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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2009
Veni, CreatorSpiritus! From the triumphant chorus of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony to the muse-choir adorning Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, the Vienna Moderns celebrated the inspirational powers of the feminine. Muses, or the spiritual forces guiding acts of artistic and literary creation, have long been associated with the creative output of the Vienna Moderns, the groups and individuals responsible for the development of modernism in the arts and literature in Vienna from 1890 to 1910. These inspiring women—commonly personified as femmes fatales, femmes fragiles, and femmes savantes—played a crucial role in bringing the art, architecture, and writing of Viennese Modernism to fruition.
1 The term “Vienna Moderns” refers to those individuals involved in the development of modernism in art, architecture, design, music, and philosophy in the Austrian Haupt-und-Residenzstadt around the turn of the century. In literature, the term is most commonly associated with the “Jung-Wien” circle of writers and critics Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Altenberg, and Karl Kraus; while in philosophy, modernism remains coupled with the names of Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach. In the arts, Viennese Modernism is linked to the institutional offshoots from the Association of Fine Artists: the Secession, led by Gustav Klimt (1897), the Hagenbund (1900), the Wiener Werkstätte (1903), and the Kunstschau (1908). Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann, and Otto Wagner represent the leading figures of architectural modernism, and modernism in music refers to the “Second Viennese School” of Alban Berg, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Arnold Schönberg, as well as the late-romantic symphonies of Gustav Mahler. In his Modernity and Crisis of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge, 1993), Jacques Le Rider particularly associates the Vienna Moderns with confronting the sexual desires of the subconscious. See also Jürgen Nautz and Richard Vahrenkamp, “Das ‘moderne’ Wien als Brennspiegel der europäischen Moderne,” in Wien 1900: Einflüsse, Umwelt, Wirkungen, ed. Jürgen Nautz and Richard Vahrenkamp (Vienna, 1996), for a similar rendering of this definition.
2 In their introduction to Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne (Munich, 1997), Emil Brix and Lisa Fischer argue that the muse (along with the category of suffragette) remains one of the most important categories of analysis shaping the history of women and gender in Austria. See also note 5 for a sampling of such muse histories.
3 Peter Altenberg to Lina Loos. Das Altenbergbuch, ed. Egon Friedell (Vienna, 1922), 170. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are mine.
4 Karl Kraus, Aphorismen: Sprüche und Widersprüche (Frankfurt, 1989), 13.
5 For such interpretations of the three women under consideration in this essay, refer to Wolfgang Fischer, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge: An Artist and His Muse (Woodstock, 1992); Hertha Kratzer, Die unschicklichen Töchter: Frauenportraits der Wiener Moderne (Vienna, 2003); Eva Geber, ed., Die Frauen Wiens: Ein Stadtbuch für Fanny, Frances und Francesca (Vienna, 1992); Heike Herrberg and Heidi Wagner, Wiener Melange: Frauen Zwischen Salon und Kaffeehaus (Berlin, 2002); and Francoise Girard, Alma Mahler oder die Kunst, geliebt zu werden, trans. Ursel Schäfer (Vienna, 1989). On the femme fatale, see Nadine Sine, “Cases of Mistaken Identity: Salome and Judith at the Turn of the Century,” German Studies Review 11, no. 1 (1988): 9–29.
6 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980); Carl E. Schorske, “Politics and Psyches in fin-de-siècle Vienna: Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal,” American Historical Review 66 (1961): 930–46; Carl E. Schorske, “The Transformation of the Garden: Ideal and Society in Austrian Literature,” The American Historical Review, 72, no. 4 (1967): 1283–1320; and Carl E. Schorske “Politics in a New Key: An Austrian Triptych.” The Journal of Modern History 39, no. 4 (1967): 343–86.
