It’s been very German around here lately, hasn’t it? Four of the last five posts relate to natives of my host country, and today things take a further turn for the wurst as we visit the ultimate German eccentric of the last, oh, 200 years or so.

It’s hard to know what there is left to say about Bavarian king Ludwig II; Luchino Visconti’s sprawling four-hour 1972 epic Ludwig tells you all you need to know about him (and, frankly, quite a deal more). Ludwig continues to exert a fascination disproportionate to his political achievements and is today better remembered than most of the sabre-rattling Prussians, doughty Saxons and myriad dull princelets of the geo-political patchwork which would, during Ludwig’s reign, form the German Empire.

If you’re not familiar with Ludwig’s CV, here it is in outline. He was born on this day in 1845, and ascended the Bavarian throne in 1864, his subjects initially smitten with the handsome young king. But it soon became apparent Ludwig was more interested in his private obsessions than the drear business of ruling. Chief among the king’s enthusiasms was the composer Richard Wagner, on whom Ludwig lavished state funds.

In 1867, Ludwig was engaged to his cousin Sophie, sister of Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria), but the engagement was broken off, with the real reason – Ludwig’s homosexuality – naturally figuring nowhere in official announcements. Ludwig became ever more withdrawn and stopped taking part in official functions. He spent enormous sums on fanciful palaces, much to the alarm of government officials. In 1886 he was deposed on flimsily substantiated grounds of insanity, and died by drowning a few days after his deposition in circumstances which have never been convincingly explained. The official verdict of murder-suicide (a doctor died with him) remains controversial.

It is those very castles which so distressed his courtiers which have ensured his posthumous legend. Superficially Ludwig and his kindred spirit Sissi may have adopted the frock-coats and crinolines of their more prosperous subjects, like many European royals chastened by almost a century of sporadic proletarian revolt. But both wilfully refused to conform to their roles and used their positions to retreat from the world and its nuisances, to construct their own fantasy kingdoms. “It is essential,” proclaimed Ludwig, “to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live”.

Ludwig’s “sanctuaries” included his imitation of Versailles at Herrenchiemsee, the less literal French Rococo pastiche of Linderhof, and – most famously – the Wagnerian medieval medley of Neuschwanstein, now visited by over a million people a year. His castles in the sky became castles of bricks and mortar, historicist confections removed from their apparent function for a ruler who wanted the trappings of kingship without the grunt work.

The enduring question about Ludwig remains: was he mad? Certainly building a to-scale replica of Versailles, the Death Star of the ancien régime, is something we might rather expect of an unhinged Central African despot than a constitutional monarch. And madness most definitely ran in the family; his brother Otto, for one, was literally barking mad (his impersonation of a dog was among the episodes which prompted his removal from public life).

Ludwig also had an obsessive need for solitude. One example among many: he had an elaborate mechanical table built which meant his food could be served without him coming into contact with servants (cf. Des Esseintes’ arm’s-length relations with the help in J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours). He wished to be gloriously, utterly alone in a nocturnal world with only the ghosts of Wagnerian heroes and French monarchs for company.

All of this, along with his sexuality, was enough to have him labelled insane. But as he protested when confronted with the diagnosis, “How can you declare me insane? After all, you have never seen or examined me before.” A fair, and indeed lucid comment, you’d have to agree, and ultimately Sissi’s description of him as “only an eccentric who lived in a world of ideas” seems the most fitting.

Both Ludwig and Sissi took the abstractions of Romanticism and not only made them reality but practised them at the level of an extreme sport. In so doing they inspired the Decadent writers who furthered the Romantics’ cult of self. Ludwig, particularly, was a shibboleth of French Decadent sensibilities. Apart from Huysmans, Ludwig’s self-imposed exile to the dominion of dreams inspired writers such as Catulle Mendès, Paul Verlaine, Robert de Montesquiou and later Jean Cocteau and Philippe Jullian. Alongside his obvious appeal to such precious spirits, Ludwig arguably served as a prism for their fascination with an absolutism still too contentious to directly engage with in republican France.

In his time and after, Ludwig received numerous epithets, including The Dream King, The Swan King, The Virgin King and – less tactfully – The Mad King. Montesquiou imaginatively labelled him the “13^th Caesar”, but it is the poet’s description of him as Rex Luna which serves him best; not quite lunatic, but driven by compulsions which scorned the light of day, making sense only in the moonlit realm of reverie and illusion.

So after I posted a couple of days ago about Ludwig II I remembered I had some photos kicking around somewhere of the palace Herrenchiemsee and its surrounds which I visited almost 10 years ago.

Situated between Munich and Salzburg, Schloss Herrenchiemsee is a palace on an island in the middle of a lake (Ludwig took his isolation pretty seriously). It was modelled on Versailles and while not quite a replica, various components – the Hall of Mirrors, the Ambassadors’ Staircase and much of the façade – are faithfully reproduced. This is architecture as drag – a playback of past styles, deracinated, too perfect, gloriously bogus. No less ersatz, of course, than the Louis the Umpteenth furniture used as a signifier of wealth and sophistication by expensive hotels and dull rich people to this day, but on a scale which reflected Ludwig’s obsessive devotion to his beloved Bourbons.

Work began in 1878 but was abandoned seven years later; one wing had been partially built and was subsequently demolished. The fact that Ludwig wasn’t able to complete his homage makes it all the more fascinating (note the unfinished windows in the photo above). One room in high Rococo style dominated by a vast porcelain chandelier adjoins a huge unfinished space with bare brick walls and floorboards which a realtor would describe as a “Manhattan loft-style live-work unit”.

Sadly I wasn’t allowed to photograph the interior but hopefully these photos evoke something of the spirit of the place.

Oh, you lucky, lucky people. Something very special is about to happen to your ears.

British art critic Brian Sewell, whose exotic parentage we explored late last year, was interviewed on BBC Radio about his passion for everyone’s favourite dead Bavarian, King Ludwig II. Hearing those extraordinary vowels work themselves around the idiosyncrasies of the Dream King is a pleasure of rare refinement. For me, learning that the child Ludwig claimed he couldn’t enjoy his food unless his hair was curled was a highlight, but there is no shortage of riches. Enjoy!

Audio: Brian Sewell on Ludwig II

The role of Bavarian king Ludwig II is a gift for any film actor. With lots of solo screen time you can really let loose with the anguished soliloquies and tempestuous mad scenes. You also get to show your range as you age up from the beautiful young king to the bloated Ludwig of later years (unless you get someone else in). There’s some pretty fancy scenery to chew as you wander distractedly through sumptuous reception rooms to a Wagner soundtrack, pausing for a bit of fruity eye contact with the help before succumbing to a violent death. The exact circumstances of that last scene (which occurred on this day in 1886) are still unknown so you can play it any way you like. Really, go nuts.

Ludwig is back at the end of this year in a new German production, a hundred years since his first film appearance, more or less. Here are ten milestones of the Bavarian king’s cinematic century:

Richard Wagner (1913)

Regarded as the first feature-length bio-pic, Richard Wagner was made to mark the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. We know how the Nazis later appropriated his music, but the fate of two figures associated with the film is also illuminating: Jewish actor Ernst Reicher, who played Ludwig, was forced to emigrate in 1933, while director Carl Froelich, who also made the first German sound film Die Nacht gehört uns, would end up as the Nazis’ head of film.

Das Schweigen am Starnbergersee (1920)

In the first film centred on Ludwig, the king was played by Martin Wilhelm (young) and Ferdinand Bonn (old). The title (“The silence on Starnbergersee”) alludes to the scene of Ludwig’s mysterious death, dramatically depicted above. The following year director Rolf Raffé made a film about Ludwig’s cousin Sissi, which featured the Austrian Empress’s niece and confidant, Countess Larisch, as herself.

Ein königlicher Sonderling (1922)

“A royal eccentric” in English, this was an Austrian production, with the king played by the wonderfully named yet not at all Scandinavian Olaf Fjord. Director Otto Kreisler made his last film in 1925 which was also, incidentally, Anita Berber‘s last film.

Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern. Schicksal eines unglücklichen Menschen (1930)

A late silent film, “Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria. Fate of an unfortunate man” was the translated title of this depiction whose script closely followed the king’s life. A little too closely, it seems; it was banned outright in Bavaria and only seen in a mangled, censored version elsewhere in Germany. The film features Max Schreck who terrified a generation in Nosferatu, while Wilhelm Dieterle directed and starred, later enjoying a successful Hollywood career in both those capacities.

Ludwig II. – Glanz und Ende eines Königs (1955)

The first Ludwig for a quarter-century was subtitled “glory and end of a king” and became the most successful German film of 1955, the same year which brought the first of three films presenting an idealised version of Ludwig’s cousin, Sissi. The script for Helmut Käutner’s film was submitted to surviving members of the Wittelsbach dynasty in exchange for permission to film in private locations. O.W. Fischer was the king and as for his even madder brother Otto…hmmm…a German post-war actor specialising in ostentatious mania? It could only be Klaus Kinski.

Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (1972)

This “requiem for a virgin king” was directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and starred Harry Baer who penned a biography of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as well as appearing in a number of his fims. The divine Ingrid Caven, another long-time Fassbinder collaborator, was also on board. This wasn’t a conventional bio-pic by any means, but a stylised collision of history and fiction. Syberberg returned to Ludwig the following year for a television programme which looked at the king’s palaces through the eyes of the court cook.

Ludwig (1972)

Syberberg’s ambitious Requiem was poorly timed, coming out the same year as the pinnacle of Ludovican cinema. Visconti’s vast four-hour study is exhaustive and exhausting, though shorter, unsympathetically cut versions have been released over the years. It wasn’t universally admired, The New York Times‘ Vincent Canby calling it “opera buffa that doesn’t know it” with “an air of self-importance that it doesn’t deserve”. Ludwig is played by Visconti’s then lover Helmut Berger while Romy Schneider is his cousin Sissi, successfully exorcising her previous portrayals of the empress.

Wagner (1983)

Hungarian actor Lászlo Gálffi played Wagner’s royal patron, but really, who’s going to remember him in a Luvvie Olympics which included John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier and – as the composer himself – Richard Burton? Feast on the scenery, because the cast certainly did! Wagner was supposed to be a feature film but as the running time swelled to Ring-like proportions it was divided into episodes for television broadcast.

Ludwig 1881 (1992)

Just as Romy Schneider relished the opportunity to deconstruct Sissi in Visconti’s Ludwig, Helmut Berger unfolded without Visconti’s domineering presence in this rich, contemplative film. It depicts Ludwig’s journey through Switzerland in the company of actor Josef Kainz, who plays the king’s favourite parts from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in historic locations. Ludwig 1881 benefits from concentrating on a limited time span rather than the whole of the king’s life.

Ludwig II. (2012)

Newcomer Sabin Tambrea is the titular king and Sebastian Schipper his older self in this film due out after Christmas. It’s been shot on location in the king’s fanciful palaces, and promises to highlight the young monarch’s cultural sophistication and forward-thinking ideals with direction by Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr, who was responsible for a 1993 study of Kaspar Hauser.

We may laugh at the prudery and hypocrisy of Victorian England, but Belle Époque France was little better. Reputations were dragged into the press and left bloodied and twitching, but as long as the perpetrator observed a minimum of decorum – that is, if victim and assailant were unidentified, even though enough details were supplied to make their identity clear – all was well. It was a pantomime in which each player wore a mask bearing their own features.

For his most scathing takedowns, Jean Lorrain (already a pseudonym) used further pen-names while popularising the blind item in use to this day. Duly camouflaged, he advanced on the arriviste, the gauche, the démodé. Even Lorrain’s literary criticism was peppered with personal attacks and his novels crowded with barely fictionalised versions of his prey.

