She wore a trailing blue-green dress and a peacock fan. One side of her face was decorated with a canceled postage stamp (two-cent American, pink). Her lips were painted black, her face powder was yellow. She wore the top of a coal scuttle for a hat, strapped on under her chin like a helmet. Two mustard spoons at the side gave the effect of feathers.

Elsa Hildegard Plötz, this startling vision, arrived in the US from Germany in 1910 with her mutinous spirit as substantial an item of baggage as any of her trunks. By that time she had been married twice, been a prostitute, an artist’s model, a cabaret dancer, an uncredited writer. But it was in the New World that she made the connections that would recommended her, if insufficiently, to the ages. The first was her association with Marcel Duchamp and embrace of Dadaism which liberated her poetry and her art. The second was the grand title she collected from her second husband, a fellow German expatriate, to become Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Almost nothing is known of the baron, but Freytag-Loringhoven’s pursuit of men generally constituted stalking rather than courting. The poet William Carlos Williams rued a short affair with her and was haunted by the baroness’s plaintive cry, “Villiam Carlos Villiams, I vant you“. Duchamp simply lived in terror of her.

There is ample evidence to suggest that the “Dada Baroness”, with her compulsion to invest mass-produced objects with totemic significance, exerted a strong influence on Duchamp’s readymades and thus on the entire history of 20^th century art. She may well have given Duchamp the urinal which became his most notorious work, Fountain. From the same year, 1917, dates Freytag-Loringhoven’s own sanitaryware sculpture, an arrangement of pipes entitled God.

But it is no slight to say that Elsa herself was her own masterpiece, her own found object. She made no distinction between art and self; for publisher Jane Heap she was “the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada.”

Freytag-Loringhoven with Djuna Barnes

Margaret Anderson’s description at the top of this post was echoed by the awed, amazed, appalled impressions of other associates. The artist George Biddle witnessed the baroness dressed in a bra composed of tomato cans and a birdcage (with live canary), arms adorned with curtain rings, hat garnished with vegetables. Arresting ensembles which, as it happened, led to her arrest on several occasions.

Her verse was just as eccentric; fragmentary, erratically punctuated and spiced with evocative portmanteaux, full of private meaning but a world away from the anarchic syllable soup of some Dadaist poets. A sample:

Lake——palegreen——shrouded——
skylake——clouded——shrouded——
yearning——blackblue——
sickness of heart——
pomgranate hue——
sickness of longing——
——! you !

In cloud——nay——ach——shroud——
nay——ach——shroud—— !
of——breast——
sickness of longing
gulps
pomegranate hue
from heart in chest——
palegreen lake in chest !
—— you !

In 1923 the baroness returned to Europe, settling first in Berlin, then in Paris. The decline in her fortunes which had begun in New York continued unabated, and the possibility of suicide was raised numerous times in her correspondence of the time.

Still, nobody’s quite sure if the baroness planned her death. For one thing, she left no note; an unusual omission for someone given to broadcasting their innermost feelings. But whether by accident or design, in her Paris apartment on this day in 1927 she left the gas stove on in her kitchen, went to bed and never woke up.

Weimar Berlin is an era of apparently inexhaustible fascination, and the documentary just shown on German TV about cabaret of the time didn’t disappoint. Highlights included Lotte Lenya singing a mesmerising “Seeräuber Jenny”, a rare glimpse of Valeska Gert‘s infamous grotesque dances as well as lots of contemporary footage putting the stage culture of the time in social and political context. The programme can be viewed online for the next seven days; even if you don’t speak German the visuals more than compensate.

There was no mention of Anita Berber, a strange omission if you’re looking at performers in Weimar Berlin, but there is a film about her in production. It’s being directed by Torsten C. Fischer, responsible for, among other things, a bio-pic about Romy Schneider.

Oddly enough I also heard a piece on the radio today about another Strange Flower of German origin, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. And while we’re throwing Germanic names around in random fashion I should mention there’s a new book (German only) about Hermann Pückler-Muskau, specifically his relationship with the slave girl Machbuba (who apparently has her own blog. Which is nice.). Oh, and a new exhibition about the eccentric 19th century German prince at his Muskauer Park estate. Finally, if you wanted to pick up an original illustration by Alastair, there’s one for sale for 17 and a half Gs (à propos of nothing my birthday is in November).

That’s all. As you were.

Nothing better epitomises the contentious voids which gnaw at the heart of Berlin than the grassy expanse where the imperial Schloss, a charmless Prussian monolith, once stood. At the centre of the capital, which in just about any other city would be bursting with pomposity, bristling with spires, abounding with columns, Berlin has…a lawn. The Schloss was damaged in the war, but not irreparably so, and in 1946 its shell was stable enough for visionary architect Hans Scharoun to present an exhibition which represented ambitious plans for rebuilding the whole city. Those plans soon foundered on the realities of the Cold War, while the East Germans finished off this remnant of imperial, war-mongering Germany, and put a glass-fronted eyesore in its place, now also gone. Shockingly, the terrible, reactionary idea of rebuilding the original palace is in an advanced state of becoming. Berlin, once a forward-thinking showcase of the best in architecture and city planning, is reduced to empty-headed pastiche of an imagined golden age.

MITTE TO PANKOW

Leaving this blank behind us, we head on to what was once the medieval heart of Berlin, now…nothing in particular. Not even the traces of those narrow streets and lanes. Not even a lawn, just a few East German office buildings vomited up in the 1960s, earmarked for, or in the process of, demolition. One of the most depressing exhibitions I’ve seen in recent years compared Berlin’s once crowded medieval cityscape with what remains. Yes, the war which devastated the centre was largely to blame, but misguided modernising initiatives claimed victims both before and after the bombs fell.

We head along Wallstrasse, which appears barely inhabited let alone occupied, on past the majolica-fronted Australian Embassy, once home to the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, and past the bears of Berlin. Not the bearded, beer-bellied, bel canto-loving variety (wrong part of town for them), but actual brown bears, the city’s mascots who live in their own pit.

We arrive at the Märkisches Museum which can tell us more about Berlin’s vanished core. It’s devoted to the history of the city although its name and historicist façade allude to the historic domain of Brandenburg. We encounter Charlotte von Mahsldorf again, who worked here until 1971 when she was dismissed after management found out that she, still living as a man in public, had attended a party in women’s clothing. Charlotte’s one step ahead of us – she was stalking these streets for traces of the past back in 1994, when she published Ab durch die Mitte, a walking tour of Berlin’s historic heart. It’s accompanied by a reflective photo essay by Burkhard Peter and represents a crucial turning point before most buildings were fixed up and many of the holes filled in. As she relates in the book, the wind-up music machines were Charlotte’s favourite displays in the Märkisches; the museum remembers not just the headline events of the capital’s history, but also its follies and diversions, with relics from nightclubs, bars and other pleasure spots.

Märkisches Museum: diorama of old Berlin

A few blocks away on Friedrichstrasse we find the site of one of those pleasure spots, perhaps the city’s greatest: the Wintergarten. Valeska Gert was once contracted to perform here but refused, calling it “kitschy”. Back in 1894, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, later known as the “Dada Baroness”, had no such qualms. She appeared in a production which saw near-nude performers arranged in tableaus meant to recreate famous paintings and sculptures: kitsch imitating art. Offstage, Elsa was pioneering a masculine style later adopted by Anita Berber (who performed here in 1917) who would pass it onto Marlene Dietrich.

One year after Elsa’s still life, the Wintergarten witnessed the birth of cinema. This was the first place in the world that an audience paid to watch moving images, presented by Berlin’s own filmmaking entrepreneurs the Skladanowsky Brothers. They may have been outclassed by the Lumière Brothers, but they got there first.

Claire & Olga

In the second half of the 1920s, singer Claire Waldoff took the man-style of Elsa, Anita and Marlene one step further; it became her trademark as she presented her earthy material at the Wintergarten. Songs like “Raus mit den Männern ausm Reichstag” (“Chuck the men out of the Reichstag”), were served up in proletarian Berlin dialect for her largely bourgeois audience. Waldoff lived openly with her partner Olga von Roeder and is remembered in a frankly disturbing memorial further up Friedrichstrasse, her teeth-baring head served up on a plinth.

The Wintergarten was destroyed in the war. The greatest showcase of Weimar variety and the birthplace of cinema is replaced by, among other things, Dunkin’ Donuts.

On the other side of Unter den Linden we would once have found the Weisse Maus, its site now taken by an upscale shopping mall. The Weisse Maus (“white mouse”) here stands in for any number of cabarets which flourished in Berlin during the Weimar era: the sites associated with Anita Berber alone could constitute a tour in themselves.

For it is indeed Anita who we’ve come to see. It’s 1923. Anita, originally from Leipzig, is already seared into the cultural memory of Berlin, its most notorious performer. She has appeared in numerous films (generally clothed) and in cabaret (often naked). By now she has hooked up with her masculine counterpart Sebastian Droste, and the two goad each other to ever-greater feats of transgression, onstage and off.

By rights Anita should have moved on from the Weisse Maus by now. It’s certainly more risqué than the Wintergarten; patrons fearing public scandal are given masks to protect their identity. As for the entertainment, well at the Weisse Maus there’s a fine line between performer and prostitute, but Anita Berber leaves no doubt that she is not on the menu. She acts up and acts out, urinating on stage, breaking a champagne bottle over a punter’s head. The confrontational violence isn’t part of the programme, rather it springs from the dissonance between what Anita thinks she is providing (art) and what the audience wants (T&A).

It’s more fun in the telling than the experiencing so we make our excuses and leave, but I recommend the excellent Cabaret Berlin for further reading on this era.

The site of the Weisse Maus loiters behind the imposing neoclassical Konzerthaus, designed by Schninkel. It’s flanked by two domed churches on Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin’s grandest square. In 1932 the Konzerthaus was the Staatliches Spielhaus, a site for theatre rather than the classical concerts it hosts now. This is where actor and director Gustaf Gründgens performed the role of a lifetime as Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust. He was back in 1934 as the head of the Spielhaus, protected by the Nazis, an arrangement which inspired Klaus Mann’s bitter 1936 novel Mephisto.

All of the abovementioned worlds came together at the Mulackritze. To step across its threshold was to enter a shadow world of notoriety, of criminality, of sexual volatility. This is where we would originally have found the bar now in Charlotte’s cellar (see part 1). It was once patronised by the kind of milieu described in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Joseph Roth (who we will meet again in the West) also left a vivid description of the sub-legal activity which defined the area. “A girl patrols up and down, like a pendulum in her regular unceasing motion, as if she’d been set going by some invisible clockwork.”

The Mulackritze might have been a dive bar in a disreputable neighbourhood, but it had an impressive clientele, with Waldoff, Gründgens, Dietrich and Bertolt Brecht all dropping by. There were days when men dressed as women, there were days when women dressed as men. Ground-breaking sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld came by to research the cross-border traffic, the grenzgänger of gender and sexuality.

The bar survived after the war as a meeting place for gays, lesbians, cross-dressers and prostitutes, but was eventually closed in 1960. The building disappeared in 1963 but not before Charlotte saved the bar, later earning a medal from the federal government for her troubles. There was still an empty plot when she returned in 1994, but it has since been filled by a new building typical of post-Reunification central Berlin. The shop on the corner sells womenswear of an after-five persuasion, but the little black dresses are cut too far above the knee for Charlotte’s taste I would imagine. This neighbourhood where the police once feared to tread is in an advanced state of gentrification, a precinct of galleries and coffee shops, fashion-forward spectacles and shiatsu masseurs.

