Isolde Kurz: A Cultural Anthology

By Isolde Kurz

What do you get when you cross a radical pacific, vegetarian, education-minded noble-woman with a with a Romantic-Realist, depressive-humorist, Nationalist German writer?
Anti-fascist fiction from a Nazi Collaborator, goofy Swabian Folk Tales, and more.
The complicated life and marvelous literary legacy of a woman of two centuries.
Isolde Kurz (1853-1944) wrote delightful stories, memoirs, fairy tales and poetry – and German readers of her time could not get enough of them. Daughter of Hermann Kurz, a famous writer, she was widely admired for her versatility and erudition.
Isolde was an unabashed patriot who lived through tremendous upheavals in history while maintaining her fundamentally humanistic and compassionate outlook on the world.
Dig into this collection to discover her craft, her wit and her wiles.
Plus: at no extra charge, a bite-sized history of Europe from Napoleon to Hitler.
Illustrated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Becca Menon
• Release date: Sep 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005714031

Isolde Kurz

Isolde Kurz (1853-1944) was a popular, prolific and erudite German writer renowned for her fine style in all genres. She became dazzled by visions of Hitler’s Germany as a new Holy Roman Empire. The Nazis in turn fêted the writer. In her 19th century youth, nationalism had been, as it currently is in many places, liberty’s darling. She did come to distance herself from the fascists as time went on, expressing disdain for their life-negating materialism, and signing a manifesto against nationalist excesses, militarism and antisemitism.

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ISOLDE KURZ: HER LIFE & WORK

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Isolde Kurz circa 1870, When She Would Have Been Almost 17

When Isolde Kurz was born in the middle of the 19th century, it was to a quiet world where indoor light came from flames. The technology of daily life had hardly changed in the hundreds of years since that of the Renaissance in Florence, Italy, where Kurz effectively dwelt during the decades of her Italian sojourn, and which she brought to life in some of her most joyous writings. When the celebrated author returned to die in her home region of Swabia during the middle of the 20th century, it was to an explosive, electrified world that was in flames.

She was a woman of her times – all of them.

As of the girl’s birth on December 21, 1853, a German nation had never really existed. At the time, there was only a loose Confederation of lesser and greater kingdoms and principalities. Among these, only Prussia had much heft. The Austrian Empire, though by later measures rather miniature, would have been a more imposing participant, except for that very reason nobody asked her to the party.

As of the writer’s death on 5th of April 1944, most of the world wished the Germany that did exist never had.

1853 had been the year Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Louis Napoleon (known as Napoleon III) was crowned emperor in France. That was nearly a decade before Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm I appointed Louis’ nemesis, Otto von Bismark, Prime Minister. Then in 1870, the German stateman’s strategic Franco-Prussian War proved the master stroke: as part of the first, 1871 Treaty of Versailles, a bona fide, unified Germany came into being in 1871.

The infamous Treaty of Versailles that would cap the Great War, or World War I, lurked in Germany’s future, and Isolde’s.

The political and practical transformations Kurz experienced were staggering. Alterations in the everyday dramatically witness the span of her years and the circumstances of her work.

Hers was a long life. Poor baby Isolde was even born too early in the 19th century to have had Brahms’ Lullaby ("Wiegenlied 1868) sung at her cradle because it wasn’t even published until she was quite a young lady of nearly fifteen. On the other hand, it’s easy to guess what probably became one of the last songs she could not have avoided hearing before she died: It was a pop hit that both sides in World War II latched onto, Lili Marleen."

The infant debuted in an era of accelerating technologies that a still-juvenile Industrial Revolution had set in motion. For instance, railroads had only slowly begun to chuff across tiny distances (since the early 1800’s), but tens of thousands of kilometers of track would be added by 1860 so that when the Kurz family uprooted from Germany to Italy in the 1870’s, a move which formerly would have been engraved by days and days of discomfort at best, the logistics were simple and speedy. Tracks crisscrossed continents, and trains altered the experience of time as well as personal, financial and national connections.

