The name Elsa Asenijeff may be fleetingly familiar to readers of Rixdorf Editions titles, having turned up as an example of radical Wilhelmine culture referenced in the respective afterwords for Berlin’s Third Sex, Death, We Women Have no Fatherland and The Nights of Tino of Baghdad. But her name and the books to which it was attached barely muster a footnote in German-language literary history despite her searingly original writing. Her likeness, on the other hand, is far more recognisable, peering from numerous depictions by her partner of many years, artist Max Klinger. Elsa Asenijeff died eighty years ago today in circumstances that remain contested, and this feels like a good time to shift the focus to one of early 20th-century Germany’s most fascinating figures.
Elsa Maria Packeny was born in Vienna in 1867. Following a comfortable upbringing and a good education by the standard for girls at the time, she pursued one of the few options available to intellectually ambitious women of her day – training as a teacher. In 1890 she married Bulgarian diplomat Ivan Nestoroff and the first issue of the largely unhappy union, son Asen, was born the following year, but died in infancy.
Elsa Nestoroff, as she still was, went to Leipzig in 1895 in hopes of studying; as a foreigner she was tolerated at a time when German women couldn’t study in their own country’s universities, although she needed her husband’s permission even to attend philosophy and economics lectures as a guest, banished to the back row. In 1896 she issued her first book – Ist das die Liebe? (Is This Love?), a collection of ‘little psychological tales and observations’ – under a pseudonym which recalled her first-born: Elsa Asenijeff. Meanwhile she bore another son, Theophil Heraklit Nestoroff, who would later become a composer and first violinist for the Vienna Philharmonic.
Elsa Asenijeff and son Theophil
In 1898, Asenijeff – now separated from her husband – attended a function in Leipzig at which, the legend goes, she repelled an over-insistent Frank Wedekind with a dagger she kept secreted in her clothes. At this same event she attracted the eye of Max Klinger who asked her to model for him, and she soon embarked upon the liaison for which she is best remembered. From a wealthy family, Klinger was already an established and successful painter and sculptor who exerted a particular influence on younger artists, and was later viewed as a key link between Symbolism and Surrealism.
That same year Asenijeff issued Sehnsucht (Longing), a collection of fragmentary, quixotic vignettes with titles like ‘Hallucination’, ‘Ecstasy’ and ‘Priestess of Pain’, populated by unnamed figures prey to unchecked emotions. Like many avant-garde German-language writers of her generation, Asenijeff was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, but here she fearlessly moves through a spectrum of sensations with a tortured intensity which reaches beyond the styles of its time and instead looks ahead to the 20th century.
Also appearing in 1898 was Aufruhr der Weiber und das Dritte Geschlecht (Uprising of Women and the Third Sex), a book-length essay which captured Asenijeff’s idiosyncratic views on the place of women in society. While she believed in women’s right to vote and to study, her particular brand of feminism found fault with the methods if not the aims of the emancipation movement of the time and highlighted differences between men and women that appear irreconcilable.
As the 20th century dawned, it wasn’t just Berlin and Munich which supported alternative lifestyles and progressive cultural production. Düsseldorf, for instance, hosted a vibrant community of outsiders. And Leipzig, a hugely important centre for publishing, gave rise to a bohemian subculture at the centre of which stood the brazenly unmarried couple: Max Klinger and Elsa Asenijeff.
Asenijeff was the face and body of numerous Klinger works of this time, and even accompanied the artist on a trip to the Pyrenees to select marble that would be fashioned into her likeness. But she was never simply a mute companion to drape picturesquely over the furniture; her intellect could not be contained by the role of muse. Klinger, who comes off poorly in any account of Asenijeff’s life, held out the prospect of marriage but in deference to his conservative family he was wary of formalising their relationship. By the time Asenijeff divorced Nestoroff in 1901, she had already had a daughter to Klinger, Desirée.
