Tibor Gergerly's 1918 caricature of Karl Mannheim evokes a milieu hardly likely to spawn a thinker and teacher destined to inspire several women to make pioneering contributions to women's studies. The 25- year- old fledgling philosopher of Georg Lukács's Budapest Sunday Circle is shown sitting in an oversized fauteuil didactically pointing an index finger as he declaims from his dissertation and puffs his pipe. Mannheim dandles a smaller Mannheim embraced by a naked woman on his knee. A figure materializes in the pipe fumes, a shrouded Madonna with halo, bearing in her arms an infant Mannheim with a halo of his own. The scene is wreathed in smoke (Reproduction in Woldring 1986: 15). The totemic chair and pipe leave little doubt that the cartoon epitomizes the world of Mannheim's juvenile four- scene play, Die Dame aus Biarritz (The Lady from Biarritz) (Mannheim 1921; 1997: 49– 76), a world in which man as flesh and blood spiritual creator of authentic works must heroically assert himself equally against the lure of woman as whore and against womanliness as sexless object of debilitating insatiable yearnings. At the final curtain, according to the stage directions in Mannheim's text, the artist hero “remains seated in his fauteuil in the center of the room, puffing up clouds of smoke, as the others withdraw.”

The action of the play turns on the relations between an artist and his wife, with an earnest but hypocritical male friend providing a foil. The plot is preposterous, almost self- parody. The artist refuses his wife the emotional intimacy she craves, inviting her instead to share his excitement in his most recent sketch of her face. Above all, he refuses to say he loves her. It is the eve of the vernal equinox, the hero's day to leave for his annual assignation with his only love, the eponymous lady of the title. According to a premarital agreement, the wife must not only permit this, but also actively assent to it in a housewifely way, by packing his suitcase. On this occasion, she resists. She reviles his obsession with his art, his uncompromising pedanticism about the language of feeling and his sadistic insensitivity to her pain. Then she seductively appeals to the sensuous bonds between them, pleading with him to give them the name of love.