But these defilements were not without consequence; numerous victims of his fictional and journalistic works fought back. In 1896 an actress by the name of Madame Bob Walter, slighted by one of Lorrain’s articles, launched a vicious physical assault. This time however the writer won the public’s sympathy and it was this incident which first brought him fame well beyond the chattering classes of Paris. Depending on which report you believe, the tireless Mme Walter followed up her attack by sending either faecal matter or used sanitary napkins in the post. Suffice to say it was something one would sooner not find on the end of one’s letter opener.

Even a positive write-up by Lorrain was not always welcome: as Philippe Jullian says “he soon gained a reputation for being a fearsome enemy and a compromising friend, because his praise had an air of complicity”. It’s impossible to understand Jean Lorrain without acknowledging his self-loathing. He excoriated himself as “abnormal…a fool…prey to only the most ignoble instincts”. A masochistic streak led him to provoke the ire of those he admired as much as the objects of his disdain. Mathilde de Morny was of the former category. She sensibly mistrusted him (calling him “a man who is never satisfied with the abyss”) and, as we saw, almost faced him in a duel.

Others were provoked to the same conclusion, including fellow Fécampois Guy de Maupassant, who was more or less a family friend, and Claude Debussy. Even Paul Verlaine sent his seconds, and Lorrain was avowedly a fan of the aging poète maudit. In fact it was only Mme Walter’s onslaught which prevented him from attending his funeral.

But Lorrain couldn’t dodge the bullet forever. In 1897 Lorrain wrote a dismissive review of Marcel Proust’s first novel which additionally alluded to the author’s private affairs and sexual tastes – tastes which, naturally, Lorrain shared. Proust demanded satisfaction, and so the diseased, ether-soaked reprobate and the hypersensitive, asthmatic recluse squared off in a field (in fact Proust fought at least half a dozen duels in his life; for a wheezy shut-in the bitch was fierce). Shot followed shot, each wide of the mark, honour was satisfied and it wasn’t until half a century later, at the Lifar-Cuevas set-to, that two more unlikely dueling opponents faced each other.

Lorrain’s anguished relations with his exact contemporary Robert de Montesquiou perfectly illustrate his gift for alienating potential allies. In 1886 the count had refused a dedication in one of Lorrain’s volumes of poetry. Wounded, Lorrain petulantly labelled him “Grotesquiou” but he was conscious that he could never compete with the poet’s slim elegance. In fact with his own dandyish affectations, Lorrain was described by one associate as “the poor man’s Montesquiou”. It’s a contrast Philippe Jullian plays up in his respective biographies of the two men (Montesquiou is “prince 1900” to Lorrain’s “Satiricon 1900”). Lorrain’s hatred was exacerbated, claims Jullian, “by the assurance of having more talent and the fear of having less taste.”

Sarah Bernhardt had to step in to halt hostilities, but they flared anew when Lorrain asserted that Montesquiou had used his cane to beat women out of the way to escape a blaze at the Bazar de la Charité in 1897 (which also claimed Sissi’s sister). In fact, the count had been nowhere near the fire. Lorrain couldn’t resist Montesquiou’s magnetism for long, and would return in his 1901 novel Monsieur de Phocas which borrowed from the count, just as Huysmans had done and Proust would later do.

As the century wore down to its nub the demands of living down to his own standards had left Lorrain exhausted. As well as regular stints of rehab in the Pyrenees he journeyed farther and more frequently and in so doing essentially established an itinerary for the gay man of letters with Decadent sensibilities. He was one of the first Western writers, for instance, to seek sensual respite in the Maghreb. He visited Capri, and although that island’s most notorious resident Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen was not at home, Lorrain caught up with him in Venice, where he shared his debauches. Lorrain went on to visit the historicist creations of Ludwig II, a hero to the French Decadents.

In 1900, a newspaper announced that Lorrain was to marry courtesan Liane de Pougy, whose career he had done much to advance. But there was only room in his life for one woman, his widowed mother who lived with him and fussed over him as she had over the young sickly Paul. Mme Duval was far happier with her son’s patronage of telegraph boys and stevedores than the rivalry of another woman, no matter how lavender the marriage. In any case Lorrain broke with the capital, moving to Nice, which he called the “city of refuge for those with compromised health, damaged reputations, finished talents”.

Even former allies were turning away. J.K. Huysmans, now in monastic seclusion, refused to act as character witness for Lorrain in a defamation case involving the artist Jeanne Jacquemin. One wonders if Huysmans’ embrace of Catholicism wasn’t first triggered by the shock of seeing the demonic creatures of his imagination come to life as Lorrain celebrated the launch of his novel Là-bas with a party, which he attended in drag accompanied by Lucifers, de Sades, Sapphos and hemaphrodites.

Bitter, absurd, Lorrain was now himself feeling démodé, and lashed out at the young. Ill his whole life, by 1905 he was already signing his works “The Cadaver”. On a trip to Paris in 1907, in a turn of events his more moralising enemies may have found satisfyingly apt, Jean Lorrain died after an enema went wrong and punctured his colon. His last words: “You have defeated me, Paris!”

Sadly only one of Jean Lorrain’s books is readily available in English: Monsieur de Phocas, published by the wonderful Dedalus Books, who have done so much to expand the Anglophone reader’s appreciation of continental Decadence. Meanwhile the ideal starting point for French speakers wishing to explore the writer’s life and works is the exhaustive jeanlorrain.net.

So I’ve noticed it’s been quite German around here lately, and you know what, I’m just going to run with it. I am very favourably disposed towards my adoptive home now that it’s finally made with the summer. Nine months of winter, a near total absence of cheddar and the most perversely difficult language this side of the Basque country – all of it is forgiven after one swim in the Liepnitzsee.

Speaking of German lakes…(Doctor Smooth Segue is on duty), we saw last month that there is a new film about Bavarian king and noted drowner Ludwig II due out later this year, crowning a century of Ludovican cinema. A teaser trailer has been released, which frankly raises more questions than it answers. While at first (quick) glance it seems at least free of the bloodless box-ticking that characterises many a German historical recreation, it also seems curiously wide of the mark. If you didn’t know the fairy tale king was a fairy you’d never know from this short outing (as it were). Maybe the filmmakers are worried that regal man-on-man action won’t help the film play in whatever the German equivalent of Peoria is.

Anyway, have a look at the trailer here (sorry, I can’t embed it). There’s no dialogue except for Ludwig’s utterance at the end, a variation on his stated wish to remain “ein ewig Rätsel” (“an eternal mystery”).

Update: embedded video below:

Strange Flowers gots mad luv for L2. This example comes from August 2010, as does this snowbound trek around one of his palaces. Brian Sewell definitely gots mad luv as evidenced by this interview, and the camera can’t get enough of the Bavarian king as you can discover here and here.

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It’s been very German around here lately, hasn’t it? Four of the last five posts relate to natives of my host country, and today things take a further turn for the wurst as we visit the ultimate German eccentric of the last, oh, 200 years or so.

It’s hard to know what there is left to say about Bavarian king Ludwig II; Luchino Visconti’s sprawling four-hour 1972 epic Ludwig tells you all you need to know about him (and, frankly, quite a deal more). Ludwig continues to exert a fascination disproportionate to his political achievements and is today better remembered than most of the sabre-rattling Prussians, doughty Saxons and myriad dull princelets of the geo-political patchwork which would, during Ludwig’s reign, form the German Empire.

If you’re not familiar with Ludwig’s CV, here it is in outline. He was born on this day in 1845, and ascended the Bavarian throne in 1864, his subjects initially smitten with the handsome young king. But it soon became apparent Ludwig was more interested in his private obsessions than the drear business of ruling. Chief among the king’s enthusiasms was the composer Richard Wagner, on whom Ludwig lavished state funds.

In 1867, Ludwig was engaged to his cousin Sophie, sister of Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria), but the engagement was broken off, with the real reason – Ludwig’s homosexuality – naturally figuring nowhere in official announcements. Ludwig became ever more withdrawn and stopped taking part in official functions. He spent enormous sums on fanciful palaces, much to the alarm of government officials. In 1886 he was deposed on flimsily substantiated grounds of insanity, and died by drowning a few days after his deposition in circumstances which have never been convincingly explained. The official verdict of murder-suicide (a doctor died with him) remains controversial.

It is those very castles which so distressed his courtiers which have ensured his posthumous legend. Superficially Ludwig and his kindred spirit Sissi may have adopted the frock-coats and crinolines of their more prosperous subjects, like many European royals chastened by almost a century of sporadic proletarian revolt. But both wilfully refused to conform to their roles and used their positions to retreat from the world and its nuisances, to construct their own fantasy kingdoms. “It is essential,” proclaimed Ludwig, “to create such paradises, such poetical sanctuaries where one can forget for a while the dreadful age in which we live”.

Ludwig’s “sanctuaries” included his imitation of Versailles at Herrenchiemsee, the less literal French Rococo pastiche of Linderhof, and – most famously – the Wagnerian medieval medley of Neuschwanstein, now visited by over a million people a year. His castles in the sky became castles of bricks and mortar, historicist confections removed from their apparent function for a ruler who wanted the trappings of kingship without the grunt work.

The enduring question about Ludwig remains: was he mad? Certainly building a to-scale replica of Versailles, the Death Star of the ancien régime, is something we might rather expect of an unhinged Central African despot than a constitutional monarch. And madness most definitely ran in the family; his brother Otto, for one, was literally barking mad (his impersonation of a dog was among the episodes which prompted his removal from public life).

Ludwig also had an obsessive need for solitude. One example among many: he had an elaborate mechanical table built which meant his food could be served without him coming into contact with servants (cf. Des Esseintes’ arm’s-length relations with the help in J.K. Huysmans’ A Rebours). He wished to be gloriously, utterly alone in a nocturnal world with only the ghosts of Wagnerian heroes and French monarchs for company.

All of this, along with his sexuality, was enough to have him labelled insane. But as he protested when confronted with the diagnosis, “How can you declare me insane? After all, you have never seen or examined me before.” A fair, and indeed lucid comment, you’d have to agree, and ultimately Sissi’s description of him as “only an eccentric who lived in a world of ideas” seems the most fitting.

Both Ludwig and Sissi took the abstractions of Romanticism and not only made them reality but practised them at the level of an extreme sport. In so doing they inspired the Decadent writers who furthered the Romantics’ cult of self. Ludwig, particularly, was a shibboleth of French Decadent sensibilities. Apart from Huysmans, Ludwig’s self-imposed exile to the dominion of dreams inspired writers such as Catulle Mendès, Paul Verlaine, Robert de Montesquiou and later Jean Cocteau and Philippe Jullian. Alongside his obvious appeal to such precious spirits, Ludwig arguably served as a prism for their fascination with an absolutism still too contentious to directly engage with in republican France.

In his time and after, Ludwig received numerous epithets, including The Dream King, The Swan King, The Virgin King and – less tactfully – The Mad King. Montesquiou imaginatively labelled him the “13^th Caesar”, but it is the poet’s description of him as Rex Luna which serves him best; not quite lunatic, but driven by compulsions which scorned the light of day, making sense only in the moonlit realm of reverie and illusion.

