Chapter 8Overcome — Taking Root — With the Future EmpressÜBERWUNDEN — WURZELFASSEN — BEI DER NACHMALIGEN KAISERIN
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And then I travelled back to Germany. I had become so Italianised that I broke myself only with difficulty of the black lace veil I had worn in Tivoli, the one Richter had painted me in1. Through a curious concatenation of circumstances that picture came into the house of my adversaries and hung there until Helga and Inge received it. Miss Fer, though, stayed in Rome. She had contracted an Italian salad-marriage with a Signor Moltedo and soon went to pieces in everyday misery.
First I went to Munich, to settle down there for my studies. I put up with my boarding-school friend Fanny G. Her husband's coming disease of the brain was already showing itself in frequent, quite unprovoked fits of rage. I felt very uncomfortable and looked for quarters in the “Görresstift.” And then I took a studio in the Maaßenstraße. The furniture I acquired from a painter in the same house who was moving to Italy. Here I now lived for nearly two years. Prince Luitpold, on his rounds of the studios, had soon discovered me and came often, for he took pleasure in my talent, and drew “the beautiful Preuschen” to his table more than once. That was what he called me, as I was told by his adjutant, Baron Wolfskeel, whose wife was a distant cousin of mine. I was soon very well introduced everywhere in Munich. Frau Amalie S. gathered a circle of friends of Goethe in her house, to whom the well-known Goethe scholar Professor Michael Bernays expounded the second part of Faust for a whole winter with glowing passion. I was one of his chief adherents, and came to know many significant people there. We were then all drawn and presented to the Goethe House2, where I have often enough taken pleasure in the great unlikeness of the portraits. Yes, it was a stimulating time for me in every respect. —
I also came often to the house of Hermann Lingg. But the old poet, a magnificent patriarch's head, once disappointed me greatly. I was about to set out on some journey, to Vienna I think, and told him so.
“Then you can do me a great favour,” he cried excitedly. “A fellow there gave me a miserable review in the Tageblatt, but it was unsigned. If you would find out who wrote it.” — “Gladly,” I said, “but perhaps you still have the paper.” — “Of course,” he cried, then rummaged eagerly in his desk and handed me, with great importance, a completely yellowed sheet from fifteen years before! —
Ah, you poor Hermann Lingg, in that moment you fell from your pedestal for me for ever! And yet your sweetest poem has accompanied me through life — the one about the dream garden:
“There stood in it a snowy bed of narcissi and, shimmering white, a tree in blossom!”
A tremendous event shook the whole of Munich soon afterwards — the tragic end of its unhappy King Ludwig3. Munich was close to a revolution when news reached it of the headlong events at Hohenschwangau and the removal of the mind-darkened ruler to Schloss Berg on Lake Starnberg. Soon after that came his end in the waters of the lake, into which he dragged his physician Dr. Gudden down with him. Or however the thing hung together. The grave keeps its secrets. I was as agitated, and shaken to the depths, as the whole people. Ever since my childhood I had had a quiet infatuation with the “beautiful fairy-tale king,” whose pitiable end I now lived through. One can almost say that every feeling person was sick with agitation and fellow-suffering. Then the dead man was laid out in the Allerheiligenhofkirche, and for three days his people were allowed to file past the catafalque. The most comprehensive measures were taken to prevent unseemly crowding. Slowly, but without a halt, the people flooded past their dead idol. There one saw peasants secretly clenching their fists, because they believed he had been murdered. The impression will be unforgettable to me. The once so beautiful ideal king, the swan-knight full of fantastic dreams — what had life and death made of him! — Bloated and swollen he lay there, like a dead Falstaff, like a parody of his whole life.
The forecourt of the church was a battlefield, from which hundreds of chignons and broken umbrellas were gathered up every evening. Sic transit gloria mundi — here too. — And yet — the wonder-castles of the “squanderer” still yield the state a fat income today. So the dead man has paid off his debts and his guilt in full. Are these the depths of life? Is this the end of everything wonderful? — But everything smooths itself out in life. Prince Luitpold became Prince Regent for the insane King Otto, and the city gradually returned to its everyday course.
