ModernGermanLiterature18801950

336 MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE

on her shoulder. Her Hebraische Ealladen (1913) have some Hebrew
melodies, but for the most part are pathologically modern. Die
Kuppel (1925) is a collection of lyrics in the same vein: apparently
artless notations of intensely personal fancies, with broken rhythms
and fainting falls. Altogether delightful - to the initiated - is Das
Peter Hilk-Buch (1906), in which she wreathes a halo round the
shaggy head of the disreputable vagabond poet, her great friend;
the whole thing is as close to reality as Eichendorff's Taugenichts.
'The Black Swan of Israel' ended her days as a kind of national
Jewish poet in Jerusalem. Her most poignant book is her last,
Das Hebrderland (1937): travel impressions of the Holy Land and
at the same time a vision of the poetry and tragedy of Jewish
history in the homeland. Very pathetic are her own illustrations.
Her own quaint drawings indeed adorn all her books, and this
alone makes them prizes for collectors - one would not even deface
them by having them bound: they are things to keep clean in the
original paper binding with the incredible and luring picture on
the cover. Dichtungen undDokumente (1951) contains a good cross-
section of her ever-varied work with its strange moods and fancies.
There can be no questioning of the womanish element in the
novels of ENRICA VON HANDEL-MAZZETTI (1871-1955). Born in
Vienna, she lived at Steyr in Upper Austria, and she belongs to
-Heimatfatnst because her best work is narrowed down to delineation
of this her homeland. Strictly speaking, however, she is not a
Heimatktinsthrin, because the theme she has made her own is not so
much the regional aspects of life and landscape as the fierce strife
of religious sects, which would be the same without as within her
homeland. Her first novel, Memrad Helmpergers denkwurdiges Jahr
(1900), is located at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when
Lutheranism had ossified into a dogma as intolerant as ever Cath-
olicism was. The son of Baron Mac Endall, a British atheist who
has been tortured to death by the Berlin parsons, is won over in a
monastery to the Catholic faith; the abbot, a man of hard nature,
has failed to influence the lad, but he is moulded by the loving
gentleness of a simple monk, Meinrad Helmperger. The decisive
factor in the conversion, however, is the picturing - sadistically
detailed - of the torture to which the defiant atheist has been put;
and here for once the author is unfair to the contrary faith, for the
Catholics would hardly have been more lenient to an atheist; she
does? however, credit nobility of character as well as unflinching