Background

"I, the Emperor of Thebes"

A cache of correspondence from Else Lasker-Schüler is up for auction in Berlin next week. Held in Croatia for many years, the collection includes postcards and letters that Lasker-Schüler sent between 1917 and 1920 to the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer and his wife, actress Tilla Durieux.

Paul Cassirer by Max Beckmann (1915)

Cassirer was a major catalyst of avant-garde art in Germany, promoting the work of Post-Impressionists, Secessionists and Expressionists from his Berlin gallery on a site where the Musical Instrument Museum now stands. Durieux was an acclaimed stage and early screen actress, and a subject of studies by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Franz von Stuck. She had clearly warmed to her pen pal since her dismissive comment on seeing Lasker-Schüler with her son Paul and husband Herwarth Walden in Berlin’s Café des Westens in the early years of the 20th century (‘the little family lived, I suspect, on nothing but coffee’).

 

Tilla Durieux as Circe by Franz von Stuck, c. 1913

 

This hoard follows a similar find from 2020, the recipient in that case being a Dutch school teacher and part-time reviewer who corresponded with Lasker-Schüler between 1905 and 1930. Here we have a narrower time frame (1917-1920) but this, intriguingly, is the period in which Cassirer published a 10-volume edition of Lasker-Schüler’s works (including the trio that make up our edition, Three Prose Works). Else Lasker-Schüler invested a great deal of creative energy in her correspondence. Never a mere listing of events or airing of opinions, her letters – often embellished with drawings – served to expand the world she created in her verse, fiction, drama and graphic works, a construct into which she would implicitly or explicitly draw the recipient. Here she lavishes compliments on the couple, often in the guise of one of her alternative personae (‘I, the Emperor of Thebes …’), alongside images of another alter ego ‘Prince Jussuf’ with a crescent moon and six-pointed star on his cheek.

Lasker-Schüler later turned on Cassirer, referring to him as a ‘shark’ in her 1925 pamphlet, Ich räume auf! (Putting Things Straight) – a rogues’ gallery of publishers she felt had exploited and mistreated her. Shortly after publication, Cassirer and Durieux entered divorce proceedings; unable to face life without his wife, Cassirer committed suicide. Lasker-Schüler appears to have regretted her harsh words, and pencilled a note on a copy of Ich räume auf! that describes Cassirer as a ‘gentleman’ (using the English word).

The estimate is EUR 25,000; hopefully the lucky buyer will share the work with the public at some point.

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Images of Jussuf

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One of the many fascinating things about Else Lasker-Schüler’s career is that through her dynamic, luminous illustrations, we have an insight into how she herself saw the characters who appear in her writings. In particular, the biblical figure of ‘Jussuf’ (Joseph/Jusuf, the favoured son of Jacob with the coat of many colours) looms large over both her graphic and written work. As the afterword to Three Prose Works reveals, Joseph was a persona of life-long identification for Else Lasker-Schüler, one that connected her to her brother Paul and her mother Jeanette, the two family members to whom she was closest. Paul taught the young Else the story of Joseph and his brothers, which she would in turn act out for her mother. Joseph was also associated with her early socialisation; when she told the story at school, a classmate mockingly declared that Else was Joseph.

That more or less came true shortly before the First World War; in a distressing phase of transition he became an alter ego to the writer and artist, although she fused the biblical figure with a fictional ‘Prince of Thebes’. This hybrid character not only turned up in Lasker-Schüler’s writing (most notably of course in The Prince of Thebes, issued in 1914 – the third of our Three Prose Works) but also her correspondence and numerous artworks. These images constitute a rich iconography spanning over 20 years, reappearing throughout the Weimar Republic and later accompanying Lasker-Schüler into exile.

Pre-World War One

It was in 1912, triggered by her painful split from second husband Herwarth Walden, that Else Lasker-Schüler reached back and reconnected with Joseph (Jussuf)/Prince of Thebes. The ‘self-portrait’ that adorned an edition of the journal Saturn the following year is a kind of ‘coming out’ of the writer’s new persona. He is shown in profile, as he would be in the majority of later images as well. He is frequently accompanied by a crescent moon or a Star of David, or more often both – shorthand for the Semitic realm in which Lasker-Schüler places her prince (see for example the cover of The Prince of Thebes, 1914). The images themselves are sometimes rendered in a few strokes which emphasise a strong brow and down-turned mouth which he shares with his creator. Once fixed, these features remained remarkably consistent.

