"Megalomonia [sic] Named as the National Vice" — an interview (1910)
A wire interview filed from New York on 22 March 1910 and printed two days later across the American Midwest, catching Preuschen while she showed work in the city. It is the only source that lets her speak at length in English, and she is merciless — about New York, about American men, and finally about her own country.
Where to find it
"Megalomonia [sic] Named as the National Vice," New York dispatch of 22 March 1910, printed in The Frontier (O'Neill, Neb.), 24 March 1910, p. 7; the same dispatch ran that day in The Citizen-Republican (Scotland, S.D.) and The Bon Homme County Independent (Tabor, S.D.), and was reprinted as "Modern America" in the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners' Advocate (NSW), 14 May 1910.
The text
Megalomonia Named as the National Vice
New York, March 22. — "America is terribly what you call 'swell-headed,' but the world could do without it," is the declaration of Baroness Hermione von Preuschen Telman1, the German woman painter who is participating in an exhibition in this city. Count von Bernstorff, German ambassador2, who came here from Washington to see the exhibit, says she is the greatest woman painter in the world. The baroness is plump, yellow-haired, genial and extremely frank.
"I find San Francisco so much gayer. I know they say this is the 'Gay White Way'3 of America, but I cannot see it. Excitement, yes — but true gayety, real pleasure — none! I think New Yorkers are all about 13 years old. You all take life with the deadly seriousness which young people at that age invariably assume.
"I find your women are much more clever than the men. Your women have read and studied; they know beautiful things when they see them. They understand good paintings and good music. Your men — b-r-r-r! They are impossible — simply impossible to talk to. I suppose the reason is that they are so busy making money.
"I have said that your women were book-clever. They are also very beautiful, some of them. But lo! they are frightfully conceited! And they show such awful unoriginality in dress. All wear their hair in exactly the same manner. A little while ago they made their head into a biscuit-quilt — and now it is a round frying pan4; because it is 'the style' your ladies must make themselves hideous.
"America is young and it has the faults and the virtues of its youth. It goes in for fine new movements, like civic improvement and woman suffrage and easy divorce. Those are all good things that we are too old and stupid to perceive in my country5. You think you are perfect — that is the main trouble. But in spite of that you are improving all the time. Some day I am sure you will even have an original poet.6"
Notes
Identifications, period context, and points where the original carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the source.
- ↑Baroness Hermione von Preuschen Telman — Her married name was Telmann — she was Preuschen-Telmann, after her first husband Konrad Telmann. "Telman" here and "Tolmänne" in the Australian reprint are two separate garblings; Rilke elsewhere calls her Hermine, and Italian sources call her Erminia. Five spellings worth trying in any archive search.
- ↑Count von Bernstorff, German ambassador — Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, German ambassador to the United States. Later the man who carried Berlin's messages to Washington through the crisis of 1917. The superlative that follows is his judgement, reported as his — not a billing she gave herself.
- ↑'Gay White Way' — Period nickname for the electrically-lit stretch of Broadway around Times Square. Her joke is that the lights are not the same thing as pleasure.
- ↑a biscuit-quilt — and now it is a round frying pan — The fashionable hairstyles of 1909–10: the puffed, padded pompadour giving way to the wide flat coil. "Biscuit-quilt" renders a German idiom for a puffed, quilted surface; the English reads oddly because the interpreter kept her image rather than finding an English one.
- ↑we are too old and stupid to perceive in my country — The sting is aimed at Germany, not America. Having spent four paragraphs mocking American manners, she grants that the Americans are right about civic reform, votes for women and divorce, and that her own country is too old to see it. Earlier versions of this page printed "odd" for "old," which inverts the joke.
- ↑Some day I am sure you will even have an original poet. — The last line is the whole interview in miniature — a concession and an insult folded together. Taken from the machine-transcribed scan, whose optical character recognition is rough: it drops the second f from Bernstorff, sets "beatuiful" for beautiful, and breaks words across column lines. Obvious errors of that kind are corrected here; nothing else is altered.