7 See Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989); John Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Socialist Movement 1848–1897 (Chicago, 1981); Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996); and James Shedel, Art and Society: The New Art Movement in Vienna 1897–1914 (Palo Alto, CA, 1981). By a “gendered” interpretation, I refer to Joan Scott's conception of gender as a “useful category of historical analysis,” the idea that gender (like class, race, or religion) is only one of many “useful” categories for reading the past: “Investigating [issues of gender] to yield a history that will provide new perspectives on old questions (about how, for example, political rule is imposed or what the impact of war on society is), redefine the old questions in new terms (introducing considerations of family and sexuality, for example, in the study of economics or war) and make women visible as active participants, and create analytic distance between the seemingly fixed language of the past and our own terminology.” Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (1986): 1068–86.
8 The situation is even more imbalanced in studying how codes of manhood shaped greater historical phenomena. David Luft's Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, 2003) represents one of the few studies of masculinity in the field aside from Le Rider.
9 On women's political activism in Vienna 1900, see Pieter Judson, “The Gendered Politics of German Nationalism in Austria,” in Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Austrian Studies, ed. David F. Good, Margarete Gradner, and Mary Jo Maynes (Providence, RI, 1996), 1–18; Richard Geehr, Karl Lueger, Mayor of fin-de-siècle Vienna (Berkeley, CA, 1990), chap. 6; Boyer, Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna, 118–19; Elizabeth Malleier, “ ‘A Emile Zola—Les jeunes filles de Vienne’; The 500 Viennese Girls, or, 500 against 4,000,” L'homme: Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 10, no. 1 (1999): 91–100; Laura Gellott “Mobilizing Conservative Women: The Viennese ‘Katholische Frauenorgnisation’ in the 1920s,” Austrian History Yearbook 22 (1991): 110–30. On feminism, see Harrriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in fin-de-siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1992); Renate Flich, “Auguste Fickert: ‘Rote’ Lehrerin und radikal bürgerliche Feministin?,” in Die Revolutionierung des Alltags: Zur intellektuellen Kultur von Frauen im Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit (Frankfurt, 2004), 43–55; and Renate Flich, Wider die Natur der Frau? Entstehungsgeschichte der höheren Mädchenschulen in Österreich (Vienna, 1992). For more on women's movements in Cisleithania, see Renate Flich, “Bildungsstrebungen und Frauenbewegungen,” Gabriella Hauch, “‘Arbeit, Recht, und Sittlichkeit’: Themen der Frauenbewegungen in der Habsburgermonarchie,” and Birgitta Bader-Zaar, “Frauenbewegungen und Frauenwahlrecht,” all in Die Habsburgermonarchie, 1848–1918, vol. 8, Politische Öffentlichkeit und Zivilgesellschaft, part 1, Vereine, Parteien und Interessenverbände als Träger der politischen Partizipation, ed. Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch (Vienna, 2005), 961–64, 965–1003, and 1005–27, respectively.
10 Lisa Fischer maintains that the women of the Vienna Moderns typically have been classified according to three categories—(1) “die imaginierende Frau,” (2) “die inspirierende Frau,” and (3) “die imaginierte Frau”—which have obscured much of their creative and intellectual output. See Fischer, “Weibliche Kreativität—oder warum assoziieren Männer Fäden mit Spinnen?,” in Wien 1900: Einflüsse, Umwelt, Wirkungen, ed. Nautz and Vahrenkamp, 144–58. See also Fischer, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge; Kratzer, Die unschicklichen Töchter; Herrberg and Wagner, Wiener Melange: Frauen Zwischen Salon und Kaffeehaus; and Giroud, Alma Mahler oder die Kunst, geliebt zu werden, for typical muse histories.
11 Whitney Chadwick argues that in conventional histories of Western art, “women [artists] and their productions have been presented in a negative relation to creativity and high culture…. Qualities associated with ‘femininity,’ such as ‘decorative,’ ‘precious,’ ‘miniature,’ ‘sentimental,’ amateur,' etc. … have provided a set of negative characteristics against which to measure ‘high art.’ ” Refer to her “Art History and the Woman Artist,” in Women, Art, and Society, ed. Whitney Chadwick (London, 1990), 8–9.
