Chapter 13Hurrying — Erring — Seeking — StrivingHASTEN — IRREN — SUCHEN — STREBEN
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
I gave a requiem lecture for Konrad Telmann at the Hotel de Rome. In the interval I received the news of my mother's death1. She had been ill for some time with a complaint that began as appendicitis, developed into a chronic stomach trouble and ended as the most malignant cancer of the stomach. She died in the clinic at Heidelberg; after my return to Germany I saw her, sadly, only once. She did not survive my father long. After his death she had moved with my sister, who had not married, to Wiesbaden. So my sister had found no suitable husband, although she was very pretty. In secret she probably blamed my career as an artist for it, and the “vulgar posters” of a large Preuschen exhibition in Darmstadt2 soon after my marriage to Telmann. She now lives on what she inherited from our father and from our uncle in Wiesbaden, gives piano lessons besides, and undertakes annual rounds of visits to cousins. —
I now at last came to know the editor of “Haus zu Haus,”3 Anny Mahn-Wothe, in person. Konrad and I had been contributors for years. A lively traffic soon sprang up between me and the Mahn household, which had become a stimulating and sociable centre of Leipzig. I met many interesting people there. The composer Paul Umlauff set many songs of Konrad Telmann's and of mine. I performed a great deal of melodrama with him4. Later I was also a judge, together with the old poet Gottschall, over nine hundred poetic prize riddles, which was quite entertaining. Through the paper I came to know the poet Eugen Stangen, and a friendship by letter sprang up. I liked his letters very much, as long as I believed that they were meant for me alone. He was finally to come out to Grunewald to look me up in person. The bell rings, I open the door, and a fat, chubby-cheeked giant hurls himself at me with outspread arms. I flee to the furthest corner. But once the first unwelcome surprise had been got over, we became quite good friends — until after twelve years a nothing tore that friendship apart. It then became clear how little genuine it can have been. But in those days “Genio” was a frequent guest in my house; the children loved him, and the “old lady” was always afraid I would marry him.
At all events he gave me much lyrical stimulus, and I gave him still more. He was a strong talent. — That I could lose him through a nothing still seems to me strange, in spite of everything.
In the Wißmannstraße I had taken on women pupils. It was a nice income. But they now proved an impossibility for me, although in Munich in my day, during my “marriage tragedy,” I had drawn a strong and dependable income from them. But my individuality had grown far too independent over the years, and I simply could not endure the pupils5, who slavishly picked up every peculiarity of mine as a “trick”; they took from me the joy of my own work, which was positively spoiled for me by it. One morning I step into the anteroom of my beautiful domed studio, in which my pupils' four easels stood. And there I discover Inge, busily engaged in destroying the previous day's laborious work with a sharp nail. To my horrified question, how she could dare, and what this was supposed to mean, she explains laconically: “But it is too hideous, what they have painted.”
The same Inge also answered her grandmother in the summer, when the old lady remarked that she was a little piglet: “Then you must be the old sow.” — She was extremely quick, little Inge. — She was, by the way, at last to be baptised, this having been seen to secretly in Helga's case a few years earlier by my mother. Just after my move, during a visit to her grandmother — I was away for one day. I was really indignant about it, for Konrad had once written:
“No, no priest shall sprinkle your forehead6 with consecrated water, so that they may one day damn you, like the blind haters, for believing otherwise.”
My cousin, Baroness Buttlar, the daughter of my uncle General von Fransecky, with whom I had spent such eventful times in Strasbourg in my earliest youth, pressed me so hard about the “little heathen.” So I let her have her way, for I told myself that the child could still keep her inner freedom and her power of decision later on, and that baptism now would only save the children from conflicts at school too early in life.
So everything was prepared for the sacred act.
