Swiss Review 4/2018

17 Swiss Review / July 2018 / No.4 Literature series most outrageous couples in Parisian bohe- mian society for decades. The couple’s pas- sionate love letters were matched by equally intense affairs. Ivan was captivated by the young poet Paula Ludwig, while Claire had af- fairs with André Malraux, Franz Werfel and Jacques Audiberti. This went on until she could no longer bear the unfaithfulness and wanted to kill herself. In 1947, after Goll’s ex- ile in the USA, the couple returned to Paris and Claire looked after her husband, who was ill with leukaemia, until his death in 1950. But she could not let go of the great love of her life. She did everything she could to prevent his work from being forgotten and even went as far as accusing Paul Celan – completely un- justly – of plagiarising him. In his final collec- tion of poems entitled “Traumkraut”, Goll wrote about the unfaithful companion of great men: “You are a dancer of fear / Dressed as meadow saffron / In the circle of red warri- ors / The bonemusic exhilarates you / But you never break out of the circle / And you never sway to me.” CHARLES LINSMAYER IS A LITERARY SCHOLAR AND JOURNALIST IN ZURICH CHARLES LINSMAYER When the Huber-Verlag in Frauenfeld pub- lished Claire Studer’s novellas “Die Frauen erwachen”, FriedrichGlauser ridiculed her. On 6 January 1919 in a letter to Robert Binswanger he called her a “male (!) Barbusse” in reference to the French pacifist of the same name and said that the book, in which an “insatiable womanmimed the belly dance of human love”, was enough to turn the stomach. Claire Studer – who was born in Nuremberg on 29 October 1890, the daughter of a Jewish hops trader, and became Swiss and gave birth to a daughter af- ter marrying the publisher Heinrich Studer in 1911 – began to develop pacifist principles as a student in Geneva and was part of the Dada movement in Zurich from 1917. Emancipation and human love soon faded into the back- ground in the works of the talented poet and author of the brilliant memoirs “Ich verzeihe keinem” (1976), making way for poetic evoca- tions of the couple’s relationship, such as the “Poèmes d’amour” (1925) and the “Poèmes de la jalousie” (1926), whichwere written in French. Glauser’s description of “insatiable” was not entirely wide of the mark, but she must also have been so irresistible to the opposite sex that shortly before her death on 30May 1977 in Paris she told Jürgen Serke: “I have the misfor- tune that men swarm around me like flies.” Rilke, Werfel, Malraux and Audiberti among suitors In 1916, long since divorced from Studer, she turned down a proposal from the Alsatian poet Ivan Goll and became Rilke’s lover inMu- nich for two years where she saw the “bril- liance of genius” in his “unearthly, gleaming eyes”. She nevertheless had Rilke’s child aborted and returned to Goll, who became her second husband in 1921, forming one of the Mesmerised by the brilliance of genius Switzerland prompted Claire Goll to become an early emancipated woman but she conquered Paris as the companion of great men. “I’m writing a novel about my last love. I want to prove to women of my age that it’s never too late for passion. I’m 82 years old but I do headstands every morning and cycle like the Emperor of Abyssinia. I adore weeds. I take Rimbaud to bed and sing the Bach cantata “I’m looking forward to death” every day. My favourite saint is Francis of Assisi. My favourite food is ice cream. But it’s no good in Germany. The German soul lies in sausage.” (Claire Goll in an interview with Elfriede Jelinek in the “Münch- ner Abendzeitung” on 31/07/1973) BIBLIOGRAPHY: “Ich sehne mich nach Deinen Briefen”, the correspondence between Ivan Goll and Claire Goll and Paula Ludwig, is available from Wallstein. The letters of Rilke and Claire Goll are available as an Insel paperback.