Cejch – Hennings Emmy (2024)

The stamp is an undated diary entry by a girl named Dagny, who restlessly wanders through German cities after the dissolution of her theater group, making a living in various ways: as an occasional prostitute, a door-to-door saleswoman of ozone tablets, an animator in a night club, a cabaret performer, or a dance hall dancer. Her radical and self-destructive honesty in her attempt to maintain inner purity is intertwined with a sometimes childlike naivety and boundless kindness with which the heroine relates to the unrefined demands of the surrounding world. All the dramas of a woman as an object of foreign choice are depicted here, either explicitly or implicitly.

In its time, the book was compared to the novels of Hamsun and Dostoevsky, and from another perspective, to Augustine's and Rousseau's Confessions. From today's viewpoint, the seemingly passive voice of the narrator can also be perceived as an anticipation of écriture féminine, thus foreshadowing attempts to deconstruct the objectifying discourse about women, developed by theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous. In this regard, the novel reads as a gripping testimony of a painful life that has lost none of its relevance.

Emmy Hennings (1885-1948) is primarily known as a poet, actress, and Dadaist...