What do people do when their backs are against the wall?
He collapses, whimpers, screams, gives way.
Or: it attacks and becomes stronger.
Like Lola Montez.
In the eye of the storm, the petite woman raises the champagne glass and toasts her adversaries.
Munich, on the afternoon of March 1, 1847: a hooting mob moves to the apartment of the scandalous courtesan.
The whore has to go, she has bewitched the monarch, is ruining the kingdom!
The first stones are already flying into your window, some of them deadly large, Ludwig I will write later.
And Lola?
Comes to the window with a sneering laugh, drinks to the Bavarian's welfare - and throws caramels at her enemies like a carnival princess.
All of life is a stage!
And Lola one of the bravest, most defensive, most charming ramp pigs of all time.
She doesn't care about conventions and takes whatever she wants: "I only ask that a tall woman be viewed by the same standards as a tall man," she writes.
"If the lords of creation reject this, then I will ask what divine right they are entitled to a life of amusements that women are forbidden."
Icon: enlarge
Lady with a whip: Lola Montez in Paris in 1859
Photo: Time Life Pictures / Getty Images
Somebody like Lola Montez, born on February 17th, 1821, is not what you want as a daughter.
But you can admire it, this dazzling fictional figure.
“Lola wasn't the cheap slut, the mistress, the victim, as so often said.
She was a dancer and actress, salon lady, author and lecture traveler, funny, clever, modern.
A chameleon that kept reinventing itself, «says her biographer Marita Krauss in an interview.
"This woman wasn't sitting there and embroidering, she wanted to make a difference."
Courageously and defensively, she broke the shackles of the ideal of women of her time in order to compete on an equal footing with men, according to the historian.
"I've thrown gauntlets everywhere for the stronger sex," is the title of her new book on Lola Montez.
Does the world need another biography about the legendary beauty with raven hair and deep blue eyes?
Even Krauss was skeptical at first.
Runaway at 16, divorced at 19
But then Duke Franz von Bayern granted the Augsburg professor access to sources that were previously inaccessible to all Lola biographers - the diaries of King Ludwig I, the most prominent of all Lola lovers.
Krauss read tightly, consulted other sources.
And with a lot of meticulousness and warmth, he reconstructed the full vita of an exceptional figure who, in the 39 years of her short life, made half the world gasp.
Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, Lola Montez's real name, was born as the daughter of an English soldier and a 15-year-old hat maker in the north-west of Ireland.
When she was two, father Edward was hired in India in the colonial army and died shortly afterwards of cholera.
Little Eliza was sent to England for a girls' boarding school. As a teenager, her mother ordered her to marry a 64-year-old solvent gentleman.
However, Eliza fled with Thomas James, a young officer in the East India Company.
After a short, unhappy marriage, she left him at the age of 19. "Runaway couples end up like runaway horses, almost certainly in a breakdown," she wrote in her memoir.
With Eliza comforting herself with another man, James filed for divorce, which in Victorian England amounted to social beheading.
Eliza stood before the end - and dashed ahead: “Fate seemed to leave me with only one excuse.
It was the adventurous life of an artist. ”She traveled to Spain, learned the language, took dance lessons.
And returned to England as the alleged widow of a shot coup leader from Seville, as Maria de los Dolores Porrys y Montez, in short: Lola Montez.
Bare bums for Warsaw residents
The legend was soon discovered: real Spaniards whistled out the only passable Spanish wheel-breaking Lola Montez at a performance.
She settled on the continent - in order to achieve fame there as a highly explosive femme fatale.
Lola lied and cheated, threw champagne glasses, made her way with slaps and lashes.
In Berlin she is said to have pulled the riding crop through the face of a police officer in anger;
the court summons tore them into tiny snippets, according to the newspaper report.
In Warsaw, she is said to have presented her bare bottom to the dissatisfied audience.
How much of the many rumors is true?
In Dresden, did Lola really smash all the furniture in the hotel room in Dresden, in which the composer Franz Liszt had her locked up before he piled up?
Icon: enlarge
What does the world cost?
In 1955, actress Martine Carol slipped into the role of the notorious Lebedame (scene from »Lola Montez«, (director: Max Ophüls)
Photo: ddp images
Historian Krauss cannot and does not want to untangle the motley tangle of curiosities surrounding Lola Montez.
One thing is clear: Hardly any star before her instrumentalized the press so perfectly, worked so tirelessly on his own riot image.
"You could best compare her with Lady Gaga today," says Krauss.
"Trample, banish the serpent!"
Such a scandalous noodle did not fit in Catholic-Biedermeier Munich.
Theoretically.
Nevertheless, Lola managed to get an audience with King Ludwig I on October 7, 1846.
And already it happened to the 60-year-old.
