The Dedalus Book of German Decadence E-Book

Ray Furness

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 473

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A collection of fin-de-siecle German and Austrian decadence writing.

Das E-Book The Dedalus Book of German Decadence wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction

From Austro-Hungary

    Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Venus in Furs

  *Herman Bahr

The School of Love

    Arthur Holitscher

The Poisoned Well

    Georg Trakl

Desolation

  *Paul Leppin

Blaugast

From Imperial Germany

  *Peter Hille

Herodias

    Stanislaus Przybyszewski

Androgyne

    Kurt Martens

A Novel from the Age of Decadence

  *Georg Heym

The Autopsy

    Hanns Heinz Ewers

Alraune

    Thomas Mann

Blood of the Wälsungs

About the Authors

Copyright

Introduction

The passages indicated by an asterisk were translated by Mike Mitchell, the others were translated by the editor (except for the Thomas Mann). I am grateful to Reed Book Services for permission to include Thomas Mann’s Blood of the Wälsungs and to Langen-Müller Verlag for permission to translate Paul Leppin’s Blaugast. Every attempt was made to seek permission to include a translation of a section of Kurt Martens’s Novel from the Age of Decadence (published by F. Fontane and Co., Berlin-West 1898).

I have grouped the translations into two sections, the first consisting of writers from Austro-Hungary, the second from Imperial Germany.

THE EDITOR

Ray Furness is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He has published a large number of books and articles on Expressionism, Wagner, Romanticism, Nietsche and fin de siècle German Literature.

His translations include the poetry of George Trakl, a study of Mozart and Posterity and Die Alraune by Hans Ewers (to be published by Dedalus in 1996).

THE TRANSLATOR

Mike Mitchell is a lecturer in German at Stirling University. His publications include a book on Peter Hacks, the East German playwright, and numerous studies on aspects of modern Austrian Literature; he is the co-author of Harrap’s German Grammar and the editor of The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy: the Meyrink Years 1890–1930.

Mike Mitchell’s translations include The Architect of Ruins by Herbert Rosendorfer, and Gustav Meyrink’s novels The Angel of the West Window, The Green Face, Walpurgisnacht, The White Dominican and The Golem.

‘There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity.’

[Novalis]

If an educated middle-class German of a century ago had sought clarification of the term decadence (a term which he may have come across in periodicals and newspapers) he might well have taken down the appropriate volume of his Brockhaus encyclopaedia of 1896 and found the following: ‘decadence (French: pronounced “Dekadangss”) – decay, decline, deterioration. Recently the term has been applied in France to an artistic movement which is a reaction against Naturalism; it is a symptom of today’s nervous, senile, fragmented society which is impervious to anything which is healthy and natural, and which seeks to whip up its blasé, jaded attitudes through extravagant stimuli. The practitioners of this school of writing are called decadents.’ Had he sought elsewhere for further information he would have discovered that the most decisive formulation of decadence had been given by Baudelaire in his essay on Edgar Allan Poe of 1867: the French poet has accepted the term – hitherto purely pejorative – and welcomed it with approval. Those critics who had rejected Poe for being morbid and bizarre had failed to realise, Baudelaire had explained, that Poe’s works had aimed at being ‘unnatural’, for the natural and the normal had lost their charms (if, indeed, they had ever possessed any). Gautier had, in the following year, admirably summed up Baudelaire’s position – the refined, the ultra sophisticated, the recherché, the subtle, the neurotic, the knowledge of being somehow explorers, or manifestations, of a terminal cultural sickness: these qualities Gautier had extolled in Baudelaire, as Baudelaire had extolled them in Poe. And that which had been adumbrated in Paris in the 1860s had become the literary watchword of the 1880s, especially in Verlaine, who had overtly proclaimed his love for the word ‘decadence’, going so far as to announce that he was ‘L’Empire à la fin de la decadence’. Our German, if he had browsed further in his Brockhaus, would finally have found references to Stéphane Mallarmé and Jean Moréas (the term ‘déliquescents’ was also used to define modern French writers, also, confusingly, ‘symbolistes’), and references to ‘artifice’ and, indeed ‘idiocy’, abounded. The impression our reader might have gained was that ‘decadence’ was a symptom of French degeneration, typical of a nation defeated in war, a country nervously strained and somehow predestined to morbid derangement.