12 Much ambiguity still exists in the field regarding the precise identity of the Vienna Moderns, though most scholars agree that the circles of the Vienna Moderns represented a remarkably interconnected social milieu. Refer to Edward Timms, “Die Wiener Kreise: Schöpferische Interaktionen in der Wiener Moderne,” in Wien 1900: Einflüsse, Umwelt, Wirkungen, ed. Nautz and Vahrenkamp, 128–43; Emil Brix and Patrick Werkner, “Einleitung” in Die Wiener Moderne: Ergebnisse eines Forschungsgespräches der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Wien um 1900 zum Thema “Aktualtität und Moderne,” ed. Brix and Werkner (Munich, 1990).
13 See Shedel's Art and Society for a discussion of the Secession's societal mission.
14 Refer to Elizabeth Clegg, Art, Architecture, and Design in Central Europe, 1890–1920 (New Haven, CT, 2006) for a more extended discussion of these institutional developments.
15 On architectural modernism, see Leslie Topp's Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Sìècle Vienna (Cambridge, 2004) and Karen Painter, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton, 1992) for a survey of musical developments.
16 Lynn Hunt, Joan Scott, and Joan Landes argue that the modern era has been characterized by the increased presence of women in the public sphere. Lynn Avery Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988); Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988).
17 The larger question of determining what was normal and conventional in this society with regard to sexual practices and interpersonal relations is an important question not yet settled in the literature, though the work of Karin Jusek represents a step in the right direction. See Jusek's “The Limits of Female Desire: The Contributions of Austrian Feminists to the Sexual Debate in Fin-de-Siècle Austria,” in Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, 20–38, and “Entmystifierung des Körpers? Feministinnen im sexuellen Diskurs der Moderne,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, 110–23. For the purposes of this essay, “modern” gender relations are defined as those that discourage gendered divisions of labor based on sexual function and support the increased presence of women in the public sphere.
18 On the gendering of the public and private spheres in Austria, refer to Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1992) and Brix and Fischer, Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne. According to traditional reasoning, certain virtues (such as action, creativity, and aggression) were inherently masculine and public. Women—naturally amicable, kindhearted, and passive—were to provide men with a feminine shelter from the rigors of the working world.
19 For a discussion of this sexually/biologically defined difference, refer to Karin Jusek, “Entmystifierung des Körpers? Feministinnen im sexuellen Diskurs der Moderne,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, 110–23.
20 For a discussion of the Austrian aristocracy and its social importance in the modern era, refer to William Godsey, “Quarterings and Kinship: The Social Composition of the Habsburg Aristocracy in the Dualist Era,” Journal of Modern History 71, no. 1 (1999): 70–105.
21 Refer to Michael Burri, “Theodor Herzl and Richard von Schaukal: Self-Styled Nobility and the Sources of Bourgeois Belligerence in Prewar Vienna,” in Rethinking Vienna 1900. Austrian Studies 3, ed. Steven Beller, (New York, 2001), 105–31.
22 Jacques Kornberg stresses that Herzl's withdrawing from a duel (when his father was on his deathbed) would haunt Herzl's confidence for the rest of his life. Jacques Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism (Bloomington, IN, 1993), 70–1.
23 Elzbieta Hurnikowa, “Die Frauen in der österreichischen und polnischen Literatur,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, 198.
24 The piece “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde” originally appeared in a posthumously published collection entitled Mein Lebensabend (Berlin, 1919), 9.
25 Peter Altenberg, “Venedig,” in Feschung (Berlin, 1915), 53–54.
26 See Altenberg's “Neun Briefe an Frau Lina L.,” in Das Altenbergbuch, 159–82.
27 Lisa Fischer, “Über die Erschrekende Modernität der Antimoderne der Wiener Moderne,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, 210.
28 Karl Kraus, Aphorismen: Sprüche und Widersprüche, 13.
29 Typical of Kraus's attitudes was his formula of the woman's soul—a highly-complex equation resulting in zero. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 288, no. 15 (1909): 15.
