ADDRESSING THE “particular allure that the actress has always exercised over the world of men,” Heinrich Stümcke foregrounds an affinity between authors and actresses, writing: “It is precisely the poet who sees in the actress a corporeal embodiment of his dreams, the shaper of his wishes and hopes [die Gestalterin seiner Wünsche und Hoffnungen].” Here Stümcke offers a conflicted dynamic in the actress-author relationship. On the one hand, he presents the actress as a passive carrier, a body animated by the author's imagination. On the other, he attributes to the actress a semi-agentic status by combining the active feminine noun Gestalterin and the genitive seiner, which assigns creative agency to the poet. In the next sentence he further suggests: “yet another thing about [the actress] has tingling allure: the knowledge that the beloved woman is the object of the wishes and desires of countless hundreds, who powerlessly bounce off of her like arrows fired too short” (ibid., 101–2). Foregrounding the actress as an object of desire and implying the author's exclusive right to that object, he formalizes active-passive, subject-object positions in the author-actress relationship. In doing so, he also summons the centuries-old fantasy of artist and muse in its gender-specific relational, aesthetic, and erotic dimensions.

Stümcke was not wrong to identify a notable affinity between authors and actresses at the turn of the century. Several modernist writers had significant personal relationships—sibling bonds, friendships, affairs, marriages—with one or more actress-muses. Arthur Schnitzler, Frank Wedekind, and Heinrich Mann are among the most prominent. Dramatic authors were, not surprisingly, particularly apt to have close affiliation with actresses. They often collaborated with theater directors and companies on new productions of their work and thus had frequent contact and at times intensive working relationships with the actresses who performed in their plays. Ties to a prominent author or artist could also be advantageous to an actress. The connection could lead to roles in stage productions, contracts with desirable theater companies, and contact with other important artists and public figures. The partnership could be mutually beneficial, defined by respect and co-productive creative exchange. Some authors jealously guarded their protégées, however, at times even preventing them from performing in plays by other authors.