Hermione von Preuschen 1854 – 1918

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Der Roman meines Lebens (The Novel of My Life)

from Der Roman meines Lebens, 1926 · 1926 · in-review

New English translation (AI-assisted, under review). Translated from the public-domain German original. This is a first draft meant to make her work readable in English — not a definitive edition.

📖 Read the German & English side by side →

Her memoir — “A Woman's Life at the Turn of the Century” — published posthumously in 1926, seven years after her death. A work in progress, translated here chapter by chapter. It opens with a dedication written by her daughter, Helga Gericke.

The Novel of My Life

By Hermione von Preuschen · memoirs, published posthumously, 1926

Foreword · ZUM GELEIT

Now your memoirs are being printed, dearest Mother, and your wish is fulfilled seven years after your death. You died a beautiful, wondrous, unconscious death. You, who feared it so ardently and wanted to keep it at bay for decades yet, were overtaken by it in the midst of your colourful Tempio-world — in radiant health, eager to work, preparing for Christmas, and surrounded by the tender love of your children. The last part of the “novel of your life,” which was to tell of your life together with the children you had at last found again, remained unwritten; it would perhaps have been the least interesting, but most certainly the happiest — for whatever you also were and wanted to be, you restless one, you who roamed the wide world of wonder and longing, you who sinned against the mother-instinct as no other and for it suffered greatly and painfully as no other, you were nevertheless, in the last and original sense, a mother, and for that you have been loved beyond measure. In the hearts of your children you have raised for yourself an imperishable monument, and in every good, naïve, warm feeling of life that seizes us, we sense you — and the mysterious meaning, inexpressible in words, of our common blood.

May none of those whom my mother mentions here, and who are still living, feel in any way personally hurt. Just as her graciousness disarmed everyone who came into contact with her — even her so-called enemies — so my mother belonged, as her greatest friend said, “to those people rarer than blue dogs: namely, those who know no moral censure.”

Hatzenberg, summer 1926 — Helga Gericke

Part One — Youth and Growth

Prelude · VORSPIEL

These pages are perhaps not to appear until I am dead. How strange that sounds! Only a few years ago it seemed impossible to me that a hearth of flame like my soul could ever go out! Utterly impossible it seemed! And now the recognition slowly dawns on me that life and death are really quite the same as waking and sleeping — quite the same, only another phase of our existence in being — and that in the end it is hardly worth wasting many words on. For we are one with the infinite, one way or another. Only that, at best — perhaps in the twilight-state of the soul after death, if it does not wholly dissolve — all our former pains and joys are pushed infinitely far away, seeming only like a dull dream-consciousness. Our whole life — like the tangled dream of a single night!

How long ago it is that I still believed, in foolish childish delusion, that I could force the world to me, to my feet. Before my “genius” it was to bow, to admire it, to be swept away by it. Ah, the delusion has died away, the dream has blown off! Now I want to give people something precious — all those who come after me and love and suffer and long, as once I did. I want to show them an honest artist's heart, ruthlessly true, far from all the mendacity of false conventions. I want to help all artist-souls, in their eternal confusion and their dull urging, in all their dark “cravings,” to find within themselves the great line — from the very beginning, on beyond themselves. The great line, which alone can save us from the chaos of life and from the chaos of our own self.

When I now think back over my life, much already becomes clear to me that once lay only dark and wild in my blood.

“It is all a matter of temperament” — this seemingly so banal sentence is just as true as the other: that only character determines the victory of genius. For a genius without strength of character goes irredeemably to ruin — world history proves it to us. And softness has ever been ground down against hardness; pliant goodness and the longing for love lie forever at odds with all the cruelties of life. How much pain life would have spared me, had I become clear about this sooner. Did I not believe, again and again, that a harder lot than mine — a crueller suffering — no human soul before me had ever borne? Now I know it: human souls are like moths that forever flutter past one another in the dark — flutter themselves almost to death and can never find what perhaps, close at hand, struggles in the same longing. They find nothing, neither without nor within — neither in themselves nor in others.

So then many give up the seeking and the struggle and every possibility of growth — and only fatten their bodies — and in the daily fight for bread they bury their ideals. These are, in truth, the “dead” amid the living; and the greatest cemetery is that of those still alive.

But woe to them, “when we dead awaken.” —

I want to show you all — you too, you living dead — my naked soul; it need not hide itself, for pettiness is foreign to it. Sub specie aeternitatis you shall be able to look upon and judge everything in my life. In doing so, human measures and human misgivings fall away. And only what is genuine remains — sifts itself from the chaff of all counterfeit feelings and thoughts. —

Family. First Impressions · FAMILIE. ERSTE EINDRÜCKE

I come from a Hessian noble family that by its traditions traces itself back to Luxembourg robber-knights. Burg Brisch, the ancestral seat, still stands there. But it is a very long time ago, and later the robber-knights reappeared in the Limburg region as pastors. And that, no doubt, gives the ill-starred mixture of my soul: a hybrid thing of robber-knight and paschal lamb — forever in the wrong place too impetuous, too daring, or else too soft and weak.

