Abstract

The essay delves into the masochistic poetry found in the poetry collection ›Confirmo te chrysmate‹ by Maria Eichhorn, who, writing under the pseudonym Dolorosa, showed significant public activity within the Berlin Bohemian circles between 1900 and 1910. Alongside her artistic endeavors she contributed to the psychoanalytic discourse on masochism. Her poems unveil the myth of a bourgeois model of desire, predicated on the notion that femininely coded desire finds its fulfillment in physical and psychological submission. Eichhorn’s poetry reveals that masochistic tendencies are not inherently feminine but rather the result of a ritualized initiation of young girls into bourgeois desire practices, wherein acts of suffering sacralize sexualized violence. Christian iconography ennobles this violence by stylizing suffering as an ›imitatio‹ of the Mater Dolorosa. The radical consequence, as Eichhorn’s poetry demonstrates, is that these practices of suffering culminate directly in a death wish for the girl.