Prussia's Scheherazade

​​ Long, long before I knew Edward Said and was able to contemplate exotic worlds, I read the Arabian Nights in gothic script. This early exposure to Scheherazade's stories meant I was forced to learn how to decipher this script at the age of 10. Not that I got it all right first time. For a long while, I thought I was reading about "Eindbad, the sailor".

At the same time, I possessed a record of oriental fairytales by Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener. The A-side was the story of "Gemahl der Nacht" (Spouse of the Night), the B-side was the story of "Gebet des Kadi" (The Prayer of the Qadi). Both had been recorded for the Bavarian broadcasting corporation in 1956.

Again and again I heard the deep, dark voice of the storyteller and the farce surrounding the qadi, whose prayer was actually a declaration of love for a woman.

A checkered life between East and West

Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener was not discovered for radio until she was 73 years old. By then, she had already led a checkered life between Germany and the Ottoman Empire with four marriages and the loss of her entire estate in 1944. Her only son died in 1945, during the last days of the war in Berlin.

​​ Deutsche Grammophon released only five of her recordings on disc in the 1950s, as reported by the journalist and radio playwright Kurt Kreiler. Ninety percent of the tapes were then lost in the archives for half a century.

In 2008, the publisher Zweitausendeins joined forces with Kreiler to release for the first time a collected edition of all the recordings titled "Das Lachen der Scheherazade", or "The Laughter of Scheherazade" (duration: 27 hours, 45 minutes).

Elsa Sophia Kamphoevener (her family was not ennobled until 1900) was born in 1878 in Hameln. Because her father served as a Prussian officer in the Ottoman Army, she also spent periods of time in Istanbul. By order of the Emperor Wilhelm I., Louis von Kamphoevener attended the court of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. to support a process of army reform.

Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the war against Russia (1768-1774), the Sultans were keen to modernize combat forces in a bid to salvage their crumbling dominions. Right up until World War One, German command structures were deeply embedded in the Ottoman Army.

The power of memory in the East

Like many German authors around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, von Kamphoevener tended to have a romanticized view of the East. Here is one of her conversation notes:

"Memory, what a wonderful thing! Those in the West have lost it, just as the Jews who Mohammed encountered had lost it. If you write everything down straightaway, what do you need memory for? As a nomad once asked me: 'Tell me, mistress, why do the westerners not have a sheet of paper up top instead of a head?'... The person who writes automatically destroys the powers of recollection and with it the infinity of knowledge that is inherent in those who do not write. The extensive knowledge of the East is much more intensively felt by those who do not write. And that is how the eastern fairytales have been preserved in the memories of the generations over many hundreds of years."

Oriental craze in the Weimar Republic

Von Kamphoevener apparently spoke eight languages and she certainly grew up in a cosmopolitan world. But it was also fashionable at the time to invent one's own biography straddling eastern and western worlds. For example, this was the era when Else Lasker-Schüler was running around Berlin dressed up as "Yussuf, Prince of Thebes" or "Tino of Baghdad".

​​ And the German-language author Essad Bey claimed (just as Kamphoevener had done) that he had ridden through Anatolia as a teenager and experienced the life of simple folk there. There is no documentary evidence to back up either claim.

Like Essad Bey, she also wrote about the Prophet Mohammed, although the manuscript was only published posthumously in 1968. In 1919, she and her brother founded a publishing house in Darmstadt specializing in "popular Oriental studies".

Von Kamphoevener published her own books, which enjoyed moderate success. She wrote a total of 18 novels.

An oriental storyteller at the battlefront

In 1994, Helga Moericke at Berlin's Free University composed her doctoral thesis on the life and work of the fairytale narrator, also commenting on her involvement in National Socialism. In 1933, the writer applied to join the NSDAP, only to be struck from the files two months later. A second application in 1935 was rejected.

In 1942, she volunteered to go to the battlefront where she entertained the soldiers by reading eastern fairytales. She took up a post at the Southern German Broadcasting Corporation in 1951. Many of her recordings from this era are improvisations, but she was also very good at developing gripping storylines during a narration. Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener died in 1963, and lived with a friend in Upper Bavaria from 1952 until her death.

The complete recordings of Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener were released as part of the new series "Zweitausendeins Documents". The publishers received the German audio book prize in 2009 in the category "Best Publishing Achievement". Apart from Kamphoevener, this collection also includes archive recordings by Elias Canetti, Gottfried Benn and Kurt Schwitters.

Turkish fairytales and German Romanticism

As Kurt Kreiler writes in the accompanying booklet, "In Kamphoevener's stories, the subject matter of Turkish fairytales mingles with the ideas of German Romanticism, the mysticism of love vies with tomfoolery, deep soul-searching with a desire to invent, laughter with tears, mockery with veneration."

Incidentally, the design of the info booklet is especially successful and recalls the old volumes from the Insel library with their embossed gold script. So a pleasure in every respect – if one has not become too sensitized through exposure to Edward Said.

Sonja Hegasy

© Qantara.de 2009

Translated from the German by Nina Coon

Elsa Sophia von Kamphoevener: "Das Lachen der Scheherazade. Das Hörwerk" (The Laughter of Scheherazade. The Audio Works), published by R. Galitz, K.Kreiler and K. Theml at Zweitausendeins. 27 hours and 24 minutes on 2 MP3-CDs.

Qantara.de

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