Robber-knight and paschal lamb! It was the signature of my soul, the curse of my life.

My mother was a née Scheffer-Hattendorf, from an ancient Hessian family of manorial landowners on a declining branch. The line counted four chancellors; it had owned many estates, among them Liederbach, of whose splendid furnishings and silken wall-hangings my grandmother often told. She came from the old Hessian family von Hanstein and had sixteen quarterings of nobility. The Scheffers held a patent of nobility from the fourteenth century, but thought themselves too good actually to bear the title. Under my mother's brother the last estate, Hattendorf, was parcelled out; he himself went to America as a farmer and died there.

My mother, in her day the acknowledged most beautiful woman in Darmstadt, married my father at sixteen; he was thirty-six. At first it was a love-match, which later did not turn out very happily. My father, who died a privy councillor, became — despite his good nature and his great gift for music — an embittered, lonely man in his later years. My ardently feeling mother — a hot-head — felt misunderstood. Later, too, the judgment of the world became her measuring-line. And yet she was the first to help me set out on my career as a painter. — I will now try to hold fast, as directly as possible, the impressions, the confused images, of my earliest childhood years.

Frankly, I have very few memories of it. I see everything in the farthest distance. I always ran away from home the moment I could so much as walk, and my father tied a little bell around my neck, which one heard tinkling now here, now there. Once I ran off into the street, as far as I possibly could; I was soon caught again, and I still feel the regret over it now. Another time I hid on the balcony behind a big pomegranate tree. I heard my mother lamenting and wailing over my disappearance, but I stayed quiet in my corner until, only after hours, I was found by chance. Why I did not come forward of my own accord — especially since I felt my mother's loud weeping prickle in all my nerves — is a riddle to me to this day. — Another time I see myself looking out of the window with my father. He was humming a song about the wind, “that tears the child's floppy ears off.” I thought: my ears are small and no “floppy ears.” That I could not grasp: why such a jesting untruth should be funny. —

My beautiful mother was painted in Darmstadt by old “court-painter Hartmann.” I can still see him before me: small, slim, with a great grey moustache. I was allowed to go with her into the sloping attic studio, and I studied the brushes and paints and their handling with the greatest attention. — At Christmas I then received white paper and coloured pencils.

Thereupon my first “sensuality” awakened, when I gave blue forget-me-nots a yellow cup; I still feel it today like a pleasure, the delicate blue against the deep yellow of the cup. — And then my greatest joy — I was still very small — was to crawl under the grand piano when my father, working the pedal hard, improvised. It put me into a kind of twilight-state; I forgot everything else over it and often had to be pulled out of my hiding-place by force. —

When my parents went to the court ball — my mother spending hours at her toilette and, as it seemed to me, wrapped in fairy-tale garments — and said goodbye to me, my father would promise to bring me back sweets. The next morning he had kept his word only sparingly. But I would slip up to the garret to the court footman Wachtel — he had far finer and more plentiful sweets “pinched” for me, the “little bell-child” — and was secretly astonished that my distinguished parents could bring me far less sugar than “Father Wachtel.”

Then we moved to another apartment with a garden in which wonder-treasures revealed themselves to me. I believe it was there that the great Pan took possession of my child's soul — I sat for days in some green corner, among flowers, fashioning little doll's-bonnets out of rose petals. With the thorns I fastened ribbons of ribbon-grass to them. And I made chains of tiny blossoms, in the manner I later saw in India, which are unknown among us. In autumn, when the grapes ripened, great blue grapes, I climbed a ladder, stuck my head between leaves and fruit, and looked into the neighbouring garden, which seemed to me a forbidden wonder-world. So fairy-tale-like was all of it to me.

Decades later I stood again in my childhood paradise and simply could not grasp where I had found all its beauties. Yes — it was the great Pan who had kissed me there for the first time! And perhaps another, too: the world-genius, or in plain German the “travel-devil,” took secret and unnoticed possession of me there.

Above us lived a family Ulrich, who came straight from Trinidad and Barbados.

The owner of the house was a “Paris tailor,” Mr. Eppenestre, who in his native Darmstadt was spending the annuities he had tailored together in Paris. In the garden house lived an old Russian count from the legation. With these people from the most various circles I then came much into contact; I heard of distant lands and cities as of the nearest neighbourhood. All this made an indelible impression on me. What all did not pass through my confused small-child mind! — Until then I had been my parents' only offspring. I was given a French-Swiss girl as a nursemaid. She was very pretty and merry, and I could soon chatter French with her like a little parrot.

