The Dedalus Book of German Decadence

by Ray Furness

  Holitscher’s Der vergiftete Brunnen (The Poisoned Well) (1900) tells of another villa, owned by one Désirée Wilmoth (née Wulp) where dubious and extravagant fantasies are enacted. Désirée, widow of the wealthy Scot McAllinster whom she had met in Monte Carlo, forms a liaison with the young genius Wilmoth (Melmoth?) who dies in mysterious circumstances. After extensive travels she settles in Munich where a host of literati dance attendance: the young poet Sebastian Sasse, from Transylvania, falls under her spell. Désirée is a femme fatale with copper-coloured hair, a deathly pallor and blood-red lips, not far removed from that vision of a sphinx-like creature described by Holitscher thus: ‘She was naked to the hips, sitting rigid and upright in a black armchair in the middle of the room. Her hair was red and, parted in the middle, fell over her shoulders and across the back of the chair … Her eyes were of pale turquoise and of a deceptive gleam, her lips were cut of dark-violet amethysts. Her nipples, erectile, were of large rubies; a diamond sparkled in her navel.’ Désirée’s dancing is reminiscent of that of Loїe Fuller: images of fire abound. The presence of Wagner is paramount in the bacchanal that Désirée performs to seduce the hapless poet; the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser is meant to overwhelm him, as are lascivious eurhythmics. The performance takes place in an enormous conservatory, choked with rank vegetation. Sasse escapes and flees to Belgium, to a town which is obviously Bruges, where he writes his novel (Bruges, together with Venice, being the decadent town par excellence, indebted above all to Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte with its descriptions of swans, brackish water and dark courtyards). He returns, healed, to Munich: he has drunk of the ‘poisoned well’ of life, and survives. Holitscher’s story Von der Wollust und dem Tode (Of Lust and Death) (Munich, 1902) does not end on such a conciliatory note, however, in its portrayal of a grotesque ‘Liebestod’. The hero can only find sexual release in death, silently cutting his wrists and sinking dead upon his beloved during a rendez-vous.

  Munich had been the city in which Désirée Wilmoth’s villa stood, as had Aschenbach’s residence and the attic of the prophet who, in Thomas Mann’s story, had exulted in visions of blood and violence where millennia of human domesticity were to be expunged in a new apocalypse. If decadence also revels in perverse cruelty then Hanns Heinz Ewers may also be included. Ewers was also associated with Munich; he had appeared in cabaret there where his grotesquely satirical humour had been exploited to the full. His first literary success were the two selections of bizarre stories Das Grauen (Horror) (1907) and Die Bessessenen (The Possessed) (1908); the novel Der Zauberlehrling oder die Teufelsjäger (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the Devil’s Huntsmen) (1909) shocked by its horrifyingly orgiastic scene in which a pregnant girl is crucified and her unborn child transfixed by a pitchfork. The second novel Alraune. Die Geschichte tines lebenden Wesens (Mandrake. The Story of a Living Creature) (1911) was immensely popular (a girl is born from the seed of an ejaculating victim of an executioner which is implanted in a prostitute named Alma Raune – the pun is untranslatable – in a nearby hospital): it reached sales of over a quarter of a million in ten years and was filmed twice, the 1928 version being provided by Henrik Galeen (who also wrote the film script for Murnau’s vampire masterpiece Nosferatu). Vampire appeared in 1920; Nachtmahr (Nightmare), another collection of horror stories, followed in 1922. Ewers considered himself to be the herald of a new fantastic satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade: the stories contain portrayals of stock-in-trade horror (spider women) and various forms of commercial nastiness. Der Fundvogel (1928) is a sensational account of an enforced sex change. Ewers was ready and eager to serve the Nazi cause; in 1932 he published an account of the escapades of the Freikorps and then, probably on Hitler’s recommendation, the biography of the pimp and martyr Horst Wessel, Ein deutsches Schicksal (A German Destiny) (1934). His earlier writing, not surprisingly, was found to be incompatible with the promulgation of rude Nordic health and Ewers was pronounced degenerate (‘entartet’). But fascism is fed by some very questionable nourishment; the links between sadomasochism and fascism are natural ones and the eroticization of that movement of which Susan Sontag has written (Fascinating Fascism, 1974) shows that Ewers, for all his degeneracy, may not have been such a unusual precursor after all.