Melchior Lechter

Of course some areas of Berlin have de-gentrified over the years. Once a boulevard of upmarket consumerism, Leipziger Strasse is now little more than the quickest route between Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who we just saw at the Wintergarten, lived here in the late 19th century. Then still Elsa Plötz, she had already studied art in Berlin but made her definitive move from her family home on the Baltic Sea to the capital of the empire in 1893.

Just 19, Elsa was already a goal-oriented pursuer of men. One of her first conquests in Berlin was the artist Melchior Lechter (who years later would die at Rilke’s grave). Part of the po-faced fancy-dress circle around poet Stefan George, in photos he looks like a fin-de-siècle sufragette. Elsa, as she normally did in relationships, took a dominant role; Lechter painted her as Orpheus.

It was in Berlin that Elsa collected two of her three husbands – August Endell and Felix Paul Greve (who later faked his own suicide and popped up in Canada as Frederick Philip Grove but that, as they say, is a whole ’nother story). We’ll see Elsa again in Berlin, but it won’t be a pretty sight.

As for the building, well it’s gone now, another of those unproductive blanks unimaginable in the centre of any other Western European city. The street lights nearby are festooned with breathtakingly offensive campaign posters for the far right, anti-immigration NPD, a largely marginalized party constantly flirting with government abolition. One of the posters shows grotesque caricatures of an Arab, a Turk and an African being spirited back to their “homelands” on a magic carpet.

We take a wide arc now to the city’s north, to the working class area of Pankow. It was home to those accidental cinematic pioneers the Skladanowsky Brothers we discussed back in the Wintergarten (the early footage of a man boxing a kangaroo? That’s one of theirs.) Otto Witte was another noted Pankow resident, and like the Skladanowskys he was essentially a showman, a carnie, an entertainer.

Otto’s golden age, which he never let anyone forget, was 1913. That’s when he claimed to have been the King of Albania for five days, through a bizarre set of circumstances and coincidences which only took place, as far as we can ascertain, in his head. Otto was a grenzgänger who moved between the worlds of truth and lies, showmanship and reality. A show is just a lie, so how can a victimless, winningly delivered story about one’s fleeting kingship be anything but an enrichment of the dull truth?

It’s getting dark and it’s a long way home so we should head for the S-Bahn station, right on the old Wall. Gopher-like, we will pop up on the western side of it in the next part.

As the final part of our Berlin tour begins, we find ourselves outside Zoo Station. In search of aesthetic diversion we head to the adjacent Museum of Photography, which includes a permanent exhibition dedicated to the late Helmut Newton. The display optimistically assumes that one’s interest in the influential German photographer might go beyond his signature images of Amazons conducting entry-level S&M in five-star hotels and extend, for example, to his cancelled passports or a dummy clad in an outfit he once wore on a shoot (jeans and a shirt, wow!). But at least its presence signals a revival of interest in this area, robbed of some of its prestige and significance with the general eastward momentum post-Reunification. The most visible symbol of this upturn is a towering luxury hotel currently under construction, which will be accepting bookings from vertiginously-heeled überfrauen and their cowering companions from next year.

Long distance trains don’t stop at Zoo anymore, but this was once a major junction for the walled city of West Berlin. It was a point of arrival for teenage runaways and angry dropouts, in an area which offered a concentrated dose of everything that every provincial tearaway’s mother ever warned them about. This was the setting for Christiane F.: Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, a gruelling first-hand account of teenage heroin addiction and prostitution published in 1978. The book was read worldwide and spawned a successful film while Christiane Felscherinow, the book’s author, became a media star, Germany’s most famous ex-junkie. Against all odds she is still alive, almost 50 and apparently clean, though there have been relapses along the way.

This, however, is an aside. The era we’re really interested in lies even further back, at the dawn of the 20th century.

BAHNHOF ZOO TO BABELSBERG

We move on to Kurfürstendamm, or Ku’damm, West Berlin’s prestige shopping boulevard. What we see before us is a low-slung post-war building with a roof extension which looks like a flying saucer in drag. But we are at this corner to remind ourselves that there was a viable Berlin bohemia which pre-dated the Weimar era. Because this is where the Café des Westens stood, an all-important meeting point for artists, writers and those who wished to bask in their vicarious glory.

It was here that Bertolt Brecht conceived Die Dreigroschenoper and Friedrich Hollaender wrote “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt” (the original of “Falling in Love Again”).  Erich Mühsam and Frank Wedekind were regulars, and it was a compulsory stop for visiting literati glitterati like André Gide, T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov. But the café’s true star was “Red Richard”. The nickname drew attention to the bearer’s ginger hair while tactfully ignoring his hunchback. Red Richard had the crucial position of newspaper waiter. In the era of Café des Westens’ apogee, Berlin produced and consumed an extraordinary amount of newspapers every day, and the man who had first dibs on fresh editions at the city’s uncontested hot spot was an important man indeed.

One of Café des Westens’ regulars was Else Lasker-Schüler (see part 3). Austrian actress Tilla Durieux witnessed the writer with her husband Herwarth Walden and son Paul, and was not impressed: “This couple, with their unbelievably spoilt son, could be seen from midday to late in the night in Café des Westens, surrounded by the crazy art crowd. The little family lived, I suspect, on nothing but coffee.” Else was shocked, shocked when management barred her entry one day, on the grounds that she didn’t consume enough. “Is a poet who consumes a lot even a poet?” she fumed. And so as the First World War approached, Café des Westens fell out of favour with the avant-garde. Red Richard, at least, skipped call-up and saw out the war here (as Joseph Roth quotes him: “You know – just between you and me – I’ve got – flat feet…”). Fast forward to the early 1920s, and bohemian Berlin has moved on to the Romanisches Café.

But before we join them there, I draw your attention to a bedraggled figure selling newspapers outside on the corner. No, it’s not Red Richard, it’s Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who we saw back in part 2. Time has not been kind. Her golden age, such as it was, is behind her. For much of the last ten years she’s been in New York, where she married a compatriot nobleman. She became known as the “Dada Baroness”, but even the Dadaists were freaked out by the found objects which comprised Elsa’s wardrobe. Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay remembers her in New York, “always gaudily accoutred in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness.” Few look beyond the exotic plumage to give her poetry or her art the consideration it deserves.

And now she’s back, impoverished, in her impoverished homeland. McKay, quite by chance, encounters her on this corner, “a shabby wretched female selling newspapers, stripped of all the rococo richness of her clothes, her speech, her personality.” Along with her meagre earnings, Elsa is dependent on hand-outs from friends like Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes and artist Pavel Tchelitchew. Disastrously, she tries to blackmail Stefan George with compromising letters.

Others might have been desperate to come to Berlin in this era but Elsa can’t wait to leave. On her 50th birthday, she marches into the French Consulate with a birthday cake on her head – with lit candles. This bizarre displays results, unsurprisingly, in her application for French residency being turned down. But after a breakdown which sees her institutionalised outside Berlin she is finally approved, moving to Paris in 1926. It is a short-lived relief: she dies there the following year.

A short stroll and we’re at an intersection which, in the early 20th century, was one of the great crossroads of Europe. Then as now it was dominated by the Gedächtniskirche, though its severed spire is now pointedly (or unpointedly, really) left unrestored after the War, a warning from history which has become a symbol both of Berlin and its self-induced suffering.

But at least it did better than the Romanisches Café, built by the same architect as the church, which is entirely gone. Its site is occupied by a shopping centre; the branch of café chain Mövenpick which is now there (which makes Starbucks look edgy) is poor compensation for the loss. The roof of the shopping centre, with its rotating Mercedes star, is yet another site featured in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.

The Romanisches was the meeting point of progressive Weimar-era culture. To separate the serious practitioners of arts and letters from the mere scene-crashers, the café was divided into two rooms, or the “non-swimmers’” and “swimmers’” sections. Else, naturally, floated freely in the latter section, along with Erich Maria Remarque, Billy Wilder, Stefan Zweig, George Grosz, Rudolf Steiner and many, many others.

We head off down Ku’damm and after veering south we are now in the solidly middle-class district of Wilmersdorf, where we find the home of Anita Berber.

Now, knowing what we know about Anita Berber and imagining how she may have lived, the most daring woman of the most liberated city in its most licentious era, what do we come up with? A basement in purple crushed velvet? A turret lined in black flock with heavy drapes drawn against the break of day? A police cell? Whatever we come up with, it is unlikely that we would conjure something like the orderly, tree-lined streets where we now find ourselves. And we probably wouldn’t imagine the comfortable, multi-generational family home she enjoyed here.

This was Anita’s first home in Berlin, which she shared with her mother, grandmother and two aunts. She arrived during the First World War, and it was while living here that she began her training as a dancer, at age 16. This would be her last Berlin residence as well, after a catastrophic tour of Europe which scandalised Mitteleuropa and brought Berber to the brink of extinction, a destination she would finally reach in Bethanien.

Berber had few equals as a succès de scandale in 1920s Germany, but one man came close. To find him, we slip out of this quiet bourgeois neighbourhood and head north to the proletarian district of Moabit. For Berliners, Moabit is synonymous above all with the prison located here. We’re in a neighbourhood filled with mietskaserne, “rental barracks”, the disdainful name once given to working-class tenement blocks. It’s here that we find Harry Domela. He is operating a small cinema in this quiet back street, a “people’s cinema” as he calls it. As strange as the location is, the programme is stranger still. It consists of one film played over and over: Der falsche Prinz (“The False Prince”). Strangest of all: it stars – and concerns – Domela himself.

Harry Domela was born in 1905 near Riga, in what was then the Russian Empire, to German parents, “Baltic Germans” forming a distinct minority in the region. He served as a child soldier with the German army after the First World War but was denied a passport, and spent the first half of the 1920s in Germany doing menial jobs as an undocumented labourer.

Domela’s keen mind and hunger for a better life expressed itself in a string of assumed identities, usually titled. German aristocrats had lost their privileges and protected status in 1919, so it’s hard to say if this was any more illegal than claiming to be Santa Claus. But his deceptions took an unexpected turn when strangers, particular ex-nobility, came to the unlikely conclusion that these titles were not alibis for a humble nobody, but rather for a more exalted personage altogether. Around 1926, stories started circulating that this stateless labourer with the rich imagination was in fact Prince Wilhelm, grandson of the last Kaiser, travelling incognito.

The two were approximately the same age and physically not dissimilar; Domela’s complicity in the ruse relied largely on suggestion and ambiguity. In any case, the success of his adventure owed little to Domela’s efforts, but rather the old order’s yearning for the imperial golden age which led them to fill in the blanks.

After enjoying a few weeks’ luxury on his credulous supporters’ coin, Domela was finally found out in early 1927 and sentenced to seven months’ jail. He used his time well, writing up his story which was published by the Malik publishing house (which we saw in part 3) as Der falsche Prinz.

It was a sensation. Not only was it a bestseller, Domela’s native eloquence and storytelling abilities also attracted praise from the kind of literary heavyweights we saw back in the Romanisches Café. Domela starred in the film version of his book (actually there were two film versions; Domela unsuccessfully sued the makers of the other) and, in 1929, opened this cinema to show it.

Unfortunately Domela’s prosperity was nearly as short-lived as his putative royalty. The cinema consumed all his money and he left Germany to launch himself on a journey through further multiple identities which took him to the end of the world. It’s too much to go into now so let’s leave with some keywords of his later adventure – André Gide, Spanish Civil War, disappearance in South America – and a promise to return to his story.

