from the Collection of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, while in Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Bauhaus Student, Avant-Garde Painter, Art Teacher we discover a “painter, art teacher, and politically active poster artist. Initially, she specialized in textile and graphic design, and later she worked as an interior designer. Her paintings reflect her profound study of the classical avant-garde.” Deported to Theresienstadt, she taught art to hundreds of children; like most of her pupils, Dicker-Brandeis was murdered in the Holocaust. Not just a neglected artist overdue for rediscovery, but an example of the best of humanity in the very midst of Hell.

At a certain point a neglected artist becomes … an artist. In the case of Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint that point appears to have arrived. Following blockbuster exhibitions, numerous books (including a multi-volume catalogue raisonné), plus a feature film of her life, the narrative of non-figurative art has been corrected to incorporate her pioneering role. “Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation.” That’s from Hilma af Klint: A Biography by Julia Voss, who also wrote the afterword for Philipp Deines’s graphic novel, The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint. And the Pamela Colman Smith revival rolls on in another graphic treatment, Cat Willett’s The Queen of Wands. “From a childhood spent between the United Kingdom and Jamaica, to early artistic success in New York, to involvement in the secret occult society Order of the Golden Dawn … Though she received little money and almost no credit for her contributions to the magical realm in her lifetime, Pixie’s impact on tarot, divination, and the worlds of mysticism and the arts have reverberated for nearly 150 years, and her story serves as an enchanted spark.” Meanwhile, if you’re assembling your dinner-party-guests-from-history list, I can recommend Lisa Kröger & Melanie R. Anderson’s Toil & Trouble: A Women’s History of the Occult whose subjects range from “Dion Fortune, who tried to marshal a magical army against Hitler” to “Elvira, queer goth sex symbol who defied the Satanic Panic”.

Every time you mention the word “occult” a book about Aleister Crowley falls out of the sky. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules. Tumbling into our selection is the luridly titled Astounding Secrets of the Devil Worshippers’ Mystic Love Cult by William Seabrook, whom you may recall as the subject of wife Marjorie Worthington’s vexed biography. Here, in a series of early 1920s dispatches, Seabrook introduced American newspaper readers to the Great Beast’s orgiastic capers (that’s from Snuggly, of whom more later). Occult artist Austin Osman Spare had comparably earthly conjunctions in mind in his pan-sexual illustrations for Richard Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published for the first time in a lavish Fulgur production. NSFW, naturally, if that’s even a thing any more (isn’t it NSFH? Oh and while I have you here between parentheses, Phil Baker’s bio, the standard work on Spare, is due for an expanded reissue next year). A dirty book gathers no dust, and we recover some primo Weimar smut in the form of a Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights (translated by Michael Gillespie), whose “charming, witty, and erotic tales capture the trials and triumphs of early twentieth-century gay life without apology or shame”. It was originally issued in the early 1920s by author “Granand” (Erwin Ritter von Busse), and its fate offers a useful corrective to the myth that Weimar Germany was an anything-goes free-for-all; it was banned upon publication and only reissued decades later. True-life transgressions are the subject of Peter Jordaan’s impressively thorough A Secret between Gentlemen, “a unique historical biographical trilogy revealing the gay scandal, hidden for 120 years, that embroiled the noted British M.P., connoisseur, and philanthropist Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea in 1902.”

In After Sappho we have a personalised queer history, a “joyous reimagining of the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late 19th and early 20th century as they battle for control over their lives; for liberation and for justice.” Subjects include Natalie Barney (who needs no introduction to the readers of these pages), Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction to anyone), along with many other lesbian or bisexual women of the 19th and 20th centuries. Author Selby Wynn Schwartz describes it as “a book about the desire to write your life for yourself, preferably in good company”. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) writes her own (early) life in HERmione, now reissued. “She was in her early twenties—a disappointment to her father, an odd duckling to her mother, an importunate, overgrown, unincarnated entity that had no place.” Donna Krolik Hollenberg, an authority on the subject, offers us Winged Words: The Life and Works of the Poet H.D., which “explores her love affairs with both men and women; her long friendship with Bryher; the birth of her daughter, Perdita, and her imaginative bond with her; and her marriage to (and later divorce from) fellow poet Richard Aldington. Additionally, the book includes scenes from her relationships with Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and D.H. Lawrence; H.D.’s fascination with spiritualism and the occult; and H.D.’s psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud.” It’s unclear why there has been such a run on H.D. of late, but if anyone’s keeping track we’re at the lengthy-New-Yorker-article stage of the revival. The women’s suffrage movement is the subject of Wendy L. Rouse’s Public Faces, Secret Lives, specifically the “variety of individuals who represented a range of genders and sexualities,” yet “publicly conformed to gendered views of ideal womanhood in order to make women’s suffrage more palatable to the public.” Another highly welcome historical study to counter the grievous fiction that trans identity is a Western invention of recent origin: Before We Were Trans, in which Kit Heyam seeks “to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.”