Sissi (Elisabeth) and Ludwig II should need no introduction to regular readers. The Austrian empress and the Bavarian king were cousins and – as we see below – might have been in-laws as well if Ludwig hadn’t broken off his engagement with Sissi’s sister Sophie. But even greater than bonds of blood and wedlock was their shared sensibility – wilful, reclusive, eccentric, otherworldly. This as much as what they did or said or created is what inspired writers and artists of their own and later ages, and it is above all these secret legacies which I have tried to map here. This requires some abridgment – see here, for example, for the full rundown of Ludwig-inspired cinema – but hopefully it captures the royal cousins’ major points of psychic intersection with kindred spirits.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Sissi on horseback, Anselm Kiefer | Elisabeth(s), The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan, Sissi & Romy (incl. Romy Schneider), Phantom of the empire, Dress-down Friday: Sissi (Sissi)
Rex Luna, Let them eat kuchen, Sewell on Ludwig, Ludwig at the movies, An eternal mystery (Ludwig)
Thin white archduke, Ludwig-Viktor-Gasse (Archduke Ludwig Viktor)
Places: Miramare (a whole Habsburg clusterfumble)
Places: Vittorialie degli italiani, D’Annunzio’s Cave (Gabriele d’Annunzio)
The countess in the afterlife, A Casati family tree, A Casati picture gallery, Casati continues to captivate…, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 3, Requiem for a Marchesa, Dress-down Friday: Marchesa Casati (Marchesa Casati)
Dress-down Friday: Robert de Montesquiou, Places: Palais Rose, Le Vésinet (incl. Casati), The hands of Robert de Montesquiou, A Lorrain special, part 2 (Robert de Montesquiou)
Dress-down Friday: Bibi-la-Purée, Verlaine’s funeral, Strange Flowers guide to London: part 2 (Paul Verlaine)

Gustaf Gründgens, Erika Mann, Pamela Wedekind, Klaus Mann

This latest instalment of my bloody-minded exercise in making semi-legible diagrams of semi-marginal figures in cultural history was inspired by the above photo, posted on paris/berlin. It shows Erika and Klaus Mann, the eldest of German novelist Thomas Mann’s six children, with actors Gustaf Gründgens and Pamela Wedekind. As the caption notes, “At the time of this photo, Erika was engaged to Gustaf but was having an affair with Pamela, who was engaged to marry Klaus, who was romantically involved with Gustaf.” Also they were appearing in a play, Anja und Esther, which was written by Klaus and was based on the affair between Erika and Pamela.

Got that?

Klaus, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Erika and Ricki Hallgarten, shortly before the latter’s suicide.

Andrea Weiss’s highly recommended 2008 book In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain tells the story of the two inseparable Mann siblings, their committed anti-fascism and years of exile from Nazi Germany along with the dense web of connections they shared. These include Klaus’s numerous lovers, the astonishing collection of people living at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights in the 1940s, as well as Erika’s lavender marriages and late-life switcheroo to unfeigned heterosexuality. Both Pamela and Erika, daughters of famous writers, ended up with men of approximately their fathers’ age. And along with all these real-world relations there were fictional variations on the same themes, including the aforementioned Anja und Esther and Klaus Mann’s most famous work, Mephisto. When it comes to the Manns (it’s hard to resist writing “the Menn”), a diagram can only be a gross simplification, but here is my attempt.

click through for a more legible view

Further reading
Faustian act (Gustaf, Erika, Klaus and Mephisto)
Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 2 (Gustaf Gründgens)
Ravaged angel, Three shows, Strange Flowers guide to Berlin: part 4, Schwarzenbach in English, Annemarie Schwarzenbach | The South, 1937, A life spent searching, Pearls: Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Death in Persia (Annemarie Schwarzenbach)
Pearls: René Crevel
Rex Luna, Let them eat kuchen, Sewell on Ludwig, Ludwig at the movies, An eternal mystery, Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi (Ludwig II)

Ludwig, eager to get his hands on Dick

As you’ve doubtless realised, today is the 200th birthday of Richard Wagner. Last year in a survey of movies about Wagner’s royal patron, Bavarian King Ludwig II, I mentioned the first biopic of the German composer, which was in fact the first biopic of anyone. It was made by director Carl Froelich to mark Wagner’s centenary in 1913. Wagner himself had died 30 years previously but his widow Cosima was very much alive and the Bavarian monarchy still, technically, in place, with Ludwig’s brother Otto its deranged, titular head.

It appears that there is a case for regarding Froelich’s creation as the very first feature film, with a then unprecedented run time of 80 minutes. However due to Cosima’s vehement opposition to the project it was accompanied not by a Wagner score but – in a truly impressive piece of method acting – a pastiche of the composer’s music written by the actor who plays him, Giuseppe Becce. Tonight the film is being presented in Baden-Baden with an orchestral arrangement of Becce’s para-Wagnerian accompaniment (to be broadcast on Arte if you happen to be in Germany or France).

Meanwhile, here is the silent original of Richard Wagner (and apologies for the puerile title…I’m going to sit in a corner and read this high-minded work of Wagnerian scholarship as penance):

“How about we cool off?”

Further reading
Rex Luna
Let them eat kuchen
Sewell on Ludwig
Ludwig at the movies
An eternal mystery
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
First Dick on film

In honour of the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Horse which begins today, here is a look at some of our favourite strange flowers in equestrian elegance mode.  There’s Renée Sintenis (again), Hermann Pückler-Muskau in an early drag race with a coach, while Lord Berners, ever the individualist, has decided to paint rather than ride his mount. Sissi‘s imperial sidesaddle glamour could never be encompassed by just one post; find more here.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Count D’Orsay

Lady Hester Stanhope

Gabriele d’Annunzio

Renée Sintenis

Lord Berners

H.D.

Ludwig II

Natalie Barney

Hermann von Pückler-Muskau

Sissi

Oh if only it were evening already, the sun set, the moon risen, the stars shining as a sign that bliss was weaving its way!

Further reading
Rex Luna
Let them eat kuchen
Sewell on Ludwig
Ludwig at the movies
An eternal mystery
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
First Dick on film

Oh, you lucky, lucky people. Something very special is about to happen to your ears.

British art critic Brian Sewell, whose exotic parentage we explored late last year, was interviewed on BBC Radio about his passion for everyone’s favourite dead Bavarian, King Ludwig II. Hearing those extraordinary vowels work themselves around the idiosyncrasies of the Dream King is a pleasure of rare refinement. For me, learning that the child Ludwig claimed he couldn’t enjoy his food unless his hair was curled was a highlight, but there is no shortage of riches. Enjoy!

Audio: Brian Sewell on Ludwig II

In 1923, Marlene Dietrich appeared in one of her very first films, Der Mensch am Wege (The Man at the Wayside), a movie that also marked the directorial debut of Wilhelm Dieterle.

At the start of the following decade the paths of Dietrich and Dieterle, while not crossing, certainly ran in parallel. Their respective 1930 films – The Blue Angel and Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern (Ludwig the Second, King of Bavaria) – premiered in Berlin within a month of each other. Ludwig the Second, which Dieterle both directed and starred in, was included in a programme of the recent Berlinale film festival that highlighted lesser-known contributions to Weimar-era cinema. Comparing it with Josef von Sternberg’s far more acclaimed Blue Angel, rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece of the era, reveals stark contrasts but also some fascinating commonalities. Particularly interesting is their differing responses to cinema techniques then undergoing rapid change, while the fractious time in which they emerged is reflected in the converging and diverging destinies of their makers.

Both The Blue Angel and Ludwig the Second reach back in time for their source material; Sternberg’s film to Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat, originally published in 1905, Dieterle’s to events in the life of the notoriously eccentric Bavarian king half a century in the past, a time still within living memory but on the cusp of becoming ‘historic’. Considering it had a pre-packaged narrative at its disposal it is surprising to note that The Blue Angel took greater liberties with its source, turning Mann’s critique of society into the minutely chronicled downfall of a single figure who transgresses that society’s codes.

Ludwig the Second aimed for veracity, using psychological assessments, official documents and Ludwig’s diaries to offer a plausible reconstruction of his decline and death, and filming on location in the monarch’s famous castles – Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee. The film’s fault, it appears, was to have followed the facts a little too closely. Such was its candour, not only about the nature of Ludwig’s oddities but the perfidy of his courtiers as well, that the film was banned in Bavaria, and even in the rest of Germany it was ruthlessly edited. Ludwig’s fifth cinematic outing (I have recently discovered another to add to this list) was in fact an outing, more or less – Ludwig’s sexuality is certainly broadly hinted at. In one charged yet enigmatic scene Ludwig wrangles with a handsome manservant while admiring some Greek statuettes; at the end he appears to have paid off the servant off with a watch.

Of course the erotic disgrace of the protagonist is far more germane to The Blue Angel, with the hapless Professor Raat falling for Dietrich’s Lola Lola, a feckless, frank-talking showgirl. Like the king, the professor has much of his persona invested in the dignity of his station. The deference with which Lola’s producer originally greets Raat, although not entirely free of irony, reflects German respect for academic attainments which if anything increased with the decline of the aristocracy. But the respective compulsions of Ludwig and Raat pull them in different directions; Raat descends to the artistic demi-monde while Ludwig ascends to the mountains, to his fantasy castles, into an absolutism of his imagination where the bourgeois parliament has no power over him or, in particular, his building programme. His peers were not to be found among the cohort of his day, but dead French monarchs with whom he dines in delusional splendour.

The most obvious differences between the films are in technique. The Blue Angel is not just a talkie, it talks in German and English in two separate versions. This gives it a directness that is magnified by Dietrich’s performance, which even now seems astonishingly real, rounded and unfiltered; certainly we never doubt Lola’s fleshly existence. Updating Mann’s novel to more or less the time the film was made meant audiences were seeing a world that was at least theoretically if not socially accessible to them. This realism turns remorseless in its depiction of Professor Raat (or ‘Unrat’ – garbage – to his students). We have an hour in his company until he pledges his troth to Lola, and we are invited to pore over his pomposity, awkwardness and loneliness at length. His ultimate humiliation is almost unbearable.

Ludwig the Second, meanwhile, is a late silent, which on the showing I caught had excellent piano accompaniment by Günther Buchwald which included – what else? – Wagnerian motifs. But with its acting styles already transforming, and spare use of intertitles, it is not so much silent as mute. The modernity here is largely visual – Dieterle’s film is far more mobile and vital than a sequence of set pieces. Especially impressive are the early use of montage effects with kaleidoscopic layering of images and sometimes text. We begin by breezing through a collage of the monarch’s early years, the hot young king flashing by in official portraits before the action begins and we encounter Ludwig well into his portly demise. It feels strange to talk of naturalism in this context, or with this personality, but Dieterle brings an awkward humanity to the role. Despite operatic touches toward the end, there is nothing to match the eye-bulging kabuki excesses of silent movies just a few years prior. One patently fake alpine backdrop viewed from the portico of Neuschwanstein jars at first, until it becomes apparent that we are inside Ludwig’s imagination as his beloved Richard Wagner, now dead, comes down the mountainside toward him as if descending the stairs at Wahnfried.

The death of the films’ respective protagonists comes from psychological collapse brought about by public humiliation. The end of Dieterle’s film, which finds Ludwig and his physician expiring in the Starnberger See, is no more able to satisfactorily explain how two able-bodied men could drown in waist-deep water in daylight than posterity. Emil Jannings’ professor, meanwhile, unravels as he is exposed to the mockery of his hometown, the faithlessness of his new wife, the crushing awareness of what he has relinquished.

What did these films say about their era? Is it overly fanciful to read the anxieties of the time in Ludwig’s thrashing, Professor Raat’s dying grasp? Certainly the scandal that attended each suggested they had touched a nerve. Nazi organ Völkischer Beobachter criticised both films, and naturally it didn’t escape the writers’ attention that their respective directors were Jewish. They, and Dietrich, left a Germany already on its descent into barbarism for the US; Dietrich famously signed up with Paramount the day The Blue Angel premiered. She made a string of successful films with Sternberg before reuniting with Dieterle for the 1944 film Kismet. All three enjoyed fruitful careers into late life, while Emil Jannings came to a Mephisto-esque accommodation with the Nazi regime and never recovered from the association after the war.

