“Maria,” by Otto Ludwig.
Perhaps no poet has felt so deeply and expressed so clearly what constitutes the fundamental problem of sleep walking and moon walking as Otto Ludwig in his youthful novel “Maria.” This novel has, according to a letter from the poet, “sprung from the anecdote of the rich young linen draper, who was passionately roused to commit an unnatural offence at sight of the landlord's daughter laid out apparently dead in the room through which he was conducted to his own. As a result of this, when he put up there years after, he found her, whom he supposed to have been buried, a mother, who had no knowledge as to who was her child's father.”
This anecdote, which he learned from a friend, took such a hold upon him that he immediately wrote down not only what he had heard but the first plan, although upon the insistent protestation of that friend he did not work out the story as it had been first conceived nor so glaringly. “I saw,” writes our poet, “at first only the psychological interest in this material. The problem was to present the story as well as possible and this was indeed a significant one for the narrator. A distinctly esthetic interest would not be possible in conjunction with that.”
There is no doubt in the mind of the experienced psychoanalyst that, when a poet is laid hold of in this manner by an anecdote, this only happens because his own significant infantile complexes are roused out of the unconscious. Also the transformations, not unworthy of consideration, which the poet makes with the story are highly indicative. The seemingly dead maiden becomes a moon walker, the landlord's daughter is changed to the attractive daughter of a pastor. “Out of the linen draper there is finally made a cultivated, artistically sensitive youth, who has in him much of Ludwig's own personality” (Borcherdt). The finished romance the poet considered the best which he had so far created, it came nearest to his ideal of a story. Although his attempts always failed to find a publisher for the “Maria,” the poet retained his love for this work all his life and it was one of the few productions of his youth which he occasionally still shared with his friends in his last years.
The theme of “Maria” is, as indeed the significant title represents, the unconscious, not to say, the immaculate conception. It is unconscious because the heroine, drawn by the moon and walking in her sleep, comes to her beloved and becomes pregnant by him without a conscious memory of the experience. Furthermore the analogy with the Mother of God becomes emphasized by the fact that in a picture “Mary and Magdalene” described at the beginning, the Queen of Heaven bears quite unmistakably the features of the heroine of the title. The main event, with its results and discovery, is developed out of the character of both hero and heroine with extraordinary psychical keenness.
Eisener like Maria is the only child of rich parents. For both love manifests itself for the most part rather unfortunately. Apparently neither gets on well with the father and both have early lost their mothers. Only Eisener even yet clings with deepest veneration to the mother who taught him to revere all women and, judging from his words, her influence upon her husband and the son's desire still appears. “Whatever of good there is in me, I owe to women. The thought of my excellent mother restrained me from many an indiscretion, as also the teaching and the example of the wisest and best of men (the father). This gentle power which is so sweet to obey and at the same time so full of reward! In loving surrender it obeys the man, while its divine power rules the man without his knowing it. The imperceptible but mighty influence of her gentle presence has determined his decision before he has comprehended it. It has fallen upon him in his anger like an angel before his own strength could arm itself, it has turned him to what is right and proper before he is conscious of the choice. Before her clear look confusion cannot exist, the coarse word of insolence sinks back unspoken into the shame filled breast. The brightness of a lost paradise shines from her eyes upon the fallen bringing pain and warning, the consolation of eternal pity smiles upon the penitent. These are the suns about which the planets of greatness, honor and beauty revolve, lighted and warmed by them.” Maria's mother on the other hand is not praised by a single syllable. We do not discover when she died nor how old the little one was when she lost her natural protectress. Only indirectly can one make conjectures in regard to this peculiarly important point.
Maria was from an early age a marvelous child. “She spoke a language of her own, which only the initiated or a very poetic person could understand. All lifeless things lived for her; she transferred to flowers, trees, buildings, yes, even furniture and clothing the feelings of a human soul. She mixed sense impressions in her speech in the strangest fashion, so that she asserted of tones that they looked red or blue, and inversely of the colors that they sounded cheerful or sad. A girl a few years older than she named her the blue song.” Both phenomena, the attributing of life to inanimate things, to which one speaks as to beloved human beings, as well as the phenomenon of synesthesia, color audition and seeing of tone colors, are as we know positively today, to be referred back to erotic motives.[20]
“With Maria's seventh year perhaps, the tendency to play and purposeless dreaming, which is always bound with such lively, mobile phantasy, gave place, to the astonishment of all, to an exactly opposite tendency. From this time she began to take root in life with all the intensity of her nature. Already in her twelfth or thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the admiration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accompany everything which she undertook; everything increased under her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar element was reality.”
What had produced this sudden turn about? I cannot escape the conjecture that here the death of her mother had a decisive influence and with it the necessity to take the place with her father of his wife. Her housewifely activity is noted first to be sure from her twelfth or thirteenth year. Yet I am of the opinion that she had already in her seventh year begun to play this rôle—in which year the death of her mother would be placed—only because she was too small it had been under the eye of a maid or housekeeper. My analyses of hysterics has taught me that so profound and sudden a transformation of the whole character always takes place upon definite erotic grounds and for a quite definite erotic purpose.
The earliest love of the tiny maiden belongs almost always to her own father, who is in truth her first beloved. One can often hear it from the child's lips, “You know, Papa, when Mama dies then I will marry you.” That is in the childish sense meant quite properly and literally. The early, premature death of the mother gives reality to such infantile wishes, at least as far as concerns the care of the house. As soon then as Maria may begin to play this part, she fills it in a striking and inimitable fashion, although in years she is yet a mere child. She is altogether the mother in the care of a boy outside the family and this, as he quite rightly remarked, laughing boisterously and heartily, even where it is not necessary. Thus her first thought, when she spends her first night banished from home, is of “the poor father, who must go to bed without the little services to which he is so accustomed.”