In a postcard to Georg Trakl, sent a few months before the war which would claim the doomed poet in its early stages, we see how Jussuf/Prince of Thebes appears in Lasker-Schüler’s correspondence. For the rest of her life she often signed her letters with some variant on these names.

 

1913 | An edition of the journal Saturn entirely dedicated to Lasker-Schüler’s work

 

1913 | ‘The Prince of Thebes heads into holy battle’

 

1913 | ‘Jussuf Prince Tiba’

 

1913 | Self-portrait as Prince Jussuf

 

1913/14 | ‘Jussuf with spear’

 

1914 | Postcard addressed to Georg Trakl

Weimar Republic

During the First World War, Else Lasker-Schüler exhibited her art for the first time, and her work in the 1920s signals her confidence as a visual artist. Jussuf recurs throughout the Weimar period, although in contrast to the martial figure of the pre-war era the depictions tend to emphasise his sensitivity. He is often paired with animals (recalling his original role as a shepherd) and in one depiction the prince admires a blue rose, blue being an emotionally charged colour in Lasker-Schüler’s world. In the 1920s he appears more often in full length, a lithe physical presence, and the treatments advance from the pen sketches that dominate early depictions to more elaborate, appropriately many-coloured images in paint and even gold leaf.

Jussuf appears in different forms in the 1923 volume Theben, arguably the consummate union of Else Lasker-Schüler’s words and images. It featured hand-written verse in facsimile accompanied by illustrations, with 50 copies additionally hand-coloured by the writer/artist herself (even the uncoloured editions can sell for around EUR 10,000 these days). Theben was issued by the publisher Querschnitt, which was owned by the prominent gallerist Alfred Flechtheim – a key figure in the dissemination of Modernism in Germany.

 

1920 | ‘Asser Memed Schalomein Jussuf’

 

1920 | ‘Jussuf sculpts his mother’

 

1921 | ‘This is Jussuf in the evening full of longing’

 

1922 | ‘Thebes with Jussuf’ (from the book Theben, 1923)

 

1923 | ‘Jussuf goes to God’ (from the book Theben, 1923)

 

1927 | ‘Jussuf’

 

1927 | ‘Jussuf tending the goats in pasture’

 

1927/28 | ‘Elephant with Jussuf’

Exile

Else Lasker-Schüler left Germany in April 1933, shortly after the Nazi takeover. Despite the penurious conditions under which she endured exile in Zurich, and later Jerusalem, she continued to write and produce art. An unusual image from 1935 returns us to the word, with Jussuf – in something like Western costume – reading his verse. The final sketch, which shows Jussuf praying for peace, is undated but may have been created around the beginning of Else Lasker-Schüler’s residency in Jerusalem, at the outbreak of the Second World War.

 

1934 | ‘Prince Jussuf of Thebes’

 

1935 | ‘Prince Jussuf reads his verses aloud’

 

1939(?) | ‘Prince Jussuf prays for peace in the world’

Dedications

As we publish Three Prose Works today, here we look at the people to whom author Else Lasker-Schüler dedicated the constituent parts, a diverse range of figures who offer an intriguing insight into the writer’s life and interests. Lasker-Schüler was an intensely social individual, building up extensive networks of friends and associates, and as well as honouring them with dedications of books, poems and individual stories, she often wove them into her work as thinly fictionalised versions of themselves, or wrote short essays about them.