Further reading
Rex Luna
Let them eat kuchen
Sewell on Ludwig
Ludwig at the movies
An eternal mystery
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
First Dick on film
Pearls: Ludwig II
Meanwhile, on Starnberger See…

Władziu Valentino Liberace was born 100 years ago today. On this august occasion I commend to your attention the video below, Tony Palmer’s documentary about the colossally successful entertainer and genial anarch of taste which was filmed in 1972 and released three years later under the title The World of Liberace.

Many years ago, for reasons I am powerless to explain, I succumbed to a fascination with Liberace that bordered on obsession. In a box in Sydney, or on some lucky person’s bookshelf, there is a trove of Liberaceana that includes cookbooks, coffee table volumes of his interiors and the catalogue from the auction of his estate, an eye-popping collision of museum-quality antiques and… oddments. And by oddments I mean the trashiest dust magnets imaginable (yes thank you I will have an original Louis XV escritoire and a two-dollar cut-glass gewgaw that Lee picked up in an airport gift shop). These editions shared shelf space with books on Ludwig II’s castles, William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon and other fearless examples of performative excess. It wasn’t that I wished to inhabit all that post-taste abundance myself, I just found some indefinable solace in contemplating what it might look like. Since then I have been drawn to other similarly singular and profligate figures, and with time and distance it has become easier to recognise the elective affinities of ornament, profusion and tragedy that bind them, an exalted lineage of maximalist presentation constituting a Long Gilded Age.

As it happens, both Ludwig and Hearst turn up in The World of Liberace. Liberace had copies made of furniture and artwork from San Simeon; that is, copies of what was already a miscellany of uprooted European styles and epochs (in much the same spirit as Lee airily referring to one of his own bedrooms as “French Victorian”). And as the film captures Liberace tenderly frigging the shaft of a candelabra that once belonged to Ludwig II, we have left camp way, way behind us and are witness instead to the exalted communion of kindred sensibilities. Where the French Decadents, say, took literary inspiration from the Bavarian king, Liberace backed his rhinestone-encrusted Roadster up to Neuschwanstein and simply helped himself to the fittings.

Henry Cyril Paget

Outside we join Lee on the terrace overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and he proudly indicates the outdoor carpet and the hidden heaters (in your face, nature), evoking the free-spending Edwardian aristocrat performer Henry Cyril Paget, Marquess of Anglesey who had burning braziers dotted about his estate for his nocturnal strolls. Like Liberace, Paget owned furs by the rack, numerous dogs and a fleet of cars, although even Lee would probably have balked at scenting his car’s exhaust with perfume as the Marquess did. Paget spent a fortune on fleeting theatrical enchantments but never sought nor won widespread acclaim. The two men shared a fondness for jewelled costumes but where Liberace had a tireless work ethic Paget merely had entitlement, squandering his inheritance rather than labouring for his rewards. Exiled, almost bankrupt, he was still ordering big-ticket items on his death bed.

Magician The Great Lafayette died in a stage fire before Liberace was born – his charred corpse identified by his rings – but there are clear parallels. Like Liberace, Lafayette (born Sigmund Neuburger) was a hugely successful performer from an immigrant family, was known for his elaborate bejewelled costumes and frequent changing thereof and even drove a car on stage. His house in London was filled with antiques and shared with canine company.

The Great Lafayette

Liberace almost died for his art, or at least from it. The day John F. Kennedy was shot he had accidentally inhaled fumes from his newly dry-cleaned costumes and suffered kidney failure so acute he was given the last rites. Like Paget, his first (or last) instinct was to shop, although not for himself, instead spending lavishly on gifts for friends and family.

Although little-known outside his native Turkey, dog-loving singer Zeki Müren was probably the most direct legatee of Liberace’s visual presentation. He arguably went even further with his costumes, and in a far more conservative environment. He too met his end onstage; during a 1996 television special dedicated to his career in showbiz he was presented with the first microphone he ever used, a sentimental gesture that brought on a fatal heart attack. Less direct reflections of Liberace can be seen in the ruffly end of Carnaby Street, the immoderation of Elton John, the not-quite-drag of Sylvester, the trio of Prince, Madonna and to a lesser extent Michael Jackson c. 1985, Versace, hip hop bling and most recently Cardi B and her spangled piano.

Zeki Müren

One quaint insight from the film is how maladroit celebrities used to be before they became accustomed to constant surveillance. We watch a stilted Liberace fingering his organ, cooking lasagne, showing off his cars, introducing his numerous dogs. It’s difficult to dislike a man so devoted to his fur friends (conversely I’m about 20 pages into a door-stop biography of Stefan George and he’s already kicked a dog and frankly I don’t know if I can bear to spend another 800 pages in his company. Prick). We are privy to Liberace’s interiors which are as extraordinary as you would imagine; he wouldn’t so much buy and furnish a house as he would construct a Liberace theme park of which he was the sole patron. We also watch him working out new stage outfits with his comically staid costumier; for one black number they settle on black jewels, because “anything else would be ostentatious.” Heaven forbid.

This domestic portrait is intercut with concert footage. That includes a truly unexpected spoken-word anti-war mash-up of Pete Seeger and Dvořák  – and this was at the height of the Vietnam War. And remember that for all the stage patter and the occasional torch song, Liberace was in fact essentially a non-vocal soloist, one of the most successful of all time.

Of course as well as Liberace’s spiritual family he had an actual family. His pushy father was a musician who wanted Liberace and his brother to devote themselves to the classics rather than the ragtime and other popular styles to which they were increasingly drawn. Thankfully he was not as extreme in his discipline as, say, Lang Lang’s father who, when the nine-year-old budding pianist was dropped by his teacher, apparently proffered a bottle of pills and told him to kill himself.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

But the most remarkable presentiment of Liberace’s destiny came through his beloved Polish-American mother. His middle name Valentino was testament to her love for the silent movie star, but even more significantly she had contact with the pianist, composer and Polish national hero Ignacy Jan Paderewski, whom Liberace met when he was eight. At the late 19th-century height of his fame Paderewski exerted an influence on audiences, particularly women, that was said to be demonic. Unsurprisingly Chopin was a great influence on Liberace as well, particularly the Hollywood version of the composer in the 1945 film A Song to Remember, which inspired Liberace’s trademark piano-top candelabra.

For some time this remained the only embellishment in his act, but soon Liberace added jewels to his evening wear, transgressing the swishy code of the time; a natty bow-tie and a fastidious manner were fine but discretion was all. In his utter disavowal of taste, restraint or proportion, Liberace offered little by way of plausible deniability, although he still stepped out with compliant beards. His true self was hiding behind the candelabra. And a candelabra really doesn’t conceal much.

In an age of plaintive acoustic authenticity, before irony became an obligatory element of the modern sophisticate’s personality, Liberace’s candied cascade of sentimental patter and syrupy fingering was naturally anathema. But earnest critique was tribute withheld in a currency that Liberace didn’t recognise anyway. As one of his mercilessly repeated lines put it – “I cried all the way to the bank”. The abiding impression of Liberace is of someone essentially warm, wise and good, his smile as much a trademark as the laugh of his friend Phyllis Diller, their habitual self-deprecation built on a bedrock of self-possession. They were both devotees of one of the first self-help authors, Claude M. Bristol. This, as much as the vast reach of network variety TV and the post-war rise of Las Vegas as an entertainment hub, was instrumental in Liberace’s success.

And – although this point is impossible to make without risking condescension – he introduced millions to classical music who were otherwise largely estranged from it. He never claimed to be Vladimir Horowitz, but then could Vladimir Horowitz play 16-to-the-bar boogie woogie? Would Alfred Brendel have tap-danced in plus-fours? Was Glenn Gould given to a high-kick in stars-and-stripes sequined shorts? Please, he’d catch his death. And it’s not like Liberace was doing the Goldberg Variations, instead the classical portion of his shows stuck largely to Romantic repertoire. Is it even possible to overdo Tchaikovsky at his most bombastic? And take Liberace’s beloved Chopin. Along with immortal works for the keyboard there are truly horrible moments, like the Étude no. 1. It already sounds like an overblown parody of the dynamic range of Romanticism, so what’s to ruin? Liberace certainly knew which composers offered him the most wriggle room.

Liberace was – is – known for the devotion of his fans. Much of the snobbery attached to him was indirectly targeting his audience; the fact that women of a certain age adored him was tendered as proof of his mediocrity. It also offered critics the satisfaction of pointing out the apparent disconnect between Liberace’s evident sexuality and the love of his female audience. These women, they thought, just don’t get it. But of course they got it. They just didn’t care.

His appeal was a fusion of attraction and identification. On the one hand he inhabited the role of the walker – the fragrant, presentable bachelor companion for older wealthy women to take to their sickle cell anaemia awareness charity canapé receptions who would be guaranteed not to try any funny stuff once the bellinis had kicked in. But in another sense he offered a form of aspirational womanhood, proudly displaying his housewifely accomplishments in décor, cuisine and fashion, kvetching about his yo-yoing weight and showing off his accessories with just the right measure of ribaldry. “It’s nice to have a big one if you have the choice,” he tells one audience member as she admires his ring. For one piece of audience participation he divides up the women and the men, adding “I hope I didn’t leave anybody out”. It’s camp, it’s winky – it’s generous.

Of course it wasn’t the stage or his costumes that claimed Liberace. In one of his last television appearances, a gaunt Liberace regaled Oprah at length about the loss of his virginity (to a woman). And if he wasn’t going to come out to Oprah he was never going to come out. Compare this with the divine, indomitable Sylvester, telling Joan Rivers about his husband and later, close to death and no longer able to walk, taking part in the 1988 San Francisco Pride parade from a wheelchair.

Liberace was one of the first major celebrities to die of an AIDS-related illness after Rock Hudson, who came out before the end. But Liberace never did. In part this was understandable, smarting as he still was from one of the first high-profile palimony cases, brought by his ex-lover and nominal chauffeur Scott Thorson, who shared the experience in his book Behind the Candelabra (source of Steven Soderbergh’s excellent film). And of course we can never forget how vicious much of the media and government were in the early years of the AIDS crisis. But this dogged denial of the self-evident truth seems sad, a refusal to extend to his core self the generosity he had so often lavished on others. He was still hiding behind the candelabra.

But all this is in the distant future as you journey to a happier time, to a friendlier place, to The World of Liberace. Buckle up!

(click here if you don’t see the video embedded)

Update:

How could I have forgotten to include my adoptive country’s own Harald Glööckler, a fashion designer whose extensive range of non-fashion branded products includes bed linen, laminate floorboards, dog accessories, wallpaper and his own edition of the Martin Luther Bible (with 3D cover)?

We’re in Vienna! Well, just outside. We’ll be back soon for a more expansive look at the Austrian capital and its rich heritage of neurosis and peculiarity, but for now Partner and self find ourselves at the western edge of the city where the streets slope abruptly upward then just as suddenly halt at the onset of the Vienna Woods. We are tracing the tale of Sissi.

What has always fascinated me about Sissi – more correctly Sisi, more formally Empress Elisabeth of Austria – is the jarring disconnect between her extremely idiosyncratic character (reclusive, morbid compulsive who had a horse called ‘Nihilst’, starved herself and lived much of her adult life longing for death) and her banal postumous image (pretty lady in a big frock). It is the latter variant that appears in effigy all over Vienna, and it is in pursuit of this sanitised phantom that the crowds queue to see her apartments in the city-centre Hofburg. I could have picked this or any number of other Viennese locations associated with the empress, but in the Hermesvilla we have an early insight into the private, tragic, flat-out weird Sissi that is infinitely more compelling.

The tragedy, it is important to point out, was real. It is difficult to imagine a more appalling fate than losing a child to suicide, but as well as this Sissi endured the death of another child in infancy and the early loss of two sisters, and the mysterious demise of her beloved cousin Ludwig. Wrenched from her idyllic Bavarian childhood and brought to Vienna on marrying Emperor Franz Joseph at just 16, her children taken away from her as soon as they were born, she grew to hate the court and put as much distance between it and herself as possible. The Hermesvilla, lying in sylvan solitude amid a former Habsburg hunting ground just outside Vienna, was a gift from Franz Joseph to Sissi, but also an attempt to lure her home. The imperial pair first stayed in the villa in 1887, thereafter Sissi generally spent the late spring of each year here.