From November he guaranteed Lola a princely annuity of 10,000 guilders a year;
on November 19, he changed his will in her favor.
The uninhibitedly in love monarch rhymed:
display
Title: 'I threw the gauntlet to the strong sex everywhere': The life of Lola Montez
Editor: CHBeck
Number of pages: 343
Author: Krauss, Marita
Buy for € 24.00
Price query time
02/17/2021 12:16 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Order from ThaliaIcon: thalia
Order at WeltbildIcon: Weltbild
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
"You have sucked in my blood,
and breathed embers into my veins, dipped my heart in a sea of fire, my being rushes towards waves of lava".
The whole of Munich was horrified: "Old whore stallion!", Ludwig's court architect Leo von Klenze railed about the king and scolded Lola Montez as a "worn out brothel whore".
Priests urged the faithful to pray for Ludwig's release from the demoness.
The Archbishop of Wroclaw wrote a fiery letter:
"King Ludwig, wake up from your dream and win, throw off the magic bandage, tear from the poison tree, crush, banish the snake." But Ludwig did not think about it at all.
"The scandal is only an apparent one," he countered in February 1847.
He held on to his "Lollita" and asserted that he had not had any "carnal dealings" with the young woman.
Wasn't the king in his lolamanie not so testosterone-driven?
Historian Krauss has checked the sources and comes to the conclusion: The couple, who communicated in bumpy Spanish, probably only had sexual intercourse twice, in June and December 1847.
Icon: enlarge
"Devil without horns and a tail": Contemporary Lola caricature from the USA
Photo: Image agency for art, culture and history
According to Krauss, the two were connected by a "chaste love": "Ludwig designed a dream of Lola," both played an "innocent game of chivalry and loyalty, of minstrels and vows of love."
Alone: Nobody believed the king that he only kissed the sofa where Lola was still enthroned.
Horse droppings and whistles
The people of Munich were particularly outraged that Ludwig threw money and gifts at his »Querida«, had them naturalized and raised them to the nobility.
The newly minted "Countess von Landsfeld", who increasingly tried to exert political influence, was greeted with horse droppings and whistles.
Insulting verses made the rounds:
"Montez du great Hur
Soon the clock will strike (...) Pooh, the devil, royal house With our loyalty is over."
On February 11, 1848, some men packed the shivering Lola, who was fighting for herself, into a carriage and maneuvered her out of town.
"The rampant Lola phobia upset the people, but it was not the reason for the March Revolution in Bavaria," emphasizes historian Krauss.
Price increases and the absolutist behavior of the love-drunk monarch provided the background for the fact that in March 1848, following the example of the revolutionaries in Paris, the people of Munich now loudly called for freedom of the press, liberalization of court proceedings and more responsibility for Parliament - on March 19, King Ludwig thanked him I. from
After Lola, disguised as a farmer or a youth, returned several times to her lover in Munich, she moved to Geneva.
There she let the languishing "corsairs" ship her across the lake, constantly approached the ex-king for money - and even wanted to blackmail him with his letters.
"Now she was greasing up, that was completely below her level," says Krauss.
"An angel and a devil in her"
When the Munich money faucet dried up and husband No. 2 burned out with her jewelry, Lola Montez got up again.
She started her second career in the USA: as an author, actress, and speaker.
"She is the bravest and most daring woman who has ever set foot on earthly soil," said the violinist Miska Hauser, a member of her team for a while.
Much of what Lola has done is not recommended for imitation, says biographer Krauss.
But: »She just didn't adapt, but chose the stony path and let the wind blow around her nose.
Many young women today could learn a thing or two from that. "
With her memoirs and the stage play "Lola Montez in Bavaria" she turned her own myth into money.
In her "lectures" she gave beauty tips, settled accounts with the Catholic Church, and roused her listeners.
Don't hide behind your husbands or women's organizations!
Fight for your own respect!
That was their timeless message:
»A woman who, in the independence and power of self-confident strength, claims her individuality and defends her share of the privileges of the world with the means that God has given her, will achieve more than a million for her fame and position in the world Women in women's assemblies. "
Lola was neither a feminist nor a man-hater - she challenged men.
"I have thrown gauntlets everywhere the strong sex and showed them how little rights it has to rise above us women in moral terms," wrote this little great woman of life in her memoir.
After suffering a stroke in the summer of 1860, Lola Montez died of pneumonia on January 17, 1861.
When Ludwig heard of her death, he noted: “I said again and again that there was an angel and a devil in her.
Luckily (er) wise the latter won in the end. "
Icon: The mirror
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/KA3LQ5ZEAFEQXOIZXJEEVDUZUQ.jpg)
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ZNQFELY5DFEPJCC5SE43NKXHWY.jpg)