The Peter Hille Book

 

Peter Hille

Although he isn’t strictly speaking a dedicatee, from the title of the work itself to the 47 constituent sketches, with the majority bearing titles featuring the name ‘Petrus’, Else Lasker-Schüler’s first book of prose is wholly devoted to her mentor – the arch-bohemian writer Peter Hille (1854-1904). Hille issued just three novels and a play in his lifetime; he has never been translated into English and remains a reasonably obscure figure even in Germany. The gaunt, weather-beaten Hille would either doss with indulgent friends or simply camp out in parks and he aroused concern even among the chronically impoverished artists and writers of late 19th-century Berlin. Lasker-Schüler met Hille around 1899 and became his protégé. After she left her first husband, she and Hille greeted the new century as Berlin’s most notorious bohemians. This was the time when cabaret was introduced to the city, and the pair were there at the very beginning. In 1902 Hille opened a cabaret under his own name in an Italian restaurant popular with bohemians at the time; he was heading home from the venue one evening in 1904 when he collapsed and died. Two years later Lasker-Schüler issued The Peter Hille Book, its cover featuring a portrait of its subject which had adorned the wall of his cabaret.

The cover of Else Lasker-Schüler’s The Peter Hille Book (1906)

The Nights of Tino of Baghdad

 

Jeanette Schüler

The first edition of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (1907) is dedicated to Lasker-Schüler’s mother, (‘To my mother the queen with the golden wings in reverence’). The writer was extremely close to Jeanette Schüler (1838-1890), and her earliest encounters with literature are bound up with their relationship; the young Else would act out the story of Joseph and his brothers for her. She was probably the most frequent dedicatee, sometimes together with the writer’s father (Aron Schüler), but more often alone. Jeanette Schüler died when Else Lasker-Schüler was 21, and for the rest of her life she almost always referred to her as ‘my dear mother’.

 

Senna Hoy

The second edition of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad appeared in 1919, and it carried a dedication to ‘my beloved playmate, Sascha (Senna Hoy)’. He also appears in the text as ‘Senna Pasha’. Senna Hoy was a name that Johannes Holzmann (1882-1914) adopted as a nom de plume at Lasker-Schüler’s suggestion, a phonetic reversal of his first name. A Jewish anarchist writer and bohemian, he published the journal Kampf! which frequently attracted the displeasure of the authorities. He was particularly inspired by the revolutionary upheavals in Russia in 1905, and two years later, just as the first edition of Tino went to press in 1907, Senna Hoy fled to the Russian Empire. By the time the second edition appeared, Senna Hoy had died of tuberculosis in a Russian asylum, despite Lasker-Schüler’s desperate efforts to free him. His body was brought back to Berlin and he is buried in the vast Weißensee Jewish cemetery. Lasker-Schüler was devastated; ‘Every shovelful of earth that they cast over his coffin, they cast over me’ she reported in a letter to Karl Kraus (a later dedicatee). You can read a little more about Senna Hoy here.

A copy of Else Lasker-Schüler’s second book of verse, Der siebente Tag (The Seventh Day, 1905), with a dedication to Senna Hoy

The Prince of Thebes

 

In contrast to The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, almost all of the eleven constituent tales of The Prince of Thebes – originally published in 1914 – were dedicated to various figures in the writer’s life. Conversely, it contained fewer characters from Lasker-Schüler’s life encrypted in the work itself (and far fewer than The Peter Hille Book, which teems with the writer’s associates). Jeanette Schüler returns as a dedicatee in the first tale in The Prince of Thebes, ‘The Sheikh’ (‘for my dear mother’), while ‘The Fakir’ is dedicated to Senna Hoy.

 

Aron Schüler

The book as a whole is dedicated ‘To my father Mohamed Pasha and his grandson Pull’. ‘Mohamed Pasha’ was Aron Schüler (1825-1897), of whom Lasker-Schüler evidently carried some fond memories, although her closest parental bond was clearly with her mother. Aron Schüler was a banker, but Lasker-Schüler thought this too mundane a profession and told people that he was an architect, claiming to have inherited her artistic talent from him. Her recollections focus on his child-like, pranking nature, noting also that this play could take on an almost violent dimension.

 

Paul Lasker-Schüler

Else Lasker-Schüler’s son Paul (1899-1927) features in both The Peter Hille Book and The Nights of Tino of Baghdad (as ‘Pull’). Here he shares the book’s dedication with his grandfather he never knew, while he is the sole dedicatee of the bloodthirsty tale ‘Chandragupta’ (which in the first edition was dedicated to Auguste Ichenhäuser, of whom little is known except that she was a Jewish artist and writer based in Munich and murdered in Theresienstadt in 1943). Paul’s birth in 1899 was the catalyst for Else Lasker-Schüler’s separation from her first husband Berthold Lasker, who was not the boy’s father. Paul was a promising artist, and Lasker-Schüler also tried to get him into early films, a project which foundered after he made an ill-advised pass at Leni Riefenstahl. He fell ill in the mid-1920s and Else Lasker-Schüler put her career on hold to care for him; he died in 1927 aged just 28. He is buried in the Weißensee Jewish cemetery, a few metres from Senna Hoy.

