Die Sumpfblume (1913)

At the center of the story is a young girl who, like many other young women in prewar Paris, seeks her hopes of a career as a hostess, dancer, or model in more or less dubious entertainment venues—pubs, bars, and backstreet dives. The moralists of the time regard this milieu as a (moral) swamp, and a clever, career-conscious young woman who rises from and escapes this swamp is called a “swamp flower.” One such specimen is named Sandra, and she seems to have seen it all. The German sculptor Edgar von Schmetting runs a studio in Montmartre and is fascinated by this swamp flower. He falls for Sandra, wants to sculpt her bare foot, and even borrows 20,000 marks, which, in the tradition of Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, he intends to invest in Sandra’s education in order to turn her into a respectable society lady. But Sandra the swamp flower cannot conceal the gutter she came from, and one day she makes off with the 20,000 marks, believing, as she tells Edgar in her farewell letter, that she can educate herself with this sum—which does not belong to her. With the money in her pocket and overflowing ambition, Sandra soon becomes a great variety-show star. One day she meets Count Dahlenberg, a gentleman whom she quickly wraps around her little finger and eventually marries. The swamp flower, with her supposedly disreputable past, becomes a society lady … were it not for her past as a cellar-dweller with a licentious history, and her brief career as an artist’s semi-nude model. But one day this comes to public light. The result: the Count goes mad and strangles his socially unsuitable wife with his own hands. “Swamp flowers shoot upward, delight, and die from the swamp air they drag along with them.”