From down-at-heel Moabit in the north we describe a west-bound quarter-circle which takes us through semi-industrial streets and, by way of contrast, the landscaped gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg, to arrive on a busy north-south arterial road.

Annemarie by Marianne

Perhaps it was precisely this location, which offered the constant option of escape, that appealed to Swiss writer and traveler Annemarie Schwarzenbach. She arrived in Berlin in September 1931 and spent much of the next 18 months there. She would undertake a number of trips from this base, but the journeys that marked her out as one of the great adventurers of the 20th century, to Persia, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, were yet to come. Schwarzenbach brought with her two addictions – alcohol and sleeping pills – and by the time she left she had added morphine to the portfolio. Liberated from conservative Zurich and her over-protective family she was driven to explore the city’s louche underbelly, often in the company of her friends Klaus and Erika Mann. Everywhere she went, Schwarzenbach was noted for her evident fragility but even more so for her boyish beauty. “Annemarie was the most beautiful creature I ever met,” proclaimed friend and photographer Marianne Breslauer. “I later met Greta Garbo, whose features seemed perhaps even more flawless, but with Annemarie you really couldn’t tell if she was a man or a woman; she seemed to me like the Archangel Gabriel standing before Heaven.”

Annemarie explored Berlin by night as night fell on the Weimar Republic, troubled by addiction and ill health and romantic entanglements, but her stay coincided with one of her most prolific periods, producing numerous articles, Lyric Novella, which was recently translated into English, a lost novel and her only play, Cromwell.

We next draw an imaginary line from Schwarzenbach’s home to Spandau, once an independent town, now absorbed into Berlin. At the halfway point of that line we find Ruhleben, an U-Bahn terminus with a major westbound road running through it. There are two modes here: deafening or deathly still, depending on whether you are loitering on that road, or anywhere else. The name “Ruhleben” (something like “peaceful life”) is either mockingly facetious or utterly appropriate when applied to our destination: the local graveyard.

Even for a cemetery in an outlying district, this is unnervingly quiet. There is no-one about and only the occasional roar wafting from the Olympic Stadium as Berlin’s ill-starred football team, Hertha BSC, draw 2:2 with F.C. Augsburg. I’ve spent quite a bit of time, perhaps too much time, in Berlin graveyards. One thing I’ve learnt: it’s never too soon to sort out the lettering on your grave. Maybe we will have more pressing priorities in the afterlife, maybe it doesn’t matter what the memorial looks like, it’s the message that counts. Oh, who am I kidding! I have seen so many crimes against typography on Berlin graves, and can only urge you to engage a graphic designer for your eternal abode as soon as possible.

And if you want to know how to get it right, come to Valeska Gert’s resting place. Her gravestone is a punchy black slab with her signature in shocking pink, as if written in lipstick on a mirror, and the one-word description, “dancer”. You see? That’s how you do it.

In her 1968 autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe (“I am a witch”), Gert foresaw her lonely death on the island of Sylt. “Only the kitty will be with me. When I’m dead, I can’t feed him anymore. He’s hungry. In desperation he nibbles at me. I stink. Kitty’s a gourmet, he doesn’t like me anymore. He meows loudly out of hunger until the neighbours notice and break down the door.” And you know what? She was right on the money – that is more or less exactly what happened in 1978.

The football fans are going home, the sun is going down…but we’re not going to do this, are we? I mean, end like this, in a graveyard, like we did in London. Let’s keep going, chasing the setting sun, aiming for the opposite side of the city from where we started. Moving beyond death, we’re seeking out a garden, the kind of garden that supposedly awaits the righteous post-demise.

We head south, past the Olympic Stadium, and death snaps at our heels. We pass Charlottenburg’s Jewish Cemetery where Lotti Huber lies (can’t stop…), on to the huge Grunewald forest which defines the city’s western edge, past another cemetery, last resting place of singer Nico (must keep going…), along the Wannsee glinting in the late afternoon sun where, across the water, we see the site of the Wannsee Conference which posited the Final Solution.

But death falls back and we reach our final destination: Babelsberg. This area is associated above all with the film studios located here for almost a hundred years, turning out early cinema landmarks like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Blue Angel and Metropolis through to Valkyrie, Inglourious Basterds and The Ghost Writer. This well-preserved historical district has buildings which could well have witnessed the arrival of our final strange flower: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.

Park Babelsberg was originally laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné, also largely responsible for the present form of Tiergarten. But it was Pückler-Muskau who defined the current format in the mid-19th century, an expression of his passion for a particularly English style of gardening which presented a deceptively carefree landscape, actually rigorously planned. Winding paths (“silent guides”, as Pückler-Muskau called them) continually drew the eye to new enchantments, just as our eccentric path through Berlin has offered us an ever-changing cast of rare blooms.

To a greater degree than anyone we have encountered so far, Pückler-Muskau was a grenzgänger, someone who transgressed boundaries at will. He moved between the Orient and the Occident, fired by democratic ideals and funded by inherited privilege, the Prussian who felt more French than German. I’m not sure, then, if it is ironic or apposite that post-World War Two borders have carved through his two most famous creations. At Muskauer Park, the re-drawn German-Polish border along the Oder-Neisse Line ran right through his ancestral property, while here at Babelsberg the death strip of the Berlin Wall indelicately carved through the landscape which he had tenderly crafted.

Where the death strip once gouged through the park, the woods grow again and we say goodbye to Berlin, for now, as the sun sets on Park Babelsberg. Berlin still hasn’t decided on a government, there’s still a big hole where the Schloss should be, the “forest boy” still hasn’t been claimed. On the other side of Berlin, Charlotte’s gramophones creak into action.

♦

And here we also farewell Pückler-Muskau, who has served so far as Strange Flowers’ turbaned mascot. Today is his 226th birthday – high time to let him retire, I think. As it happens, today is also Strange Flowers’ birthday: two years ago today we encountered the “arch, alien glamour” of another German eccentric, the illustrator Alastair, which began this adventure. And so flushed with anniversary enthusiasm, over the next days and weeks I’m going to try out a new banner, some new features and have a go at a redesign. Please do forgive me for the work in progress to come.

And meanwhile: thanks for your interest and support.

Google Alerts, we need to talk. Day after day you stink out my inbox with links rarely even tangentially related to my search criteria, and yet you ignore something like this. “This” is Body Sweats, a collection of writings by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness, and thus in the shadow world of Strange Flowers a capital B capital D Big Deal. Though it was published in November I’ve only recently found out about it.

It’s a Big Deal because the baroness is generally discussed more in the context of her provocative, performative public identity than her work (mea culpa). The silence which greeted her sculptures, poetry and prose when it first emerged exposed the chauvinism of the Dadaists, often as dismissive of women’s artistic contributions as the bourgeoisie they purported to disdain. This collection is edited by Irene Gammel, who wrote the excellent Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity – A Cultural Biography, and Suzanne Zelazo.

Here’s a look at the launch of the book and an exhibition dedicated to the life and works of Freytag-Loringhoven:

I hope to talk more about Body Sweats when I get my hands on it, but in the meantime I’ve leafed through 2011’s back pages to see what else I’ve missed (or in some cases, forgotten) of the year’s books.

Another MIT title, Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life is the “the first full-length critical biography of Jarry in English”, according to the original publishers Atlas Press. The Atlas list has much to recommend it, trolleying fearlessly down the less-trafficked aisles of the cultural history hypermarket: pataphysics, Dadaism, Absurdism, Surrealism, proto-Surrealism. Titles include works by and about Jacques Rigaut, Hermann Nitsch and Erik Satie as well as the notorious poetic pisstake of Decadence, The Deliquescences of Adoré Floupette.

One book I really should have mentioned by now: the memoirs of fabulist Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse. A little over a year ago I was lamenting the fact that Backhouse’s “memoirs” (actually a largely invented account of improbable sexual encounters with many of the great figures of the age, from Lord Alfred Douglas to the Dowager Empress) had not yet appeared in print. Not six months later, those self-same memoirs appeared. “If true,” pants the blurb, “Backhouse’s chronicle completely reshapes contemporary historians’ understanding of the era, and provides an account of the Empress Dowager and her inner circle that can only be described as intimate.” (Spoiler alert: it’s not true).

I’m grateful to form is void for opening my eyes to the fascinating Sam Steward, “professor, tattoo artist and sexual renegade”. Like Sir Edmund Backhouse, Steward claimed to have slept with Lord Alfred Douglas, the difference being that in his case it was true. And there were numerous other distinguished names in his meticulously documented list of clothes-optional encounters. Among the numerous virtues of Justin Spring’s book Secret Historian is that it answers the most obtuse question imaginable: what is the missing link between Gertrude Stein and Ed Hardy?

My psyche is still recovering from its first glimpse into the world of Maximillien de Lafayette. I stumbled across him as the author of the first English language biography of can-can star La Goulue. Have a look at the Amazon entry for the book: I urge you in the strongest possible terms to scroll down and read Monsieur Lafayette’s epigrams (e.g. “If the top of your head is made of butter, don’t walk in the sun.”) His website is quite something, the design apparently the result of an experiment whereby meth-addicted lab monkeys are taught rudimentary HTML. The dozens of titles on offer cover everything from hospitality to UFOs. Choose from How to Read Peoples’ Vibes and Know Who They Really Are Just by Looking at Them (See their Aura, Sense their Vibes, Feel their Energy), How Some Famous Ufologists, Ancient Aliens & Ancient Astronauts Theorists Fooled You. Are They So Ignorant Or Simply Dumb? and How to Make Lots of Money from your Restaurant and Don’t Let Employees and Customers Steal from You!! According to the website De Lafayette apparently “wrote more than 1,200 books, 11 Dictionaries, and 9 encyclopedias”, all without recognising the difference between the simple past and the present perfect. Edging out on a limb and assuming the urbanely cravatted figure pictured on the home page hasn’t actually, personally penned 1,200 books, we are left to speculate who or what is responsible for this geyser of published wisdom (Wikipedia-skimming content bot? Consortium of ill-paid freelancers? Aliens?).

I haven’t yet read Nigel Kelly’s recent biography of Quentin Crisp, The Profession of Being, but heartily applaud any serious study of the great unacknowledged philosopher of the 20th century and — much as I imagine the ever-gracious Mr Crisp himself would have done —  I pass politely over the cover without comment. Meanwhile, the last collection of unpublished Crisp writings, Dusty Answers, remains…unpublished.

There is but one degree of separation between the late Mr Crisp and the German illustrator, writer and ambulant performance piece Alastair. The missing link is the Marchesa Casati, who once served as Alastair’s muse and patron and later – well into her decline – encountered Crisp in London. Thanks to feuilleton for pointing out a new monograph featuring Alastair’s rarefied, demonic, rococo graphic work. It seems to largely duplicate the efforts of Victor Arwas’ out-of-print Alastair: Illustrator of Decadence, but until Alastair’s extraordinary life and work get the full-scale chi-chi coffee table treatment they so richly deserve, any new compendium is welcome. Oh, and if you want to know how much it would cost to find Alastair’s illustrations in their natural habitat, check out some eye-watering prices at Bookride.

More sulphurous imagery from Daemons of Pleasure, a collection of theoretical writings by Austin Osman Spare, better known as an artist, with an introduction from the brilliant Genesis P-Orridge. It appears to be in purely digital form at present. For German readers, a new translation Austin Osman Spare: Kunst und Magie was also published recently.

