Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow

Writer

• Born: July 18, 1871
• Died: July 27, 1918

Biography

Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow was born July 18, 1871, to Ludwig Graf, a district councilor, and Marie Gabriele Blanche, Comtesse d’Allemont zu Reventlow. While Franziska’s siblings lived up to family tradition, she was the black sheep of this ancient and noble clan. She was expelled from a private school at age fifteen, and at twenty-one she ran away from home to study art. In Hamburg, she met Walter Lubke, whom she would later marry and whom she persuaded to support her artistic ambitions. Learning, however, that her father was terminally ill, she went home to see him, but her disapproving mother forbade it. Reventlow afterward protested this incident in an article for the local newspaper.

Returning to Hamburg, she married Lubke and soon afterward obtained an abortion without his knowledge. She persuaded him to continue paying her tuition at art school where, as an early proponent of what was later called free love, she had a series of affairs chronicled in her diary. Lubke eventually learned of them and obtained a divorce. Soon after this, Reventlow discovered she was pregnant again; this time, in 1897, she gave birth to a son, never naming the father.

While pursuing a literary career, Reventlow continued to have open affairs with writers and artists in a time when promiscuity, especially among women, was socially condemned. In 1903, she entered a ménage à trois with two men, a writer and a painter. Later, finding herself broke, she negotiated a nominal marriage to a wealthy Baltic-German noble, Alexander von Rechenberg-Linten, whose family was pressuring him to find a wife. After they married in 1911, von Rechenberg-Linten gave Reventlow the funds as stipulated, but the bank where she invested them soon failed.

The one stable factor in Reventlow’s life was her writing. She began by publishing anecdotes from her life; her first novel, Ellen Olestjerne: Eine Lebensgeschichte (1903), draws largely upon the earlier autobiographical stories. Still a rebel, she appeared in this book to approve of the heroine’s lack of conventional morality, a stance that drew hostility from most critics.

Reventlow had a seemingly ambivalent attitude toward men. As a free spirit, she displayed her affections openly, but it has been argued that she exploited men—Lubke and von Rechenberg- Linten—economically; this was perhaps understandable in an era when women had virtually no financial freedom. Reventlow’s 1912 novel Von Paul zu Pedro: Amoureskine catalogues the protagonist’s male lovers, including those with no distinctive qualities, and creepy would-be rescuers—but also the type of men who could be good companions. Again, while reviewers conceded the book’s literary merits, its apparent lack of morality brought antagonism from reviewers and from society in general.

Reventlow’s saving grace was humor, especially as directed toward herself. Her best-known book, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen: Oder, Begebenheiten aus einem merkwürdigen Stadtteil (1913, Mr. Dame’s notebooks: or, events from a remarkable neighborhood), makes fun of its author and her role models. This endeared her to readers and to some formerly hostile critics, who came to recognize her comic gift. A pioneer in lifestyle and literature, Reventlow died in surgery July 27, 1918.