Margarete Bohme

The Diary of a Lost One [original German title: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen]

New York: The Hudson Press Publishers, 1908. Very Good. Item #47709

New York: The Hudson Press Publishers, 1908. First American Edition. Octavo (19cm); forest green cloth stamped in gilt and light green; 319pp. No dust jacket. Boards edgeworn with some brief spotting and smudging to cloth. Spine a touch faded and nudged at ends. Toning to endpapers, with prior owner's name and small bookseller's ticket to front free endpaper. Binding sound and pages unmarked.

Now generally agreed to be a work of fiction, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was a sensation when originally published in Germany in 1905. Purporting to be the diary of a young woman forced by her circumstances into a life of prostitution, the work had sold 1,200,000 copies by the end of the 1920s and was called by one scholar, "Perhaps the most notorious and certainly the commercially most successful autobiographical narrative of the early twentieth century," (Gertensberger, p. 108). Typical of moralizing reviews upon this edition's release, the San Francisco Call Bulletin called it "a horrible book but a wonderful lesson." Basis for the 1929 film Diary of a Lost Girl starring Louise Brooke and directed by G.W. Pabst. Uncommon in retail.

References:

Gerstenberger, Truth to Tell: German Women's Autobiographies and Turn of the Century Culture, University of Michigan Press, 2000

San Francisco Call Bulletin, "Books Reviewed," Sunday August 30, 1908, page 7.

Price: $250.00