Please enjoy the panoramic view of Vienna

Once you arrive at the extensive grounds of the Lainzer Tiergarten, as it is now known, you still have a way to go (so far from public transport! It’s like they weren’t even thinking about the resale value). We detour via a promised hill-top view over Vienna but today it is veiled in autumn mists. They have drifted away by the time we approach the villa, and there is something magical about the way it slowly becomes visible throught the trees.

Like Sissi’s later Corfiot bolthole Achilleion, it’s a substantial residence that still adheres to a recognisably human scale. But it’s an oddly disparate structure; the side facing the U-shaped courtyard presents a stern Mitteleuropa countenance, while the garden facade is adorned with filigree wrought-iron lace; in parts it could almost be an overblown colonial-era Australian house, until the dominant gene reasserts itself, in the form of an out-sized protuberance jutting from one side like the jaw of one of Franz Joseph’s Habsburg forebears.

Inside the interiors reflect a range of late 19th-century design ideals. Some spaces, such as the elegant main staircase, are relatively restrained, although it is never entirely clear how much they reflect original circumstances. A range of historicist approaches distinguish other parts of the house, most cohesively in Sissi’s private gym with its Pompeiian-style murals, most regrettably in some maladroit ceiling paintings.

I mean, it’s not exactly Tiepolo, is it?

Sissi’s bed chamber, meanwhile, is an overwrought, nightmare-ish melange of competing motifs and materials, Mannerist in its unsettling disproportion. Murals speak of the empress’s identification with Shakespeare’s Titania while the bed, with its funereal baldachin, isn’t even the creepiest thing in the room. That would be the shrouded figure in the corner, which Sissi commissioned to mark the death of her son. Imagine brushing up against that as you get up to pee in the middle of the night; ill met by moonlight indeed.

More morbid mementoes await; Sissi’s cousin Ludwig appears in a formal portrait, but also in a pastel of the dead king laid out in state. Even by the standards of an era that offered us mourning jewellery and photographic portraits of mothers who had died in childbirth, the scent of mortal doom hangs heavy in what is supposed to be a leafy getaway.

But the garden outside is still full of life so we exit via the gift shop, leaving with a rubber ducky Sissi and a copy of Michaela Lindinger’s book Sonderlinge, Außenseiter, Femmes Fatales: Das “Andere” Wien 1900 (“Eccentrics, Outsiders, Femmes Fatales: The “Other” Vienna around 1900″), a book that is so intensely me I can’t believe I haven’t come across it before. It also offers some valuable pointers to our Viennese digressions to come. For now, we set off in search of Sturm, the fresh, sweet, barely fermented harvest wine they serve in autumn here. After a visit to the faux toile gents’ we pass by Ulrike Truger’s contemporary statue showing Sissi the peek-a-boo solipsist with a fan in front of her face and head for a Heurigen.

Further reading
Sissi & Romy
A Casati family tree
Dress-down Friday: Sissi
Thin white archduke
Rex Luna
Phantom of the empire
The 12-step Sissi lifestyle plan
Sissi on horseback
Places: Miramare
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
Places: Sissi and Fanny’s Corfu

Alpha and omega. Das A und O, as the Germans say when they wish to emphasise the elementary importance of something. The essence, the crux. The beginning and the end.

We find ourselves in Bavaria seeking the alpha and omega of its deeply eccentric onetime ruler, King Ludwig II – the sites of his birth and of his death. This early autumn expedition takes us to a palace in western Munich and then to a lakeside location about 20 kilometres south of the city limits.

Like everything else in Ludwig’s life, its inception and cessation were veiled in mystery, accompanied by gossip and celebrated with a rich iconography. Ludwig ­– the “Swan King”, or less charitably the “Mad King” – famously created extravagant settings for the existence that fell between these poles. The most lasting products of his life (apart from the music of his idol Richard Wagner, which he helped to bankroll) were three historicist palaces in remote locations. The king was discomfited by public life, burdened by the business of ruling and far happier in Neuschwanstein, Linderhof and Herrenchiemsee, where he communed with the spirits of French monarchs. His occasional tumbles with flesh and blood manservants caused the devoutly Catholic king to repent bitterly. If you are new to Ludwig you could watch these ten films real quick and catch up, or explore the manifold influence he and cousin Sissi exerted on similarly singular sensibilities.

Alpha

Somehow it’s been 20 years since my last visit to Munich. For the majority of that time I have lived within easy reach in Berlin, and for the last five or so years the writers, thinkers and rebels of the city’s bohemian heyday around 1900 have staked out a large part of my mind. I always meant to make it back here, but something always came up. Now, staying with friends outside the city I am venturing into the Bavarian capital for the day. As my home borough in Berlin has Germany’s highest Covid infection rates at the time it would be illegal to stay in a hotel here. And because 2020 is the year that just keeps on giving I am not arriving via comfortable, efficient, low-emissions train, but by hire car. And you’d think the capital of car-crazed Bavaria would know how to keep traffic flowing at this distinctly non-peak mid-morning hour, but … nah.

Central Munich is cold and masked and anxious. At Nymphenburg Palace it is spitting rain. I didn’t make it here last time and based on the fact that it was the Bavarian royal family’s summer residence I had always imagined it to be comparatively dinky. But it is huge. While it doesn’t present the monolithic frontage of a Versailles, it just rambles on, and on, and on.

At the central block you can ascend to a terrace, look out at the expansive, rigorously arranged gardens and find yourself in cinema history. The famous garden tableau from Last Year at Marienbad was filmed here, although the palace facade in the film was shot a few kilometres north in Schloss Schleißheim. It is fitting that Alain Resnais’s enigmatic masterpiece should share this location with Ludwig, who once declared a wish to remain “an eternal mystery”.

For Ludwig, enigma was in die Wiege gelegt, or laid in his cradle, as the Germans refer to inherent and unalterable conditions. On a summer’s day in 1845, Princess Marie of Prussia gave birth to the future Bavarian king in her Nymphenburg quarters, still to be seen in their original Empire decor today (it was Napoleon who had raised Bavaria to kingdom status). We can probably rule out the possibility that Ludwig was himself laid in a coroneted cradle by green-winged angels, but a painting depicting just such an allegorical scene was recently rediscovered. Franz Xaver Nachtmann’s portrayal was riffing on the concept of the divine right of kings; if it be God’s will that they should wear the crown, might sovereigns – like pennies – fall from Heaven?

A picture within the picture hints at further mysteries. A pious pair gaze up in adoration at the Virgin and Child enthroned aloft. On the right we have Saint Teresa of Avila, a gesture to Ludwig’s grandmother Therese, who gave her name to Theresienwiese, the field on which Oktoberfest is emphatically not taking place this year. She is joined by Saint Louis (Louis IX of France), alighting here in honour of the infant’s grandfather Ludwig I, who was named for the saint’s ill-fated descendant Louis XVI. And wouldn’t you know it, little Ludwig was born on big Ludwig’s birthday.

Except … court tattle had it that Ludwig was born a few days prior to August 25, with the news held over to cheer up the old man on his special day. And then there’s the question of paternity. Officially the father was Marie’s husband, Prince (later King) Maximilian. But as you pass through Ludwig I’s famous gallery of beauties two rooms over, you may notice Princess Marie (along with Lady Jane Digby, later joined by Lola Montez). Munich, notorious at the time as a particularly gossip-hungry city, buzzed with rumours that Marie’s father-in-law was actually the father. Ludwig I never could keep it in his lederhosen.

Or was it yet another Ludwig? Sumptuously named Bavarian general Ludwig Freiherr von und zu der Tann-Rathsamhausen was also rumoured to have sired the future king. Or perhaps it was an Italian servant? Eyewitnesses couldn’t even agree on the more readily observable events around Ludwig’s birth – was it a 25- or 101-gun salute which greeted the news?

An eternal mystery.

Omega

We fast-forward the next forty years and arrive at the eastern shore of Starnberger See, in a beech forest barely suspecting autumn, with snow-capped mountains just visible in the mist beyond the southern point of the lake. This is the town of Berg whose palace was well known to Ludwig. The young king spent time here after coming to the throne in 1864. Naturally he was expected to find a suitable mate, and it appeared that the tall, slim, handsome monarch may have found his perfect match just across the lake. Schloss Possenhofen, on the western shore, was the childhood home of Ludwig’s cousin and kindred spirit Sissi, but it was her younger sister Sophie who was sized up as a consort. She appears to have genuinely fallen for the young king vom anderen Ufer (literally: “from the other shore”, figuratively: gay). They were betrothed but it soon became apparent that Ludwig was not marriage material. The engagement was dissolved; commemorative coin makers were out of pocket and poor Sophie – she never could catch a break! – was briefly linked to the similarly unsuitable Austrian Archduke Ludwig Viktor and ended up dying in the fire at the Bazar de la Charité in Paris.

It was a far more rotund Ludwig who returned here in 1886, and not of his own volition. The Bavarian government was alarmed at the king’s profligate expenditure for unnecessary building works and his reluctance to actually do the less fun kingly stuff like rule the country. He was declared insane on spurious evidence, forcibly deposed and taken from Neuschwanstein to Berg. He would never leave.

Nothing in Ludwig’s life has left as many riddles as its conclusion, which came on 13 June 1886. A cross at splashing distance from the shore a short walk from the Schloss marks the spot where his body was found, along with that of physician Dr Bernhard von Gudden, in waist-deep water. The official version holds that Ludwig, determined to end his life, held Dr Gudden under water until he died, and then suffered a heart attack before he could drown himself.

A contemporary postcard shows an angel, darker of wing and graver of countenance than the seraphim that attended his birth; a finger to her lips counsels silence as she lays a ghostly coronet, perhaps the one that adorned his cradle, on the waters. At Ludwig’s funeral witnesses reported that the Munich church in which he was laid to rest was struck by lightning. But the rumble of rumour rolled on. Was the king shot on the secret orders of the Bavarian prime minister, or did it go all the way up to Chancellor Bismarck? Had his cousin Sissi organised help, and did Ludwig simply drown as he swam out toward a waiting boat, or was he shot in the endeavour by a policeman meant to protect the king but mistaking his identity? And did Dr von Gudden, horrified at the thought of being implicated in the monarch’s death, then simply kill himself? This is not even an exhaustive list of the conjectured circumstances of Ludwig’s death.

Over 20 years ago a secret society of monarchist Bavarian separatists calling themselves “Guglmänner” emerged, dressed in peaked black hoods similar to the ones worn by Spanish penitents. The group is particularly obsessed by Ludwig, and his demise, which they are convinced was the work of the Prussians (I delve into the bizarre world of the Guglmänner in a little more detail here). But the king also remains remarkably persistent in folk memory – I saw more Bavarian flags emblazoned with his likeness than German flags. Mourners in traditional costume still gather here every 13 June, just as the village of Oberammergau ­­– best known for its Passion Play – still marks his birth every year with a bonfire.

At the shore a larger cross watches over the cross in the water, larger still on an incline looms the “Votive Chapel”, where Christ enthroned – all grown up now – holds a book with the letters: alpha and omega.