The elevator had just been invented (1850), but hadn’t yet transfigured cityscapes or rural-to-urban demographics, as it would shortly do.

Only a few cycles around the sun would bring the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) to rattle human vanity.

During Isolde’s formative years, Slavery and Involuntary Servitude continued in Russia and in the United States (into the 1860’s, and in Brazil until 1888).

Dynamite, Alfred Nobel’s creation, developed as a useful though dangerous tool only as Isolde approached her teens (1866).

The invention of the telephone and telegraph (1876) would soon recalibrate the pace of everyday information and communication.

With the 20th century looming on the horizon, the electrification of Europe would begin to spread tentatively from a small town in Surrey, England (1881).

Thomas Edison’s first phonograph recording did not exist until Kurz neared the age of twenty-five (1877), and Europeans wouldn’t commonly own playback devices until well into the 20th century.

Isolde’s mother made sure her daughter learned to ride, but not a bicycle, and not because of the girl’s gender but because the device wasn’t invented until she was well into her thirties (1885).

Coincidentally around this time, internal combustion automobiles came tootling along, too (1863-1885). Nonetheless, that was long before she would have been likely to have seen an automobile, and decades before cars got going paving entire countries.

The author grew up without running water, much less an indoor toilet. Indoor plumbing did not become common until well into the 20th century.

Isolde was middle-aged when Marconi invented the radio (1897). Germany radio broadcasting began in 1923, in fair parallel to most other countries.

On the heels of the revolution in communication, came aviation. The incoming century showed fresh possibilities for human flight beyond simple gliding.

These nifty achievement in use of the aether and use of the air turned out to facilitate the new century’s newly catastrophic cruelties of two World Wars.

Politics and practicalities apart, for an intellectually voracious, multilingual artist like Isolde Kurz, the upheavals to aesthetics she witnessed must have been even more mind-boggling.

The writer was born in time for the last, rich rays of Romanticism to bless her bassinette. Actually, her father, Hermann Kurz (1813-1873), a significant writer, must be regarded as a latter-day offspring of German Romanticism . Importantly, he introduced historical and social realism into his fiction. Yet his work still, like that of older Romantics, venerated the land, the folk and folklore.

Even while Isolde’s father helped usher in the heyday of Realism with its unprecedentedly glaring light, an aesthetic alter ego began casting sensuous shadows reeking of the diabolically divine as the Symbolist Movement.

In Great Britain there would be the Pre-Raphaelites with their rejection industrialization, love of myth and devotion to the art of the early Renaissance, which they described as less sloshy than what came after it. Isolde was introduced to this movement while she was living and writing in Florence, Italy. She found them simpatico, and there’s no question some of her work has elements in common with theirs.

However the 19th century’s last gasps of beauty-loving did not hold back oncoming cults of ugliness. Befoulment-proud Naturalism made Realism look wishy-washy; tortured Expressionism would make Naturalism look like a walk in the park; nihilist Dadaism would come along using humor as a bitter poison; then playful Surrealism tossed it back up as a tonic.

Kurz would also live through literary adventurers spelunking the labyrinth where the Stream of Consciousness flow. And she probably pondered the mysteries of that shape-shifting evergreen dubbed Modernism.

Last, one great German literary movement hung over Isolde Kurz’s final years. Surely this indefatigable reader knew of Exilliteratur, the works of both Jewish and Gentile writers such as Alfred Döblin, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, who, horrified, terrorized, or both, had fled Nazi Germany.

But the well-known Isolde Kurz, a consistently enlightened and compassionate author, stayed in the Third Reich to celebrate it, to scold it, and yet, in death, to revile it.

More’s the pity that Kurz, fluent in English since childhood, did not join her many compatriots such as Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) in exile in Hollywood. With her deep understanding of how to model plausible narrative worlds on the armatures of fairy tale, and her gift for conversation that reads naturally, she tantalizes with thoughts of American screenplays by our enigmatic scion of European History.

