3 - Sexy Beasts

Summary

ON SEPTEMBER 23, 1904 a new adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Erdgeist premiered at the Neues Theater in Berlin, directed by Max Reinhardt. The production starred Gertrud Eysoldt in the lead as Lulu and, contributing to its novelty, it featured Wedekind himself as the Tierbändiger (animal tamer) in the prologue. At the beginning of the play, Wedekind stepped out from behind the curtain dressed in an iconic ringmaster's costume to deliver the opening lines (figure 3.1):

Walk in! Into the menagerie,

You proud gents, you boisterous women,

With hot desire, and cold dread,

To see the soulless creature,

Tamed by human genius.

The poetic monologue rehearses a well-established opposition between animal and man, who is made master by his intellect and soul. The animal's subjugation on display promises to affirm man's superiority. The Berliner Morgenpost reports that Wedekind “praised the beasts of his circus, all of which he commanded, and introduced a delectable rarity, a poisonous snake: Ms. Eysoldt was carried onto the stage in the pierrot costume of the first act.” The Tierbändiger continues: “She was made to incite calamity / to lure, to seduce, to poison— / to murder without anyone feeling a thing.” To demonstrate his lack of fear and his complete mastery over the deadly creature, he then scratches under her chin like a house pet as he calls her “my sweet beast” (ibid.).

With the overt equation that Wedekind draws between the figure of Lulu and animal predators in the dramatic prologue to Erdgeist it is fitting that reviews of the 1904 stage production also used zoomorphic rhetoric. Critics wrote about “Ms. Eysoldt the all-conquering snake,” or the “snake-woman in the guise of Lulu-Eysoldt.” They praised Eysoldt's performance in the role, to which she brought her “her snake-like grace [Schlangengrazie].” For others, Eysoldt's Lulu was perhaps too convincing and too naturally assimilated. A reviewer for the Volkszeitung comments: “With what uncanny naturalness she plays this snake in human form, this woman, who without conscious reflection coldly steps over the corpses of the men who worship her, and in the end drives the only man who ever loved her to ruin and fires a pistol at him.”