But let us move to a more sophisticated level and see what the German-speaking literary critics have to tell us. Hermann Bahr, the Austrian littérateur and essayist, visited Munich in 1888 and moved from there to Paris: with acute sensitivity and remarkable openness to the literary scene in that city Bahr saw that the Naturalist watchwords and slogans had had their day and that something new was in the air. Naturalism, that short-lived attempt to reproduce the surface texture of reality as faithfully as possible was now superseded by the cultivation of inner visions and the search for the outré and the artificial. Bahr’s collection of essays, Studien zur Kritik der Moderne (1894), contains a section on ‘Die decadence’ which succinctly and with considerable insight formulates the preoccupations of the new generation of writers: they wished, Bahr explains, to flee from the trivial superficialities of Naturalism, wishing instead to ‘modeler notre univers intérieur’. They despised the taste of the mob and sought the bizarre and the extraordinary. They demanded artifice and were characterised by a febrile mysticism. They wished to express the inexpressible and to grasp the impalpable; they sought dark, sultry images. They entertained above all the insatiable desire to portray the monstrous and the boundless – it was no coincidence that they were Wagnerians. They detested the banal, the banausic and the quotidian; they sought with assiduity the exceptional and the outlandish. With unfailing acumen Bahr saw the importance of Wagner for the new mentality – Wagner as purveyor of unheard-of delights and sensations, the hierophant and magus for impoverished souls who sought that fearful ravishing of which Baudelaire had spoken some thirty years earlier. And decadence did not simply mean sterile decline, for the literary scene in Paris brought forth fascinating blooms which sprang as asphodels from fetid waters.

Bahr established himself in the Café Griensteidl in Vienna and acted as intermediary between Paris and Vienna in terms of ideas and manifestoes: his novel Die gute Schule (The School of Love), published in 1890 when Bahr was twenty-seven portrays the Parisian vie de bohême in a lurid and sensational manner, particularly the contorted relationship between the hero and Fifi (Bahr’s father rejected it out of hand). But a man who achieved a greater notoriety (and a much wider readership) for his writings on decadence was Max Nordau, whose Entartung (Degeneration) appeared in two volumes in Berlin 1892/3. Nordau had moved to Paris in 1880 and keenly observed the latest literary and medical developments in France: he had studied with Charcot at the Salpêtrière at the same time as Freud. It seemed to Nordau that he was surrounded by symptoms of general decline, seeing in the decadents, symbolists and mystics unmistakable symptoms of degeneracy. ‘We stand now’, he wrote ‘ in the midst of a severe mental epidemic, a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria’. Nordau’s pseudo-scientific, journalistic survey of the contemporary literary scene, interspersed with peevish broadsides against the chief exponents of modernism, was widely read: there are references to him in works as divergent as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Andrey Bely’s The Dramatic Symphony. Although Nordau had first-hand experience of Paris (he commented on Verlaine’s asymmetrical skull and ‘Mongolian physiognomy’, symptoms, apparently, of degeneration, as were Mallarmé’s long, ‘faun-like’ ears) he also singled out Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites for scathing attack: imbecility, mysticism and incomprehensibility seemed to be rampant. Of interest here is Nordau’s furious attack on Richard Wagner. ‘Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted  …’ For Nordau the German composer was the paradigm of decadence, an artist both degenerate and harmful whose grandiose visions were but histrionic gestures poised above incandescent decay and which sprang from ‘a pathological over-excitement of the genitals’. Seeing a link between decadence and Romanticism, this guardian of cultural standards and public morals could not refrain from condemning Wagner’s art as a lurid and dying manifestations of that earlier efflorescence, with the composer himself representing ‘the last fungoid growth on the dunghill of Romanticism’. But a much greater intellect had already launched his dazzling attack on the Master of Bayreuth, on the ageing and perfumed voluptuary of Parsifal above all, and his polemic lifts the discussion of decadence to a considerably higher level.

Friedrich Nietzsche, shortly before his mental collapse, felt compelled once again to come to terms with his erstwhile mentor and idol, that man who, for good or ill, had had the most profound effect upon his stricken life. In Der Fall Wagner (1888) Nietzsche sought to single out those cultural manifestations of his age which he considered to be diseased – and Wagner is their paradigm. ‘Wagner’s art is sick. The problems that he deals with on the stage – they are without exception the problems of hysteria. The convulsive nature of his emotions, his overheated sensibility, his taste which demands ever stronger stimuli, his instability, which he raises to the status of a principle, and last but not least his choice of heroes and heroines, if you look at them as physiological specimens (a gallery of degenerates!) – all of this provides a case-history that leaves no doubt: Wagner est une névrose.’ He continues: ‘Yes, if you look at it closely, Wagner doesn’t seem to be interested in any other problems than those that interest the little Parisian décadents today. Just a few steps away from the hospital!’ Unaware of the existence of the Revue Wagnérienne and knowing of the ‘little Parisian décadents’ only by hearsay, Nietzsche nevertheless sensed the peculiar affinity which existed between the German musician and the new literary tendency in France; the expression ‘névrose’, a possible borrowing from Paul Bourget, is an appropriate one. The thinker who suffered most under Wagner, who felt intense relief at the latter’s death in 1883 but who was drawn time and time again to re-define his own intellectual position vis à vis the Master (and Thomas Mann goes as far as to claim that Nietzsche’s polemic against Wagner was the most important aspect of his entire work) – this man knew that Wagner’s grandiloquence and imperiousness concealed fascinating uncertainties, vagaries, even perversions; it was the French capital which, interestingly enough, received his dubious and prodigious offering most readily.

