by Ray Furness
She was half ready for bed, having come over in slippers from her dressing-room, which was opposite his. Her loosened hair flowed down over her open white peignoir; beneath the lace of her chemise Siegmund saw her small breasts, the colour of smoked meerschaum.
‘You were so cross,’ she said. ‘It was beastly of you to go away like that. I wasn’t going to come at all. But then I did, because that was not a proper good-night at all …’
‘I was waiting for you,’ he said.
Still bending over him, she gave a grimace of pain, which made the facial characteristics of her kind stand out to an extraordinary degree.
‘Which does not prevent my present posture,’ she said in their habitual tone, ‘from causing me a not unappreciable amount of discomfort in the back.’
He threw himself from side to side to stop her.
‘Don’t, don’t … Not like that, not like that … It doesn’t have to be like that, Sieglind, you see …’ His voice was strange, he himself noticed it. He felt parched with fever, his hands and feet were cold and clammy. She knelt beside him on the skin, her hand in his hair. He lifted himself a little to fling one arm round her neck and so looked at her, looked as he had just been looking at himself- at eyes and temples, brow and cheeks.
‘You are just like me,’ he said, haltingly, and swallowed to moisten his dry throat. ‘Everything is … as it is with me … and the way … nothing touches me is just like … Beckerath for you … it balances out … Sieglind … and on the whole it is … the same, especially as far as … taking revenge is concerned, Sieglind …’
He was seeking to clothe in reason what he was trying to say – yet his words sounded as though he uttered them out of some strange, rash, bewildered dream.
But to her it had no quality of strangeness. She was not ashamed to hear him say such unpolished, such clouded, confused things; his words enveloped her senses like a mist, they drew her down whence they had come, to the borders of a kingdom she had never entered, though sometimes, since her betrothal, she had been carried thither in expectant dreams.
She kissed him on his closed eyelids; he kissed her on her throat, beneath the lace she wore. They kissed each other’s hands. They loved each other with all the sweetness of the senses, each for the other’s spoilt and costly well-being and delicious fragrance. They breathed it in, this fragrance, with languid and voluptuous abandon, like self-centred invalids, consoling themselves for the loss of hope. They forgot themselves in caresses, which took the upper hand and turned into an urgent thrashing and then just sobbing –
She sat there on the bearskin, with parted lips, supporting herself with one hand, and brushed the hair out of her eyes. He leaned back on his hands against the white chest of drawers, rocked to and fro on his hips, and gazed into the air.
‘But Beckerath,’ she said, seeking to find some order in her thoughts, ‘Beckerath, Gigi … what do we do about him, now?’
‘Oh,’ he said and for a second the characteristics of his kind stood out sharply in his face ‘he ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little less banal, from now on.’
From: Stories of Three Decades.
Thomas Mann. Seeker and Warburg,
London, 1946.
About the Authors
Bahr, Hermann (Linz 1863 – Munich 1934)
Hermann Bahr’s fame rests primarily on his work as a critic and essayist: his essay on ‘Die decadence’ is probing and perceptive. He was at the centre of the latest literary developments or, indeed, one step ahead. He was often lampooned (by Karl Kraus particularly) for his awareness and championship of the latest trends. His novel Die gute Schule (The School of Love), appearing in 1890, is the first German novel to deserve the predicate ‘fin de siecle’: it portrays the sexual adventures and entanglements of a nameless painter from Lower Austria with Fifi in Paris. The school of love is, apparently, the only source of wisdom.
Ewers, Hanns Heinz (Düsseldorf 1871 – Berlin 1943)
Ewers began writing poetry heavily indebted to neoromantic and decadent modes; he appeared in cabaret in Munich where his grotesquely satirical humour was exploited to the full. His second novel, Die Alraune: The Story of a Living Creature (1911) was immensely popular, reaching sales of over a quarter of a million in ten years. Ewers considered himself the herald of a fantastic, Satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade; later he willingly served the Nazi cause but was soon rejected as degenerate, his work being incompatible with visions of rude Nordic health. His work is of interest in the link it provides between decadence and proto-Nazi attitudes.
Heym, Georg (Hirschberg, Silesia 1887 – Berlin 1912)
Son of a lawyer, Georg Heym embarked on legal studies in Würzburg but soon took up writing: a longing for violent catastrophe characterized his work from its beginnings. Attempts at historical drama were unsuccessful and Heym’s literary breakthrough came with an introduction to the avant-garde Neuer Club in Berlin. Heym excelled at highly structured portrayals of apocalyptic horror; there are traces of Baudelaire in his poetry and word paintings akin to Van Gogh. The Autopsy demonstrates Heym’s brilliant (and morbid) imagination, with echoes of Edgar Allan Poe. He was drowned in a skating accident on the Wannsee.
Hille, Peter (Erwitzen/Höxter 1854 – Berlin 1904)
Peter Hille is known primarily as an arch-Bohemian and vagabond (the poetess Else Lasker-Schuler propagated the legend). He studied briefly in Leipzig, then attempted journalism and finally turned to writing; he lived in the slums of Whitechapel, worked sporadically in the British Museum and visited Swinburne (with an introduction from Victor Hugo). Hille attempted novels and plays but was not successful in sustaining a narrative thread and was not at ease with conventional drama, preferring sketch, impression and aphorism. Impoverished, he often slept in the open, frequently in the Tiergarten, Berlin. His Heriodias is an example of the German contribution to portrayals of that fascinating figure which haunted the imagination of the decadents.