But one evening there was great commotion in the house. A strange woman ran through the nursery with big sponges and water-cans; then I heard shrill screaming. I was put to bed earlier than usual, and Louisa even forgot to rub my thumb and forefinger with “the bitter stuff.” That was to break me of the habit, for every night I sucked two fingers to fall asleep and had already half sucked them away; I still see them before me: quite thin were the little fingers, with deep dents in them. That was the “Suckeles” — the sucking. With my left hand I would then pull the sheet over my ear and scratch eagerly at it — the “Kratzes,” the scratching. Without “Suckeles” and “Kratzes” falling asleep was impossible for me, and I felt it as bottomless cruelty that they wanted to break me of this pleasure, to spoil it for me, with rubbings of wormwood. — That evening, though, I scratched and sucked entirely undisturbed, to my heart's content.

The next morning my father came to my bed, lifted me out, and carried me into my mother's bedroom: “You've got a little sister.” I gazed in wonder at the little marvel of the world, delighted in the tiny hands, could not grasp where the child had so suddenly come from. The “stork” seemed to me so improbable. Why did he not let himself be seen? —

But from that time a cooler air surrounded me in the house. All love was directed to the newborn sister, the “baby of the nest.” And I began early to feel that my heart was far too warm for the ordinary temperature of the world. And so, with few exceptions, it has been cold all its life. —

Soon lessons were to begin. Herr Huth, a stout man with little grey curls and a snub nose, taught me to read and write. I thought he looked exactly like a picture of Luther that hung in the nursery.

One day my grandmother was expected. I looked forward to it greatly, for she always brought splendid “Magenmorsellen” — stomach lozenges, a speciality from Marburg, where she had recently been living. — Grandmother did come, and soon afterwards went out with my parents; Louise was with little Mimi, who had developed into an impudent little bawler.

I used the time to search grandmother's trunk for more “Magenmorsellen,” but instead found a magnificent lace bonnet with long fluttering lilac ribbons (I can still see it) and a big gold cross. The latter I put into my little pearl bag, but the splendid bonnet under the bed. Served grandmother right. Why did she bring so few lozenges!

In the evening the bonnet was to be christened and the gold cross worn. Neither could be found; great agitation arose, the servants were accused. It became uncomfortable for me; I said, “Just look under the bed.” There lay the state-bonnet, in the farthest corner, crumpled up. My mother wanted to strike me. On this occasion she found the gold cross in my bag. “You wicked child, you bad child,” she wailed. “Why did you do that?” — And to this day I do not know why. Perhaps because man's heart is evil from his youth? —

I was now soon to enter school, after being taught for four years by Herr Huth-Luther. But now the chief sufferings of my childhood began. I could not make friends with the other little girls, always kept myself apart, and could not understand why they were forever shrieking and merry. I had so much to ponder, so much to think about. The most glorious thing, after all, had been life in Venice, among the great painter-princes. If only one could suddenly say, too: “Anch'io sono pittore!” — Every rose I got hold of in summer I set in a vase on my windowsill. But only when the sky was blue. Then I dreamed myself off to Venice. The window-cross turned into a pointed arch. Below, the lagoon sobbed, and I was Titian painting his dead daughter, or the blonde Dogaressa who, deceiving her old husband, awaited her “paramour.” This word paramour awakened quite peculiar imaginings in me.

But school was an abomination to me. Actually I attached myself to no one there; only one good, stupid girl — Lola Reis she was called — came, all through those years, unfailingly to fetch me for the walk to school. I knew nothing else about her. Nor did I ever hear of her again later; after confirmation I lost sight of her. Is it not almost so with all people? One wanders together a little while, and then the one stays a few steps behind, never catches up with the other again, and one never hears of each other again.

Most dreadful of all to me were the breaks, when all the girlfriends, arm in arm, chained themselves together and whispered among themselves. It was then that the feeling of loneliness first crept consciously over my heart.

So as not to be together with the others, I often climbed secretly during the breaks up to the loft and crept about among the wet washing. And these breaks seemed to me endless.

Learning was a joy to me. I especially loved history and languages. The history teacher, Dr. Boßler — red-haired, slim, and elegant — was even my first crush. I was, to be sure, not the only one in the class who secretly adored him. For his lessons we all wore our Sunday boots. Ten years later he did indeed marry one of his pupils.