The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon by William Cross is the first biography of the wife of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, of busting-open-Tutankhamun’s-tomb-and-dying fame. Almina, most probably an illegitimate Rothschild, was clearly a fascinating woman in her own right. “Here opening up before us the physical and emotional idiosyncrasies of our Victorian and Edwardian ‘betters’,” aver the publishers, “the philanthropists, the litigants, the loveless unions, the skeletons half in and half out of the closet, the gamblers, the rakes and adulterers, all written with an authentic eye on the facts as far as they can be established glimpsed through the ever closing ranks of the British aristocracy.”

Finally, a catalogue of artworks related to our old friend Raymond Roussel. Locus Solus takes its name from a novel written by Roussel in 1914, about a wealthy eccentric who surrounds himself with bizarre marvels (which, incidentally, is a servicable description of the writer’s own career). The name “Locus Solus” is here applied to a Madrid exhibition exploring the French writer in the context of visual art, which I hope to report on next week.

Please leave a comment if you think I’ve left out any unsung 2011 titles with Strange Flowers appeal!

Meanwhile, for a zesty, satisfying serving of books that everyone has more or less ignored over the years, I invite you to discover my new favourite blog, the auto-explanatory Writers No One Reads. The unappreciated talents and singular personalities profiled include Stefan Grabinski, “the Polish Poe”; Aloysius Bertrand, most maudit of poètes; and Romanian Surrealist suicide, Ghérasim Luca. The excerpts and author descriptions make you want to instantly render the blog’s name untrue.

If you have any level of interest in Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven north of “idle fancy”, you will doubtless be fascinated by the huge amount of material by and about her which can be found online. The University of Maryland, particularly, holds an invaluable archive of the “Dada Baroness” (born on this day in 1874), including drafts of her autobiography – both in her own distinctive upper case handwriting and typescript – which was subsequently reworked by Djuna Barnes.

I’ve only scratched the surface but there are already some amazing treasures here, including dozens of poems in Elsa’s hand as well as a large amount of correspondence. Most of the letters date from the mid-1920s when the baroness had returned to Europe from New York and found herself on an unremitting downward spiral which only ended with her death in 1927. She sold newspapers in Berlin and was otherwise reliant on the support of friends. In desperate straits she turned to her father-in-law, to Peggy Guggenheim, even to George Bernard Shaw (“BERNARD SHAW – YOU ARE SUCH GREAT THING – I AM SUCH MISERABLE THING – THAT IS ALL I CAN TELL YOU”).

The letters make pretty difficult reading in every sense (deciphering the handwriting, parsing Elsa’s eccentric syntax and then encountering the desolation of her life). For light relief we must go further back, via the University of Manitoba’s archives of materials relating to Felix Paul Greve (Elsa’s second husband, later Frederick Philip Grove), and Elsa herself. This 1910 newspaper clipping is much more the baroness we know and love, finding her and Greve arrested as “suspicious persons” thanks to Elsa’s cross-dressing (although this was frankly at the vanilla end of her sartorial repertoire, as New York would soon discover).

Oh boy.

Although you’d never know it from the tangle of arrows below, I actually tried, tried to make this diagram intelligible, but when you’re mapping the relations of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, born on this day in 1886) and Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), complication is a given. They were, respectively, an American writer best known for her poetry, and an English writer born into fantastic wealth, whose historical novels are now largely forgotten. Their relationship lasted from 1918 to H.D.’s death in 1961 but as the diagram indicates, this was a far from exclusive arrangement.

There is already an overlap with our first attempt at this diagram thingummy in the person of Peter Warlock. As with that debut attempt, this representation is of necessity subjective, selective and simplified, and it’s easier to read if you click through and view it on its own. And if it looks complicated to you, just imagine being Perdita…

If nothing else this serves as a placeholder for things to come back to: the amazing film Borderline (in which Bryher looks like she’s been CGI’d in from decades into the future), the Swiss Modernist masterpiece Villa Kenwin, Robert McAlmon’s posthumously published roman à clef The Nightinghouls of Paris, not to mention the autobiographical Being Geniuses Together…and on and on.

Further reading
Borderline madness (Bryher et al)
Berenice Abbott | portraits (James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Robert McAlmon, Sylvia Beach)
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 3 (Djuna Barnes, Robert McAlmon)
Dada Baroness, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and 4, I am such miserable thing (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)
To the very dregs (Peter Warlock)
Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes, Djuna 40/80/120 (Djuna Barnes/John Glassco)
“A huge old baby vulture”, Dress-down Friday: Edith Sitwell, Edith speaks (Edith Sitwell)
Witch’s Cradle (Peggy Guggenheim)

As chaotic as the diagram below looks, it would have been even more difficult had I followed my original idea of including more or less anyone of interest in Munich from about 1890 to 1914. That, I soon realised, is a fool’s errand and I instead fixed on writer and free spirit Fanny zu Reventlow, the “Cosmic Countess”, as a fairly arbitrary mid-point around which to gather, or attempt to gather, some of the key figures who made the Bavarian capital one of Europe’s most exciting, progressive cities of the era.

Munich’s avant-garde may have been on the margins of Wilhelmine society, but its proponents certainly didn’t lack self-regard, and a number of romans à clef testify to the interest they both took in themselves and ascribed to a wider readership.

Reventlow’s painting of the Schwabing “Eckhaus” where she lived with Bohdan von Suchocki and Franz Hessel

Mapping the overlapping circles of the “Kosmiker”, adherents of Alfred Schuler, and those who gathered around Stefan George, is particularly challenging. I’ve left out some of the latter, and those I’ve included were arguably not all in the poet’s innermost circle. There are whole books on George’s followers so this was only ever going to be a cursory glance. The “Dada Baroness”, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, took rather a larger role than is entirely appropriate considering that she was not intimately acquainted with Reventlow, but even in death it is in her nature to draw attention to herself.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Cosmic countess, Everything all the time, Franziska zu Reventlow | artworks (Fanny zu Reventlow)
Alfred Kubin | drawings, Alfred Kubin at home, Alfred Kubin | Hascisch (Alfred Kubin)
Dada Baroness, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4, Catching up, I am such miserable thing (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)
Pearls: Oscar A. H. Schmitz
Dress-down Friday: Alastair, A Casati family tree, Alastair on film, Alastair | Les Liaisons dangereuses, Places: Schleißheim (Alastair)
Dress-down Friday: Bohemian Schwabing, Munich (the whole Schwabing shebang)

Brooks & Barney

Well…this was inevitable, wasn’t it? Once the idea of mapping connections between writers, artists and undefinable members of semi-forgotten scenes was in the air, it was a given that writer, saloniste and singular cultural catalyst Natalie Clifford Barney (born on this day in 1876) would turn up at the midpoint of one of these busy diagrams.

One of the most prominent of Paris’s 20th century American expatriates, Barney networked at an Olympian level. This diagram is largely limited to her close relationships, none of which was of greater duration or intensity than that with painter Romaine Brooks. But if you want to know who came to her weekly literary salon, which lasted an extraordinary 60 years, just make a list of every prominent author who lived in or spent any length of time in Paris during that period and it’s likely they would have been there.

Thinly veiled literary works both by and about Barney abound, full of tempestuous passions, relics of a time when you couldn’t even score a fingerbang on the Left Bank without someone penning a roman à clef about it.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Salon queen, Pearls: Natalie Clifford Barney
Grey eminence, Romaine Brooks | drawings, The Other Amazon (Romaine Brooks)
Goodbye Dolly (Dolly Wilde)
Caribbean Queen, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 3,  Before Whale Cay, Dress-down Friday: Joe Carstairs (Joe Carstairs)
Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly, Arthur Cravan: poet, boxer, blogger, Three shows, Arthur Cravan est vivant!, Pearls: Arthur Cravan
World Famous Aerial Queen, Dress-down Friday: Janet Flanner, El hombre elefante, Pearls: Janet Flanner
Dress-down Friday: Djuna Barnes, Djuna 40/80/120, Circles: H.D./Bryher, Djuna Barnes | drawings
Dress-down Friday: Thelma Wood
Dada Baroness, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and 4, I am such miserable thing (Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)
Monsieur le Marquis, La Marquise de Sade, Dress-down Friday: Mathilde de Morny
Sodom’s ambassador to Paris, A Lorrain special, part 1 and part 2 (Jean Lorrain)
Pearls: Colette

In saddle and stirrup — on tarnished heath —/Let’s cross phantasmagorical land —/Till topping silversentinel dunes —/Into smacking low tide —/Upon bottom of sea we ride.

Further reading
Dada Baroness
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and 4
Catching up
I am such miserable thing
Circles: H.D./Bryher
Circles: Fanny zu Reventlow
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (pictured above with Claude McKay) was born on this day in 1874. Writer Irene Gammel discusses her radical self-presentation in her 2002 book Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity:

…she flaunted her extraordinary body images on the streets of New York, with each new day adding to her repertoire of costumes frequently made from utilitarian objects. Tomato cans and celluloid rings adorned her wiry body. She wore a taillight on the bustle of her dress (“Cars and bicycles have taillights. Why not I,” she told the French American painter Louis Bouché). She used teaspoons as earrings and American stamps on the cheeks of her face. Like exotic artifacts her remarkable body poses were recorded in photography by Berenice Abbott and Man Ray, in lithography by George Biddle, and in paintings by Theresa Bernstein. Like the startling Kodak blitz flashing in the dark in this new visual age, so she flashed in and out of the countless memoirs of modernist writers and artists, leaving a myriad of visual fragments that speak to the fragmentary nature of modernist narrative itself.

[...]

For today’s reader and viewer, however, Freytag-Loringhoven’s corporeal art is far from being evidence of madness, craziness, or marginality, for her body-centered art and dislocation of conventional femininity intersect with postmodern notions of radicality. “She was New York’s first punk person 60 years before their time,” notes Time magazine. The Baroness seems vivid today because of the interest in gender play and ‘acting out’ [...] as if she were a very distant great-aunt of feminist performance art.”

Further reading
Dada Baroness
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and 4
Catching up
I am such miserable thing
Circles: H.D./Bryher
Circles: Fanny zu Reventlow
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney

Behind the arresting image of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the notorious “Dada Baroness” who treated cutlery drawers as jewelry boxes and stalked Manhattan streets in her startling creations, there was a creative professional who never got the attention or kudos of her male colleagues. Her early, if not pioneering use of ready-mades was just one facet of her output, which spanned both visual arts and literature. The examples below could fall into either category, being poems handwritten by the baroness in her distinctive script and embellished to varying degrees (or designs inscribed with poetry). Most of them date from the early 1920s with the exception of the last piece which was likely created in 1927, the year of Freytag-Loringhoven’s death. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was published in 2011.

Further reading
Dada Baroness
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin, part 2 and part 4
Catching up
I am such miserable thing
Circles: H.D./Bryher
Circles: Natalie Clifford Barney
Circles: Fanny zu Reventlow
Pearls: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
Dress-down Friday: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Edith Olivier at the entrance to Daye House by Rex Whistler

Happy new year!

In the first full week of 2015, by the light of the first full moon, here’s a look at some of the more interesting books coming our way this year.

The year 1800, or thereabouts, has always been a line in the sand marking the beginning of Strange Flowers’ notional timeline. It’s not completely arbitrary: it is around then that the assertion of radical individuality becomes apparent in cultural history. Naturally there had been compellingly singular figures before that, but with the American and French Revolutions and ensuing upheavals, including the rise of Romanticism, came something recognisably akin to our present-day ordering of Western society. And that order brought with it the possibility of presenting a persona not merely derived from one’s assigned station in life.

