The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (3 page)

Trakl briefly visited Berlin in 1913, visiting that sister to whom he was bound by an incestuous relationship and whose miscarriage (or abortion) finds an oblique reference in his poetry; he made few contacts in the city, one exception being the Expressionist poetess Else Lasker-Schüler. She would later become closely associated with Expressionism, marrying Georg Lewin in 1901 and renaming him Herwarth Walden, but she was also aware of fin de siècle preoccupations and delighted in neo-romantic exoticism: Peter Hille, arch-Bohemian and vagabond, called her ‘the dark swan of Israel, a Sappho whose world has disintegrated.’ Hille collapsed on a Berlin railway station and died in a nearby hospital in 1904. The ‘novellette’
Herodias
is a genuflection towards the Salome topos which had always haunted the decadent imagination, from Gustave Moreau to Oscar Wilde – and Oskar Panizza who depicted her as the Devil’s consort and the mother of all-conquering syphilis. The
femme fatale
Herodias – the name given to Salome by the Fathers of the Church who confused her with her mother – dances and triumphs, but there is no joy in this voluptuous evil, and she longs for some transcendent blessing from this prophet whom she has had beheaded. Trakl’s early sketches
Barrabas
and
Maria Magdalena
share the predilection for oriental barbarism (Hille had also attempted a
Cleopatra
and a
Semiramis
): cruelty and exotic religiosity are very much part of the decadent stock in trade. Another poet associated with Berlin is Georg Heym, drowned in a skating accident in the Wannsee in January 1912. Heym is acknowledged to be one of the most talented among the early Expressionist poets but is represented here by
Die Sektion
(
The Autopsy
), a remarkable piece of poetic prose which finds beauty in viscera and faeces and a mystical rapture in the laceration and surgical dismemberment of flesh. Heym, a great admirer of Baudelaire (that poet who, as was mentioned, had accepted and embraced the epithet ‘decadent’) may have been drawn by his reading of the French poet to Edgar Allan Poe, particularly
The Colloquy of Monos and Una
and its memorable lines ‘I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of the one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still duly felt that you slept by my side’: the dead man’s mind is still filled with the dream of love. It has been claimed that
The Autopsy
somehow parodies the morbid aesthetic cult of death at the turn of the century; Heym’s tour de force is more probably an extension of diary entries (June 1908) where Heym identified himself with the first dead person he ever saw, imagining that he himself were dead, his head still filled with what he called his ‘year of love” for Hedi Weißenfels with whom he associated red poppies. Heym’s horrified fascination with death reverberated throughout his whole work, and
The Autopsy
is a brilliant evocation of the repugnant and the poetic.

It is obviously erroneous to think of Berlin simply as the city of Naturalism and, later, Expressionism: writers like Hille and Scheerbart (an eccentric precursor of Dadaism who died an alcoholic in 1915) exemplify quite different attitudes. And in the work of Stanislaus Przybyszewski we find what is probably the most extreme form of writing in which decadent themes, plus a lurid satanism, excel even the practitioners of Paris. In the 1890s there stood at the corner of Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse a wine-bar advertised by a sign depicting a Bessarabian wine skin: August Strindberg renamed it ‘Zum schwarzen Ferkel’ (“The Black Pig”) and it became a meeting place mainly for the Scandinavian artists of that city. Into this milieu came the German-speaking Pole Stanislaus Przybyszewski, arch-bohemian and self-styled satanist, together with the fascinating Dagny Juel, painted by Munch, married by Przybyszewski and later murdered in a hotel room in Tiflis. Przybyszewski had intended studying architecture but abandoned this and turned to psychology and medicine before devoting himself entirely to literature, settling in Friedrichshagen and mixing freely with the writers and artists who had settled in that suburb. The impression that Przybyszewski made was one of a febrile and demonic bohemian, obsessed with a tormented and lubricious sexuality.
Zur Psychologie des Individuums
concludes with a paean of praise to ecstasy, the rapture of sex and the acceptance of pain; in
De Profundis
the emphasis is upon the psychopath and on those whom society rejects as sick;
Totenmesse
(
Requiem Mass
) uses a stream-of-consciousness technique to convey the chaos of deranged speculation of some neurotic protagonist, a requiem for a dead woman which degenerates into self-indulgent laceration. In later life Przybyszewski, in a moment of exaltation, felt a perverse pride in that Peter Altenberg had claimed that he, Przybyszewski, was a murderer because Otto Weininger had committed suicide after reading
Totenmesse;
he would also announce that it had been his playing of Chopin which had inspired Richard Dehmel’s cycle
Verwandlungen der Venus
(
The Metamorphoses of Venus
). Sexuality in its more aberrant forms begins to predominate in Przybyszewski’s writing.
Androgyne
is a short narrative in exalted prose which delights in the rhapsodic evocation of bizarre sexuality fused with mystical longing. It is a typically elaborate concoction, very reminiscent of Huysmans in the portrayal of a secret chamber encrusted with fantastic jewels where strange rites are enacted. Przybyszewski’s lurid hyperbole, his mephis-tophelean appearance and cult of the abnormal were avidly rehearsed to project an unwholesome and diseased image; the emphasis on the rank, choking growths of his inner world, and the foul miasmas which rose from the depths of his Psychè make this writer one of the most remarkable within the decadent canon.