In the house of Paul Heyse4 I was particularly favoured and spoiled. I spent good hours there. He and his beautiful young wife founded a “Single-Layer Evening,” of which the members were Frau Oberst Linz (the writer Amelie Godin), the old, ninety-year-old Assessor Strumy, a writer, the poet Ludwig Laistner, a young aesthete besides, a medical man really, and Heyse's most intimate adlatus and friend, Dr. S., and my humble self. Soon I came almost every evening to the brilliant Amelie Godin, and there I met her intimate, Oswald S.5, again and again. And so it came about and so it was made, the new knotted fate. —
But I felt so lonely, I longed for love. And then, on a dusky winter afternoon, the beautiful Oswald knelt at my feet in my studio and asked me whether I would become his wife. — “If you say no I shall shoot myself, for only at your side can anything great become of me.”6 Like the young Faust before Gretchen — I could not help thinking, and said yes. All of them had helped us to find each other: the Heyses, Amelie Godin, and a dear old artist friend, Fräulein von Berckholtz, the youthful love of Wilhelm Metzler, the Frankfurt patron, who had recommended me to her, and in whose opulent home I was like a child of the house.
For a few weeks we still kept the engagement secret, then I travelled to my parents and tried to make the match palatable to them. They were beside themselves: a mere Doctor S., without means, an aesthete who thought himself too grand to practise. Then he came himself and calmed my parents by his engaging manner, appeared very grand and spent a great deal of money (which, alas, I had given him beforehand). They thought he must be very wealthy in spite of everything; he gave my sister an old German jewel, brought my mother fresh bunches of roses every day (which then travelled promptly into the icebox to be preserved). In short — he charmed everybody in the end; only with me did he have friction and scenes. I wept a great deal in those days. But he called me his “Dilaram,” his heart's-wisdom, and always knew how to win me round again. —
My parents had consoled themselves in the end with the thought that as a well-known painter I would always keep my maiden name — my father also wanted to obtain me the right to go on using the “Baroness.” And Oswald was after all such a special person, a friend of princes, a friend of Paul Heyse and a friend of Ibsen. He had such beautiful velvet eyes, though with Jew's ringlets over his ears, as my father said7.
But — he was accepted, the official engagement celebrated. I, however — I went off first for the whole summer to Paris to work, and then to northern Spain. And in the autumn a Frau Regierungsrätin Meitzen had invited me to Berlin. It often gave me pause later that from the moment of my engagement onwards I was almost frantically intent on getting away from Oswald, on making long journeys. That surely cannot have been real love at all!
I stayed half a year again in Berlin, in the hospitable, sociable Meitzen house. — And then the Crown Princess Victoria8 of that time (the sister of the Grand Duchess Alice) wanted to make my acquaintance. She invited me to paint at her palace, in the Tornow collection. The waves of my experience ran high. I also had a studio in the Von-der-Heydt-Straße, and painted “Evoë Bacche” and “The Camp of Cleopatra.”
I was celebrated as the “founder of the historical still life.” Paul Lindau wrote in a review of “The Camp of Cleopatra” that I ought to tackle “Wallenstein's Camp” next. I had success and recognition everywhere, and — money like hay9. In those days I earned at least ten to twelve thousand marks a year. And was thoroughly high-spirited. Wrote very little to Oswald. Then he came himself. Conquered the house of my friends the Meitzens, and I announced my engagement in Berlin too.
His introduction at the house of my uncle, General von Fransecky10, was very comic; my uncle was then Governor of Berlin and lived in the charming palace on the Potsdamer Platz with the magnificent rococo garden out of old Berlin. My uncle had a hideous cur, “Molch,” whom he and the whole household loved above everything. As I now stepped through the door with Oswald, the fat dog shot yapping between his legs. He gave it a kick that came within a hair of killing the stout animal. My uncle was beside himself and observed that this was not a recommending act of introduction.
