Writers No One Reads

Cover by Hans Bellmer. Here’s a bio of Mynona (pseudonym for Salomo Friedlaender, 1871–1946), from The Golden Bomb:

While the Friedlaender part of him was a tireless philosopher, propagating a mixture of Stirnerian ideas and neo-Kantianism (his numerous philosophical included Kant For Children), his Mynona half (being the reverse for the German word for “anonymous”) wrote several novels and countless grotesques which were widely published in Expressionist periodicals. However, the two sides cannot be understood separately, for, as he wrote, “above all, the grotesque humorist has the desire to refresh the memory of the divine, mysterious primal image of true life….” Although friends with almost all of the Expressionists and a star attraction at their readings, this bohemian writer and “forerunner of the laughing Dada,” as one Dadaist described him, was too “uncomfortable” for many: he died in poverty in Paris after being refused help to emigrate to the United States by Thomas Mann.

Mynona has very few stories in English. There’s one in Jack Zipes’ book The Operated Jew. It looks like he also wrote a book on George Grosz. (See my Weimar Whiplash post for many Grosz book covers.)

A quote from Mynona’s “A Child’s Heroic Deed” (1913, included in The Golden Bomb):

Exactly nine months after this blood red sunset, poor Mathilde brought a monstrosity into the world: a creature as red as a hard-boiled crab, with spiny outgrowths instead of hair. But nonetheless it managed to live, and was known throughout its life as the red hedgehog.