Special Effects and German Silent Film: Techno-Romantic Cinema by Katharina Loew (review)

Abstract

is not a roman à clef, nor is it autobiographical, despite its references to people and events in Salomé’s life. It explores questions about maintaining relationships and exercising self-sufficiency that Salomé addresses in other texts. Spreitzer’s edition of the novel includes highly informative endnotes that clarify the characters, settings, and plot in relation to Salomé’s statements in her letters and essays, the people she knew, her other literary works, and the intellectual discourses that shaped her thought. The afterword expertly links the narrative to the rest of Salomé’s oeuvre by analyzing relevant passages from Salomé’s letters and essays. As Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger argue in their foreword, the narrative traces the ways that Annaliese undermines her conventional marriage by carving out a space of her own within it. Her prominence and “imaginative sensitivity” explain the choice of title (lvii). Beck and Whitinger’s translation offers a wealth of analysis and information about Salomé and the novel. This first translation into English should reach a wide, international readership. The translation is readable, thoroughly considered and researched, and could serve as a model for those interested in translation studies. Beck and Whitinger’s erudite introduction presents their translation philosophy, which includes bringing their readers to the foreign text by preserving elements of German language and culture (lviii–lix). Their extensive endnotes contribute an impressive amount of context and clarification to Salomé’s narrative. The serendipity of a new edition and a new translation of Das Haus, both beautifully edited and with complementary critical apparatuses, presents a welcome opportunity for delving into debates in the early twentieth century on such issues as marriage, gender, career, poetics, rationality, psychology, and religion, issues that Salomé explored in both fiction and essays. Her multi-perspectival consideration of conflicting desires for self-sufficiency and self-surrender in intimate relationships emerges through her representation of the two houses and the changing views of her characters. Spreitzer’s edition and Beck and Whitinger’s translation, read in tandem, offer fascinating insights into Salomé’s last novel and its social, psychological, and aesthetic context. Susan C. Anderson, University of Oregon