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La flétrissure
Después de su segunda novela, El estigma (1920), Emmy Hennings fue considerada entre lo mejor y más importante de su generación literaria. La sinceridad radical y autodestructiva de la joven Dagny, que se mueve sin descanso por las ciudades alemanas y se ve obligada temporalmente a la prostitución, solo encuentra comparación en las novelas de Hamsun y Dostoievski o en las «confesiones» de san Agustín y Rousseau. A modo de diario novelado— aquí por primera vez en nuestro idioma —encontramos un fascinante y contradictorio relato de una vida problemática, obstinada y, en suma, llena de rebeldía, que además guarda un duro alegato contra el destino de las mujeres de su tiempo.
344 pages
First published January 1, 1920
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About the author
Emmy Hennings
25 books14 followersEmmy Hennings (born Emma Maria Cordsen; also known as Emmy Ball-Hennings) was a poet and performing artist, and, with Hugo Ball, founder of the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire. A vulnerable artist, the poet Erich Mühsam called her an "erotic genius"; for Hermann Hesse she was "a fairy-tale bird and a little angel"; and her partner Hugo Ball asked admiringly: "Are you aware of the sheer power of your singing voice?" That Hennings was able to radiate such magic is remarkable – not least because her life was plagued by material and psychological hardship, displacement, drugs, prostitution, illness and prison. She struggled with various disabilities throughout her life, but the power of her poetry and charismatic stage presence outshone the misery and privations.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 20, 2022
Emmy Hennings is an impressive figure who’s never quite received the recognition she deserves. An anarchist, activist, and an advocate of free love, during WW1 Hennings co-founded the infamous Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire but she’d already spent years as an actor, poet, and writer. Branded was published in 1920 and immediately hailed for its radical approach and innovatory style. It draws directly on Hennings’s own experiences during the early 1900s when she was scraping a living as an actor but often forced to take on any work that would pay. It’s narrated by Dagny, a German woman in her twenties – one of Hennings’s many real-life pseudonyms. When her story begins, Dagny’s newly arrived in Cologne after her acting work suddenly dries up. She has the clothes she’s wearing and just enough money for a coffee. Homeless and hungry Dagny drifts into “survival” sex work. At first, she picks up men in cafés, spending the rest of her time wandering the city streets. Eventually she joins a group of women in a rundown brothel and reluctantly becomes a full-time sex worker. But Dagny is in search of some higher meaning, she’s fascinated by Catholicism, and philosophy, and the only person she really identifies with is Sonia, the saintly "prostitute" in Crime and Punishment. She constantly questions the society around her, its values, and its treatment of women. The first half of Hennings’s novel’s a marvellous, detailed recreation of the daily existence of sex workers in pre-war Germany, the makeshift brothel community as well as the bars and café culture of Cologne. It’s a sympathetic account, vivid and imaginative, direct yet lyrical with a distinctly modernist feel.
Later Dagny returns to the stage, travelling through Germany with a Yiddish-theatre company, although it’s clear from her observations that acting for women’s not much different from sex work. The sections centred on the theatre, the different German towns and rooming houses are gripping but there are a few points where Dagny’s reflections on spirituality seem a little self-indulgent and overly long, particularly in the concluding pages. Despite the less successful elements I thought this was fascinating, the characters, the settings, the perspectives on German culture and society are rich and striking, and much of this feels surprisingly fresh and immediate. There are obvious parallels to the work of later Weimar writers like Irmgard Keun, as well as to authors like Jean Rhys with her impoverished, marginalised women. When this first appeared Hennings was compared to Dostoevsky and Knut Hamsun, although at times this also reminded me of Rilke’s portraits of urban alienation albeit with a more mystical flavour. Edited and translated here by Katharina Rout, this edition’s published by Broadview Press, like their other works it’s accompanied by an incredibly comprehensive and useful array of notes and biographical material.
