Tag Archives: marriage

March 3 Was Mistress Day in China

Posted on March 4, 2011 | 8 Comments

In case you missed the announcement in Global Times, this was it:

“An online forum advocating ‘mistress rights’ has declared March 3 to be Mistress Day, in order to draw attention to their plea for ‘open acceptance in society.’

“Yesterday, the China Mistress Association conducted afternoon ‘festivals’ in various cities across the country to mark the occasion.

“According to San Jie (pseudonym), the association’s organizer, discussion topics will include ‘how to get my man to come to my place every day,’ ‘how much does your man give to you every month?’ and ‘when will he buy me a house and car?’”

Time Magazine comments (March 2):

“After decades in which straight-laced communist mores kept any romance – extra-marital or more conventional – in check, China is in the throes of a sexual revolution…. Many wives tolerate the liaisons, reasoning that as long as their husbands take care of their families, a little bed-hopping is acceptable.

“Nevertheless, fewer Chinese wives may be willing to put up with their husband’s peccadilloes. The country’s divorce rate is at an all-time high, with cheating a main reason for the splits. Detective agencies that specialize in catching wayward husbands are doing a booming business.

“Beyond the personal realm, mistresses have become a political issue. A 2007 government survey found that almost 90% of provincial-level officials convicted of graft in the previous five years had mistresses. One prosecutor from central China, for instance, was convicted of having siphoned off $2 million in government money, in large part to fund his seven-woman-strong mistress habit. It’s a chicken-or-egg question. Did the mistresses come first, leading to the corruption needed to support these latter-day concubines? Or did the availability of illicit cash make mistress-acquiring an attainable an enviable lifestyle choice?

“Some puritanical Chinese Communist Party intellectuals have tagged the increase in ‘little wives’ as just another sign of the excesses of China’s capitalist reforms. But the dirty secret, of course, is that Mao Zedong depended on a collection of young ladies dedicated to pleasuring the Chairman. Most other Chinese simply weren’t as free to indulge as their Great Helmsman. A Chinese friend of mine who once served as a mistress shrugged when I asked about her liaison. ‘Everybody’s happy,’ she said, although she admitted the wife, also her friend, probably didn’t know about the affair.”

A new video has been posted at YouTube about a novel published by Eric Koch in 2000 that takes place in Berlin in 1929 during the Crash, just before Hitler’s rise to power.

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Eric Koch’s New Novel, The Weimar Triangle

Posted on December 2, 2010 | 1 Comment

Part Two: The Story

Jay, a handsome young emissary of the Bank of Ontario, arrives in Frankfurt to look into the possibility of acquiring a German bank. After a casual meeting in a bar, he makes friends with Hans, who runs a company selling old books on the Internet. Jay has always had historical interests and, while pursuing his investigations, is drawn into a publishing project that follows the discovery of old diaries and documents of various kinds. They were left behind by the grandparents of one of Hans’s companions, and by a friend of theirs, when they left Frankfurt to emigrate to New York in the ’thirties, the Nazis having found them racially undesirable. These papers are the basis of the novel.

The grandparents are Hanni and Hermann Geisel, and their friend, Erwin Herzberg. The novel is divided into three parts. Part One: Hanni’s diaries, written during the International Exhibition of Music, which was held in the summer of 1927 in Frankfurt to observe the centenary of Beethoven’s death. Part Two: excerpts of Erwin’s memoirs written years later, and Part Three, Hermann’s assorted letters and papers, under the title The Anti-Republic.

Hanni was an amateur musician with literary interests and a prominent hostess, Erwin a well known journalist specializing in popular culture and Hermann a pacifist lawyer who chronicled the miscarriages of justice carried out by the right-wing judiciary. Many judges had condoned the hundreds of murders committed by early Nazis between 1919 and 1923, including the murder of Rosa Luxemburg.

The centerpiece of the novel is a short detective story written by Hanni revolving around the theft of a lock of Beethoven’s hair, which was to be shown at the Exhibition.

Readers will recognize many well-known characters from the arts and politics. The novel demonstrates that by 1927 the Weimar Republic was stabilizing. It implies that it would have survived had it not been for the crash of 1929, which launched Hitler who, up to then, had been a marginal figure. One running theme is the traumatic shock suffered by the German military in 1918 when their last offensive collapsed. Having believed in the inevitability of victory, they were unprepared for defeat.

During the course of the novel Hanni falls in love with Erwin. It is not clear to the reader, until the end, what Hanni’s husband Hermann has to say about this.

The resolution suggests that among the many contributions to modernity made by the Weimar Republic, the concept of triangular marriage under certain conditions was among the more interesting.

Tomorrow: a review of the novel by the author

A series of videos about the Weimar Republic and The Weimar Triangle have been posted at YouTube.

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