How Literature Becoms Life

It is a paradox that Lou Andreas-Salome's life has occasioned the most varied dramatizations, while her own contributions on the themes of drama and the theatre continue to receive hardly any scholarly consideration. Liliana Cavani's film Jenseits von Gut und Bose (1977; Beyond Good and Evil), Giuseppe Sinopolis's opera Lou Salome (1981), and Yves Andlau's play Columbus. Der Ballonfahrer (1984; Columbus. The Balloonist) demonstrate that AndreasSalome's life lends itself to be read as the perfect substance for a production of the literary Lulu or of the biblical Salome. All these works use AndreasSalome's relationships with famous writers, artists, and scientists as a backdrop. However, in addition to her own dramas Der Teufel und seine Grosmutter (1922; The Devil and his Grandmother) and Die Tarnkappe (1934; The Cloak of Invisibility), and to another play still missing today that she coauthored with Wedekind (cf. Paul, Sechs Antworten... 222), a large number of theatre reviews testify to the fact that Andreas-Salome was not only active as a writer, essayist, and psychoanalyst, but that she was thoroughly immersed in the theatre. This relative neglect is all the more astonishing considering the regard in which her literary criticism was held during her lifetime – her Henrik Ibsens Frauen-Gestalten (1892; Henrik Ibsen's Female Figures), for example, was decisive in fostering the popularity and understanding of Ibsen in Germany (cf. Meyer-Benfey 306; Paul Sechs Antworten... 99-112). Yet scholarship has noted this aspect of her writing only in passing (Frowen; Gropp; Paul). The theatre reviews represent a substantial portion of the work Andreas-Salome published in a range of literary magazines over a period of 40 years. Unlike her treatises on the themes of the erotic, femininity, and psychoanalysis, this body of work has yet to appear in book form and scholarly research has neglected these 80 articles. Cordula Koepcke, for example, remarks

Art · Arts, Culture, and Music Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Theatre and Performance Studies