Further reading
Rex Luna
Let them eat kuchen
Sewell on Ludwig
Ludwig at the movies
An eternal mystery
Circles: Ludwig II/Sissi
First Dick on film
Pearls: Ludwig II
Meanwhile, on Starnberger See…
Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern

Over the years I have written numerous times about the inexhaustibly fascinating life of Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898) – a.k.a. Sis(s)i – and its heady amalgam of eccentricity, disaster, glamour, beauty and melancholy. Whenever I do, I get angry comments from Sissi stans who scan the net for narratives that stray from their vision of the suffering Habsburg Madonna. There is no question that the Austrian Empress was shadowed by tragedy, as I have acknowledged, and it is impossible to understand her life without recognising the depression that pursued and frequently overtook her. But God forbid you should disturb these devotees’ image of Our Lady of Sorrows riding side-saddle through a vale of tears by suggesting that – misfortune notwithstanding – Sissi was just really goddam weird, a morbid, capricious, drug-addicted, tattooed narcissist; a high-strung, high-maintenance neurological high-wire act with a generous production budget.

While I never relish messages from Sissi’s self-appointed standard-bearers, I genuinely wonder what they make of the current profusion of Elisabethan offerings, in particular three current German-language screen productions with international reach (plus a recent series by German broadcaster RTL and a new English-language book, Empty Theatre by Jac Jemc). All of them take significant liberties with both the historical account and the popular image of Sissi established by Romy Schneider in a trilogy of Wirtschaftswunder-era films beloved of German-speaking Europe to this day. The last 12 months have given us Netflix series The Empress (showrunner Katharina Eyssen), and the feature films Corsage (director Marie Kreutzer), and Sisi & I (director Frauke Finsterwalder), which just premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Each of them occupies a restricted time span, representing the beginning, middle and end of Sissi’s reign, respectively.

The Empress arguably hews closest to the sanctified image. Devrim Lingnau persuasively embodies the headstrong teenage Bavarian princess who, having previously been left largely to her own devices, finds herself ill-equipped for married life let alone the unimaginable pressure of being imperial consort. This is very much a costume period drama and while its locations are not the historical settings, they are lavish enough that, as with The Crown, they competently maintain the illusion. The series concentrates on Sissi’s troubled onboarding at court and, like the 1950s trilogy, appoints Franz Joseph’s mother as the villain. So far so faithful, but this depiction also comes with departures from historical fact that contrast sharply with this evident quest for authenticity.

Witness, for example, the mutual passion between Sissi and Franz Joseph in the series, a romantic indulgence at odds with historical reality. We also find a confected episode of ill-fated Archduke Maximilian scheming to take over his brother’s empire and his wife, and an invented lady-in-waiting with revolutionary sympathies who gains the empress’s trust. Sissi’s interest in the underclass jars with the record, so too her engagement in realpolitik (beyond a genuine sympathy for Hungarian liberation). Like the recent Netflix series about Freud, The Empress freely embellishes widely known figures and events that arguably offer drama enough in themselves. Here, after six hours we are still only a few months into Elisabeth’s marriage; a further series is mooted, so will they follow The Crown by swapping out the leads and advancing through the decades?

If you’re impatient for the years of darkness and disquiet to come, two current films may satisfy your curiousity. They bear striking similarities; both are pan-European arthouse co-productions with women directors which foreground previously occluded episodes of the historical narrative. They both use modern music and other anachronisms, rejecting the conventions of period drama and toying with the idea of authenticity itself without proposing alternative histories as such. Each avails itself liberally of the drugs, tattoos, morbidity, narcissism and caprice supplied by an intimate reading of the subject’s life. Each makes much of Sissi’s devotion to her work-outs and beauty treatments, her eating disorder and public fainting, and contains a pivotal scene where the empress cuts her legendarily long hair. Each of them leans into the Diana connection by depicting Sissi’s (documented) visit with the princess’s ancestors at Althorp, where she enjoys breathless horse races and an enigmatic affair with a local.

Corsage was first to cinemas. Sissi, as portrayed by Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), is adrift; her relationships with her husband, children and servants are all conducted at arm’s length. Her only kindred spirit appears to be her cousin Ludwig II, and even there she misreads his affections. As she turns 40 a tactless doctor informs her that this is the life expectancy for a working-class woman of the time. In fact the increasingly spectral Sissi appears to be engineering her own disappearance, clearing her schedule, outsourcing her public appearances to a veiled lady-in-waiting and grooming a railway official’s wife to serve as her husband’s mistress.

While some settings are accurate (Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace), elsewhere Corsage is provocatively ahistorical, unfolding in locations that are clearly, ostentatiously not what they purport to be. “Althorp” appears amid manifestly central European mountains, rather than the barely rolling hills of Northamptonshire I know from visits to my in-laws. Meanwhile the rough, backstage aesthetic of some interior scenes reminded me of the first time I visited Versailles. I was struck by the contrast between the labyrinthine, unadorned passageways and the sumptuous state rooms; passing from one to another felt like stepping out on stage. Corsage suggests that it is in the wings that we should locate the true personae of its subjects rather than their upholstered public avatars. Of course, this and the thin crowd scenes might simply reflect a limited budget. But this asceticism and the numerous post-dated features also seem driven by a kind of belligerence which dares us to take issue, urging us to abandon our preconceptions of historical drama. Strikingly, glass appears prominently in these anachronistic elements – light fixtures, eyewear, windows, doors, camera lenses, syringes – suggesting that we must look through these (literally) transparent distractions to find inner verities.

Visiting a psychiatric institution, Sissi bonds briefly with an inconsolable woman who, like her, has lost a daughter in infancy, yet otherwise the empress appears to be driven by morbid curiosity rather than any profound connection with the downtrodden among her subjects; “the lion doesn’t lose sleep over the opinions of sheep” as she avers. But there is little for us to hold on to. While audiences are surely sophisticated enough not to require every female lead to be likable or relatable, this is main character syndrome to excess, to the exclusion of all else, an exceptionalism that eclipses anything by which a mortal being might be expected to construct a liveable existence.

If Corsage presents a solipsistic drifter consumed by her own psychodrama, Sisi & I – as the title suggests – is essentially a two-hander, shot on 16 mm to create a dreamlike atmosphere. Here we see Sissi (Susanne Wolff) through the eyes of her lady-in-waiting Countess Irma Sztáray (Sandra Hüller, the embodiment of vexed dissatisfaction in Toni Erdmann). Her function is to keep pace with the restless empress, to accompany her as she stalks the landscape for hours at a time; this all squares with the record and even Irma’s seasickness is rooted in reality. As she arrives at Sissi’s idyllic, matriarchal island court (Malta standing in for Corfu) she is subjected to an entrance exam that is at once boot camp and hazing ritual. The most obvious anachronisms here are sartorial; the first image of the film is a corset, but on Corfu it is only gossipy gay Archduke Ludwig Viktor who appears to actually wear them (his drag theatricals ring true, but by this time real-life Sissi had fallen out with her brother-in-law). Long-dead, the other light-loafered Ludwig (II) here appears in spirit only, with a prophetic warning.

Scripted by the director and her husband Christian Kracht (author of Imperium in which he fictionalised Wilhelmine stowaway August Engelhardt), Sisi & I is primarily about friendship between women. But the bond depicted here comes with an enormous imbalance of power, subject to the whims of its manipulative senior partner; at one point Sissi insists that they embark for Algiers (Malta again) because she wants to try a local ice cream. Early on there is a suggestion of The Favourite, as the newcomer supplants a previous lady-in-waiting in the empress’s affections, but with Sissi bestowing and withdrawing her favour like the warmth of the sun, the abusive relationship of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant seems a more apt comparison. The film is a notionally queer reading yet admirably disinterested in examining the point at which relations may have transgressed the limits of passionate female friendships in the moral codes of the time. “Shame,” pronounces Sissi, “is for the bourgeoisie.”

Diet is central once again, with Sissi subsisting largely on thin soup and purging her occasional blow-outs. At one point she is more or less force-fed by her mother (what a treat to see Angela Winkler again!). Sissi’s relentless physical exertion, her beauty routine, her eating disorder were evidently driven less by vanity than a need to reclaim the agency cruelly wrested from her in the early years of her marriage. Sissi’s assassination is extensively foreshadowed throughout the film; when it comes it differs from the known facts in crucial details (no spoilers!). I wasn’t even sure if what I was seeing was deliberate; days later I still don’t know what to make of this scene.

The concurrence and extensive thematic overlap of the two films positively compel comparison. In both cases, variances with the record are conscious authorial choices that draw out some higher truth of the characters (in contrast with the fabrications of The Empress, which appear designed to keep fickle streaming audiences engaged at all costs). To sit scowling in the dark with a pen and pad noting solecisms – like one of my angry correspondents might do – is to misread the directors’ intentions entirely. The comparison between Sissi and Diana that both films evoke (also extensively explored in Andrew Sinclair’s 1998 book Death by Fame) is illuminating. For it is not just their unhappy marital relations, clashes with courtiers, eating disorders, depression and violent death that the two women share, but also the way their respective images have transformed in the public imagination. Most of us can contextualise the artistic swerves of a film like Spencer because, whether we’re actively interested or not, we have absorbed years of inside reports alongside the public record. We expect to see a portrayal that disrupts the sanctified image, otherwise – why bother?

But despite the presence of actors recognisable to monoplex-goers the world over, the public and private Elisabeth remains an Austro-German phenomenon – for now. Sisi & I and Corsage are both end-products of a process of (over-)familiarisation which most English-speakers, say, haven’t experienced; few of us grew up watching Romy Schneider’s portrayal every Christmas, like many Germans have. These new treatments seek to provide rich, subtle shading to selected parts of a portrait that most international audiences don’t even recognise in outline.

For my part, I found Sisi & I the more convincing of the two. Naturally I can’t say with certainty what Sissi was like (and in a Q&A session after the Berlinale screening, director Frauke Finsterwalder said she banned her actors from reading biographies of the empress). But drawing on my assumptions I felt Susanne Wolff better captured Sissi’s restlessness, caprice and neurosis, but just as importantly the crippling depression that engulfed much of her latter life. While Vicky Krieps’s empress radiates sadness, it is melancholy without rigour; it is difficult to imagine this wry, loose-limbed Sissi embarking on a punishing trek.

In either case, stans, you’re probably not going to like what you see in these films, but you know what? You can just ignore them (and me). The lioness is sleeping, the sheep are free to dream whatever they want.

Berlin is cold and dark, there’s snow on the ground and the supermarkets are full of Lebkuchen and testy shoppers, so … it must be time for Secret Satan! Here we go with our annual serving of books with boho/queer/decadent/surreal/occult themes, and hopefully some surprises. I’ve been doing this since 2017 and while I enjoy selecting the titles, it’s an idea that has grown out of all proportion; something once fun risks becoming gruelling and overlong (this is known as Series Five Arrested Development Syndrome, or SFADS). They’re also getting a little repetitive as I find myself exploring the same furrows, bound by the limitations of my own tastes. Plus, I’m out of touch with publishing schedule rhythms since my own modest endeavours in the field came to a close last year. So, fair warning: this may be the last Secret Satan. But hey! Let’s not bum this party out before it’s even started.

As ever, please consider buying from independent book retailers, from Bookshop.org, or the publishers themselves. I have also just got my first order from Asterism, a great initiative that brings together some of the most interesting small presses working today. More on that below.