All the same, Oswald afterwards often enjoyed the Governor's box at the royal theatres. How that did him good. The rococo garden, with its stone figures and colonnades around the pond à la Versailles, is the loveliest thing to me in these Berlin memories of relations. Afterwards I spent a few weeks once more at my uncle's wine estate at Erbach in the Rheingau, bought with his “victory endowment.” Later his daughter Anna inherited it, who had married Colonel von Buttlar. After her death the magnificent property became, by will, a convalescent home for officers' daughters. They live there in splendid style and pay one mark a day for it.
In those Berlin days I also went a great deal to Christian Wilberg, the painter of Pergamon, to Meyerheim, Knaus and Anton von Werner11, to the Dernburgs, the Spielhagens and the Rodenbergs, the Lindaus and many others. And my friendship with the Crown Princess — for in all those weeks and months it had become one — wove a halo round my head.
Yes, those were golden days of my life, the days of working with the “Crown Princess,” who already wore the invisible martyr's crown of the later Empress Frederick. She was infinitely kind to me. Soon she took me into her own studio, even painted into my pictures, which pleased me rather less. When she was invited to a dinner she would come over first to show herself to me in the full splendour of her toilette. Once she pointed to a little bunch of violets at her neckline: “Do you remember?” I had brought it to her that morning. She always kissed me on coming and going, and I told her about my engagement. She was touched to the depths by it, and said, which outraged me greatly: “When you are married, I wish you many, many little babies.”12 — Incidentally, we never spoke German together; a great deal of English and French, but most of all Italian, which she spoke without any accent. How deep her knowledge, her striving and her gifts were, I came fully to recognise in those months. I was often drawn into court concerts too. Once — I was to collect the lady-in-waiting Countess Kalckreuth and had made myself late — I had to enter the reception rooms alone. I did not dare to put my eyeglass on. A tall footman seemed to me to be standing in one of the doorways, and I almost barged into him.
“Well — so proud, Fräulein von Preuschen, you do not know me at all today?” came the well-known voice of the Crown Prince — whose fate was to be fulfilled in a short time13! But how sunny everything seemed then! — And then the exalted lady painted me! I have counted it: we had twenty-two sittings14. And while she did it she told me so much that was sad that I had to weep, and was immortalised by her with quite red eyes. I, who had sat so often to Ferdinand Keller and always found myself so “flattered” in his pictures, could set my mind at rest on that score now. Flattered I certainly was not, on the contrary. Very, very like, all the same, but — as Oswald said later — “enough to cure you.” The Crown Princess gave me the picture, framed, as a wedding present. I went to Darmstadt for a few weeks. When I was back in Berlin the princess asked me what my parents had said about the picture. I, in my stupid honesty, replied: “My father says he takes fright when he comes into the room.” “What does that mean?” asked the Crown Princess, frowning. But I rescued myself quickly: — “Inasmuch as he thinks it is myself.” —
From Berlin, before the wedding, I went once more to Venice for four months. Yes, it cannot be otherwise: quite instinctively I wanted to use my freedom in every way while I still had it. Those were peculiar months — in the house of a thoroughly Italian family I had a room and a balcony over the Canal Grande. And in the Palazzo Rezzonico, the wonderful one, I rented myself a studio for ten lire a month. There I painted nine large panels “out of modern Venice,”15 fish and flowers, which later had much success at the Paris Salon. One of them, the largest, I gave to the Crown Princess.
How I enjoyed the Venetian summer! In spite of the heat and the smell of the lagoon. — The lily bloom! It was indescribable, what a fullness of lilies poured itself over Venice. And how I revelled in the Doge's Palace (where I painted interiors) and in all the churches. Especially in San Marco. And in the great museums. I was in Chioggia too, and thought of poor Emma Lutteroth. She had been so happy there.
Yes, my freedom pleased me very much. But Oswald demanded his “Dilarama,” his heart's-wisdom, ever more longingly (she faded for him soon enough). At last I travelled back to Darmstadt. There the trousseau had been finished in the meantime, and my father believed more and more in a “good match.” For my bridegroom had spoken of his millionaire aunt Überson (whose gold later dissolved into nothing). But my father, who was drawing up his will in those days, then disinherited me in favour of my sister16 on the strength of this “wealthy match.”