We come finally to Prague, the famous Bohemian city which is always associated with Franz Kafka. But Kafka stood aloof from the eccentricities of young writers such as Paul Leppin, wishing (despite the echoes of Sacher-Masoch) to write an elegant and pellucid German without excrescences and convolutions. Prague is also the city of the Golem and the old Jewish cemetery, of dark corners, alleyways and courtyards shot through with legend and fantasy. Gustav Meyrink is its narrator and Alfred Kubin its illustrator, the former’s novels and short stories being inextricably associated with supernatural horror. Meyrink certainly aimed for a
frisson
in his readers and a story such as
Die Pflanzen des Dr Cinderella
(
The Plants of Dr Cinderella
) (see the
Dedalus/Ariadne Book of Austrian Fantasy
) is particularly effective in its portrayal of the synthesis of human and vegetable (the pulsating plants, the bowls of whitish fatty substance where toadstools were growing). But the writing of Paul Leppin is closest to what may be called decadence:
Severins Gang in die Finstemis (Severin’s Journey into Darkness
) (1914) is a portrayal of listlessness, artifice, a prurient dallying with thought of murder and destruction and a final collapse into impotence and resignation. Leppin gives us the full range of decadent types – the neurotic Severin, the nihilistic Nathan Meyer, the aesthete Doktor Konrad, the hedonist Nikolaus and Lazarus Kain, addicted to pornography.
Blaugast
(published 1948) is a portrayal of degeneration not dissimilar to Heinrich Mann’s
Professor Unrat
(known to English readers as
The Blue Angel
): the hero slithers to the lowest depths of society and finally ends up exposing himself in a park; he also earns money in bars by imitating animal noises and delighting the drunks of both sexes by masturbating. Leppin is very much of his time in his descriptions of boredom, futility and
accidie
which are only relieved by thoughts of violence and lurid sensationalism. Max Brod, friend of Kafka and close observer of the literary scene in Prague in the early years of this century had contributed (in his
Schloss Nornepygge
(1908)) to the portrayal of aesthetidsm and violence (the hero’s involvement in anarchy, the orgies in the castle and the ball in the open-cast mine where the resentment of the proletariat is meant to heighten the pleasure of the participants). The cult of violence in decadence, when linked to the antics of the Futurists, would produce an atmosphere of instability both fascinating and disturbing.

To be decadent, then, meant to draw sweet, morbid sensations from the contemplation of dissolution, to prefer the artificial and the unnatural, to tend towards a sterile aestheticism, to flirt with cruelty in an attempt to rouse a flicker of interest, to dabble in febrile mysticism or in immorality with deliberately satanic overtones. There is much of the
poète maudit
about its practitioners, much of the young man’s defiance and extravagance, an exhibitionism which prefers the poisoned tinctures to more wholesome fare. But a drop of poison, we are told, can improve the health of an organism, just as an exotic spicing can improve the taste of the blandest offering: Munich and Vienna, Berlin and Prague provided much that was unsettling. And the livid phosphorescence of decadence can still be enjoyed in these later, more rebarbative times.

In the middle of the night there was a knock at my window. I got up, opened it and started back – it was Venus in Furs, just as she had first appeared before me.

‘Your stories have excited me, I’ve been tossing and turning and can’t get to sleep’ she said. ‘Come and keep me company.’

‘Wait a moment.’

When I entered her room I saw Wanda crouching before the hearth; a small fire was burning.

