THE "MUSE" OF DADA

“I’m a woman. I’ve let go of the controls. The question about the „why“ and the „whence” .

I’m only confessing the “how”.

How was it?“

 - The brand

She lived, in the last year of her life, in a room above a gas station/grocery store, in Magliaso, Tessin, in Switzerland. It was 1948. Count the dead: Hugo. Eric. Else, Ernst’s wife. Kurt, in England. The gypsies, the bohos and drunks from Munich, the cabaret singers who supplemented their incomes with tricks on the side – like she did. Cities: Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden.

When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Hugo. There were some announcements in the Swiss papers. She was not utterly forgotten, ever. One paper commented that the price of her burial service was paid late: a collection was made among friends.

She was hewed out of the same raw sensitivity to the violence in half-capitalist/half ancien regime world that went into the great female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, which she would have read in German translations in the Piper edition. Novels that were not “reflexions” of society, but much more suggestive, more intrusive than that: guides to excess, to marginality, to the polar opposite of bourgeois decency.  Dostoevsky was an event. Hamsun was an event. In Gide’s essay on Dostoevsky, he presents the credo:

I recently read an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux, who used a phrase that somewhat astonished me: : « First you have to try to know yourself,” he said. The interviewer must have not understood – Certainly a literatus who seeks himself [qui se cherche] runs a great risk: that of finding himself. After this, he will only write cold books, conforming to himself, all resolved. If he knows his lines, his limits, it is in order not to cross over them. He no longer has any fear of being insincere ; he is afraid of being inconsequent. The true artist remains half unconscious of himself, when he produces. He does not really know who he is. »

« He does not really know who he is”. The radical disjunction between who one is, from every social and political perspective, and who one is, from the subjective point of view, creates the space of a certain impossibility to settle on an identity. This space was populated by both artists and con artists, by cabaret singers and prostitutes, by pimps and poets, by agents and counter-agents, by revolutionaries and provacateurs. She was a familiar of this circle, which she found everywhere – even in Switzerland – in the 1910s and 20s. The underground, bohemia, the party, the cult, psychoanalysis or the avant-garde, these are names for overlapping domains.

The domains, of course, had a reach outside the circles in which she travelled. The Dostoevsky who discovered the Underground, for Gide, Hesse, Hugo Ball, etc., was at the same time the Dostoevsky who inspired the proto-Nazi antisemites that would latter fill the role of Nazi ideologues: Brasol, the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes of a Writer, would also translate and distribute Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the US, finding a patron in Henry Ford, and a receptive audience in Wilson’s State department and the Department of War.  

Alienation, like a hit of acid, is an unpredictable trip.

 In Der Brandmal, she wrote a novel that took its impetus from her own adventures; but her narrator was nevertheless a double, or perhaps the anima, of the narrator of Hamson’s Hunger, with the same mental obstruction lying in the path of any normal course of getting by, a certain refusal to shrink back from the brink of death – death by starvation. Hunger was a keynote. She was not born to bourgeois parents, professionals, she did not go to university, she did not recognize, even, the attraction of the stability of the bourgeois household. Her father, a sailor, was remade into a Sindbad or an Odysseus in her mind – but she was well aware that she was creating a symbol for her own use out of the old man.

Prison [Gefaengnis] and Der Brandmal are a set. The woman who is imprisoned in Prison, who is unjustly imprisoned, who is shaken by the experience so as to see everything in a new light, is connected to the woman who, in Munich, was ripped off by a client – and who consequently took from the client what they had agreed upon. It was for the latter – recompense for her, theft to the court – that she was imprisoned.

Of course, we can trace her in the texts of men, who often reveal their seedy sides in their notebooks, these exploitative fighters against exploitation. Eric Muehsam, for instance, an anarchist, who was later arrested after the Reichstag fire, and murdered “by an SS commando in the night of July 9-10, 1934” in the Oranienburg concentration camp, knew her and claimed she “seduced him” so that they had “coitus” when he was infected with gonnorhea. They were friends, they both worked freelance for Simpliccimus, and she probably charged him for the “coitus”.

Eric Muehsam: The poor girl gets way too little sleep. And since she is very willing, she never gets any rest.“  https://www.xn--mhsam-tagebuch-gsb.de/tb/diaries.php#h5_r190

 By this time she had a daughter. And she was living, as always, hand to mouth, even as she was building up a reputation as a cabaret singer and dancing. She was working at an artist’s bar, Kathi’s, until 3 in the morning, and taking painting classes. To be a cabaret singer you had to put in long hours: it wasn’t a matter of one song, it wasn’t Liza Minelli in Kabaret, it was work.

Later came Hugo, later came her entrance into history, opening the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dances, the masks, the free-floating signifiers.

No Muse ever worked so hard.