The finest example of this is the dandy, who embodied a self-willed nobility appropriate to the age of Napoleon, the ultimate self-made man. Published this week, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut finds the rebel in the dandy, although author Elizabeth Amann concedes that it is not always easy to recognise: “We tend to think of the dandy as disengaged and indifferent, too superficial to espouse a political cause and too self-absorbed to care about society.” Amann looks beyond the classic Regency mode of Dandyism, examining the Muscadins and Incroyables and other tribes of 1790s Paris – both revolutionaries and reactionaries – and the sartorial codes by which they communicated their political allegiances.

The quartet profiled in W. Sydney Robinson’s The Last Victorians are Victorians only in the sense of being born before 1901 (and Arthur Bryant only just), all coming to prominence later in the 20th century. Life-writing enthusiasts will recognise the format as a borrowing from Lytton Strachey’s radical quadruple biography, Eminent Victorians (1918). In reevaluating Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, General Gordon and Thomas Arnold, Strachey was calling the entire foundation of Victorian Britain into question. Robinson’s subtitle – A Daring Reassessment of Four Twentieth Century Eccentrics – is promising, but his subjects (a government minister, a historian, a cleric, a broadcasting executive) are hardly sacred cows. Does anyone reading this have any long-cherished illusions about W. R. Inge they can’t bear to see up-ended? Or even know who W. R. Inge was?

Both incontestably Victorian and undeniably eccentric, Frederick Rolfe is the subject of Rolfe, Rose, Corvo, Crabbe by Miroslaw Aleksander Miernik, which concentrates on the writer’s multiple personae and posthumous reputation. It’s more a thesis than a page-turner, but that’s precisely what makes it significant, indicating as it does that Rolfe may belatedly be coming into academic focus. Readers looking for a more accessible entrée to Rolfe’s legacy are directed to Robert Scoble’s recent The Corvo Cult.

This year marks 100 years – more or less – since the anti-art movement Dada emerged out of New York and Zurich. I say “more or less” as it wasn’t until the following year that the Cabaret Voltaire opened and Hugo Ball issued the first Dada manifesto. But in February 1915, Ball delivered his bitter, unsentimental Memorial for Fallen Poets in the capital of wartime Germany, a key moment for the performance wing of what would later be termed Dada. That same year he ended up in Zurich with his wife, writer Emmy Hennings, along with Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara, while Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp settled in New York. The movement might not have had a name, but by 1915 its key components were all in place.

Ball is the cover star of Jed Rasula’s wonderfully titled Destruction was my Beatrice (actually a quote from Stéphane Mallarmé), which is due out in June and claims to be “the first narrative history of the emergence, decline, and legacy of Dada”. If I tell you there is also a forthcoming book reassessing the role of women in Dadaism, without scrolling down you already know it’s going to be called Mamas of Dada, right?

It’s a timely study; last year, the long-whispered suggestion that “Dada Baroness” Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was pivotal to the presentation of Duchamp’s infamous urinal, and thus the revolutionary reimagining of the artwork, finally received serious attention. And for the German readers there’s an unrelated forthcoming collection addressing the same subject: Die Dada: Wie Frauen Dada prägten.

Barbara McCloskey’s The Exile of Georg Grosz examines the post-Dada career of another prominent Dadaist. According to John Heartfield, he and George Grosz received membership cards for the German Communist Party from the hands of Rosa Luxemburg on New Year’s Eve, 1918. It’s a deeply symbolic exchange, as revolutionary momentum passed from dyed-in-the-wool Marxists to the rabble of artists parading under the banner of Dada. Just over two weeks later Luxemburg was assassinated and her Spartacist rebellion crushed. But Grosz and his associates channelled their fury into their art right through the Weimar Republic and into exile.

In observing the death last week of another German exile, Luise Rainer, many reports naturally concentrated on her achievement in winning back-to-back Oscars. But reflecting further on her passing, it occurred to me that with her goes the last living link to the Weimar performance tradition: Rainer took dance lessons from Mary Wigman, was schooled in stagecraft by Max Reinhardt and later inspired Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The ferment of Weimar creativity is further examined in The Partnership by Pamela Katz, who co-wrote 2012’s biopic Hannah Arendt. The book opens in 1927 with the meeting of Bertolt Brecht and his most famous collaborator, Kurt Weill, and sheds light on a lesser-known (and under-credited) co-writer, Elisabeth Hauptmann. It also looks at Brecht and Weill’s actress wives, Helene Weigel and Lotte Lenya (respectively).

Around the same time that Brecht met Weill, Harry Crosby was looking for a scarf for his wife Caresse when he first encountered Kay Boyle, who was working in Raymond Duncan‘s Paris boutique – seriously, that’s the kind of para-historical factoid I live for. It also hints at the wonders promised by a forthcoming volume of Boyle’s letters, of which there were apparently around 30,000. “One of the Lost Generation modernists who gathered in 1920s Paris, Kay Boyle published more than forty books, including fifteen novels, eleven collections of short fiction, eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and various essays and translations. Yet her achievement can be even better appreciated through her letters to the literary and cultural titans of her time.”

Boyle was just one of numerous American women who gravitated to Paris at that time who felt it more sympathetic to their artistic temperament, sexuality or race, or – in the case of performer Ada Smith, a.k.a. Bricktop – all of the above. Bricktop’s Paris, by T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, uses both fiction and non-fiction to depict women of colour in the City of Light.

More postcards from the margins in Almost Famous Women. Published tomorrow, Megan Mayhew Bergman’s book weaves stories around the real lives of Dolly Wilde, Joe Carstairs and other characters to whom Strange Flowers hasn’t yet been introduced but is sure it will like.

The (northern) spring opens this year with three books about Rex Whistler on the same day. Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, authors of 2012’s In Search of Rex Whistler, return with two books which delve further into the sources of their subject’s elegant, fantastical works. Love and War and Family, Friendships, Landscapes are available individually or in the stunning slipcase pictured above, based on Whistler’s design for a Hans Christian Andersen collection, and cover Whistler’s personal connections, both romantic and otherwise (Whistler’s heterosexuality never ceases to surprise).

Rounding out the trio is A Curious Friendship, in which Anna Thomasson explores Whistler’s relationship with the much older writer Edith Olivier, who became something of a den mother to the Bright Young Things, who frequently gathered at her home, Daye House. It’s not immediately clear why Whistler should be experiencing such a rush of attention now, although the fact that his works enter the public domain this year can’t hurt.

Finally we come to Jean Findlay’s Chasing Lost Time. I recall seeing reviews for this biography of C. K. Scott Moncrieff last year, but it appears to have been held over. Best known as the first major translator of Proust into English, Moncrieff was clearly a complex character:

From the outside an enigma, Scott Moncrieff left a trail of writings that describe a man expert at living a paradoxical life: fervent Catholic convert and homosexual, gregarious party-goer and deeply lonely, interwar spy in Mussolini’s Italy and public man of letters – a man for whom honour was the most abiding principle. He was a decorated war hero, and his letters home are an unusually light take on day-to-day life on the front. Described as ‘offensively brave’, he was severely injured in 1917 and, convalescing in London, became a lynchpin of literary society – friends with Robert Graves and Noel Coward, enemies with Siegfried Sassoon and in love with Wilfred Owen.

What’s not to like?

Patricia and Pierre were having trouble collecting the forty dollars for the paper for the Magazine. People were asking what it would look like. Victor had said: “The likes of it has never been seen before.” They could only repeat that. People were asking if it would come out every month or quarterly. Victor had said: “Well, we shall see. All we’re concerned about is a first issue.” In the end it was Patricia’s belief and Victor’s influence with a friend which convinced Desti cigarettes and Preston Sturgess to place the advertisements which rescued them.

The first issue came out in time for the opening of the first “Independents” show in New York, which had been instigated by Victor. The title was “The Blind Man”. On the cover was a drawing by Alfred Frueh of a dog dragging a blind man through a gallery of paintings. Apart from one which didn’t really fit, the articles were free expressions of pure fancy and a challenge to the orthodox.

The first thing to say about the extract above, from Henri-Pierre Roché’s Victor (in Chris Allen’s translation), is that it is part of a text that was never finished. The manuscript in Roché’s hand was in a rudimentary state on his death in 1959, first published in French in 1977 and in this version in 3 New York Dadas + The Blind Man, a highly recommended 2013 title issued by Atlas Press.

The second thing to say is that the text reflects real people and events with varying degrees of encryption. So there really was a journal called The Blind Man, its cover was precisely as defined and in fact the launch described above, marking the first day of the first Independents’ exhibition in New York, happened 100 years ago today. The publication really did carry an advertisement for Desti cigarettes, but the involvement of the (here misspelt) dramatist and screenwriter Preston Sturges is a mystery. The identities lurking behind the other named participants, however, were clear enough: Patricia was the sculptor Beatrice Wood, the titular Victor was Marcel Duchamp and Pierre was Roché himself. In detailing not just the trio’s cultural production but their entangled romantic attachments as well, Roché seems to be returning to the roman à clef à ménage à trois that he had pioneered in Jules et Jim, in which he played Jules to Franz Hessel‘s Jim.

Roché, Wood and Duchamp were the creators of The Blind Man, a small, combative publication that could not have emerged at a more fractious time. The US had just joined the war in Europe, the Romanovs had already been swept from power in Russia’s first revolution of the year and within days Vladimir Lenin would steam into the Finland Station to set the second in motion. The world was turning on its head and at the opening party of the exhibition Mina Loy‘s existence was upended by her first sight of Arthur Cravan; each was to be the other’s One (although they didn’t actually meet until the Independents Ball, ten days later). Cravan naturally features in Roché’s account, although under his own name. Perhaps it was an aide-memoire that Roché was going to substitute later; perhaps Cravan had sufficiently mythologised himself that he passed muster as a fictional character.

The Blind Man was Dada in all but name. A good deal of the first issue was taken up with Roché’s programmatic text which reflected the entwined aims of the journal and the exhibition, their shared vision of a confident avant-garde finally ready to shake off the long 19th century. Rounding out the eight pages were articles by Beatrice Wood and Mina Loy in praise of the new independent spirit that had come to the New York art world.

But the Independents show was most famous for what it didn’t feature – Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal “readymade” by the pseudonymous “Richard Mutt”, refusé by the refusés. The second issue of The Blind Man, twice as long as the preceding number, turned against the exhibition, and included a photograph (by Alfred Stieglitz, no less) of the porcelain provocation otherwise withheld from the public’s gaze, the only record of the piece which was subsequently lost.

As Dawn Ades notes, the first commentators on what was possibly the most notorious artwork of the 20th century were women, Beatrice Wood and Louise Norton. Not only that – Duchamp recorded that “One of my female friends under a male pseudonym, Richard Mutt, sent in a porcelain urinal as a sculpture.” It was submitted with Norton’s phone number from which Ades concludes that this female friend was Norton herself. But in her biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Irene Gammel seizes on the confected provenance of the work, with artist and object both apparently hailing from Philadelphia and – noting that Baroness Elsa was in Philadelphia at the time – speculates that in fact her subject was behind the work. Freytag-Loringhoven’s own sanitaryware piece God arose the same year, and may even have pre-dated Fountain. And even before the First World War, the woman later dubbed the “Dada Baroness” had found a piece of metal on the street and declared it to be an artwork with the same sovereign determination that Duchamp would later invest in his readymades.