30 Refer to Nancy Wingfield's “Echos of the Riehl Trial in Fin-de-Siècle Cisleithania,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 36–47 on how the 1906 trial of an infamous procuress initiated dialogue on the regulation of prostitution not only in Vienna but throughout Cisleithania.
31 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 42, no. 5 (1900): 7.
32 Similar to Mayreder and Lang, Kraus viewed Viennese feminists as alienated from their natural femininity and that their campaign against sexual morality was nothing but, in the words of Harriet Anderson, an elaborate form of “sexual titillation.” See Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 3–4.
33 Arthur Schnitzler, Reigen: Zehn Dialoge (Stuttgart, 2002), 45.
34 Regarding the feminist movement's campaign to bring women into the public sphere, Weininger—like his devotee Kraus—viewed the women's movement as an indication of cultural decline. But, in contrast to Kraus, he looked down on “natural” femininity and viewed the Viennese feminists as intellectual and physical hermaphrodites. In his thinking—because “W's need and capacity to emancipate herself lie only in the elements of M which she possesses”—only Mannweiber (masculinized women) deserved emancipation. […dass Emanzipationsbedürfnis und Emanzipationsfähigkeit einer Frau nur in dem Anteile an M begründet liegt, den sie hat]. Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter (Vienna, 1905), 80.
35 Although Weininger's theories were often cast as decidedly misogynistic, using gender—rather than viewing maleness and femaleness as biologically defined—as a historical yardstick provides a more nuanced interpretation. After all, Weininger himself argued that each person reflects a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics. It is when these traits are out of balance that one's gender identity becomes troubled. In Weininger's own life, as he was both a repressed homosexual and “effeminate,” these tensions were never resolved. Such themes suggest how strands of feminism, antifeminism, and virophobia were interrelated in fin-de-siècle Vienna. See Agatha Schwartz, “Austrian Fin-de-Siècle Gender Heteroglossia: The Dialogism of Misogyny, Feminism, and Virophobia,” German Studies Review 28, no. 2 (2005): 347–66 for a discussion of such issues.
36 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 229, no. 14 (1907), 14.
37 Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter, 143–44.
38 Ibid., 399.
39 See Chandak Sengoopta, “Reponses to Weininger,” in Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago, 2000), 140–41.
40 See Mayreder's chapter on masculinity in Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit and her essay “Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit im historischen Wandel,” in Rosa Mayreder oder Wider die Tyrannei der Norm, ed. Hanna Bubeniãek (Vienna), 61–97.
41 Rosa Mayreder, “Von der Männlichkeit,” in Mayreder, Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit: Essays (Jena, 1905), 102.
42 Rosa Mayreder, “Das subjective Geschlechtsidol,” in Mayreder, Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit: Essays, 260.
43 Ludwig Hevesi, “Kabarett Fledermaus,” in Hevesi, Altkunst-Neukunst (Vienna, 1909), 240.
44 Although modernist critics like Ludwig Hevesi were enamored with the playful delicacy of Hoffmann's “Flaches Modell” cutlery—produced from 1904–10 for clients such as Fritz Waerndorfer, the Wiener Werkstätte's main financial backer—many Wiener-Werkstätte clients were taken aback by the Flaches Modell's surgical-like form. In contrast, the “Rundes Modell” cutlery, first designed for the Cabaret Fledermaus and then commissioned for other clients, proved more popular with most customers. Devoid of the ball-ornaments characterizing many of Hoffmann's early designs, the “Rundes Modell” possessed a rounded, less scapular form presumably more suited to eating. Adolf Loos later satirized this entire commotion over cutlery in the 1908 article “Kulturentartung.” See Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Franz Glück (Vienna, 1964), 274.