The ‘last fungoid growth on the dunghill of Romanticism’? A ‘neurosis’? Thomas Mann, like Nietzsche, never failed to be enthralled by Wagner and the composer’s presence may be found in the earlier stories, the great essays, the later novels, in countless letters and diary entries; it is also Thomas Mann who openly insisted that he, Mann, was a ‘chronicler and analyst of decadence, a lover of the pathological and of death, an aesthete with a tendency towards the abyss  …’ That sickly connoisseurship of sensation which Nietzsche had detected in Wagner, as well as the brutality of many of his effects, provided Mann with many an insight into the nature of decadence. The proximity of love and death in Tristan und Isolde (prefiguring Freud’s writing on Eros and Thanotos by decades), the glorification of incest in Die Walküre, the heady fusion of sexuality and religion in Parsifal (the holy grail and gaping wound, the omnipresence of blood, the spear and chalice, flower maidens, castration and incense) – appropriate indeed that Wagner should be High Priest of an age characterised by a guilt-ridden eroticism, a morbid inflation of the ego and the cultivation of recondite worlds. Did we ever, Thomas Mann was later to muse, truly ‘overcome’ decadence? – or did we simply play with the idea that it was to be superseded? As a young writer he was able to observe closely the bohemian atmosphere of Munich, that city where Stefan George reigned as hierophant and Grand Maître in matters relating to poetry (his Algabal poems, dedicated to King Ludwig the Second, continued the ‘Heli-ogabalic’ cult of beauty, cruelty and degeneracy which was adumbrated by Gautier in the famous preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin and referred to by des Esseintes in A rebours, that bible of French decadence). Munich was the city of Richard Wagner and that king who worshipped him and escaped finally into death by drowning: Nordeau would make mocking references to the ‘madman’ who, appropriately, ‘marched at the head of the Wagnerites’. There will be much of Wagner in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice), also of George and the cult of male beauty: Aschenbach moves from Munich to that city where Wagner had composed much of Tristan and where he was to die. Other Thomas Mann stories with a Munich setting include Beim Propheten (At the Prophet’s) where the narrator describes a visit to an attic to listen to the overheated perorations of a manic visionary, and Gladius Dei, a delightful portrayal of Munich as a city of art which an overwrought and censorious student condemns for its frivolity and wickedness.

What, then, is ‘decadent’ about Mann’s early writing? An aestheticism which renders its practitioners incapable of warm, human feeling, a heightened sensitivity, a paralysing glimpse into the heart of things, the cultivation of a blasé and ultra refined lassitude – and above all an exposure to Wagner, with frequently fatal consequences. The short story Tristan portrays a sanatorium where Gabriele Klöterjahn and her unlovely suitor swoon in an illicit enjoyment of the ‘Liebestod’; the novel Buddenbrooks describes the nervous exhaustion and collapse of Hanno who surrenders to that same opera (the naturalistic descriptions of typhoid fever do not blind the reader to the inference that it was the Wagner delirium which drew a willing victim to his dissolution). But the finest example of decadence in Thomas Mann is the story Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the Wälsungs) of 1906. In Thomas Mann’s own words it is ‘the story of two pampered creatures, Jewish twins from an over-refined Berlin-West milieu who take the primeval incestuous relationship of Wagner’s Wälsungen-twins as a model for their own sense of luxurious and mocking aloofness.’ Spoilt and cosseted, Siegmund Aarenhold leads a life of sterile boredom: his days pass in emptiness and narcissistic self-reflection. With his twin sister Sieglinde he has an equal partner in elegant and arrogant refinement, and her fiancé, the hapless von Beckerath, is their equal neither in sartorial nor in intellectual matters. It is he who is the blundering Hunding-figure, and it is inevitable that the twins, without him, should be driven to the opera to see Die Walküre. Haughty and blasé in their box they watch the performance and cannot refrain, amidst the consumption of Maraschino cherries, from ironic and condescending remarks on both singers and orchestra. Enthusiasm of any kind is alien to their sense of snobbish superiority, but Siegmund particularly feels the powerful surging momentum of Wagner’s work, and the passionate turmoil of the music excites him, causing doubts and an unsettling perturbation. As Wagner’s twins had defied Hunding and passed through ecstasy and tribulation, so Siegmund Aarenhold, nervously agitated despite his cool exterior, sinks with his sister on to the rug in stammering confusion: the Wagner parallels are obvious. But whereas Wagner created out of passionate inspiration it is Siegmund Aarenhold’s tragedy that what was probably his first spontaneous act should be one of narcissism and perversion, born of defiance and vindictiveness (the cuckolding of the ‘goy’ von Beckerath). It is only Wagner who can stimulate powerful responses in Siegmund, responses which, however, result in an act of crude desecration.