  Sadism … masochism – any account of what decadence was, must needs deal with these terms. The writers of French decadence, as Mario Praz has told us, were well aware of the ‘divine Marquis’, and cruelty and perversion abound in Huysmans, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain and others. Our concern here is with Leopold Sacher-Masoch whose relationship with decadence is oblique but whose name, thanks primarily to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, is redolent of an eccentric and perverse sexuality. This Ruthenian writer published his best known novel Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs) in 1869, some fifteen years, that is, before A rebours : it was meant to be part of a cycle known as Das Vermächtnis Kains (The Legacy of Cain). The brutality of de Sade is rarely found in Sacher-Masoch, who prefers the fetish, the artificial and the blurring of the human and the image, the statuesque and the atmospheric: the shrill confrontation of light and darkness in de Sade’s castles gives way to hotels, sanatoria and heavy curtains where Venus-Wanda holds sway. Sacher-Masoch was fêted by the literary establishment when he visited Paris in 1886 and certain of his stories (including Femmes slaves) were published in 1889 and 1890 in La revue des deux monies. Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, a novel which, on its appearance in Brussels in 1884, was greeted by a fine of two thousand francs and a two year prison sentence, owes much to Sacher-Masoch (the heroine, Raoule, delights in humiliating Jacques, her ostensible lover: after his death she transforms him into a wax doll in which his hair, nails, eyelashes and teeth have been implanted). Sacher-Masoch is in the curious situation of having his work virtually ignored whilst his name became universally known and vulgarised. There is no reference in German decadent literature to his work; a later echo, however, is found in Franz Kafka, particularly in his masterpiece Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), with its picture of a lady in fur, the name ‘Gregor’ and numerous punishment fantasies. Kafka’s fearful machine (In der Strafkolonie (The Penal Colony)) may also have its precursor im Sacher-Masoch’s Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), whose heroine uses an ‘iron virgin’ to torture her lovers. The tension between debility, power and desire was one which Kafka well understood.

  In 1874 Sacher-Masoch published a somewhat titillating account of the depravities and perversions of Viennese aristocratic ladies in Die Messalinen Wiens. It was in Vienna that Hermann Bahr, as we know, analysed the new direction in the arts: his novel Die gute Schule exulted in portrayals of accidie and excess. Bahr emphasised the role played by ‘nerves’ in French decadent literature (Paul Bourget); ‘neurasthenia’ seemed to be a common disorder, a modern epidemic. It was Hofmannsthal who formulated the Wildean statement ‘To be modern means to like antique furniture – and youthful neuroses’. A cult of the ‘soul’ is adumbrated, also the cult of the artist-figure whose nerves are so finely tuned that he can pick up private sensations and transmute them into art. Aestheticism, the conscious refinement of the senses (and also of the personality itself) is very much in evidence. But whether this necessarily can be equated with decadence is another matter; impressionism would seem to be a more appropriate label for this narcissistic introspection, these exquisite rêveries. A writer like Felix Dörmann strove to love ‘all things abnormal and sick’, but the pose is unconvincing.

  What, then, was specifically decadent about the Vienna of this time? Certain aspects of the painting of Klimt (Judith), Bahr’s sensational novel, Mahler’s morbidity and fascination with death and transience (despite the desperate attempts at life-affirmation), the obsession with sexuality in its stranger forms and an awareness of sterile refinements. Was it a city of neuroses? It was a world analysed by Sigmund Freud and observed with detachment by Freud’s Doppelgänger Arthur Schnitzler whose work frequently reflects a world of repression, sexual tension and guilt. But Schni
tzler’s self-deprecating irony and gentle scepticism preclude any attempt to label him as ‘decadent’. (The famous Traumnovelle certainly dabbles with the accoutrements of decadence – black silk, naked nuns, crucifixion – but the dreams and visions are not simply there to give a frisson; they represent the working out of a married couple’s repressed feelings of guilt.) There is no preoccupation with degeneration in Schnitzler, albeit mental illness is frequently encountered in his writing; there is a humour which is sadly lacking in the purveyors of the outré and the abnormal. Schnitzler recorded the poses of the coffee-house literati with wry amusement: he did not castigate them as did the satirist Karl Kraus. Worthy of mention is the Salzburg writer Georg Trakl who lived sporadically in Vienna and Innsbruck before enlisting in 1914 and dying by his own hand in a psychiatric hospital in Cracow later that year. Trakl was much indebted to the French in his early poetry, and the prose narrative Verlassenheit (Desolation) with its portrayal of the Count who silently awaits his own dissolution brings Roderick Usher forcibly to mind, Poe filtered, as it were, through Mallarmé. Usher’s passive assent to his own decline and his bizarre relationship with his sister fascinated many of the artists of fin de siècle France (Debussy had made sketches for an opera on their story): the minute yet ubiquitous fungus that covers the whole of the house in Usher and the evil water of the adjacent lake are also found in Trakl’s obsession with putrefaction. The overwrought, over-ripe passages in Trakl, the poisoned plants, sultry Catholicism and, above all, the theme of incest – the decadent sin par excellence, sweet and accursed – put Trakl very much within the decadent camp, as does the sadomasochism of Blaubart. But Trakl did not remain a Felix Dörmann; the prurience of decadence and the effulgence of symbolism are transcended in the last utterances, which point to a mystical Expressionism.