45 Egon Friedell to Lina Loos, n.d., Lina Loos Nachlass, Autograph (hereafter cited as Aut) H.I.N. 127.000, Handschriftensammlung, Wienbibliothek im Rathaus (hereafter cited as WBRH) (formerly Wiener Stadt-und Landesbibliothek), Vienna.
46 Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Frankfurt, 2005), 91.
47 Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Erziehung,” in Sämtliche Schriften, 395.
48 See Adolf Loos, “Damenmode,” in Dokumente der Frauen 6, no. 23 (1902): 660–64.
49 Flöge has even been referenced as a muse of the Wiener Werkstätte. See Herta Neiß, 100 Jahre Wiener Werkstätte: Zwischen Mythos und wirtschaftlicher Realität (Vienna, 2004), 122.
50 Mary Wagener, “Fashion and Feminism in fin-de-siècle Vienna,” Woman's Art Journal 10, no. 2 (1989): 29–33.
51 Roman Sandgruber, “ ‘Frauen in Bewegung’: Verkehr und Frauenemanzipation,” in Die Frauen der Wiener Moderne, 53–64.
52 Refer to Fischer, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, 39–42.
53 Gustav Klimt to Emilie Flöge, March 1913, Paris, Gustav Klimt und Emilie Flöge Nachlass (hereafter cited as GKuEF/N), Aut. 959/48, Handschriftensammlung, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (hereafter, ÖNBH) Vienna.
54 GKuEF/N, Aut. 959/47-59, ÖNBH, Vienna. In contrast to the candid and highly informal nature of Klimt's correspondence with Emilie, Klimt's letters to his sister-in-law Helene and his niece are all politeness and formality, even in his manner of penmanship. See Gustav Klimt to Helene Klimt, Aut. 959/59.
55 Fischer, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, 38–39.
56 Refer to Shedel, Art and Society, “The Philosophy of the Secession,” 5–45.
57 On van der Velde's influence in Vienna see “Dutch Art-Nouveau Artistic Dress,” Art Journal 54, no. 1 (1995): 30–33, and Mark Wigley, “White-Out: Fashioning the Modern,” Assemblage 22 (1989): 6–49.
58 For such an interpretation, refer to Fischer's An Artist and His Muse or Alessandra Comini, Gustav Klimt (New York, 1975).
59 For Alma's account of this pursuit as Klimt followed her family's travels through Italy, see her Tagebuch-Suiten 1892–1902, ed. Antony Beaumont and Susanne Rodebreymann (Ithaca, NY, 1999).
60 Fischer, Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, 13, 109.
61 GKuEF/N, Aut. 959/47-59, ÖNBH.
62 See especially his May 1914 cards written to Emilie from Brussels during a visit to the Haus Stoclet—the first major commission of the Wiener Werkstätte, for which he produced the murals—upon which he trusts her with his clients' remarks on the recently completed Primavesi portraits, as well as speculations about sitters for further portrait commissions. Gustav Klimt to Emilie Flöge, May 1914, Brussels, GKuEF/N, Aut. 959/50-1, ÖNBH.
63 GKuEF/N, Aut. 959/57, ÖNBH.
64 Wolfgang Fischer connects many of Klimt's humorous sketches, such as a self-caricature depicting Klimt as a testicle-shaped mouse, to a fear of women. Refer to Fischer, An Artist and His Muse, 112.
65 See Neiß, 100 Jahre Wiener Werkstätte, 124, 134.
66 On the Austrian “Sommerfrische,” refer to Verena Perlhefter, “It Is Such a Wonderful Feeling to Be in the Countryside: The Phenomenon of the Austrian Sommerfrische,” in Stephan Koja, Gustav Klimt's Landscapes (New York, 2002), 17–30 and Deborah Coen, “Liberal Reason and the Culture of the Sommerfrische,” Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 145–59.
67 Gustav Klimt to Emilie Flöge, 13 May 1914, Passau, GKuEF/N, Aut. 959/49-1, ÖNBH.
68 See Franz Theodor Csokor and Leopoldine Rüther, ed., Du silberne Dame, Du: Briefe von und an Lina Loos, (Vienna, 1966).