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the one Richter had painted me in — Helene Richter, one of the two elderly painters she had shared rooms with in Tivoli the previous summer, painted her in the black lace veil — so a portrait of Preuschen at twenty-four or twenty-five existed. And she traces it: it ended up “in the house of my adversaries” and hung there until her daughters Helga and Inge got hold of it. Whoever the adversaries were — the sentence is deliberately unexplained — this is a portrait with a documented chain of custody down to her own children, which makes it one of the more findable pictures in the memoir.
- ↑presented to the Goethe House — Michael Bernays (1834–1897) was the leading Goethe scholar of the day. His Munich circle had portrait drawings made of all its members and gave them to the Goethe House. So a drawn portrait of Preuschen, made in the mid-1880s, should be in the holdings of a Goethe House — most likely the Frankfurt Goethehaus / Freies Deutsches Hochstift, possibly Weimar. She says herself she enjoyed “the great unlikeness of the portraits,” which suggests she saw the set hanging. Worth an enquiry: it would be one of the few securely dated likenesses of her.
- ↑the tragic end of its unhappy King Ludwig — Ludwig II of Bavaria was deposed as insane on 9 June 1886 and found dead in Lake Starnberg with his psychiatrist Bernhard von Gudden on the evening of 13 June. The cause has never been settled. This is an eyewitness account of one of the most mythologised events in German history, from a witness nobody has quoted — and it dates her Munich years precisely: she was living in the Maaßenstraße in June 1886. Her verdict on the body is worth having in full, because a century of Ludwig romance has made it unsayable: “bloated and swollen he lay there, like a dead Falstaff, like a parody of his whole life.”
- ↑Paul Heyse — Paul Heyse (1830–1914), the dominant figure of literary Munich and, in 1910, the first German writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The list of that evening circle is the answer to a question the English record cannot answer: how a provincial painter came to be inside literary Munich. It is also where she met her first husband — Heyse's own closest hanger-on.
- ↑Oswald S. — Oswald Schmidt, the physician who became her first husband; they married in August 1882 (listed as married in the Saale-Zeitung of 30 August 1882), and the divorce was news in July 1890 (Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 9 July 1890). Throughout this chapter she gives him only an initial. Every source in English calls the first marriage brief and unhappy and stops there. This chapter is the only account of how it was made: a shared literary circle, two friends acting as matchmakers, and a proposal delivered on the studio floor.
- ↑“If you say no I shall shoot myself, for only at your side can anything great become of me.” — The proposal, in his own words as she reports them forty years later — a threat of suicide and a claim on her talent, and not one word about hers. Her own gloss on it is the sharpest thing in the chapter: “Like the young Faust before Gretchen.” In Goethe that is not a love scene but a seduction, and it ends with Gretchen destroyed. She says she thought of it at the time, and said yes anyway.
- ↑though with Jew's ringlets over his ears, as my father said — Her father's phrase, reported without comment. Whether Oswald Schmidt was Jewish is not stated anywhere we have seen; what the sentence records is the casual antisemitism of the household she came from — and that she still found it worth quoting forty years later. It is left standing here rather than softened, because softening it would misrepresent both the family and the period. Read together with “a mere Doctor S., without means,” it shows what the objection to the match actually consisted of.
- ↑the Crown Princess Victoria — Victoria, Princess Royal (1840–1901), eldest daughter of Queen Victoria, married to the future Emperor Friedrich III; Empress for the ninety-nine days of his reign in 1888, and thereafter the Empress Frederick. A serious painter herself, and a patron of women artists. Note how she is introduced: as “the sister of the Grand Duchess Alice.” Alice was Preuschen's Darmstadt patroness, who died in 1878 — so the connection to the Prussian court most likely runs through the Hessian one, which would also explain the sunflower picture sold to Queen Victoria a decade earlier.