Our first book makes a smooth segue from my last post, which concerned the Munich villa of artist Franz Stuck. Secessions (eds. Ralph Gleis and Ursula Storch; no indication of translator) is the catalogue to an exhibition about the Secession movements in three cities, and their most emblematic representatives. The first was Munich in 1892 (Stuck) followed by Vienna (1897, Gustav Klimt), and finally Berlin (1898, Max Liebermann). Recreating these progressive breakthroughs in the sites of their inception (mostly; soz Munich), the exhibition recently wound up in Berlin and will continue next year in Vienna. And for more on the creative energies that made Vienna a leader in art and so many other areas, we have Richard Cockett’s Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World: “Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens.” As well as the fabled, familiar fin-de-siècle, Cockett’s study shows the innovations of the city continuing between the wars. And it is here that we locate Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase. Anita Berber in Wien 1922 (Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy. Anita Berber in Vienna 1922; ed. Magdalena Vuković). While only textually accessible to the German-speakers, this is a handsome, richly illustrated edition. It covers an episode that we looked at last year, when Anita Berber and dance partner Sebastian Droste upended the Austrian capital with scandal both onstage and off. It features numerous images for which the pair posed for the great Viennese photographer Madame d’Ora (Dora Kallmus), an honour they shared, improbably, with the last Empress of Austria. Zita became consort in the middle of World War One and died the year the Berlin Wall fell, by which time she “had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia”. That’s from Larry Wolff’s The Shadow of the Empress, in which the decline, fall and spectral afterlife of the Habsburgs is interwoven with the genesis of Richard Strauss’s opera Die Frau ohne Schatten. The libretto was by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was a friend and keen supporter (along with his frustrated admirer Stefan George) of Leopold Andrian, grandson of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and member of the Young Vienna group. Andrian’s psyche was a battleground between his faith (Catholic) and orientation (gay), as reflected in his 1895 novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis, in which we share the thoughts of aristocrat Erwin, including his attraction to an impoverished former classmate. It is difficult to overstate the impact of this, one of the key German-language texts of this era, and I was shocked to discover it had never been published in English. Thanks, then, to Francesca Bugliani Knox for translating The Garden of Knowledge and to Studio Will Dutta for this beautiful hand-finished (limited) edition. This slender volume remained Andrian’s sole literary output, more or less; as the 20th century began he embarked on a career in diplomacy.

To be – as Leopold Andrian was – gay, European and aware in 1895 was to live with a vivid sense of peril, and it is another same-sex affair across class lines in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s trial that year that dominates Tom Crewe’s novel The New Life. It also makes the important point that when you enter conventional marriage as a cover for your sexuality, you’re actually ruining two lives. The titular anti-hero of Laura Lee’s Wilde Nights & Robber Barons: The Story of Marcel Schwabe was sent away to Australia during Wilde’s trial; he, too, had had an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas and was otherwise enmeshed in numerous schemes and scandals of the day, emerging as something of a swishy Flashman. Honestly, it’s a crazy story; try here for a primer. And naturally Wilde’s trial looms large in the reissued Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s, the utterly essential study of the Yellow Decade; I rave at greater length about Matthew Sturgis’s 1995 book here. (Aside: a few years ago I caught an exhibition that included the actual calling card that kicked it all off, in which the Marquess of Queensberry denounced Oscar Wilde for “posing as a somdomite” (sic), although so indistinct was his enraged scrawl he might just as well have accused him of peeing in a submarine.) Meanwhile Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Past explores the often reactionary politics that dwelt within the heart of a movement that prided itself on its apolitical elevation from the concerns of the chattering classes. Alex Murray’s study reveals the quixotic ideologies of the likes of Swinburne, Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Machen, and the feverish jingoism of the two women writers who published under the name Michael Field.

More distaff Decadence in Extraordinary Aesthetes: Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture (ed. Joseph Bristow), which highlights the neglected work of writers like Amy Levy, Ella D’Arcy, Mabel Dearmer (a writer and illustrator who provides the outstanding cover image) along with changing male views of modern womanhood. Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives is a more accessible study with extensive thematic overlap. Author Jad Adams celebrates “pioneers of a new style, living lives of lurid adventure and romance, as well as experiencing poverty, squalor, disease, and unwanted pregnancy” and notes that “A third of the writers of the Yellow Book, the outstanding literary and artistic journal which published in the middle years of the 1890s, were women.” Across the Channel we find the wonderful Rachilde, card-carrying cross-dresser (for real) whose works combine gender sedition, diabolic forces and a whole Index Librorum Prohibitorum of other outré themes. Available in English for the first time (translated by Brian Stableford), her gothic, supernatural novel The Princess of Darkness (1896) is “a frightening treasure that any connoisseur of perversity is bound to savor”. Rachilde issued the book under a male pseudonym before reviewing it under her own name and, hilariously, trashing it. This brings us to her close companion Jean Lorrain. About a decade ago, I was lamenting that there was only one book by “Sodom’s ambassador to Paris” available in English, but now we have quite a selection, thanks in large part to Snuggly. The latest additions to their roster are his first book The Blood of the Gods (1882, translated by Jacob Rabinowitz), a proto-Decadent collection of stories in verse, and The Turkish Lady (no indication of translator). This is a trio of stories whose title tale (1898) was originally published with narrative photos in something like a fotonovela style. Rachilde and Lorrain were united not just by friendship and scandal – they were also both celebrity spokesmodels for Vin Mariani, a “tonic” wine reputed to aid productivity and wellbeing, a fact not unrelated to its high cocaine content. It enlivened the fun-de-siècle revels of everyone from the most disreputable bohemians to Pope Leo XIII. Yet another Vin Mariani shill was French writer Joséphin Péladan, who was also a self-proclaimed “sandwich man of the Beyond” and descendant of Assyrian kings. Son of Prometheus: The Life and World of Joséphin Péladan is the first major study in English of this singular figure who “authored over a hundred novels and monographs in an attempt to bring about the spiritual regeneration of society through mythopoetic art underpinned by esoteric thought.” Author Sasha Chaitow has written extensively on Péladan, and this volume also includes a foreword by Per Faxneld, who certainly knows his way around this field.

Faxneld is the editor, along with Johan Nilsson, of Satanism: A Reader, which reaches back to the mid-19th century in its survey of a phenomenon too often confused with the imbecilic mummery of devil worship. “Ranging from the esoteric to the anti-clerical, countercultural, and political, the texts span a wide variety of genres, from poetry and polemical religious tracts to ritual instructions and internet FAQ’s.” There is contemporary commentary to accompany these texts, which come from authors including Helena Blavatsky, history’s first self-proclaimed Satanist Stanisław Przybyszewski and – yes, you know he’s coming, there he is … he’s here! – Aleister Crowley. Here he is again trying to sneak in through the back door of a roman à clef, Ethel Archer’s The Hieroglyph. The author of The Book of Plain Cooking dishes up something considerably spicier in this, her sole novel which encompasses “her relationship with the magus Crowley and the various guises he took as poetic mentor, psychonaut, and mystical philosopher”. And Tobias Churton continues his impressively thorough survey of Crowley’s global adventures by detailing The Great Beast’s dark doings in the City of Light. Aleister Crowley in Paris finds Crowley joining the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order, proposing to Eileen Gray and staging “a demonstra­tion for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde’s tomb”. In Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States we rediscover Black Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph, a practitioner of the occult carnality that Crowley would later espouse (author Lara Langer Cohen offers an intriguing introduction to Randolph here). Our subterranean journey takes in “Black radical manifestos, anarchist periodicals, sensationalist exposés of the urban underworld, manuals for sex magic, and the initiation rites of secret societies”, with a consistent focus on the uses of space (space, of a different kind, is the place for Afrofuturism, a “lens used to imagine a more empowering future for the Black community through music, art, and speculative fiction.”) Around the same time we find the Oneida Community, one of the many competing sects in 19th-century upstate New York. In An Assassin in Utopia, Susan Wels relates the story of this idealistic society/sex cult and of one frustrated member, incel malcontent Charles Julius Guiteau (you know you’re an incel when you can’t get laid in a sex cult) – and a depressingly familiar pathway to violence, in this case the assassination of US President James Garfield.

Admirers of libidinal 20th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare are alerted to the reissue of the standard Spare biography by Phil Baker and A Bestiary of Austin Osman Spare, a slim edition accompanying an exhibition at the Viktor Wynd Museum in London (available at the discount price of £6.66, because of course) plus a new edition of Spare’s key text, The Book of Pleasure. The combination of words and images in which Spare sets out his esoteric philosophy is challenging; even Phil Baker calls it “almost unreadable by modern standards … vexing to read, like being told a boring dream”. Context always helps, and this edition comes with additional material including an afterword that analyses Spare’s “Sacred Alphabet”, which was in turn remarkably similar to a system of private signs devised by 19th-century French medium Hélène Smith. In Hélène Smith: Occultism and the Discovery of the Unconscious, Claudie Massicotte explores the life of a figure increasingly viewed in the context of outsider art rather than simply the credibility or otherwise of spiritualist practice. Jennifer Higgie’s The Other Side details other women producing art across dimensions, “from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint […] and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun.”

The Dance of Moon and Sun: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (eds. Judith Noble, Tilly Craig and Victoria Ferentinou) is apparently “the first critical examination of her diverse legacy” (really? genuinely asking here; I thought there had been at least one but that could be the expired eggnog talking) in which contributors “explore themes of authorship and agency, Colquhoun’s drawing practice, her Celtic motifs, British Surrealism and alchemy.” Her American contemporary Paulina Peavy was a compelling figure and one I’ve been keen to explore further; she claimed her works were guided by a UFO who came to her during a séance, and she would paint wearing special masks for which she patented a face glue. Laura Whitcomb’s Paulina Peavy: Etherean Channeler is the first major work dedicated to this singular creative force, who early on espoused what she called “conscious surrealism”. The environments in which one of the great 20th century Surrealists lived and created in Britain, France, Spain and Mexico are the subject of Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, an intimate view from family member Joanna Moorhead, who previously penned a biography of Carrington. The artist’s close companion and collaborator Remedios Varo is the subject of a new academic study. Remedios Varo: Science Fictions (eds. Caitlin Haskell and Tere Arcq) explores “the integral relationship between Varo’s layered interests—in alchemy, architecture, magic, mysticism, philosophy, and science—and her beguiling technical approach to art making”. If nothing else, Varo is responsible for the artsiest pharmaceutical ads imaginable – her 1960s images for Bayer are representations of various maladies in an uncompromisingly occult style (please consult your alchemist if symptoms persist). But for some reason Leonora Carrington always forms a double act in my head with Dorothea Tanning; forthcoming book Exquisite Dreams: The Art and Life of Dorothea Tanning covers the extraordinary sweep of the American artist’s life. Author Amy Lyford covers not just Tanning’s art but her endeavours in literature and film as well, in a career often filed under “Surrealism”, although she herself said “it disgusts me to be lumped in with all of these so-called Surrealist painters.”

Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable (ed. Jennifer R. Gross) is a major new study combining text and images from a polymath creator who is impossible to pin down to a medium or movement. Through her persona, connections and output, Mina Loy offers us numerous pathways. Here she is, for instance, alongside Beatrice Wood, Clara Tice and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern by Lottie Whalen, “the story of a group of women whose experiments in art and life set the tone for the rise of New York as the twentieth-century capital of modern culture.” That quartet features in the brief yet highly consequential story of the World War One-era journal The Blind Man which re-emerged recently in a rerun of the endless debate around authorship of the radical Dada work Fountain (Duchamp v. Freytag-Loringhoven, round 176). Emily Hage’s Dada Magazines: The Making of a Movement examines The Blind Man and other publications, and a brief detour of these forking paths takes us to another study of the material legacy of Dada, The Dada Archivist: Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Berlin Dada by Stina Barchan. Following our thread back to Loy at the centre of the labyrinth and then groping back out into the darkness to a slightly menacing roar in the distance we come to Futurism & Europe: The Aesthetics of a New World (eds. Fabio Benzi and Renske Cohen Tervaert) which “examines for the first time the many interconnections between Futurism and other European avant-gardes as varied as the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in the Netherlands, Omega Workshops in Britain, Constructivism in Russia and Esprit Nouveau in France”. Loy was one of a surprising number of women who ventured into the unwelcoming terrain of Futurism. My favourite is probably the brilliant Valentine de Saint-Point, who came up with her own Futurist manifesto (which begins: “Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.” What’s not to love?). In Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism, Jennifer S. Griffiths introduces us to another woman artist who embraced the dynamism and optimism of early Futurism – not only tracing aircraft in flight on her canvases but flying herself in early two-seater planes. She broke with the Futurists as they moved closer to Mussolini and she was more or less wiped from the narrative of the movement. Because – surprise! – fascists ruin everything.