A more localised piece of queer history in Places of Tenderness and Heat, which spirits us to fin-de-siècle St. Petersburg, “a city full of risk and opportunity”. Author Olga Petri “takes us through busy shopping arcades, bathhouses, and public urinals to show how queer men routinely met and socialized.” One of the most influential products of Silver Age St. Petersburg was Sergei Diaghilev, the revolutionary cultural catalyst and creator of the Ballets Russes, and the subject of Rupert Christiansen’s Diaghilev’s Empire. “Off stage and in its wake came scandal and sensation, as the great artists and mercurial performers involved variously collaborated, clashed, competed while falling in and out of love with each other on a wild carousel of sexual intrigue and temperamental mayhem.” Diaghilev also features in Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs: “Talented intellectuals, artists, poets, philosophers, and writers eked out a living at menial jobs, while others found great success. Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, and Stravinsky joined Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein in the creative crucible of the Années folles …” In a similar vein comes Homeward from Heaven by Boris Poplavsky who shares the not exactly congested category of “Paris-based boxer-poets who died in their early 30s” with our old sparring partner Arthur Cravan. Translated by Bryan Karetnyk, Poplavsky’s novel was “… written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.”

We remain in between-the-wars France for Anna de Courcy’s Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age. “Dazzlingly beautiful, highly intelligent and an extraordinary force of energy, Nancy Cunard was an icon of the Jazz Age, said to have inspired half the poets and novelists of the twenties.” A year ago the great Josephine Baker was interred in the Panthéon, in a ceremony which sadly did not feature the current head of the FBI on his knees begging forgiveness of Baker’s spirit for the Bureau’s vicious campaign of harassment during her lifetime. The Flame of Resistance by Damien Lewis (NB not the actor) is an anomaly in the writer’s oeuvre in that it is not about the SAS. But it is a tale of wartime heroism which finds Baker – “one of London’s most closely-guarded special agents” – undertaking enormously risky clandestine operations. “Baker’s secret war embodies a tale of unbounded courage, passion, devotion and sacrifice, and of deep and bitter tragedy, fueled by her own desire to combat the rise of Nazism, and to fight for all that is good and right in the world.” Josephine Baker often appears in those “awesome women in history” books you grab when you’re panic-buying for a 10-year-old girl’s birthday; how grotesquely unjust that she should have to appear alongside that vile collaborator, Coco Chanel. More Americans in Paris: in Strange Impressions we have extracts from the previously unpublished memoirs of painter Romaine Brooks. The author’s own title, which may give you an insight into her childhood and how it shaped her later life, was No Pleasant Memories.

Natalie Barney (her again!) is the one degree of separation between Brooks (her lover) and our next subject (her sister), who helped popularise the Baháʼí faith in the West, as we discover in The Life of Laura Barney. Author Mona Khademi “traces the journey of Laura Barney from her pampered childhood to her life as a feminist, global-thinker and peace-builder who was twice decorated by the French Legion of Honoré.” (Natalie) Barney biographer Suzanne Rodriguez is the author of Found Meals of the Lost Generation: People, Stories & Recipes from 1920s Paris, now reissued and with which, among other things, “…you can transform your living room into Gertrude Stein’s famous salon”. Stein features in Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, in which Scott Herring offers “portraits of writers and artists who sought out or employed unconventional methods and collaborations up until the early twenty-first century. Herring finds Djuna Barnes performing the principles of high modernism not only in poetry but also in pharmacy orders and grocery lists. In mystery novels featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas along with modernist souvenir collections, the gay writer Samuel Steward elaborated a queer theory of aging and challenged gay male ageism.”

Herring’s account includes a chapter on “The Harlem Renaissance as Told by ‘Lesbian Elder’ Mabel Hampton”, while a clutch of recent reissues introduces a new readership to the outstanding between-the-wars profusion of Black arts that was the Harlem Renaissance. They include The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes’s Not without Laughter, collections of short fiction and essays by Alice Dunbar Nelson and Zora Neale Hurston, respectively, Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (whose collected articles are now available in a single edition) and a convolute of Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen (the latter in a film adaptation last year). Passing is a dominant theme of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, now reissued by Everyman’s Library, and Alexandra Lapierre’s Belle Greene (translated by Tina Kover), a novelisation of the fascinating real life of Belle da Costa Greene, director of the private library of banker JP Morgan. “Flamboyant, brilliant, beautiful […] Belle is among New York society’s most sought after intellectuals. Although she looks white, she is African American, the daughter of a famous black activist who sees her desire to hide her origins as the consummate betrayal.”