- ↑money like hay — At least ten to twelve thousand marks a year, she says, in about 1881–82: the passage lies between Evoë Bacche, on show in Berlin by January 1881 (Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 6 January 1881), and the engagement before her wedding of August 1882. A senior Prussian civil servant might make five to six thousand; a skilled worker perhaps a thousand. This is the single most useful sentence for correcting the picture of her. The English-language record has a scandalous woman painter of Symbolist curiosities; here, at about twenty-seven, she is at the top of a market she says she invented, out-earning most professional men in Germany — some five years before the Mors Imperator scandal broke.
- ↑my uncle, General von Fransecky — Eduard von Fransecky (1807–1890), whose stand in the Swiepwald decided the battle of Königgrätz in 1866; Governor of Berlin from 1879. A relation worth having on the record: she was the niece of one of the most celebrated Prussian generals of the wars of unification, with the run of his palace on the Potsdamer Platz. It is also the second such connection in the memoir — a family far better placed than the “mere Doctor S.” objection alone would suggest.
- ↑Meyerheim, Knaus and Anton von Werner — The commanding names of official Berlin painting: Paul Meyerheim, Ludwig Knaus, and Anton von Werner, director of the academy and the Hohenzollerns' history painter. Julius Rodenberg edited the Deutsche Rundschau; Friedrich Spielhagen was among the best-selling novelists of the age. Set beside the Munich list in this same chapter — Heyse, Lingg, Bernays — it makes the point that the English record misses entirely: three years before the scandal she was received at the centre of both German art capitals.
- ↑“When you are married, I wish you many, many little babies.” — Quoted in English, as it was said, and immediately labelled: it outraged her. The moment is worth pausing on. The most highly educated woman at the Prussian court, herself a painter, congratulates a professional artist of twenty-six or twenty-seven, at the top of her earning power, by wishing her many babies — and the artist is offended and remembers it for thirty-five years. It is the 1896 lecture in embryo, delivered from the friendliest possible quarter.
- ↑whose fate was to be fulfilled in a short time — Friedrich III came to the throne in March 1888, already dying of throat cancer, and reigned ninety-nine days — so “in a short time” is written with some thirty-five years of hindsight and does not date the scene. Her Berlin months cannot be fixed from this passage alone. But Victoria's portrait of her was a wedding present, and the wedding was in August 1882 (the couple are listed as married in the Saale-Zeitung of 30 August 1882) — which puts these sittings before it, in the early 1880s, while Victoria was Crown Princess throughout (1861–88).
- ↑we had twenty-two sittings — So a portrait of Hermione von Preuschen by the future Empress Frederick exists, painted over twenty-two sittings in Berlin in the 1880s, and given to the sitter framed as a wedding present. A portrait of her by Victoria has surfaced in the research around the 2026 Berlin exhibition; this is the sitter's own account of it, and it supplies what a catalogue cannot: that she wept through the sittings because of what the Crown Princess was telling her, and was painted with red eyes. Her husband's verdict on the likeness was “enough to cure you”; her father's was that he took fright on entering the room.
- ↑nine large panels “out of modern Venice,” — A whole cycle to look for: nine large panels of fish and flowers, painted in a rented studio in the Palazzo Rezzonico, later shown with success at the Paris Salon — and the largest of them given to the future Empress Frederick, which puts it in a Hohenzollern collection. It is also the second cycle of hers built on the same principle as the 1890 “windows to the South”: a series of tall panels, sold and dispersed as a group. The Salon showings should be traceable in the Paris catalogues.
- ↑disinherited me in favour of my sister — The last sentence of the chapter, delivered without a word of comment — and one of the hardest facts in the memoir. The sequence is worth laying out: her fiancé boasts of a rich aunt who turns out not to exist; her father believes it, redrafts his will, and leaves her portion to her sister. Within a year the marriage had collapsed. She was earning ten to twelve thousand marks a year at the time, which is presumably how she survived what followed — and it makes the “I had given him the money beforehand” aside earlier in the chapter look less like an aside.