Paul Lasker-Schüler’s profile sketch of his mother on the latter’s book Konzert (1932)

 

Franz and Mar(e)ia Marc

‘The Dervish’ carries a dedication to the Expressionist painter Franz Marc (1880-1916), a great friend of Lasker-Schüler, and his second wife Maria Marc (1876-1955), an artist who also exhibited with her husband’s ‘Blue Rider’ group (her name rendered for some reason as ‘Mareia’). Franz Marc also provided three colour illustrations to The Prince of Thebes to complement the author’s own monochrome drawings. The couple took Lasker-Schüler in after her divorce from Herwarth Walden, but she couldn’t take the quiet of their country home. Later she was greatly shaken by Franz Marc’s death at the Battle of Verdun in 1916, and her 1919 work Der Malik, which picked up on the ‘Abigail’ cycle, took the form of ‘letters’ to the artist.

One of Franz Marc’s watercolour images for the first edition of The Prince of Thebes (1914)

 

Kete Parsenow

An actress who worked under directors like Max Reinhardt, Katharina (Kete) Parsenow (1880-1960) was sufficiently special to Lasker-Schüler to warrant two dedications in The Prince of Thebes. The first of the three main ‘Abigail’ tales is dedicated to the ‘Venus’ Kete Parsenow, while the brief appendage ‘An Incident from the Life of Abigail the Lover’, carries the unusual and specific dedication to ‘the Venus child Kete Parsenow when she was five years old’. The highly attractive Parsenow made a great impact on the avant-garde of Vienna when she performed there in the early 20th century, and was closely associated with two other dedicatees in The Prince of Thebes.

A recent edition of Kete Parsenow’s correspondence with Karl Kraus

 

Karl Kraus

The dedicatee of ‘Abigail the Second’, writer Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was an admirer of Kete Parsenow, and maintained a long correspondence with her, as well as with Else Lasker-Schüler, particularly in the period leading up to the First World War when she poured her heart out to him over pages. It is perhaps this confessional role that prompted Lasker-Schüler to refer to him as ‘The Cardinal’. Kraus is well known as one of the leading figures of the ‘Young Vienna’ group, alongside Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg and Hermann Bahr. A combative critic, he issued his own journal Die Fackel from 1899 until shortly before his death in 1936.

A volume of Else Lasker-Schüler’s letters to Karl Kraus


Walter Otto

The dedication of ‘Abigail the Third’ to ‘Walter Otto, the great youth’ introduces a figure who stands out as an anomaly among the predominantly bohemian, literary and artistic recipients of Lasker-Schüler’s acknowledgements. Walter Otto (1878-1941) was an academic – a historian and philologist focussed on antiquity, and a political reactionary who was active in (opposition to) the Räterepublik in Bavaria shortly after the First World War. More pertinently, from Else Lasker-Schüler’s perspective, he was the second husband of Kete Parsenow.

 

Erik-Ernst and Erna Schwabach

‘Singa, the Mother of the Dead Third Melech’ is dedicated to Erik-Ernst Schwabach (1891-1938), the co-owner of the publishing house which issued The Prince of Thebes, and his wife (Erna). Schwabach came from a rich Jewish banking dynasty, although he had little interest in the family business and instead took up writing, served as a patron to artists and writers, and established the ‘Verlag der weißen Bücher’ (‘White Book Press’) shortly before the First World War, focusing on works by Expressionist writers. Losing much of his inherited wealth in the hyperinflation of the 1920s, he died in exile in London in 1938.

