ModernGermanLiterature18801950

THE NOVEL OF NATURALISM AND DECADENCE 85

1943); she remained 'consistent', but managed after the turn of
the century to enliven her hard and relentless studies of working-
class and peasant milieu with a peculiar humour, which served her.,
so she said, like a mackintosh in rain. She was the only woman
among the primitive naturalists - as a member of M. G. Conrad's
circle she wrote for Die Geselhchaft - who earned a niche in literary
annals by the permanent merit of her work. She was rather a
writer for the writing fraternity than for the mass of the reading
public; the short stories with which she began (Feierabend und
andere Munchmr Geschichten, 1893; Lebensstucke, 1893) and her two
plays (Der standhafte Zinnsoldat^ 1896; DerBaa, 1897) were too true
to the naturalistic type to appeal to light-minded readers. Her
Gedichte in Prosa (1893), too, are interesting mainly as experiments
in form; they belong to the imitations of Whitman which followed
the lyric revolt of Holz and Schlaf. Her protective humour did,
however, lend some popular appeal to her novel Winkelquartett
(1908), and there is the regional attraction of Heimatkunst in the
short stories of her Pimpernellche (1901) and Aus unsers Herrgotts
Tiergarten (1906), which render the moods of her native Palatinate;
she has strictly regional reality, too, in her novel Die Nann (1906),
which unfolds the life of peasants in the Brenner Pass district.