The cover of the second issue – which bore no resemblance to the first – featured Duchamp’s Broyeuse de Chocolat. The issue further contained an appreciation of the artist Marie Laurencin by Gabrielle Buffet, verse by Francis Picabia, Walter Arensberg, Charles Demuth and Erik Satie, and a drawing of Edgar Varèse by Clara Tice (who also contributed to Bruno’s Weekly). The issue signed off with a request slash challenge: “Brave people who like to run risks may send to THE BLIND MAN five dollars as subscription and encouragement.” Few were the brave, it seems, for after just two issues, The Blind Man met the most Duchampian demise imaginable, when Roché lost a chess match to decide whether he or Picabia, publisher of the rival 391, would forge ahead in the micro-market for Dadaist journals.

For further exploration, the Atlas Press collection contains annotated facsimiles of the two issues, the translation of Victor, along with an introduction by Dawn Ades and an extract from Beatrice Wood’s memoirs, I Shock Myself. And, as noted in January, Ugly Duckling Presse are publishing a centennial edition later in the year which brings together reproductions of The Blind Man as well as the one-off title rongwrong, which documented the Roché-Picabia match, along with other related material and extensive commentary.

Somehow it is already the first day of Advent, which means we are drawing ever closer to that most wonderful time of the year, the day that brought the birth of our saviour Quentin Crisp. You are doubtless wondering how you can mark the season with gifts to passive-aggressive co-workers, Brexit-voting cousins and flag-flying neighbours in a way that will leave your reputation as an inscrutable recondite snoot intact. Allow me to present a round-up of giftable cultural history with which you can unmistakably signal your degenerate cosmopolitan values:

… because if you were to wind the clock back 100 years (the kind of thing we’re given to doing around here; witness a proto art intervention, an early milestone in marriage equality and the respective deaths of the ‘heathen madonna’, the ‘sandwich man of the beyond’ and a yellowface magician) and you were to find yourself in Munich, you really would need a copy of Dreamers to know what the hell was going on. Volker Weidermann’s book (translated by Ruth Martin, who talks about it here) describes a moment when poets, anarchists and chancers impetuously seized the reins of power in Bavaria in the immediate wake of World War One. It couldn’t last, of course, but as you read this magnificently rendered account you will find something extraordinary on just about every page.

… because while that was going on in Munich, Berlin’s artists were preparing a revolt of their own amid the post-war ferment, although the Scheisse wouldn’t well and truly hit the Ventilator until January. Because it’s where Dada met Bauhaus (and in fact predates the formal establishment of Bauhaus) and not nearly enough people are familiar with the Novembergruppe, a radical, revolutionary, multi-genre, interdisciplinary movement that encompassed everyone from Kurt Weill to Hannah Höch, Walter Spies to Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to Otto Dix. Because Monday marks the 100th anniversary of the group’s first meeting (although their name celebrated the inspiration of the previous month), and an exhibition reflecting its insanely varied output is currently on in Berlin, accompanied by a catalogue.

… because women have been written out of the canonical narrative of early Modernism long enough and because five years after I saw and was astonished by a show of her work in Berlin it is great to see that Swedish abstract pioneer Hilma af Klint is having an actual MOMENT, oh yes she is, a proper uptown-exhibition, multiple-monographs, articles-in-foldy-out-newspapers moment, and it’s wonderful and so richly deserved. Paintings for the Future accompanies the Guggenheim show while Notes and Methods draws the reader further into her profound, idiosyncratic mysticism.

… because women have been written out of Surrealism long enough, here’s The Milk Bowl of Feathers, an anthology of Surrealist fiction which complements over-familiar names like Louis Aragon, André Breton and Salvador Dalí with the likes of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Mina Loy and Leonora Carrington.

… because Leonora Carrington brings us to her compadre, Spanish artist Remedios Varo whose written work can now be enjoyed in a new Wakefield anthology, Letters, Dreams & Other Writings (translated by Margaret Carson).

… because for some unfathomable reason there is STILL no Annemarie Schwarzenbach bio in English, and while this is in German, Jenseits von New York (Beyond New York) at least features her outstanding photos of segregation- and Depression-ravaged rural America.

… because having done devastating between-the-wars verité you may be interested in its aesthetic antithesis which you will duly find in Jane Stevenson’s Baroque between the Wars, which brings to mind Stephen Calloway’s masterly compendium Baroque Baroque.

… because I recently had a MAJOR BIRTHDAY and not to boast or anything, but I got a signed Alfred Kubin lithograph from my partner. How good is that? It’s an image of the prophet Jeremiah playing the harp and bitching, because ‘I thought you might relate to a complaining old man’. This catalogue is from an exhibition currently showing in Munich which explores the Austrian artist’s relations with that city’s avant-garde Blaue Reiter group, and while it, too, is in German it is at least a quality trove of Kubin images, something that is surprisingly hard to find.

… because we love Pierre Loti around here and are pleased to see him take his place in the Reaktion ‘Critical Lives‘ series, right there between Lenin and Jean-François Lyotard. Because author Richard M. Berrong is well-versed in Lotiana, having published In Love with a Handsome Sailor: The Novels of Pierre Loti and the Emergence of Gay Male Identity. Because – speaking of handsome sailors – on page 120 there is a photo you really must see of Loti’s special friend Léo Thémèze. Woof! as I believe no one says any more. And because there is also an extraordinary photo of La Loti herself in circus attire on page 44. Run, don’t walk. Run.

… because in rooting around at Reaktion I stumbled across this, Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais, a study of one of the great Decadent motifs.

… because hothouse flowers made me think of the wonderful vignette of Aubrey Beardsley scenting his carefully cultivated blooms in the utterly essential account of the English Decadence, Passionate Attitudes, and that book’s author Matthew Sturgis has a new life of Oscar Wilde, and if there is anything more to say about said life I would certainly trust him to say it.

… because that in turn reminded me that last year there was a great article in the London Review of Books by Colm Tóibín in which ‘De Profundis’ framed a fascinating double portrait of Ma and Pa Wilde, and that he followed it up with studies of the respective fathers of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce and it made me want to read more, and now in Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know I can.

… because you might be curious to know how Joyce shaped up as a father himself, which you can in a fictional account of the life of his troubled daughter Lucia, by Alex Pheby.

… because that brought to mind the curious intersections in the lives of Lucia Joyce and Antonin Artaud who were both treated by the same doctor in the same Parisian psychiatric clinic and had both been discovered roaming Dublin, manic and dishevelled. Artaud’s disjointed thoughts from his erratic pilgrimage through Ireland are recorded in letters now issued by Infinity Land Press as Artaud 1937 Apocalypse, translated by Stephen Barber.

… because even though a lot of my conscious hours are monopolised by translation and I am never less than fascinated by the process I sometimes feel like I understand it less the more I do it and reading Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor makes me grateful that smarter people than I are giving more thought to it than I ever could.

… because if you ever wondered what went down in the sessions between Sigmund Freud and his analysand, the great Modernist poet H.D. (and who among us has not?), Kath MacLean can offer you an idea in Translating Air.

… because this is unexpectedly turning out to be a great year for uncovering unjustly neglected stories and although Gentleman Jack, Angele Steidele’ study of lesbian Regency diarist Anne Lister, orginally appeared in German it has been translated by Katy Derbyshire so you know it must be good.

… because, like I said, the unsung are having their moment, as Ria Brodell’s illustrated Butch Heroes um… illustrates, and it also reminds me that next year will bring Diana Souhami’s No Modernism without Lesbians, a title that is brilliant, bold and true.

… because untold stories always contain more untold stories, as evidenced by Joan E. Howard’s We Met in Paris, in which Grace Frick steps forth from the shadow of her partner Marguerite Yourcenar.

… because Spurl Editions are congenitally incapable of a dull book. I have reviewed three of them and I never write book reviews (this? darlings, this is a shopping list). Because their unerring sensibilities have turned up another treasure in Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (translated by William Weaver), which boldly busies itself with ‘The definition of madness, the problem of identity, the impossibility of communicating with others and with being (or knowing) one’s self’.

… because when I was flying into Thessaloniki earlier in the year I was reading Owen Hatherley’s Trans-Europe Express, specifically the chapter describing 20th century development in said city (which is entitled ‘No, No, No, No’… spoiler alert: he’s not a fan) and as fond as I am of Greece’s second city the book was so fascinating and well-argued I couldn’t hold it against him. Because from Lviv to Madrid, it ably defines and analyses the nature of the European city in a book abounding in erudition, observation and discernment.

… because of the numerous people to live out their penniless decline in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, couturier Charles James, ‘the Ovid of fashion’, was possibly the most unlikely and most interesting, as reflected in Michèle Gerber Klein’s Charles James: Portrait of an Unreasonable Man.

… because the Decadence and Translation Network recently got under way and it’s always good to see more Decadent works appearing in translation, such as Jean Lorrain’s withering satire Errant Vice and Lilith’s Legacy, an anthology of works by Renée Vivien. Because both are translated by Brian Stableford who judging from his translation output alone is actually a sleepless compulsive – and what could be more Decadent?

… because it’s always fascinating to see how the recherché literary modes of Belle Époque Paris mutated throughout space and time, as reflected in And My Head Exploded: Tales of desire, delirium and decadence from fin-de-siecle Prague (translated by Geoffrey Chew) and Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology.

… because if you only know occultist Pamela Colman Smith from her tarot cards, or not at all, Stuart R. Kaplan’s authoritative, exhaustive and superbly realised monograph The Untold Story will open your eyes to an extraordinarily gifted and characterful artist whose work ranged from fairy tale illustrations to graphic representations of Beethoven sonatas.

… because if you had a choice of taking life lessons from a) a guy who hung out with Gertrude Stein and André Gide, tattooed bikers, slept with hundreds of men (including Rock Hudson and Lord Alfred Douglas) and kept meticulous notes thereof, penned gay erotica while introducing a hitherto absent transgressive note to the Illinois Dental Journal or b) oh, I don’t know, Alain de Botton or some insufferable ballache like that – who would you choose? The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward is lost no more. Hallelujah.

… and because if there is anything I have absorbed from the teachings of Christ, it is to love others as I love myself, to remember those less fortunate and (I’m paraphrasing here) to celebrate His birth by flogging my latest product. Ilse Frapan’s visionary feminist novel We Women Have no Fatherland, originally published in 1899, is reflective, despairing, exorbitant, inspiring, sentimental and angry.

Just like Christmas.

Such are the peculiarities of this most seasonal of seasons that our rundown of forthcoming titles comes at an indecently brief interval after our last bookish blow-out; this Janus-faced time of year(s) looks back and looks forward and evidently needs something to browse wherever it casts its eyes. Our planned reading for the coming year sees us returning to familiar themes with hopefully enough new stimuli to repel middle-aged stasis.

We begin in Berlin where left-wing activist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by a reactionary militia during the Spartakus rebellion 100 years ago today, her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal from which it was retrieved only months later. Early on, Luxemburg championed freedom of opinion and warned of the dangers of Russia’s emerging Soviet dictatorship, and the fact that her name continues to adorn public spaces in Berlin while no-one would think of reviving, say, Stalinallee tells us much about her enduring significance. Klaus Gietinger’s Eine Leiche im Landwehrkanal was published a few years ago and now appears in English as The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (translated by Loren Balhorn) to mark the anniversary of her death.

If that occasion marked the violent baptism of the Weimar era, in 1931 German court reporter Gabriele Tergit provided a vital account of its sickly demise. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm, her first work of fiction, addressed the machinations of the media itself, its core narrative offering us a largely talent-free singer who is suddenly elevated to ubiquitous renown. That alone makes it highly relatable in the present day, but it is also a brilliantly observed and bitterly funny account of Berlin as the lights started going out. It is great to see NYRB Classics bringing this scandalously forgotten piece of Weimar literature to English-speaking readers as Käsebier Takes Berlin (translated by Sophie Duvernoy).

