Chapter 24Munich Exhibition — Switzerland — Spain — Portugal — Madeira — JohannaMÜNCHNER AUSSTELLUNG — SCHWEIZ — SPANIEN — PORTUGAL — MADEIRA — JOHANNA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
The next summer I travelled with Helene von Monbart (Hans von Kahlenberg)1, or, as she was called in the family, with “Stilzchen,” on an “essence-of-Switzerland.” We picked out pretty well the most magnificent of it: the Rhône glacier, the Eggishorn with the Märjelensee, Chamonix, the Gornergrat. —
I had just put behind me a great Munich exhibition in the Kaim Halls2, at which their director, Baron Aufsess, played Wagner every afternoon as a “mood-maker.” The exhibition had been quasi-opened by Prince Ludwig, the later king (kindly sent to me by the Prince Regent as his deputy), and had had a great success. So great that my one-time teacher Ferdinand Keller (whom I visited in his villa on the Starnberger See) mocked at it quite testily.
Johanna was very useful as a secretary for an exhibition of that kind. My Munich successes had thoroughly turned the good soul's head. —
After four weeks of Switzerland I come back to the Waldfrieden early one morning, much refreshed by the journey but tired out by the night train, and ask Johanna to bring me something to eat, I was utterly famished. She goes off towards the kitchen at a hurried step, but it takes her so long to come back that I look over the sideboard and begin to nibble up three or four little white and pink biscuits out of the silver cake-basket they were always put into. But they taste so bitter that after the four pieces I eat no more. At last, when faithful Johanna appears with a snack, I ask: “Where did you get the biscuits?” — “Did the Baroness not buy them herself? They were standing in the corridor, in a little box.”
“Then it will have been rat poison that Frau Kwiet put there — I did not buy those biscuits. Go up at once and ask.”
Johanna exits deeply affronted.
After some minutes she comes back very sheepish: “It is rat poison!”
That was, after my return, the first deed of innocence of her faithful soul.
I soon felt very ill, and had the doctor sent for. He made a grave face. “Strychnine, and four biscuits! A twelve-year-old child died recently on two of them.”
I was ill for three weeks, could keep nothing down and digest nothing, was bedridden and under a doctor's care.
After that I got well again, and the doctor congratulated me on my bear's constitution. —
With one single inhabitant of Schmargendorf I had struck up a friendship, with the well-known friend of Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé3. She came to me very often, had a great love for little Inge too and would watch her at her quiet play in a corner of the studio, brought her Russian picture-books and Eskimo dolls as well. Actually I now believe that I was a kind of test-rabbit to her for the sufferings of the female psyche and physis4. I learned a very great deal from her. Unfortunately her husband received a call to Göttingen — I never saw her again. But in those days she took pleasure, as she always said, in my “preposterous genuineness” — as against everything perverse in modern life.
And then I travelled again with “Stilzchen,” on a freight steamer, to Lisbon. From there we journeyed through Portugal. After that Spain. In Granada we kept Christmas. It was so cold that on the fountain of the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra the icicles hung for a fortnight. But the Alhambra so enraptured me that I resolved to come there in summer as soon as I could, and paint.
When the pomegranates are in flower, Granada is at its loveliest! To this day I have not carried that plan out, something always came in between. But I revelled in Spain's landscapes and art treasures. The only tiresome thing, when I came home dead tired in the evening, was the making of conversation and the having-to-be-witty.
After that I went on to Madeira, where I spent two intoxicatingly beautiful spring months. The first news I found waiting there was the far from cheering word that, of my pictures which had come back from a large and rather sensational special exhibition at Blanch's in Stockholm5, five great crates of monumental frames had gone missing. It was a very considerable loss of thousands: despite years of the most eager enquiry the frames were never found again, were as if swallowed by the earth. Ever since, I have had to exhibit the large pictures only in miserable substitute frames, or more correctly: in frame-substitutes, which greatly diminishes their effect. —
Before my departure I had given Johanna two hundred marks for my last framing bill for smaller studies, and thirty marks for the fire insurance.
One day I am very roughly woken out of my Madeira intoxication by a letter from Frau Kwiet at the “Waldfrieden.”
“No, I really could not do that to you, to let your glorious things, worth over two thousand marks, be distrained and knocked down for the sake of the two hundred marks of frame money. — Your great Persian carpet, the Venetian chandelier and the little piano! The buyers were already assembled, the milkwoman, the postman and so on. The bailiff was just saying: ‘for the third and last time,' when I brought him the two hundred marks for the frame-maker, which I had got hold of. For Johanna, you see, had given the money to her friend Dina.” —
The good soul did many a thing, in the best and purest intention, that might have ended badly.
Only with difficulty did I get back into the old travelling and working mood on Madeira. I then made further excursions into the interior, to Gran Curral and Rabaçal, which stand unique in my memory. Rabaçal between giant walls that have only one entrance, through a natural tunnel in the rock. A mountain valley with nothing in it but flowering laurel slopes and a hundred kinds of fern, in trees and in shrubs. Some fifty huge waterfalls plunge with wild force into this rock cauldron from the sky-high walls. And the whole of it a shining green, foaming and roaring. A landscape as if from another star.