  Trakl briefly visited Berlin in 1913, visiting that sister to whom he was bound by an incestuous relationship and whose miscarriage (or abortion) finds an oblique reference in his poetry; he made few contacts in the city, one exception being the Expressionist poetess Else Lasker-Schüler. She would later become closely associated with Expressionism, marrying Georg Lewin in 1901 and renaming him Herwarth Walden, but she was also aware of fin de siècle preoccupations and delighted in neo-romantic exoticism: Peter Hille, arch-Bohemian and vagabond, called her ‘the dark swan of Israel, a Sappho whose world has disintegrated.’ Hille collapsed on a Berlin railway station and died in a nearby hospital in 1904. The ‘novellette’ Herodias is a genuflection towards the Salome topos which had always haunted the decadent imagination, from Gustave Moreau to Oscar Wilde – and Oskar Panizza who depicted her as the Devil’s consort and the mother of all-conquering syphilis. The femme fatale Herodias – the name given to Salome by the Fathers of the Church who confused her with her mother – dances and triumphs, but there is no joy in this voluptuous evil, and she longs for some transcendent blessing from this prophet whom she has had beheaded. Trakl’s early sketches Barrabas and Maria Magdalena share the predilection for oriental barbarism (Hille had also attempted a Cleopatra and a Semiramis): cruelty and exotic religiosity are very much part of the decadent stock in trade. Another poet associated with Berlin is Georg Heym, drowned in a skating accident in the Wannsee in January 1912. Heym is acknowledged to be one of the most talented among the early Expressionist poets but is represented here by Die Sektion (The Autopsy), a remarkable piece of poetic prose which finds beauty in viscera and faeces and a mystical rapture in the laceration and surgical dismemberment of flesh. Heym, a great admirer of Baudelaire (that poet who, as was mentioned, had accepted and embraced the epithet ‘decadent’) may have been drawn by his reading of the French poet to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly The Colloquy of Monos and Una and its memorable lines ‘I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of the one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still duly felt that you slept by my side’: the dead man’s mind is still filled with the dream of love. It has been claimed that The Autopsy somehow parodies the morbid aesthetic cult of death at the turn of the century; Heym’s tour de force is more probably an extension of diary entries (June 1908) where Heym identified himself with the first dead person he ever saw, imagining that he himself were dead, his head still filled with what he called his ‘year of love” for Hedi Weißenfels with whom he associated red poppies. Heym’s horrified fascination with death reverberated throughout his whole work, and The Autopsy is a brilliant evocation of the repugnant and the poetic.

