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The Popular Novels of Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum

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The Popular Novels of Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum DRUDGERY, DREAMLAND AND DIONYSUS: THE POPULAR NOVELS OF INA SEIDEL AND VICKI BAUM Rosemary Anne Sillars Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of European Languages Aberystwyth University 2015 DECLARATION This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not being currently submitted in candidature for any degree Signed……………………………………………….. (Rosemary Anne Sillars) Date…………………………………….. STATEMENT 1 This thesis is the result of my own investigations, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references A bibliography is appended. Signed……………………………………………….. (Rosemary Anne Sillars) Date…………………………………….. STATEMENT 2 I hereby give my consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the tile and summary to be made available to outside organisations. Signed……………………………………………….. (Rosemary Anne Sillars) Date…………………………………….. Abstract The novels, poems and journalism of Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum were part of that everyday popular literature read and enjoyed by an international audience throughout the years of the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and beyond. Their wide distribution and popular themes ensured that they reached a diverse public, but their publishers aimed their attentions at that female readership whose buying-power and literary tastes were now acknowledged as a significant market-factor. Both authors recognised their powerful position and took upon themselves the responsibilities, with which they believed they were thus endowed, to enlighten, educate and inform. They wrote from a view of themselves as creative artists with particular literary skills but, above all, as women. Understanding ‘womanhood’ as their primeval inheritance, they saw a woman’s physical powers of generation and nurture as part of the order of the natural universe, uniting them with other female beings. But ‘womanhood’ also had symbolic and transcendent implications, linking humanity not only with the earth from which it sprung and to which it would return but also with the infinite cosmos beyond. The present thesis argues that this viewpoint was encouraged by personal and family histories but also by the social climate of Weimar. Choosing political irresponsibility and creative freedom, both women were content to consider themselves as alienated from a contemporary world they found in many ways distasteful, while continuing to expoit the advantages and opportunities it offered for career-success. They turned popular intellectual currents to their advantage, making domestic narratives and theatrical melodramas from a diversity of sources, exploiting current enthusiasms for the dramatic arts to demonstrate their views of the world which surrounded them. They also offered their readerships ideas of better, even utopian, social orders with historical, philosophical or anthropological antecedents. Their ideas of a better world and a woman’s place within it, shared with their vast and diverse popular, and international, readership, eased rather than challenged the ideological rise to dominance of National Socialism. Contents CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION and BRIEF LITERATURE REVIEW CHAPTER 2 LIVES IN PARALLEL, A BIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE 2.1 Chalk and Cheese? …………………………………………………………. 39 2.2 Lives in progress……………………………………………………………. 43 2.3 Common experience………………………………………………………… 46 2.4 Shared disillusions………………………………………………………….. 48 2.5 All girls together……………………………………………………………. 49 2.6 Love and Marriage………………………………………………………….. 51 2.7 Nietzscheanerinnen…………………………………………………………. 53 2.8 The Seidels and the idea of Germany………………………………………. 57 2.8.1 Munich and Modernism…………………………………………….. 59 2.8.2 A Literary Career…………………………………………………… 62 2.9 The Baum Family…………………………………………………………… 66 2.9.1 The Baums’ Austria………………………………………………………… 70 2.9.2 Visions of Heimat……………………………………………………............ 71 2.9.3 Encounter with Modernity…………………………………………............... 72 2.9.4 A Literary Career……………………………………………………………. 74 2.10 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….. 76 CHAPTER THREE POPULAR NOVELISTS, CREATIVE WOMEN 3.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………… 82 3.2 What was a Best-Selling Author? …………………………………………. 84 3.3 German publication figures of novels by Ina Seidel and Vicki Baum…….. 88 3.4 The Weimar market for popular literature………………………………….. 91 3.5 The predominance of Berlin in contemporary publishing………………….. 95 3.6 Self-education through popular literature………………………………….. 96 3.7 The later influence of National Socialism………………………………….. 109 3.8 A specifically female notion of creativity………………………………..