Anna Croissant-Rust, “Poems in Prose” (1896), introduction and no. 1 (“Never again”)

Anna Croissant-Rust (1860-1943, née Rust) began her writing career in Munich in the late 1880s with prose works in the new Naturalism style. Her stories and sketches, set mostly in the southern German pétit-bourgeois and peasant milieux, make for a nice contrast with mainstream Naturalism, centered on the Berlin bourgeoisie and proletariat.

I first encountered Anna Rust while paging through the 1888 editions of the magazine Die Gesellschaft. I was looking for supporting materials to Gerhart Hauptmann’s novella “Bahnwärter Thiel,” which I am teaching this semester and which was first published in the same magazine that same year. I found her delightful little story “Eine Eisenbahnfahrt,” which relates the lively interactions between several different “types” of middle-class women in a Damenkoupee on a train ride into Munich (topics of conversation and controversy include smoking, legitimate subjects of art for female artists, and interactions with men). It’s a perfect companion piece to Hauptmann’s famous railroad story; I plan on translating and posting it by and by.

Another canonical text I am teaching this semester is Arno Holz’s Phantasus (1898), generally regarded as the pioneering work of “free” verse in German literature. Here, too, we find a companion piece in the oeuvre of Anna Croissant-Rust: her 1896 collection Gedichte in Prosa (1896). I’ve read just a few of the first poems, but it strikes me as an underappreciated work, so I will be translating my way through it. Here is the first poem:

Never again

A rain of pale rose petals about me,
softly. They rain down and flutter and I cannot grasp them.
Oh, the sweetness, the eye-closing sweetness.
Do you remember?
How timid the early day! Bright-golden, eyelash-closing. And yet full of rippling sun, waiting in the morning wind, hardly half awoken.
Did I seek your mouth?
Did I flee your lips?
What compelled me to you?
What tore me from you?
The rain of pale rose petals about me, rippling softly.
I cannot grasp them.
The sweetness, the sultry, trembling sweetness!
Do you remember?
How hot was the full day! Spraying light, victorious. A dizzy tumble in the blaze, a crying-out — —
Too much radiance, too much light, too much sun, too much beauty — — you and I — —

And now, the night.
Evermore the night.
No evening, no noontide, and nevermore morning.
Never again! —
Give it back to me! —
Do you remember? —
Never again!
Never? — ! —
A rain of pale rose petals about me, softly. They rain down and flutter and I cannot grasp them.

(Unfortunately, because WordPress does not allow indenting, I cannot reproduce the format exactly).

This is more poetic prose than free-verse. The rose-passage functions as a little narrative frame flowing around—and within—short, emphatic questions and sentence-fragment exclamations. In this it anticipates much Expressionist writing a couple of decades later. There is a kind of “stychomithia” here, in which the speaker is in dialogue with herself (Nie mehr! — Nie?) Note the antitheses: Suchte ich deinen Mund? / Floh ich deine Lippen? / Was zwang mich dir zu? / Was riß mich von dir?). Note also this expressive punctuation towards the end:

The most interesting aspect of the poem for me is how to interpret the rain of rose petals. Is this a purely symbolic-psychological experience of love’s end and irrecoverability? Or are we to understand it, say, as the poetic transfiguration of a walk through an autumnal rose garden, where the purling of wilted petals prompts the recollections?

Immediately on reading the opening lines and before I had formed any view, I thought of the famous story of the Roman emperor Elagabulus, who entertained his dinner party guests by bathing them in showers of flower petals (“violets and other flowers,” according to the Augustan History) … up to the point where they were smothered. In 1888, the Anglo-Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema immortalized this story in a painting, in which he rendered the flowers as rose petals:

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus

It seems possible to me that Anna Rust knew this famous painting, given that she grew up in an artistic household (her two sisters became visual artists) and between 1884 and 1895 was closely connected to the artists and writers of the Schwabing “bohemian” scene in Munich. Even if she did not know this particular work, renditions of the story by other contemporaneous artists were with roses (see La Pluie de roses D’Héliogabale by A. Hellaunt from 1880, recorded here, p. 286).

What might Heliogabalus’s roses have to do with Rust’s poem? It’s certainly not a direct or methodical reference. Perhaps they provided a kind of impressionistic or motivic inspiration: the rose petals continue to fall around the speaker through the poem, and the bright morning and day of love turns into night at the end. Still, we don’t really have the sense that the rain of flower petals is obscuring the light, much less smothering the speaker.

I love the unusual verbal adjectives constructions augenschießende Süße (“eye-closing sweetness”) and wimpernschließend (“lash-closing”) for the hellgolden daylight of early morning.