Gertrud Eysoldt and the Persistence of Decadence on the German Avant-Garde Stage

Abstract

In October 1901, Max Reinhardt’s avant-garde Berlin cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’ [‘Sound and Smoke’] added to its line-up a new skit entitled ‘Die Dekadenten’ [‘The Decadents’]. The piece was based on a parody of Decadent and Aestheticist sensibilities that had appeared in 1898 in the magazine Jugend [see Fig. 1]. In it, two young men lounge in a fin-de-siècle café, smoking, drinking absinthe ‘the way Verlaine used to’, and discussing the effects of specific colours on their nerves. After basking in the notion of a blue house with a green roof lit from within by a cadmium-yellow flickering light, the two barely escape dying of ‘an excess of bliss’ by getting up and leaving the café, carrying on their shoulders ‘the great weariness of the declining century’. The clichéd, overwrought Decadence of this 1898 vignette clearly still has traction in October 1901, as can be seen in a magazine illustration of Reinhardt’s ‘Schall und Rauch’ version [see Fig. 2]. Reinhardt had already lampooned the aesthetics of the Yellow Nineties in 1901, when his cabaret ensemble parodied Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) as ‘Ysidore Mysterlinck’s “Carleas und Elisande”’; but with ‘Die Dekadenten’, he underscored his apparent rejection of the Aestheticist, Decadent, and Symbolist traditions. It was on that very same ‘Schall und Rauch’ stage one year later, however, that the company gave its famous private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome with Gertrud Eysoldt (1870-1955) in the title role – the performance that would inspire Richard Strauss to write his 1905 opera. Over the course of the next several years, as ‘Schall und Rauch’ morphed into the Kleines Theater and Reinhardt also took on directorship of the Neues Theater and the Deutsches Theater, the same ensemble that had mocked ‘The Decadents’ in 1901 performed Salome over 140 times and brought a number of other Decadent and Symbolist plays to the attention of Berlin audiences.[ The association of Reinhardt with Decadence was soon strong enough that the critic Leo Berg could write in 1906 of there having been two types of young playwright at the turn of the century: ‘the Idealists … who clung to Shakespeare and Schiller, and the Decadents, who were adopted with great success by Max Reinhardt’.