Literary reminiscences from Schwabing, the artists' quarter of Munich, are full of descriptions of "die tolle Gräfin" (the mad countess) Franziska zu Reventlow. Some of the memoirists had been her lovers, or wished they had been: Theodor Lessing called her the "Braut von ganz Schwabing" (the bride of all Schwabing). Fiction also has its share of lightly disguised--and quite disparate--portraits of her. The "Schleswig-Holstein Venus," as the erotomaniac and satirist Oskar Panizza called her, was the model for Lilly von Robicek, who lives for love alone, in Ernst von Wolzogen's best-seller Das dritte Geschlecht (The Third Sex, 1899). In Heinrich Mann's Die Jagd nach Liebe (The Hunt for Love, 1903) she is Countess Yvonne Zank, the fickle mistress of the wealthy dilettante Claude Marehn. Yvonne betrays Claude with his brutal mentor Eisenmann, yet she is soon enchanting the young man once more. Recuperating from one of her many...