‘An habituée of the Romanisches Café’: Alix Strachey’s 1920s Berlin

Stedman, Gesa

doi:10.1093/fmls/cqx015

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“…(D'Abernon, 1946: vii) By far the most rewarding sources in literary terms are Alix Strachey's letters. This is not surprising, given the fact that she styled herself a Berlin café writer (see Stedman, 2017). Her ironic, self-deprecating tone tinged with psychoanalytical vocabulary has a different effect on the reader compared to the more conventional, less individualistic, and thus more factual and less rich memoirs by the two aristocratic writers.…”

Section: The Three Textsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Restoring friendship and confidence as far as possible between the inimical nations’: Post-World War I Berlin through English eyes

Stedman

2021

Journal of European Studies

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Three British women writers and their memoirs or letters serve as the key witnesses to rapid change from war-torn Berlin to a highly desired tourist destination. The war-induced transition of Berlin was matched by the social changes for women whose traces can be found in the three texts: the writer’s position changes from that of the voyeuse to the flâneuse. While the old aristocratic cosmopolitanism in Evelyn Blücher’s and Helen D’Abernon’s circles was on the wane, a more middle-class cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by the Bloomsbury psychoanalyst and translator Alix Strachey, became more important in the aftermath of World War I. The three writers share an interest in social observation, but all three are tied by their particular upper-middle- or upper-class habitus. An image of Berlin emerges which predates Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin myth by at least a decade.

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Section: The Three Textsmentioning

confidence: 99%