The unknown from the Seine

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The unknown from the Seine.

The stranger from the Seine (French: L'inconnue de la Seine ) was an unidentified young woman whose death mask was to be found on the walls of many artists' apartments after 1900. She inspired numerous literary works.

Legend

According to legend, the unknown woman is a suicide whose body was recovered from the Seine in Paris around 1900 . An employee at the Paris morgue is said to have been so impressed by her beauty that he took a plaster cast of her face. He had a death mask made, of which numerous copies were made in the following years, which became fashionable as a morbid furnishing accessory in the Parisian bohemian era. The mysteriously peaceful expression on the face of the dead gave rise to countless speculations about their lives, their circumstances of death and their state of mind in the afterlife.

The popularity of these images at the time is interesting in terms of media history. It is related to multiple reproductions: The fact that the imprints of the death mask were photographed and then reproduced from the negatives seemed to reinforce their authenticity. The water seemed to have captured the last facial expression of their life like a photo, which is not the case with water corpses .

Elisabeth Bronfen passes on another legend of its origins, according to which a resourceful plasterer from Hamburg made an impression of the face of his living daughter.

reception

Fiction

Germany

  • The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) ponders: “The Mouleur, whom I pass every day, has hung two masks next to his door. The face of the young drowned woman, which was taken off in the morgue because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively as if it knew. "
  • In 1926 Ernst Benkard published Das last Antlitz , a volume about death masks translated into several languages, in which it is said about the unknown woman that she “is, however, a delicate butterfly for us, carefree swinging its fine wings in front of the lamp of life that time has fluttered and scorched. "
  • Reinhold Conrad Muschler's novella The Unknown (1934), in which the fate of the provincial orphan Madeleine Lavin, who falls in love with the British diplomat Lord Thomas Vernon Bentick, is portrayed in an extremely maudlin, is also an integral part of the myth . When, after a few very romantic flirtations, he went back to his fiancée, she went into the water and "her face smiled transfigured when she was found".
  • Hertha Pauli , Wolfgang Pauli's sister , had already published the story L'Inconnue de la Seine in the Berliner Tageblatt on November 4, 1931 . In 1933, her close friend Ödön von Horváth processed this story into the drama The Unknown from the Seine . In 1934 death masks appeared , the first published collection of poems by Friedrich Ernst Peters , the last poem of which is dedicated to the stranger from the Seine and her shining (and slightly mocking) smile from beyond.
  • In Claire Goll's short story The Unknown from the Seine (1936), the protagonist Armandier dies of a heart attack when he is faced with the death mask because he believes he recognizes his daughter's face in a mixture of delusion and guilt.
  • In Max Frisch's farce The Great Wall of China (1946), the unknown appears as a figure.
  • In Johannes Mario Simmel's novel And Jimmy went to the rainbow (1970), her mysterious smile is compared with that of the protagonist.

Russia

In 1934 , possibly influenced by Muschler's novella , Vladimir Nabokov wrote an untitled poem about the unknown, which was published in June by the Paris émigré magazine Poslednie Novosti .

France

  • Maurice Blanchot , who also owned such a mask, described it as “une adolescente aux yeux clos, mais vivante par un sourire si délié, si fortuné, [...] qu'on eût pu croire qu'elle s'était noyée dans un instant d'extrême bonheur ”(Eng.“ a young girl with closed eyes, but who was enlivened by a relaxed, happy smile [...] that one could have believed that she was in the water in a moment of great bliss went.").
  • In 1931, the author Jules Supervielle published a short story that spreads as a first-person narrator about the sense and nonsense of suicide from the perspective of those who are tired of life.
  • In Louis Aragon's novel Aurélien (1944) the unknown also plays a major role.

Other media

  • Muschler's novella was the basis of the German film Die Unbekannte by Frank Wisbar (in Austria: The Unknown from the Seine ) in 1936 with Sybille Schmitz (Madeleine) and Jean Galland (Thomas) in the leading roles.
  • In 1941 the Austrian choreographer Hanna Berger created the solo choreography L'Inconnue de la Seine Op. 27 to Claude Debussy's piano piece Reflets dans l'eau from the Images (Vol. 1), which also refers to the unknown from the Seine.
  • From 1945 onwards, Man Ray tried to "breathe life" into the mask in several cleverly illuminated photographs.
  • The face of the stranger from the Seine also adorns the head of Resusci-Anne , the first aid doll that has been developed by Peter Safar and Asmund Laerdal since 1958 and has been mass-produced for first aid courses since 1960 (see Heart-Lung Resuscitation ).
  • The Austrian composer Richard Maux (1893–1971) wrote an almost half-hour symphonic poem entitled Die Unbekannte von der Seine (Opus 791), which in its last version from 1959 was also conducted in a radio recording by ORF with the ORF symphony orchestra by Karl Etti is available.
  • On the mini album Gaudeamus Igitur (released in April 2017) by the band Welle: Erdball there is a song with the title L'inconnue de la Seine .
  • The British musician Frank Turner dedicated her on his album No man's land the title Rescue Annie and related podcast from the series Tales from No Man's Land .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bronfen, Elisabeth: Only about her corpse. Death, femininity and aesthetics. , Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich 1994. ISBN 978-3-88897-079-5 , p. 296.
  2. ↑ Christian Adam : Reading under Hitler. Authors, bestsellers, readers in the Third Reich. Galiani, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86971-027-3 , pp. 178–180 (deals with Muschler's novella and its reception during the Nazi era).
  3. ↑ Don Barton Johnson: L'Inconnue de la Seine and Navokov's Najade, in: Comparative Literature 44: 1992, no. 3, pp. 225-248.
  4. ↑ Andrea Amort : Hanna Berger. Traces of a dancer in the resistance. Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna 2010. ISBN 978-3-85033-188-3 , p. 13 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Unknown from the Seine, The
ALTERNATIVE NAMES l'Inconnue de la Seine (French)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French female suicide whose death mask has been reproduced
DATE OF BIRTH 19th century
DATE OF DEATH around 1900