CHARLOTT A BIT LOOPY – Another forgotten gem from Weimar

Once again Alfred Döblin has steered me to a contemporary writer I’d never heard of, but am delighted to have discovered (cf. Paul Gurk and Robert Müller ).

Wilhelm Speyer was one of that small group of exiles provided by MGM with a one-year contract in 1940 – a kind of welfare for these traumatised writers as they adapted to refuge in the California sun. (See Döblin in Hollywood ) So for a year Speyer and Döblin drudged away in the same scriptwriters complex.

There seems to be no evidence that Döblin and Speyer interacted in any way, professionally or socially, in LA or in Weimar Berlin, where they had shared the same publisher. Though surely their paths did cross at times.

But after the war, when Döblin expended much energy setting up the Mainz Academy as successor to the defunct Prussian Academy of the Arts, he secured Wilhelm Speyer as a founding member. And when Speyer died in 1952, it was Döblin who delivered the funeral oration on behalf of the Academy.

(I haven’t seen the text of Döblin’s oration. It’s no doubt included in vol. IV of the Kleine Schriften (Smaller Writings), of which one sole copy has been offered for months on abebooks.de at €620.00, plus postage.)

A little searching showed that one of Speyer’s novels from the 1920s had recently been republished. I acquired a copy – and my goodness! What a wonderful complement to the glorious 2025 English summer (our first real summer for three years)!

Charlott etwas verrückt was published in 1927 – peak year for the Weimar Republic, as it recovered from the hyperinflation and was not yet aware of the looming calamities. The novel was at once made into a film, with silent star Lya de Putti.

Then, between its last Weimar reprint (1932) and its reappearance in 2008 – it completely vanished from sight. (Apparently an English translation appeared in the 1930s, but it too has completely vanished.) Yet Speyer easily stands comparison with foreign contemporaries like Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford.

So, yet another notable work of early 20^th century German-language fiction that fell victim to the enormous cultural breach of 1933-1945.

Who was Wilhelm Speyer (1887-1952)?

Speyer was born into a middle-class Berlin family of Jewish origin, but was baptised Protestant. He rejected the formal oppressiveness of the Prussian high school, and was sent away to a pioneering rural-life boarding school Haubinda. He always looked back fondly on the practical agricultural and workshop activities.

After service in WW1, he headed to Berlin, where he wrote several novels including, in the mid 1920s, a pair of best-selling Young Adult books: Der Kampf der Tertia (The Third Form Goes to Battle) and its sequel The Golden Horde, in which teenagers take on overbearing bureaucrats.

His equally best-selling novel for grown-ups, Charlott a bit loopy , was at once made into a film, and was reprinted several times up to 1932, only  to vanish until the new edition appeared in 2008.

Speyer went into exile in 1933, and in 1940 ended up in LA. Like Döblin he was unable to meet the requirements of the movie business, and lived in poverty until he returned to Europe in 1949. There he wrote a very large family novel, which went almost unnoticed. He died in 1952, and was then forgotten.

Contemporary reviews of Charlott etwas verrückt (quoted in the Afterword to the 2008 edition)

“A book like champagne: fizzy, cheerful, bubbling over. Here financial speculations and deep passions are directed lightly and playfully by charming female hands.”

“… starts at a 120 kph tempo … a fresh and successful document of our time. Assuming that ‘our time’ means Berlin  of the last few years, between the Potsdamer Bridge and the golf club. … It’s the fairy tale and the harlequinade of our age. It has miracles and heart-restoring face-slaps, the newest technologies and most ancient love, there is searching, yearning, a wedding with three jazz bands and everyone joining in … the abandoned husband, the newly chosen, even the wicked witch guarding treasure from the dragon. … Since the War and despite the War, a reality has arisen where fairy tales can again be put into play.”

“… written by a man who knows this world too well to take it too seriously. … has a buoyancy all too rare among German writers …”

“… a witches’ brew of automobiles, golfers and millionaires. In Charlott’s world there are no proletarians, and the Soviet Union exists solely to provide fake papers.” And yet: “…German novels up to now have lacked tempo and rhythm; the Americans and Russians are ahead of us. …This novel attempts to match the modern taste. … As amusing and amoral as this world we do not love but have to live in. … Crazy times.”

“Above all I recommend it to our ladies, who will feel every sympathy for Charlott, their dark-haired long-waisted sister. But when you, my lady, reach the part with the tea afternoon and Charlott stands in the doorway clad in the most elegant half-mourning, all black and white with a whiff of tabac blond, cheeky, modest and cold; when you see how the charm of her invincible little doggy nose and her bold personality deliver knockout blows to her enemies – then you will for sure cry out in delight: Charlott, a bit loopy!”

Last but not least, Albert Vigoleis Thelen (author of the tremendous Island of Second Sight):  “Speyer proves once again that he is the most cultivated and charming storyteller in German literature. His books are entertainments, but in the best sense of the word.”

The current critical view (from the Afterword to the 2008 edition)

Money, generations and sex – the three pivots around which the world’s instincts orbit. All the participants – the well to do older generation and the younger eager to inherit, men and women both, it’s all about the money, about having and not having, about making gifts and paying with dud cheques, about living on credit and fake bankruptcies. … Appearance and reality become the same: all is swindle.

The older generation mistakenly believe they hold the lives of the heirs in their hand. In the course of the novel they learn better, for the future heirs reject the union of capital and power. The ‘gilded youth’ try in various ways to assert control over their own lives, here and now. Above all it’s the women who take charge of their own fate, and are no longer willing to wait on chance.

What actually motivates the main characters – Justus and Charlott – to become swindlers? Here again we have a game, this time in the genre of the light-reading novel which (like a fairy story) ends in a wedding. But both characters have to deceive in order to achieve this happy ending: Justus plays the bankrupt for love – it’s the only way to win Charlott back. Charlott requires her inheritance at once, for love – it’s the only way to rescue Justus. But love – this subjective word – is never uttered. Apparently it’s a coin no longer current, whose value has to be rediscovered even at the cost of a big dose of loopiness. Or that’s Camilla’s cryptic explanation to Holk: “Charlott’s marrying Justus not just out of sympathy, but for another very definite reason that you can never understand… Don’t worry! She’s a bit loopy, but always knows what she’s doing.”

Yet Justus and Charlott begin their hunt for happiness from different starting points. Neither money nor love can offset the most essential difference: their completely different relationship to Time. Each represents a diametrically opposed concept of the present. In the novel it’s the young who test the present against the rest of time; with their ‘speedy’ contemporaneity they are far ahead of the older generation. And Charlott is the speediest of all.

In Charlott, one of the most astonishing female figures of literary male and female phantasy meets the Twenties – a “boyish gazelle  with the inner resilience of a dangerous little predator”, as one reviewer put it. Young, self-assured, sporty, sassy, naturally with shingled hair, short skirts, made-up face and a cigarette, she is the very embodiment of the ‘new woman’ (unlike Irmgard Keun’s less confident heroines a few years later).

She’s “a woman who knows what she wants” . Yet she’s no mere literary template of the type, but a trend-setter who constantly emphasises her uniqueness.

Here, then, are the first three chapters!