Only, the daughter of the Romantic nationalist Hermann had visions of Hitler lighting life to a new Holy Roman Empire from the ashes of The Treaty of Versailles. She wrote fawning paeans to and about the Führer. A letter she wrote Correspondence suggests that even so, when the Fascists fêted her 80th birthday as a cause for national celebration at the end 1933, the year of the Hitler’s ascent to power, the crafty writer was playing possum by lying low in a hospital bed. The author of the anti-authoritarian A Riddle had been dazzled by the National Socialists. Was blind bedazzlement lifting?

Isolde was, after all, also her mother’s daughter. Marie von Brunnow Kurz (1826-1911) – nicknamed Red Marie for her socialist and pacifist political engagement – was, in the words of a friend, the most beautiful human being anyone who knew who ever encountered. The aristocrat held decidedly progressive views on politics, as well as for that matter, on the education of women.

Isolde Maria Klara Kurz was the only daughter among four sons. Hermann had chosen Isolde’s name from the myth of Tristan and Isolde, the surviving fragment of which he had translated from Middle-High German which he in addition completed by appending his own verse ending.

Hermann enjoyed friendships with other important German writers. In particular, the great poet Eduard Mörike was an intimate whose correspondence with Hermann continues to be published. Also the German-Jewish writer Paul Heyse, a prominent and influential novelist, story writer and translator who would go on to win the 1910 Nobel Prize, joined the Kurz patriarch to edit collections of translated literature. The prominent literary friends were soon soliciting assistance from a fourteen-year old Isolde, who was to contribute to this project with translations of Stendhal as well as of the fiction of the self-styled Count Arthur de Gobineau, a controversial French novelist and poet who wrote the unfortunately influential Essay On the Inequality of The Human Races (Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines).

But Isolde owed her peerless education to her mother. Marie von Brunnow, who followed a disciplined, scholarly, athletic and forward-looking plan for her daughter’s instruction, was likely influenced by A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), author of Frankenstein). Conservative Germans let it be known they found Frau Kurz’s educational agenda –Latin and Greek, English, Italian, French, Russian, along with-dancing, riding, swimming and other sports – scandalous.

The writer explained, "I did have as a mother a woman whose relation to the then-state of women stood in the strongest opposition. Since she came from the old nobility, which was externally progressive, she could see through bourgeois prejudices. While better educational possibilities were available to her, she also helped herself on her own, although she brought to her marriage no systematic knowledge except a wide horizon and an endless enthusiasm for all that is great and beautiful, for poetry, languages, philosophy and history, especially ancient. What she herself had only partly achieved, she wanted to see completed in her daughter."

During the 19th century, when Kurz would live to the age of 47, Nationalism remained liberty’s darling. The movement had been so during the 18th century’s American and French Revolutions. Isolde’s mother, scion of the aristocracy, had once been proudly arrested for the crime of "lèse-majesté" as a participant in the Revolutions of 1848, a world-changing event that also led her parents to meet.

Isolde’s father was a jail-bird, too. As the editor of The Democratic Observer (Demokratischen Beobachter) in Stuttgart, when the authorities found an article obnoxious, they threw him in the pokey for three weeks. Upon gaining his freedom, he married Isolde’s soon-to-be mother. The noble lady would go on to choose the name of the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi for their youngest son. The Janus-faced father, the democratic conservative, the forward-thinking traditionalist, the writer, translator, humorist and depressive, approved Marie’s selection for its ancient bardic meaning, lance-bold.

A united Italian kingdom was to welcome the family. In 1877, Isolde, her mother and Balde moved to an Italy that had thrown off foreign princes more than fifteen years earlier. The move came five years after Isolde’s Germanophile father had died having survived to see his own country unified under a Prussian emperor.

The trio was following the eldest brother, Edgar (1853–1904), born less than a year before her. He was physician whose radical socialist politics, imbibed with his vegetarian mother’s milk, had made it impossible for him to establish a practice in the conservative homeland.