Thomas Mann was closely associated with writers like Kurt Martens and Arthur Holitscher (the latter providing a model for the degenerate aesthete Detlev Spinell in Tristan). Martens made his reputation in 1898 with the novel Roman aus der decadence (A Novel from the Age of Decadence), a title which Thomas Mann had wanted as a subtitle for his own novel Buddenbrooks. The novel is set in Leipzig in the years 1896–7 and attempts to capture the fin-de-siècle atmosphere prevalent amongst the intellectuals of that city. The hero, Just, is characterised by an enervating lassitude: his erotic entanglements with Alice, the wealthy daughter of an industrialist, drift into paralysis (he fills his room with wilting foliage and hopes, in vain, for stimulation). His attempts to transform a beggar girl into an Amaryllis, a Salome (Wilde and Gustav Moreau are cited), or a great criminal (des Esseintes had prepared the way) get nowhere. Just has read the obligatory Scandinavian literature (Jonas Lie), and Martens’s autobiography also tells of the influence of Arne Garborg (Tired Souls). The decadent climax of the novel is the so-called ‘Festival of Death’: Just’s friend Erich von Lüttwitz, having inherited a fortune, decorates his villa in the latest art nouveau style and invites his colleagues to an orgy, the culmination of which is to be his death. Both von Lüttwitz’s escapades and Just’s exhaustion seem symptoms of some deep malaise; it is no coincidence that the latter – as a good decadent should – seeks refuge in the Catholic Church.

Holitscher’s Der vergiftete Brunnen (The Poisoned Well) (1900) tells of another villa, owned by one Désirée Wilmoth (née Wulp) where dubious and extravagant fantasies are enacted. Désirée, widow of the wealthy Scot McAllinster whom she had met in Monte Carlo, forms a liaison with the young genius Wilmoth (Melmoth?) who dies in mysterious circumstances. After extensive travels she settles in Munich where a host of literati dance attendance: the young poet Sebastian Sasse, from Transylvania, falls under her spell. Désirée is a femme fatale with copper-coloured hair, a deathly pallor and blood-red lips, not far removed from that vision of a sphinx-like creature described by Holitscher thus: ‘She was naked to the hips, sitting rigid and upright in a black armchair in the middle of the room. Her hair was red and, parted in the middle, fell over her shoulders and across the back of the chair  …  Her eyes were of pale turquoise and of a deceptive gleam, her lips were cut of dark-violet amethysts. Her nipples, erectile, were of large rubies; a diamond sparkled in her navel.’ Désirée’s dancing is reminiscent of that of Loїe Fuller: images of fire abound. The presence of Wagner is paramount in the bacchanal that Désirée performs to seduce the hapless poet; the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser is meant to overwhelm him, as are lascivious eurhythmics. The performance takes place in an enormous conservatory, choked with rank vegetation. Sasse escapes and flees to Belgium, to a town which is obviously Bruges, where he writes his novel (Bruges, together with Venice, being the decadent town par excellence, indebted above all to Rodenbach’s Bruges la morte with its descriptions of swans, brackish water and dark courtyards). He returns, healed, to Munich: he has drunk of the ‘poisoned well’ of life, and survives. Holitscher’s story Von der Wollust und dem Tode (Of Lust and Death) (Munich, 1902) does not end on such a conciliatory note, however, in its portrayal of a grotesque ‘Liebestod’. The hero can only find sexual release in death, silently cutting his wrists and sinking dead upon his beloved during a rendez-vous.

