DIE MEHLREISENDE FRIEDA GEIER
If the new objectivity served the “function of social and compensation for a generation of men who had lost their identity,” the appearance of a woman armed with Gracián's Art of Worldly Wisdom seems inconceivable.[94]
The supreme commandment of someone doing business with someone else is that the former must never step into the latter's shoes. Compassion cripples.[96]
Acknowledging the other's right to existence unavoidably diminishes your own substance. Whatever you've not gotten your own hands on will be stashed away by someone else.
People are only too eager, for anyone they take to be an outsider, to hang the breadbasket a little higher. That means you end up with nothing but the table in your teeth.[97]
Business trips and sex are like a gauntlet for Frieda Geier; she endures them with mixed feelings because others are always intent on curtailing her mobility. Her lover, a sports idol (selected from the “breeding material” of the provinces) cannot cope with this “double being”: he cannot merge symbiotically with a figure who is at once “sensuous female” and “ascetic with short hair.”
This restless creature, you have to hold it down with every fiber, hold on to it with all your might.[98]
To the small town she ultimately seems to be a vampire, undermining the businessman's livelihood, draining the athlete's vitality. Surrounded by a pack of men, the heroine is forced to disappear so that her lover can overcome his crisis, in both his athletics and his business. She reappears one final time, but the idol's comrades lie in wait for an ambush—at the Jewish cemetery.
Individuals must stand up, experience ostracism firsthand, and with their slender selves stomp through the thicket of reigning opinion.[99]
If the cool persona in the figure of a woman cannot be instrumentalized as a prostitute, she is hunted as a “witch.”
Marieluise Fleißer's novel is a medium that exposes the self-destructive aspects of new objectivity leitmotivs. The transfer of themes of winning mobility through anonymity, incognito, or minimalist survival—woven through a soldier's mentality or a dandy's attitude—to a woman evokes a (thrilling) note of Angst. In the handbooks—whether composed
Fleißier had already put into words a woman's experience with men of the sort of Plessner's duelist in her collection of stories, Ein Pfund Orangen, which appeared in 1929. “She got to know men,” says one of her characters, “and one was like the other, having a system for women, but no mercy.”[100] We encountered this system in the conduct codes of distance; Fleißer directs her outsider's gaze at it, registering its unshakable rule: “The man determines the distance.”[101] And the system assigns a place to the other sex: “she was warmth, and not a person.”[102] As a lesson for women, it prescribes the code of virile distance:
These were the frosts of freedom [see Figure 9]; she had to learn to freeze. No one depends on anyone.[103]
But the female characters in Fleißer's texts get a lesson in a decisionism of their own. The author sends them into the system of the conduct codes, where they learn to their horror that “the natural enemy is them.”[104]
Perhaps what we see here is the shadow that Schmitt's Begriff des Politischen throws over the battle between the sexes. Or perhaps it is the deeper ground from which the theory developed. We recall Schmitt's definition:
The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity in union or separation, in association or dissociation.[105]
The “enemy” in this conceptual system is always “the other,” and it suffices for “his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien.” This kind of knowledge, which the female characters learn firsthand, offers them neither a standpoint from which they can deal with the other sex nor a feeling of self-determination that would enable them to draw boundaries. The lesson is imposed on them. For a time they seem to assimilate the principles of boundary drawing in
These were the frosts of freedom (Karl Hubbuch, Improvisiertes Fruhstuck [Improvised breakfast]. With the permission of Myriam Hubbuch.)
an initiation rite granting them access to the combatants' fencing hall: “Maturation meant that a light had gone on about the enmity prevailing among people.”[106] But since women have to represent the estrangement of first nature inside the sphere of trust, their claim to their own subjective artificiality suddenly ends up in the sphere of dissociation, where the intensity of the separation they embody is too much even for separation specialists. Those who sermonize on the “frosts of freedom,” says Brecht, eventually shy away from the effects.
Operating in the sphere of mistrust, Frieda Geier learns the enemy rules of behavior:
“Men must be destroyed, or else they destroy you,” a woman friend had said. Suddenly a thought came to mind-knowledge cuts to the quick.[107]
The point is that it cuts her. Describing these techniques, the female author clearly has need of a certain masochism to set her heroine down in enemy terrain-allowing her to “swim free,” I might have said, were swimming not the domain of the sports hero she is trying to thwart.
Bela Balazs, in a polemical remark aimed at the coolness doctrine in Reader for Those Who Live in Cities, notes Brecht's effort “to howl with the wolves” as a way of deceiving the pack; Balazs clearly fails to recognize the usefulness of the pack. Fleißer's heroine experiments with her enemy's code of conduct. In the social structure inhabited by her heroine, the maneuver comes at the cost of real-life substance. “She cannot howl with the wolves.”
Plessner, Schmitt, Serner, Brecht, and Jünger present variants on the cool persona. “Watchdog,” Fleißer will later term this avant-garde type; it watches over the boundary drawn by the dueling subject.[108] A paradox develops from its simultaneous resistance to and desire for decentering, whereby what Musil termed the “dis-armoring of the ego” (a genuinely modernist impulse) undermines the will to be a “subject in armor” (a motif of the decisionist avant-garde). Marieluise Fleißer's novels show us that the woman who allows herself to be pulled into this melee of virile narcissism gets cut to the quick. That pleasure can be gotten from the act is testimony to the uncanny dimension of Fleißer's texts.