Chapter 14Villa Waldfrieden — Preuschen Exhibitions — “Erotic” PoetryVILLA WALDFRIEDEN — PREUSCHEN-AUSSTELLUNGEN — »EROTISCHE« LYRIK
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
After a year I was given notice in Grunewald, on the ground of the owner's own use. Then “Genio” discovered an idyllic villa with a large garden in neighbouring Schmargendorf. There were nine rooms; the landlady, Frau Kwiet, lived in the little gable room, and otherwise I had the house entirely to myself. Firs and a great lime tree stood in the garden. It was unspoilt and old-fashioned, far from any tinsel splendour. So I moved into the Villa Waldfrieden1, where I camped for ten years under the most various fortunes. It was damp and ice-cold and heated wretchedly, but it had “Stimmung.” Every room was toned to my furniture, poison-green and pink and yellow, the studio white; the Egyptian frame from the Camp of Cleopatra I had set up round the window there; it all looked very grand, and I did not think I could ever have it more beautiful.
I now first put on a large and very successful exhibition in the Potsdamer Straße, at which the Empress Auguste Viktoria ordered a “fire-screen.”2 I painted water lilies on a sheet of water for it. But they were too “modern” for their Majesties. The Kaiser sent word to me that he preferred my earlier pictures. I showed my pictures beneath Turkish carpets belonging to the firm of Heim; the head of it assured me daily: “You are an artist, but no businesswoman.” How often in later years I have had to think of that. — I had a very peculiar cashier there. His hair and beard were snow-white, and he asked whether he ought not to dye his hair black. I had no objection. The next day the colour had gone wrong on him, and he appeared with brilliantly violet hair. — A visitor said to me: “That man is not acting in your interest. When I asked him the price of that picture, he whispered in my ear: ‘She'll let it go cheaper.'”
I made a lovely study journey to the palm wilderness of Bordighera and to La Mortola near Mentone, of which Konrad had told me so much. I was very industrious there. “Genio” visited me, and his appearance, à la suburban baritone, aroused the delight of every shop girl. There, out of our being together, our walks and our conflicts, arose many poems which appeared in due course in my “Flammenmal.”
At my next large exhibition, in a splendid columned room on the Hausvoigteiplatz, I engaged a very capable cashier, the “Otto,” who proved so serviceable that the next year I took him over with me to my great “defiance exhibition” in Düsseldorf. That exhibition was honourable, but costly. The Prince Regent had lent me for it all the large flower pieces of mine in his possession3, and Herr Fiertz of Zurich the Mors Imperator. — There, as on the Hausvoigteiplatz, I also gave readings of my poems. Some of them, at which I read nothing but love poetry and which I quite harmlessly called “Erotic Poetry Evenings,”4 drew a colossal crowd. But the people had promised themselves something else. In “Ulk” there was then a poem with a picture: Hermione reads poems, and the little pigs listen. And they grunt with contentment: “Oh, how interesting it is — but sadly one has to say, for ‘erotica' not spicy enough.”
Yes, the world does not understand genuine eroticism — to the world, eroticism is filth. — That too is one of the conflicts of my life.
In the third year I again put on a large exhibition, at the Köllnischer Fischmarkt. I had my Corfu studies in it5 and called it the “Greek Exhibition.” An architect B. helped me with it — I agreed a picture with him in payment. At the end he nevertheless presented a bill for several thousand marks. A long-drawn-out lawsuit followed, with dreadful agitations, but with final triumph — the man of honour had lost his case.
To this exhibition there came, as cashier, a “friend” of “Genio's,” Johanna Lautenschläger.
She then stayed with me nine years as secretary and lady's maid. She was sickly and therefore not very capable, but adaptable and rapturously devoted, and in my increasing inner isolation I believed that I was at least surrounded by one faithful soul, whom I must therefore keep at any price.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑So I moved into the Villa Waldfrieden — The house she is identified with, located at last: Schmargendorf, then a village on the edge of Berlin, found for her by the poet Eugen Stangen. She lived there ten years — roughly 1899 to 1909 — before the Tempio Hermione at Lichtenrade. It is worth having the details, because the Villa Waldfrieden turns up in half a dozen later chapters as simply “home” and is otherwise a name with nothing attached. Nine rooms, a garden with firs and a great lime, and a landlady, Frau Kwiet, living in the gable room above her. Damp, freezing, and impossible to heat. She painted every room to match the furniture that was going into it — poison-green, pink, yellow, the studio white — and then set the Egyptian frame from her own picture The Camp of Cleopatra around a window as architecture. A rented suburban villa, done over as a stage set, on a scale she says she never afterwards bettered. One more thing the name may carry: the Schmargendorf villa where Lou Andreas-Salomé lived and Rilke lodged from 1898 to 1900 — Hundekehlestraße 11 — was also called Villa Waldfrieden, and chapter 20 calls Lou “my Schmargendorf friend.” It is the same house: the Berlin address book of 1902 lists her at Hundekehlestraße 11, “Villa Waldfriede.”
