The Red Countess

Hermynia Zur Mühlen, Lionel Gossman

Description

Born into a distinguished aristocratic family of the old Habsburg Empire, Hermynia Zur Mühlen spent much of her childhood and early youth travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. Never comfortable with the traditional roles women were expected to play, she broke as a young adult both with her family and, after five years on his estate in the old Czarist Russia, with her German Junker husband, and set out as an independent, free-thinking individual, earning a precarious living as a writer.





Zur Mühlen translated over 70 books from English, French and Russian into German, notably the novels of Upton Sinclair, which she turned into best-sellers in Germany; produced a series of detective novels under a pseudonym; wrote seven engaging and thought-provoking novels of her own, six of which were translated into English; contributed countless insightful short stories and articles to newspapers and magazines; and, having become a committed socialist, achieved international renown in the 1920s with her Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children, which were widely translated including into Chinese and Japanese.





Because of her fervent and outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she and her life-long Jewish partner, Stefan Klein, had to flee first Germany, where they had settled, and then, in 1938, her native Austria. They found refuge in England, where Zur Mühlen died, forgotten and virtually penniless, in 1951.







This new, expanded edition contains:





• Zur Mühlen’s autobiographical memoir, The End and the Beginning

• The editor’s detailed notes on the persons and events mentioned in the autobiography

• A selection of Zur Mühlen’s short stories and two fairy tales

• A synopsis of Zur Mühlen’s untranslated novel Our Daughters the Nazi Girls

• An essay by the Editor on Zur Mühlen’s life and work

• A bibliography of Zur Mühlen’s novels in English translation

• A portfolio of selected illustrations of her work by George Grosz and Heinrich Vogeler

• A free online supplement with additional original material

 

Sujets

• Nazism
• Biography
• World War I
• Women's history
• Austrian literature
• Memoir
• History of Europe
• German literature
• Feminism
• Austria-Hungary
• Autobiography
• Germany
• Première Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783745579
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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
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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.
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Contents
Translator’s Introductory Note
1
Acknowledgements
5
1 .
The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life
Hermynia Zur Mühlen
7
2 .
Supplement to The End and the Beginnin g
Hermynia Zur Mühlen
163
3 .
Notes on Persons and Events Mentioned in the Memoir
Lionel Gossman
175
4 .
Feuilletons and Fairy Tales: A Sampling
Hermynia Zur Mühlen
279
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
5 .
Our Daughters the Nazi Girls . A Synopsis in English
Lionel Gossman
347
6 .
Remembering Hermynia Zur Mühlen: A Tribute
Lionel Gossman
407
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


Notes and translations © Lionel Gossman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0140.09
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 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 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 sy