On the way back I painted for a few weeks more in Cintra near Lisbon, in the magnificent parks of Monserrate and Penha Verde. —
When I came home again, Johanna greeted me joyfully. She had lent Dina the bed linen and the silver as well. Only with the greatest difficulty did I get them back. —
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Helene von Monbart (Hans von Kahlenberg) — Helene von Monbart (1870–1957), the best-selling novelist who published as “Hans von Kahlenberg” — the second woman in two chapters whom Preuschen names under a man's pen-name, after Emil Marriot in Vienna. Kahlenberg's Nixchen (1899), the diary of a girl ruined by a genteel education, was a succès de scandale and went through dozens of printings; she was one of the most widely read German women writers of the decade. That two of her friends wrote as men, and that she herself did not, is the argument of her 1896 lecture running underneath the memoir: the professional name a woman could use was a man's. She is also travelling here with a nickname, “Stilzchen” — from Rumpelstilzchen, the goblin who spins and must not be named. Another literary friendship no account of Preuschen records. (Hans von Kahlenberg (Helene von Monbart))
- ↑a great Munich exhibition in the Kaim Halls — Another one-woman show in no account of her — the fifth the memoir has produced, after two in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hanover and Vienna. Munich's press has a Preuschen exhibition in August 1905, probably this one: Prince Heinrich of Bavaria visited it on 9 August and Prince Ludwig on 15 August (Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 August 1905; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 17 August 1905). The Kaim-Säle in the Türkenstraße, built in 1895 for Franz Kaim's concert orchestra (the ancestor of the Munich Philharmonic), were Munich's newest concert rooms, with a large hall and a smaller one used for exhibitions. Preuschen hired them for her pictures and had the director play Wagner in the afternoons to set the mood — the Berlin formula of chapter 14, staged in the city where she had studied. The opening, she says, was performed by Prince Ludwig, deputising for his father the Prince Regent Luitpold, who owned several of her flower pieces; Ludwig became King Ludwig III of Bavaria in 1913 and was the last. If this is the show of August 1905, his visit was not the opening: he viewed it on 15 August, after Prince Heinrich had already been there on the 9th (Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 August; Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 17 August 1905). The same summer fits the Swiss weeks the chapter opens with: that December three Swiss landscapes, views of the Eggishorn and Monte Rosa, were shown in her studio as “works of last summer” (Berliner Tageblatt, 16 December 1905).
- ↑with the well-known friend of Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé — Chapter 20 named her in half a parenthesis as “my Schmargendorf friend.” Here is the friendship itself — and a date, because her husband's call to Göttingen came in 1903. This is the paragraph that turns a passing name into a documented friendship. Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) — Nietzsche's, Rilke's and later Freud's intimate — lived in Schmargendorf, and Preuschen says she was the only person in the village she became friends with: she came often, watched Inge — born in 1896, so six or seven by then — play in the corner of the studio and brought her Russian picture-books and Eskimo dolls. The friendship ends when Friedrich Carl Andreas was called to the chair of West Asian languages at Göttingen, in 1903, and the couple left Berlin — which agrees with the ambassador Wedel's dates in chapter 23 and puts chapter 23 in 1903 rather than the 1901–02 the memoir's sequence suggests. It does not date this chapter, though: the paragraph looks back, and the Munich show above is in the press in August 1905. Rilke had lodged in Lou's Schmargendorf house, itself called Villa Waldfrieden, in 1898–1900; it was Preuschen's house too — the Berlin address book of 1902 lists her at Hundekehlestraße 11. Outside this chapter, nothing we have read records that the two women knew each other.
- ↑a kind of test-rabbit to her for the sufferings of the female psyche and physis — Written before Lou Andreas-Salomé's psychoanalytic years, and shrewd about them in advance: she is describing herself as a case. The judgement is retrospective — “Eigentlich glaube ich jetzt” — and unresentful; the sentence after it says she learned a very great deal. Preuschen's word is Probierkaninchen, the animal a thing is tried out on. Lou Andreas-Salomé was then writing the essays on erotics and on the feminine that preceded her Die Erotik (1910), and she came to Freud in 1911; a friend who supplied “die Leiden der weiblichen Psyche und Physis” at close range fits that work exactly. Two women, both writing about what being female cost, each using the other — one for material and one for what she learned. It is the memoir's most modern-sounding sentence.
- ↑a large and rather sensational special exhibition at Blanch's in Stockholm — A sixth unrecorded one-woman show, and the best-documented address of them all: Blanchs Konstsalong on the Kungsträdgården was Stockholm's leading private gallery. Blanch's art salon, attached to Blanch's café on the Kungsträdgården, was where Stockholm saw the Opponents and the French moderns in the 1880s and 1890s; a solo exhibition there that made a stir is a real event in Swedish art life, and Swedish newspapers of the period are digitised and searchable at the Royal Library. Note also what it implies about the scale of her operation by now: she was shipping monumental canvases in crates between Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Stockholm while travelling in Portugal, Spain and Madeira. The lost frames mattered to her because she designed them — the panther-skin-and-allegory manner she took from Ferdinand Keller — as part of the pictures.