Munich had been the city in which Désirée Wilmoth’s villa stood, as had Aschenbach’s residence and the attic of the prophet who, in Thomas Mann’s story, had exulted in visions of blood and violence where millennia of human domesticity were to be expunged in a new apocalypse. If decadence also revels in perverse cruelty then Hanns Heinz Ewers may also be included. Ewers was also associated with Munich; he had appeared in cabaret there where his grotesquely satirical humour had been exploited to the full. His first literary success were the two selections of bizarre stories Das Grauen (Horror) (1907) and Die Bessessenen (The Possessed) (1908); the novel Der Zauberlehrling oder die Teufelsjäger (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the Devil’s Huntsmen) (1909) shocked by its horrifyingly orgiastic scene in which a pregnant girl is crucified and her unborn child transfixed by a pitchfork. The second novel Alraune. Die Geschichte tines lebenden Wesens (Mandrake. The Story of a LivingCreature) (1911) was immensely popular (a girl is born from the seed of an ejaculating victim of an executioner which is implanted in a prostitute named Alma Raune – the pun is untranslatable – in a nearby hospital): it reached sales of over a quarter of a million in ten years and was filmed twice, the 1928 version being provided by Henrik Galeen (who also wrote the film script for Murnau’s vampire masterpiece Nosferatu). Vampire appeared in 1920; Nachtmahr (Nightmare), another collection of horror stories, followed in 1922. Ewers considered himself to be the herald of a new fantastic satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade: the stories contain portrayals of stock-in-trade horror (spider women) and various forms of commercial nastiness. Der Fundvogel (1928) is a sensational account of an enforced sex change. Ewers was ready and eager to serve the Nazi cause; in 1932 he published an account of the escapades of the Freikorps and then, probably on Hitler’s recommendation, the biography of the pimp and martyr Horst Wessel, Ein deutsches Schicksal (A German Destiny) (1934). His earlier writing, not surprisingly, was found to be incompatible with the promulgation of rude Nordic health and Ewers was pronounced degenerate (‘entartet’). But fascism is fed by some very questionable nourishment; the links between sadomasochism and fascism are natural ones and the eroticization of that movement of which Susan Sontag has written (Fascinating Fascism, 1974) shows that Ewers, for all his degeneracy, may not have been such a unusual precursor after all.

Sadism  …  masochism – any account of what decadence was, must needs deal with these terms. The writers of French decadence, as Mario Praz has told us, were well aware of the ‘divine Marquis’, and cruelty and perversion abound in Huysmans, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain and others. Our concern here is with Leopold Sacher-Masoch whose relationship with decadence is oblique but whose name, thanks primarily to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, is redolent of an eccentric and perverse sexuality. This Ruthenian writer published his best known novel Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs) in 1869, some fifteen years, that is, before A rebours : it was meant to be part of a cycle known as Das Vermächtnis Kains (The Legacy of Cain). The brutality of de Sade is rarely found in Sacher-Masoch, who prefers the fetish, the artificial and the blurring of the human and the image, the statuesque and the atmospheric: the shrill confrontation of light and darkness in de Sade’s castles gives way to hotels, sanatoria and heavy curtains where Venus-Wanda holds sway. Sacher-Masoch was fêted by the literary establishment when he visited Paris in 1886 and certain of his stories (including Femmes slaves) were published in 1889 and 1890 in La revue des deux monies. Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus, a novel which, on its appearance in Brussels in 1884, was greeted by a fine of two thousand francs and a two year prison sentence, owes much to Sacher-Masoch (the heroine, Raoule, delights in humiliating Jacques, her ostensible lover: after his death she transforms him into a wax doll in which his hair, nails, eyelashes and teeth have been implanted). Sacher-Masoch is in the curious situation of having his work virtually ignored whilst his name became universally known and vulgarised. There is no reference in German decadent literature to his work; a later echo, however, is found in Franz Kafka, particularly in his masterpiece Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), with its picture of a lady in fur, the name ‘Gregor’ and numerous punishment fantasies. Kafka’s fearful machine (In der Strafkolonie (The Penal Colony)) may also have its precursor im Sacher-Masoch’s Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), whose heroine uses an ‘iron virgin’ to torture her lovers. The tension between debility, power and desire was one which Kafka well understood.

In 1874 Sacher-Masoch published a somewhat titillating account of the depravities and perversions of Viennese aristocratic ladies in Die Messalinen Wiens. It was in Vienna that Hermann Bahr, as we know, analysed the new direction in the arts: his novel Die gute Schule exulted in portrayals of accidie and excess. Bahr emphasised the role played by ‘nerves’ in French decadent literature (Paul Bourget); ‘neurasthenia’ seemed to be a common disorder, a modern epidemic. It was Hofmannsthal who formulated the Wildean statement ‘To be modern means to like antique furniture – and youthful neuroses’. A cult of the ‘soul’ is adumbrated, also the cult of the artist-figure whose nerves are so finely tuned that he can pick up private sensations and transmute them into art. Aestheticism, the conscious refinement of the senses (and also of the personality itself) is very much in evidence. But whether this necessarily can be equated with decadence is another matter; impressionism would seem to be a more appropriate label for this narcissistic introspection, these exquisite rêveries. A writer like Felix Dörmann strove to love ‘all things abnormal and sick’, but the pose is unconvincing.