Rating: 3.5/4
Later Dagny returns to the stage, travelling through Germany with a Yiddish-theatre company, although it’s clear from her observations that acting for women’s not much different from sex work. The sections centred on the theatre, the different German towns and rooming houses are gripping but there are a few points where Dagny’s reflections on spirituality seem a little self-indulgent and overly long, particularly in the concluding pages. Despite the less successful elements I thought this was fascinating, the characters, the settings, the perspectives on German culture and society are rich and striking, and much of this feels surprisingly fresh and immediate. There are obvious parallels to the work of later Weimar writers like Irmgard Keun, as well as to authors like Jean Rhys with her impoverished, marginalised women. When this first appeared Hennings was compared to Dostoevsky and Knut Hamsun, although at times this also reminded me of Rilke’s portraits of urban alienation albeit with a more mystical flavour. Edited and translated here by Katharina Rout, this edition’s published by Broadview Press, like their other works it’s accompanied by an incredibly comprehensive and useful array of notes and biographical material.
Rating: 3.5/4
December 1, 2024
Emmy Hennings is one of the more mysterious figures of cultural history: a founding Dadaist, she came to Zurich during the First World War from a background of peripatetic acting, hawking, mystical thinking, morphine use, and survival sex work. This novel, which is based on those days wandering starving around Germany, was a colossal hit when it was first published, but forgotten after the war, and not really rediscovered until feminist literary historians got hold of it in the 1990s.
Lucky they did. With no chapters and no concession to conventional ideas of plot or character development, it still feels experimental, and was much more so when it came out in 1920. Its narrator, Dagny (a pseudonym Hennings used in real life), evokes a world of hostess bars, cheap cabarets, vaudeville performances, brothels and abject poverty, where her finances allow her to give herself ‘one bed night for every two or three park nights’.
Compared to more modern treatments of this sort, what's especially notable here is Hennings's tone: she's not painting herself as cynical, edgy, a worldly-wise outsider. Instead she comes across as perennially open, hopeful, a spiritually questing naïf. Her close descriptions of how an encounter in a café can lead to something transactional, or how working as a waitress can shade organically into prostitution, are fascinating purely on a sociohistorical level; some of her comments on sex work sound like the sort of things said more recently by people like Virginie Despentes:
Her relationship with this work is fascinatingly nuanced. At times – though rarely – she feels desire of her own (‘I felt something like arousal ripple down my hips and loins, and had to lower my eyes’); but mostly, she is assiduous in pointing out how the one-sidedness of such relationships (naturally enough) militates against her sharing in the emotions of it all.
This is quite incisive. There is also an unexpected fluidity in sex and gender here that feels modern: ‘You're like a boy, but you're a girl,’ someone says to her, and Dagny herself claims, ‘I am and will always be both male and female.’ ‘Passions can move in almost any direction,’ she says reassuringly to a woman who makes a pass at her.
The dada-ness of Branded is open to discussion. It is more superficially coherent than more ‘central’ works of dada writing, but let's not gatekeep it too much: its ethos, of a world succumbing to machinery, evil impulses and spiritual emptiness, is pure dada projected backwards into the pre-War world. Dream sequences, fantasies, visions and moments of magic realism show an impatience with the constraints of naturalistic prose. At times, indeed, it reads almost like a dada manifesto, especially in her comments on the crassness of popular art:
It's extremely welcome to have this English edition from Katharina Rout, whose translation is solid enough, if sometimes bouncing around a bit too much in register. She comes into her own, though, in a very well researched introduction, which gives a great précis of Hennings's life, as well as in the book's ‘contextual materials’, which include extracts from other contemporary ‘prostitution novels’, religious texts, works of social research, and some fantastic photos.
Hopefully this will help bring Hennings back to the centre of discussions about the history of rebel art and the counterculture, where she belongs. ‘If the world wants to burn, I will drop, a small burst of fire, into a sea of flames,’ she writes, like an early punk-bodhisattva. ‘Can't help but burn myself up.’
Lucky they did. With no chapters and no concession to conventional ideas of plot or character development, it still feels experimental, and was much more so when it came out in 1920. Its narrator, Dagny (a pseudonym Hennings used in real life), evokes a world of hostess bars, cheap cabarets, vaudeville performances, brothels and abject poverty, where her finances allow her to give herself ‘one bed night for every two or three park nights’.
