ALRAUNE, by Hanns Heinz Ewers

Every so often, I'll read something that's thoroughly fascinating, but yet leaves me somewhat squicked out. This is one of those works.

Alraune, by Hanns Heinz Ewers and published in 1911, is the tale of scientist Jakob ten Brinken and his friend Frank Braun, who are fascinated by heredity, and to see it in action, they set about experimenting with artificial insemination, impregnating a slatternly prostitute with the semen of a depraved murderer. A daughter is born, Alraune, a beautiful child who is taken in by an upper-middle-class family.

Alraune, however, lacks scruple. Beautiful and perfectly mannered, she brings destruction to everyone around her. Every chapter is an episode in which some foolish soul is drawn to her as a month unto a flame, and ends up self-destructing in one way or another. And it's not just men; women also fall head-over-heels for the cruel Alraune, and are destroyed by her.

Finally, close to the end, Alraune genuinely falls in love and has a romantic idyll with her one of her creators, Frank Braun. Alraune belatedly develops a guilty conscience, begins sleepwalking....and ultimately meets her end.

It's hard to approach this book objectively. A plot revolving around heredity and eugenics, from a Germany that was only a couple of decades from being taken over by the Nazi party, can make even the most hardened reader cringe. It's important to remember that this was a time when the topics of heredity and eugenics were big in the public consciousness even here in the U.S. and in other countries. In 1912, a year after this book was published in Germany, American psychologist Henry H. Goddard published his infamous study, The Kallikak Family, which made claims that "feeblemindedness", mental disabilities, and criminal tendencies were hereditary. Of course, even Goddard's contemporaries pointed out that he overlooked the role of malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies in the developments of the "feebleminded" Kallikaks. In our present days of being over-nourished, we forget that vitamin deficiencies were a real problem. Everyone consumes iodized salt these days, and we've forgotten that iodine deficiency doesn't just cause goiter, but can also lead to intellectual disabilities. The Kallikaks of Goddard's study were also a poor backwoods family; naturally issues such as isolation, inbreeding, and poverty should have been in play. Modern critics have also pointed out the possibility of widespread alcoholism in the family and chronic fetal alcohol syndrome from one generation to the next. Stephen Jay Gould, in his book The Mismeasure of Man, makes a case for Goddard's data being fudged and photos of the backwoods Kallikaks being doctored.

This was also not far from the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision in the U.S. Supreme Court, that ruled that state laws requiring compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" and intellectually disabled did not violate the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment. Forced sterilization continued in the U.S. but declined after WWII; even so, some states still have eugenics-related compulsory sterilization laws on the books, but they are not enforces, and as late as 1981 forcible sterilizations occurred in Oregon.

Even some of Edgar Rice Burroughs' works seemed to endorse eugenics; his posthumously-published novella "Pirate Blood" has a modern descendant of Jean Laffite suddenly drawn into piracy because of heredity.

So you can see that it wasn't unique to Germany. Still, it's disquieting today to read. Even now we're struggling with the idea that maybe some things ARE hereditary, such as a tendency to alcoholism, while at the same time decrying any sort of forced eugenics as immoral.

There's also the woman-as-destroyer trope. Again, this was nothing new, in Germany or anywhere else. German dramatist Frank Wedekind gave us the play "Earth Spirit" in 1894, and its sequel "Pandora's Box" in 1904, that tracked the trail of destruction left by Lulu, a seductress who loves and ruins everyone she meets until meeting her destruction. These were adapted as the 1929 silent film Pandora's Box, starring Louise Brooks, and Alban Berg's 1935 opera Lulu.

Of course, we see this in American media; just look at the 1933 film Baby Face, in which Barbara Stanwyck fucks her way to the top and wreaks havoc on the way. And reading this, I was also reminded of the notorious 1969 trash novel Naked Came the Stranger, in which a woman retaliates against a cheating husband by catting around with every man in her neighborhood, and leaving wrecked relationships, ruined marriages, and even a corpse or two in her wake. (Yes, I read it a few years ago, mainly for a laugh.)

The question of misogyny raises its head when these works are discussed, and I'd say that depending on where you're coming from, Alraune and Lulu and other works can be seen as misogynist. Women are destructive, they bring ruin to all around them. Conversely, some have claimed works like these (especially Lulu) to be proto-feminist, in showing a woman with agency who owns her own sexuality and doesn't need to subsume herself to a man in order to make her way in the world...and I would say that these views are also legitimate.

It can be hard to say what is really misogynistic or feminist sometimes. You may know of (or remember) the series of trash films about a lady Nazi named Ilsa, flicks like Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, and Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheikhs. They were made to be exploitation, and for years they were, but then they were embraced by a younger generation of women who saw them as empowering. Star Dyanne Thorne has expressed her amazement at the women who would come to her at conventions to praise those films. I personally have seen similar at burlesque shows; once "girlie shows" were for drooling old men who wanted to ogle scantily clad women, but now I've found that burlesque is empowering for women who see it as a way of owning their sexuality and declaring the beauty of their bodies just as they are. As I've said before, we shouldn't be too quick to judge; the exploitation of one generation can be the empowerment of the next.

