Fräulein Else Steinhardt

Celebrate Else Steinhardt.

People should not be defined by their victim-hood.

Fraulein Else is the name of the novella Arthur Schnitzler wrote in 1924. It was a forerunner of Joyce's stream of consciousness writing and it incorporated some of the psychosexual ideas from Freud's theories. It's about a young girl of 19 who lives in Vienna and is cornered into stripping for an old voyeur by her own mother. The father is having financial problems and the man will help the father if the girl obliges.

There are some parallels with our Else. She was roughly the same age as the character in the novella when it was written, and she probably moved in the same circles as Schnitzler, as a young opera singer. Moreover, Else was, if not classically beautiful, highly flirtations and attractive. In the pictures of her she is often arch: she licks ice creams, sits on laps and embraces naked statues.

In other pictures she is dressed in loose, flowing clothing, matching the open, aware expression on her face. Richard Steinhardt, her brother, dedicates a picture of them both from in the '20s, with the words (in English):

"To the prettiest girl I know."

After going through the family letters and photographs. I realise how little the tragedy at the end of Else's life defined her. The rapist doesn't define the life of the person they raped. The victim of mass murder is not be defined by the mass murder, however horrifying. Else was not defined by Auschwitz.

I can imagine Else in the amazing interwar period in Red Vienna, thoughtful, often post-coital. I imagine her independent of a loving, domineering father, nostalgic for the Hapsburg empire; I imagine her liberated from history and racial identity - flourishing in the mystery of sex, finding life and thereby enhancing meaning.

Music, performance, friendship, laughter, sadness. Her best friend and cousin, Paula, her dolder brother Richard, her more intellectual brother, Arthur, and all their friends. Her mother Regina and her father - his pomposity burst, he dies in the Prague in March 1941.

She wanted to become an opera singer; she became one. She had support and help to do so and by the time the Nazis banned all Jewish actors and singers and directors from the stage, though she was not celebrated, she was well known and had built up quite an impressive repertoire.

Her last performance was in Vienna was in 1937 in an Operetta by Strauss. She kept her cuttings and her calling cards and stage photos - I have them. Her repertoire, which she took to Paris in 1938 to give to theatres there, in order to find work is here.

And I'll type it up as it is on paper, to celebrate Else. I'll copy from the paper, yellower now, with it's faded letter "d's".

Repertoire: Else Steinhardt

__________________________

Opernsoubrette, Lyrische Sangerin u. Operettensangerin.

Boheme: Mimi, Musette

Butterfly: Butterfly

Caveliere rustieana: Lola

Carmen: Mieaela, Frasquitta

Don Juan: Zerline

Figaros Hochzeit: Cherubin,Suzanne

Freischutz: Annehen

Hansel und Gretel: Gretel

Lustige Weiber: Frau Fluth

Oberon: Oberon

Tiefland: Nuri

Unhold Ohneseele: Prinzessen (Rimsky Korsakow)

Verkaufte Braut: Marie

Waffenschmidt: Marie

Werther: Sophie

Zauberflaute: Pamina: 1. Knabe

______________

Land des Laeheins: Lisa

Graf V. Laeheins: Angele

Eva: Eva

Friearike: Friearike

Paganini: A...." Elisa

Fleaedermaus: Rosalinae: Aaele

Fruhlingsluft: Emilie

Geschiedene Frau: Jana

Im weissen Rossl: Josepha Vogelhuber

Berzen im Sehnee: Margaret

Fortunios Liea: Marie

Die sehone Galathe: Galathe

Abentenei in Tunis: Marion

Die Goldene Mule: Ketlerein

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION : The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...

Donkeyshott & Xuitlacoche

Search This Blog