Andrew's Wiki
German Pension

A satirical collection of stories, mostly set in a German spa among various ill patients, seen by a shocked, easily disgusted expat Anglophone who hunts out vulgarity and laughs at everyone. Others are third-person narratives concerning the deadliness of everyday life and the unfairness of the woman’s lot.

Themes

• Gluttony, Greed, and Cruelty
  • Germans are gluttonous
  • Husbands are cruel
  • Sexual instinct is all about cruelty
• Nationalism and Patriotism
  • Germans have a poor view of the English
  • Germany: either vulgar or over-hyped
• Innocence
  • Young women are innocent; old women are ones whose innocence has been lost
  • Sexual innocence gets women into trouble
• the New Woman
  • Beware of fake revolutionaries: conservatives in disguise

Germans at Meat

• Short, throwaway piece
• Sets the tone of the rest of the volume
• English are cold, passionless, gluttons
• Narrator is shocked!
• Showcases the prejudices of nationalism
• ”’I suppose you are frightened of an invasion, too, eh?’ ... I sat upright. ‘I assure you we are not afraid.’ ‘You ought to be…. You have got no army at all – a few little boys with their veins full of nicotine poisoning.’”

The Baron

• The much discussed Baron gives a confidential talk to the narrator, admitting that he keeps away from others in order to digest better.
• Second set-piece
• Castigates snobbery and shallowness

The Sister of the Baroness

• Maupassant-like “surprise” piece
• Succession of let-downs, anti-climaxes
• The death of Romance, as a valid mode of living and as a valid plot for writing about
• // “We gorged on the scandals of High Birth generously buttered.”
• ”’How I should adore to kiss you. But you know I am suffering from a nasal catarrh, and I dare not give it to you.’” //

Frau Fischer

• Narrator is shy about sharing the details of her illness and declines to “show her bodice” to waiters
• Difficulty of relating to other women
• “But I consider childbirth to be the most ignominious of professions.”

Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding

• Frau B experiences wild mood swings, moving from euphoria at socializing to depression at her bourgeois life (five babies)
• Exhibition of coffee pot with surprises in it—models of babies and cradles—makes her sad and weak, not jubilant, like the others
• Night of her own wedding: had to be physically forced to have sex
• Nihilism—“What is it all for?” she asks herself—with an early version of classic KM’s evocations of rapid alternations of mood—and more about female suffering, this time international, interclassed

The Modern Soul

• Artistic night shows how silly a female speaker, the “modern soul,” is (Fraulein Godowska)
• Feminism is seen as confused and contradictory
• “She told us not to go in the woods in trained dresses, but rather draped as lightly as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles.”

At Lehmann’s

• Set at a cafe
• Tale of (waitress Sabina’s) somewhat violent sexual awakening against backdrop of a painful birth
• Harsh indictment of what sex means for women, and an eye for the petty but meaningful humiliations the working-class girl endures

The Luft Bad

• Narrator goes to the baths: a curious mixture of the constricted and the free (“black boxes” that are open to the air; nakedness armed by an umbrella)
• Modernity as everything being too public; we need to save privacy
• “I think it must be the umbrellas which make us look ridiculous.”

A Birthday

• We follow the uncertainly bossy man of the house, Andreas Binzer, awaiting the birth of his son and heir
• Harold Beauchamp-like hero
• Trails the first stages of marriage (love, excitement, adoration) into the later ones (bids for control, sense of what has been lost)
• “No one can accuse _me of not knowing what suffering is,” he thought. _
• Man’s confused sense of rights and wrongs in the modern world, not knowing how far he can boss and when he needs to give in to sympathy.

The-Child-Who-Was-Tired

• Plagiarism-translation of Chekhov’s “Sleepy”
• A poor girl, possibly mentally challenged, brought into another family to work herself to death, loses her cool and kills the baby after learning another will be born
• Not a very good story, for all the copying: Its gritty realism doesn’t match KM’s gentle satire at this point; it feels histrionic and overly dramatic next to the other stories about daily life.

The Advanced Lady

• Throughout a rural excursion to a local farm, the long-awaited Frau Professor is seen to have conservative viewpoints
• Pastoral irony: the farmers don’t care at all about the beauty of the natural world, and they at all costs avoid walking about in nature!
• // “Yes, it is a novel – upon the Modern Woman. For this seems to me the woman’s hour. It is mysterious and almost prophetic, it is the symbol of the true advanced woman…. It is the danger of beauty, and the beauty of danger, and there you have the ideal of my book: that woman is nothing but a gift!”

The Swing of the Pendulum

• Viola, a budding writer, poverty-stricken as she waits for her editor-lover to get a good job to support her, considers dumping him and going for prostitution. An unnamed man bumps into her room by accident, she invites him in, a violent scuffle ensues, and she emerges clean, beatific, ready for her editor-lover again.
• Not really a German background; just a life of cosmopolitan, placeless hotels
• “I was not in love. I needed someone to look after me – and keep me until my work began to sell – and he kept bothers with other men away…. I wasn’t born for poverty – I only flower among really jolly people.” (Sounds a lot like KM’s viewpoint herself, esp. with Bowden
• A women’s attraction to the violence of sexual instinct, and the difficulty of a woman supporting herself, is morbidly probed by KM.

A Blaze

• A typical Edwardian tale about dangerous flirtation, set in a ski resort
• “Elsa, in a white velvet tea-gown, lay curled up on the sofa – a book of fashions on her lap, a box of creams beside her.”