Whore talks
Whore Conversations is a novel cycle by Heinrich Zille . It was published in 1921 (with the wrong date “1913”) as a private print by the Fritz Gurlitt publishing house under the pseudonym W. Pfeifer and was banned by the Prussian censors on the spot.
content
The cycle is about eight women who, gathered at an imaginary regulars table in a soup kitchen , exchange their experiences in Berlin's “ Milljöh ” at the beginning of the last century. The names of the women are only given in nicknames or first names, that's how the women call themselves: Olga , Pauline , Rosa , Alma , Brushfrieda , Bollenguste , Lutschliese and Minna . The reports are all about strongly sexually pornographically drawn stories, influenced by the catastrophic living and living conditions at the timeWorking class at that time. The dialogues in the original language and spoken in the Berlin dialect are probably reproduced authentically. The illustrations drawn for this are not, but they are strongly influenced by the reality prevailing at the time in which Zille moved. With merciless attention to detail, Zille depicts the impregnation of a little girl by her own father, while the mother is dying in the next bed, or the rape of another by a tramp.
The women call themselves “ whores ”, but all of them have other occupations such as flower workers or factory workers. They describe their experiences from early sexual abuse to tolerated incest , in very unsentimental language. What they all have in common is that they basically strive for a different life, but in this life more or less as women, as whore, wife and (multiple) mother due to the social circumstances and also because of the lack of opportunities for advancement or education as women " are chained ".
- ... "If we hadn't lived so dirty and hadn't been so poor, then some things would have been different."
Trivia
The resemblance to Lukian's “ Hetaeric Talks ” is striking and certainly not a coincidence. Immediately inspiring was probably the series of books Großstadt-Documents published by Hans Ostwald between 1904 and 1908 , which contained as volume 23 the “Ten CVs of Berlin Control Girls ” by Wilhelm Hammer . In fact, the original title of the publication planned in 1919 was hetarian talks .
radio play
- Whore talks . Der Audio Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3898136990 (with Margit Bendokat , Kathrin Angerer , Gudrun Ritter , Winnie Böwe , Dagmar Manzel and Maria Kwiatkowsky as Pauline, Rosa, Alma, Brushfrieda, Bollenguste and Lutschliese)
literature
- Heinrich Zille: Whore Talks. With a foreword by Winfried Ranke. Schirmer-Mosel, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-921375-81-9 . (Facsimile with inscription)
- Heinrich Zille: Whore Conversations / heard, written and drawn by W. Pfeifer. New edition. Facsimile print. Schirmer-Mosel, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-88814-081-1 . (Reprint of the 1921 edition; W. Pfeifer was Heinrich Zille's pseudonym)
- Whore conversations , heard, written and drawn by Heinrich Zille under the pseudonym W. Pfeifer. With an introduction by Matthias Flügge and a bibliographic commentary. Fackelträger Verlag, Cologne; Special edition for KOMET Verlag, Cologne [2012], ISBN 978-3-86941-181-1 . (Small printed facsimile of the 1921 edition with legend)