 

Hans Adalbert von Maltzahn

The tumultuous last tale in The Prince of Thebes, ‘The Crusader’, carries a dedication to Hans Adalbert von Maltzahn (1894-1934), a relatively obscure figure rarely evoked beyond the context of his association with Lasker-Schüler. Maltzahn came from an aristocratic background but as a young man made an impression on Berlin’s early 20th-century bohemian circles with his good looks and left-wing views. Lasker-Schüler was not immune to his charm, referring to him as the ‘Duke of Leipzig’ and along with this dedication wrote a number of love poems to him, although Maltzahn was evidently gay. Later she managed to get him out of active duty in the First World War through the intercession of Dadaist Wieland Herzfelde. As a forthcoming German-language biography details, Maltzahn worked as a theatre critic and translator and (after a trip to Brazil, from which he was expelled) moved to Paris in the late 1920s, where he died in 1934.

 
 

Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated by James J. Conway)

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Back to black

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Our forthcoming title, Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler (20 June 2022), is the last in the current format of Rixdorf Editions, so we wanted to take a final look at the series design. First up: if you haven’t already, check out this blog post which covers the original design concept for our books as conceived by Cara Schwartz (and here you can also read up on the extraordinarily prophetic caricature that adorns our translation of Hermann Bahr’s Antisemitism).

Like all of our books, the cover of Three Prose Works uses a black background and recontextualises imagery from around the time of publication, the early 20th century. And like all of the titles since 2019, it is designed by Svenja Prigge (you can see more of her work here). But perhaps before we look at our interpretation, we should see how Lasker-Schüler’s books appeared in her own time. The three works which make up our edition – The Peter Hille Book, The Nights of Tino of Baghdad and The Prince of Thebes – were all published prior to the First World War.

Das Peter Hille-Buch (The Peter Hille Book) was originally issued in German in 1906. Its cover bore a portrait of Hille himself as the one-eyed Norse god Odin by artist Franz Stassen, an image which had once adorned the wall of the cabaret in Berlin where Hille (and Lasker-Schüler) performed.

The cover of Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads (The Nights of Tino of Baghdad), which followed in 1907, simply bore the title in gold against a pink background. The frontispiece by Max Fröhlich, however, seems to illustrate the opening passage of the book (‘You must visit me three days after the rainy season, for the Nile has receded then, and great flowers shine in my gardens, and I too rise from the earth and breathe. A mummy am I, as old as stars, and I dance in the time of the leas. Solemn is my eye and prophetic rises my arm …’).

Else Lasker-Schüler was not just a writer, she was an artist as well, but what might seem a natural step – getting her to supply the cover images herself – didn’t occur until her epistolary novel Mein Herz (My Heart) in 1912. In 1914 the third of our three prose works, The Prince of Thebes, carried Lasker-Schüler’s own illustration, a Semitic vision of a warrior with a Star of David nestled in a crescent moon on his cheek and his helmet, flanked by a Black comrade. This edition featured a number of other line drawings by Else Lasker-Schüler along with three colour illustrations by her friend, the Expressionist painter Franz Marc.

After the First World War, these three titles along with seven others were issued in a complete edition of Lasker-Schüler’s work to that point by art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer with cover images by the author; she re-used the illustration from The Prince of Thebes, but for the other two we can finally see how Lasker-Schüler herself visualised her works.

When we issued our translation of The Nights of Tino of Baghdad as a PDF-only release to our mailing list in 2019, Svenja Prigge’s design picked up on the motif of dance from the Cassirer edition, using an image from one of the thousands of collector cards produced in the early 20th century. A little larger than a standard business card, they were often richly coloured and issued in thematic sets as promotional extras with products like cigarettes and the ubiquitous ‘Leibig meat extract’. The marketing advantage presumably consisted in children collecting the cards and then asking their parents to keep buying the same brand so they could complete their sets. These collectibles are sold to this day; I found the well-preserved examples here at flea markets in Berlin.

 
 

Here the image comes from a card issued with ‘Zuntz’ brand coffee and tea, part of a set of scenes from One Thousand and One Nights, the great Arab narrative cycle which shares numerous motifs with Lasker-Schüler’s prose writing. The image was supplied by the Dresdner Kunstanstalt who were responsible for numerous collector cards, postcards and other ephemera from the era. This scene finds the character of Morgiana dancing for the chieftain of the notorious 40 thieves. The sensuality of this vignette is deceptive; Morgiana is about to stab the thief to death, echoing the violence which seems to inexorably follow each erotic encounter in The Nights of Tino of Baghdad.