Compared to more modern treatments of this sort, what's especially notable here is Hennings's tone: she's not painting herself as cynical, edgy, a worldly-wise outsider. Instead she comes across as perennially open, hopeful, a spiritually questing naïf. Her close descriptions of how an encounter in a café can lead to something transactional, or how working as a waitress can shade organically into prostitution, are fascinating purely on a sociohistorical level; some of her comments on sex work sound like the sort of things said more recently by people like Virginie Despentes:
If I satisfy some passing fellow for two marks fifty, I have the same right to speak about love as the wife who longingly expects her husband for lunch. I need that fellow as much as she needs hers. Long for him just as much. Or more. More.
Her relationship with this work is fascinatingly nuanced. At times – though rarely – she feels desire of her own (‘I felt something like arousal ripple down my hips and loins, and had to lower my eyes’); but mostly, she is assiduous in pointing out how the one-sidedness of such relationships (naturally enough) militates against her sharing in the emotions of it all.
I protest and insist I did not invent lust. Its inventor, so ingenious and perfidious, can't have been female. By her nature, woman is no inventor. I've had to endure the most acute pain for lust's sake. Lust that I don't share means pain and suffering. Strictly speaking, the fact that I despise that accursed lust, that I deep down despise it – that is, I believe, the reason I am despised.
This is quite incisive. There is also an unexpected fluidity in sex and gender here that feels modern: ‘You're like a boy, but you're a girl,’ someone says to her, and Dagny herself claims, ‘I am and will always be both male and female.’ ‘Passions can move in almost any direction,’ she says reassuringly to a woman who makes a pass at her.
The dada-ness of Branded is open to discussion. It is more superficially coherent than more ‘central’ works of dada writing, but let's not gatekeep it too much: its ethos, of a world succumbing to machinery, evil impulses and spiritual emptiness, is pure dada projected backwards into the pre-War world. Dream sequences, fantasies, visions and moments of magic realism show an impatience with the constraints of naturalistic prose. At times, indeed, it reads almost like a dada manifesto, especially in her comments on the crassness of popular art:
Why is it always the shallowest stuff that makes the most money? It should be withheld from audiences, who instead should be offered something really good. Appetite comes with eating, does it not?
It's extremely welcome to have this English edition from Katharina Rout, whose translation is solid enough, if sometimes bouncing around a bit too much in register. She comes into her own, though, in a very well researched introduction, which gives a great précis of Hennings's life, as well as in the book's ‘contextual materials’, which include extracts from other contemporary ‘prostitution novels’, religious texts, works of social research, and some fantastic photos.
Hopefully this will help bring Hennings back to the centre of discussions about the history of rebel art and the counterculture, where she belongs. ‘If the world wants to burn, I will drop, a small burst of fire, into a sea of flames,’ she writes, like an early punk-bodhisattva. ‘Can't help but burn myself up.’
December 24, 2024
Emmy Hennings co-founded the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, then gained renown in the German-speaking world for this remarkable work of auto fiction, published in 1920, based on her own years as a nomadic actress and sometime sex worker. The narrator, Dagny, arrives in Cologne jobless and moneyless, and is persuaded by an old acquaintance to enter into sex work. She works the streets, sometimes sleeping in parks, and paints a vivid if dissociated and almost hallucinatory at times picture of her encounters with the men and women around her. At the same time, she’s a more spiritual seeker, cherishing her copies of a psalm book and Crime and Punishment, and addressing herself to God, the Nameless One. Later in the book, she returns to acting, but it’s evident - both within the text and in the excellent introduction by translator Katharina Rout - that the lines between sex work and being an actress at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany were blurry, as she’s expected to entertain men each evening after the show.
It took me an age to read, as it’s a very interior novel. The inward-turning, reflective prose was very effective - it provided not only a social portrait of the life of a young woman on the margins, but also entree into her rich, if dissociative, inner life. The tone wasn’t patronizing, since here Hennings was one with her subject. Dagny reflects on her alienation, on city life, on her relationship with money - all things that Expressionust artists were cantering at the same time, but with a powerfully gendered lens. Hennings was also apparently an enthusiastic Catholic, and the religious musings were less successful for me as a reader. In any event, it’s all a heady combination, think Jean Rhys, think Hole. Recently well translated with the aforementioned very helpful introduction and rather more footnotes than needed. 3.5.