So...back to Alraune....

Some have also voiced revulsion at how Ewers became involved in the Nazi party (most notably Jess Nevins) but it's worth pointing out that Ewers got involved mostly because of his own nationalism and Neitzschean philosophies. Ewers doesn't seem to have been an anti-Semite (his books feature positive Jewish characters who are patriotic Germans) and he was, to use a modern term, "heteroflexible" which eventually put him at odds with the Nazis. In 1934, most of his works were banned by the Third Reich and his assets seized; he died of TB that year.

Is Alraune a Nazi work? Not really, I'd say. The use of eugenics as a story element can be uncomfortable and problematic to modern readers, but it's no worse than other works of the period. It was a time when even the "good guys" of the world took eugenics seriously. There was still a lot we didn't understand. It's also got a lot of decadence and depravity simmering under the surface, the sort of thing the Nazis would have disapproved of.

It is a misogynist work? That can be up to interpretation. It can be a male fevered fantasy of destructive female sexuality....or can be an exploration of how a woman can own her sexuality and defy the repressive and hypocritical society around her. And as destructive as she is to men, ultimately men are powerless against her, and it takes another woman's actions to bring about her end.

Interestingly, Alraune is the second book in a trilogy about Frank Braun; I think the first is now available in a new translation, and the third may be in the works. Alraune is available in a new translation as an e-book; the introductory essay by the translator is most entertaining.

Am I sorry I read it? No, not at all. And while I'm not its biggest fan, at the same time there was something about it that I found compelling, even if it was just as a window into another time and another mindset that may not be as far away from ours as we think. And I'd say there's a strong possibility I'll look into any other works that are currently available. Yes, there were times I squirmed mentally, but life is shallow if we never take a good hard look at the things that disquiet us.

Alraune has been filmed several times, including a famous 1928 version with Brigitte Helm of Metropolis, and Paul Wegener, director of The Golem.  The latest was in 1952, with Hildegarde Knef and Erich von Stroheim. Its influence can be seen in other works....Species, anyone?

Maybe not required reading, but good if you want to confront some uncomfortable questions.

FATAL KISSES by Elliott O'Donnell

Hmph. Elliott O'Donnell can be a fun read, but this book, first published in 1929, left a sour taste in my mouth.

O'Donnell (1872-1965) was an Irish-born author who published a huge number of stories purporting to be true tales of ghosts that he personally investigated. I've read a number of his stories, and while I find them preposterous and utterly unbelievable, they're still great fun from a sheer-entertainment viewpoint. Even his contemporaries believed that O'Donnell embroidered his stories with fictitious elements, if not made them up entirely.

He also wrote several novels, including FOR SATAN'S SAKE (1904), THE SORCERY CLUB (1912), and THE DEAD RIDERS (1953), all of which I'll be reviewing at some point in the future (really). This odd book, a collection of historical essays with some ghostly elements, was interesting at first, but a growing mood of sheer misogyny began to taint the books' enjoyment.

It's basically tales of seduction and murder, and every tale features an evil, destructive woman whose kiss presages some violent end. Now, to be fair, some of these harridans are well-documented murderesses....



This charming scene, for instance, is the lovely Marie de Brinvilliers poisoning her father in 1666. Married to an inconstant husband (although O'Donnell makes him out to be an innocent dupe), she became infatuated with a young officer named Ste. Croix...but Marie's father had him thrown in the Bastille. There, however, he learned the fine arts of poisoning from the noted Exili and Marie proceeded to experiment on her servants, then killing her father, then her brothers, then finally trying to kill her husband. Ste. Croix, according to one source, had no desire to marry and slipped de Brinvilliers an antidote, shortly before Ste. Croix himself died (some sources say natural causes, others say he was also poisoned). Marie was eventually arrested, tried, and executed in 1676. O'Donnell makes her out to be ruthless and cunning, which was probably pretty much the truth.



This lovely is Bianca Capello, Duchess of Tuscany and second wife of Francesco I de' Medici. Venetian by birth, she eloped with a Florentine clerk, only to find life with his poor family oppressive. She eventually caught Francesco's eye...and historical sources say he seduced her, but O'Donnell holds that she seduced him. Francesco was already married, to Joanna of Austria, but she eventually died (O'Donnell holds Bianca responsible, and she may have been). Francesco had also given Bianca's husband a job in court, to keep her near, and hubby began to dally with other women until he was killed himself. (O'Donnell holds Bianca responsible, and she may have been, but it's all speculation.) Francesco married Bianca in 1578, and while she had better relations with her family, she had no end of troubles with the other Medicis, including her brother-in-law, Cardinal Ferdinand. Now...history says that both Bianca and Francesco died on the same day; the usual story is malarial fever, but O'Donnell's story (probably fictitious) holds that she and Francesco attempted to poison Ferdinand but ended up taking the poison themselves. Interestingly, in 2006 an investigation of their bones found the presence of arsenic.