The ones I most admired of all the pupils — or rather the resident boarders — were Henriette Schadee, a Dutch girl whom I later visited in Rotterdam, and Fanny Jais, the buxom Munich lass who was engaged to a medical man, Dr. Graf. I was often in their house in Munich later, too. Sadly the poor doctor soon went mad. — Then there was the picture-beautiful Lily Meyer from Brazil, who recited Cassandra so wonderfully. (I always tried to imitate her.) She married the art-writer Dr. Wilhelm Lauser in Vienna. I stayed with her too on my wanderings. They lived in a large park, and she was rocking her first-born. (I learned there to eat boiled corn-cobs with butter.) — Where have they gone, these women? It seems to me I can still hear them laughing and joking. Fanny Jais loved to kiss, but the headmistress — nicknamed “the little grey cloak” — then forbade it her. “That was all too sensual.” This remark set the whole class to hard thinking. — To the English teacher, Fräulein Lanz, I often brought pomegranate blossoms from the tree behind whose tub I had once hidden. The red pomegranate blossoms of that tree flamed through my whole childhood. Whomever I loved, I brought some to. But it seemed to me as if no one recognized the symbolic gift of my flaming heart. All my life, in the face of every happiness, I remained the little girl with the pomegranate blossoms! Craving and never finding! —

At home I did not feel too comfortable. More and more the parents' love turned to my sister, who by her clinging, outwardly tender nature brought it about that her every wish was fulfilled. —

We had moved again, and I was given, next to the kitchen, a narrow little chamber — a “room of my own”! That made me infinitely proud, puritanically plain though the closet was. I trained beans and bindweed before the window, kept a secret sweet-collection in an old writing-desk, and set on the windowsill a plate of fruit and an open favourite book, Schwab's Treasury of Ballads. When I now thought at school of this, my very own Eldorado, my heart swam in bliss. As soon as I was home again, I locked myself into my kingdom, under the pretext of urgent schoolwork. Only then did I feel completely free, completely myself.

Here too we had a garden, to which, between two walls, a narrow vine-walk led. What dreams that green arbour enclosed for me — flashing, when the sun shone on it, with green-golden lights. My father planted and sowed in his leisure hours; my mother cleaned vegetables the while and called on me, always in vain, to help. “You'd rather run up and down the vine-walk like a wild animal,” she said reprovingly. — In time I came to feel our “privy-councillor household” as dreadful — the contradiction of being and seeming in our life. Everything came down to throwing sand in the eyes of “the world.” Court balls and costly street-dresses! At home one did not like to be caught unprepared. To ask an unforeseen guest to table would have been an impossibility; whereas there were great parties, with weeks of preparation (daily redoubled belt-tightening) and distinguished hired servants. Or else lodging-visits that turned everything upside down. With guests our table was famous; for the four of us alone it was very meagre.

I once aroused my mother's horror when I declared to her that I had never yet eaten my fill.

Very often an old inheritance-uncle came, Baron Zoch, on whom every possible consideration was lavished. I was his favourite — my sister then, decades later, inherited from him. He was widely travelled, very demanding, a Swabian who began every sentence with “Hajo.” We therefore called him the “Hajo-uncle,” and he impressed me mightily at the time; for me he was surrounded by the nimbus of his far travels.

My father often had appointments out of town. We were then usually allowed to come along, “to make use of the carriage.” All these journeys made a deep impression on me; I started a book in which I noted the various places these trips brought me to. Each time, at a new entry, I had the involuntary feeling: “Now there is one place fewer in the world that you do not yet know.” For from earliest childhood I had a burning drive to travel and a feeling that it was something like an iron duty for me to know and see everything — but everything — in this world thoroughly. — On each of these outings I took my sketchbook, and brought back my childish drawings of all the newly-seen things with great pride. Once we drove to Lindenfels in the Odenwald. Around the romantic castle-ruin the elder was in bloom. At the inn we met a young painter — August Fritz he was called — who later, far too early for him, went to ruin and died. But at the time his skill made a tremendous impression on me. He praised my feeble attempts and said to me at parting: “Adieu, little artist.” —

I still possess an old notebook from that time, in which are found the words: “Adieu, little artist!” This word brands itself into my brain in letters of flame and decides my fate — I shall be an artist!

One summer we were in Jugenheim on the Bergstrasse. All the sweet, almost southern beauty of the Heiligenberg — the seat of Prince Alexander of Hesse and his wife, Princess Battenberg, the mother of Alexander, the later first prince of the Bulgarians — dug itself into my soul. Often we sat by the “golden cross,” which affords a glorious view over the Rhine plain. — How I loved nature even then! —

But from now on no picture in any magazine was safe from me. I copied everything, everything, and was infinitely proud of it.

Then came the war of '70 with its upheavals! Into my little room came billeted soldiers. A gunsmith, who not long afterwards died of cholera.