The other brothers would also adopt Italian lives: the soon-to-be noteworthy sculptor, Erwin Dietbald Kurz (1857–1931), and big-hearted Alfred (1855 - 1905), her sworn enemy in childhood, the prankster and bully, the "Beserker" – the Mamma’s boy. Erwin’s joined Edgar in declaring his Socialism, while Alfred imitated his older brother in becoming a doctor. And naturally, the entire Kurz brood hovered over the ailing baby of the family, Balde (1860 – 1882).

Isolde, Frau Kurz and the young invalid o established themselves in Florence, where the Renaissance had been born. It wasn’t long before the two women formed a hub of a German artists’ community, even after Isolde bought a cherished place of her own. This extraordinary group included significant writers, artists and aestheticians of the era. Among others, there was a female fairy tale writer from an earlier generation, Gisela von Arnim, whom Isolde would have delighted to recognize as the daughter of the major Romantic literary figures Achim and Bettina von Arnim. The widely-read, left-wing Jewish author, Ludmilla Assing was a close friend. There were also eminences such as Arnold Böcklin, Hans von Marées, Adolf Friedrich von Schack, Karl Hillebrand, and Konrad Fiedler, whose wife Mary undertook to copy Isolde’s poems for circulation to publishers. The circle boasted too, of Adolf von Hildebrand, not only a distinguished sculptor, but author of the influential volume The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst). Kurz referred to Hildebrand as the sole direct influence on her own work, and devoted a slim 1931 volume to him, The Master of San Francesco, A Book of Friendship (Der Meister von San Francesco, Ein Buch der Freundschaft).

These people could not have been solemn, self-important blowhards. One thing Kurz never had any use for was humorlessness.

The initial Italian period led to Kurz’s initial book, the 1888 Poems (Gedichte). Many of the pieces had appeared in the prestigious magazine Die Gartenlaube (Garden Leaves). Then there was what she calls the breakthrough of her Florentine Novellas (Florentiner Novellen) (1890). The craft matured quickly. During the fin-de-siècle period through the first years of the 20th century, Kurz did her best, most technically brilliant, imaginatively inventive and intellectually nervy work.

Not by chance, during these years of exploration and innovation, the writer had taken the brave step of establishing her own private household, apart from her mother, the eternal spiritual, intellectual and emotional well-spring of the artist’s entire life and work. But when the mother died in 1911, the inspired creative outpouring became an ordinary mortal writer’s output.

The Nietzschean chef d’oeuvre of 1895, A Riddle ("Ein Rätsel"), hails from early in this fecund episode. It’s an ingenious short story woven wilyly around a murder mystery, and employs transparently well-worn literary tropes to undermine the reader’s – as well as the writer’s – point of view.

She would end this intellectually imaginative episode at her artistic summit: the 1908 Lilith’s Children. It dared take on the form Goethe, the Germans’ Shakespeare, had set firmly as the model on the highest mountaintop with his Faust: dramatic, narrative poetry. Kurz wrote a serious, funny, mystical, feminist story in innovative, theatrical verse.

Gems lie scattered through the entirety of Kurz’s occasionally audacious collections of poetry and narrative, which include invented fairy tales, historical fiction, biography, autobiography, hybrids and more. Look for some of her best poetry in her 1938 autobiography, The Pilgrimage To the Unattainable (Die Pilgerfahrt nach den Unerreichlichen). In it she wisely liberates an eloquent love song, Ever To Two ("Immer Zu Zweien), from its earlier incarnation, which had been an impossibly discursive 390 line poem. The similarly erotic lyric, You Drive Like a North-thrust Storm (Du fuhrst gleich einem Sturm aus Norden"), in which she begs not to be deflowered quite so roughly, should not be overlooked. Whatever else this unmarried woman born during the Victorian Era was, she was not a prude.

Isolde experienced a passionate romance while in Italy. The author makes sure to write in her memoir that her friend, her other, made her happy or miserable the way an earthly lover would have done. Yet her rhapsody brims with sexuality. Here and elsewhere Kurz manages to write about eros with a combination of delicacy and directness endure as a model. Look too at her luminous sonnet Sleepflakes ("Schlummerflocken" from 1905’s New Poems {Neue Gedichte}) in which she conjures a pitch-perfect diction.

