The Politics of Cultural Mediation: Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Felix Paul Greve (review)

This collection of essays on cultural mediation brings together scholarship by Canadian and German specialists on two German expatriates who, to a larger or smaller extent, left their mark on the two anglophone North American literatures. The lesser-known but perhaps more exciting figure is Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the 'Baroness' who - as Paul Hjartarson and Irene Gammel show - played a provocative role on the New York Dada scene of the 1910s and 1920s, mixing with artists and writers such as Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams. On the other side of the Atlantic, she had been a member of artistic circles in Munich and Berlin together with her sometime husband Felix Paul Greve, the other figure on whom this volume focuses: the debt-ridden writer who faked a suicide and built a new existence for himself north of the forty-ninth parallel under the name of Frederick Philip Grove, interestingly insisting on using the same initials, FPG, on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the useful introduction by the editors elaborating on the concept of cultural mediation by making use of contemporary practitioners such as Salman Rushdie, the book consists of three parts, each of them offering different facets of the act of 'bearing' culture across boundaries and of 'being borne' across cultures. The first and second parts focus on the Baroness and FPG respectively in the context of cultural mediation in Europe and North America, and the third one consists of a key text on cultural mediation by Greve himself.

The first of three essays on the Baroness is 'Limbswishing Dada in New York,' a lively and fascinating description of her gender performance and her 'performative trajectory from Europe, through NewYork and back to Europe' by Irene Gammel. Then Richard Cavell studies Freytag-Loringhoven's poetics and its German origins in 'Baroness Elsa and the Aesthetics of Empathy,' and finally Klaus Martens's 'Two Glimpses of the Baroness' offers new and stimulating insights into Elsa's theatrical background in Germany and into her modelling herself after the German actress Else Lasker-Schüler. In the essays on FPG, Jutta Ernst deals with his role in Germany as a cultural mediator (translating authors such as Gide and Wilde) trying to establish himself in the artistic world by making his name and work known in literary magazines. Pointing forward to the final part of The Politics of Cultural Mediation, Morris then traces the influence of Oscar Wilde, whom Greve had translated into German, on FPG's later fiction, especially on Settlers of the Marsh. Paul Hjartarson finally interprets the process of Grove's own cultural Canadianization against the background of the political and historical situation in the early twentieth century.

The third and last part of the volume reprints Felix Paul Greve's essay 'Randarabesken zu Oscar Wilde,' giving us - side by side - the German original and Paul Morris's reliable but not always literal (is, for example, the Ahasveruszeichen, the mark of Ahasuerus, really the same as 'the mark of Cain'?) translation 'Oscar Wilde: Marginalia in Arabesque.' This turns out to be a programmatic text which gives quasi-prophetic glimpses of the future Frederick Philip Grove, being on the one hand a model text of cultural mediation by presenting Wilde to a German audience, and undergoing, on the other, the process of cultural mediation itself by being translated into English by Paul Morris. Here, however, the reader has a chance of following up the process of mediation because the text is given both in the German original and in Morris's translation. Interestingly enough, Greve sees Wilde as the model of the 'deracinated' or entwurzelte artist who, in striving to develop new roots in a new country, is the ideal cultural mediator.

All in all, despite a few minor typographical errors, especially in the German text...