Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts by Lou Andreas-Salomé, and: Annaliese's House: A Translation of Lou Andreas Salomé's 1921 Novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts by Lou Andreas-Salomé

Abstract

Reviewed by: Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts by Lou Andreas-Salomé, and: Annaliese's House: A Translation of Lou Andreas Salomé's 1921 Novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts by Lou Andreas-Salomé Susan C. Anderson Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts. By Lou Andreas-Salomé. Edited by Brigitte Spreitzer. Taching am See: MedienEdition Welsch, 2021. Pp. 396. Cloth €32.80. ISBN 978-3-937211-44-2. Annaliese's House: A Translation of Lou Andreas Salomé's 1921 Novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts. By Lou Andreas-Salomé. Translated by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger. Rochester: Camden House, 2021. Pp. lxiv + 227. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1-64014-101-8. Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) wrote most of her final novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts in 1904, but she waited until 1921 to complete and publish it. It has taken one hundred years for an English translation to appear, and it coincidentally appeared in the same year as a new German edition was published. The novel traces the unfolding of two women's psyches within the socio-cultural and emotional constraints of patriarchy. At issue is to what extent the [End Page 585] women can move within and beyond those constraints and how the central image of the house represents their struggle. The house in which the main characters, the Branhardts, live is modeled on the house "Loufried," which Salomé and her spouse, Friedrich Carl Andreas, bought in Göttingen after Andreas accepted a position at the university there. Das Haus was originally entitled Die Ehe, but the final title better encompasses the novel's focus on both marriage and family relationships. Critics at the time praised Das Haus for its nuanced focus on women, family, duty (Auguste Hauschner), harmony, and psychological complexity (Gabriele Reuter, Christine Touaillon). Yet in the later twentieth century, Salomé was criticized for her outdated views of gender. The book received little scholarly notice until Salomé's literary oeuvre underwent critical reevaluation towards the end of the twentieth century. Since then, the text has figured in studies of Salomé's thoughts on psychology, religion, aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. As Muriel Cormican has pointed out, Das Haus reveals Salomé's contradictory ideas about women's emancipation, ideas that both encourage women's autonomy and accept as given a woman's desire to submit in marriage. The house imagery relates to the psychological changes in Annaliese Branhardt and her daughter, Gitta, who later moves into another house with Markus. It also highlights the women's different views of marriage and provides a space for the development of creativity, the deepening of family relationships, and serves as a microcosm of social relations. As Brigitte Spreitzer argues in her nuanced afterword to the German edition, the house in the novel serves as a three-dimensional space for imagination and the unconscious (351). By placing the narrative within the context of Salomé's aesthetic theories, Spreitzer contends that the house represents the author's storytelling as well as the characters' growth and changes of perspective. The house also at times serves as an analogy for Annaliese and Gitta's entrapment in the patriarchal order, while offering them a safe place to develop the strength to break free of its confines, to a certain extent. The novel's end, as Spreitzer notes, shows Annaliese outside facing away from the house, embodying Salomé's ideal woman who has found an outlet for her creative impulses through her unconstrained psyche (373). Spreitzer's analysis offers rich context to the house imagery by connecting it to notions of home and the unconscious in Salomé's letters, diary entries, essays, and fiction. Her interpretation illuminates Salomé's grappling with women's social and gender roles throughout her writing as well as her efforts to deconstruct gender binaries. The main narrative perspective is that of Annaliese, but readers also have insight into the thoughts of her spouse, Frank Branhardt, and their adult children, Gitta and Balduin. Salomé sets up a generational conflict between parents and children as well as conflicts over gender roles between Annaliese and Frank, Gitta and her husband...