From the author’s own diary: “I walk the street, and my books are street books.”
“The money in my pocket felt very dubious and strikes me as more and more suspicious. It is my humiliation, and the blazing mark of my disgrace. I wipe the money with my handkerchief so it’s at least clean on the outside before I pass it on to more innocent hands. Money is also counterfeit, though a superbly potent fake. Real money does not exist, I tell myself. It would be a fluke if it ever did. What you exchange it for is something entirely different.”
“Everything for the taking and yet to be paid for. How deeply degrading money is. It is irrelevant what I begin. I can begin whatever I like, it all still ends the same way: with a surrender for money.”
“Here I sit, in front of my mirror, inspecting this doll. I know how to be double. Under the black brows are light, blond ones. The real ones.”
It took me an age to read, as it’s a very interior novel. The inward-turning, reflective prose was very effective - it provided not only a social portrait of the life of a young woman on the margins, but also entree into her rich, if dissociative, inner life. The tone wasn’t patronizing, since here Hennings was one with her subject. Dagny reflects on her alienation, on city life, on her relationship with money - all things that Expressionust artists were cantering at the same time, but with a powerfully gendered lens. Hennings was also apparently an enthusiastic Catholic, and the religious musings were less successful for me as a reader. In any event, it’s all a heady combination, think Jean Rhys, think Hole. Recently well translated with the aforementioned very helpful introduction and rather more footnotes than needed. 3.5.
From the author’s own diary: “I walk the street, and my books are street books.”
“The money in my pocket felt very dubious and strikes me as more and more suspicious. It is my humiliation, and the blazing mark of my disgrace. I wipe the money with my handkerchief so it’s at least clean on the outside before I pass it on to more innocent hands. Money is also counterfeit, though a superbly potent fake. Real money does not exist, I tell myself. It would be a fluke if it ever did. What you exchange it for is something entirely different.”
“Everything for the taking and yet to be paid for. How deeply degrading money is. It is irrelevant what I begin. I can begin whatever I like, it all still ends the same way: with a surrender for money.”
“Here I sit, in front of my mirror, inspecting this doll. I know how to be double. Under the black brows are light, blond ones. The real ones.”
March 28, 2025
jedna z těch knížek, kterou mám hned po dočtení chuť otevřít zas na první stránce
June 1, 2023
Es una novela autobiográfica (ella es Dagny) escrita en forma de diario en tres partes. Sus comienzos en Colonia en busca de trabajo honrado sin conseguirlo y sus inicios en la prostitución por necesidad; su relación con otras compañeras; sus inicios en cabaret y fundación del cabaret Voltaire.
Se podría decir q está muy cerca del existencialismo.
El libro desprende ternura. Se lee muy bien y lo más sorprendente es como describe el mundo de la prostitución sin escenas de sexo o cosas escandalosas. Describe los sentimientos de ella y de sus compañeras con una profundidad y belleza increíbles. Muestra la dureza de todo ese mundo pero no cae en tópicos ni en cosas groseras.
En la novela se ve desde el principio la búsqueda de Dios o del sentido. Es un Dios buscado, deseado, siempre presente aunque en muchos momentos no lo entienda o lo sienta.
Emmy fundó el cabaret Voltaire e inició el dadaísmo. Tuvo mucha influencia en el mundo cultural de los años 20 pero su carrera literaria se perdió, oscurecida por un mundo de hombres.
Muy aconsejable descubrir a esta autora.
La traducción me parece que no es muy buena, tiene algunas erratas y a veces frases sin mucho sentido. Pero la aconsejo para conocer todo ese mundillo.
Se podría decir q está muy cerca del existencialismo.
El libro desprende ternura. Se lee muy bien y lo más sorprendente es como describe el mundo de la prostitución sin escenas de sexo o cosas escandalosas. Describe los sentimientos de ella y de sus compañeras con una profundidad y belleza increíbles. Muestra la dureza de todo ese mundo pero no cae en tópicos ni en cosas groseras.