  It is obviously erroneous to think of Berlin simply as the city of Naturalism and, later, Expressionism: writers like Hille and Scheerbart (an eccentric precursor of Dadaism who died an alcoholic in 1915) exemplify quite different attitudes. And in the work of Stanislaus Przybyszewski we find what is probably the most extreme form of writing in which decadent themes, plus a lurid satanism, excel even the practitioners of Paris. In the 1890s there stood at the corner of Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse a wine-bar advertised by a sign depicting a Bessarabian wine skin: August Strindberg renamed it ‘Zum schwarzen Ferkel’ (“The Black Pig”) and it became a meeting place mainly for the Scandinavian artists of that city. Into this milieu came the German-speaking Pole Stanislaus Przybyszewski, arch-bohemian and self-styled satanist, together with the fascinating Dagny Juel, painted by Munch, married by Przybyszewski and later murdered in a hotel room in Tiflis. Przybyszewski had intended studying architecture but abandoned this and turned to psychology and medicine before devoting himself entirely to literature, settling in Friedrichshagen and mixing freely with the writers and artists who had settled in that suburb. The impression that Przybyszewski made was one of a febrile and demonic bohemian, obsessed with a tormented and lubricious sexuality. Zur Psychologie des Individuums concludes with a paean of praise to ecstasy, the rapture of sex and the acceptance of pain; in De Profundis the emphasis is upon the psychopath and on those whom society rejects as sick; Totenmesse (Requiem Mass) uses a stream-of-consciousness technique to convey the chaos of deranged speculation of some neurotic protagonist, a requiem for a dead woman which degenerates into self-indulgent laceration. In later life Przybyszewski, in a moment of exaltation, felt a perverse pride in that Peter Altenberg had claimed that he, Przybyszewski, was a murderer because Otto Weininger had committed suicide after reading Totenmesse; he would also announce that it had been his playing of Chopin which had inspired Richard Dehmel’s cycle Verwandlungen der Venus (The Metamorphoses of Venus). Sexuality in its more aberrant forms begins to predominate in Przybyszewski’s writing. Androgyne is a short narrative in exalted prose which delights in the rhapsodic evocation of bizarre sexuality fused with mystical longing. It is a typically elaborate concoction, very reminiscent of Huysmans in the portrayal of a secret chamber encrusted with fantastic jewels where strange rites are enacted. Przybyszewski’s lurid hyperbole, his mephis-tophelean appearance and cult of the abnormal were avidly rehearsed to project an unwholesome and diseased image; the emphasis on the rank, choking growths of his inner world, and the foul miasmas which rose from the depths of his Psychè make this writer one of the most remarkable within the decadent canon.

  We come finally to Prague, the famous Bohemian city which is always associated with Franz Kafka. But Kafka stood aloof from the eccentricities of young writers such as Paul Leppin, wishing (despite the echoes of Sacher-Masoch) to write an elegant and pellucid German without excrescences and convolutions. Prague is also the city of the Golem and the old Jewish cemetery, of dark corners, alleyways and courtyards shot through with legend and fantasy. Gustav Meyrink is its narrator and Alfred Kubin its illustrator, the former’s novels and short stories being inextricably associated with supernatural horror. Meyrink certainly aimed for a frisson in his readers and a story such as Die Pflanzen des Dr Cinderella (The Plants of Dr Cinderella) (see the Dedalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy) is particularly effective in its portrayal of the synthesis of human and vegetable (the pulsating plants, the bowls
of whitish fatty substance where toadstools were growing). But the writing of Paul Leppin is closest to what may be called decadence: Severins Gang in die Finstemis (Severin’s Journey into Darkness) (1914) is a portrayal of listlessness, artifice, a prurient dallying with thought of murder and destruction and a final collapse into impotence and resignation. Leppin gives us the full range of decadent types – the neurotic Severin, the nihilistic Nathan Meyer, the aesthete Doktor Konrad, the hedonist Nikolaus and Lazarus Kain, addicted to pornography. Blaugast (published 1948) is a portrayal of degeneration not dissimilar to Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (known to English readers as The Blue Angel): the hero slithers to the lowest depths of society and finally ends up exposing himself in a park; he also earns money in bars by imitating animal noises and delighting the drunks of both sexes by masturbating. Leppin is very much of his time in his descriptions of boredom, futility and accidie which are only relieved by thoughts of violence and lurid sensationalism. Max Brod, friend of Kafka and close observer of the literary scene in Prague in the early years of this century had contributed (in his Schloss Nornepygge (1908)) to the portrayal of aesthetidsm and violence (the hero’s involvement in anarchy, the orgies in the castle and the ball in the open-cast mine where the resentment of the proletariat is meant to heighten the pleasure of the participants). The cult of violence in decadence, when linked to the antics of the Futurists, would produce an atmosphere of instability both fascinating and disturbing.

  To be decadent, then, meant to draw sweet, morbid sensations from the contemplation of dissolution, to prefer the artificial and the unnatural, to tend towards a sterile aestheticism, to flirt with cruelty in an attempt to rouse a flicker of interest, to dabble in febrile mysticism or in immorality with deliberately satanic overtones. There is much of the poète maudit about its practitioners, much of the young man’s defiance and extravagance, an exhibitionism which prefers the poisoned tinctures to more wholesome fare. But a drop of poison, we are told, can improve the health of an organism, just as an exotic spicing can improve the taste of the blandest offering: Munich and Vienna, Berlin and Prague provided much that was unsettling. And the livid phosphorescence of decadence can still be enjoyed in these later, more rebarbative times.