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven didn’t quite conquer the Kurfürstendamm when she returned to Weimar Berlin toward the end of her life, in fact all she did there was sell newspapers. Now the artist and writer known as the ‘Dada Baroness‘ appears as an elusive presence in Siri Hustvedt’s forthcoming novel Memories of the Future. Another extraordinary, highly eccentric image-maker accedes to the fictional realm in French author Nathalie Léger’s Exposition, published by the wonderful, new-ish press Les Fugitives, which revisits the life of Second Empire self-portraitist Countess de Castiglione and is translated by Amanda DeMarco (who also translated Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin).

The task of fictionalising Arthur Cravan, the proto-Dadaist boxer-poet nephew of Oscar Wilde, was something Cravan himself managed quite well, even leaving us with a cliffhanger in the form of his mysterious (presumed) death. But his multiple identities and the irresistibly incongruous set of associations triggered by his existence mean there is still a lot to unpack in his life. Unsurprisingly he has been a subject of recurring academic interest, the latest example being The Fictions of Arthur Cravan by Dafydd Jones. Its cover is a naive image Cravan painted under another pseudonym, Robert Miradique, as explained in the extensive catalogue for last year’s exhibition Arthur Cravan: Maintenant?

Cravan’s uncle is never far from these pages. Despite the forbidding taboo around Wilde in the years following his death, a number of writers who came of age in that era – including Brian Howard, Ronald Firbank and the Sitwells – were drawn to the Yellow Decade they were too young to participate in, even as the 20th century brought new forms that cast the 1890s further into shadow. It was a paradox captured in Martin Green’s Children of the Sun: A Narrative of Decadence in England after 1918 (1976). Now comes Decadence in the Age of Modernism (edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray) which “argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance.”

Returning to the source, it is highly surprising to discover that How to Become a Mage is the first English translation of French Decadent mystic Joséphin Péladan (courtesy of K. K. Albert with Jean-Louis de Biasi) in over a hundred years. Interest in Péladan was buoyed by the 2017 Guggenheim exhibition Mystical Symbolism, which explored Péladan’s own late 19th century exhibition series Salon de Rose+Croix, a landmark event of hermetic image-making in the modern era.

In a related vein, Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Magic and Visual Culture from Fulgur looks at “the fascinating intersections between esotericism and visual culture through a decidedly cross-cultural lens, with topics ranging from talismanic magic and the Renaissance exploration of alchemy, through to the role of magic in modern art and 20th century experimental film.” Meanwhile Hilma af Klint’s moment continues in World Receivers, the catalogue to an exhibition currently to be seen in Munich in which the Swedish artist’s pioneering abstraction appears alongside images by English medium Georgiana Houghton and geometric patterns of compulsive intricacy by Swiss Outsider artist Emma Kunz.

Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald is a name even less likely to excite recognition than the above trio. An exhibition starting in Berlin next month, with accompanying catalogue raisonné from Zagava, aims to bring the early 20th century German illustrator to a wider public. Ewers-Wunderwald touched on occult themes in her work, with some of her best-known images adorning works penned by her husband, the notorious Hanns Heinz Ewers.

In 1898, the dandified bisexual Ewers encountered one of his heroes – Oscar Wilde (see? I told you. He’s everywhere). The setting was the island of Capri, “a wildly permissive haven for people – queer, criminal, sick, marginalized, and simply crazy – who had nowhere else to go” according to the forthcoming A Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri. They include Flowers favourites Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, Jean Lorrain, Romaine Brooks and the Marchesa Casati. James’s 2016 book, The Glamour of Strangeness, was a thrilling account of a diverse sextet – including Walter Spies, Isabelle Eberhardt and Maya Deren – and their respective pursuits of fulfilment in distant locations. His trip to Capri promises to be another genius combination of locus and persona and frankly I can’t wait. And an even more localised cultural history of an Italian island location awaits us at the distant horizon of the year in Grand Hotel, Palermo: Ghosts of the Belle Epoque, Suzanne Edwards and Andrew Edwards’ study of the Sicilian hotel where Wagner completed Parsifal and Raymond Roussel finally encountered oblivion in an act that may or may not have been suicide.

Similar uncertainty surrounds the early death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, who published a prodigious amount of Romantic poetry under the name L.E.L. which was highly popular in its time, fell into disfavour, attracted the posthumous scorn of Virginia Woolf and much later praise from Germaine Greer. Lucasta Miller’s new biography of the writer, L.E.L., highlights a life “lived in a blaze of scandal and worship, one of the most famous women of her time, the Romantic Age in London’s 1820s, her life and writing on the ascendency as Byron’s came to an end.” Her rapid fame came with rumours of sexual impropriety, as difficult to verify as the cause of her death in the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana).

Reaching even further back we find two highly contrasting responses to antiquity. In Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned (translated by Victor Corti), Antonin Artaud considers the legendary depravity of the emperor, ancient Rome’s ultimate teen tearaway, in a book originally published in French in 1934. Artemis Leontis, meanwhile, offers Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, the first biography of a woman who grew up in an eccentric and artistic milieu in New York City and later dedicated her life to the revival of ancient Greek culture, including a recreation of the festival of Delphi. She shared her passion with the similarly rigorous Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora), who would become Eva’s brother-in-law when she married Greek writer Angelos Sikelianos (brother of Duncan’s wife). In the course of her research Leontis discovered a trove of correspondence that illuminated an even earlier liaison of the young Eva Palmer, with Natalie Clifford Barney.

You know me so you know I will have something to say about Wilhelmine Germany and its neglected treasures. This year’s bounty includes a new English translation (by Gary Miller) of Eduard von Keyserling’s pre-WWI masterpiece Waves, from Dedalus. Keyserling is Karl Lagerfeld’s favourite writer, well-respected in Germany, yet he remains criminally ignored in the wider world. He was one of the few German exponents of literary Impressionism, but is almost as well known for his alarming appearance as his exquisite prose. Lovis Corinth’s unsettling 1900 portrait of the author (above) was the subject of Klaus Modick’s recent book Keyserlings Geheimnis. Like Alvin Albright’s attic-bound portrait of Dorian Gray in the 1945 film adaptation of Wilde’s novel (see?!), it suggested not just physical but moral corruption as well; Keyserling was in the advanced stages of syphilis.

When translating Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, one of the many things that struck me was how utterly familiar the sexual and romantic practices of early 20th century Germany seemed. For instance – Hirschfeld describes a telegraph hook-up service by which subscribers could summon temporary companions corresponding to their fetishes and other preferences. So, basically Grindr over 100 years ahead of time. In Love at Last Sight, Tyler Carrington explores the technologically advanced means by which the lonesome and horny found like-minded strangers in Wilhelmine Berlin. This year will also highlight the visual sophistication of the era in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Artists of the New Weimar, based on an exhibition in Ottawa this year that examines the philosopher’s impact on art, and Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis by Miriam Paeslack, which captures the German capital at its most self-confident.

Finally, 15 January also marks the day on which this nonchalant chap – Austrian writer Hermann Bahr – died, in 1934. Bahr is interesting for more reasons than I can list, not least his crucial role in the cultural hothouse of fin-de-siècle Vienna, his championing of new forms in German-speaking Europe and his status as a catalyst of Modernism. Best known for drama (both as a critic and a creator), secondarily as a writer of transgressive prose, it was one of his non-fiction works that attracted my attention. It is my next translation for Rixdorf Editions and will appear later in the year.

Antisemitism, originally published in Germany in 1894, finds Bahr setting out to examine modern manifestations of an ancient hatred by interviewing the great and good. It was an extremely innovative approach; the word (and concept) “interview” had only just been adopted in German, and Bahr’s broad focus – talking to writers, politicians and others in Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and beyond – suggested that antisemitism was a pan-European problem that required a pan-European solution (Bahr later referred hopefully to the idea of a “United States of Europe”). His respondents included Social Democrat patriarch August Bebel, spiritual leader Annie Besant, French writer Alphonse Daudet and German scientific polymath Ernst Haeckel. Bahr’s survey is by no means an echo chamber, with his interviewees widely distributed across a spectrum of opinion from philosemitism to extreme prejudice.

Once again, so much here seems modern, not least the susceptibility of sections of the public to clueless, bigoted loudmouths. Antisemitism was nearing its pre-Nazi zenith, a rising political force in Germany and a major disruptive power in France which was about to descend into the rancour of the Dreyfus Affair. What is particularly striking is the number of well-meaning respondents who predicted that if everyone just ignored it, antisemitism would simply burn out and disappear. And how well did that turn out? It would be unfair to confront figures of the past with their lack of clairvoyance, but nor can we ignore this most glaring lesson from history: Don’t. Fuck. With. Fascists.

***

So that is our self-imposed lot, but there are still more titles that I should like to mention briefly; for example, In the Stillness of Marble, a “tragic and personal, visionary and transgressive” text by troubled Chilean writer Teresa Wilms Montt. The mysteries of the Czech capital reveal themselves to Surrealist Vítězslav Nezval in A Prague Flâneur (Twisted Spoon, translated by Jed Slast), while if you have five hundred free-falling British pounds burning a hole in your backstop you can treat yourself to the mammoth three-volume International Encyclopedia of Surrealism. And if you want to go full coffee table there’s John Richardson: At Home, highlighting the big-ticket boho interiors of the collector and Picasso biographer I will always remember as author of the hilariously snarky Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters.

OK, now I feel like I’m talking over the orchestra at the Oscars. But there’s more! The Kindness of Strangers by blacklisted emigré Salka Viertel, buddy of Greta Garbo! Edythe Haber’s Teffi: A Life of Letters and Laughter about a bizarrely forgotten Russian writer who rejected Rasputin and lived to tell the tale! My agent whose name I just forgot! A catalogue of an exhibition covering the gloriously queer life of Archduke Ludwig Viktor! The Caledonian cultural miscellany of Kirsten Norrie’s Scottish Lost Boys!

*crescendo, indistinct shouting, something about Oscar Wilde*

The Feast Day of Saint Quentin of Crisp is already behind us, so it’s high time we got naughty, nice and nasty with our annual seasonal book list. I’m not going to lie – this year Satan’s little helpers have found a shizzload of interesting books that stray into our purview of wayward cultural history. And remember – these are just the titles originally published in English. We still have another post of translated books to come.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

This year marks a century since Walter Gropius established a certain school of architecture and design in Weimar, and trying to buy all the Bauhaus-related books out this year will probably land you in the poorhaus. You don’t need me to tell you why Bauhaus remains a big deal; much that is currently in your line of sight, including the device on which you are reading these words, probably owes at least something to the functional design of Gropius and associates (a forthcoming book explicitly joins those dots). But the official account of Bauhaus and its streamlined aesthetic has itself been streamlined, planing away the ludic, the mystical and the illogical for which the faculty and student body had a much greater susceptibility than the school’s reputation for machine-tooled rationalism would suggest. An even graver omission from the story is the contribution of women; in fact women made up the majority of applicants when the Bauhaus first opened, but they were largely fobbed off to the weaving department. One of their large-scale works was a rug for Walter Gropius’s office, and it’s hard to ignore the symbolism of their work being trod underfoot by men. So among the deluge of editions this year it is especially gratifying to see these lacunae addressed in a quartet of books by experts Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler. Otto’s Haunted Bauhaus offers us an “investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus’s signature sleek surfaces and austere structures” while the women of Bauhaus get the Taschen treatment in Rössler’s Bauhausmädels, a theme that the pair also tackle in Bauhaus Women and (as editors) in Bauhaus Bodies which draws these strands together and adds body culture, fashion, performance, utopianism and mysticism, including the Mazdaznan cult of the extraordinary Swiss artist Johannes Itten (for whom there is a new catalogue raisonné, of which the first volume appears this year).

