Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1870)

Question of the Day - for those who have read Venus in Furs  -  do you see it as camp?

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

Works I have so far read for German Literature Month 2014

1.   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

2.   Gertrude by Hermann Hesse 

3.  "Diary of a School Boy" by Robert Walser (no post)

4.  Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

5.  Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig 1925

6.  Life Goes On by Hans Keilson

7.  Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

8.  "The Wall" by Jurek Becker

9.  "Romeo" by Jurek Becker

10.   "The Invisible City" by Jurek Becker.

11.  Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard

12. "Dostoevsky's Idiot" by Robert Walser

13.  "French Newspapers" by Robert Wasler 

14.  Jakob the Lier by Jurek Becker

15.  The Trial by Franz Kafka 1915

16.  "The Seamstress" by Rainer Maria Rilke  1894

17.  "The Experiement or the Victory of Children" by Unica Zürn 1950

18.  "The Star Above the Forest" by Stefan Zweig. 1924

19.   Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch 1870

Venus in Furs first entered my world in the long ago and faraway when I listed to the lyrics of a song by that name, written by Lou Reed and preformed by The Velvet Underground.  

"Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather

Whiplash girlchild in the dark

Comes in bells, your servant, don't forsake him

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Downy sins of streetlight fancies

Chase the costumes she shall wear

Ermine furs adorn the imperious

Severin, Severin awaits you there

I am tired, I am weary

I could sleep for a thousand years

A thousand dreams that would awake me

Different colors made of tears

Kiss the boot of shiny, shiny leather

Shiny leather in the dark

Tongue of thongs, the belt that does await you

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart

Severin, Severin, speak so slightly

Severin, down on your bended knee

Taste the whip, in love not given lightly

Taste the whip, now plead for me

I am tired, I am weary

I could sleep for a thousand years

A thousand dreams that would awake me

Different colors made of tears

Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather

Whiplash girlchild in the dark

Severin, your servant comes in bells, please don't forsake him

Strike, dear mistress, and cure his heart"

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836 to 1895) was born in the Austro Hungarian Empire in Galacia, birth place of numerous  writers and artists.  He pursued numerous occupations but his Venus in Furs made him immortal and from it derives the term "masocism".  There have been numerous theatrical performances and several movies made from Venus in Furs and my post will contain some images from them.

As the story opens Severin is relaying a dream he had about discussing love with Venus, while she was wearing only fur, specifically ermine.  Severin's friend wants to try to break his obsession with cruel women so he tells him read a manuscript entitled "Memoirs of a Super-Sensual Man".  In the manuscript a man details his long sexual obsession on a beautiful Russian Baroness, Wanda von Dunajew.  (As I saw her last name I wondered why it contains the letters "jew" but I let it go.)  When he first meets her she is wearing a beautiful ermine fur coat.  Rapidly he becomes obsessed with Wanda and begs her to whip him while wearing only fur. He signs a contract agreeing to be her slave for six months.  He preforms all of the standard acts of sexual slaves, boot licking, begging for the whip, accepting her distain for him while she enslaves other men, watching her do with other men what she will not do with him.

  There are several ambiguous scenes in which he may be providing her with oral sex, depending on exactly how we take the various references to the man having his head in Wanda's lap while she is wearing only furs.   

To the man's great horror, Wanda herself becomes obsessed with a Byronic type man and this seems to at least partially break her power over the man.

There are lots of interesting discussions about the nature of relationships between men and women.

As I read this I began to wondered if Venus in Furs can be seen as being Camp literature, as classified by Susan Sontag.  The Weimer Republic was very much a Camp saturated era.  The term was first used in a literary work by Christopher Isherwood in a story set in the Weimer Republic.  Camp culture in Germany of the Weimer and Nazi eras had intimate connections with homosexuality  and we do see the limited sexuality of the man, his love of pain. 

There also the question of the three black women in the employ of the baroness - why are these women depicted as black, does the man's interaction with them under the control of Wanda a commentary on slavery?

Venus in Furs was a very interesting thought provoking read.   It is culturally significant.  There are deep veins of Masocism in much of German literature, obsession with beautiful unobtainable women that leads to great pain or death.  