Max Klinger: Elsa Asenijeff in Evening Dress, c. 1903/04
In 1902 Asenijeff issued perhaps her best-known work, Tagebuchblätter einer Emanicipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman), which drew an admiring letter from Else Lasker-Schüler. Strongly autobiographical, its Viennese central character ‘Irene’ is freshly divorced and studying in Leipzig; a female friend commits suicide after an unhappy affair with an artist. Asenijeff directs her full fury at the fixed gender roles offered by society at the time; not just the patriarchy of the bourgeoisie but also the romantic delusions of the bohemian circles in which she moved. Again the vigour and subjectivity of her vision were more suggestive of the future than anything of the past, an impression reinforced by the pre-Expressionist vehemence of Der Kuss der Maja (Maja’s Kiss), a fiction collection issued the following year. This included ‘Der Tod der schönen Hetäre’ (‘The Death of the Fair Hetaera’), translated below, a mythic tale that foretold the change in fortunes of her later life with striking prescience. Here the hetaera and poetess evidently represent the dual aspects of her public persona – artist’s courtesan and independent writer, the mute muse and the eloquent advocate.
Asenijeff enjoyed a brief period of relative renown prior to World War One, when her works were anthologised and set to music. Following a study of her lover’s Beethoven memorial Asenijeff entered into a true collaboration of her words and Klinger’s images in Epithalamia (1907). In 1913 she appeared in Das Kinobuch alongside Else Lasker-Schüler and other exponents of Expressionism. Two episodic verse collections, Die neue Scheherezade (The New Sheherazade) and Hohelied an den Ungennanten (Song of Songs to the Unnamed) consolidated her status in the emerging movement, and she offered inspiration to younger Leipzig writers.
Max Klinger: Belta vince (Beauty conquers), ex libris for Elsa Asenijeff
The last quarter-century of Elsa Asenijeff’s life makes difficult if inconclusive reading. In 1917 a relatively minor debt brought her in contact with the law, and Klinger withdrew from their long-standing if unofficial arrangement. Having constantly refused to extend the security of matrimony to her, in 1919 he married a model 36 years his junior. The following year, Asenijeff – poor, isolated, socially outcast – was declared legally incapacitated on highly tenuous grounds. Klinger died the same year and with no assistance forthcoming from her own family Asenijeff remained institutionalised for much of the rest of her life.
It is thanks to years of assiduous research by Leipzig writer Rita Jorek that we know anything of her later years. It appears that Asenijeff was simply an inconvenience, and her angry protestations of mental fitness were taken as confirmation of her ‘condition’, while the few friends who may have been able to help were kept from seeing her. Asenijeff’s last published work Aufschrei (Outcry, 1922) was a bitter reckoning with the world and the men who brought so much destruction to it.
In the ensuing years Asenijeff was shuffled from institution to institution. In 1933 she was transferred to a ‘Corrective Facility for Antisocial and Work-Shy Adults’, falling into one of the categories marked out for persecution under the Third Reich. On 5 April 1941 Elsa Asenijeff died, officially of pneumonia, but it is thought she may have been a victim of the Nazi euthanasia programme.
A plaque adorning one of Asenijeff’s residences in Leipzig, erected through Rita Jorek’s advocacy, contains lines from Die neue Scheherazade:
And I wish to be free, proud and alone
To bear my life upright
And to be my own destiny … !
Elsa Asenijeff
The Death of the Fair Hetaera
translated by James J. Conway
The fair hetaera lived by the passionate desires of men.
Nobody ever told her to take up the dishonourable profession, rather her blood chose it just as decisively as another, born in filth, saves herself in loving fidelity for her one true love.
She loved no one but knew how to inspire love in others.
Her thoughts never transcended the earthly realm. For she believed that the most beautiful thing is a woman’s body with its thousand ever-changing movements. And she found no end of delight in the beautifully domed siblings upon which she gazed in the mirror.
But as she was otherwise proud by nature she by no means gave herself to anyone who crossed her path, rather she chose whoever pleased her and it was a mark of favour that she would allow him to fulfil her desires.
So it was that she outshone the richest queen; her feet trod not sands but pearls, her countenance was reflected in diamonds.