The magnificent Morgan Library that Greene built up was recently the venue for a major exhibition on the life and work of provocateur Alfred Jarry, whose works are still being rediscovered in English. Speculations, translated by R J Dent, is a “darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces … everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind”. Something for everyone, then. By this stage of our Satanic selection, when talk turns to the umbral delights of the Belle Epoque, regular readers will know to expect a slew of Snuggly titles – and this year is no exception. New anthologies address the classic fin-de-siècle trope of the femme fatale and collate occult-related fiction while a new collection of works by Hersh Dovid Nomberg bears the delightful title of Happiness and Other Fictions (translated by Daniel Kennedy, who has more translations from the Yiddish at Farlag Press). From the late-breaking (1923) Decadence of Hélène Picard’s Sabbat (translated by Brian Stableford): “Seeing Satan emerging from a poppy and accepting him as her poetic savior …” OK, stop right there and just take my money. Snuggly have an impressive list of works by the similarly outré Jane de la Vaudère, to which they now add The Priestesses of Mylitta (again translated by Brian Stableford). Set in Babylon, it introduces us to “the cult of the eponymous goddess, whose worship consists, in part, of newly married women delivering themselves to haphazard lovers, the story, which was very probably the author’s last completed work, is one of both tenderness and torture, brutal bloodshed and the adoration held in delicious kisses.” Each of these rediscoveries points to an uncommonly interesting creative force, so how fortunate that this year also brings the first English biography of the author, Resurrecting Jane de la Vaudère by Sharon Larson. “A controversial figure who was known as a plagiarist, La Vaudère attracted the attention of the public and of her peers, who caricatured her in literary periodicals and romans à clef. Most notably, La Vaudère claimed to have written the Rêve d’Egypte pantomime, whose 1907 production at the Moulin Rouge featured a kiss between Missy and Colette that led to riots and the suspension of future performances.” From the same era the fascinating polymath Victor Segalen looks back at one of his idols in the 1907 Le double Rimbaud, here in a bilingual edition (English translation by Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs). “While disclosing the two Rimbauds that most interested him, the writer and the adventurer, the seer and the outlaw, Segalen aims at overlapping his own shadow with Rimbaud’s and walking beyond the signposts of his own mind so as to confront the two roads taken by the other poet, the imaginative one and the real one.”

I don’t at all hold with Britain’s Daily Telegraph, the mouthpiece of the party that has screwed the country from top to bottom, but they do a good obituary, with some of the more diverting recent examples to be found in Eccentric Lives: The Daily Telegraph Book of 21st Century Obituaries. It was a Telegraph obituary that sparked the classic account of butch fatale island despot Joe Carstairs; author Kate Summerscale returns with The Book of Phobias and Manias: A History of Obsession (whose cover bears the classic image of the divinely manic Countess de Castiglione – who died on this day in 1899). You name it, someone somewhere is turned on or terrified by it, as we discover in this “history of human strangeness, from the middle ages to the present day, and a wealth of explanations for some of our most powerful aversions and desires.” Obsession drives Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, “a carefully woven tapestry of death and melancholy that has seen numerous cinematic and operatic adaptations and inspired the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo” (and also worked its way into Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Bougrelon). The translator is Will Stone, who also brings us the first English edition of Nietzsche in Italy, an account of the philosopher’s travels by Guy de Pourtalès first published in 1929 (which neatly complements Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin, mentioned above). Friedrich Nietzsche’s own Thus Spake Zarathustra is available in a new translation by Michael Hulse in which “Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendor as a man who prizes self-worth above all else as a moral code to live by.” Salomo Friedländer (who published as Mynona) was the author of an influential study of Nietzsche; like many writers born around the beginning of the German Empire, he was in thrall not just to Nietzsche’s thinking, but his magisterial prose as well. But in the slim volume Black – White – Red (translated by W. C. Bamberger), Mynona works in the “grotesque” form, a mode that was enjoying renewed attention from Germany’s avant-garde in the early 20th century, including writers like Hermann Harry Schmitz, Oskar Panizza and Else Lasker-Schüler (a fellow devotee of Nietzsche).

Reaching further back in German cultural history, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self explores ideas to which Strange Flowers is irresistibly drawn – the modern conception of personality that arose in the wake of the French Revolution. Alongside familiar figures like Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, author Andrea Wulf introduces us to writer and translator Caroline Schlegel, whose salon brought these and other minds together. “When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s …” Simultaneously, the dandies were modelling another conception of self-will; British Dandies by Dominic Janes “explores that social and cultural history through a focus on three figures: the macaroni, the dandy, and the aesthete. The first was noted for his flamboyance, the second for his austere perfectionism, and the third for his perversity.” Their spiritual descendants haunt Nino Strachey’s Young Bloomsbury, which describes the moment in the movement’s history when a “group of queer young creatives joined their ranks, pushing at gender boundaries, flouting conventions, spurring their seniors to new heights of artistic activity.” Subjects include Vita Sackville-West’s dazzlingly camp cousin Eddy, who furthered the early 20th-century tradition of the cultured country house in “England’s last literary salon” as related in Simon Fenwick’s The Crichel Boys. “Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys – later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer – became members of one another’s surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel’s visitors’ book reveals a Who’s Who of the arts in post-war Britain – Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson – who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation”. Country house social experimentation of a different kind in Anna Neima’s Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall, a progressive community inspired by Rabindranath Tagore. The invented tongue of the original Utopia, Thomas More’s, joins “the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith; and considers the quest for the true philosophical language” in Marina Yaguello’s Imaginary Languages (translated by Erik Butler). The island of Redonda comes closer to the original meaning of the word “utopia”, or “non-place”. Redonda is a place, just – an uninhabited outcrop in the Caribbean which makes Joe Carstairs’s Big Whale Cay look positively continental. But in Try Not to Be Strange, we discover the bizarre and remarkably persistent mythology which arose around the island “kingdom” and its succession of underworld overlords, largely fabricated in the distant bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia. Author Michael Hingston presents “the complete history of Redonda’s transformation from an uninhabited, guano-encrusted island into a fantastical and international kingdom of writers. With a cast of characters including forgotten sci-fi novelists, alcoholic poets, vegetarian publishers, Nobel Prize frontrunners, and the bartenders who kept them all lubricated while angling for the throne themselves …”