69 This is the story of their first encounter, as narrated by Lina years later. Refer to “Adolf Loos und ich” in Lina Loos, Das Buch ohne Titel (Vienna, 1947), 80-82.
70 In addition to the Löwenbräu anecdote, Lisa Fischer reports an alternate version of their meeting, wherein Loos escorted Lina back to the Casa Piccola after a fall sustained while promenading around the Ring. See Fischer, Lina Loos: oder, wenn die Muse sich selbst küsst (Vienna, 1994), 60–61. Yet another variation is provided by Burkhard Rukschcio and Roland Schachel's Adolf Loos: Leben und Werk (Salzburg, 1982) in which Loos extolled Lina, when asked to select between his beloved cigarette case and a highly decorative one, for choosing the simplest and thus most modern object. Rukschcio and Schachel, Adolf Loos, 51–52.
71 Kratzer, Die unschicklichen Töchter, 102.
72 See Lina Loos, Das Buch ohne Titel; Lina Loos: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna, 2003); and Lina Loos, ‘Wie man wird, was man ist:’ Erlebte Geschichten, ed. Adolf Opel, (Vienna, 1994).
73 See Loos's remarks on the Kindfrau in his memorial piece to Altenberg in Adolf Loos, “Abschied von Peter Altenberg,” in Das Altenbergbuch, 349–58.
74 Loos's penchant for the Kindfrau reached a dramatic and much-publicized climax in 1928, when he faced charges of ‘Unzucht’ (sodomy) against minor girls. See the files documenting this case in the WBRH, H.I.N. 138.870/1 (Urteil gegen Adolf Loos vom 1. Dezember 1928 mit einer Beilage und 3 Zeitungsausschnitte).
75 Lisa Fischer, Lina Loos oder Wenn die Muse sich selbst küsst, 78.
76 Even Loos's early love-letters to Lina, written during his military service in Krems, contain frequent requests for pocket-money as well as grander schemes for financial help from her father. See the letters of Adolf to Lina, Jan-June 1902. WBRH H.I.N. 126.821-126.870.
77 Adolf Loos's second wife, Elsie Altmann-Loos, recalled an anecdote of Adolf's in her memoirs. Once, when only two crowns were left in Lina and Adolf's household, Adolf was to bring home groceries for their bare pantry. Instead, he squandered their last two crowns on an English wooden-and-silver mustard pot. When questioned why he bought an empty container rather than food to fill it, Loos replied that he could surely find another few crowns much easier than such a charming mustard pot. Elsie Altmann-Loos, Adolf Loos der Mensch (Vienna, 1968), 30–37.
78 Lisa Fischer, Lina Loos, 74.
79 Adolf Loos, “Wohnungswanderungen (1907),” in Über Architektur: Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna, 1995), 56.
80 Adolf Loos, “Von einem armen reichen Mann,” in Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, 201–7.
81 Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism (New York, 2000), 112.
82 Leslie Topp, Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge, 2004), 162–65.
83 Lisa Fischer, Lina Loos, 86.
84 Adolf Loos, “My Wife's Bedroom,” photograph in Kunst: Monatsschrift für Kunst und Alles andere 1, no. 1 (1903): 13.
85 Refer to Benedetto Gravagnuola, Adolf Loos: Theory and Works, trans. Roberto Schezen (New York, 1982), 102–4.
86 Kunst: Monatsschrift für Kunst und Alles andere 1, no. 1 (1903): 12–13.
87 Adolf Loos to Lina Loos, 16 July 1903. WBRH H.I.N. 126.901
88 Marie Lang, whose feminist vision stressed progressive motherhood and a freer attitude toward sexuality, had left her husband, the respected jeweler Theodor Köchert, for the lawyer Edmund Lang. Marie then bore a child, Heinz, six months before her wedding to Edmund. In any case, it was quite to Adolf's surprise when he discovered Lina having an affair with the 18-year-old Heinz in the very bedroom he designed as a tribute to her purity. While this scandal also led to Heinz's suicide (after consulting Altenberg on the subject), it also convinced Loos to release Lina from the marriage in 1905 at which point she resumed her acting career. Refer to Anderson, Utopian Feminism, 135–37, for an account of this scandal.
