Carl Einstein’s ‘Leda’ as a Literary Fairy Tale about Decadence: Commentary, Translation, and Original Text

Abstract

‘Leda’ by Carl Einstein (1885-1940) is a fragmentary sketch of a literary fairy tale (unpublished; probably written between 1905 and 1912) that repudiates its decadent sub-genre in the context of an early expressionist critique of human self-knowledge.[i] For the literary-historical study of decadence, it is of interest as an eccentric contribution to the critical appropriation of decadent forms in Modernist departures from the fin de siècle.

[i] Carl Einstein, Leda, in Werke, 4 vols, ed. by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Fannei & Walz, 1992-1996), vol. 4: Aus dem Nachlaß I (1992), pp. 64-70. The piece has received little attention in scholarship; the sexual problematics explored in this story are mentioned in passing in Klaus-Dieter Bergner, Natur und Technik in der Literatur des frühen Expressionismus (Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 225-67.