Chapter 39Buying the TempioTEMPIO-ANKAUF
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
I painted very industriously through the winter, and in the first spring of 1908 chance led me to Lichtenrade near Berlin. Acquaintances had told me that land there was still affordable.
Professor von Scala in Innsbruck and his wife had for years been goading me: why did I pay so much rent in Schmargendorf, when for cheaper money I could dwell on ground and soil of my own.
So I went out to Lichtenrade, on the very day on which I had first heard its name. We viewed a parcel in the bare field, rather far from the station. Just as we were about to board, my acquaintances said: “Before you came, a while ago, we passed a house here in the Prinzessinnenstraße of the kind I imagine you would build for yourself.” I wanted to see the house for myself, and they led me to it. A small white house with a columned portico, standing on a rise, around it a large, ill-kept garden. I was delighted with the architectural proportions of the house, and we stepped in to ask after its builder. “Why do you not rather buy this house?” asked its owner. — After four weeks I was the proprietress!
And now came a rebuilding and papering and painting. Walls and doors were taken out, central heating and a bath built in, the cellar transformed into a mezzanine. I was all fire and flame, was wholly absorbed in the new plan, positively melted into one with my villa, which was to be called Tempio Hermione1 (a name friend Sudermann2 tried with all his might to talk me out of).
Then the garden was completely altered and planted. I bought a few hundred cypresses, which were set as a hedge around the property. (In the hot summer that followed, in my absence, they all perished.)
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑Tempio Hermione — The "Hermione Temple": Italian tempio, with her own name attached — precisely the self-staging her critics ground their teeth at, chosen over the objections of one of Germany's most famous writers. The house is the stage of the rest of her life. From here come the chapters still ahead — the purpose-built picture hall she added on the neighbouring plot in 1909, opened 2 June 1911 with more than two hundred of her paintings and and its first summer brought a repeat Rose Festival and, on 3 September 1911, the Greek Moon Festival; the second world journey planned from it; the return "back to the Tempio" that titles chapter 43. Robert Koch and much of Berlin society signed the guest book, which survives in the Tempelhof Museum. And it is where the story ends: she died in the Tempio in December 1918, in the hunger winter after the war. Sudermann lost the argument about the name; posterity uses nothing else.
- ↑Sudermann — Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928), then among the most performed dramatists in Europe (Heimat, with its Magda, above all) — "friend Sudermann" is dropped in as casually as the Björnsons. (Hermann Sudermann)