The Red Countess Select Autobiographical and Fictional Writing of ANZUSHermynia Zur Mühlenand (1883-1951) the Early Cold War Translated, Annotated and with an Essay by Lionel Gossman THE RED COUNTESS Hermynia Zur Mühlen in the garden of the estate at Eigstfer, Estonia, c. 1910. Courtesy of Dr. Patrik von zur Mühlen. The Red Countess Select Autobiographical and Fictional Writing of Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883-1951) Translated, Annotated and with an Essay by Lionel Gossman https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Lionel Gossman The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the author(s), but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work. Attribution should include the following information: Lionel Gossman, The Red Countess: Select Autobiographical and Fictional Writing of Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883-1951). Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi. org/10.11647/OBP.0140 Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/834#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www. openbookpublishers.com/product/834#resources ISBN Paperback: 9781783745548 ISBN Hardback: 9781783745555 ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781783745562 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781783745579 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781783745586 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0140 Cover image: Hermynia Zur Mühlen (drawing of late 1920s) drawn by Emil Stumpp. Reproduced with the friendly permission of the Emil Stumpp Archive, Gelnhausen, Germany. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Translator’s Introductory Note 1 Acknowledgements 5 1. The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life 7 Hermynia Zur Mühlen 2. Supplement to The End and the Beginning 163 Hermynia Zur Mühlen 3. Notes on Persons and Events Mentioned in the Memoir 175 Lionel Gossman 4. Feuilletons and Fairy Tales: A Sampling 279 Hermynia Zur Mühlen Editor’s Note 279 The Red Redeemer 282 Confession 287 High Treason 291 Death of a Shade 294 A Secondary Happiness 300 The Señora 304 Miss Brington 308 We Have to Tell Them 313 Painted on Ivory 318 The Sparrow 325 The Spectacles 340 vi The Red Countess 5. Our Daughters the Nazi Girls. A Synopsis in English 347 Lionel Gossman 6. Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Tribute 407 Lionel Gossman 7. Works by Hermynia Zur Mühlen in English Translation 435 8. Image Portfolio 437 List of Illustrations 441 Additional online resources available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/834#resources Translator’s Introductory Note In the first two chapters of this volume we present Hermynia Zur Mühlen’s 1929 autobiographical memoir, The End and the Beginning (Ende und Anfang. Ein Lebensbild), in a revised and extensively corrected version of Frank Barnes’ translation of 1930 (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith), which, though readable enough, contains many errors. A surprisingly large number of words and phrases in the 1930 translation were simply misunderstood (e.g. ochrana [okhrana in the usual English transcription] – the Russian secret police – translated as “the Ukraine”), and on more than one occasion Zur Mühlen was made to say quite the opposite in English of what she wrote in German. In addition, the original title has been restored in the present edition, as has the original lay-out of the text. The title of the 1930 translation, “The Runaway Countess,” was doubtless designed to attract a particular class of readers, probably readers of the popular romances of the time. As the present edition is directed rather toward readers interested in the social and cultural history of the period covered by the narrative and, in particular, in women’s writing and women’s history, it seemed appropriate to restore Zur Mühlen’s own title, which has a political rather than romantic resonance. The original German title was intended to evoke the end of one social and political order and, with the Russian Revolution of 1917, the beginning of another, in the author’s eyes far better one, and at the same time, in her own personal life, the end of dependency and the beginning of a new existence as a free woman, capable of determining her own identity and her own destiny instead of having to submit to those imposed on her by history and tradition. Zur Mühlen also gave titles to the 77 sections of varying length into which she divided her narrative. These were dropped from Notes and translations © Lionel Gossman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0140.09 2 The Red Countess the 1930 translation, which was divided instead into 24 untitled sections. There seemed to be no reason to prefer that arrangement of the text to the author’s own. The latter has therefore been reinstated. A supplementary chapter, written by Zur Mühlen in 1950 for a post- World War II re-publication of the 1929 German text in the Socialist magazine Die Frau, has been translated and placed, as Chapter 2 of the present book, at the end of Zur Mühlen’s original text, immediately after the final section, “Zdravstvui Revolyutsia.” It was not always possible to reproduce certain characteristic features of Zur Mühlen’s literary style in English translation – notably the effect of impressionistic immediacy achieved by means of punctuation and the elision of co-ordinates like “and” – and it was virtually impossible to convey the Viennese flavour of her language. Translation is inevitably subject in considerable measure to conditions imposed by the target language. Every effort was made, however, to stay as close to the original as possible. The attraction of Zur Mühlen’s memoir lies not only in the charming freshness with which it narrates a young woman’s struggle to be a full, free, and independent human being, in defiance of the conventions and expectations of her time and social class, but in its sharply observed and often humorous portrayal of a bygone world from the unusual angle of the headstrong, rebellious daughter of an Austrian aristocrat and minor diplomat. The numerous individuals and events referred to in the memoir, some quite prominent and well known, many obscure or now forgotten, serve as a reminder that the world that disappeared in the fires of the First World War was full of colourful characters whose often surprising careers can be unexpectedly revealing. In addition, the memoir touches lightly and naively on major issues of the time, such as the interconnected Balkan and Moroccan crises and the climate of revolution in czarist Russia. In the hope of restoring some sense of the author’s world, a fair number of the individuals and events mentioned in the narrative have been identified and described, most often quite briefly, sometimes at considerable length in Chapter 3. In a few especially interesting cases, these notices take the form of little essays. As much information as could be accommodated in the book without expanding it unduly has been provided, in particular, about Zur Mühlen’s family members and about figures little known in the Translator’s Introductory Note 3 English-speaking world, such as the poets Freiligrath and Anastasius Grün. Where information about those figures was hard to come by, the editor has listed some of his sources for the convenience of the reader. Thumbnail images accompany some of the descriptive endnotes. This revised edition of the Open Book Publishers 2010 publication contains material not included in the earlier volume. Chapter 4 contains a sampling of the hundreds of short narratives that Zur Mühlen wrote for newspapers and magazines. These were selected and translated for this edition because of the light they shed on Zur Mühlen’s principles and practice as a politically committed writer, who also earned her living by writing and translating. In addition, translations of two of her socialist fairy tales for children have been included in order to give the reader an idea of the work for which she won an international reputation in left- wing circles in the 1920s and 1930s. Chapter 5 consists of a substantial synopsis in English of a vigorously anti-Nazi novel written by Zur Mühlen in 1934, suppressed in Germany and Austria, and never translated into English. This is followed in Chapters 6 and 7 by the translator’s essay on Zur Mühlen’s life and literary career and by a list of her works in English translation. To close, Chapter 8 offers a sampling of illustrations by the artists George Grosz and Heinrich Vogeler of two of Zur Mühlen’s fairy tale collections and one of her numerous translations. This new edition of Zur Mühlen’s memoir is supplemented by an online appendix available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/834#resources.