Holitscher, Arthur (Budapest 1869 – Geneva 1941)
Holitscher was born in Budapest as the son of a Jewish businessman. He turned from banking to literature and published his first book in 1893 (the influence of Knut Hamsun is apparent). In 1896 he settled in Munich and worked as a publisher’s reader: Der vergiftete Brunnen (The Poisoned Well), his most famous novel, appeared in 1900 (Thomas Mann had recommended it). After World War One Holitscher became increasingly disenchanted with Bohemian attitudes and became active in left-wing politics; sympathy for the Soviet Union became manifest in many of his writings. He was in Paris in January 1933 and moved to Ascona, later Geneva, where he died. Robert Musil spoke at his grave.
Leppin, Paul (Prague 1878 – Prague 1945)
Born into an impoverished lower middle-class background, Paul Leppin worked until 1928 as a clerk in the Post and Telegram service in Prague. His writing is very much of its time in the morbid (and frequently lascivious) atmosphere evoked; he became part of the literary bohême of the city and achieved notoriety with Severins Gang in die Finsternis (Severin’s Journey into Darkness) of 1914, where a sultry sexuality prevails. Greatly influenced by Meyrink, he became a spokesman of the mysterious and the erotic atmosphere of old Prague, of which he became the ‘Troubadour’. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and suffered two strokes after his release: he died as a result of syphilis. The novel Blaugast. Ein Roman aus dem alten Prag (Blaugast. A novel from Old Prague) was written in 1932 and published posthumously in 1948.
Mann, Thomas (Lübeck 1875 – Kilchberg/Zürich 1955)
Thomas Mann is one of the greatest twentieth century German novelists; his magisterial stance, immense erudition, psychological finesse and ironic subtlety have little equal in world literature. As a young man he was fascinated by the phenomenon of decadence and observed the literary scene in Munich most keenly, claiming that his own work derived much from the awareness of degeneration. Wälsunägenblut was originally meant to appear in 1906 but was withheld from publication f
or many years because of certain objections and reservations on the part of Thomas Mann’s father-in-law. It appeared in 1921 as a bibliophile edition with lithographs by Th. Th. Heine. It has been included in this anthology as it is one of the stories of Thomas Mann which most blatantly portrays the dubious influence of Wagner, one of Thomas Mann’s ‘trinity of eternally united spirits’ (the others being Schopenhauer and Nietzsche).
Martens, Kurt (Leipzig 1870 – Dresden 1945)
Martens was the son of an eminent civil servant in Leipzig, and studied law there, also in Heidelberg and Berlin. He turned to writing and made his name with the novel Roman aus der decadence (A Novel from the Age of decadence) in 1898. He lived from 1899 to 1922 in Munich where he contributed to the literary journal Die Jugend. He was a friend of Thomas Mann who wished to use the title of Marten’s novel as a subtitle for his own Buddenbrooks. Martens wrote other novels and plays which met with little success. His autobiography (1921-1924) gives a memorable account of the literary vie de bohême in Munich. He witnessed the air raid on Dresden in February 1945 and committed suicide afterwards.
Przybyszewski, Stanislaus (Lojewno, Prussian Poland 1868-Jaronty/Hohensalza 1927)
Przybyszewski studied medicine and architecture in Berlin before publishing pseudo-psychological studies on Chopin and Ola Hansson. He became the centre of Berlin’s bohême, an habituè of the wine cellar ‘Zum schwarzen Ferkel’ where he consorted with Edvard Munch and Richard Dehmel. As a ‘satanist’ and ‘androgynist’ he is the most outré of the German writers of decadence, an intensely subjective individual whose writing probed sub-rational darkness and exulted in wild, chaotic descriptions of hyperbole and uproar. He made an indelible impression on his German contemporaries and is frequently portrayed in the literary works of the day. He lived in Munich from 1906-1919 before moving to independent Poland. His works in Polish are less significant: he became a member of the Young Polish Movement and edited the literary journal Zycie . He was married to Dagne Juel whom Edvard Munch frequently painted; she was later murdered in Tiflis.
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von (Lemberg 1836 – Lindheim/Hessen 1895)
Born in Ruthenia, i.e. Western Galizia, as the son of a senior police official, Sacher-Masoch studied law in Prague and Graz before devoting himself entirely to literature. He edited the ‘Gartenlaube für Österreich’ and later, in Leipzig, the literary journal ‘Auf der Höhe’. His earlier novels extol the Carpathian landscape and the rich confusion of races in the Bukovina; the later work, including Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs) (originally part of a series of novellas called Das Vermächtnis Kains (The Legacy of Cain) explores the world of sexual fantasy and perversion. It was Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) which coined the term ‘masochism’ and made the author notorious; his wife Wanda sought later to cash in on this notoriety by her own anthology Damen im Pelz (Ladies in Furs).
Trakl, Georg (Salzburg 1887 – Cracow 1914)
Georg Trakl is the poet of decay par excellence; his slender oeuvre is suffused with an awareness of transience and putrefaction. Addicted to drugs at an early age (he studied pharmacy in Salzburg) he adopted the pose of the poète maudit and was drawn into an incestuous relationship with his sister. Like many others of his generation he was fascinated by the poetry of Baudelaire and may have known Baudelaire’s (and Mallarmé’s) translations of Edgar Allan Poe. Verlassenheit (Desolation) is very reminiscent of The Fall of the House of Usher. Trakl wrote many poems of haunting euphony but was also keenly aware of sin and damnation. He committed suicide in the psychiatric wing of the military hospital in Cracow.
Copyright
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Publishing History
First published by Dedalus in 1994
First ebook edition in 2012
Compilation & Introduction copyright © Ray Furness 1994
Original translations copyright © Ray Furness and Mike Mitchell1996
Blaugast by Paul Leppin copyright © Langen Müller in der F.A. Herbig
Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, Munchen
Blood of the Wälsungs by Thomas Mann copyright © Reed Book Services
The right of Ray Furness to be identified as the editor of this work and the right of Ray Furness and Mike Mitchell to be identified as the translators of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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