And with this very Strange Flowers selection of misfits we draw our Satanic selection to a close. My own publishing venture is winding up, so rest assured this will be the last time I shill for Rixdorf Editions (though I can’t promise I won’t put out anything under my own name and tell you all about it!). Most titles are still available but they’re selling fast at the five-year anniversary price of five yo-yos; have a look here. It will all be over at the end of this year; they’ll be gone forever and this will have been nothing but a strange and beautiful dream.

Lolotte Valon was the sensation of Vienna. At least, of that snobbish, sophisticated Vienna that sets the tone for bad morals and even worse taste. Lolotte Valon had suddenly appeared in Vienna – no one knew where from – and this new apparition turned the strolling habitués of the Graben on their heads. Lolotte Valon was – there was no denying it – a triumphant beauty. Her golden red hair presented a striking contrast to her large sea-green eyes, which were framed by almost unnaturally long black eyelashes. The bright red lips of her mouth spoke of unrestrained avarice and unbridled hunger for life. Her figure was boyishly slim and, along with her soft, serpentine movements, emanated the kind of sensuality that turns men into slaves.

One hundred years ago today, German performer Anita Berber and partner Sebastian Droste presented an evening of dance at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. This is the most banal description of what would prove to be one of the great scandals of the day, an event that even now is striking in its conceptual extremity. Equally forward-looking, this stage show was just one part of an ambitious multi-platform project under the banner of Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy) which had considerable thematic overlap with the performers’ lives.

In case you’re new to Berber, here is a primer on her life presented at something like the pace with which she burned through it. Born in Leipzig in 1899, Anita Berber began dancing and taking acting lessons at around 14, made her stage debut in Berlin at 17, started modelling at 18, at 19 made the first of what would eventually be 24 films in just five years, and became a drug addict at 21. Berber was married and already separated at 22, remarried at 25. On stage she performed with or without clothes, with or without partners Sebastian Droste and Henri Chatin-Hofmann, drawing on an Expressionist aesthetic and themes of transgressive sex, psychological terror and drug use. Decline set in around the middle of the decade, accelerated by drug and alcohol abuse, and Berber didn’t survive the twenties – history’s or her own.

While Berber is most closely associated with Weimar Berlin and our careworn clichés of the time – divine decadence, dancing on the edge of the volcano – a significant amount of her career played out in Vienna. She had performed in the Austrian capital on multiple occasions prior to her 1922 sensation, alongside Tilly Losch among others, and shot the majority of her films there (usually smaller parts, reflecting her reputation as an unreliable player).

Berber and Droste, who trailed bedlam and bad debt in their wake, turned up in October 1922; shortly after arrival Berber checked herself into a sanatorium and Droste was stealing money to buy drugs but, hardly a criminal mastermind, he was soon under arrest. By the time of their performance he was on a suspended order to leave the country.

Her beauty alone would have been enough to attract attention, but it was something else Lolotte did that made her the talk of the day in Vienna. On the street she wore gossamer silk dresses that revealed her shoulders and part of her marble white bust, with a sable fur wrapped loosely around her body in place of a fur coat. And she was always accompanied, either on her arm or leisurely trotting behind her, by a small black grizzly bear. If one were to add that Lolotte Valon was never to be seen without her monocle, that in the street she smoked something from a little gold pipe that, the aroma suggested, was mixed with opium, you can well understand why the gentlemen and ladies would form a guard of honour whenever the exotic beauty came along.

The scandal of the occasion is pre-programmed, but for Droste, and even more so for Berber, this performance is not just about titillating the bourgeoisie. It is the apotheosis of their vision, which for them forms part of a lineage extending back to the gothic novel. It feeds on the idea that we are drawn to things that are objectively horrific, and that they can be refashioned as entertainment. The Grand Guignol theatre in Paris was still running at the time, in Germany you have the novels of Hanns Heinz Ewers with their extremes of sexuality and dread, while in Vienna, just a few years previously, Sigmund Freud had presented his theory of the uncanny, combining the sensations of compulsion and repulsion. Berber and Droste take all of this, distending and magnifying it, while borrowing from the stylised Expressionism of early Weimar cinema.

