A run for your money

Back to table of contents.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The Joanna LeMuse controversy began in 1974 when then Spinke scholar and philologist Peter Szondi infamously contended in a paper that Spinke's drag persona, Joanna LeMuse, was in fact the name of a woman with whom Spinke had been involved in a passionate love affair. The real LeMuse, Szondi claims, came from the well-to-do Koch family of Berlin, and Joanna Koch—for "LeMuse" was merely a stage name—was the only daughter of influential government bureaucrat, Kaspar Koch. Joanna was known as a "wild child," and ran away from home in 1918, when she was seventeen, around the same time the name "Joanna LeMuse" began appearing in advertisements and billings for strip shows and other indecent novelty acts. It is the existence of these strip show postercards that throws doubt upon the previously held assumption that LeMuse was purely and simply an invention of Spinke's. Clearly, argues Szondi, Spinke, no matter how convincing he may have been in drag costume, would have been incapable of moonlighting as an actual stripper. Hence, LeMuse, following Szondi's logic, must have been a real woman—namely Koch—before Spinke adopted the persona. By early 1919, under her stage name LeMuse, Joanna Koch began reciting poetry and sometimes played piano in Berlin's Emporium di Arte, a club down the block from Spinke's Seidenstrumpf known for its purported recreational drug use and experiments in the avant-garde. According to Szondi, Spinke must have met Koch/LeMuse here in late 1918 or 1919, when he suggests the affair began. It is clear from Spinke’s fragmented letter archive that by the end of 1919, Koch/LeMuse was desperately in love with Spinke, and desired marriage, but Spinke continually refused. Using a bank statement from 1931—when Spinke applied, unsuccessfully, for a visa to travel to the United States—Szondi deduces that from April through December 1919, Spinke must have been paying off bribes of some sort, judging from the biweekly withdrawals of a significant sum that went, ostensibly, unspent. This was occurring just before Spinke's disappearance from the historical record in January 1920, and shortly after coming into the small fortune from his clever and illegal seizure of the English banker Nigel Forester's foreign investment earnings that March. These bribes, Szondi argues, were likely directed toward Joanna Koch's father, the official in charge, among other things, of investment foreclosures and earnings renewals. On January 1, 1920, Joanna Koch returned with a friend to her father’s mansion in Dahlem at four in the morning only to die six hours later of an usually deep knife wound in the chest, just below the rib cage. She was nearly three-months pregnant. Szondi hypothesizes the following: Joanna became pregnant with Spinke’s child in October 1919. Because Spinke refused her insistence upon marriage, she threatened to inform her father of the pregnancy if he would not marry her, while simultaneously offering the absolution of Spinke’s bribery debt to her father if he would accept the marriage. Spinke, fearing the worst from the powerful Kaspar Koch if he refused, killed Joanna to keep her quiet, and then disappeared until the storm surrounding her murder quieted. While this story has become accepted more recently by some scholars, when Szondi first introduced his theory it was met with criticism and derision, the chief complaint being a lack of evidence. The Joanna LeMuse controversy raged among Spinke scholars for several years, culminating in a series of insult-ridden and entirely unprofessional letters between Cornell University’s Michael Kammen and Szondi, leaked to the editor of the present journal through an anonymous source. The following selection, a poem in villanelle form, was printed on an Emporium di Arte drink menu from 1919, and was attributed to “Joanna LeMuse.” It was then later republished, under the same name, in 1922, but this time in his literary journal, re-titled in English, Of Love and Hate. Whether it was written and performed by Koch, as Szondi would have it, written by Spinke and performed by Koch, as this editor believes, or written and performed by Spinke, as Kammen contends, it remains a classic testament to a troublesome time in the life of both Spinke and Koch, and bears witness to the intense desire for frivolity and bohemian aesthetics of two young and creative minds.]


The Burmese Topless Dancer

When I was a dancer in Burma
I did not sleep around,
but I fell for a flapper named Erma.

Erma from Burma, born a herma-
phrodite—read me Ezra Pound
when I was a dancer in Burma.

After three weeks I went to a derma-
tologist for the rash that I found—
and I fell for that flapper named Erma.

He sent me off to the land of perma-
frost, said the skin must be drowned
in a serum of oram and sherma;

And that was how I earned a
Living back then, dancing fleshy and round—
And I fell for that flapper bitch Erma.

Scarred for skin and for life—I’m a germa-
phobe, mentally unsound;
But when I was a dancer in Burma,

I was renouned.