My mother did nursing in a military hospital. I was sometimes allowed to visit her and bring the wounded flowers and fruit. How that made me happy. Even then the captured wounded French were treated with special interest. Often we looked from the school windows into another hospital, and many of us blew little kisses to the French soldiers with the red trousers! — until the headmistress got wind of it and the punishment followed. — My uncle Fritz, my mother's youngest brother, a first lieutenant in Austrian service, once severely wounded at Königgrätz and turned into a one-armed man, now came in 1870 for a long visit and, with his one arm, his manly beauty, and his white uniform, aroused the interest of the whole little residence-town. I could not stand him; I did not trust him. He felt himself a martyr because he could not go along into the new war. In summer, as almost every year, we were again for a long time at Hattendorf, on the estate. Grandmother had already died; my uncle Louis ran everything on a lavish scale. Uncle Fritz, who was staying there to recuperate, somehow, in a mysterious way, kicked over the traces. I eavesdropped on many a secret family council about his sins, which interested and excited me greatly. It was all so dark; life had so many questions and riddles. When would one know everything? I drew eagerly again, this time from nature. For the painter Schlösser, a Darmstadt child who had been driven from Paris by the war, had seen my work and made it my duty never again to draw from copies, but only from nature. So I drew, in that Upper-Hessian corner, on the Schwalm, near Alsfeld's stork's-nest, everything that came before my fingers. But far more gladly I roamed aimlessly about in fields and woods. A little hill I climbed every evening to watch the sun go down. Then I spread out my arms, gazed as if enraptured into the red glow, and cried: “Great World-Spirit, take everything from me, only let me see the world, the world!” —

When I then came far too late to supper, my good aunt Ottilie — my mother's unmarried sister — scolded: “There's no bearing you any longer; you get crazier by the day.” I now also read indiscriminately whatever came under my fingers, and life seemed to me ever more colourful and confused. More and more I withdrew into myself. Yes, I was soon entirely estranged from my parents. They did not understand me.

Adolescence · ADOLESZENZ

Most of all I loved to read travel-accounts. They were the only thing, too, that could move me to tears! But my father would then say: “Just don't imagine you'll ever be able to make great journeys round the world. Where do you mean to get the money for it? It's also much better to stay quietly at home. Your travel-notions are just as mad as your artistic whims! Wherever did you get such a restless spirit? It will come to a bad end with you yet — perhaps on the gallows!” — — — Very consistent my good father was not in this, to be sure. For soon afterwards he told me again of the adventurous journeys of the Africa-traveller Alexandrine Tinne — who, of course, as he wisely added, was murdered by natives. Thus did her unseemly travel-urge avenge itself.

But soon my sensitive soul would nearly have believed in a murder of my own doing! Once again we were all driving in the carriage along a bumpy country road. I was clutching my father's hand, fearfully and tight. All at once a jet of blood shot up from his artery like a fountain, and it wanted but little for my father to bleed to death from it. Luckily a country doctor drove past who was able to apply a proper bandage. “Now do you see that you may yet come to the gallows?” my father cried reproachfully. — This incident cast deep shadows into my soul. And another likewise. During an autumn stay in the country, at the “Half Moon” in Heppenheim — where the ripe apricots grew into our windows and the whole fruit-abundance of the Hessian Bergstrasse welled into my soul — my mother took me along to a viewing of the giant provincial lunatic-asylum at Heppenheim.

That day made an indelible impression on me.

— “And now the ladies shall see the raving ones too, if only from afar,” smiled Dr. Ludwig, after first letting us be circled by sufferers of St. Vitus's dance. — “Little miss, just put your eye here to the keyhole; the door is bolted!” — I was fourteen years old then, and obeyed with a pounding heart. My eye fell on a woman with long grey hair, in a shift-like gown, who had her back to me. As if spellbound, my gaze clung to her. Could she have felt that she was being watched? She turned round suddenly, threw back her hair, approached the door. I knew it was locked; but even had it been open, I could not have stirred at all — I was as if paralysed.

And now the madwoman bent down — perhaps she had noticed feet below, through the crack of the door — she bent down and pressed a bloodshot eye close to the keyhole. I looked straight into the very hearth of madness — so long, until I collapsed unconscious.

“Your mother deserved a thrashing for this pedagogical deed,” said my old friend Theodor Storm later, when I told him of it.

One of my first poems was born at that time, ending: “And I understand even the madhouse.” Yes, I began to understand much, much. Only one thing not: why I was not happy. The hot hands of longing began softly to stroke over my heart and to lash up my blood.

