The child murderer in Emmy Hennings' novels "Gefängnis" ("Prison", 1919) and "Das Haus im Schatten" ("The House in Shadow", 1929/30)

In 1919 the singer, cabaret performer, actress and poet Emmy Hennings, a multitalented and highly fascinating, though still underrated, figure of the German avantgarde, published her first autobiographical novel Gefängnis (Prison), a firstperson account of her experiences as a jail inmate in Munich in the wake of the First World War. The book provides a unique, unconventional glimpse of the daily routine of the prisoners, offering deep insights into the individual lives of the women inmates from a female point of view. The narrator’s voice criticizes the bourgeois society and debunks the inconsistancies and contradictions of its male-focused patriarchal structures and justice courts which claim the right to determine when a woman is to be held a criminal. That is particularly clear in the case of prostitutes; the scene in which the narrator comes across Else, a young woman who killed her child, is even more striking. She is still wearing her pregnancy clothes, as if she were irreducibly bound to the experience she tried to eliminate from her life by killing her child. She looks apathetic and hopeless. Moreover, she is losing her hair, traditionally a distinctive feature of femininity. The reason for her crime is not stated. But the topic of the child murdering mother haunts Emmy Hennings throughout her work. Having left her own daughter in her mother’s care in order to pursue her dream of self-fulfilment as an actress questions wide-spread fin de siécle-notions abouts the association of womanhood, motherhood and modernism / avantgarde, as formulated not only by male authors, but also by ‘feminist’ writers such as Lou Salomé, Franziska zu Reventlow and Ellen Key. Not surprisingly then, in a later unpublished version of Prison, called Das Haus im Schatten (The House in Shadow), the narrator gives more room to the child murderer’s character (here called Stella), by whom she is overtly fascinated, thus surrendering to the inexplicable, enigmatic attraction of this prisoner and particularly of her beautiful voice. The child murderer herself explains the reasons for her crime as a way out of a reparatory marriage with a man she no longer loved, a choice of freedom beyond any social constraints and expectations about women’s duties and roles, even if it eventually leads to a blind spot.