I first met Emmy Hennings in 1912 or 1913, in the old Café des Westens. Blonde, slender, and fragile, at the time she was the girlfriend of Ferdinand Hardekopf, a poet whom we all admired, and the splendor that her relationship with this handsome arbiter moralis of pre-1914 Berlin bohemian society made her a first among equals in that paradisiacal café where so many other beautiful girls were to be seen.
She was originally a discovery of John Höxter’s, a regular at the café, morphine addict, talented and highly intelligent. On some occasion or other he had met her in the street and brought her to the café.
In spite of our general admiration for her, Emmy always made me feel a little uneasy, so I never tried to become friends with her. Our meetings only became frequent during the Dada years, when she had long been Hugo Ball’s girlfriend (and later his wife). But when she told me one day that just the previous day she had a vision of her grandmother, who had appeared under a tree on the Utoquai in Zurich and told Emmy that she should no longer stay at the Hotel im Hinteren Sternen where she was living at the time—all of this confirmed my original uncertainty about her. What’s more, it turned out that Emmy really did have to move because of renovations in the hotel.
That was only one of her many visions. Finally I was willing to believe that she really did “see” things, half a hysteric, half a mystic.
In her forlorn, bare room in the Hotel im Hinteren Sternen, which looked rather like a prison cell or a monk’s cell, she had hung Madonnas and crucifixes—an unexpected decor in the atheistic and nihilistic period of Dada to which she belonged. But in her personal world they were legitimate. In her presence I never could suppress a feeling of having a bad conscience (which I never had otherwise); I could never shake off this psychic or spiritual uncertainty when I met her, this ghostly girl, accustomed to being loved, enmeshed in mysticism. I was ashamed, unconsciously, of my robustness.
Naturally, Emmy’s strange relation to everyday reality always made for complications, which could neither be solved on the level of reality, nor understood on the level of the mystical. The actress Sita Staub, Hardekopf’s beautiful wife, was only one among the many people who were involved in helping Emmy. It turned out, though, that everyone was prepared in practical ways to help this strange creature who lived half her time in another world.
In a certain sense, Hugo Ball’s disposition was similar to hers. When the two were conversing, I felt banished into the “jungle.” With Emmy, to be sure, I had conversations lasting for hours in which I said hardly anything, because I would get the creeps when she showed me suddenly where my aura was and in what colors she saw it. But with Ball I seldom had conversations during his Dada activities in 1916–17. Not until later in Bern, in connection with my work as political contributor to the Freie Zeitung, did I have closer contact with him. He, too, had this unreal aura—was it this that made their mutual attraction so strong?
I regard it as a fact that Emmy’s mystical and religious influence ultimately guided Ball along her own lines. Left to himself, Ball was much rather a doubter. Everywhere he doubted, Emmy perhaps gave him some (however unprovable) certainty. In her hypersensitivity she radiated precisely those powers that he, with his hyperintelligence, was lacking, or at least she strengthened innate tendencies in him. In the end, his final disbelief in Dada (declared in 1917) and his abstract poems conceived as a decomposing (or rebirth) of language, were a sort of belief with the signs reversed.
My contact with Emmy became somewhat more real when she asked me (via Hardekopf) to illustrate her book Gefängnis (Prison). Emmy originally came from Schleswig-Holstein, and at some time, somewhere, she had landed in prison, perhaps because some lover or other had taken her to court, or because a policeman had suspicions about her mystical stories. Outrage gave my pencil wings. I protested that this hypersensitive creature should ever have been shut into a prison cell. (And the good old Prussian cells were not exceptionally comfortable.)
At all events, a whole series of sketches and page-size drawings came into being, which, to my knowledge, were never published. A few have been preserved. In them Emmy is the Innocent, a part she played in her life unconvincingly, but which she probably was, if one chooses to believe the enamored testimonies of two extraordinary lovers, Hardekopf and Ball.
During Dada, she danced in the Cabaret Voltaire. It was inevitable that this highly impressionable creature, the mistress of important writers, should also begin to write. She wrote poems, the simple rhythm of which primarily showed how much she was a country girl. But later something more of the subtle personality she had developed flowed into her work. Hermann Hesse admired her, both as a person and as a poet, and as I recall he wrote something about her. The Swiss newspapers, National-Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, as well as some Swiss magazines, published her work. Small volumes appeared at the time when she was living in Agnuzzo in Ticino, in contemplative seclusion with Ball, and where she looked after him during his last years.
I had lost sight of her completely since her marriage to Ball in 1918. When I met her again in Ticino in 1934, Ball had been dead for seven years. Emmy was working by day in a factory and at night as a writer in the cold, narrow-shouldered house in Agnuzzo that Ball had bought. She took me from floor to floor as if Ball were still alive. Everything was in its place—Ball’s clothes hung beside hers, his books were next to hers. She was, as far as possible, “united with him in God,” a hermit. To the aura of uncanniness that I always felt about her, my feelings now included a deep respect for the constancy and loyalty of such a frail creature.
Since at the time I was living in Carabietta on Lake Lugano, not far from her, I saw her frequently, and one day I climbed with her daughter Annemarie and Olly Jacques, our spirit guide in Ticino, up to the Baumanns’ house on Monte Brè (Baumann was a rich Swiss from Java). Here Emmy’s daughter, tiny and most talented, hardly twelve years of age, had painted frescoes all over the walls. She is said to be living in the village of Agno, quite close to my Locarno home, with children and grandchildren—Emmy’s great-grandchildren.11
Even now as I write this, the ghostliness of Emmy’s world casts a shadow over me, although for many years she has been cultivating eternity, beside Hugo Ball, in the little cemetery at Sant’Abbondio.