What, then, was specifically decadent about the Vienna of this time? Certain aspects of the painting of Klimt (Judith), Bahr’s sensational novel, Mahler’s morbidity and fascination with death and transience (despite the desperate attempts at life-affirmation), the obsession with sexuality in its stranger forms and an awareness of sterile refinements. Was it a city of neuroses? It was a world analysed by Sigmund Freud and observed with detachment by Freud’s Doppelgänger Arthur Schnitzler whose work frequently reflects a world of repression, sexual tension and guilt. But Schnitzler’s self-deprecating irony and gentle scepticism preclude any attempt to label him as ‘decadent’. (The famous Traumnovelle certainly dabbles with the accoutrements of decadence – black silk, naked nuns, crucifixion – but the dreams and visions are not simply there to give a frisson; they represent the working out of a married couple’s repressed feelings of guilt.) There is no preoccupation with degeneration in Schnitzler, albeit mental illness is frequently encountered in his writing; there is a humour which is sadly lacking in the purveyors of the outré and the abnormal. Schnitzler recorded the poses of the coffee-house literati with wry amusement: he did not castigate them as did the satirist Karl Kraus. Worthy of mention is the Salzburg writer Georg Trakl who lived sporadically in Vienna and Innsbruck before enlisting in 1914 and dying by his own hand in a psychiatric hospital in Cracow later that year. Trakl was much indebted to the French in his early poetry, and the prose narrative Verlassenheit (Desolation) with its portrayal of the Count who silently awaits his own dissolution brings Roderick Usher forcibly to mind, Poe filtered, as it were, through Mallarmé. Usher’s passive assent to his own decline and his bizarre relationship with his sister fascinated many of the artists of fin de siècle France (Debussy had made sketches for an opera on their story): the minute yet ubiquitous fungus that covers the whole of the house in Usher and the evil water of the adjacent lake are also found in Trakl’s obsession with putrefaction. The overwrought, over-ripe passages in Trakl, the poisoned plants, sultry Catholicism and, above all, the theme of incest – the decadent sin par excellence, sweet and accursed – put Trakl very much within the decadent camp, as does the sadomasochism of Blaubart. But Trakl did not remain a Felix Dörmann; the prurience of decadence and the effulgence of symbolism are transcended in the last utterances, which point to a mystical Expressionism.

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

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

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

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

Sacher-Masoch: Venus in Furs

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

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

‘Wait a moment.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you think so? I don’t.’

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

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

‘And so this fur is beginning to inspire your extraordinary imagination,’ Wanda cried, and began to drape herself coquettishly with her fur coat so that the darkly gleaming sable played charmingly about her arms and breasts. ‘Now – how do you feel about this? Are you on the rack already?’

Her green piercing eyes were fixed on me with a strange, scornful ease; overwhelmed by passion I threw myself before her and flung my arms around her.

‘Yes  …  you have aroused in me my favourite fantasies, longings which have lain dormant for years.’

‘And what are these?’ she asked, placing her hand upon my neck.

I was seized, beneath this little warm hand, beneath her gaze which questioned, beneath those half closed lids, with a sweet intoxication.

‘To be the slave of a woman, a beautiful woman, one whom I love and worship!’

‘And one who ill-treats you for it!’ Wanda interrupted me, laughing.

‘Yes, one who binds me and whips me, one who kicks me whilst belonging to another.’

‘And one who, when you are insane with jealousy, will go to your happy rival and go so far as to present you to him and give you over to his crudeness, his brutality. Why not? Do you like my final picture?’

I looked at Wanda, terrified.

‘It exceeds my wildest dreams!’

‘Yes, we women are resourceful’ she said. ‘Be careful when you have found your ideal, as it can easily happen that she will treat you more cruelly than is good for you.’

‘I fear that I have found my ideal already!’ I cried, and pressed my glowing face into her lap.

‘But you don’t mean me, do you?’ Wanda cried, throwing off her furs and dancing about the room. She was still laughing as I went downstairs, and when I was standing in the courtyard, deep in thought, I could hear that wilful, malicious laughter still.

*        *        *        *

‘Am I really to incorporate your ideal?’ Wanda asked roguishly when we met in the park.

I could not answer at first. The most contrary of sensations raged within me. She had sat down upon a stone bench and was playing with a flower.

‘Well  …  am I?’

I knelt and seized her hands.

‘I beg you once more – be my wife, my faithful, honourable wife; if you cannot do this, then be my ideal, but completely without reservation, without mitigation.’

‘You know that I will give you my hand after a year if you are the man I am looking for,’ said Wanda, very seriously. ‘But I think you would be more grateful to me if I were to realise your fantasies. So, which do you prefer?’

‘I think that everything in my imagination lies in your nature.’

‘You are wrong.’

‘I think,’ I continued ‘that it gives you pleasure to have a man completely in your power, to torment him –.’

‘No, no!’ she cried, agitated. ‘And yet  …’ She paused. ‘I don’t understand myself any more. I must make a confession to you. You have corrupted my imagination and heated my blood, I’m now starting to find pleasure in it all  …  The animation with which you’ve been speaking about Mme de Pompadour, about Catherine the Second and all the other frivolous, cruel, self-indulgent women has captivated me, overwhelmed me and makes me want to be like these women who were slavishly idolised throughout their lives and would perform miracles, even in the grave. And now you’ve made me a miniature despot, a Mme de Pompadour for domestic use.’