Kingly coronets from anointed places flocked around her smile. Yet smiling was all she did (for she knew it became her), and she believed that men were only there at all to worship the body of woman. For what other use might there be for them?
But one day Death, whose ribs contained no flesh, stood in her room as cold-hearted as an hourglass.
Quite business-like and with great proficiency, he simply cut the threads of her life, paying no mind to her resistance.
When her loved ones came to her in the morning she was dead.
Who would have thought it! Instead of fulfilling pleasant dreams of bliss there lay a body upon which decay was writing its bright runes.
And as violently as they once loved her, they now fled from her.
But as she had passed her life frivolously, lavishing her bounty on each day with no fear for the next, there was nothing with which to pay the gravedigger or the coffin-maker.
Therefore it well nigh transpired that she, once so adored, was not borne to the dark furrow where all life’s pathways converge. And no servant of the Lord could be found to accompany the last retinue of the now blameless body.
Then the pale, chaste poetess passed by.
‘You, look here,’ the bystanders called to her. ‘You have imagination – give us slander for the sinner!’
But the child’s eyes of the poetess shone with clemency: ‘May your errors be forgiven and the wrongs of the dead buried.’
After this she went out, cleaned the dead body, weeping that such beauty should pass, and when it was night she bore her out of the city on her powerful, slender shoulders. For she was poor, as poets are, and could not pay the gravedigger. She lay the dead woman under the lilac bushes on the hillside, loosed her sumptuous brown curls and lay them like soft silks around her body. Then she shook the lilac bushes above until the whole corpse was covered in blooms. After picking the leaves off and gently throwing them away, finally she stirred up the soil and trickled it over the dead woman.
She then planned to wait until the stars were ablaze to keep vigil, as is the custom. But she was tired after her arduous labours and as the balmy evening wafted over her she fell asleep.
But then it seemed to her as though she had only now awoken.
And as though the dead woman were gently striding blue meadows with flickering blossoms aglow. But these blossoms were the stars that she had once so admired from below. She flew by them like a timid desire.
Finally they had flown across the blue realm of Heaven to Mother Mary. The angels grew restive and pressed the tips of their wings before their faces.
But the beautiful dead woman grew larger and her proud head reared up into invisibility. Her eyes flinched not as the swarm of prosecutors, dark bats in sombre fluttering cloaks, screeched around her countenance.
Yet there seemed so much guilt and error about her, so many condemned to death and misfortune for her sake, that the blackness of it blocked out the sun.
But she comprehended none of this, for the meaning of words were always alien to her, and she merely gazed at her outstretched foot and playfully extended her toes.
Now they deliberated: she was to be bound to the heaviest shooting star and thus cast down into Hell.
Then the poetess stepped forward. ‘Who are you, I know you not,’ said the Queen of the Stars. ‘Oh, but I know You, dear Mary, sweet mother!’
It was not as the bats had averred. It was only the wicked and the weak, superfluous even unto themselves, who perished for her sake. The worthy, however, grew strong by her and their defiance liberated itself from hers and was part of her good works. All this she did in her own manner but she, too, could only be ruthless to weeds and beneficial to the flourishing.
The poetess now saw that the Lady Mary had grown pensive, and mischievously she quickly added: ‘Sweet Mother Mary, take her among your pure ones so that she may improve. And when the angels see her beauty they will be more deeply touched by the lot of humanity and pray more fervently for the unwitting sins of our weakness.’
The gentle Lady Mary could no longer contain herself. Tears poured down her noble, merciful face. She touched not the dead woman, taking instead the poetess in her forgiving arms yet speaking unto the other: it is forgotten and forgiven. Come here to my left hand, because at the right sit the mothers who drew their last breath with the new-born’s cry.
‘The Death of the Fair Hetaera’ by Elsa Asenijeff was first published in German as ‘Der Tod der schönen Hetäre’ in Der Kuss der Maja, issued by the Seemann-Verlag, Leipzig, in 1903.
This translation © 2021 James J. Conway