This Orientalist aesthetic was typical of the time. As the Afterword to Three Prose Works describes, visual signifiers of an imagined Middle East were incredibly popular throughout high and low culture in early 20th-century Germany. Lasker-Schüler reported her delight at a Berlin circus which made use of these ‘Eastern’ motifs, so it was imagery with which she was certainly familiar. But she was also familiar with antisemitism, including the term ‘Oriental’ – a slur that bigots used to describe Jews. Lasker-Schüler’s response appears to have been to defiantly embrace this insult and transform it into a positive, constructing an ‘Oriental’ world in her writing and even in her day-to-day life.

When we returned to Lasker-Schüler for Three Prose Works, we returned to the Zuntz One Thousand and One Nights set, with Morgiana now joined by the flagellant sorceress who is keeping the King of the Black Isles captive, and Maruf the cobbler at the spring. In place of the whip we gave the sorceress a pansy (taken from a botanical print); the character of Tino – who recurs in different guises throughout the Three Prose Works – is a fierce adversary but also susceptible to beauty.

The swirling figures pick up on the motif of dance which recurs throughout the three works, their weightlessness evokes the intoxicating disorientation of Lasker-Schüler’s prose, while their different forms represent the Orlando-like transformation that Tino undergoes. The cyclical momentum parallels the circular if fractured narrative that emerges throughout the three books. The pansy is the kind of flower to be found in the Nietzschean, Germanic forest settings of The Peter Hille Book, but the leaf on its stem resembles a palm tree, and points to the Orientalist journey ahead. By the time we end up in Jerusalem at the end of The Prince of Thebes, there are elements which seem to take us back to the source – quotes from Nietzsche and European flowers … and so it goes, round and round.

However it took a while to arrive at this arrangement; to prove that we really don’t rush into our designs, here are just some of the original alternatives.

As I mentioned in our original design round-up, the guiding concept for the Rixdorf Editions books was to have imagery from the time reconfigured on a black background, to suggest elements emerging from obscurity just as the works themselves were being rediscovered. And this is all true, but as this is the last cover in this format, it’s time I let you in on the original original inspiration:

Fuzzy-Felt.

 
 

If you’ve never encountered this low-tech children’s toy of yesteryear, Fuzzy-Felt came as a box full of coloured pieces of felt in different shapes which you could arrange into pictures in a lurid pop-folk style on a black felt background. I have a dim (yet clearly persistent) memory of playing with a care-worn Fuzzy-Felt set, which presumably belonged to one of my cousins, when I visited my aunt and uncle’s farm in rural South Australia. There was something about the suspension of carnivalesque elements against an unfathomable void which captured my young imagination. So there you go – it was Fuzzy-Felt all along.

Duly unburdened of that burning secret, it remains only for me to thank Cara Schwartz and Svenja Prigge for their expertise, taste and patience in producing these cover images over the last five years.

Three Prose Works by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated by James J. Conway) will be published on 20 June 2022

Postcard from Sophienstrasse

Sophienstraße 21

A while back we visited Niederschönhausen, the town (then) outside of Berlin where authors Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf formed a bohemian community of two and fomented a literary revolution in the form of Papa Hamlet. Although set in Norway, that book was very much informed by their familiarity with Berlin’s less desirable residential areas. An even more acute study of this world comes to us in another of the duo’s texts included in our edition of Papa Hamlet, the 1890 short story ‘Die papierne Passion’ (‘The Paper Passion’). It offers not just a compelling social study, but a unique record of a building that, remarkably, is still around.

The original publication of ‘Die papierne Passion’ by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf

The story was inspired by Johannes Schlaf’s time as a student when he lodged in the Scheunenviertel (‘Barn Quarter’), immediately north of Berlin’s historic heart, before departing to share Holz’s sylvan seclusion in Niederschönhausen. At the time (the late 1880s) the Scheunenviertel was already beset by overcrowding, with constant new arrivals, particularly Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe (more from Slow Travel Berlin). Like so much of Berlin, this neighbourhood was dominated by buildings arranged around courtyards, with a typical configuration offering a front block facing the street, a rear block behind it separated by a courtyard, which was often also framed by side blocks. Depending on the depth of the plot there might be up to four successive courtyards leading away from the street – often gloomy spaces which retained more noise than light.