Berber may have been chaotic, but for her, it was always about the art. “We dance death, illness, pregnancy, syphilis, madness, dying, infirmity, suicide, and no one takes us seriously,” she complained. “They just gawp at our veils, trying to see what’s under there, the swine.” She always fought against this reduction to T&A; literally, on occasion. She had little impulse control at the best of times, but she was never more aggressive than when her art was disrespected. In 1930, Czech critic Joe Jenčík published a valuable documentation of her dances. Unfortunately Berber didn’t live to see it; she would doubtless have been pleased that someone took her so seriously. Tellingly, it contains a chapter called “Atelier or Boudoir”, crystallising the central dichotomy in her career.

Viennese audiences may have anticipated levels of sensuality permissible in a male-female dance partnership, perhaps a roll call of “great lovers of history”, but Droste and Berber were more like twisted siblings, a kink-positive Hansel and Gretel. Their dances came with names like “Cocaine”, “Suicide”, “Mad House” and “Byzantine Whip Dance”. It wasn’t just this, or the nudity, that shocked the audience on 14 November 1922 (although the extent to which Berber danced completely nude has always been overstated). In Berlin, at least, the disrobed performer had been a stage feature since Olga Desmond presented herself as a “living sculpture” in faux-high brow performances at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in 1906. No, even now Berber and Droste’s act isn’t something to be neatly filed under “isn’t it cute what people used to find shocking”. One of their set pieces had Berber supine beneath a gallows as Droste ejaculates in his death throes. You’d still think twice about taking Nanna to that particular matinee.

All of this is provocation enough, but remember – this isn’t Berlin, it’s Vienna; it isn’t a murky basement, it’s the Konzerthaus, which is in the first rank of classical venues in the city alongside the Musikverein and the Staatsoper. The evening’s pianist, Otto Schulhof, accompanied the likes of Jascha Heifetz, Pablo Casals and Eugène Ysaÿe throughout his career. The pair’s dances of utter abandon were set to pieces by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns; the use of the “Moonlight Sonata” to accompany a scene of suicide prompted one Viennese critic to propose a “Beethoven Protection Law”. In Catholic Vienna, Berber appeared as a nun while Sebastian Droste appeared as his namesake saint. If there was any precedent for this collision of high culture and shock value it was the premiere of Paul Hindemith’s outrageous one-act opera Sancta Susanna in March of that year, which brought crucifix-humping nuns to the august Frankfurt Opera.

One day Lolotte Valon appeared at the Tabarin accompanied by a Hungarian gentleman, and danced. She danced with such sultry abandon, so wildly, so furiously that all the guests got up and even the waiters forgot to encourage the guests to continue drinking. Of course, when the dance was over, she invited one or another of the guests to a further dance, and now at last the beau monde discovered that the beautiful young woman’s name was Lolotte Valon and that she came from somewhere in the East.

Berber and Droste’s performance, and the pair’s utterly dysfunctional offstage behaviour, preoccupied the Viennese press for weeks. The very day after their Konzerthaus appearance, Droste was arrested for robbing a pair of German countesses of jewellery and money; Berber openly shot up in cafés. They got into contractual wrangles about further performances, they were banned from the stage yet performed anyway, and stole all the while. Droste was finally expelled in early January, a few days later the police came for Anita. In her hotel room, she greeted them naked, tore up the warrant, impertinently addressed them with the informal “du” that she used for everyone she met. Berber left the city but with Viennese irreverence, parody versions of the pair’s act soon appeared in the city’s entertainment listings: “Anitta Gerber in Her Gruesome Dances”, “Annita Sperber and Sebastian Drosinger”, or simply “Anita Berber II”.

Berber and Droste would never perform together again (they may have been married, by the way, but it says something for the chaos of their lives that we can’t say with certainty). But their Viennese legacy transcends the newspaper clippings, caricatures and court records that documented their time in the city. For it was here that their grand project of a Gesamtkunstwerk took brief form. Somehow in among the turmoil they found time to shoot a film of their stage show, directed by Fritz Freisler. It premiered in Vienna in March 1923, but tragically the film Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy is lost to us.

Luckily there is a more durable record – a book that bears the same title as the performance and the film, which was published in 1923. Droste and, especially, Berber were at the height of their infamy and notoriety, and they might easily have cashed in with a trashy memoir, and it would no doubt have been highly successful. But what they actually came up with was a high-brow production featuring photos by Viennese photographer “Madame d’Ora”, Dora Kallmus, whose lens captured everyone from empresses to drag queens. Here the few nude and near-nude studies find a sympathetic setting. Berber shows her range in a series of choreographic studies, including this image which appears to have been taken on the very day of her and Droste’s performance. Elsewhere, drawings by important Austrian Expressionist Felix Albrecht Harta are joined by Berber’s own naïve images, presumably self-portraits, including the cover graphic.

