A "body" of writing: the voice of Henriette Hardenberg.

If the body is the site of sexual difference, the place that identifies a given subject as "male" or "female," then it is the poetry and prose of a recently re-discovered Jewish-German Expressionist, Henriette Hardenberg (1894-1993), that deconstructs this "body." Her texts continually stop short of presenting the reader with a "body image," defined by feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz as "an internalized image or map of the meaning that the body has for the subject [and] for others in its social world" (39). Hardenberg--who was a dancer--represents her subject in terms of movement, an ongoing process of self-definition, where the "body" is never allowed to congeal into the fixity of an image. Whereas culture often reduces women to physical appearances, the voice of this female poet introduces the reader to a subjective physical landscape, representing not what a subject looks like, but how she feels. As I will show in a series of close readings to follow, Hardenberg's texts not only question the mind/body opposition that has been a dominant paradigm of Western philosophy, they also destabilize the spatial and hierarchical boundaries, such as inside/outside, above/below, liquid/solid, intimate/distant, that allow for the construction of the "body" as a visual image. If "a stabilized body image," as Grosz explains, "requires and entails understanding one's position ... in space, as well as a set of clear-cut distinctions between the inside and the outside of the body, [and] a position as a sexually determinate subject" (48), then Hardenberg appears to be in defiance of such a position.

To begin with, the physical body of Hardenberg, the author, seems profoundly connected to the "body" of her work. Her texts, like the voice that speaks in them, have appeared, vanished, and re-appeared on the literary marketplace, simultaneously with her real-life departure into exile and her death. Born in Berlin under the name of Margarete Rosenberg, Hardenberg took on a pseudonym when she began to publish her poetry in Expressionist journals at age eighteen, in order to obscure this fact from her father, a lawyer. She studied Expressionist dance and, at a Dalcroze School performance, met the man who was later to become her husband, the Expressionist Alfred Wolfenstein. The couple moved to Munich, where Hardenberg worked as a model and actor and befriended the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1918, a volume of Hardenberg's poetry, Neigungen, was published, followed by further journal publications during the twenties. In 1930, she divorced Wolfenstein and, in 1937, fled Germany for London because of the National Socialists' antisemitic policies. She remarried and for over thirty years worked as a private secretary for an art historian. Although she lived until she was ninety-nine years old, most of her writing was produced during the early part of her life, before her displacement into exile, and it was not until shortly before her death that her work was re-edited by Hartmut Vollmer.

Hardenberg's exile, along with her job as a secretary, may account for the modest body of her work. In face of the need to survive and support herself, Hardenberg's authorial voice became mute. For most of her remaining life, she was forgotten, although in private she never entirely gave up writing. For all intents and purposes she was, in fact, silenced. In what may be, perhaps, an uncanny harbinger of this development, silence announces itself early on in her poetry, as her voice seeks to transcend the limitations of the physical body by way of exploring the limits of language. According to Marina Krug, who interviewed the poet shortly before her death in London, Hardenberg had always wished to "express her desire for immortality, i.e., for transgressing the limits of her body and her identity" (7). Krug, who differentiates between Hardenberg and the male Expressionists, defines this identity in terms of being "marginalized as a poet, Jew, and woman" (57). Vollmer, on the other hand, draws attention to Hardenberg's emphasis on nature and "transformation of self" (Sudliches Herz 190), a process he describes, in his essay on Hardenberg and Rilke, as "driven by the desire for a universal connection to humankind" (76). Similarly, Beth Bjorklund, in her review in World Literature Today, situates Hardenberg within the broader context of German Expressionism, stating that her texts "share the characteristic features of expressionist poetry" (103) and "rank among the finest of expressionist prose writing" (104). However, reading Hardenberg is not merely of "historical interest as the work of one of the few women expressionist writers" (104) as Bjorklund concludes; nor can it be fully explained in terms of such notions as "universality" or "self." Rather, I find that Hardenberg's texts fundamentally question all notions of a coherent self or universe, as she distinctly problematizes the relationship between subject, body, and surrounding space. Implicitly, her writing functions as a critique of the way in which women are reduced to their bodies, as they are taught to judge themselves in terms of physical appearance. Explicitly, she represents the relationship between a subject and her body as complex and shifting--the "body" being, in this sense, not merely an extra-textual, biological referent, but rather a textual site, a metaphorical space where "identity" is continually defined and re-defined through language.

Hardenberg's first published poem, "Wir werden," appeared in the Expressionist journal Die Aktion in 1913. Endowed with the rhetorical force of a manifesto, it combines the first-person perspective of a single body with the plural of an unidentified "we":

 
   Wir werden herrlich aus Wunsch nach Freiheit. 
   Der Korper dehnt sich, 
   Dieses Zerrende nach geahnten Formen 
   Gibt ihm U e b e r spannung. 
   Schwere Huften schauern sich zu langem Wuchse; 
   Im Straffen beben wir vor innerem Gefuhl-- 
   Wir sind so schon im Sehnen, daB wir sterben konnten 
   (Dichtungen 40). (1) 

Here, beauty does not refer to external appearance but to desire ("longing"). The body is engaged in an effort to transcend itself and is represented through movement rather than as a fixed image. The poem stretches the limits of both language and the body by evoking movement as a means to physical and spiritual transformation. Depending on where one chooses to see its climax--in the visually stressed middle or in the end--it may be either a critique or an affirmation of corporeality.

In fact, the significance of this poem is in the tension it produces between two competing possibilities of interpretation: on the one hand, there seems to be a progression toward the last line, where death is invoked as a kind of ultimate transcendence, a departure (release) from the body. "Too much strain" at the center would then suggest that the opposition between body and mind had to be overcome in favor of another, spiritual dimension. On the other hand, the reader's gaze is drawn toward the central line, which is visually strained to expand through the insertion of extra spaces between letters. This typography makes it seem as if the poem itself were a body continuing to expand; the stress on the middle takes emphasis away from the end. If one sees this line as the focus, it appears as if the poem is really about the tension between two halves.