Mary Blandy, shown here, is still an object of debate. She was a wealthy young woman, but her miserly father controlled her money, and would never approve of any man who came calling. An unwilling spinster, in 1746 she fell under the spell of the charming Hon. William Cranstoun, who supplied her with "love powders" to give her father, with the idea that they would ease his opposition to her marrying Cranstoun (who was already married, and may or may not have been trying to annul his own unhappy marriage). Of course, the love potion was really arsenic, and Papa Blandy died (some sources say it was a lingering death). She was arrested after writing a letter to Cranstoun begging him to burn her letters, and was found guilty of murder and hanged in 1752. Her final words were a request to not be strung up too high, for modesty's sake.

At the time, she was made out to be a bawdy, unrepentant murderess, and O'Donnell takes a similar view. However, modern scholars (when they look back on the case at all; it's largely forgotten today) tend to view Mary as an innocent lovestruck girl who made a series of foolish mistakes and trusted the wrong man.



The inclusion of Maria Tarnowska makes sense; for many of O'Donnell's readers, she would be remembered as a cause celebe. The daughter of a prominent Irishman who had emigrated to Russia and become a count (thus establishing the rather absurd idea of the Ukrainian O'Rourkes), she had married a minor count but had a number of affairs on the side. In Venice in 1907, one of her lovers, Nicholas Naumov, killed another of her lovers, Count Pavel Kamarovsky, supposedly at her instigation. (O'Donnell holds that she was responsible for a number of deaths, manipulating men to satisfy her vanity.) She was arrested in Vienna and tried in 1910 in Venice, and became the subject of a media circus on both sides of the Atlantic. "The Russian Affair" had people stuck to their newspapers for months. Both she and Naumov were found guilty, but she was sentenced to a mere eight years in prison and was released after only five. (O'Donnell claims that she died in prison, but that is untrue; she moved to South America and died there in 1949.)

Many of the other tales are hard to pin down, and some are obviously reworked versions of folktales, ghost stories, and fairy tales. The first story of the book, "Nuzzly the Beautiful," appears to use a real character, the daughter of Muhammad Ali, the Wali of Egypt from 1805 to 1848. However, it's unknown if Hatice, or "Nazli," was truly the drop-dead-gorgeous homicidal maniac that O'Donnell makes her out to be. However, the tale is very reminiscent of Sax Rohmer's Egyptian stories and I wonder if there wasn't an influence there. "Queen Elizabeth and the O'Rourke" is perhaps the mildest of the bunch, with a probably apocryphal tale of an Irish noble who briefly was the lover of Elizabeth I (and who died mysteriously not long after). "A Fiendish Mother" has a woman who's willing to kill her own daughter out of jealousy, and whose ghost haunts Oulton House in London (although I have no idea if it's still standing). "The Dark Angels of Jeypore" is several tales of women who were behind the court intrigues in India (although in this one, the evil women are balanced by several upstanding, virtuous women characters). "The Kiss in the Crystal" tells of a curse put on a Scottish family (thanks to a cruel matriarch) by a seer; the curse was actually part of popular folklore and written about by Sir Walter Scott. "Gerlinde" is simply a German fairy tale about a man who promises his heart to a girl who turns out to be a ghost. "The Kiss on the Scaffold" appears to be merely a write-up of a tabloid tale from the early 1800s, in which a West Country wife murders her inconvenient older husband, is executed, then her spirit comes to get her lover after seven months. "A Kiss and a Curse" is a retold legend of the Valley of the Rocks in Devon. "The Marble Head" is a purportedly true story of an Italian family under a hideous curse, all thanks to a woman's greed. Finally, "The Kiss in the Theatre" is based on newspaper reports from the 1880s of a heartless woman and a jealous husband.

Really, I have to say...the writing itself isn't so bad. O'Donnell had a straightforward, almost journalistic style, which made his embroidered tales all the more shuddersome. But, when it becomes clear that every fatal kiss is going to involve some evil and destructive woman, it becomes a little hard to deal with, and toward the end, when O'Donnell launches into an anti-feminist rant, going on about how they all hate men, you just have to put it aside for a while. I know I did.

I got this through interlibrary loan; I browsed the 'net and found copies for sale for well over $100, so unless you're a diehard collector, I wouldn't recommend going after this. As I said, O'Donnell can be fun, but this is a glimpse into a darker side. I'm not sure if he was ever married, but the misogyny that radiates from this book makes me wonder. I've caught whiffs of snobbery from his works before, but this is the most out-and-out prejudiced that I've ever seen him be. I may put other O'Donnell works on the Required Reading list, but not this one.