‘Well,’ I said, excited, ‘if that’s what you’re capable of, then give in to it, let nature take its course, but don’t be half-hearted about it: if you can’t be a good, faithful wife, then be a devil!’

I was excitable, overwrought, and the nearness of this beautiful woman made me feverish. I don’t remember what I was talking about, I only remember kissing her feet – and then I picked up one of them and placed it on my neck. But she swiftly and angrily drew it back, and rose to her feet. ‘If you love me, Severin,’ she said quickly, and her voice sounded sharp, peremptory – ‘if you love me, then do not speak of such things again. Do you understand me? Never. Or I might –’ She smiled and sat down again.

‘I am absolutely serious,’ I cried, almost hallucinating. ‘I adore you so much that I would suffer everything at you hands for the sake of spending my whole life at your side.’

‘Severin, I warn you once more.’

‘Your warning is in vain. Do whatever you want with me, but don’t push me away completely.’

‘Severin,’ Wanda replied. ‘I am a frivolous young woman and it’s dangerous for you to give yourself to me completely. You will finally become my plaything and who would protect you if I abuse your insane ideas?’

‘Your nobility would.’

‘Power makes us arrogant.’

‘Be arrogant, then!’ I cried, ‘Kick me!’

Wanda folded her arms above my neck, gazed into my eyes and shook her head. ‘I fear I may not be able to do it, but I’ll try, for your sake, for I love you Severin more than I have ever loved a man before.’

*        *        *        *

Today she suddenly took up her hat and scarf and bade me follow her to the market. She inspected a selection of whips, long whips on a short handle, used in dog training.

‘These should do,’ said the vendor.

‘No, they’re much too small,’ said Wanda, casting a sideways glance in my direction. ‘I need a big one.’

‘Perhaps for a bulldog?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the sort they have in Russia for recalcitrant slaves.’

She looked at what was on offer and finally chose a whip which made me feel rather uncomfortable.

‘Well, adieu Severin,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to make certain purchases where you may not accompany me.’

I took my leave and went for a walk; on the way back I saw Wands coming out of a furrier’s shop. She called me to her.

‘Consider this,’ she said contentedly. ‘I’ve never made a secret out of the fact that it was your deep, contemplative nature that captivated me so; it now appeals to me to see this earnest suitor completely in my power, writhing in ecstasy at my feet, but how long will this last? A woman loves a man; she ill-treats her slave and finally kicks him away with her foot.’

‘Well, kick me away with you foot when you have tired of me,’ I responded. ‘I want to be your slave.’

‘I see that there are dangerous tendencies within me,’ said Wanda after we had walked a few paces. ‘You have awakened them, and it will not be to your advantage. You understand how to awaken hedonism and cruelty; you portray pride in such glowing colours  …  What would you say if I embarked on this and if I started on you, like Dionys who roasted the inventor of the Iron Ox in his own creation to find out whether his roaring and his death-rattle really did sound like the lowing of an ox. Perhaps I’m a female Dionys?’

‘Be it so!’ I cried. ‘Then my imaginings will have come true! I belong to you, for good or ill – you must chose. The destiny within my breast drives me onwards, demon-like, over-powering  …’

*        *        *        *

‘My dear Severin,

I do not wish to see you today, nor tomorrow, and only in the evening of the day after that – and then as my slave.

Your mistress,

Wanda.’

‘As my slave,’ was underlined. I read the note again (it had come early in the morning), I had a donkey saddled and rode into the mountains in order to still my passion, my longing, in the splendours of the Carpathians.

Then I returned, hungry, tired, thirsty, and above all infatuated. I quickly got changed, and a few minutes later was knocking on her door.

‘Enter!’

I went in. She was standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a white satin gown which flowed across her body like light, and a scarlet satin jacket with a rich trimming of ermine; in her powdered, snowy hair a small diamond tiara was sparkling. Her arms were crossed upon her breast, her brows were knitted.

‘Wanda!’ I ran towards her, about to embrace her and kiss her, but she stepped backwards, and her glance measured me from head to foot.

‘Slave!’

‘Mistress!’ I knelt and kissed the edge of her robe.

‘That is correct.’

‘How lovely you are!’

‘Do I please you?’ She walked up to the mirror and gazed at her reflection with haughty approval.

‘I shall go mad!’

Her bottom lip twitched scornfully and she looked at me mockingly between half-closed eyes.

‘Give me the whip.’

I looked about the room.

‘No, remain kneeling.’ She strode to the hearth, took the whip from the mantelpiece and let it whistle through the air, smiling at me. Then she slowly rolled back the sleeve of her fur jacket.

‘Wondrous woman!’ I cried.

‘Silence, slave!’ She suddenly glowered at me, wildly, and struck me with the whip: but in the next moment she had put her arm tenderly about my neck and bent down towards me, in pity. ‘Did I hurt you?’ she asked, half-ashamed, half-frightened.