Itten turned up as a character in a recent German drama series about Bauhaus, along with Gropius’s wife Alma Mahler in a big hat and even bigger Viennese accent; she is the subject of a new biography by Cate Haste, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler. Back in Vienna, Alma Mahler was not best pleased when she received a bill from Dr Sigmund Freud in 1911, particularly as it was not even for her own therapy, but sessions taken by her first husband, Gustav. Who had just died. Now with our minds still very much on Vienna – the first part of our wanderings in the city can be found here, the second is coming up next week – we visit Dr Freud (who naturally features in Norman Lebrecht’s Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947). In Vienna a century ago he published one of his most influential papers, one that dealt with das Unheimliche, the uncanny – the unsettling amalgam of compulsion and repulsion, familiarity and alienation, a quality that had long been evident in visual arts and literature and was particularly at home in German letters. In London, in the very home he inhabited in exile, the Freud Museum is hosting an exhibition to commemorate, accompanied by a catalogue, plus there’s also a new collection of essays entitled On Freud’s “The Uncanny” (edited by Catalina Bronstein and Christian Seulin). Oh, and you can also get an “uncanny candle”, which apparently smells like the roses from the Freud Museum garden rather than, say, haunted calculators.

Another of Freud’s famous analysands was the modernist poet H.D., or Hilda Doolittle, who took to the fabled couch in part to pick apart this mess; a clutch of her essays are now collected in Visions and Ecstasies (through David Zwirner Books, in a series that also includes a history of the codpiece by Michael Glover). Joining Doolittle in the Pennsylvania-born Modernist Lesbian category is Gertrude Stein, and in Gertrude Stein Has Arrived by Roy Morris Jr. we get to revisit the delightful anomaly of an out butch modernist who left the US to produce resolutely radical works ending up a fêted literary celebrity in her homeland. Stein inspired the title of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance by Hannah Roche, and features alongside Radclyffe Hall and Djuna Barnes, the latter also celebrated in Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s Modernism edited by Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, and in a little volume of three stories she wrote under the name Lydia Steptoe. Sadly Djuna Barnes’s biography of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven never saw the light of day, but we do have an experimental study of the poetry of the “Dada Baroness” by Astrid Seme, more specifically the punctuation therein — Baroness Elsa’s Em Dashes. Can I share something embarrassing? For years I have struggled with the difference between em dashes and en dashes. Which is the wide one and which is the shorter one? And then THIS YEAR it was explained to me that – duh — the letter “m” is wider than “n”. Anyway Elsa’s hand-drawn punctuation marks might more properly be termed emmm dashes, such is their length.

Now if you would like to adopt a suitably beatific expression and follow me to the spirituality section (watch yer riah on them dreamcatchers…), allow me to present American Messiahs by Adam Morris, which speaks deeply to my fascination for apocalyptic cults. A fictional, English version comes in Claire McGlasson’s The Rapture in which a vicar’s widow declares herself a Daughter of God, forms the “Panacea Society” and pronounces the English commuter town of Bedford to be the site of the original Garden of Eden. Except that outline isn’t actually fiction at all, it really happened (just in case you were wondering why Bedford seemed too idyllic to be a mere Thameslink terminus).

In The Professor & the Parson by Adam Sisman, we encounter Robert Parkin Peters, “plagiarist, bigamist, fraudulent priest and imposter extraordinaire”. He was first exposed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also uncovered the perfidy and peccadillos of Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse (and whose nose for deceit famously and calamitously deserted him when he was presented with the “Hitler diaries”). “Motivated not by money but by a desire for prestige, Peters lied, stole and cheated his way to academic positions and religious posts from Cambridge to New York, Singapore and South Africa. Frequently deported, and even more frequently discovered, his trail of destruction included seven marriages (three of which were bigamous), an investigation by the FBI and a disastrous appearance on Mastermind.”

I am grateful to Wormwoodiana for their pointer to a reissue of The Devil’s Saint by Dulcie Deamer, originally published in 1924. Like Rosaleen Norton, with whom she shared thematic interests, Deamer was born in New Zealand but found infamy in the bohemian underworld of Sydney. Once, on being evicted from her accommodation, Deamer avenged herself by leaving behind a horse she had coaxed to an upstairs bathroom (she left it with a bale of hay and a bath full of water). Crowned “Empress of the Holy Bohemian Empire”, she was the presiding spirit of the city’s Artists’ Balls, which she appears to have parodied in The Devil’s Saint (extract here). You will search this book’s colophon in vain for the words “nihil obstat”, but it looks like fun.

American photographer Shannon Taggart has investigated spiritualist practices for years, and Fulgur have published the results in a typically exquisite production, Séance, with a foreword by Dan Aykroyd (wait, what?). Oh, and if you happen to find yourself at a séance wondering who you’re gonna call, Adrian Dannatt has some prime suggestions in Doomed and Famous: Selected Obituaries. It includes an extremely Strange Flowers-y selection, “an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world’s rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum and much much more.” Meanwhile Heather King, self-described “ex-barfly Catholic convert” offers Fools for Christ: Fifty Divine Eccentric, Artists, Martyrs, Stigmatists and Unsung Saints, which may well appeal to ex-Catholic barfly converts as well.

Three gay Catholic converts of the late 19th/early 20th century who are close to our hearts yet sadly not included in that collection are represented in reissues this year through Snuggly (along with a mysterious stranger from Düsseldorf). Snuggly are on a hot streak right now. There are more selections to come in our translation post so it is probably easier to just point you and your PayPal account in the direction of their website, but for now I commend to your awareness The Shadow of Death by “scholar, connoisseur, drunkard, poet, pervert” Count Eric Stenbock, Six Ghost Stories by the faux-priest Montague Summers, who combined “a manifest benignity with a whiff of the Widow Twankey”, and Amico di Sandro, an unfinished portrait of Botticelli by failed priest and would-be pope Baron Corvo.

A French trio of the same era enliven the latest work from Julian Barnes. The titular hero of The Man in the Red Coat is Samuel Pozzi, a handsome individual immortalised by Sargent in the portrait that is included sans head on the cover (was the hand inspired by Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man, as featured on the Corvo edition?). Pozzi was a surgeon and gynaecologist who operated on a prestigious Parisian clientele in his Place Vendôme practice. But Barnes’s book is also about Prince Edmond de Polignac, half of one of the most notorious lavender marriages of the day, and our old favourite, arch aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, who inspired some of the greatest examples of Decadent literature. And if you need context we have the authoritative new Decadence and Literature edited by Jane Desmarais (whose cultural history of hothouse flowers, a classic Decadent motif, I can highly recommend) and David Weir.

Nihilist poet Harry Crosby was inspired by the great flowering of Decadence although he arrived in Paris too late to have experienced it directly. He cycled rapidly through influences and in 1927 he was proclaiming his “swan-song to the decadent” and embracing the prevailing avant-garde movement of Surrealism. This trajectory is captured in Seeing with Eyes Closed which collects the prose poems originally published in limited quantities by the Black Sun Press he operated with wife Caresse. Although arriving much later, Penelope Rosemont was another American captured by the hypnagogic mutiny of Surrealism. In Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields we find her “rubbing shoulders with some of the movement’s most important visual artists, such as Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Mimi Parent, and Toyen; discussing politics and spectacle with Guy Debord; and crossing paths with poet Ted Joans and outsider artist Lee Godie.” Artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun, at least nominally a Surrealist, is enjoying a posthumous renaissance that continues with a collection of her shorter written works entitled Medea’s Charms, and a biography by Amy Hale coming in the new year, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully. The Viktor Wynd Museum in London is currently hosting the first exhibition of Colquhoun’s work in the city for over 40 years, although with the Tate having acquired her extensive archives this year, it is unlikely to be 40 years until the next one.

Feral House have just reissued the memoirs of “Dirty” Helen Cromwell, who sounds like she was all kindsa fun. Good Time Party Girl (written with Robert Dougherty) is the “long-lost autobiography of a woman who lived life with no regrets from the 1880s to the 1960s” which takes us “into the colorful criminal underworld from New York to San Francisco and every whorehouse, tavern, and mining camp in between.” Elsewhere, Into the Night, edited by Florence Ostende with Lotte Johnson to accompany an exhibition currently showing at the Barbican in London, examines the night-spot as a laboratory for creation and progress. Venues like the Chat Noir in Paris provided a space for artists and writers to mix, hone their personae and bring new forms to life. The Chat Noir even issued its own magazine, which influenced a Gilded Age vogue for similar titles across the Atlantic as Brad Evans relates in Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism.

The parameters of modern life were expanding, but this change wasn’t all issuing from candle-lit taverns and small-run journals. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman explores the lives of American women of colour, “the first generations born after emancipation.” “These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood – all deemed scandalous, even pathological, at the dawn of the twentieth century, though they set the pattern for the world to come.” At the same time, W.E.B. Du Bois zoomed out to encompass the black American experience as a whole; you may well have already seen the extraordinarily modern graphics he created for this purpose at the beginning of the 20th century. These are now paired with contemporary photographs in Black Lives 1900.

City Lights Books are publishing the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, 60 years after they issued one of his very first works, the absurd “Abomunist Manifesto”, in which Kaufman burlesqued the apocalyptic tone of political and cultural statements of intent. Death to the Fascist Insect, a collection of writings by the Symbionese Liberation Army, is considerably more earnest, and genuinely apocalyptic. The SLA became notorious for the kidnap and brainwashing of Patty Hearst, who parlayed the traumatic experience into an unlikely cult movie career, appearing in the last five movies by John Waters. His latest book, Mr. Know-It-All, is a wise and hilarious primer on pretty much everything and although some anecdotes may be familiar if you’re a long-time fan, I would rather listen to John Waters repeat himself than almost anyone else extemporising. Here he riffs on Hearst’s experience and fantasises about William Donohue, the viciously homophobic President of the Catholic League, being kidnapped and forced to watch Pasolini’s Salò on repeat (“A ransom would be pointless because who would want him back? I bet even the Pope thinks he’s an asshole”). Alongside Salò in the canon of extreme cinema that John Waters has championed is Derek Jarman’s Blue, which brings us to Dungeness Blues, a stunning edition by Zagava which includes poetry by Jarman himself and responses from Jeremy Reed, also included on a cassette.

In Germany it is always the anniversary of something. The Twenties are around the corner again and the flood of Bauhaus books suggests we will be recalling the innovations of Weimar Germany in real time + 100 years. Brendan Nash, who can tell you more about Isherwood’s Berlin than anyone, summons this period in his first novel, The Landlady. And we recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event that dominates Ben Fergusson’s An Honest Man, a deeply affecting love story disguised as a thriller. This is the perfect book to end on because it has my favourite ending of any book this year. And the fact of my knowing both these writers as fine, upstanding members of their community in no way influences my enthusiasm.

I’ll be back imminently with some translated selections. And please – support the people who truly care about books and who are making this wealth of reading possible by ordering directly from small presses and/or supporting your local independent bookshops. It really makes a difference.