89 Most of her essays were published after World War I in periodicals and newspapers such as Wiener Woche, Prager Tagblatt, Arbeiter-Zeitung, Neues Wiener Journal, Die Dame, Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Das Buch Ohne Titel (Vienna, 1947) was the first anthology of Lina's works.
90 Christa Gürtler and Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager, Erfolg und Verfolgung: Österreichische Schriftstellerinnen 1918–1945: Fünfzehn Porträts und Texte (Salzburg, 2002), 46–47.
91 Lina Loos, “Wie man wird, was man ist,” in Wie man wird, was man ist: Lebensgeschichten, 106.
92 See Lisa Fischer, “Weibliche Kreativität–oder warum assoziieren Männer Fäden mit Spinnen?” and “Das Schicksalsjahr 1902,” in Lina Loos oder Wenn die Muse sich selbst küsst, 73–103. Loos's subsequent wives have produced biographies of Loos that reveal him to have displayed similar patterns of behavior toward them. The age gap between Loos and his bride only increased in his next marriages to the dancer Elsie Altmann and Claire Beck, a client's daughter. Refer to Claire Loos, Adolf Loos Privat, ed. Adolf Opel (Vienna, 1985) and Elsie Altmann-Loos, Mein Leben mit Adolf Loos.
93 Adolf Loos to Lina Loos, 16 July 1903. WBRH H.I.N. 126.901
94 Adolf Loos, “Damenmode,” in Dokumente der Frauen 6, no. 23 (1902): 663.
95 Ibid., 660.
96 Ibid., 661.
97 Ibid., 664.
98 Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos's Cultural Criticism, 119.
99 See Adolf Loos, “‘Wiener-Weh’ (Wiener Werkstätte),” Neue Freie Presse, 27 January 1927, 6.
100 Berta Zuckerkandl, “Künstlermoden: Zu den Vortrag Van der Veldes in Wien,” Die Zeit,16 March 1901, 168–69.
101 Adolf Loos, “Die Herrenmode,” in Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, 20. Emphasis in original.
102 In his Welt von Gestern, Zweig describes how, in contrast to the fashions of the turn of the century, modern fashions (of the 1940s and 1950s) deemphasized the difference between male and female. Zweig, Welt von Gestern, 92–96.
103 Lina Loos, “Wenn ich mein Leben überdenke,” in Wie man wird, was man ist: Lebengeschichten, 275.
104 Ibid., 275–76.
105 Ibid., 277.
106 See Herrberg and Wagner's “Inspirierend und kühn: Die Netzwerkerinnen der Salons,” in Wiener Melange, which highlights how Alma has been celebrated as the muse of Vienna 1900. Herrberg and Wagner, Wiener Melange, 25–49.
107 Alma Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben (Frankfurt, 1975), 13.
108 See, for instance, Antony Beaumont's discussion of Alma's father reverence in his introduction to a recently-published collection of Mahler's letters to Alma. Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife, ed. Henry-Louis de la Grange and Günther Weiss (Ithaca, NY, 2004), 13–15.
109 Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben, 14.
110 E. F. “Kravitt, The Lieder of Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler,” The Music Review 49, no. 3 (1988): 190–204.
111 See Francoise Girard, Alma Mahler oder die Kunst, geliebt zu werden; Karen Monson, Muse to Genius; Susan Keegan, The Bride of the Wind: The Life and Times of Alma Mahler-Werfel (New York, 1991); Patricia Stanley, “Marriage as Self-Expression in the Life of Alma Mahler-Werfel,” European Legacy 1, no. 3 (1996): 931–36; Ellen Lee, “The Amazing Alma Mahler: Musical Talent, Bountiful Charm, and a Zest for Life,” Clavier 38, no. 4 (1999): 20–23; Tess Lewis “Music Was the Food of Love: So Was Architecture, Painting, and Verse,” Hudson Review 52, no. 3 (1999): 405–14.
