The
Scorpion

When Anna Elisabet Weirauch published the first volume of Der Skorpion in Berlin in 1919 — nine years before Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness — it found an immediate and passionate readership. Censored in 1926 for fear it would corrupt youth and placed on the Nazi Index of Dangerous Literature, it survived anyway: passed hand to hand, translated, reprinted, abridged, and mutilated by pulp publishers.

This Ovid Publishing Group edition presents, for the first time in English, the complete and unabridged text of both books as Weirauch intended — restoring the full arc of one of the great love stories in early twentieth-century literature.

Mette Rudloff grows up motherless in Berlin, raised by a well-meaning but remote father and an overbearing aunt. As a young woman, she drifts through a stifling social world of needlework circles and dull French reading circles until the day a door opens and Olga Radó walks into her life.

What follows is one of the great love stories in early twentieth-century literature. Olga is brilliant, cultured, commanding, elusive — a woman who carries a golden cigarette case engraved with a scorpion. She becomes Mette's teacher, her intellectual awakening, and eventually her great love. But their relationship exists in a society that has no tolerance for it, and Mette's family — led by the implacable Aunt Emilie — mobilizes every weapon at its disposal: private detectives, psychiatrists, forced separation, and the relentless pressure of respectability.

The Scorpion is not a tragedy, nor is it a story of triumphant liberation. It is something rarer and more honest: the story of a woman learning to live with the full weight of who she is.

Ovid Publishing Group's LGBTQ+ Library brings forgotten and overlooked works of queer literature back into print through new English translations and carefully annotated editions. Specializing in public domain works from the 18th through early 20th centuries, the collection recovers voices that were censored, prosecuted, published anonymously, or simply lost to time.

Each edition pairs faithful new translations with scholarly introductions that place these works in their historical and cultural context, ensuring that the pioneers of LGBTQ+ literature finally reach the modern readers they were written for.