- ↑the Empress Auguste Viktoria ordered a “fire-screen.” — A commission from the reigning Empress, and then a verdict from Wilhelm II himself — passed on second-hand — that he preferred her earlier work. Both are in one breath with the word “modern” in quotation marks. The commission is in the press: a large folding screen, 135 × 90 cm, of a Spree canal with water lilies, meant as a Christmas present for a reigning German princess (Emscher Zeitung, 11 November 1899). But the order was reported some nine months after the Potsdamer Straße show closed in February 1899, which makes her “at” that show doubtful. This is the third German court to buy from her: Queen Victoria took a sunflower picture in the eighties, the Empress Frederick sat to her, and here Auguste Viktoria orders a painted fire-screen. Note what the object is. Not a picture for a wall but a screen to stand in front of a stove — decorative furniture, the kind of commission a court gave a woman painter — and she paints water lilies on water for it, which is as close to Jugendstil as the imperial household was ever going to get. The Kaiser's taste was famously and aggressively conservative; he had denounced modern art in public. That his opinion came back to her at all means she was near enough the throne to be worth correcting. The present went to Baden: in January 1902 the Grand Duchess of Baden lent two screens to the Hausvoigteiplatz exhibition, one of them painted on the commission of “our Empress” (Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 January 1902) — so it is in the Baden collections, not a Hohenzollern inventory, that it ought to be looked for.
- ↑The Prince Regent had lent me for it all the large flower pieces of mine in his possession — Two provenance facts in one sentence. Luitpold of Bavaria owned several large flower paintings by her — not one — and lent the set back for a show; and the man who bought Mors Imperator is named again, this time as Fiertz. The Munich press bears out his ownership: he bought a flower piece of hers, White Pansies, in October 1896 (Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 October 1896), and the account of his collection printed for his ninetieth birthday lists “flower pieces by Hermine v. Preuschen” (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 11 March 1911). The earlier chapter called the buyer “der Kaufmann Fritz in Zürich,” and this translation glossed him as a merchant named Fritz. This spelling is almost certainly the right one and Fritz the slip: Fierz is a common Zurich surname, and a Herr Fiertz who lends a large picture across a border for an exhibition is a collector with a name to search on. That matters, because Mors Imperator went into Swiss private hands around 1892 — a private gallery in Basel, by one Leipzig report, which has it for sale again in September 1901 (Leipziger Tageblatt, 30 September 1901) — and, after showings at her own exhibitions up to 1905, drops out of every record we have found until it resurfaced for the 2026 Berlin exhibition. The gloss in the Mors Imperator chapter has been corrected to match. (the painting)
- ↑“Erotic Poetry Evenings,” — She hired halls and read her own love poems to enormous audiences, having given the evenings a name she calls “quite harmless” — and got the audience the name deserved. The satirical weekly Ulk, which had already caricatured her over Mors Imperator ten years earlier, ran a cartoon of her reading to a row of contented pigs: interesting, they grunt, but not spicy enough. It is the second time Ulk has taken her as a subject, which is itself a measure of her public standing — you have to be famous to be worth the joke twice. Two things are going on at once. She is a widow of about forty-five supporting two children by hiring rooms and performing her own erotic verse in public, which was an audacious way to earn money in Wilhelmine Berlin. And the audience came for the title, not the poems, which is exactly the complaint of the sentence that follows.
- ↑I had my Corfu studies in it — Four one-woman exhibitions — Potsdamer Straße, Hausvoigteiplatz, Düsseldorf, Köllnischer Fischmarkt — the last of them built out of a body of Corfu studies from a Greek journey the memoir has not otherwise mentioned. They span six years, not three, and her “third year” is very probably January 1905. Taken together this is the clearest picture yet of how she actually worked after Telmann's death: she was not exhibiting with other people, she was mounting her own shows, hiring the room, hiring a cashier, borrowing back pictures from their owners, printing posters, giving paid readings in the same room, and suing the contractors afterwards. Every one of these four is a datable Berlin or Düsseldorf event, and the press dates them: the Potsdamer Straße show from the start of January to about 25 February 1899, with thirty pictures sold eight days before the close (Berliner Tageblatt, 23 December 1898 and 17 February 1899); the Hausvoigteiplatz, at no. 6/7, from a press preview on 4 January 1902 to a farewell evening on 9 February, with 43 pictures sold (Berliner Tageblatt, 4 January 1902; Neues Tagblatt, Stuttgart, 12 February 1902); Düsseldorf in May and June 1902 (Kölnische Zeitung, 24 May 1902; Rhein- und Ruhrzeitung, 16 June 1902); and, very probably the Greek Exhibition, Köllnischer Fischmarkt 6 from 4 January 1905 (Berliner Tageblatt, 4 January 1905). Not one of them appears in any account of her we have found.