Amrit Kaur knew it; Italian writer Livia Manera Sambuy went In Search of Amrit Kaur (translator Todd Portnowitz) after coming across a photo of the Indian royal with an intriguing caption. “It claims that the Punjabi princess sold her jewels in occupied Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp where she died within a year.” Not all of this will turn out to be true. Nancy Cunard, Martha Gellhorn and Sylvia Townsend Warner knew it. They join other subjects electrified by the Spanish Civil War and the Republican cause in Sarah Watling’s Tomorrow Perhaps the Future. And Peter Feuchen knew it. The Danish adventurer and committed anti-fascist is the subject of Reid Mitenbuler’s Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age. The extraordinary Irving Penn cover image shows Freuchen, alongside his wife Dagmar Cohn, in a fur coat made from a polar bear he killed in Greenland. Feuchen spent many years in Greenland and was deeply enmeshed in and respectful of Inuit culture. The white sheen of the island in maps, and its outsized scale in the Mercator projection has captured many an imagination. In advance of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s 1960s journey from Togo to the Arctic island we find another West African adventurer in Philippe Soupault’s slim novella The Voyage of Horace Pirouelle (translated by Justin Vicari). “Inspired by a Liberian schoolmate’s sudden departure for Greenland on a whim and his subsequent disappearance into that distant country, Soupault imagines his alter ego’s adventures as entries in a journal both personal and fictional. Adopted by an Inuit tribe, Pirouelle drifts from one encounter to another, from one casual murder to another, until his life of liberty and spontaneity leads him to stasis at the edge of existence.” Philippe Soupault is one of those names you often find in a conga line of between-the-wars luminaries without (if you’re anything like me) being able to definitively place them. This is in part explained by a dearth of texts available in English, so all credit to publisher Wakefield (who have also added to their impressive series of Marcel Schwob rediscoveries with the essay collection Spicilege, translated by Alex Andriesse). Moving from the Surrealist Soupault to the “counter-Surrealist” René Daumal, we alight upon an intriguing relaunch. Many years ago in Sydney, back in a time when you could stumble on a mystery without instantly googling it away, I found a second-hand book by Patti Smith in a tiny, unusual format with foil stamp lettering. I had recently discovered her music but didn’t even know she issued books, so the whole thing was an intriguing enigma, and the small object seemed charged with a magic that resided just beyond my conscious awareness. Only many years later did I piece it all together: this was one of a series of books by Hanuman, which began in 1986; the press operated out of the Hotel Chelsea in New York but had its small-format books printed in India. The short texts, which covered the counterculture past and present, are now being reissued. From the first series comes René Daumal’s The Lie of the Truth (trans: Philip Powrie), a feisty rumination on falsehood. As it happens, Patti Smith is a great admirer of Daumal and his “science of imaginary solutions”, in particular his master work Mount Analogue. In his own day, Daumal came into conflict with André Breton – usually a good indication of character.

René Crevel was similarly at odds with Breton; his sexuality couldn’t fail to provoke the homophobic pontiff of Surrealism. Crevel’s bizarre 1929 novel Are You All Crazy? (translated by Sue Boswell) takes us from bohemian Paris via Davos (where the tubercular Crevel sought treatment) before winding up in Berlin, where we encounter Dr Optimus Cerf-Mayer – a grotesque parody of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Naturally you remember René Crevel from his habit of smoking opium in a submarine in Toulon with lesbian princess Violette Murat, and this brings us neatly to the brilliant photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer, who captured Murat and others in the port city. Take a look at this delightful video in which she recalls hanging out with Jean Cocteau as he cruised sailors (and smoked opium). Her candid studies of this time are recorded in albums held by the Tate, a stupendous, cornucopious selection of between-the-wars bohos, raging queens and other Flowers favourites – Bunny Roger, Edward Burra (“Lady Bureaux”), Augustus John, Bryher, Kenneth Macpherson, Jimmie Daniels, Brian Howard, William Seabrook [breathes into paper bag]. The photographer’s own tale is finally told in Thoroughly Modern: The Pioneering Life of Barbara Ker-Seymer, Photographer, and Her Brilliant Bohemian Friends by Sarah Knights. “Ker-Seymer was prefigurative in the way she lived her life as a bisexual woman and in her contempt for racism, misogyny and homophobia. Fiercely independent, for much of her life she rejected the idea of family, preferring her wide set of creative friends.” Then, naturally, she gave up photography and opened a laundrette and made a big success of it and I LOVE HER. More singular destinies in Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories which together support author Diarmuid Hester’s thesis that “places make us”. The journey includes destinations such as E. M. Forster’s Cambridge, Josephine Baker’s Paris, Claude Cahun’s Jersey and James Baldwin’s Provence. And not just places on a map, but the actual spaces in which their occupants lived out a freedom frequently denied them elsewhere. The evocation of queer space in Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (eds. Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang) has something decidedly current about it, from the bisexual lighting of the cover image to the confidence of the imagery within. “Laurencin’s feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Natalie Clifford Barney.” And in a new edition of Barney’s The One Who Is Legion we are confronted with a true anomaly of her oeuvre. It is her only novel, the only book she issued in English (rather than her preferred French) and her most consistent engagement with modernism. It concerns a suicide who returns as “a genderless being with no memory of a pervious life, she/he is merged with the One. […] Now in a noncorporeal state, A.D. is able to turn aside from carnality, becoming ‘legion’ – that is, part of everyone.” (Suzanne Rodriguez).

The writers and publishers issuing these rediscovered works and thoughtful reappraisals of the past are doing utterly commendable work, which is more vital than ever in the face of the cretinous trolls driving our exhausting culture wars. Three new books illuminate the history of drag, two covering New York (Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City by Elyssa Maxx Goodman and the first-person testimony of Craig Olsen’s P.S. Burn This Letter Please), plus Drag: A British History. The home of the panto dame has proved surprisingly hospitable to cross-dressing entertainers (not always, of course), and Jacob Bloomfield’s study locates drag as “an intrinsic, and common, part of British popular culture.” Jac Jemc’s inventive Empty Theatre novelises a familiar double act: the gothic burlesque of Empress Elisabeth (subject of a post earlier in the year – this is what I mean by furrows!) and the Wagnerian escapism of her cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria, living out his sexuality in the shadows of his fantasy castles. Another gay king reigns (in his own head, at least) over The Story of the Paper Crown (translator: Frank Garrett). Polish author Józef Czechowicz was better known as a poet, and has never been previously available in English. It is difficult to believe that this dazzlingly inventive book is 100 years old; in it we encounter “Henryk, a sensitive young man who, through philosophical debates, sex, religious visions, and febrile fantasies, undertakes a journey whose ultimate purpose is to come to terms with his homosexuality as well as to build a foundation for an authentic life.” This was an outcome sadly denied pre-Raphaelite artist Simeon Solomon, who was arrested for cottaging and eventually broken by prison and drink. Less familiar than his canvases and drawings are his written works, including prose poems, correspondence, and a “one-act farce on the erection of Cleopatra’s Needle”, which are gathered in Collected Writings. This is another title from Snuggly, clearly Secret Satan’s MVP. Their books, plus the Czechowicz (publisher Sublunary), the Hanuman reissues and our old favourite Spurl, as well as numerous other interesting publishers are available through a new(-ish) joint initiative Asterism. You can order directly from their online bookstore – I recently got my first dispatch from them, and quicker than most suppliers in the US can manage. Their line-up offers a wide variety of inventive, sometimes challenging works from small presses with a sense of mission and passion. More than just a platform, this is a little model of hope, a reminder that individual expression can, indeed should co-exist with collective endeavour: we are alone, we are not alone.

To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900–1950 (eds. Mirjam Zadoff and Karolina Kühn) takes us to Germany, from the Wilhelmine era to the post-World War Two reconstruction period. Along with private individuals, this volume covers the equivocal records of pioneers such as Claire Waldoff, Elisàr von Kupffer, and Magnus Hirschfeld. The good doctor Hirschfeld appears again in Jeffrey Schneider’s Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany, which explores soldier fetishisation, “an underground sexual economy of male prostitution as well as a political project to exploit the army’s prestige for queer emancipation.” It quotes from my edition of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin’s Third Sex, the first English translation from Hans Ostwald’s visionary “Metropolis Documents” series – one of the most comprehensive studies of urban experience ever undertaken. I have long been puzzled that there hasn’t been more interest in the Metropolis Documents so the appearance in English of another volume, Ten Life Histories (translated by Stephen Carruthers) is a welcome development. Wilhelm Hammer’s 1905 text examines the lives of Kontrollmädchen – prostitutes registered with the Berlin police – in a pathologising approach familiar from the author’s study of Berlin lesbians, the only one of Ostwald’s series to be banned. I realise early 20th-century German publishing conventions may not be a matter of unending fascination for all, but I was intrigued to see the arrival of Siegfried the Wrestler: The Wilhelmine World of a Colportage Novel. Kolportage was the name given to the door-to-door sale of books in instalments; originally this included all kinds of literature, but later tended toward less sophisticated fare which was considered morally questionable. Author Peter S. Fisher notes that in current scholarship, patronising dismissals by middle-class opponents of this “trash” form are easier to find than responses from their – often working-class – readers. German writer Klabund (Alfred Henschke) emerged from Munich bohemian circles; he had his own moral battles to fight, facing accusations of obscenity and lèse-majesté. Here the perennially ill author, who died in Davos in 1928, delivers something feverishly akin to the Czechowicz and Crevel works noted above (all three writers died in their thirties). Spook (1922; translated by Jonah Lubin) is a “hectic, creepy autobiographical story about a young man who suffers a hemorrhage in Berlin and is haunted by bizarre figures and delusions in his twilight state” and also features a magnate draining the blood of his son to gain eternal life (sorry! I’m getting mixed up – that was from the news).

“Pablo Picasso,” insisted Jonathan Richman, “was never called an asshole.” Author Claire Dederer might disagree; in Monsters she considers case studies including Richard Wagner, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen and Norman Mailer as she seeks to answer the eternal question – can you hate the artist and love the art? Picasso joins an eclectic cast including Mascha Kaléko, Gustaf Gründgens, Theodor Adorno, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller in Love in a Time of Hate (translated by Simon Pare). The format of Florian Illies’s latest book will be familiar to anyone who read the author’s 1913; it has the same dense simultaneity, the same acceleration toward doom, the same weighting toward German names. The text swoops down on a subject for a few paragraphs – sometimes just one – before shifting elsewhere, only to return pages or chapters later. But where 1913 walked us through a year before war, here we have a whole decade of rolling anticipation, focusing on the conjunctions of creative professionals in the shadow of the Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of the Third Reich. Nin and Miller also feature in Dirty Books by Barry Reay and Nina Attwood, the story of Obelisk Press and its evolution into the Olympia Press. Both outfits provided a kind of literary laundering service, taking the profits from erotica and putting it into challenging modernist works. “From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided.” The name Olympia Press, by the way, came from Édouard Manet’s scandalous 1860s canvas Olympia, which also inspired Michel Leiris’s 1981 The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, to which Tomoé Hill now responds in her debut, Songs for Olympia (another title available through Asterism). A response to a response may sound a little … removed. Yet this is a stimulating confrontation with Manet, Olympia (actually Victorine), Leiris, and her own biography, in a profoundly personal panel discussion entwined with memory, desire and scent: how would Victorine smell if she stepped out of her frame?

Thanks for reading; I hope you’ve found something special for yourself and/or the twisted sophisticates of your acquaintance.