Frida Uhl
Encyclopedia
Frida Uhl was an Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n writer and translator, who was closely associated to many important figures in 20th-century literature. She was married to August Strindberg
August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography,...

. She was the daughter of the well-known Friedrich Uhl, editor of the Wiener Zeitung
Wiener Zeitung
Wiener Zeitung is an Austrian newspaper. It is one of the most famous newspapers in Europe and one of the oldest, still published newspapers in the world. It is the official publication used by the Government of the Republic of Austria for its formal announcements. It was founded in 1703 under the...

, and Maria Uhl, a devout Catholic. She met Strindberg in early 1893, when she was only 20; they soon married and she at once tried to organize a production of his work in England, and took his financial affairs in hand. They had a daughter, Kerstin, together. Strindberg did not approve the active role Frida was taking in his business affairs, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1895.

Frank Wedekind
Frank Wedekind
Benjamin Franklin Wedekind , usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright...

 was the father of Frida's second child. She sent her children to be cared for by her parents. With a later lover, the poet Hanns Heinz Ewers
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Hanns Heinz Ewers was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself...

, she started the first German cabaret in 1900. She was closely involved with several writers of the Young Vienna
Young Vienna
Young Vienna was a society of fin de siècle writers who met in Vienna's Café Griensteidl and other nearby coffeehouses from 1890 until 1897...

 movement, such as the poet Peter Altenberg
Peter Altenberg
Peter Altenberg was a writer and poet from Vienna, Austria. He was key to the genesis of early modernism in the city.-Biography:...

 for whom she organized a subscription, and the journalist Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus
Karl Kraus was an Austrian writer and journalist, known as a satirist, essayist, aphorist, playwright and poet. He is regarded as one of the foremost German-language satirists of the 20th century, especially for his witty criticism of the press, German culture, and German and Austrian...

, whom she convinced to sponsor a reading of Wedekind's Pandora's Box
Pandora's Box (play)
Pandora's Box is a play by the German dramatist Frank Wedekind. It forms the second part of his pairing of 'Lulu' plays , both of which depict a society "riven by the demands of lust and greed".G. W. Pabst directed a silent film version , which was loosely based on the play, in 1929...

.


Her affair with the writer Werner von Oesteren was particularly stormy. She threatened him on two separate occasions with a revolver. Details of this relationship were made public in 1905 when she sued him for harassing a detective she had hired to follow him.

In 1908 she fired a gun in a Viennese hotel on New Year's Day. It is unclear whether this was a suicide attempt; she had recently written a number of suicide notes. The event caused a great scandal as Prince Fugger-Babenhausen was a guest at the party. She fled to London.

On 26 June 1912, she opened the Cave of the Golden Calf, a nightclub decorated by Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...

, Charles Ginner
Charles Ginner
Charles Isaac Ginner was a painter of landscape and urban subjects. Born in the south of France at Cannes, of British parents, in 1910 he settled in London, where he was an associate of Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman and a key member of the Camden Town Group.-Early years and studies:Charles Isaac...

, and Spencer Gore
Spencer Gore (artist)
Spencer Frederick Gore was a British painter of landscapes, music-hall scenes and interiors, usually with single figures...

. Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 complimented her on her acumen. Other luminaries who frequented the establishment included Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...

, Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford
Ford Madox Ford was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature...

, and Augustus John
Augustus John
Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....

.

In 1914 she left for the United States, where she quickly secured a job with Fox Film.

In 1937 she published the memoir Marriage with Genius.

She spent her last years in her family's summer residence at Mondsee and died there at the age of 71 in 1943.

Footnotes

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