'Die Dichterin im Bordell': The Poetry of Ada Christen

Abstract

'Die Dichterin im Bordell5: The Poetry of Ada Christen IAN F. ROE UniversityofReading The first volume of poetry by Ada Christen, the pseudonym of Christiane von Breden, was a bestseller that provoked great interest and much contro versy when published in 1868by theprestigious Hamburg firmofHoffmann and Campe. The interest in Lieder einerVerlorenen [Songs of aL?st Woman] was such that a third edition was required as early as 1873, by which time two further volumes of poetry had appeared ? Aus derAsche [From the Ashes, 1870] and Schatten [Shadows, 1872] ? and these were followed by a fourth book of poems, Aus der Tiefe [From the Depths, 1878], collections of short stories, a novel and two unsuccessful plays. The success or notoriety of the early volumes in particular may have been fuelled by publication outside Austria, but it undoubtedly resulted from the immediacy with which emotions and desires were expressed by a woman writer. It is as an embryonic exploration of a personal female sexuality that the poems most obviously merit study today; elements of social criticism are also of interest, although these feature more prominendy in the later collections of poetry and also in the stories. When Christen died in 1901, the obituaries in the Viennese press were generally favourable,1 but ten years after her death W. A. Hammer was noting in a slim anthology of her works that her writing was already disap pearing from the public gaze, although he saw her as a 'Dichterin von ph?nomenaler Sch?pferkraft und seltenem Freimute' [poet of phenomenal creativity and rare candour] and emphasized the need to save her work for all times.2 Hammer's fears soon seemed justified, and scholarly interest in her works was subsequently almost non-existent until a few years ago, being restricted to two short dissertations, brief book chapters and occasional mentions in encyclopaedias of German or Austrian literature.3 A rather 1 Neue Freie Presse, 20 May 1901, p. 6; 23 May 1901, pp. 1-3; Fremden-Blatt, 21 May 1901, pp. 13-14; Neues Wiener Abendblatt, 10 June 1901, p. 4; Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilage 115, 21 May 1901, p. 8. 2 Ada Christen, Ausgew?hlte Werke, ed. and introd. byW. A. Hammer, Deutsch-?sterreichische Klassikerbibliothek29 (Vienna,Teschen and Leipzig, [1911]). 3 See especially the section by Christiane Touaillon, in Deutsch-?sterreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. by Johann Willibald Nagl, Jakob Zeidler and Eduard Castle, 4 vols (Vienna, 1899-1937), , 709-16; Paul Reimann, 'Ada Christen', inReimann, Von Herder bisKisch. Studien zur Geschichte der deutsch-?sterreichisch-tschechischen Literaturbeziehungen (Berlin, 1961), pp. 34-38; Hans Heinz Hahnl, Vergessene Literaten. F?nfzig ?sterreichische ^ensschichale (Vienna, 1984), pp. 87-90. IAN F. ROE 45 more substantial article by Eduard Beutner, which appeared in 1985, coincided with the first of a number of reference works on women's writing.4 Otherwise the recent mini-revival has been largely confined to Masters dissertations at Austrian universities, most recendy in 2001, but two of these (Pattiss and Seel) are concerned only with the prose works.5 Ada Christen is essentially unknown to English-language scholarship ? a recent English-language history ofwomen's writing accords her less than two lines6 ? and the present article has as itsprincipal aim tomake good that omission. More specifically, however, the intention is to offer what is not available in any language, namely a critical appreciation of the first two volumes of Christen's poetry, in particular with regard to the themes that were so controversial at the time, but also (within the limitations imposed by a short essay) including some comment on matters of form and style, and on the reception of the poetry in the newspapers and journals of the period. Appreciation ofAda Christen's works has not been helped by the fact that they are hardly obtainable in printed form, apart from the original volumes. One selection, though mainly of extracts from her prose works, appeared in the 1911 anthology byW. A. Hammer referred to above; and a selection of poems has recently been made available on the internet in a site authored by Wolf Busch.7 Some aspects of her life have been briefly documented, not least the confusion surrounding the year of...