Cejch

Emmy Hennings (1885-1948) is best known as a poet, actress and Dadaist performer at the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire, which she founded with her husband Hugo Ball in 1916. Less well known until recently were her autobiographical novels, The Prison (Gefängnis, 1919) and The Strait (Das Brandmal, 1920), in which she recounts her first-hand experiences of life on the margins of society. Cejch is an undated diary account of a girl named Dagny who, after the dissolution of her theatre group, wanders restlessly through German cities, earning her living in all sorts of ways: as an occasional prostitute, a peddler of ozone tablets, an entertainer in a nightclub, a cabaret performer or a chanteuse dancer. Her radical and self-destructive honesty in her attempt to preserve her inner purity is combined with a sometimes almost childlike naivety and a boundless goodness with which the heroine relates to the indiscriminate demands of the outside world. Explicitly or only in hints, all the dramas of woman as an object of someone else's choice are depicted here. In its time, the book was compared to the novels of Hamsun and Dostoevsky, and from a different perspective to Augustine and Rousseau's Confessions. From today's perspective, the narrator's seemingly passive speech can also be seen as an anticipation of écriture féminine, anticipating attempts to deconstruct the objectifying speech about women developed by theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. In this respect, too, the novel reads as a haunting testimony to a troubled life that has lost none of its relevance.