Mel von ü

Robert Walser - Two Feuilletons from 1925 - "Parisian Newspapers" and "Dostoevsky's Idiot"

From "Dostoevsky's Idiof" by Robert Walser 

My Posts on Robert Walser

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

The schedule and guidelines for participation are on the event webpage.  Just reading the  posts of all the other participants is tremendously informative. There is an interesting contest or two and some prizes to be won.  One of the tasks participants are charged with is reading a work first published in 2014 and this collection qualifies.  

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.   Events like this are one of the great things about being part of the international book blog community.  I know there is a lot of work that goes into a month long event and I offer my thanks to Lizzy and Caroline

Works I have so far read for German Literature Month 2014

1.   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

2.   Gertrude by Hermann Hesse 

3.  "Diary of a School Boy" by Robert Walser (no post)

4.  Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

5.  Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

6.  Life Goes On by Hans Keilson

7.  Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

8.  "The Wall" by Jurek Becker

9.  "Romeo" by Jurek Becker

10.   "The Invisible City" by Jurek Becker.

11.  Wittgenstein's Nephew by Thomas Bernhard

12. "Dostoevsky's Idiot" by Robert Walser

13.  "French Newspapers" by Robert Wasler 

Last year during German Literature Month in November 2013 I read and posted on a few of the unique short stories of Robert Walser (1878 to 1956, Switzerland).  I also read one of his four novels,  Jakob von Gunten.  Robert Walser wrote a large number feuilletons.  The term originally came from the name for a section of French newspaper that published short non-political personal essays, often with an element of fiction.  Joseph Roth was a master of the form.  The feuilletons of Walser blend into fiction because of the artfully dated persona of the narrators.  As far as I know the two works I will post on here can be read only in Selected Stories Robert Walser, with a preface by Susan Sontag. Both of these works are only about three pages and I read each three times.   Both were first published in 1925 and were translated by Thomss Walen and Carol Gehrig.

"Parisian Newspapers"

In "Parisian Newspapers" Walser, speaking it the first person, talks about how reading Paris newspapers has given him French mansions, beautiful sophisticated Parisian ladies and elegant food.  He has spent days in cheap cafés.  He knows he won't be there but he doesn't need to.  The works feels very improvisational, like a master riff jazz saxophone player.

"Doestoesky's Idiot"

"Doestoesky's Idiot" is Walser's reaction to reading the novel.  Walser almost had to identify strongly with the central character, Prince Mishkyn.  Walser knew he was far from a normal person.  He wants to know why he has not inherited millions.  He talks about the characters in The Idiot.  You can tell,he was deeply impacted by the book and the characters in the novel. In these lines you can see how he projects himself into the story and compares his world to the world of the novel.

I will be reading two more longer works by Wslser soon, "The Walk" and a story both Susan Sontag and W, G. Sebald greatly admired, "Kleist in Thun".

Please share your thoughts on Robert Walser with us.

Mel u

Jurek Becker - Three Short Stories by the Author of Jacob the Lier - From The Wall and other Stories -2014

German Literature Month November 2014 Year IV

The schedule and guidelines for participation are on the event webpage.  Just reading the  posts of all the other participants is tremendously informative. There is an interesting contest or two and some prizes to be won.  One of the tasks participants are charged with is reading a work first published in 2014 and this collection qualifies.  

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.   Events like this are one of the great things about being part of the international book blog community.  I know there is a lot of work that goes into a month long event and I offer my thanks to Lizzy and Caroline.

One of my goals for German Literature Month 2014 was to discover some new to me writers of high quality.  With the month over a third done, my first new to me writer I greatly admire is Jurek Becker.  Becker, a German born in Poland (1937 to 1997), is best know for his holocaust novel, Jacob the Lier which was made into a movie  with Robin Williams in the lead role.

Some months ago I was kindly given an advance review copy of The Wall and other Stories by Jurek Becker.  I decided to save it for German Literature Month. ( It is now in print and is available as a Kindle edition.). There are five short stories in the collection and a selection from Jacob the Lier.