Apart from serious-minded essays by a journalist and architect respectively, much of the text is taken up by Berber and Droste’s own poetry. These verses may not be in the first rank of Expressionist literature, but they have an authentic intensity, staccato dispatches from disordered minds consumed by drugs, dread and exultation.

Overall, this was certainly something your Weimar-era sophisticate could leave out on their Bauhaus coffee table to be admired. It was published by Gloriette, a bibliophile Viennese press which also issued a one-act play by Lina Loos and Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street) by Hugo Bettauer. Later filmed with Greta Garbo and Asta Nielsen, with a small part for our old pal Valeska Gert, its treatment of prostitution typified Bettauer’s frank approach to sexuality. In another book for the press, Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews), he confronted the rising antisemitism of Vienna head on.

When Lolotte Valon’s public dance performance was announced one day, it proved a big sensation for those who had nothing better to think about, and the main hall of the Konzerthaus was filled. Lolotte Valon danced naked, or at least almost naked. Two rosettes of diamonds on her breasts, a veil around her waist – that was her entire costume. And the smartest bon vivants declared that they had never seen greater harmony in a body, never seen lines more beautiful and more perfect.

But it was not just in the Gloriette catalogue that Bettauer and Berber crossed paths. Even before Berber’s expulsion, Bettauer had pseudonymously enlisted her in a literary project that tracked her movements in something like real time, an extended blind item that was serialised in the newspaper Der Tag and later became a novel. In Der Kampf um Wien (The Battle of Vienna; extracted here), Berber appears as “Lolotte Valon”; the text takes significant liberties with her life in the course of fictionalisation. Perhaps refusing to believe that such an agent of chaos could be of self-willed origin, here Bettauer makes “Valon” a tool of a Hungarian agitator who is seeking to make Vienna part of a fascist empire. Leaving aside the observation that this has no basis in Berber’s life, it was an extraordinarily prescient vision, particularly as the term “fascist” had presumably only entered public consciousness a few weeks earlier with Mussolini’s March on Rome. But Bettauer was not just an early chronicler of fascism, he was an early victim as well, slain by a far-right assassin in 1925. 

Back in Berlin, Berber’s solo act came into its own, as Germany’s economy spiralled into hyperinflation. But this identification fixed her in time, and her own nefarious reputation was subject to inflation. Just about any outrage or excess could be believably attributed to her; Bettauer at least had the excuse of fiction. Yet you don’t need to sensationalise – sticking to the verifiable facts provides sensation aplenty.

The most famous image of Berber – Otto Dix’s portrait – is also the most telling account of her decline. In 1925, Berber is garishly made up for the dark shadows of Expressionist performance, a perhaps unwelcome reminder of the desperate excesses of the hyperinflated early 1920s. Dix, meanwhile, represents the “New Objectivity” which would dominate in the latter part of the Weimar era. As their trajectories cross over in the middle of the decade, there is an electric confrontation of styles. Berber is cruelly subjected to the unforgiving glare of the new sobriety in German art; the lights have come on in the club, everyone’s gone home, the fever has broken.

Berber kept performing with ever-diminishing returns. Her 1926 “Dances of Eroticism and Ecstasy” sought to replicate the Vienna sensation, but the moment had passed. Sebastian Droste died the following year, and afterwards Anita remembered him with surprising fondness in a newspaper interview. Exhibiting an equally unexpected level of self-awareness, she noted that no one had lived as feverishly and avidly as they had, and declared: “the naked dancer Anita Berber is dead”.

If this was a wish to leave not only her career but her tumultuous life behind, it came true the following year, 1928. Six years to the day since she electrified and horrified the good burghers of Vienna, she was laid to rest in a cemetery in Berlin, just a few streets from where I write this exactly 94 years later. A park across the road, another former cemetery, now bears her name and, in an impressive example of nominative determinism, has become a drug hot spot. Just as fitting, Berber also shares her name with a Berlin nightclub.

My own modest existence came about on another 14 November in the intervening 100 years. And not to overburden you with commemoration, but my small press Rixdorf Editions last week celebrated its fifth birthday. Sadly there will not be a sixth, but if you are at all curious to see what I got up to over there, you can pick up the books at the anniversary/closedown price of just five euros here, and read my thoughts on the whole adventure here.

Polly Peabody was nobody’s fool. She was raised with the snobbery, self-regard and genteel neuroses of her privileged Bostonian background, but even before she met poet Harry Crosby and went way off-script to become glamorous Paris-based publisher Caresse Crosby, she had proven herself to be a spirited, entrepreneurial force. Born in the Gilded Age as Mary Phelps Jacob, generally known as Polly, prior to World War One she made productive use of the extensive downtime that came with the debutante’s existence by inventing the first modern bra (and she was definitely not the “inventor of the modern shoe” as Wikipedia currently avers).