112 Walter Sorell, “Meeting Alma Mahler-Werfel,” interview with Alma Mahler, Austria Kultur 4, no. 3 (1994): 15.
113 Alma Mahler-Werfel, interviewed by Walter Sorell, cited in Sorell, Three Women: Lives of Sex and Genius (New York, 1974), 5.
114 Stanley, “Marriage as Self-Expression,” 935.
115 Susan Filler, “A Composer's Wife as Composer: The Songs of Alma Mahler,” Journal of Musicological Research 4, nos. 3–4 (1983): 427–42.
116 Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler, 5 December 1901, Typescript of “Ein Leben mit Gustav Mahler,” Mahler Correspondences, Mahler-Werfel Papers (hereafter cited as M-W Papers), Manuscript Collection (hereafter cited as MS Col.) 525, Box 35, Annenberg Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt Library, The University of Pennsylvania (hereafter cited as ARBML).
117 Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler, 20 December 1901 (cited by La Grange as 19 November 1901), Dresden, Hotel Bellvue, Typescript of “Ein Leben mit Gustav Mahler” and Mahler Correspondences, M-W Papers, MS Col. 525, Box 35, ARBML.
118 Alma Schindler, Tagebuch-Suite IV, entry dated 29 January 1898, M-W Papers, MS Col. 525, Box 26, Folder 1502, ARBML.
119 Walter Sorell, “Meeting Alma Mahler-Werfel,” interview with Alma Mahler, Austria Kultur 4, no. 3 (1994): 7.
120 Alma Mahler-Werfel, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, trans. Basil Creighton (Seattle, WA, 1968), 71.
121 Ibid., 42. Alma commented that “sometimes he played the part of a schoolmaster, relentlessly strict and unjust…. I was a young thing he had desired and whose education he now took in hand.”
122 Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler, 20 December 1901, Dresden, Hotel Bellvue, Typescript of “Ein Leben mit Gustav Mahler” Mahler Correspondences, M-W Papers, MS Col. 525, Box 35, ARBML.
123 Ibid.
124 Mahler-Werfel, Memories and Letters, 22.
125 Although Alma discusses her “half-nature” throughout her diaries, her “Suite 25,” dated December 1901–January 1902, particularly illustrates the struggle between the frivolous aspects of her personality and her serious, intellectual self. Refer to “Suite 25” in the published edition of her diaries, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Tagebuch-Suiten 1892–1902, ed. Antony Beaumont and Susanne Rodebreymann (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 737–52.
126 Alexander Zemlinsky, Correspondence to Alma Mahler. M-W Papers, MS Col. 525, Box 22, Folders 1380-1397, ARBML.
127 Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben, 48.
128 Alma Mahler-Werfel, “Zwischen Zwei Kriegen” (novel manuscript written in the early 1940s), M-W Papers, MS Col. 575, Folder 1572, ARBML.
129 The penultimate sentence of the novel reads; “Und sie [Eva and Viktor] wussten plötzlich, dass es kein Judentum,—kein Ariertum, keine Trennung gibt, sondern ein Christentum auf höchster Stufe—die Menschenwerdung des Menschen—an sich—alle Stoffe sind dieselben—der Mensch ist nur ein schmaler Streif Leidenschaft.” Alma Mahler-Werfel, “Zwischen Zwei Kriegen,” 84.
130 Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben, 370.
131 Julie Marie Johnson, “From Brocades to Silks and Powders: Women's Art Exhibitions and the Formation of a Gendered Aesthetic in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” Austrian History Yearbook 28 (1997): 269–92; “Writing, Erasing, Silencing: Tina Blau and the (Woman) Artist's Biography” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 4, no. 3 (2005).