… 112 3.9 The writer’s work…………………………………………………………… 115 3.10 The artistic temperament…………………………………………………… 121 3.11 Popular novelist or creative artist? …………………………………………. 128 3.12 The creative processs…………………………………………..…………… 135 3.13 Conclusion………………………………………………….……………… 136 CHAPTER 4 WORLDLY WOMEN 4.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………. 140 4.2 Changing definitions of women’s role in Weimar society…………………. 148 4.3 Literature aimed at a new readership………………………………………. 150 4.4 The woman question……………………………………………………….. 151 4.5 Self-image and public-image: Weimar women’s idea of themselves………. 153 4.6 Narrating women…………………………………………………………… 158 4.7 Women in war ………………………………………………………………. 159 4.8 Changed social mores………………………………………………………. 164 4.9 Women’s physicality/sexuality…………………………………………….. 165 4.10 Homosexuality……………………………………………………………… 170 4.11 Motherhood………………………………………………………………… 173 4.12 Women in the modern world……………………………………………….. 174 4.13 Women and public life………………………………………..…………….. 177 4.14 Gender as biology…………………………………………………………… 179 4.15 Nietzsche and a better life for women…………………………………….... 181 4.16 Childbirth………………………………………………………………… 182 4.17 Fictional images of motherhood……………………………………………. 183 4.18 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….... 185 CHAPTER 5 NOT-AT-HOME 5.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………. 190 5.2 Ina Seidel and Inner Emigration…………….……………………………… 192 5.3 The place of both writers in Exile Studies…………………………………. 205 5.4 Vicki Baum as Exile Writer….……………….…………………………….. 209 5.5 Looking backwards………………………………………………………… 215 5.6 Personal alienation as exile – expulsion from the Mother…………………. 217 5.7 The idea of Heimat……………………………………………………………….. 219 5.8 Reconstructing the lost Heimat…………………………………………………. 221 5.9 Fictional Exiles……………………………………………………...……… 226 5.10 Conclusion………………………………………………………….………. 235 CHAPTER 6 SALVATION THROUGH THEATRE: THE ARCANE ARTS OF THE NOVELIST 6.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………. 239 6.2 Rejection of rationalism through theatre ………….……………………….. 245 6.3 Numinous images – the silent pictures……………………………………… 249 6.4 The saving grace of theatre ……………………………….………………… 251 6.5 Literary dramas…………………………..……………..…………………… 250 6.6 Propagandist tales and theatre for the Masses ..…………….......................... 256 6.7 The dramaturgical metaphor – sets and performances of social life……….……........................................... 260 6.8 Everyday Rituals……………………………………………………………. 268 6.9 Performing the human animal.………………………….………………….. 271 6.10 The play-actor, the performer as embodier….……………………………… 275 6.11 Melodramatic interludes……………………………………………………. 279 6.12 Dionysian Rausch………..…………………………………………………. 282 6.13 The immortality of art……….……………………………………………… 289 6.14 Conclusion……………..……………………………………….................... 291 CHAPTER 7 SHARED VISIONS AND SPLINTERED CIRCUMSTANCES 7.1 Introduction: Comparison and Juxtaposition……………………………… 297 7.2.1 Life Histories……………………………………………………………….. 304 7.2.2 Ethnicity…………………………………………………………………….. 305 7.2.3 The nation as family………………………………………………………… 307 7.3 The facts and fictions of two female popular novelists…………………….. 307 7.3.1 Writing utopias in an age of mass culture…………………………………… 310 7.4 The reality of women’s lives………………………………………………... 312 7.5 Strangers in their own lands………………………………………... ……… 316 7.6 Idealist visions and theatrical deliverance………………………………….. 319 7.7 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….. 323 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….. 321 1 Chapter 1 Introduction In the Epilogue to his book Writing Weimar, David Midgeley comments: the intellectual utopianism of both left and right under the Weimar Republic is characterised by a revolt against the conception of modernity entailed in Max Weber’s description of modern knowledge as inescapably ‘disenchanted’ and fragmented. It would be worth establishing precisely how novels of the period relate to the same issue.1 While the popular novelist Vicki Baum would have been unwilling to publicly accept that her novels were either intellectual, utopian or in revolt against modernity, the equally popular novelist Ina Seidel, her contemporary, might have accepted all of those designations. The women shared, however, a will to re-enchant the world for their readers, both in day-dreams of what it might be like to be rich and famous, or equally fanciful visions of rural idylls and domestic fire-sides. Their fictional heroines generally find their beautiful illusions smashed by the careless or malevolent world. Utopia, both authors believed, is not to be achieved through planned re-organisation of the circumstances of individual lives or communities but remained an idea to be illustrated, cherished and pursued, more a philosophic or quasi-religious concept, akin to a Christian heaven, than a sociological or political theory. This study, which declares its subject-matter to be the writings of two novelists,
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