"Las[Beta] mich sein, was ich bin": Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld's performance of a lifetime

[...]her insistence here on the "truth" value of her recollections-and this is but one of a series of such statements sprinkled throughout the text-functions not only to (self-)authorize her representation of history, but also aims at persuading her reader that these memoirs provide direct and unmediated access to the "truth" of her subjectivity Schulze-Kummerfeld presents her life as the journey of a coherent and above all consistent "self" whose inner and outer contours can be truthfully described, delineated, and contained on the written page. Examples like this show that at times she felt quite keenly the necessity of consciously playing and policing her "self" as a means of countering popular expectations. [...]she also recognized that such policing risked sacrificing the acclaim due to her as an actress (the implication being that by withholding her attention from her admirers she risked alienating them from her onstage performances).16 In other words, Schulze-Kummerfeld found herself compelled to perform her "self" in such a way as to maintain a delicate balance between her "self" as commodity (as alluring stage presence) and the "self" she claimed as her interiority (as virtuous woman). [...]one of the major objectives of these memoirs is to recuperate the actress as a virtuous woman and to recast the public woman as one who struggles not to remain virtuous, but rather to maintain her reputation as a virtuous woman without making visible the effort and craft this requires.18 In other words, Schulze-Kummerfeld's memoirs document her ongoing effort-culminating in the memoirs themselves-to produce a performance of Virtuous Womanhood which erased all signs of its own performative dimension. [...]these descriptions of her troubles with her fans also have another function within the memoirs: they create and confirm the image of the young Karoline as an attractive and alluring celebrity. [...]while her memoirs work to counter the stereotype of the actress by giving the lie to the image of carefree pleasure and loose morals among actors in fiction, they also exploit those fictional stereotypes by calling attention to the many social and emotional benefits of the profession.