In the house above us lived a Justizrat Meisenzahl with two daughters. The younger, Auguste, four years older than I — about eighteen — was to become a pianist, and played her runs, trills, and salon-pieces all day long over our heads. To my parents' despair and my secret admiration. Then I came to know her and went up to her often. But by chance my mother discovered that she was keeping a tryst with a young man, and now the friendship was forbidden me. I wrote of this despairingly to “her,” Auguste. Which earned my father a coarse letter from the Justizrat, and me a stricter ban.

Of this too I still have a notebook effusion, scrawled in pencil, half blurred by tears: “All over between me and Auguste, only admired from afar. She despises me for having done that to her.” — And then again: “Watched Auguste from afar on the swing.” — “The other day in the hallway, in the dusk, fell upon her neck.” — —

Then, little by little, the grief over Auguste ebbed away. Other cares, other experiences reared up. A snowy winter came, with blood-red sunsets. I attended lectures by Otto Roquette; then walked alone, in the sunset-glow, through the white gardens. There the verse came to me: Didst thou behold the sunset glow, / high above the cypresses, / and didst thou not sink groaning to thy knee: / oh, that I could forget — —

But I had as yet hardly ever seen cypresses, nor did I know what I was supposed to forget. But the verse pleased me greatly. —

Then the confirmation lessons with the friendly pastor. His friendliness was always, to me, his most striking quality. He conceived his office of preparing us for entry into the community of adult Christians neither highly nor deeply, but entirely by rote — “Schema F.” But he was friendly, always friendly. On the confirmation day itself we were all deeply moved as well. I knelt before a little wreath of blue-flowering forget-me-nots and received the text: “Be faithful unto death, and I will give thee the crown of life.” Ah, I have been faithful to myself — only far too much. And from that alone, all these endless sufferings.

Strangely, I can scarcely remember the course of my confirmation day — it cannot have been all too solemn. Religious conflicts had not come to me — not yet. I believe I always had far too much to do with myself. But for a while I read my Thomas à Kempis very diligently, morning and evening. And Feuchtersleben's “Dietetics of the Soul.” I was now a grown-up girl and felt myself very important.

On our thank-you visit to Pastor S., each of us shyly slipped our twenty-mark obol into empty flower-vases, under embroidered doilies and antimacassars. Let us hope he really did find all the Easter eggs we laid him.

Spreading Wings · FLÜGELSPANNEN

Now, then, I belonged in full standing to the Christian community, and accompanied my mother, much more self-assured now, every Sunday into the court church, where we throned on red velvet cushions on the right-hand dais, in the so-called “court-stall.” I believe that must have impressed the dear Lord too! And after the — I almost said exhibition — after the church ceremony, then, came a general shaking of hands and greeting, an inspecting and appraising of toilettes, a bowing towards the adjoining box of Their Most Exalted Highnesses — really uplifting.

Sometimes afterwards I would still go to the picture gallery or the museum, which were then still in the old palace; most gladly of all, to be sure, to the plaster casts in the hall of antiquities — which my mother did not like to see. She found it improper for young girls. Even then I found the green fig-leaves on the white plaster figures improper in the highest degree. But I could never walk through the old rooms without thinking of the famous “White Lady” of the Darmstadt palace. (Every respectable princely castle that respects itself possesses one, after all.) She was once called Countess von Orlamünde and is said to have stabbed her children to death with a needle. Or her husband — I no longer rightly know. But I had already often looked at her portrait in the hunting-lodge of Kranichstein with a faint shudder. — The White Lady! —

Even if I said earlier that I possessed no friend, I must nevertheless commemorate one playmate of my youth, or rather companion. She was, to be sure, several years older than I, and mentally ahead of her years. She was called Anna von Krane and had an old governess, Fräulein Josse, who before her had brought up “Carmen Sylva,” the Queen of Romania, at Wied on the Rhine, and was still quite filled with her princely charge. She achieved the utmost in drill that an instructress can bring off. She was also Lutheran-pious in the extreme, and bore a strong resemblance to old Queen Victoria — inwardly too, I fear, for her blue-red complexion might have suggested secret drink, had she not been so very correct. From my tenth year I came every Saturday afternoon to Anna von Krane's to draw. Anna was just as gifted as I — that is, in quite a different direction. There was always fresh crumb-cake, and Fräulein Josse read aloud to us, Fouqué's “Magic Ring,” “Oberon,” and similar books of wonder. Anna was great friends with the same-aged Marie, Princess Battenberg, later Princess of Erbach. Life has torn all three of us apart.

