Chapter 20The BarbarianDER BARBAR
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
In that time a Russian began to write to me. I never saw him — he wrote to me, the “Barbarian,” for two years, the most glorious, most delirious letters. This paper ardour soon went out into nothing. — But by these letters the Astartenlieder were strongly fertilised. And they brought me for a while the dubious fame of being named together with Marie Madelaine1. But never were there more different natures than ours.
Hers frivolous, coquettish, perversely sensual, — mine shaken through all its depths, unsatisfied, but genuine.
Yes, if I were not so “genuine” (which my Schmargendorf friend Lou Andreas-Salomé2 called the “preposterous” in me), then I should have got further. —
But as it was, alas, what others called “pose” in me was always only a compulsion, under which I slowly bled away.
My travels distracted me again and again from my inner unrest, desolation, loneliness — the misery of longing for one single understanding human soul — or honestly said: a man's soul. But in the vain search for it I drank an ever more bitter contempt for the world and for mankind. Actually it was ungrateful of me, for I had many valuable people for company. And my friends the Sudermanns3! On their estate of Blankensee in the Mark, which they beautified every year with antique statues and temples, I spent pleasurable, stimulating and work-filled days each summer. In the course of time we counted some thirty park motifs that I turned to account in painting from there. How glorious were the white roses on the railing of the rear castle steps. And Kläre Sudermann I loved dearly. Yet I always had the feeling: all of these live their life for themselves, take pleasure perhaps, at the very most, in your company for the moment, but what are you to them in the last end? —
Only once, when I had been telling them very vividly of my latest travels, did Kläre betray to me that Sudermann had said to her: “Hermione, with her foolhardy travels and her restlessness, is really a wonder of nature. — When does she ever get enough?” That was the single moment in which Sudermann caught a glimmer of the core of my being.
No — it was in vain to search for a spark, for one single spark of the soul of my dead. — I had to make compromises.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Marie Madelaine — The era's most scandalous erotic poetess — a shelf she immediately disowns. Marie Madeleine, the pen name of Baroness Marie Madeleine von Puttkamer (1881–1944), whose collection “Auf Kypros” (1900) was the succès de scandale of German erotic verse. To be “named together with” her placed the Astartenlieder in the decade's wave of erotic poetry by women — the “dubious fame” Preuschen at once repudiates, drawing the distinction of the next sentence. The book prints “Madelaine”; kept as found.
- ↑Lou Andreas-Salomé — Writer and later psychoanalyst, the intimate of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud — and, this sentence reveals, Preuschen's friend and Schmargendorf neighbour. Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) — writer, later one of the first psychoanalysts; the intimate of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud. Her Schmargendorf home was the Villa Waldfrieden, Hundekehlestraße 11, where Rilke — who had reviewed Preuschen admiringly in 1896 — lived from 1898 to 1900. And “Villa Waldfrieden” is the name of Preuschen's own Schmargendorf house from about 1899 (chapter 14); the Hundekehlestraße villa was demolished in 1910, two years after Preuschen left for the Tempio. It was one house, not two: the Berlin address book of 1902 lists her at Hundekehlestraße 11. Whether the two women lived there at the same time or one after the other, the address books of 1899–1903 can settle. Either way, this half-sentence sets Preuschen inside the Rilke–Salomé circle at its Schmargendorf moment.
- ↑the Sudermanns — Hermann Sudermann, then the most performed German playwright alive, and his wife Kläre — their estate Blankensee dates these summers from 1902 on. Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928), whose plays were then performed around the world, and his wife Clara — “Kläre” — (1861–1924), a writer herself. Sudermann bought the Blankensee estate south of Berlin in 1902 and filled its park with antique statuary, exactly as she describes — which dates these “every summer” visits from 1902 onward. Some thirty park motifs painted there means a whole corpus of Preuschen pictures with a subject that still exists: Schloss Blankensee and its park survive.