Eva Siewert, Jeanne Mammen, and the Fortune-Teller

"Six months ago, we had been weak like Saul when we went to the Witch of Endor. We had visisted a clairvoyant with a guilty conscience and an een more tormenting curiosity about the burning question: are we going abroad?". In the autobiograpcal story, Das Orakel, the German writer and former radio journalist (1907-1994) recalls when she and her Jewish partner Alice Carlé (1902-1943) posed this question to a fortune-teller in 1939, Siewerts equates the visit to, as she writes, "Saul when he went to the Wicht of Endor". The narrative is from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament; 1 Samuel 28:3-25) and has powerful parallels with Siewert's fictionalised description of a visit to see a medium before the outbreak of World War Two. This paper outlines the similarities between these accounts. It then compares Siewert"s interpretation of the subject of the fortune-teller with an illustration on the same topic that the iconic Berlin artist Jeanne Mammen completed around 1928.