Anna's chief doll was called “Penelope” and had a Greek peplos. As a grown girl she conducted only learned conversations at court balls. “Don't you find this heat reminds one of the leaden roofs of Venice?” The lieutenants were afraid of her erudition. Later everything relaxed, even the correctness! She moved with her father — a onetime officer of very strong artistic bent — to Düsseldorf and secretly converted to Catholicism. Fräulein Josse maintained that this was her death-blow. Anna von Krane is now a well-known author of decidedly Catholic books. — — —

Then I still associated a little with my cousins. In the child-rich house of the Chamberlain and Councillor of State and his wife, a Baroness Löw von Steinfurth, everything went topsy-turvy. Later the distinguished girls founded a kind of boarding-house for young foreigners, which throve quite well but filled my correct parents with dismay. Two of the sons became generals.

The father, my father's brother, was a highly gifted, very musical man.

But for two years, after my confirmation, I had two intimate friends: Mina Hahn, later Frau Renz, and Amalie Kühn, who afterwards married an aniline manufacturer. Mina Hahn came with her mother from Worms when I was about sixteen. We quickly became friends. She seemed to be enthusiastic about me and everything freer and more artistic. Frau Hahn owned a charming villa in Seeheim on the Bergstrasse. There, with Mina and Amalie Kühn, I spent unforgettable, romantic summer weeks in the rose season. It was like a fairy tale. Every day we wandered to another castle-ruin overgrown and fragrant with elder. Never before had the deep beauty of life so dawned on me. How harmlessly happy we were, how merrily we raved! There too we read Storm's novella “Rose Season.” “There are days that are like roses.” We quoted it hourly and roused ourselves to an enthusiastic letter of youth to the poet. By return came Theodor Storm's answer: “Dear young German girls, a greeting from youth — what dearer thing could befall me?” From this there gradually spun a correspondence between me and Storm that lasted until his death, that furthered and gladdened me infinitely, and of which I shall sometimes tell more.

From early to late we roamed in Seeheim through the wonderful beech-wood. When I think of that time, a folk-song always comes to mind that we sang then: “There once was a Jewess, a wondrously beautiful woman.” Seeheim has long since been sold to Mina's cousin, the brother of the later envoy v. S.; the friends I lost long ago — through life, through outward circumstances — not through death. — —

At that time my innermost destiny concentrated itself into isolated travel-experiences, for at home I liked it less and less. I had, one after another, painting lessons from various teachers, but that was all dilettante stuff and afforded me no inner satisfaction. At last my father allowed me a single weekly lesson from the Riviera-painter Christian Morgenstern in Frankfurt am Main. He too did not satisfy me. The much-esteemed painter, whose fine southern atmospheric moods pleased me, had me copy from his own pictures; but I felt that the painter Schlösser was right, and that only the study of nature could be of use to me. Nevertheless I gladly went to Frankfurt, because after painting until two o'clock I looked over the city in the afternoons. With what feelings I visited, again and again, the Goethe house! And revelled in the tropical charms, the camellia-splendour, of the Palm Garden. — Regularly I took my chocolate at de Giorgi's. Even now, when I pass this chocolate factory and breathe its scent, it wafts over me like a breath out of my earliest youth. With overwhelming power! —

And then I was invited to relatives, Baron and Baroness Schwartzenau in Oestrich-Winkel in the Rheingau. A glorious autumn I enjoyed there; we made wonderful walking-tours (the fat Schwartzenaus were sturdy walkers all the same) to the Hallgarter Zange and many other viewpoints. But more than in all this I lived here, at her grave, in the life and death of Karoline von Günderode — in her morbid passion for the composer Creuzer. At the edge of the churchyard, at the grave of the suicide, deeply shaken, I read the words: “O thou Ether, my father, o thou Earth, my mother — take me up into infinity.” Or something like it. A veritable cult I made of Karoline.

And then the good Schwartzenaus took me along to Eltville, to Fräulein Lademann. The nearly eighty-year-old lady had known Goethe in her youth and never tired of telling of it. Like a seeress she seemed to me in her enthusiasm.

But most gloriously of all life opened to me when I followed an invitation of my father's friend of youth, Frau von Palézieux, to Vevey.

My first larger journey!

Beforehand I had also been with my good aunt Ottilie on a “student walking-trip” to Wilhelmshöhe and believed that there could be nothing greater in the world than the view from the Hercules on the Habichtswald.

But now, for the first time, the wide world and the wonders of the snow-mountains opened to me. To be sure, in the hospitable, child-rich house I was supposed to sit still a great deal or play tennis, which suited me less. I almost perished of inner impatience. And I shall never forget how a friend of the house once said to me reprovingly: “Vous n'êtes pas en voyage ici, vous êtes en séjour.” [You are not travelling here; you are staying.] But soon I could bear it no longer and resolved to help myself.

