A remarkable illustrated text produced by the author during one of her stays in a mental institution.

The House of Illnesses

Zürn, Unica

Atlas

In 1970, Unica Zurn, the companion and lover of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, threw herself from the sixth floor window of their apartment in Paris. Her suicide was the culmination of thirteen years of mental crises which are described with disarming lucidity in The Man Of Jasmine, subtitled Impressions from a Mental Illness. Zurn's mental collapse was initiated when she encountered in the real world her childhood fantasy figure "the man of jasmine": he was the writer Henri Michaux, and her meeting him plunged her into a world of hallucination in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her return to "reality" was constantly interrupted by alternate visionary and depressive periods. Zurn's compelling narrative also reveals her uneasy relationship with words and language, which she attempted to resolve by the compulsive writing of anagrams. Anagrams allowed her to dissect the language of everyday, to personalise it, and to make it reveal hidden at its core astonishing messages, threats and evocations. They formed the basis of her interpretation of the split between her inner &amp; outer lives and underpin the texts included in this selection. The Man of Jasmine is certainly one of the greatest descriptions of mental collapse, but it is much more. Zurn's familiarity with Surrealist conceptions of the psyche, and her extraordinary self-possession during the most alarming experiences are allied to vivid descriptive powers which make this a literary as well as a psychological masterpiece.

The Man of Jasmine/& Other Texts

Biographies & Memoirs

Atlas Pr

This dark, autobiographical coming-of-age novel reads more like an exorcism than a memoir
In Dark Spring, author Unica Zürn traces the roots of her obsessions: The exotic father she idealized, the "impure" mother she detested, the masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals which she said described "the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood." Dark Spring is the story of a young girl's simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness, revealing a different aspect of the "mad love" so romanticized by the (predominantly male) Surrealists. Unica Zürn (1916–70) emigrated in 1953 from her native Berlin to Paris in order to live with the artist Hans Bellmer. There she exhibited drawings as a member of the Surrealist group and collaborated with Bellmer on a series of notorious photographs of her nude torso bound with string. In 1957, a fateful encounter with the poet and painter Henri Michaux led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. She committed suicide in 1970―an act foretold in this, her last completed work.

Dark Spring (Exact Change)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Exact Change

Review\n[Zürn's] compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to release from everyday language an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, and Zürn's eloquent yet direct style, make "The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts" a literary masterpiece, while providing a rare insight into extreme psychological states. -- Margaret Lane ― Midwest Book Review\nAnagram play meets psychic crisis in Unica Zürn’s acclaimed Surrealist document of mental precarity 
In the 25 years since Atlas Press first published this account by Unica Zürn (1916–70) of her long history of mental crises, she has come to be recognized as a great artist at least the equal of her partner, the Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Yet her work is barely comprehensible without the texts printed here―now revised by translator Malcolm Green―in which she demonstrates how Surrealist conceptions of the psyche allowed her to welcome the most alarming experiences as offering access to an inner existence that was the vital source for her artistic output. Green's introduction to this volume was the first study to consider her life and work from this perspective.\nZürn’s first mental collapse was initiated when she encountered her fantasy figure, “the Man of Jasmine,” in the person of the writer and artist Henri Michaux. This meeting plunged her into a hallucinatory world in which visions of her desires, anxieties and events from her unresolved past overwhelmed her present life. Her greatest works were produced during times of mental crisis, often when confined in asylums, and she tended to encourage the onset of these crises in order to provoke intense creativity. Her description of these episodes reveals how language itself was part of the divinatory method that could aid her recovery or predict a new crisis. Her compulsion for composing anagrams allowed her to release from everyday language an astonishing flood of messages, threats and evocations. This method, and Zürn’s eloquent yet direct style, make this book a literary masterpiece, while providing a rare insight into extreme psychological states.

The Man of Jasmine & Other Texts

Atlas Press

This fierce fable of childbirth by German Surrealist Unica Zürn was written after she had already given birth to two children and undergone the self-induced abortion of another in Berlin in the 1950s. Beginning in the relatively straightforward, if disturbing, narrative of a young woman in a tower (with a bat in her hair and ravens for company) engaged in a psychic war with the parasitic son in her belly, The Trumpets of Jericho dissolves into a beautiful nightmare of hypnotic obsession and mythical language, stitched together with anagrams and private ruminations. Arguably Zürn's most extreme experiment in prose, and never before translated into English, this novella dramatizes the frontiers of the body―its defensive walls as well as its cavities and thresholds―animating a harrowing and painfully, twistedly honest depiction of motherhood as a breakdown in the distinction between self and other, transposed into the language of darkest fairy tales. Unica Zürn (1916–70) was born in Grünewald, Germany. Toward the end of World War II, she discovered the realities of the Nazi concentration camps―a revelation which was to haunt and unsettle her for the rest of her life. After meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953, she followed him to Paris, where she became acquainted with the Surrealists and developed the body of drawings and writings for which she is best remembered: a series of anagram poems, hallucinatory accounts and literary enactments of the mental breakdowns from which she would suffer until her suicide in 1970.

The Trumpets of Jericho

Wakefield Press

Der Mann im Jasmin: Eindrücke aus e. Geisteskrankheit (German Edition)

Ullstein

Dunkler Frühling

Merlin Verlag

The German artist and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) joined the ranks of Surrealism in the 1950s, after moving to Paris and taking up residence with the German-born Surrealist Hans Bellmer. Drawn to the movement's espousal of automatic drawing and writing, Zürn pursued Henri Michaux's declaration that "the hand dreams," making a vocation of these techniques with drawings and paintings that are labyrinthine in detail, as one form sprouts out of another. Zürn has left us an account of the sensation of automatic drawing: "After an initial moment when the pen 'swims' hesitantly on the paper, she discovers the place assigned to the first eye. It is only when she is being watched from the depths of the paper that she begins to get her bearings and, effortlessly, one motif is added to another." This lovely limited-edition survey reproduces drawings done between 1954 and 1967.

Unica Zürn: Alben

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Brinkmann & Bose

Primavera sombría

Arts & Literature

Pepitas de calabaza

«Leer este libro, de algún modo, supone recorrer el arco que va del suicidio soñado, acariciado por una niña de doce años, al suicidio real que se producirá cuarenta y dos años más tarde.» Menchu Gutiérrez Después del volumen El trapecio del destino y otros cuentos (2004), Siruela publica esta estremecedora novela

Primavera sombría (Libros del tiempo) (Spanish Edition)

Genre Fiction

Siruela

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Books by Zürn, Unica