Danielle Sarréra

Danielle Sarréra (* 1932; † 1949 in Paris ) is a fictional French poet.

Life

The main part of the Danielle Sarréra mythology is her suicide. As a 17-year-old, she is said to have thrown herself in front of the train at Gare de Lyon (Paris). In addition, the young runaway left several exercise books in her last home, an attic at 42 rue Bonaparte, filled with short prose, which the writer Frédérick Tristan published in the 1970s under the titles "Oeuvre" and "Journal". The mysterious author thus became a literary underground icon. Feminists were among her followers, but also numerous young readers, some of whom - after reading it - followed her to their death. Danielle Sarréra's works have been translated into Dutch, Italian and English. A German version of “Oeuvre” and “Journal” appeared in 1978 under the title “Arsenikblüten”. A strong inspirational force emanated from the myth and work of Danielle Sarréra. Thus creating Valie Export numerous illustrations to "Arsenikblüten" and Rainer Werner Fassbinder had them in the terrorist drama " The Third Generation " (1979) recite. In the theater and performance scene she was embodied by actresses such as Chady Seubert and Lilith Rudhart (both Berlin), Bénédicte Trouvé (Berlin / Paris) and Hanne Derud (Oslo). The poet and playwright Paul M Waschkau (Berlin) initiated the 1st Danielle Sarréra Congress in 2003 in the Berlin Orphtheater . The narrative Café Cancer of the author and journalist Harald Harzheim transported to Sarréra myth into the horror genre. The playwright and prose writer Nino Harativili was inspired by the Sarréra case for her debut novel Juja . Diana Syrse's chamber opera "Arsenikblüten" was premiered on July 18, 2014 in Munich.

The fact that apart from the texts there was no evidence of its existence cast doubt on the author's identity at an early stage. Finally, the editor, Frédérick Tristan, admitted to having been the author of her own texts. Danielle Sarréra was the name for his "other me". In the meantime, Pierre Borel has questioned Tristan's authorship. In doing so, he refers to the historical contradictions and stylistic differences between the Sarréra texts and the novels of Tristan. His conclusion: the author is still unknown.

plant

“Oeuvre” and “Journal” are small collections of short prose. In it, the author describes her martyrdom in the midst of a mythologically charged present, in which Antigone and Ophelia populate Montmartre. She is a tortured princess, imagining a world "where no grapes have been ripening for a long time, where animals all have leprosy and people all suffer from insomnia". A central figure is the "Skull Drill Knight" (alias Christ), with whom she connects a pitch-black love-hate relationship. While he is raping her, she reads about his crucifixion in John's Gospel and is happy about his imminent death described there. She knows that she - the virgin - becomes pregnant with a child "whose cry was enough to make the worlds deaf". You, whose cross-eyed look drives even a sinister Ostyak into exhaustion. And above all of this is the "Creator of the Void". A Gnostic view of the world in which the first-person narrator moves between powerlessness, being alive, melancholy and the admission of the futility of love. Interpreters like Bernd Mattheus interpreted the texts as an expression of social resistance, while Pierre Borel saw them as an expression of schizophrenia. The German edition contains facsimile examples that reveal another dimension of the works: in the middle of the texts, written on the squared paper of a math exercise book, there are drawings and scribbles. Their motives, e.g. For example, the portrayal of a man with secateurs approaching a flower articulates an almost childlike expression of helplessness.

Works by Danielle Sarréra

• Oeuvre . Le Nouveau Commerce, Paris 1974
• Journal . Le Nouveau Commerce, Paris 1976
• Arsenic flowers . Munich 1978, ISBN 978-3-88221-205-1 .

literature

• Rob van Erkelenz: Een Queen van Tederheid . In: Danielle Sarréra: De ridder van de schedelboor , translated by Rob van Erkelenz. Uitgeverij Perdu, Amsterdam 1993
• Pierre Borel: L'Agonie d'Antigone - Variations on Danielle Sarréra . Libraire Nizet, Paris 1993
• Vincent Engel: Frédérick Tristan ou la guérilla de la fiction . Éditions du Rocher, Monaco 2000
• Harald Harzheim: Café Cancer . Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-937737-22-5
• Paul M Waschkau: Poetry & Ecstasy , the Myth of Danielle Sarréra . In: Journal for Special Poetry - ALASKA No.1 , Berlin 2003, ISSN  1437-0506
• Nino Haramicwili: Juja. Roman , Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-940426-48-2
• Manuela Reichart: Honor death . In: Die Zeit , No. 43/1978, review of the arsenic flowers .

Web links

• paul m waschkau: Poetry & Ecstasy at INVASOR.org