During World War One she married Richard Peabody (“I said yes. I love to say yes”); the pair had two children, but active service in France had rendered Dick a cantankerous drunk whose greatest passion was chasing fire engines; he had an alarm, wired to the local fire station, installed above the marital bed for this purpose. While Harry Crosby came back from his own traumatic tour of duty with a similarly powerful thirst (and the Croix de Guerre), the experience also turned him into a reckless nihilist, “electric with rebellion” in Polly’s description. Their first encounter was in 1920, when they joined a group outing to a fun fair; within hours of meeting Harry pledged his heart to Polly in the Tunnel of Love, on the 4th of July no less (that’s a whole Springsteen album right there).

The Cuckold Peabody reacted with remarkable alacrity to the rapidly developing affair between his wife and a 22-year-old war hero. In fact Dick emerges from this tangled narrative as a surprisingly sympathetic character. He eventually sought treatment for his alcoholism while simultaneously advancing public understanding with his influential theory that it was a life-long condition that could be managed but not eliminated.

But again – Polly Peabody was nobody’s fool. This is worth emphasising, because even though her younger lover now entreated her incessantly to divorce her husband, she took her time. She was entranced by Harry’s dark magnetism, yet she was not at all a helpless maiden requiring his protection, such as it was. He saw her as a woman in need of rescue, when in fact she was a woman in need of adventure.

For all her strength of will and vision of wider horizons, Polly still sought the blessing of their Boston set, while Harry couldn’t bear the “sexless, hypocritical busy-bodies”. Courting Polly in the face of disapproving families and the censorious society in which they moved was an experience he described as the “darkest period” of his life. Coming from someone who had literally scooped up scattered limbs from the mud at the Battle of Verdun, that’s quite something.

Harry’s assault on Polly’s defences took on the quality of trench warfare. Their relationship was often conducted long-distance, yet he badgered her relentlessly, both beseeching and issuing high-handed commands. He told her how to wear her hair, warned her not to drink, mawkishly confessed his failings and made constant promises of improvement, belittled her writing ambitions, tried to forbid her (ultimately failed) attempt to break into the early movies, lavished gifts on her children even though he cared little for them, repeatedly threatened to kill himself if she did not commit herself to him and all along held out the prospect of a suicide pact. As a suitor, Harry Crosby came with so many red flags he was a one-man May Day parade.

Crosby was in Paris in the summer of 1922 when he cabled one last proposal and set off for New York; so confident was he of Polly’s acquiescence that he had already booked the bridal suite on the return passage. And she, indeed, responded with one word: YES (she loved to say yes).

Perhaps she imagined the event to be safely in the not excessively immediate future, but as soon as Harry disembarked in New York on 9 September 1922 he took her to the Municipal Building, five minutes before closing, and they were wed. They then went to the Church of the Heavenly Rest to be blessed – presumably at Harry’s insistence. Along with an eccentric form of sun worship, there was a surprising amount of Christianity in Crosby’s anarchic, morbid, nihilistic worldview; and he fashioned their names into crosses. She, drawing on greater experience in the field, wasn’t too fussed about marriage whatever the venue.

And if Polly ever expected fidelity of Harry, she was soon disabused of the illusion. Even on the voyage over he flirted with a woman with “gold hair and soft eyes”, and by the time of his suicide pact with a mistress seven years later, there would be numerous others. But for a moment, the union brought peace to the restless soul of Harry Crosby, as he recorded in his diary one hundred years ago today:

The battle is over, the race is run. Thank the Sun, Thank the Sun the race is won.

Further reading:
I shall never, never forget
Eclipse
Lapses into piety
Always yes
For eternity
Pearls: Harry Crosby
Harry Crosby | photographs
When Harry met Polly

Once again, like a long-missing cat dropping a propitiatory dead bird at your feet to explain and excuse its absence, I return to justify my extensive blogging silence by presenting you with something I have been chewing on – my latest translation project for Rixdorf Editions.

Out today, Three Prose Works is a collection of pre-World War One fiction by the great German-Jewish writer Else Lasker-Schüler. Better known as a poet, here she builds whole worlds in prose, informed by Nietzsche, fairy tales, 1001 Nights, the Torah and her own early engagement with the creative life. The three works in question are each made up of interconnected stories. In The Peter Hille Book, we find the author herself (in the persona of “Tino”) travelling in schematic Germanic settings with “Petrus” (representing her mentor, arch-bohemian Peter Hille) in a series of short, lyrical sketches. In The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, Lasker-Schüler sends her avatar on a perilous, erotically charged journey through an imagined Middle East. Tino also features in several of the longer, more parabolic tales of The Prince of Thebes, now a warrior princess leading the charge in a tumultuous conflict; World War One would begin within just days of its publication. It should be noted that Lasker-Schüler herself never designated these three works as a triptych, but there are enough correspondences between the digressive tales to justify presenting them together.