‘No!’ I replied,’ and even if you did, the pain that you give me is purest joy. Whip me if it gives you pleasure.’

‘But it doesn’t give me pleasure.’

And again that strange intoxication seized me.

‘Whip me!’ I begged. ‘Whip me without mercy.’

Wanda cracked the whip and struck me a second time. ‘Have you had enough?’

‘No!’

‘Are you serious? No?’

‘Beat me, please, it gives me such pleasure.’

‘Yes, because you know it isn’t serious,’ she replied, ‘that I haven’t the heart to hurt you. This whole crude game offends me. If I were really a woman who beat her slaves, then you would be horrified!’

‘No, Wanda,’ I said, ‘I love you more than I do myself, I am devoted to you, in life and death, you can do whatever you want with me, whatever your pride dictates.’

‘Severin!’

‘Kick me with your feet!’ I cried and threw myself before her, my face close to the floor.

‘I hate all these charades,’ Wanda said impatiently.

‘So, mistreat me in earnest.’

A sinister pause.

‘Severin, I give you one last warning –’

‘If you love me, be cruel to me,’ I implored, lifting my eyes to her.

‘If I love you?’ she repeated. ‘Very well!’ She stepped back and gazed at me, smiling darkly. ‘So be my slave, and know what it is to fall into the hands of a woman!’ And at that moment she kicked me.

‘How does that suit you, slave?’ She swung the whip. ‘Get up!’

I was about to rise. ‘No,’ she commanded. ‘On to your knees!’

I obeyed, and she started whipping me.

The lashes fell, strong and swift, upon my back and my arms, each one cut, burning, into my flesh, but the pain ravished me and I felt an ecstasy that they had come from her, the one whom I adored and for whom I was ready to lose my life at any moment.

Now she stopped. ‘I am beginning to find this agreeable,’ she said, ‘but it is enough for one day. I am seized by a devilish curiosity to see how far your strength will last, and by a cruel delight in seeing you tremble beneath my whip, hearing your cries, your groans, until you beg for mercy, and I whip you mercilessly until you lose your senses. You have awoken dangerous tendencies within me. Now get up.’

I seized her hand and tried to press my lips against it.

‘What insolence!’

She kicked me away with her foot.

‘Out of my sight, slave!’

[…]

It is evening. A pretty young maid orders me to appear before my Mistress. I climb up the wide marble steps, go through the vestibule – a large salon, decorated with sumptuous and lavish splendour – and knock at the door of the bedroom. I knock very gently, intimidated by the luxury that surrounds me, and she does not hear me, so I stand for a few minutes outside the door. It seemed as though I were standing before the bedchamber of the great Catherine, as though she would appear at any moment in a green fur négligée, a red medallion on her naked breasts and white, powdered ringlets.

I knocked again. Wanda opened the door impatiently.

‘Why so late?’ she asked.

‘I was standing outside the door; you did not hear my knocking!’ I replied timidly. She closed the door, took my arm, and led me to the red damask ottoman where she had been resting. The whole of the room was done out in red damask, the wallpaper, curtains and the four-poster bed, and on the ceiling was a splendid painting, Samson and Delilah.

Wanda received me in ravishing déshabille : the white satin robe floated lightly and picturesquely around her slim body, revealing her arms and breasts which nestled softly and casually in the dark fur of the large, green velvet jacket trimmed with sable. Her auburn hair, half loose, and held by strings of black pearls, fell down over her back to her hips.

‘Venus in furs,’ I whispered as she pulled me to her bosom and threatened to suffocate me with her kisses. Then I say no more, think no more as everything is drowning in a sea of inexpressible rapture  …

Wanda finally pulled herself gently away and, leaning on one arm, looked at herself. I had sunk to her feet; she pulled me up and played with my hair.

‘Do you still love me?’ she asked, and her eyes were blurred in a sweet intoxication.

‘How can you ask?’ I cried.

‘Do you remember your vow?’ she continued, smiling sweetly. ‘Now that everything is ready I ask you once again: do you really wish to be my slave?’

‘Am I not your slave already?’ I asked, astonished.

‘You have not signed the documents yet.’

‘Documents? What documents?’

‘Ah! I see you’re not interested in it,’ she said. ‘Let’s forget it.’

‘But Wanda,’ I said, ‘you know that there is no greater bliss for me than to serve you, to be your slave, and I would give everything to know that I was in your hands – even my life.’

‘How handsome you are when you are excited, when you speak so passionately!’ she murmured. ‘I am in love with you more than ever before, and how can I be ruthless towards you, cruel and strict? I fear I won’t be able to do it.’

‘I am not worried about it,’ I replied, smiling at her. ‘Where are the documents then?’

‘Here they are,’ she said, pulling them half ashamedly from her bosom, and handing them to me.