‘Autumn is coming’ she announced, ‘the nights are already quite cool. I don’t wish to displease you but I can’t take off these furs until the room is warm enough.’

‘Displease me! You minx! You know perfectly well – put my arms around her and kissed her.

‘Of course I know it – but how did you get this obsession with fur?’

‘I was born with it,’ I replied. ‘I’ve had it since childhood. As a matter of fact, fur has an unsettling effect on all overwrought individuals, and this is caused by universal, natural laws. It’s a physical effect, at least it’s strangely tingling, and nobody can quite resist it. Science has recently discovered a certain affinity between heat and electricity – at least they have a similar effect upon the human organism. The earth’s torrid zones produce people who are more passionate, and a warm atmosphere produces excitement. It is the same with electricity. That’s why we get the bewitchingly beneficial influence that cats make upon excitable, intellectual individuals, and that’s what makes these long-tailed darlings of the animal world, these graceful iridescent electric batteries, the favourites of people such as Mahomet, Cardinal Richelieu, Crebillon, Rousseau and Wieland.’

‘So,’ Wanda cried, ‘a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?’

‘Of course,’ I replied, ‘and this is how I explain the symbolic power that fur has gained as an attribute of power and beauty. Kings looked to fur for this in earlier times; a ruling aristocracy insisted on fur in their sartorial requirements, as did great painters when they portrayed the queens of beauty. For the divine form of his Fornarina Raphael could find no more precious frame than dark fur, as could Titian when he painted the rosy flesh of his mistress.’

‘I am most grateful for this learned erotic disquisition,’ Wanda said, ‘but you haven’t told me everything. You associate fur with something quite distinctive.’

‘Certainly,’ I cried. ‘I keep telling you that I find a strange excitement in pain, that nothing can whip up my passions more than tyranny and cruelty, especially the perfidy of a beautiful woman. And I can only conceive of this woman, this strange ideal from the aesthetics of baseness, this soul of a Nero in the body of a Phryne, as being draped in furs.’

‘I know,’ Wanda interceded ‘it gives a woman something imperious, impressive.’

‘It isn’t only that,’ I continued. ‘You know that I am a
supersensory
being, that for me everything is rooted in the imagination and draws it nourishment from this source. I was a precocious child and extremely excitable, and when I was about ten years old I came across a book on the legends of the martyrs. I can remember the mixture of horror and ecstasy with which I read how they rotted in prisons, were laid upon the grill, were transfixed with arrows, boiled in oil, thrown to wild animals, were crucified and suffered the most appalling agonies with a kind of joy. From that time onwards I regarded suffering and torment as a kind of pleasure, and it had to be a torment imposed by a beautiful woman, because for me everything poetic, everything demonic, is concentrated in woman. I made a cult of this.

In sensuality I saw something holy, indeed,
only
holiness; I saw something divine in woman and her beauty because life’s most important goal – reproduction – is her prime task. I saw in woman the personification of nature, of
Isis,
and man was her priest, her slave; she confronted him as cruel as nature which thrusts away that which has served her as soon as she no longer needs it – whilst for him mistreatment, even death
through her
is the most voluptuous bliss.

I envied King Gunter who was tied up by the powerful Brunhilde on their wedding night; I envied the poor minstrel who was sewn up into a wolf’s skin by his moody mistress who then hunted him like a wild animal; I envied the Knight Ctirad whom the bold amazon Scharka captured through cunning in a forest near Prague: she dragged him to her castle at Divin and, after she had toyed with him for a while she bound him on the wheel and –’

‘Monstrous!’ Wanda cried. ‘I could wish that you had fallen into the hands of such a wild woman, sewn into your wolf-skin, and, I tell you, you would soon forget your poetry beneath the teeth of her wild dogs, or on the wheel.’

‘Do you think so? I don’t.’

‘I don’t think you’re being particularly clever.’

‘Perhaps not. But listen: from that time onwards I used to read insatiably stories which portrayed the most dreadful cruelties, and I especially liked to look at pictures or prints where these were portrayed – all the bloodiest tyrants who ever sat on a throne, the inquisitors who tortured heretics by roasting or beheading, all those women who have gone down in history as voluptuous, beautiful and violent, like Libussa, Lucrezia Borgia, Anne of Hungary, Queen Margot, Isabeau, the Sultana Roxalane, the Russian tsarinas of the last century – and I saw them all in furs or robes lined with ermine.’