A view of the Scheunenviertel

Each complex was a social microcosm; the apartments on the lower floors of the front block were generally reserved for the better off, with conditions deteriorating the higher and further back you went. Once you arrived at the top of one of the rear blocks you might well find apartments housing multiple families or a revolving cast of lodgers. In the most extreme cases the same bed would be occupied by different people working different shifts throughout the day. Well into the 20th century, these overcrowded spaces were notorious for appalling health and social conditions. And often the buildings weren’t solely reserved for residents. The Berliner Mischung (Berlin mix), sometimes known as the Kreuzberger Mischung, named for another working-class district on the other side of the River Spree, was a mode of urban development at the time which crammed residential, commercial, artisanal and even industrial usage into the same space with predictably poor outcomes for the people who called them home.

An image by Heinrich Zille depicting living conditions in Berlin around the end of the 19th century

Sophienstraße 21 is a prime example of this. Right behind the Sophienkirche, Berlin’s only remaining Baroque church, it presents a genteel front to the street which once concealed a teeming world of apartments, workshops and a tavern, as well as a sewing machine factory. Here Johannes Schlaf lived as a lodger in a household watched over by the loud, vulgar Mother Abendroth who ceaselessly bellowed her grievances in broad Berlin dialect. She appears unencrypted in ‘The Paper Passion’, while the student Haase, sensitive and ill-at-ease, is likely a stand-in for Schlaf himself.

An 1882 map showing Sophienstrasse 21 and the Sophienkirche

An 1882 map showing Sophienstrasse 21 and the Sophienkirche

Considering Berlin’s history it is truly fortunate that we have such a rich, closely observed literary account of a location that we can still visit today. Now known as the Sophie-Gips-Höfe, this is the very exemplar of post-reunification gentrification, with some avant-garde landscaping, walls adorned with text (but no graffiti), expensive apartments, media companies, an architectural practice, a high-end gallery, a French bookshop and a bakery (many Berliners will remember this as the former home of Barcomi’s Deli). With a bit of guesswork, here are some extracts from the text in the settings that inspired them (these photos were taken in late summer so as well as the grime, crowds and industrial activity you’ll have to imagine the snow for yourself).

‘A small Berlin kitchen, up four flights of stairs, around Christmas time …’

‘Meanwhile there is an occasional low rattling of window panes amid the muffled clatter of the factory in a rear block beyond the courtyard …’

‘From four storeys below in the cellar tavern comes the thin sound of an accordion …’

‘Another heavy, iron-laden wagon has just rattled through the gateway to the courtyard …’

‘The thin, monotonous peal from the Sophienkirche steeple can now be heard from the street …’

‘It’s the evening service. In between, from the bel étage below, a piano …‘

‘Beyond the low, snow-covered side block across the way the factory sends dark smoke into the winter sky, aswarm with fine powdery snow. Its numerous windows gaze yellowy-red through the flurry. The large black steel rails, belts and wheels in the bright squares move back and forth continuously. There is a snuffing and groaning in regular bursts …’

‘Heavy, dull blows from the courtyard. Between each, a shrill woman’s voice …’

‘Outside windows warped with frost are being thrown open, a few women are calling down into the courtyard, there is already a confused frenzy of buzzing and shouting down below …’

‘The women scream, a thick knot of people has gathered in front of a ground floor apartment. The whole courtyard is in uproar …’

‘A black knot of people comes through the front door. In their midst is a man, staggering; they are dragging him out …’

‘The factory chimney looming tall and black into the dirty grey snowy sky casts a red flame fluttering high into the whirling white-grey flakes …’

 
 

‘The Paper Passion’ by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf was originally published in German as ‘Die papierne Passion’ in the anthology Neue Gleise. Gemeinsames von Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf by F. Fontane in Berlin, 1892. This translation © 2021 James J. Conway, included in Papa Hamlet.