But we had reckoned without Inge. When the water touched her head she ran off screaming. She ran like a weasel and hid in the furthest corner of the church. Only by force could the act of baptism be completed. At the time I found it extremely embarrassing. Now I smile at it. And is it not so with most of the things in life that outrage us, appal us, bewilder us? We gain our distance from them, and all that is left to us is a smile.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑In the interval I received the news of my mother's death — She is standing up in a Berlin hotel giving a memorial lecture for her husband when she is handed the news that her mother has died — and she gives the sentence no reaction at all, running straight on into the clinical history of the illness and then into her sister's marriage prospects. The two are a month apart in the press. The requiem evening at the Hotel de Rome was on All Souls' Day, 2 November 1899 (Berliner Tageblatt, 3 November 1899); her mother died at Heidelberg on 5 December 1899 (Heidelberger Zeitung, 12 December 1899), nearly three years after Telmann and her father. Either there was a second evening in December, or the memoir has run the two together.
- ↑the “vulgar posters” of a large Preuschen exhibition in Darmstadt — A solo exhibition in her home town, about 1892 or 1893, big enough to be advertised on street hoardings — and unrecorded anywhere else we have looked. Two things are worth having here. The first is the exhibition itself: Darmstadt, shortly after the Telmann marriage, with printed posters, which means the local press covered it and the posters were designed by somebody. That is a findable event. The second is the accusation, which she reports as her sister's private opinion and does not trouble to rebut — that a woman's name on a hoarding was low enough to spoil her sister's chances of a husband. The last sentence is the reply: her sister is alive as she writes, living on inherited money, giving piano lessons and going round the cousins once a year.
- ↑the editor of “Haus zu Haus,” — Anny Wothe (1858–1919), who wrote as Anny Wothe-Mahn — a prolific and widely read novelist, and the editor of the Leipzig family paper both Preuschen and Telmann had been writing for. “Konrad and I had been contributors for years” is a sentence to act on. Family weeklies of that kind printed poems, sketches and serials under their authors' names and ran to thousands of pages, and the Leipzig runs are held and increasingly digitised. Years of Preuschen's prose and verse — and Telmann's — are sitting in them. It would be the largest single body of her published writing outside the seven volumes of poetry, and nobody has gone through it.
- ↑I performed a great deal of melodrama with him — »melodramatisch sprechen« is a technical term, not a manner: melodrama meant a text spoken aloud over music, a serious and popular concert form of the period. So she was performing her own and Telmann's poems in public, to Umlauff's settings. This is new. We knew from the previous chapters that Paul Umlauft and Alexander von Fielitz set her poems; here she is on the platform, reciting to the piano. It is one more search to run in the concert notices and music catalogues, and one more thing she did professionally that no account of her records — the widow of a novelist, touring her dead husband's poems and her own as spoken concert pieces.
- ↑I simply could not endure the pupils — The woman who two years earlier had stood up at the International Women's Congress to argue that women must be admitted to serious artistic training could not stand teaching them, and says so. It is not the contradiction it first looks like, and it is worth being exact about the difference. Her 1896 lecture is about institutions: that the state academies were shut to women, that Rome was the only place a woman could study properly, and that the talent was being wasted by the arrangement rather than by nature. Nothing in it says she wanted to be anybody's teacher. What she cannot bear is being copied — »Mätzchen«, the word the pupils reduce her manner to, means little tricks or affectations — and having her own work spoiled by watching four easels imitate it badly. She had taught for money during the first marriage, when she needed it, and stopped as soon as she did not. Set beside the one regret of chapter 11, that she painted when she might have walked with her husband, it says something consistent about her: the work came first and she resented anything that stood between her and it, including four young women paying her. (the 1896 lecture)
- ↑no priest shall sprinkle your forehead — Telmann's lines for his daughter, quoted by his widow as the reason she was angry — and then set aside two sentences later. This is the practical end of the free-thinking that shaped the previous chapter: the cremation forbidden by the Church, the burial among unbelievers, the pastor sent away. Here the same convictions meet a cousin, a baroness, complaining about a “little heathen,” and lose. Her reasoning is worth reading twice, because it is not a surrender so much as a calculation: the child keeps her inner freedom and can decide later, and in the meantime a baptism certificate saves her from trouble at school. It is exactly the argument a freethinker of 1898 would have had to make about a German school, and she makes it over her dead husband's verse.