Such moving, evocative language as these two pieces present proves but too rare in Kurz’s polished, often commonplace poetry. Her prose in all genres is less self-conscious. Her great gift was as a storyteller.

So it makes sense that Kurz’s greatest poetry came as a story. Lilith’s Children (Die Kinder der Lilith), her genre-smashing epic poem of 1908, is a fable, novella in verse, Bible story and verse drama. With its narrative drive, vivid characterizations, twists on Scripture, inventive rhythmic asymmetries, sexuality, comedy and pathos, what spins out from its pages is anything but commonplace.

Judeo-Christian mythology was not the only kind that moved Isolde. Kurz knew and was excited by the Hindu Vedas, which many Germans of the late 19th century read in Max Müller’s translation. Her autobiographical Pilgrimage recalls her passion for the Luther Bible, but a host of her books witness how she loved the Greek myths, too. The 1890 stories Fantasies and Fairy Tales (Phantasien und Märchen) suggests Kurz had encountered some Buddhist as well as Hindu ideas. Among other things, About the Firefly, a modern, not to say proto-Magic Realist fairy tale, involves reincarnation, while the fantasy Hashish dives into the All-Oneness. Or the author may just be giving shape to widespread esoteric understandings of being and time.

Young and old, a courageous Isolde refused to be a Protestant, or a Catholic, or any sort of Christian. Indeed she refused any religion. Yet this same self-styled pilgrim never lost faith in the Unknown, Ineffable to which we all belong, no matter what people call Him, stupidly arguing. Unlike Nietzsche, Kurz had not found that God is dead, but that God, the wondrous It she had sensed and sought since childhood, is everywhere.

To all appearances, the death in 1911 of Marie von Brunnow after a long illness broke Isolde’s connection to the heavenly Muses. Isolde herself notes in her autobiography that the 1910 Recollections of Florence (Florentinische Erinnerungen) was largely written before their return to Germany, and also specifically points to Lilith’s Children as her last major book before crossing the sad landmark passage of a mother’s passing. The mother’s spirit suffuses that work of art. After the death of her mother there was a notable falling off in the writer’s productivity. She would re-forge her link with Mnemosyne’s daughters again, but never to the same tensility. Nothing Kurz wrote following the loss finds such a formally and philosophically limber, adventuresome Isolde as that of many her early tales. She certainly never again shows herself the same subversive as the Kurz of A Riddle and Lilith’s Children.

In fact it took Kurz some time to write much at all. Two Fairy Tales (Zwei Märchen) of 1914 merely presents two tales from 1890’s Fantasies and Fairy Tales. The Humanists (Die Humanisten) proved merely a separately printed excerpt from Florentine Novellen. Cora and Other Stories (Cora und andere Erzählungen), the next work of fiction, did not even follow Lilith’s Children and Frau Kurz’s demise at all until 1915, five years after Recollections of Florence, an unheard-of interval for the diligent author.

One noteworthy book did emerge in the meantime. In 1913, Kurz did issue Travels Through Greece (Wandertage in Hellas). Both inviting and erudite, the volume is describes a journey to and throught the land of Classical mythology undertaken to fill the void left by the mother’s passing – and not undertaken alone.

Isolde went abroad with Ernst von Mohl. He had been a schoolmate of her brother Edgar’s. A pet of Frau Kurz’s, in the old days Ernst had become a constant presence in the Kurz household, and had been made Isolde’s Classics tutor. In 1911, Von Mohl returned to Germany from decades teaching at the courts in Russia. He and Isolde, who was about to turn 60, had an emotional reunion at the moribund’s bedside in Munich, where the family had once again put down German roots in 1910. Isolde would spend what she termed a shared life with the man she called in the book so-dedicated to him, A Genius of Love (Ein Genie der Liebe) until his death in 1929.

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the writer kept herself busy penning poems – mawkish