Else Lasker-Schüler left Germany in 1933, never to return; she died in Jerusalem in 1945 but over the last few decades has been restored to her rightful position as one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century. It is an enduring mystery why she isn’t better known in the English-speaking world; I don’t honestly think my efforts will do much to change that, but engaging with her life and work has been hugely rewarding.

The afterword to Three Prose Works details the highs and lows of Else Lasker-Schüler’s extraordinary life, and there is more to explore on the Rixdorf Editions website, including the background to Svenja Prigge’s cover artwork, a profile of the figures to whom the writer dedicated the parts of Three Prose Works, Lasker-Schüler’s film treatment for a radical pre-World War One cinema project, a brief account of her great friend Senna Hoy, a Jewish bohemian anarchist who died in a Russian asylum, an exploration of Else Lasker-Schüler’s time in Berlin, where she spent over half her life, and her tribute to another Rixdorf author, Magnus Hirschfeld (oh, and just to drop another bird at your feet – for The Public Domain Review I profiled Hirschfeld and his ground-breaking study of early 20th-century queer life, Berlin’s Third Sex).

And from these pages you can explore Else Lasker-Schüler’s artwork, discover some unsettling historic parallels in an exhibition of her correspondence, accompany her to the Bauhaus in 1920, and admire her wardrobe through time. And if that sounds like too much work, you can always watch this video I put together, which gives you the essentials of her life in just three of your Earth minutes:

Finally, in the spirit of show, don’t tell, I offer this visceral and absurd extract from Three Prose Works. Taken from The Prince of Thebes, it tells of the first of three kings by the name of Abigail; the feminine name is typical of the play of gender, sexuality and other building blocks of identity throughout the three works, which together present as something like an Orientalist Orlando.

He was still in his mother’s womb when he became Melech. The Melech’s mother lamented because Abigail refused to be born. He lay secure in his mother’s sumptuous womb and snored so loudly that his slumber could be heard from the palace right across the river, all the way to the east of the city. The young Melech did not wish to be born. And Diwagâtme, his mother, outgrew the King’s cushion, and a room in the palace was upholstered for her great womb, and there she spread out day by day. The young Melech had now been dwelling in her womb for twenty years and refused to be born. The Melech’s mother then summoned one man from each group in the city to advise her. The most distinguished priest of the Jehovanites, one of the cattle breeders from both the red and yellow Adamites, and the dearest of the boys of Sabaoth who was to have been the playmate of her son Abigail. And the market square was hollowed out and padded with soft sheep fleece for Diwagâtme, for with her body in this state the mother of the stubborn Abigail could no longer stay in the palace, and so one midday it transpired, on the counsel of her medical advi­sor, that innumerable slave hands carefully carried her to her new position in the middle of the market square in Thebes accompanied by music from bagpipes and bells and drums. Abigail refused to be born. But one day his mother heard him utter a heavenly melody and it made her think of the Song of Songs of Solomon, yet she kept this new secret of her body from the city and even from those closest to her. Her son Abigail was no ruler but a poet; while she understood his desire to stay in that dark, untroubled night, to others it was an ever-expanding mystery. But the burden of this secret made Diwagâtme ill; shadows shrouded her shining eyes, and she became dumb with fear that one day she would weave her son’s poetic soul into an indifferent conversation, especially as her only joy was to hear her son’s Song of Songs. Nor did she wish to be touched by that little polity that formed around her body like an island, inspecting and taking measurements. The persistent Melech, however, kept living off the flesh and blood of his mother, and she felt most distinctly that he had a fondness for certain dishes, that he only versified when he enjoyed the sweet blood that came from his mother eating candied roses. But whenever the impatient citizens of the city approached his mother, he crept deep into his lonely, pounding home until that day when he kicked his mother’s heart into her ribs with great force and killed Diwagâtme. Then the matricide refused no more – to be born out of frozen night. Diwagâtme was buried, but he, her son, was set upon the throne in the palace. Abigail the First sat naked on the throne in his last skin, which was tender and new and pristine. And out in the wide world he was afraid – his hands kept searching for walls and the daylight hurt his eyes. But his citizens carried him on their shoulders throughout the city, throughout the land – their miraculous Melech! Abigail was handsome, each of his limbs rested; every tint in its proper place! All the daughters of Thebes were devoted to him; the long expectation in which the city had lived had left them with imploring eyes and parted, smiling lips, and in their hair they wore flowers with an open chalice for the butterflies. Yet Abigail crawled into the belly of every virgin and now longed only for the moon when it pounded round and tender in the sky. Then, early one morning, his palace caught fire, killing Abigail the First, the son of Diwagâtme who took to her grave the secret that her son was a poet. He stood and took a step and for the first time walked on his own two feet, the feet of a spoiled King which had otherwise reclined on the shoulders of his citizens. The palace was ablaze by the time Abigail noticed, whereupon he climbed down a column of the building, collapsed in a faint, and was trampled by a caravan still dreaming in the dawn. This was the end of Abigail the Late-Born of Thebes.