Walter Serner's ​The Tigress

Reviewed by Nicole Yurcaba

(Twisted Spoon Press, 2025)

Walter Serner may very well be an author about whom the majority of authors have never heard. However, anyone familiar with the Dada movement, and particularly Zurich’s Dada scene, will know Serner’s name well. Serner helped found the movement, and he embodied Dada’s anarchic principles. He constantly moved across Europe, and he wrote crime stories as well as a literary gem--The Tigress--that is now available to readers thanks to Twisted Spoon Press.

The Tigress is the story of Bichette, the eponymous Tigress, who stands as the “uncrowned queen of Parisian prostitutes.” Bichette meets a masterful grifter, Fec, and through a series of haphazard episodes, the unthinkable happens: Fec seems to tame the Tigress. This sudden taming leads the couple into a series of wild and dangerous shenanigans in the French Riviera’s fancy restaurants, hotels, and casinos until everything culminates in Montmartre. The characters’ duplicity and manipulative natures reveal which masks they will don and change, depending on which situation arises and for whom they must perform.

Of course, despite The Tigress’s erotic, nihilist reputation—one that eventually led the Nazis to ban and burn it—Serner’s novel has quite a few philosophical elements to offer the book’s audience. First, there is the ever-present conversation about what persona one reveals in any given situation. It is Gaby—“a model and a coke addict who never seemed to sleep”—who introduces the concept in the book’s first few pages. She declares quite dramatically to Fec, “‘That’s just it, you jackass! You’re doing nothing for yourself. People never take you for what you are, but only what you make them think you are. And you also have to pretend to be what you really are. How else are they supposed to know what to take you for?’” Gaby’s declaration is not only a challenge to Fec, but a catalyst for the ever-changing roles Fec and Bichette will adopt.

At times, Fec and Bichette’s antics play out like scenes from a noirish espionage film. The translation, perhaps, helps create the cinematic qualities. One of the book’s most beautifully described scenes occurs when, after a trip, Bichette and Fec arrive in the same place: “Anyone who saw them would believe it was only by chance they each ended up in the same place together. It looked as if each were walking alone. Each waited for the other to begin.” The description is simple and minimal, but even more so, it possesses insight into Fec’s and Bichette’s relationship. As much as the two attempt to deny their togetherness, that togetherness is undeniable.  This quick, simple scene also hints at the pair’s Machiavellian nature—one that foreshadows their undoing.
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In another scene, Fec waxes existentialist. He provides a monologue about how one of his and Bichette’s ventures is “purely negative,” and that safeguarding themselves from “work and boredom is not a venture.” He asserts:

The real venture is our very life. The fact that we ourselves belong, above all, to our avocations. The body gives what it has to give. Its pleasures are real. You can’t fool yourself about that…Of course, in the end, to live is not a venture. But we don’t want to hang ourselves. So, in spite of everything, we have no venture. Because we’ll always be living pointlessly. In a way that provides us with the most fun, the most pleasure.

Bichette accuses Fec of “versifying” and calls him “nutso.” Fec’s “versifying” and Bichette’s accusations against him show a distinct rift in their relationship. Fec reveals himself to be, despite his criminal nature, a deep thinker and amateur philosopher. Bichette’s comments further disclose her superficiality. For both characters, this conversation exposes their intellectual, social, and even emotional complexities. Thus, what Serner provides in these characters is a brief examination of how an individual changes, reveals, or keeps hidden their masks, since Fec defies the “dumb criminal” stereotype inherent in literature since ancient and medieval times.

The Twisted Spoon Press edition of The Tigress also contains an essay by philosopher Theodor Lessing, an essay by Serner himself, and an excerpt from Expert Opinion from Alfred Doblin. These extra essays are fascinating reads in themselves, not only providing context for better understanding The Tigress, but also providing an overview of the controversy the novel stirred. Lessing’s article is extremely critical of Serner’s writing in general, going so far as to assert that, “Serner has also written about a hundred short stories. They exhibit a lack of everything that makes a poet: musicality, a sense of nature, landscape, mood, silence, humor.” Serner’s essay, “Theodor Lessing and the Sex Trafficker,” is a fascinating inclusion. Serner takes on Mr. Steegeman, his publisher, and discusses a statement which Steegeman provided to Lessing, claiming that “there is nothing” in Serner’s books he had not experienced personally. Serner artfully defends, “This is true. Things I have seen or heard, and often things I have experienced firsthand, lie behind every line I have written.” He continues: “But to identify my life with the realities portrayed in my fiction is by no means the irrefutable fact many might assume. It would be difficult to find an author who is more conversant with Europe’s criminal underworld and who has described it more honestly than have I.” Thus, Serner establishes that, in a way, his works are social commentaries written through keen observations and tangential experiences.

Nonetheless, one cannot read The Tigress without acknowledging the controversy its subject matter caused. The placement of “Expert Opinion from Alfred Doblin” as the book’s final essay is, quite simply, perfect. The State Youth Welfare Office petitioned for The Tigress to be placed on the “List of Trash and Smut Writings.” Doblin, however, judged The Tigress “to be an excellent work of art—and in light of its naturalistic-amoral basic approach, a work devoid of any ‘filthy’ (i.e., pornographic) intent.” Therefore, reading a work like The Tigress is almost an act of rebellion even today, especially as book bans and state-driven censorship threatens literature, particularly in the United States. Therefore, understanding the historical context of not only The Tigress, but also Serner’s life, becomes even more significant.
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Serner died in 1942, after he and his wife were transported to Theresienstadt concentration camp and eventually to Riga. His works, however, continue to garner a cult following in Germany. Now, thanks to the hard work of Twisted Spoon Press, his work can continue to gain much-deserved attention—and an entirely new following—elsewhere.

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​Nicole Yurcaba (Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian American of Hutsul/Lemko origin. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Seneca Review, New Eastern Europe, and Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press, Lit Gazeta, Chytomo, Bukvoid, and The New Voice of Ukraine. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University, and is the Humanities Coordinator at Blue Ridge Community and Technical College. She also serves as a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and Southern Review of Books. Her poetry collection, The Pale Goth, is available from Alien Buddha Press.