So far I have read three of the stories and will post on them today and hopefully the other two before the month is over.  Two of the stories deal with a child's experience of life in a Jewish Ghetto in Poland during World War Two and one amazing story centers on a foreign worker living in Berlin after the war during the period before the wall came down.  

Works I have so far read for German Literature Month 2014

1.   Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

2.   Gertrude by Hermann Hesse 

3.  "Diary of a School Boy" by Robert Walser (no post)

4.  Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

5.  Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

6.  Life Goes On by Hans Keilson

7.  Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

8.  "The Wall" by Jurek Becker

9.  "Romeo" by Jurek Becker

10.   "The Invisible City" by Jurek Becker.

"Invisible Cities" 

"Invisible Cities", first published in 1990, is the shortest work in the collection. It is almost an essay.   Becker lived with his parents in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland under German control, from the  age two to five. Then for a while in a concentration camp. He and his parentd survived.   Of course for him life in the Ghetto was just normal life, starvation, inspection, and constant fear of his parents and the violence around them, the disappearing of those he knew, were just normal. Now the war is long over, he is a grown man, a well known author who writes stories about childhood in the Ghetto.  As a child and young man he never talked much about those years with his parents and now they are gone.  He is involved right now in putting together an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto.  He is trying to construct or find the lost memories of his experiences from the photos,trying to see a now to him invisible city.  We sense his sadness at the permanent loss memories, a loss of history.  Sort of you feel he is a bit ashamed of making a handsome living from experiences he cannot remember.  

"Romeo"

"Romeo, initially published in 1980, is about a foreign worker, I guessed he was Polish, living in East Berlin but working, in the legally divided and separated by the infamous Berlin Wall city of Berlin, in West Berlin.  He is when we meet him fairly newly arrived, there to send money home, and learning the tricks of getting by while living in the divided city.  Everyday he has to cross through a check point, pay a fee and exchange his money.  All this traveling eats into his earnings.  He meets a Turkish worker who teaches him a lot of ways to save money. The more he can send home the sooner he can go back to his country.  The best idea is to find a West Berlin girlfriend he can live with to avoid the travel expenses and the border crossing fees. Of course the girls will want a bit of money, only fair.

  His friend takes him along to a bar said to be good for meeting German girls.  Compressing a good bit, he does meet a Germsn girl, not in his words , "too whorish looking" and seems shy at first.   Just an average looking girl.  I don't want to tell the end but their first encounter is beautifully done, you sense the great loneliness in both. The sexual encounter is very well narrated. You can tell it has been a very long time for both of them.   The girl is kind of prostituting herself and the man plans to use her for a place  to live, of course he will give her money, but in a country destroyed by war one cannot be too squeamish about puritanical strictures.  

"The Wall"

"The Wall", the title story and longest one in the collection, was first published in 1980.  It is told by a boy, maybe ten, living with his parents, in a Jewish Ghetto.   There are daily line ups for head counts to make sure no one has tried to climb over the wall.  The Germans are continually shirking the size of the Ghetto by moving the wall, constricting the people inside.  Germans are seen as subhuman beasts.  One day his family is ordered to move out of their house, taking only a few things.  Now they live in a terribly small place, all sleep in one bed.   Of course boys will be boys and a neighbor boy bolder than the narrator suggests they climb over the wall at night, when they reason all the Germans are sleeping, go back to vacated houses and see what they can find.   The trip across the wall is very dangerous and exciting, perfectly told from the boy's point of view.   I don't want to spoil the ending of this story but something amazing happens.

These were three great stories.  There are three more in the collection and I hope to read and post on them this month.  All are translated for the first time into English.

Author Bio (from the wepage of the Goethe Institute)

Jurek Becker was born in 1937 in Łódź, Poland. He was interned in the Łódź Ghetto with his parents from 1940 to 1944 and was subsequently a prisoner in the Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. After the war, Becker's father took him to East Berlin, where they were among the few surviving Jews who chose to stay in Germany. He became a screenwriter and novelist. A dissident in East Germany, in 1977 he emigrated to West Berlin. He died in 1997.

I am going to read Jacob the Lier very soon.