On the next short summer night I got up secretly at four o'clock and rode to Chillon. There I stood in Bonivard's prison and recited Byron's “Prisoner” to myself with deepest feeling: “My hair is grey, but not with years.” Byron was then my idol. By nine o'clock I was sitting innocently again at the coffee-table of the Palézieux family. “Afterwards we'll drive with our dear guest to Chillon,” the hostess suddenly said. And a few hours later I stood once more before the astonished castellan-woman. I pulled my hat low over my face and was ashamed to death. “Mais je connais donc cette demoiselle,” the woman said half-aloud and puzzled. [But surely I know this young lady.] I turned blood-red and pretended not to understand. —

But we made still other glorious excursions. “Do you see the white up there in the mountains?” said Mela Palézieux, the eldest daughter. “Is that snow?” I asked. “No, but the narcissus fields of Les Avants. We'll climb up there tomorrow.” It was a full day's tour. Now a rack-railway runs up there, and stately hotels rise everywhere; I was up there again later. But then it was more beautiful, in the boundless narcissus-splendour dammed in by no cultivation.

Blossom crowded on blossom, the slender stalks pressed together, and the scent surged over them like a stupefying cloud. An experience, one never to be forgotten, were these fragrant narcissus fields to me! And another, just as great: the blooming rose-hedges in Glion and Montreux, everywhere. After the accustomed Nordic meagreness I simply could not grasp it, and could not comprehend that my hostess's family behaved so coolly toward all these splendours. And then the Dent du Midi in the alpenglow! And the Savoy mountains! — Geneva in its grandeur almost frightened me. — On the way back I spent eight more wonder-rich days with my favourite uncle Eduard, General von Fransecky, the hero of Sadowa, who had become governor of Strasbourg. He lived in the palace-like government building on the Broglie. I had a whole suite of genuine rococo rooms, received daily military serenades and fresh bunches of roses. But what was all that against the Minster! Every free moment I slipped over into its glowing dark. In Erwin von Steinbach's fairy-tale turned to stone I understood for the first time the much-mocked saying: “Architecture is frozen music.” All the most glorious cathedrals in the world I later saw, and all the greatest places of worship on earth; nothing has shaken and carried me away more than the Strasbourg Minster. The young Goethe I saw in spirit standing beside me, up on the tower, where with reverent awe I looked at his and Byron's signatures scratched in stone. — But nothing penetrated deeper into my soul than the mystical glow of colour of the old stained-glass windows when the sun shone through them. It stirred in me dark blisses like those the little child once felt crouching under the piano when my father made music. I felt it, even if quite unconsciously, already then: such moments of being loosed from all earthly things, from the “everyday,” are for the artist's soul the only ones worth living. — What all I wanted, I did not know, but it surged chaotically within me, like balls of mist behind which the sun wrestles. Would it break through? Radiant and great? Or would only a brief flash of sun clear the chaotic struggle for moments? Is not every human life, more or less, a battle between mist and sun? —

When, after all these experiences, I returned to Darmstadt to my parents' house, I felt ever stranger and lonelier. Ever more I strove out into the wide world! My longing was for an art school, for thorough study. But first I was to be introduced into the world of society. To be led to “court”! My otherwise so anxiously thrifty mother made the most wonderful toilette-purchases for me in Frankfurt. — The old fat Grand Duke Ludwig had died a year before. To be presented to him is said to have been very amusing; he always murmured something unintelligible that the initiated interpreted as “white beans, black beans, black beans, white beans.”

The new Grand Duke Ludwig, however, had an English princess for a wife, the brilliant Grand Duchess Alice. She had heard of my talent for painting and took a quite special interest in me, personally took me under her wing.

The first court ball! I wept bitterly beforehand and implored my mother not to lead me into the “world,” this society-world — (the word seemed a mockery to me) — for I was surely far too ugly. Ah — after a few months I had already become excessively vain about outward personal advantages. My first ball-gown I always remember. Blue-grey tarlatan, the airy flounces held everywhere with pale-pink and black silk bows. The colours harmonized gloriously. “Why, in this dress you look like rosy-fingered Eos,” said Anna von Krane in her very own style. —

This winter then pleased me very much. Amid sheer dancing and pleasure and vain worldly splendour, all my dark cravings paled for a few months. Besides, I had conceived a platonic passion for an English legation attaché, Mr. Jerningham. He had not the slightest designs on me, but he had said to someone of me, “She is very pretty,” and had given me a camellia at the cotillion. That sufficed my fantastical heart. I made English poems then. One of them I still remember: “My love was mad, my love was wild, why hast thou captured me, o Hugh, thy false, false words beguiled me to Eternity.” — —

He then soon became engaged to an American widow, a quadruple millionairess, and suddenly vanished from the scene. And my longings awoke again. — — —

Notes & references

Sources for the quotations and allusions — hover the dashed terms above for a quick note. Added by this project; not in the original.