En la novela se ve desde el principio la búsqueda de Dios o del sentido. Es un Dios buscado, deseado, siempre presente aunque en muchos momentos no lo entienda o lo sienta.
Emmy fundó el cabaret Voltaire e inició el dadaísmo. Tuvo mucha influencia en el mundo cultural de los años 20 pero su carrera literaria se perdió, oscurecida por un mundo de hombres.
Muy aconsejable descubrir a esta autora.
La traducción me parece que no es muy buena, tiene algunas erratas y a veces frases sin mucho sentido. Pero la aconsejo para conocer todo ese mundillo.
August 7, 2022
"En sueños reconozco mi disposición, la que durante el día no tengo fuerzas para llevar a cabo. Me lamento de ello en el propio sueño y no sé aún si despertaré. Sé de un pantano cenagoso. A él huyo. Me hundo como hebras de niebla en la alta hierba. Tiembla allí mi lamento apagado, ningún oído humano puede percibirlo. Solo el mecido cañaveral se inclina ante el viento nocturno en señal de ligera aprobación. El lodo solloza. La noche suspira. La gran compasión mueve a la muda naturaleza. He amado y amo las landas norteñas. Me saludan en sueños. ¿Acaso la tierra natal me envía su fulgor e intuye mi necesidad?"
Obra prácticamente desconocida. Un relato de supervivencia a pie de calle en la Alemania de los años veinte. A modo de diario novelado, su autora confiesa y amolda el sufrimiento de una existencia arrastrada por la necesidad a través de la palabra. La inocencia y la rebeldía de su voz perdura adherida en las paredes de la conciencia del lector. Duro alegato contra el destino de las mujeres de su tiempo marcado por la necesidad y la misoginia.
Lectura previa recomendable: Crimen y Castigo.
Obra prácticamente desconocida. Un relato de supervivencia a pie de calle en la Alemania de los años veinte. A modo de diario novelado, su autora confiesa y amolda el sufrimiento de una existencia arrastrada por la necesidad a través de la palabra. La inocencia y la rebeldía de su voz perdura adherida en las paredes de la conciencia del lector. Duro alegato contra el destino de las mujeres de su tiempo marcado por la necesidad y la misoginia.
Lectura previa recomendable: Crimen y Castigo.
June 12, 2023
Coincido con todas las otras críticas excepto co el que afirma que Hennings era anarquista? Me pregunto en que se basa para semejante afirmación.
El libro tiene frases a veces confusas, al menos la edición en castellano
El libro tiene frases a veces confusas, al menos la edición en castellano
February 17, 2025
This was kinda odd. The diary fiction novels are going 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼downhill. The skittish, unwell, bouncing all over the place language in this book was hard to follow. There were some parts which were interesting and like made me sad for the situation she was in as a prostitute but overall odd
February 18, 2025
A stream of consciousness diary to enjoy
August 28, 2025
Müsste fünf mal lesen um alles greifen zu können.
December 31, 2024
Decepcionado:(. Me ha costado horrores terminarmelo, a pesar de que tenía todos los ingredientes para que me gustara, por el formato diario, por la marginalidad y por el existencialismo. Pero esq se me ha hecho imposible engancharme al ritmo de la narración. Al principio creía q era por la traducción, pero poco a poco me iba dando la sensación que la menda escribía en un automático que ni Kerouac puesto de coca. De vez en cuando algún destello de iluminación, sobre todo algunos párrafos más místicos sobre religión. Pero al de a poco vueeeeelta a sumergirme en el fango de una prosa que renquea y salta de una cosa a otra sin darte tiempo a procesar. Total, me llevo la impresión de que más que mal escrito está mal corregido, o nulamente editado.
November 6, 2019
Es la historia de una mujer, en primera persona, que vive obsesionada con la tristeza, la autocompasión y la muerte. Sus esfuerzos para sobrevivir (no ya para vivir) parecen siempre abocados al desastre. Un libro duro, bastante triste, y en algunos momentos también aburrido.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews