Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in Its Cultural Context 9781909662261

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
CONTENTS
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century
1 Social Injustice and Emotional Truths in the Fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
2 Political Literature and Pacifism: Minna Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof and Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder!
3 Truth, Art and Sympathy in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie
4 The Exploitation of Women’s Bodies for Sex and Science in Helene Böhlau’s Der Rangierbahnhof and Halbtier!
5 Morality and Maternalism: Vera’s Eine für viele and Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland
6 Pregnancy and Ambivalence in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus
7 The Unmarried Mother in Clara Viebig’s Die Schuldige, Das tägliche Brot and Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus
8 Ilse Frapan, Else Jerusalem and the Reception of Women’s Novels in the Early Twentieth Century
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871–1910 Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context

legenda leenda , founded in 1995 by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an Editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative literature association and the association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland.

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GERMANIC LITERATUREs Editorial Committee Chair: Professor Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford) Dr Barbara Burns (Glasgow University) Professor Jane Fenoulhet (University College London) Professor Anne Fuchs (University of Warwick) Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London) Dr Almut Suerbaum (University of Oxford) Professor Susanne Kord (University College London) Professor John Zilcosky (University of Toronto) Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland. The chronological scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages down to the present day. appearing in this series 1. Yvan Goll: The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole, by Robert Vilain 2. Sebald’s Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, by Helen Finch 3. Goethe’s Visual World, by Pamela Currie 4. German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Shortt 5. The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing, by Charlotte Lee 6. Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context, by Charlotte Woodford Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910 Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context ❖ Charlotte Woodford

Germanic Literatures 6 Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2014

First published 2014 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2014 ISBN 978-1-909662-26-1 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Acknowledgements Introduction: Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century Social Injustice and Emotional Truths in the Fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Political Literature and Pacifism: Minna Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof and Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! Truth, Art and Sympathy in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie The Exploitation of Women’s Bodies for Sex and Science in Helene Böhlau’s Der Rangierbahnhof and Halbtier! Morality and Maternalism: Vera’s Eine für viele and Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland Pregnancy and Ambivalence in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus The Unmarried Mother in Clara Viebig’s Die Schuldige, Das tägliche Brot and Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus Ilse Frapan, Else Jerusalem and the Reception of Women’s Novels in the Early Twentieth Century Conclusion Bibliography Index

ix 1 19 38 58 75 91 106 123 143 165 169 187

For Isabelle, Nicholas and Madeleine

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

I am greatly indebted to the British Academy for a Mid-Career Fellowship (2011– 12), during which most of the research and writing for this book took place. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my former doctoral supervisor Professor Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, whose support of this project and enthusiastic encouragement over many years made all the difference. I am very grateful to Professor Elizabeth Boa who was kind enough to read the initial manuscript of this book. I have particularly benefitted from her valuable and supportive comments. Moreover, her thought-provoking contribution to The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2012), which I co-edited with Benedict Schofield, first gave me the idea of writing a study on women’s protest fiction. Many thanks, too, are owing to Selwyn College, Cambridge, to the Tiarks Fund and the Schröder Endowment of the Department of German at the University of Cambridge, for additional financial support, and to the editors of German Life and Letters for permission to include in Chapter 1 part of my article ‘Suffering and Domesticity: The Subversion of Senti­mentalism in Three Stories by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 47–61. I would like to thank Professor Ritchie Robertson for his valuable advice at different stages of this project, and Barbara Burns for her insightful comments on the manuscript. I am very grateful also to Susan Wharton and Graham Nelson for their expert editorial assistance and advice; Michael Tilby for his constant encour­ agement of my research; Godela Weiss-Sussex for her generous help and invaluable discussions; the contributors to The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century for their insights into revaluating fiction that did not make it into the national canon; and my colleagues in the Department of German at the University of Cambridge who have read and commented helpfully on sections of this work. Excellent suggestions made at various stages by Professor Joachim Whaley and Professor David Midgley have informed the shape of this final version. This book would not have been possible at all without the long-term support and encouragement of my family. I would like to thank especially my parents Anne and Geoff Pears and my husband Patrick, also Richard and Michelle Woodford, Ian and Betty Kershaw, and my three children: this book is dedicated to Isabelle, Nicholas and Madeleine. c.w., June 2014

I n t roduc t ion

v

Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century In 1910, Victor Klemperer, the journalist and brilliant diarist, later to become an eminent professor of Romance literature, ref lected on the likelihood of the fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) standing the test of time.1 On the whole, Klemperer thought it would. He praised Ebner-Eschenbach’s mastery of the art of the short story, and suggested that there were few living writers whose place in literary history was as secure as hers. Though well aware of the prevailing identification of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach with nineteenth-century realism and its philosophical idealism, Klemperer suggests she is a thoroughly ‘modern’ writer.2 She prioritizes truth over beauty, he claims, and refuses to overlook difficult social questions. He suggested that Ebner-Eschenbach’s novels and stories deserved to be appreciated by posterity as works of art and was convinced that they would never lose their cultural and historical value.3 While fiction by women in German from the end of the long nineteenth century may no longer be readily available in bookshops, its particular focus on the truthful exploration of women’s experience justifies Klemperer’s assertion that it would remain worth studying, not least because the social questions such fiction asks continue to resonate in our own time. In this study, I argue that fiction of social protest written by women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represents a tradition of modern writing significantly different from that by male writers in German. It is not adequately described by the conventional literary terms used to explore men’s novels in this period and needs to be considered as an artistic tradition in its own right. Exciting literary innovation by women was accompanied by a significant protest at the manifestations of patriarchy in modern society and against the representation of women in literature that underpins patriarchy.4 This era was one of the most dynamic for the German women’s movement, and women’s problem novels politicized women’s private experiences, often interpreting them through critical discourses from the extra-literary sphere. Although by no means exhaustive, this study aims to illuminate important literary developments in the women’s novel against the background of the social changes which, with the advent of modernity, affected literary production and women’s lives. Novels by women from the 1890s and 1900s were sometimes referred to as ‘Eman­zi­pationsromane’ (novels of emancipation), as a result of their emphasis

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Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

on women’s self-determination, their liberation from patriarchal authorities, and their critique of the sexual double standards inherent in contemporary society.5 Ulla Wischermann, in her study of the publications of the women’s movement around 1900, highlights four main themes underpinning women’s demands for equality and emancipation in this era: a desire for political participation; a call for the improvement of women’s education, including their admission to university; campaigns on the subject of women’s work in and outside of the home; and the theme of sexual reform, including the question of girls’ sex education and the problem of prostitution.6 These social questions resonate importantly in the novels in this study, whose contribution to the debate on women’s emancipation generated significant publicity and sympathy for women’s social protests and contributed to the raising of women’s political consciousness. Women in Germany and Austria were not given the right to vote until 1918; nonetheless fiction was an important way for women to gain a campaigning voice in the extra-parliamentary realm. In 1890, the lifting of the anti-Socialist laws, which had banned all groups and associations with a social democratic agenda, gave momentum to the diverse movements within German society calling for social change, including the women’s movement.7 The Union of German Women’s Associations (Bund deutscher Frauenvereine) was founded in 1894 with commissions focused on campaigning against the poor conditions suffered by working-class women and against state regulation of prostitutes and brothels, among other issues. Similar concerns are treated extensively in women’s novels from this period, with a particular prominence given to the sexual exploitation of working-class women and its corollary, the social marginalization of the unmarried mother. From 1905, the Bund für Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Mothers) campaigned radically for women’s sexual and reproductive freedoms, including legal protection and state support for unmarried mothers.8 Achieving the right to higher education was another of the most urgent demands of the women’s movement. The 1880s saw the matriculation of female students from Germany at the University of Zurich (from 1908 they could also attend university in Prussia). That first generation of female university students, who included the Socialist Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), furthered the campaign for women’s rights as members of the professions.9 The activist Anita Augspurg (1857–1943), the first German woman to gain a doctorate in law, undertook extensive campaigning on family law for one of the commissions of the Union of German Women’s Associations, which was given a particular urgency by the publication of the first draft of the new German civil code (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch) in 1896. Socialist texts also made an important contribution to women’s demands for reform. Friedrich Engels’s Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staates (1884: The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State), proposed that bourgeois patriarchy and its ideology of the family was a damaging system in need of correction, and spoke out against contemporary marriage conventions, while August Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1885: Woman under Socialism), called for women’s equal legal rights and full participation in the State. The case studies treated in this book address some of the most important social changes of modernity through fiction by women who themselves often struggled

Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

3

against their own lack of education and had to confront the prejudices of maledominated publishing institutions. They also made an important and often neglected contribution to the development of the novel in German. Chapter 1 examines how the realist fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach addresses gender inequalities as well as the gulf of understanding between rich and poor. Chapter 2 focuses on women’s political novels, comparing the representation of war in the Socialist novel Stefan vom Grillenhof (1879) by Minna Kautsky (1837–1912) with the better-known Die Waffen nieder! (1889: Lay Down your Arms!) by Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914), an important leader of the peace movement in the years leading up to the First World War. Chapters 3 and 4 show how Gabriele Reuter (1859–1941) and Helene Böhlau (1859–1940) pioneered the writing of deliberately provocative novels, confronting their readership with aspects of women’s experience usually excluded from fiction. Their novels highlight the damaging nature of women’s subordinate position in society, while also revealing how knowledge of social injustice, in particular the sexual exploitation of working-class women, was kept hidden from middle-class women. Böhlau’s fiction also engages with the topic of women’s reproductive rights and is examined in the context of medical writings on the availability of contraception. Chapter 5 explores the ideology of extended motherliness as an ethical response to modernity through the novel Christa Ruland by the feminist campaigner Hedwig Dohm (1831–1913), as well as women’s confrontation with questions of sexual morality in the city, through Eine für Viele, a little-known novel by Betty Kurth (1878–1948), calling for men to alter their sexual behaviour. Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) distanced herself from revelatory fiction of social protest. However, in her novel Das Haus (The House: 1904/1919, examined in Chapter 6, the protagonist’s rejection of pregnancy and motherhood is an important theme, and constitutes both a personal protest and an attempt to reshape gender relations in the twentieth century. The novel is explored in the context of changing social discourses on contraception and abortion in the early twentieth century. Ideas on population control and eugenics started to affect the way in which the figure of the unmarried mother was represented politically in the years around 1900, as Chapter 7 explores by analysing the representation of unmarried mothers in Clara Viebig’s (1860–1952) ‘Die Schuldige’ (1897: The Guilty Woman) and Das tägliche Brot (1900: Our Daily Bread), and Gabriele Reuter’s campaigning novel Das Tränenhaus (1908: The House of Tears), which fictionalized the author’s own experience of giving birth in an institution for unmarried women. Finally, Chapter 8 shows how Ilse Frapan’s provocative novel Arbeit (1903: Work) uses the figure of a woman doctor to emphasize the importance of women’s participation in the professions and at the same time to campaign against the treatment of the working classes by doctors. Its original title Arbeit, mein Opium overtly references Marx’s well-known phrase ‘die Religion [...] ist das Opium des Volkes’ (religion [...] is the opiate of the people) to suggest how the protagonist turned to work as therapy in her pioneering search for economic and social emancipation.10 The work is juxtaposed with Else Jerusalem’s contribution, in Der heilige Skarabäus (1909: transl. as The Red House), to the public debate on sexual health and prostitution, and shows how

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Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

both novels’ active engagement with social problems played an important role in their authors’ marginalization in literary histories. Amid the growing nationalism from the years immediately before the First World War onwards, the novel of women’s emancipation and the novel of social protest were identified as profoundly unpatriotic, indeed even un-German. My final chapter contends therefore that nationalism in the early twentieth century had an important effect on the reception of women’s fiction in particular, in a way that has not yet been fully explored. Revisiting the Women’s Novel From the late 1970s, feminist literary scholars began reconstructing the field of German women’s writing. Lexica of bibliographical and biographical information, based on contemporary sources, formed the starting point for a generation of academics revisiting long-neglected works by women.11 Gisela Brinker-Gabler’s Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart: Gedichte und Lebensläufe (1978) drew attention to the long-standing and significant tradition of women’s poetry, and remains in digital form an invaluable resource for teaching and research.12 Barbara Becker-Cantarino’s ground-breaking Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit (1987) traced the history of women’s writing from the early modern period through to the age of Goethe and ref lected on the cultural and social conditions that women had to confront as writers.13 Important early studies, such as Gisela Brinker-Gabler’s two-volume collection of essays, Deutsche Literatur von Frauen (1988), as well as Frauen Literatur Geschichte: Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (1985), edited by Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann, or German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History (1985), edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, were not only inspirational in drawing attention to long-forgotten authors, but also provided a theoretical and methodological framework for their scholarly treatment.14 Moreover, the Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature (1997), edited by Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord, rewrote German literary history in order to do justice to women’s significant historical contributions to its development, and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly as editor of the Cambridge History of German Literature gave a new prominence to women writers across all literary eras.15 It goes without saying that such studies turned away from the literary canon, for women’s writing is by definition uncanonical in German. Importantly, they focused on the writing that was published and read in its own time, and they analysed women’s work in the context of the social and commercial conditions affecting the production of literature. Studies showed the growing participation of women writers in the nineteenth-century market place: Patricia Herminghouse, for example, estimated that women made up around one third of all literary authors of the nineteenth century.16 Konstanze Fliedl drew attention to how the growing professionalization of the literary sphere at the end of the nineteenth century affected women’s writing, as women developed a sense of writing as a career, participating in networks of women encouraging female creativity.17 Studies revisited underresearched genres such as the romance, moral-didactic fiction, and domestic fiction, to show how women writers innovated and found freedom within such apparently

Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

5

conservative genres, and how, in the words of Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, ‘[r]adicality [...] can also be present in the performance of propriety, especially when that propriety is present in a woman who presents a modest appearance even if her activities tend to deviate from the expected gender role.’18 More recently, more mainstream works such as Todd Kontje’s Companion to German Realism, containing contributions on Luise Mühlbach, Louise von François, and Eugenie Marlitt, have acknowledged the importance of women to the development of the German novel.19 The present study aims to demonstrate the existence of a tradition of protest within the women’s novel by broadening the range of texts usually studied in this period and paying close attention to their publication context. The lack of readily available editions has up to now inevitably affected the reception of women’s fiction around 1900. Works that were often republished frequently during the Weimar years could not be printed under the Nazis from 1933, when the novel of women’s emancipation was discreetly dropped from literary histories. Gabriele Reuter’s novel Aus guter Familie (1895: From a Good Family), for example, was never out of print until 1933. But after that, it was not reprinted in German until the production of a critical edition, with accompanying primary sources for use by students, in 2006.20 Now, however, the digital revolution has transformed the availability of women’s fiction. The Sophie Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women funded by Brigham Young University was one of the pioneering projects to make texts available to students and researchers world-wide, with the aim of promoting research on German women’s writing, including at undergraduate level.21 In particular, now that original editions can be easily scanned and reproduced, a wealth of littleknown material is gradually becoming available. The project Austrian Literature Online (ALO), along with the Ariadne project for the publication of literature by women, both hosted by the Austrian National Library, have also produced digital copies of original works which were previously only to be found in a small number of rare book rooms.22 The recent digital publication of periodicals and newspapers also makes it possible to explore in more detail than ever before the literary field in which fiction by women f lourished. Out-of-copyright works by women have also been made available by specialist publishing houses. Helene Böhlau’s Der Rangierbahnhof (1896: The Shunting Yard) and Halbtier! (1899: Half-Beast!) have recently been reprinted by Turmhut, a pub­ lishing house founded in 2008 which, alongside children’s literature, has a special emphasis on women’s fiction from the period 1896 to 1914. Many of the fictional works of Lou Andreas-Salomé, published by Ullstein in the 1920s and later reprinted by Ullstein in small print runs, have become more widely available, in competing editions no less. Other than her early novellas Fenitschka (1898) and Eine Ausschweifung (1898: transl. as Deviations), Andreas-Salomé’s fiction has usually been overlooked by critics. It was so difficult to access a copy that this is perhaps not surprising. A number of Clara Viebig’s novels and stories have been published in recent years by Ulan Press and Rhein-Mosel-Verlag. Though only a beginning, it is a valuable step on the way towards making such novels accessible to students. A welcome development is Zeno.org, a website devoted to the publication of outof-copyright literary texts, which has reprinted works by writers such as Marlitt,

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and texts which have completely faded from view or are at best the subject of the occasional footnote, such as Ilse Frapan’s two novels exploring the hardships faced by female university students in Zurich, Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland (1899: We Women Have No Fatherland), and Arbeit. Frapan ranked with Reuter and Böhlau as one of the most significant women writers of the era before the First World War. The appearance online of Sophie Pataky’s Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder (1898), providing biographical summaries for late nineteenth-century women writers and a list of pseudonyms, is also an invaluable resource for exploring now-forgotten women writers.23 Many important works remain out of print and hard to find, such as Clara Viebig’s Das tägliche Brot or Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus. Minna Kautsky’s novels were rarely bought by libraries because of their pronounced political outlook, so there are very few holdings of them today, and no modern editions. But copies of such novels are becoming easier to locate through online bookshops, and libraries are now able to digitize such works on demand. Gender and Genre in the Nineteenth Century As Todd Kontje showed in his path-breaking work Women, the Novel, and the German Nation 1771–1871 (1998), significant numbers of women writers from the late eight­eenth century onwards wrote successful domestic fiction that also confronted political questions.24 Kontje also shows how women were sidelined into the genre of domestic fiction by a patriarchal literary establishment anxious to preserve its own hegemony over the means of cultural production.25 Jeffrey Sammons also casts light on the exclusion of women from the canon. As literary history was increasingly co-opted to nation-building, he suggests, the German national tradi­tion became predominantly ‘Goethean and romantic’: it drew on the romantic and, later, high modernist conception of the self-exploratory artist and the cult of art as remote from the problems of society.26 As such, the social and historical novels which were widely read in the nineteenth century and often written by women were excluded from the national tradition. But for many of the most prominent women writers of the end of the nineteenth century, self-analysis was inseparable from an analysis of bourgeois patriarchy; and self-realization, through education, art or work, was necessarily set in the context of their social role as daughters, wives, or mothers. Domestic fiction generally, and the characteristic sentimental style of the midnineteenth century were considered second-rate, not least because its authors were predominantly female. For Kontje, women’s very association with the social novel contributes to the neglect of the genre within this national tradition. Barbara Becker-Cantarino suggests a process of ‘gender censorship’ at work around the start of the nineteenth century: even sym­pathetic male mentors steered women writers in the direction of the domestic novel, where they would be successful in the marketplace only if their literary representations of women’s lives conformed in some measure to the stereotypes of bourgeois patriarchy.27 Women writers, therefore, if they wanted their works to be published and read, had difficulty escaping from the dominant middle-class domestic script. Yet a sideways glance at women’s involvement with the genre of drama shows the importance of fiction for providing women with a canvas on which they could

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begin to shape the representation of their own emotional and social realities. In the late nineteenth century drama constituted perhaps the key field of experiment for male writers, but women dramatists met with little encouragement.28 While poetry and the novel are private forms — the novel itself has close links to the confessional autobiography — drama presupposes a public stage performance and acceptance by the institutions which control what can be performed. Susanne Kord’s inf luential study Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen (1992) reveals the hidden history of women’s drama,29 and puts paid to the common impression that women simply did not write for the stage. But writing drama was considered deeply unrespectable; many women used pseudonyms to protect their reputation.30 They included the naturalist dramatist Ernst Rosmer (pseudonym of Elsa Bernstein),31 whom the theatre critic Alfred Kerr called a male comrade without parallel (‘ein Mannskamerad ohne gleichen’).32 He praises her realist drama Dämmerung (1893: Twilight), which treats provocative themes such as venereal disease and hereditary illness. Yet he incongruously refers to the author, Ernst Rosmer, as ‘Frau Rosmer’, and his enthusiasm is a touch condescending: ‘diese reichbegabte, frische, goldige Frau’ (‘this highly-gifted, fresh, adorable woman’).33 Bernstein’s pseudonym, which echoes the name of the protagonist in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (1886), incidentally the first work chosen for publication by the new publishing house of Samuel Fischer, was clearly no protection against patronizing critics and their gendered reviews. The principal female dramatist of the nineteenth century, Charlotte BirchPfeiffer (d. 1868), was a former actress and a theatre manager. She adapted many popular novels and stories for the stage to some acclaim, as well as writing original comedies and light dramas which met with much success.34 However, her plays were seen even at the time as mere entertainment, driven by market forces, with too much concession to the audience’s love of a happy ending.35 Others wrote dramas that remained unfinished or were turned down by theatre directors because of the unconventional gender roles which they represented. The poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, known to posterity as the author of the novella Die Judenbuche (1842), wrote a fragmentary drama, Bertha oder die Alpen (1814), which confronts women’s search for self-fulfilment outside of the socially-prescribed role in the family, by depicting a woman whose musical and intellectual talents are regarded as deviant by her uncomprehending family.36 The Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach also wrote plays featuring unconventional gender roles. Her first tragedy, Maria Stuart in Schottland (1860), was performed successfully in Karlsruhe in 1861 before the director, Eduard Devrient, knew of the gender of its author.37 Yet the same director turned down her later play, Marie Roland (1867). Like Maria Stuart, it treats the theme of female political agency, presenting the audience with the eponymous female revolutionary, the moderate leader of the Girondists, arrested and executed in 1793 for spearheading opposition to Robespierre’s reign of terror.38 Ebner-Eschenbach was discouraged by the difficulty of reaching an audience with her dramas, and in her fiction she found considerably more freedom from patriarchal norms to represent women differently. Unlike the drama, the domestic novel provided women with a socially sanctioned space to make their own. Marlitt’s romances, serialized in Die Gartenlaube from 1866,

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were among the earliest full-length German novels published in weekly episodes and demonstrated that a long novel could be as much of a commercial success as the novella, the quintessential genre favoured in nineteenth-century Germany. From 1878, Marlitt was joined at Die Gartenlaube by Wilhelmine Heimburg (pseudonym of Bertha Behrens, 1850–1912) whose first novel there, Lumpenmüllers Lieschen, was published in 1879. Together with E. Werner (pseudonym of Elisabeth Bürstenbinder, 1838–1918), Heimburg carried on the Gartenlaube tradition of the popular woman’s novel for the rest of the century, though the weekly became far more narrowly aimed at the women’s market than it had been in Marlitt’s day.39 Marlitt’s wellwritten novels are liberal, secular and anti-aristocratic, and retain a broad appeal. Her heroines, though they conform to traditional family roles and usually excel at feminine skills such as nursing or homemaking, are also independent-minded, courageous and outspoken. Elisabeth (in Goldelse, 1866: Gold Elsie) earns her own living giving piano lessons, for her father’s participation in the 1848 Revolution has led to the failure of his career. Grete in Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen (1885: The Woman with the Garnets) crops her hair and travels abroad with a scientific expedition run by a Berlin professor who is a friend of the family. Fee in Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell (1867: The Old Maid’s Secret), clambers across rooftops to save a friend’s reputation, and the eponymous heroine of the short story Schulmeisters Marie (1865) explores spooky houses in the dark for the same purpose. Marlitt’s outspoken, independent heroines act against corruption and narrowmindedness. They follow in the tradition of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice (1813) — echoed in the protagonist Elisabeth in Goldelse — or of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847).40 Marlitt’s novels are packed with melodrama and coincidence, the characters are well developed and convincing and the narrative has lightness of touch and the occasional hint of irony. In Schulmeisters Marie, for example, after uncovering the mystery of a friend’s secret marriage and child, Marie bravely solves the mystery of some stolen money. She then encounters her friend on the road who asks whether Marie is surprised to find her there, alone and so late at night. Marie quips: ‘Ach, nach dem, was ich eben erlebt habe, kommt mir gar nichts mehr wunderbar vor’ (‘after what I have just been through nothing can surprise me any more’).41 From Serialized Romances to the Problem Novel: Publishing Women’s Fiction With the development of a German mass market in fiction from the 1870s onwards, imaginative works played an important role in the formation of a national culture.42 Although book-buying was something of a luxury, women readers devoured fiction through the lending library, and also in serialization in subscription magazines and newspapers. There, fiction was carried alongside pieces on social questions and articles on new scientific ideas such as, for example, the theory of evolution, or Germany’s new colonial settlements in Africa. Fiction was informed by, and in itself also transmitted to a wider audience, many of the new scientific, ideological and philosophical ideas of the age, playing an important role in the transmission of knowledge, particularly for women. Novels and stories reached a wide readership

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through the press by the end of the nineteenth century, with print runs in the tens of thousands, or sometimes hundreds of thousands.43 Although the market for literature was predominantly conservative and middle-class in the late nineteenth century, women writers increasingly used the oppor­t unity it provided to experiment with ways of representing women’s lives in fiction. In turn, this stimulated demand for topical fiction engaging with the question of women’s emancipation, and particularly with the issue of sexual morality. Some publishers specialized in contemporary problem fiction. Samuel Fischer, in particular, saw social novels by women writers as having an important place alongside works by writers who are still well known, such as Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hermann Hesse.44 In artistic fiction protesting in a modern aesthetic against old modes of representation, and in more explicitly topical works engaged with social issues, women writers secured the freedom to experiment linguistically, stylistically and thematically. The cultural journal Deutsche Rundschau, founded in 1875 and edited by Julius Rodenberg, was important in offering women writers a space for the publication of realist fiction. Deutsche Rundschau, a review magazine in the tradition of Dickens’s Household Words, had a print run of around 10,000 copies sold across Germany and Austria. Aimed at the better-educated reader, it had a reputation for quality fiction, by authors such as Gottfried Keller or Theodor Storm. Each monthly issue began with serialized fiction, moving on to topical discussion items, pieces on art or science, and a roundup of the latest in politics. In Rodenberg’s words: Unter Mitwirkung von ausgezeichneten Vertretern der schönen Literatur und der Wissenschaften sucht die ‘Rundschau’ das geistige Leben der deutschen Nation in seiner Gesammtheit (!) zum Ausdruck zu bringen und folgt mit nicht minderer Aufmerksamkeit jeder Aeußerung des öffentlichen Lebens in Staat und Gesellschaft.45 [The Rundschau seeks through collaboration with excellent representatives of belles lettres and the sciences to give a voice to the intellectual life of the German nation in its entirety and will follow just as carefully every pronouncement on public life in the State and society.]

It had a truly national reach, achieving its aim not simply to publish literature from Germany, but from Austria too: an early suggested title had been ‘Berlin and Vienna’. The journal had begun in collaboration with Berthold Auerbach, author of Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (1843: Black Forest Village Tales), and correspondingly its speciality was poetic realist novellas. Rodenberg also particularly sought out depictions of women’s fates: Theodor Fontane’s Frau Jenny Treibel and Effi Briest were serialized there before their first publication in 1892 and 1894–95 respectively. The reputation of the Rundschau for high-quality prose fiction made the aspiring novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach anxious to please Rodenberg, who had approached her as early as 1875 inviting her to contribute to the journal.46 She was delighted when he accepted the story Lotti, die Uhrmacherin (1880: Lottie the Watchmaker), which began her long career as a Rundschau author. Her two major novels Das Gemeindekind (1887: transl. as Their Pavel)47 and Unsühnbar (1890: transl. as Beyond Atonement) were serialized there prior to publication by the journal’s

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Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

publisher, the Paetel brothers. Numerous short stories of hers appeared there too, although she also wrote for other journals, including occasionally Die Garten­ laube. Unsühnbar, her novel of female adultery, provoked much criticism on moral grounds. The heroine, noblewoman Maria Dornach, marries her father’s choice of husband, but is later seduced by the Byronic figure Felix Tessin, a former suitor, who tries to ruin her in order to settle a score with her father. Maria gives birth to Tessin’s child, conceals his parentage from her husband, but controversially reveals it to the world when her husband dies suddenly, in order to prevent the illegitimate child inheriting her husband’s fortune.48 Male critics attacked the novel as a melodramatic tear-jerker, whereas her female acquaintances, as Ebner’s diaries show, were sometimes offended by her choice of subject matter: ‘Das Buch hat auch unter meinen besten Freunden wenig Freunde. Und es ist doch gut!’ (‘Even among my best friends, few like the book. But it really is good!’), commented EbnerEschenbach bitterly in her diary.49 Helene Böhlau also made her reputation as a Deutsche Rundschau author, parti­ cularly with her gentle Rathsmädel stories set in Weimar, whose popularity with the readership can be inferred from the way the initial free-standing novella (1884: The Councillor’s Daughter) was followed by a series (1886–87), and later ‘Wie die Enkelin der Rathsmädel zum Blaustrumpf wurde’ (1897: How the Granddaughter of the Councillor’s Daughter became a Bluestocking’) in a further collection of Weimar novellas.50 In the course of the 1890s, however, Böhlau took on more socially critical themes, such as illegitimate pregnancy in her novel Das Recht der Mutter (1896: The Mother’s Right), serialized in Die Romanwelt in the same year. Despite a long-established working relationship with the Rundschau editor Julius Rodenberg, Böhlau clearly had difficulty persuading him to serialize her feminist novel Halbtier! since he kept asking for extensive amendments. Rodenberg insisted, against her wishes, on the novel’s title being changed for serialization from Halbtier! to the innocuous Adam und Eva, and was uncomfortable with the provocative content of the story. Although Böhlau conceded the change of title, she sent back the proofs, rejecting other editorial changes with the words: ‘Ich werde eisern auf meinen Correkturen bestehen und werde Alles daran setzen, daß sie so gedruckt werden wie ich sie jetzt korrigierte’ (‘I will insist firmly on my corrections and place every emphasis on the text now being printed in the form that I have now corrected’).51 Halbtier! did not appear as a book with the Rundschau’s house publisher Paetel. Like Der Rangierbahnhof, previously serialized in the literary journal Vom Fels zum Meer (1893–94), it came out with the publishing house owned by Friedrich Fontane, son of the novelist Theodor Fontane, who was more prepared to take a risk with public taste. Clara Viebig married Friedrich Theodor Cohn, one of the partners at F. Fontane & Co., and achieved critical acclaim, as well as considerable notoriety, with her novel Das Weiberdorf (1900: The Village of Women), published by F. Fontane, depicting sexually promiscuous women in an Eifel village where most of the men were absent because they had left to work in iron foundries in the Rhineland.52 In 1903, Cohn founded the publishing house Egon Fleischel & Co., where he continued to publish Böhlau and Viebig. Friedrich Fontane also published Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1905: The Diary of a Lost Woman), the fictional diary

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of a prostitute, published anonymously and attributed to Margarete Böhme. In that novel, a motherless middle-class girl is raped by one of her father’s students, and is ruined by the resulting pregnancy; the baby is taken away from her, and she ends up as a prostitute, for only in the demi-monde does she meet with any sympathy.53 The notable contribution of women writers to Deutsche Rundschau ref lects their growing prominence on the literary scene. Julius Rodenberg recognized the appeal among readers for stories about women, and so offered many women writers their first break as published authors. As well as pieces by Isolde Kurz, Marie von Bunsen (1860–1941), and Marie von Olfers (who also published under the name M[arie] Werner, 1826–1924),54 the journal published several stories by the Swedish author Anna Charlotte Leff ler, Duchess of Cajanello (1849–1892),55 and a novella by Felicie Ewart (pseudonym of Emilie Exner), ‘Eine Mésalliance’.56 All these are littleknown writers whose work one might struggle to find elsewhere. Ilse Frapan was one of the most frequently published women writers in Deutsche Rundschau, and has been long overlooked by critics. Nine of her short stories appeared between 1887 and 1898.57 Writing in 1893, a reviewer of two collections of her novellas praises Frapan as one of the most important literary talents of the day, destined to enrich the German novel. He claimed that although possessed of a modern love of truth, she belongs in the tradition of poetic realism with her healthy outlook on people and the world (‘gesunde Welt- und Menschenauffassung’).58 The sub-titles of some of Frapan’s novellas, such as ‘a story from Hamburg’ or a ‘Swabian village story’, suggest a preference among readers for regional or Heimat tales over stories of urban life, and for so-called ‘healthy’ optimism over the decadent literature of the fin de siècle with its fascination for less comfortable truths. However, as Chapter 8 will explore, Frapan’s early choices of theme were inf luenced by her need to draw an income from her writing. She turned to topical fiction later, once her university studies in Zurich had enabled her to make money by working as a scientist. Besides mainstream journals such as Deutsche Rundschau, a market emerged from the 1890s onwards for fiction in the newly emerging feminist press, which also published features advocating the need to re-write women’s lives in fiction, reviews introducing new works to the readership, and short serialized works embodying the values of the movement. The schoolteacher and historical novelist Egid Filek, writing in Auguste Fickert’s journal Neues Frauenleben in 1904, complained that the mass production of romances for girls prevented them from approaching literary classics that might broaden the mind.59 In an essay on family literature in Dokumente der Frauen, the feminist Rosa Mayreder complained of the tyranny of fiction in which the preservation of the sexual ignorance of daughters took precedence over any artistic considerations.60 Literature like this eschewed truthful observation of contemporary life and its problems, she claimed, and this concealment of the truth was to blame for the unhappiness of many women’s marriages. Such journals carried stories by Ricarda Huch, Carry Brachvogel, and the Swedish writer Ellen Idström alongside articles on social issues by contributors such as Emma Eckstein, who moved in socialist circles and also wrote on psychoanalysis.61 From 1890 onwards, the literary journal of the newly-founded publishing house of Samuel Fischer, Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, provided an important space for

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authors who rejected the transfiguration of reality which characterized the style of Deutsche Rundschau and embraced instead a new art, which took a hard look at reality and contemporary life (‘die neue Kunst, die die Wirklichkeit anschaut und das gegenwärtige Dasein’).62 It was later called Neue Deutsche Rundschau, not because of any connection with Rodenberg’s journal but rather in open competition with it for the leading place in the market. The aspiration to represent truth and urban modernity informed Fischer’s whole enterprise as publisher. His motto to impress new values on his public (‘dem Publikum neue Werte aufzudrängen’), shows his commitment not to pander to but to change public taste, to offer the readers new topics and new artistic forms. Hermann Bahr, an important contributor to the Freie Bühne who helped Fischer to secure the rights to the work of Viennese authors such as Schnitzler, wrote of the artist’s commitment to respond truthfully to their own impressions of the modern world: ‘Wir haben kein anderes Gesetz als die Wahrheit, wie jeder sie empfindet. Der dienen wir. Wir können nichts dafür, wenn sie rauh und gewaltthätig ist und oft höhnisch und grausam. Wir sind ihr nur gehorsam, was sie verlange’ (‘We have no other law but the truth as each of us experiences it. We serve the truth. We cannot do anything about it when the truth is coarse and violent and often derisive and brutal. We merely obey what the truth demands’).63 From the outset, the Freie Bühne carried pieces on the question of women’s place in society and literature. In its first year, the Baltic writer Laura Marholm (1854–1928) contributed two essays on women in Scandinavian literature, and Lou Andreas-Salomé published a short fictional piece based on the female characters in several of Ibsen’s plays. Irma von Troll-Borostyáni (1847–1912), Helene Stöcker (1869–1943), and later the inf luential Swedish feminist Ellen Key (1849–1926) all published essays on women’s rights in the journal. While Troll-Borostyáni, as an equal-rights feminist, called for political emancipation and equal legal status with men, Helene Stöcker based her arguments on sexual difference while radically emphasizing women’s right to sexual freedom. The essays in Freie Bühne offered a wide range of provocative perspectives on the women’s movement, often in the same or successive issues, with the deliberate intention of stimulating further discussion. The fiction published by women in Freie Bühne für modernes Leben and Neue Deutsche Rundschau is in keeping with the ‘modern’ programme proclaimed in the journal’s title. As opposed to the provincial f lavour of much fiction hitherto, the authors engage with urban life, in works marked by artistic experimentation, anti-conventionalism, secularism (if not open hostility towards religion), and the exploration of psychological and sexual identity. Many also rejected the optimism and Enlightenment ethics inherent in German idealist thought and fiction, in favour of a moral relativism inf luenced by Nietzsche. The journal offered a valuable space for women writing contemporary topical fiction and is thus a fascinating source of short stories by overlooked women writers such as Elsbeth Meyer-Förster, Carry Brachvogel, Elsa Bernstein, and the Norwegian Amalie Skram, as well as Rosa Mayreder-Obermayer’s ‘Der Klub der Übermenschen’, satirizing the young men of an Austrian Nietzsche society.64 Fannie Gröger’s ‘Sanct Nothburgas Erdenreise’ makes fun of the veneration of saints in Catholic Austria by having St Nothburga get permission from St Peter to

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go and take part in her own saint’s day in her local church.65 She is appalled at the inauthenticity of the relics on display and the selfishness of the parishioners’ prayers: one girl wants to find a moment to slip off with her lover, a woman tries to bribe her to make her miscarry an unwanted pregnancy. However, Nothburga manages to enjoy the intoxicating atmosphere of the village celebrations which follow the Mass, and, inebriated, becomes far too curious about a couple she finds making love in the forest. Seeing the world with open eyes, it is implied, involves recognition of humans as prone to irrational and selfish urges and driven by animal instincts. Adine Gemberg’s novel Aufzeichnungen einer Diakonissin, serialized in 1895 (1896: The Memoirs of a Deaconess, publ. by Samuel Fischer), has a similarly anti-religious tone, being the fictional memoirs of a young nun who dies of typhus at the age of twenty-six.66 The protagonist Minna lacks religious conviction and the work rejects prevailing religious interpretations of illness as an opportunity to develop inner strength or a heightened spirituality. Minna’s real passion is for music, and when she is not singing her life lacks all meaning. She encourages another nun, Christine, to leave the convent to fulfil her desire to be a singer. The protagonist’s own talent has been wasted in a lifetime of renunciation imposed on her when she was too young to understand.67 Redemption, it is implied, is to be found above all in self-expression and art. For most of the nineteenth century it was standard practice for fiction to appear in the weekly or monthly press before publication in book form. The fees offered by journals and newspapers outstripped anything authors could earn from the royalties on a book. However, by the start of the twentieth century, a clearer divide was emerging between the serialized fiction of the mass market and the novel or story as a work of art. Samuel Fischer’s newly founded publishing house, for example, promoted contemporary fiction through its series ‘A Library of Contemporary Novels’ (Bibliothek zeitgenössischer Romane) from 1908 onwards, which encouraged regular purchase of novels by publishing one title each month, with a print run of 15,000 copies each. Though aimed at as wide an audience as possible, such novels — which had not already been serialized — were promoted as being set apart by their literary quality from the offerings in the press. Many women writers were Fischer authors, beginning with Gabriele Reuter. Reuter’s much-acclaimed Aus guter Familie was Samuel Fischer’s first bestselling novel, which reached its twentieth edition by 1911.68 Fischer thought highly of Reuter, who published with him for the rest of her career. Reuter was not the only woman writer to help Fischer make his name in pub­ lishing. When in 1897 Fischer wrote to Arthur Schnitzler outlining plans for a new series of novellas — the ‘Collection S. Fischer’ to be packaged with attractive cover illustrations for the price of only one or two marks — and trying to win Schnitzler over to the enterprise, Fischer expressed the hope that Maria Janitschek (1859–1927), like Reuter, would be among the participating authors.69 Maria Janitschek’s Raoul und Irene, previously published in Neue Deutsche Rundschau, appeared in 1897 as one of the first three novellas in the collection. When Fischer decided to expand his factual range to topical essays, Ellen Key’s Das Jahrhundert des Kindes (1902: The Century of the Child) became his most successful as well as his most inf luential

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Women, Fiction and Protest in the Late Nineteenth Century

non-literary title.70 Elsa Jerusalem’s novel, Der heilige Skarabäus, practically unknown today, ran to its nineteenth printing in the first year of publication, and had reached 32 reprints by 1919. However, market success is a double-edged sword, and particularly so within the tradition of German literature. The Dichter (poet), a writer of artistic literature who eschewed commercial considerations, was unfavourably contrasted in Germany with the Literat (man of letters), who wrote for a wide readership. Many of the most important writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany had careers as civil servants or clergymen and so did not depend on their writing for an income. They had the freedom to write what they chose. A canon of German literature consisting of their writing might consist largely of apolitical writing by Protestant males.71 We might contrast them with Arthur Schnitzler, writing in his diary in 1907: ‘Wieder Pläne durchgesehen. Manches anziehende — aber was “bringt Geld–”?’ (‘Looking through my plans again. Many things are attractive — but what will “make money”?’)72 Some women turned to writing precisely because it was one of the few ways in which an impoverished middle-class women might gain an income without compromising her social position: Marlitt, for example, had to end her career as a singer and took up writing fiction; Gabriele Reuter began writing because her father’s premature death left a large family dependent on relatives’ charity — later, she also had an illegitimate child to support alone; Ilse Frapan spent her life with a female companion, an artist, and supported them both by her writing until university study opened new doors. Writing facilitated women’s emancipation from their male guardians, and gave them the opportunity to encourage other women to embrace the freedoms of modernity: Gabriele Reuter’s novels Ella von den Weiden (1900: Ellen of the Meadows) and Liselotte von Reckling (1903) end with female protagonists welcoming their new-found freedom after a decision to separate from their husbands. Yet as the publishing industry turned increasingly towards a mass readership, the gulf started to widen between prestige forms of ‘high’ literature and popular, market-orientated fiction. Women started to become increasingly pigeonholed into the latter. Thus works from the Wilhelmine era, when the distinctions between the two were not yet so clear, are often retrospectively — and misleadingly — dismissed as ‘popular’. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach lamented at the end of the nineteenth century that women’s writing existed in a ghetto, with women relegated to their own chapter of the history rather than participating in the development of the novel per se.73 This treatment of women’s novels as distinct from similar works by men is not to see them in any way in isolation. Women writers were indeed deeply embedded in the literary networks and institutions of the day, as this introduction has shown. EbnerEschenbach saw the token chapter on women’s writing in literary histories as the equivalent of a railway carriage segregating those whom society wished to exclude. This is not the intention of the present volume. Rather, this study will show that the novel of women’s emancipation has been marginalized precisely because of its engagement with politics and protest, and its communication to a wide public of challenging ideas for social reform.

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Notes to the Introduction 1. Viktor Klemperer, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’, Jahrbuch der Grillparzer-Gesellschaft, 19 (1910), 183–234. 2. Ibid., p. 198. 3. Ibid., p. 225. 4. See for example Ruth-Ellen Joeres, ‘Die Nebensächliche: Selbstbehauptung durch Protest in den Schriften deutscher Schriftstellerinnen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Frauensprache — Frauenliteratur? Für und wider eine Psychoanalyse literarischer Werke, ed. by Inge Stephan and Carl Pietzcker (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1986), pp. 68–72; Todd Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 10 (‘protest abounds in the women’s novel’); and Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 9, part I: 1870–1900: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Jahrhundertwende (Munich: Beck, 1998), p. 210. 5. See, for example, Hermann Hölzke, ‘Die Emanzipationsromane’, Die deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen der Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Gerstenberg, 1913), pp. 184–90. 6. Ulla Wischermann, Frauenbewegung und Öffentlichkeiten um 1900: Netzwerke — Gegenöffentlichkeiten — Protestinszenierungen (Königstein im Taunus: Helmer, 2003), p. 59. 7. Ibid., p. 59 and pp. 195–96. 8. Ibid., pp. 69–70. 9. See Romana Weiershausen, Wissenschaft und Weiblichkeit: Die Studentin in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004). 10. From the preface to Karl Marx, ‘Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie’, first published in the only issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 1 (1844), 71–85 (72). 11. For example Elisabeth Friedrichs, Die deutschsprachigen Schriftstellerinnen des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Lexikon (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981). 12. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart: Gedichte und Lebensläufe (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1978). 13. Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit: Frauen und Literatur in Deutschland von 1500 bis 1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987). 14. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1988); Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Frauen, Literatur, Geschichte: Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985). 15. The Feminist Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed. by Friederike Eigler and Susanne Kord (Westport, CT; Greenwood Press, 1997); The Cambridge History of German Literature, ed. by Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Patricia Herminghouse, ‘Women and the Literary Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in German Women, ed. by Joeres, pp. 78–93 (p. 79). 17. Konstanze Fliedl, ‘Auch ein Beruf: “Realistische” Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. by Brinker-Gabler, II, pp. 69–85. 18. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 117. 19. Todd Kontje, A Companion to German Realism 1848–1900 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002). 20. Gabriele Reuter, Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens. Studienausgabe mit Dokumenten, ed. by Katja Mellmann, 2 vols (Marburg: LiteraturWissenschaft.de, 2006). There is also an excellent English translation by Lynne Tatlock of Reuter’s novel From a Good Family (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999). 21. See www.sophie.byu.edu. 22. See www.onb.ac.at/ariadne. 23. Lexikon deutscher Frauen der Feder. Eine Zusammenstellung der seit dem Jahre 1840 erschienenen Werke weiblicher Autoren, nebst Biographieen der lebenden und einem Verzeichnis der Pseudonyme, ed. by Sophie Pataky, 2 vols (Berlin: Pataky, 1898). 24. See Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation.

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25. Ibid., p. 8. 26. Jeffrey L. Sammons, ‘The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification’, in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. by James Hardin (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 26–45 (p. 30). 27. Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘ “Gender Censorship”: On Literary Production in German Romanticism’, Women in German Yearbook, 11 (1995), 81–97. 28. See Susanne Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); Susan L. Cocalis and Ferrel Rose, Thalia’s Daughters: German Women Dramatists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Tubingen: Francke, 1996); and Sarah Colvin, Women and German Drama 1860–1945: Playwrights and their Texts (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2003). 29. See Elsa Bernstein: Dämmerung. Drama in fünf Akten, ed. by Susanne Kord (New York: MLA, 2003). 30. See Kord, Ein Blick, pp. 15–16 and Kord, Sich einen Namen machen: Anonymität und weibliche Autorenschaft 1700–1900 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996). 31. Susanne Kord, ‘The Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Triangle: Men Between Two Women in Bernstein’s Naturalistic Dramas’, in From Fin-de-Siècle to Theresienstadt: The Works and Life of the Writer Elsa Porges-Bernstein, ed. by Helga Kraft and Dagmar Lorenz (New York: Lang, 2007), pp. 131–46. 32. Alfred Kerr, ‘Ernst Rosmer’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895), 1241–49. 33. Ibid., pp. 1242 and 1249. 34. Birgit Pargner, Zwischen Tranen und Kommerz: Das Ruhrtheater Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffers (1800–1868) in seiner künstlerischen und kommerziellen Verwertung. Quellenforschung am Handschriften-Nachlass (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1998). 35. Susanne Kord quotes Heinrich Laube’s comment on the productivity of Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer as a writer of comedy for the popular market: ‘Wäre die f leißige Fabrikantin in Berlin, die Birch-Pfeiffer nicht da, die für den Markt arbeitet, die Schauspielerhäuser müßten geschlossen werden’ (‘If Birch-Pfeiffer, that hard-working industrialist in Berlin, were not there to work for the market, the theatres would have to close’), Laube Theaterkritiken und dramatische Aufsätze, ed. by Alexander von Weilen, 2 vols (Berlin: Schriften der Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte, 1906), I, p. 172. Quoted by Kord, Sich einen Namen machen, p. 24; see also pp. 70–76. 36. See Elisabeth Krimmer, ‘ “Dangerous Practices”: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ’s Drama Bertha oder die Alpen’, in Thalia’s Daughters, ed. by Cocalis and Rose, pp. 115–28. 37. See Ferrel Rose, ‘The Disenchantment of Power: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Maria Stuart in Schottland’, in Thalia’s Daughters, ed. by Cocalis and Rose, pp. 147–60; Susanne Kord, ‘Performing Genders: Three Plays on the Power of Women’, Monatshefte, 86 (1994), 95–115; and Sarah Colvin, Women and German Drama. Rose suggests that Ebner’s awareness of the extent to which she would be associated as author with the literary protagonists’ values and choices led her to be cautious with gender roles in her dramas, for she ‘recognized that, unlike her tragic heroines, she cannot simply exit the stage’ (p. 158). 38. Marie Roland and Maria Stuart in Schottland have been republished in paperback in Macht des Weibes: Zwei historische Tragödien von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ed. and introd. by Susanne Kord (London: MHRA, 2005) and in the critical edition of Ebner-Eschenbach’s works: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Die historischen Tragödien: Maria Stuart in Schottland, Marie Roland, Richelieu, Jacobäa, ed. by Marianne Henn (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2006). 39. See Lynne Tatlock, ‘The Afterlife of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction and the German Imaginary: The Illustrated Collected Novels of E. Marlitt, W. Heimburg, and E. Werner’, in Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 118–52. 40. Elisabeth’s opponent in Goldelse (1866) is called Bertha, presumably after Bertha Mason, the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). 41. E. Marlitt, Schulmeisters Marie [1865], in Thüringer Erzählungen, Gesammelte Romane und Novellen, 10, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Keil, 1900), pp. 338–97 (p. 394). 42. See Lynne Tatlock, ‘Introduction: The Book Trade and “Reading Nation” in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Publishing Culture, pp. 1–21; Charlotte Woodford, ‘Introduction: German Fiction and the Marketplace in the Nineteenth Century’, in The German Bestseller in

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the Late Nineteenth Century, ed. by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), pp. 1–18. 43. The circulation of Die Gartenlaube increased from 5,000 copies when it was founded in 1853 to 382,000 copies in 1875; the circulation of Über Land und Meer was 150,000 copies in 1875. See Reinhard Wittmann, ‘Das literarische Leben 1848 bis 1880,’ in Realismus und Gründerzeit, ed. by Max Bucher et al., 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976), I, pp. 161–257 (p. 194), and Monika Estermann and Stephan Füssel, ‘Belletristische Verlage,’ in Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, 2 vols, Das Kaiserreich 1870–1918, ed. by Georg Jäger (Frankfurt a.M.: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 2001), I, part 2, pp. 164–299 (p. 199). Marlitt’s novels were published in twenty to thirty weekly instalments. Family weeklies played a role in providing entertainment and information for the nation that television would come to play by the late twentieth century. See Andreas Graf, ‘Familien- und Unterhaltungszeitschriften’, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, ed. by Georg Jäger, I, part 2, pp. 409–47 (p. 409). 44. See Peter de Mendelssohn, S. Fischer und sein Verlag (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1970). 45. Julius Rodenberg, ‘An unsere Leser’, unnumbered preface to the October to December issue of Deutsche Rundschau, 80 (1893), at the start of its twentieth volume. 46. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘Ich fange an zu erschrecken vor der viel zu großen Meinung, die man sich jetzt von mir macht. Den Erwartungen Dr. Rodenbergs werde ich wohl nie entsprechen können’ (‘I am starting to become anxious about the far too high opinion that people now have of me: I will probably never be able to live up to Dr Rodenberg’s expectations’), Tagebücher, ed. by Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel, 6 vols (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1989–97), II, p. 355 ( July 1875). 47. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Their Pavel, transl. by Lynne Tatlock (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008). 48. See Charlotte Woodford, ‘Realism and Sentimentalism in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar’, Modern Language Review, 101 (2006), 155–70. 49. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher, III, p. 33 (7 June 1890). 50. Helene Böhlau, ‘Die Rathsmädel’, Deutsche Rundschau, 41 (1884), 132–44; ‘Rathsmädelgeschichten’, in Deutsche Rundschau, 49 (1886), 321–47; 50 (1887), 453–63; 51 (1887), 119–24; 438–56; 52 (1887), 291–98; 445–57; ‘Wie die Enkelin der Ratsmädel zum Blaustrumpf wurde’, Altweimarische Liebesund Ehegeschichten (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1897), pp. 122–59. 51. Henriette Herwig and Jürgen Herwig (eds), ‘Nachwort zu Helene Böhlaus “Halbtier!” ’, in Helene Böhlau, Halbtier! (Mellrichstadt: Turmhut, 2003), p. 260. 52. See Caroline Bland, ‘Clara Viebig: Using the Genres of Heimatkunst und Großstadtroman to Create Bestselling Novels’ in The German Bestseller, ed. by Woodford and Schofield, pp. 77–93. 53. See Elizabeth Boa, ‘Taking Sex to Market: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen: Von einer Toten and Josefine Mutzenbacher, Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, von ihr selbst erzählt’, in The German Bestseller, ed. by Woodford and Schofield, pp. 224–42. 54. Isolde Kurz, ‘Die Reise nach Tripstrill. Märchen’, Deutsche Rundschau, 69 (1891), 135–42; ‘Ein Räthsel’, Deutsche Rundschau, 84 (1895), 296–307; ‘Das Vermächtniß der Tante Susanne’, Deutsche Rundschau, 100 (1899); Marie von Olfers, ‘Leben’, Deutsche Rundschau, 48 (1886). Mostly known under pseud. of M. Werner, Olfers ran a salon and published Die Vernunftheirath und andere Novellen (1887). The best-known work of Marie von Bunsen, an aristocrat who moved in royal circles and almost became the Empress Victoria’s lady-in-waiting, was an account of the fateful winter of 1887–88 which saw the death of Friedrich IV of Prussia, serialized in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1892 and published as Gegen den Strom: ein Stimmungsbild aus dem neuen Berlin (Berlin: Paetel, 1893). It was also translated by Mrs. Dugdale as A Winter in Berlin (London: Arnold, 1899). 55. Anna Charlotte Edgren-Leff ler, ‘Die weinende Venus’, Deutsche Rundschau, 73 (1892), 99–133; ‘Die alte Dienerin’, Deutsche Rundschau, 74 (1893), 267–80. Edgren-Leff ler, the daughter of a university rector, also published a problem drama Sanna qvinnor (True Women), and her life is examined in Laura Marholm, Das Buch der Frauen (Leipzig: Langen, 1895). 56. Felicie Ewart (pseud. of Emilie Exner 1850–1909), ‘Eine Mésalliance’, Deutsche Rundschau, 89 (1896) 161–201. Exner was president of the ‘Wiener Frauenerwerbsverein’ (Viennese Association for Women’s Employment) from 1901–1906. She also wrote Die Emancipation in der Ehe. Briefe

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an einen Arzt (Hamburg: Voß, 1895) and the published speech on the subject of women and medicine: Weibliche Pharmaceuten. Vortrag gehalten im Vereine ‘Erwerbende Frauen’ am 7. März 1902 (Vienna: Kainz &. Liebhart, 1902). 57. Ilse Frapan, ‘Die Last’, Deutsche Rundschau, 51 (1887), 321–56; ‘Altmodische Leute. Hamburger Novelle’, Deutsche Rundschau, 62 (1890) 1–24; ‘Was Gottes Wille ist. Schwäbische Dorfgeschichte’, Deutsche Rundschau, 63 (1890), 161–99; ‘Klärchen’s Frühlingsfahrt. Eine Novelle in Briefen’, Deutsche Rundschau, 68 (1891), 1–30; ‘Capitän Feddersens Kummer. Hamburger Erzählung’, Deutsche Rundschau, 71 (1892), 321–46; ‘Stilles Wasser’, Deutsche Rundschau, 76 (1893), 321–47; ‘Wegscheide’, Deutsche Rundschau, 88 (1896), 321–45; ‘Mamsell Biene’, Deutsche Rundschau, 92 (1897), 321–43; ‘Der Sitter’, Deutsche Rundschau, 96 (1898), 325–62. 58. Ernst Wechsler, ‘Ilse Frapan’, Deutsche Rundschau, 67 (1891), 144–47 (p. 145). 59. Egid von Filek ‘Mädchenlektüre’, Neues Frauenleben, 16 (1904), issue 12, 3–8. See also Auguste Fickert, ‘Bildungsgang eines jungen Mädchens’, Die Volkstimme, 17 May (1893), 6–7. 60. Rosa Mayreder, ‘Familienliteratur’, Dokumente der Frauen, 2 (1900), issue 20, 543–50: ‘Das junge Mädchen ist es, um deren geistige Unberührtheit an dem Familientisch ewig gezittert wird’ (‘A young girl’s purity of mind is a constant source of anxiety for those who gather around the family dinner table’, p. 546). 61. Emma Eckstein, ‘Das Dienstmädchen als Mutter’, Dokumente der Frauen, 2 (1900), issue 21; Emma Eckstein, ‘Vorbereitung der Frau zur Lebensarbeit’, Dokumente der Frauen, 2 (1899), issue 19. See also Eckstein, Die Sexualfrage in der Erziehung des Kindes (1904: The Question of a Child’s Sexual Education). 62. Otto Brahm, Die Freie Bühne, 1 (1890), 1. 63. Hermann Bahr, ‘Die Moderne’, Die Überwindung des Naturalismus (Dresden: Pierson, 1891), pp. 2–6, cited from Jahrhundertwende: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1890–1910, ed. by Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), pp. 167–69 (p. 167). 64. Amalie Skram, ‘Karens Weihnachten’, Die Freie Bühne, 3 (1892), 404–08; Amalie Skram, ‘Die Leute vom Hellemoor’, Die Freie Bühne, 4 (1893); Carry Brachvogel, ‘Ein Testament’ Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 7 (1896), 688–97; Elsbeth Meyer (later Meyer-Förster), ‘Das Drama eines Kindes’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 5 (1894), 1232–57. This sensitively portrayed story of a troubled adolescent’s relationship with her father was published with S. Fischer in 1895 and was then turned into the drama Käthe: Schauspiel in vier Aufzügen (Leipzig: Reclam, 1897). Ernst Rosmer (pseud. of Elsa Bernstein), ‘Der Bauer und das Prinzesschen. Ein Märchen’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895), 262–73; Rosa Mayreder-Obermayer, ‘Der Klub der Übermenschen’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895), 1212–28. 65. Fannie Gröger, ‘Sanct Nothburgas Erdenreise’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895), 584–93. 66. Adine Gemberg, ‘Aufzeichnungen einer Diakonissin’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895). 67. Adine Gemberg’s novella Morphium (Berlin: Fischer, 1895) is on the subject of drug addiction, which she revisited with her later work Der dritte Bruder im Schlaf — Tod — Wahnsinn (1898). See also Ruth Cornelie Hildebrandt, ‘Ich stand neben dem Leben’: Grenzgänge zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung. Untersuchungen zum Werk Adine Gembergs (Norderstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2005), pp. 111–67. 68. Mendelssohn, pp. 49–50. 69. Letter of 3 Feb 1897, Samuel Fischer to Arthur Schnitzler, quoted by Mendelssohn, p. 238. 70. See Reiner Stach, 100 Jahre S. Fischer Verlag 1886–1986: Kleine Verlagsgeschichte (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1986), p. 30, and Mendelssohn, pp. 272–73. 71. For example, Nicholas Boyle, ‘The Bourgeois and the Official: A Historical Overview’, German Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 5–27, who suggests that the German canon is characterized by ‘an ideology of apolitical “Bildung” ’ (p. 21). 72. Arthur Schnitzler, Tagebuch, ed. by Peter Michael Braunwarth, 10 vols (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981–2000), VI, p. 278 (20 May 1907). 73. Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher, IV, p. 272 (Anhang 1893).

Chapter 1

v

Social Injustice and Emotional Truths in the Fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach The fiction of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) is deeply informed, in its themes and in its aesthetic strategies alike, by the author’s personal protest against the confines of her gender and social position. Ebner held politically liberal views and was critical of the narrow gender roles and religious conservatism she had experienced during her upbringing as an Austrian noblewoman.1 In her memoirs, Meine Kinderjahre, she recalls recognizing how as a woman writer she was excluded from Europe’s important classical heritage because she had never been to school, still less the kind of grammar school where Latin and Greek were routinely taught to boys: ‘Was gehört sich alles nicht für ein Mädchen! Himmelhoch türmten sich die Mauern vor mir empor, zwischen denen mein Dichten und Trachten sich zu bewegen hatte, die Mauern, die mich — umfriedeten’ (‘How much was unsuitable for a girl! The walls towered above me to the heavens in which my thoughts and deeds were confined, walls which — enclosed me’).2 According to Ebner’s diaries, the emancipation of women (Frauenemancipation), so abused by its detractors, meant ‘die Möglichste Ausbildung aller weibl[ichen] Fähigkeiten innerhalb ihm von der Natur gezogenen Grenzen’ (‘the development of all women’s capabilities to the extent that it is possible within the limits set by nature’).3 Ebner’s fiction confronts the restrictive gender roles imposed on women in late nineteenth-century society and reveals the role of religious institutions in perpetuating women’s inequality.4 Her stories also engage importantly with the ethical questions arising from the uneven distribution of wealth and power in an age of industrialization where the gap between rich and poor grew ever larger.5 Written for a largely bourgeois market at a time when the novel, as Peter Brooks puts it, ‘still maintained an unembarrassed relationship to popular fiction’,6 Ebner’s fiction shares the intense ref lection on modes of narrative that characterizes the best of German realism in the late nineteenth century.7 Through irony and humour, Helen Chambers argues, Ebner navigates a course between what she perceived as the two temptations of late nineteenth-century prose, towards vulgar depiction of social deprivation for sensational effect on the one hand, and sentimentality on the other.8 Ebner employs emotionality as a strategy to explore the psychological truths that lie behind everyday experience and ref lects critically on the ideas that

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inform her own and her readers’ preconceptions. Ebner avoided writing romantic fiction like E. Marlitt’s for the women’s market (though in her first novel Božena, 1876, she comes closest to it), sensing that its focus on marriage and courtship perpetuated the conservative gender roles of the nineteenth century. Instead her stories on the theme of marriage challenge the conventional romantic script. In ‘Comtesse Paula’ and ‘Comtesse Muschi’ (from Zwei Comtessen, 1885), for example, Ebner confronts the bourgeois ethos of renunciation through strong female figures who refuse to comply with their families’ ideas of a suitable husband, while in ‘Poesie des Unbewussten’ (1883: ‘The Poetry of the Unconscious’, from Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten), a comic story told in postcards by a newly-married woman to her mother, Ebner confronts with sensitivity the problem of a husband’s pre-marital philandering.9 In Ebner’s short story ‘Die Kapitalistinnen’ (1885: The Women Capitalists), a pair of elderly unmarried sisters are forced to engage abruptly with modernity on the sudden realization of the uncertainty of the financial markets. The financial crisis in the story, born of the speculation fever that gripped the nineteenth century, exemplifies the loss of old certainties in a modern age of capital, where lives can be thrown into turmoil by complex impersonal forces. The power of the markets over the sisters is clear in the story from their treatment of share coupons as fetish objects, with the safe where they are kept like a tabernacle whose key preys on their minds. The sisters have even removed the shares from their ragged envelopes and re-folded the coupons pedantically, obsessively making new, sequentially numbered envelopes for them, whose bright clean appearance better ref lects their important status. Elise and Johanna are forced to confront the potential loss of their life savings: Bohemian Land Credits have collapsed. But as it turns out, their fortune is safe: they have simply attempted to cash in the wrong papers, which they have mis-numbered in their pedantic attempt to tidy them up. The short story, narrated with much humour, does not so much reveal the author’s fascination with the reality of the financial bond market, but rather with the emotive bonds that connect individuals and it ref lects on how such bonds change in the light of economic and social developments. It narrates women’s attempts to develop some agency and selfdetermination in the absence of male relatives, ending with the sisters’ mistaken but nonetheless empowering belief that they now understand the communications sent from their bank. In her fiction, Ebner also felt drawn to confront the social injustice and extremes of poverty that she frequently noted in her diaries, particularly on her family’s country estate in Zdislawitz in Moravia (now the Czech Republic).10 Drawing attention to the inf luence on Ebner of the Russian realists Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) and Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), and their sensitive treatment of the living conditions of serfs, the critic Herbert Zeman foregrounds Ebner’s own emotional response to the issue of working-class poverty, depicting it as something intuitive rather than ref lective: ‘Mit den kleinen Leuten, mit den ungerecht Behandelten schlägt das Herz der [...] Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’ (‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s heart beats with the little people, with those treated unjustly’).11 Such an assertion blurs the boundaries between the figure of the author and the narrators of Ebner’s

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21

stories and implies a link between the author’s gender and her sympathy with her protagonists.12 Linda Kraus Worley detects a political subtext to the gendered inter­ pre­tations of Ebner’s fiction by her contemporaries, suggesting that ‘the repeated evocation of stylistic and thematic elements coded as “feminine” can be read as linked not only to her biological sex, but also tied to her geopolitical “feminine” position as an Austrian author’, after the military defeat of Austria by Prussia in 1866.13 While Ebner eschews the cold objective gaze associated with the French realism of Flaubert, its evocation of readerly sympathy is a part of a complex set of narrative strategies intended to draw attention to the social problems associated with modernity. Ebner expressed admiration for the novel Die Familie Hartenberg: Roman aus dem Wiener Leben (1883: The Hartenberg Family: A Novel of Viennese Life) by her acquaintance in Vienna, Emilie Mataja: Sie hat einen erstaunlichen Roman geschrieben: voll Talent ohne einen Schatten von Illusion, das pure, trockene häßliche Leben in einer verkommenen Bürger­ familie. Das Buch erschien im Feuilleton d[er] Wien[er] Allgem[einen] Z[eitung;] ich las es mit der intensivsten Spannung, und lebhaftem Grauen.14 [She has written an astonishing novel: the precise depiction of the sober and ugly life in a bourgeois family in decline is full of talent and without a trace of illusion. The book appeared in serialization in the Vienna General Newspaper; I read it with the most intensive excitement and lively horror.]

Key phrases in this description identify the important features of Mataja’s style for Ebner: there is no transfiguration of reality; the approach is sober and aspects of life are described which are ugly and usually suppressed by literary accounts. There is no attempt to sentimentalize poverty, and the effect on the reader is unsettling. Ebner, for all her admiration of Mataja’s break with convention, was writing for a more conservative readership herself. She had an eye to the taste of figures like Julius Rodenberg, the editor of Deutsche Rundschau, the foremost literary journal of poetic realism.15 Peter Pfeiffer shows how Ebner participated carefully in the creation of her own media image, to convey an impression of her own harmlessness as a kind of camouf lage.16 She was anxious to avoid the attention of critics who so often challenged her more satirical or socially critical works.17 For example, in a letter to her close friend the poet and literary critic Betty Paoli (1814–1894), Ebner reports that she had found a safe home for the pre-publication in 1879 of her satirical story Die Freiherren von Gemperlein (1881: The Gemperlein Barons) in the Viennese journal, Die Dioskuren, where, she implies, hardly anyone would read it:18 ‘Hofrath Falke f lehte in so rührenden Accenten um einen Beitrag für die “Dioskuren” daß ich ihm die Gemperlein sandte. Die werden im oesterrichischen Jahrbuche so sanft ruhen wie in der Gruft von Wlastowitz’ (‘Counsellor Falke implored me so touchingly for a contribution to the “Dioskuren” that I sent him the Gemperlein Barons. They will rest as peacefully in the Austrian Yearbook as they do in the family tomb at Wlastowitz’).19 Wlastowitz is the country estate owned by the fictional Gemperlein brothers. The story had been turned down for Deutsche Rundschau,20 and it seems that Ebner buried the story out of timidity. Ebner adds a postscript: ‘So hoffe ich wenigstens. Weh mir wenn sie von einem Wiener

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Kritiker bemerkt würden!’ (‘I hope so at least. It will be the worse for me if they are noticed by a Viennese critic!’) Paoli’s reply expresses regret that the Gemperlein brothers would not reach a wider audience, but Ebner is clear that she welcomes their isolation (‘mir thut die Ruhe so wohl die sie dort genießen werden!’)21 Ebner may be making a virtue of necessity. But this reminds us, as Pfeiffer has shown, of Ebner’s careful navigation of the literary codes of the day, and how her more challenging works, written for a liberal, intellectual audience, were not the ones on which her reputation was made. The early short story ‘Die Großmutter’ (1875: The Grandmother) illustrates the complexity of Ebner’s narrative perspective, which she employs expertly to reveal the dissonance between how life should be, and how it really is for the proletariat, without sensationalizing urban misery. A grandmother arrives at the morgue to try to identify her only grandson, whom she presumes to have drowned.22 His body has been taken to the Institute for Anatomy of the local teaching hospital, where those with no one to pay for a burial will later be dissected for medical research. The grandmother in the story is perceived from the point of view of the doctor in whose laboratory she seeks news of her missing son. She seems to the doctor the sorrowful epitome of poverty and adversity, which she bears with dignity (p. 274). Her quiet demeanour impresses him, together with the sobriety with which she explains to him how her drunken husband has left her, followed by the children who rejected her path of honesty. The narrative describes his growing engagement with her fate, as she waits in his laboratory to be shown into the mortuary, and he ref lects on her simple ‘greatness’, and her strength of character: she seems in fact to conform to the poetic realist Adalbert Stifter’s understanding of greatness as expressed in the preface to his collection of stories Bunte Steine (1853): ‘ein ganzes Leben voll Gerechtigkeit, Einfachheit, Bezwingung seiner selbst, [...] [...] halte ich für groß’ (‘I consider greatness to consist in a whole life filled with justice, simplicity and self-denial’).23 When the grandmother is suddenly confronted with the horror of her grandson’s corpse, the doctor is captivated by the force of her silent grief which finds expression in neither cry nor tears. But his empathy with her is destroyed in a single blow when she asks if she can have the grandson’s jacket back, which she has recently made and so will be able to sell. As she tells this soberly to the doctor, he views her suddenly with distaste. In effect, the doctor’s reading of the grandmother accords with the aesthetic of poetic realism. The intrusion of mer­cenary motivations and the allusion to the depths of her poverty interrupt his illusion of the grandmother and hence his comforting view of the world around him. On receiving her fourteen-year-old grandson’s only coat, the hitherto stoical grandmother breaks down and weeps, embracing the garment as if it were the grandson himself. The change of demeanour invites the reader to read the signs. Had she been unconscious of the deep longing she feels for the jacket, which finally enables her to grieve for her son, the last remaining member of her family with whom she is in contact? Does she merely tell the doctor she wants to sell it, because she is ashamed of admitting to her emotions in front of a man of a higher social class? The story makes intricate use of the possibilities of perspective: the grandmother is

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23

seen throughout from an external point of view, her fate at first poeticized by the educated male doctor, who is drawn to her story as to no other. When earlier in the story she explains soberly to the doctor that she no longer has any feelings for the rest of her family — good for nothing, the lot of them — has she constructed a story for herself that acts as a coping mechanism for her loneliness? The doctor interprets the grandmother, both in his sympathy and his horror, through his own, necessarily partial understanding of the nature of poverty. For the grandmother, the coat may also serve as a substitute for the body which she cannot receive for Christian burial. The juxtaposition between his own distancing from her, when she asks for the coat, and the third-person narrator’s sensitivity to her tears and despairing body language, encourages the reader to question his judgement. The story thus remains close to the aesthetic of poetic realism, yet calls into question the poetic realist gaze as an adequate means of understanding the true effect of the social conditions on the subject. One study of Ebner’s social criticism in her fiction suggests that to take it seriously, we need to overlook its ‘sentimental tendentiousness’.24 Yet it is not possible to separate Ebner’s social engagement from her narrative strategies, as this brief investigation of ‘Die Großmutter’ has shown. Critics all too often fail to explore how sentimentality operates as a discourse, at best suggesting that it indicates indebtedness to popular genres of writing for women, but sometimes even dismissing it as an indication of women writers’ limited education.25 However, there is a vast difference in effect between an overly emotive narrative voice, and a careful and distanced exploration of sentimental attitudes on the part of a protagonist within a story, as Ebner shows us with ‘Die Großmutter’. In ‘Die Großmutter’ it is the doctor, at first, who appears to fall victim to sentimentality in his attitude to the grandmother, and the attitude is short-lived: it cannot survive her behaving in a way that defies his previous expectations. The grandmother’s own silent tears, confined to the closing sentences of the story, by contrast seem a cathartic release after her earlier dignified composure, and the narrative itself avoids too close an identification with her through the interruption of the doctor’s sudden and as it turns out premature revulsion. Identification and Sensationalism As the motto to Ein Spätgeborner (1875: Born too Late) makes clear, it is not what people undergo, but how they experience what happens to them that fascinated Ebner: (‘Nicht was wir erleben, sondern wie wir empfinden, was wir erleben, macht unser Schicksal aus’).26 The sentence also emphasizes Ebner’s rejection of any kind of social or economic determinism. In ‘Der Muff ’, a companion story to ‘Die Kapitalistinnen’, written in March 1885, Ebner again confronts the divide between the wealthy and the poor, as a gulf not just of circumstances but also of understanding. The story highlights the pitfalls of random acts of financial benefaction, particularly those linked to self-gratification on the part of the giver.27 It touches on the moral problem of sensationalizing social deprivation: the protagonist in the story appears to revel in observing the poor and imagining the

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effects of their miserable living conditions. This gaze is almost that of a female flâneur, a wealthy, leisured observer of the city scene, who observes human life and imagines the stories behind the faces: Du gehst durch die Straßen der großen Stadt, und wenn deine Augen nur offen sind, siehst du in kurzer Zeit das Elend in jeder denkbaren Gestalt; von dem geistigen und moralischen Elend an, das hinter äußerem Glanz verborgen vorbeistolziert, bis herab zu dem Elend des hungernden, vom Tode schon gezeichneten Lasters.28 [You walk through the streets of the metropolis and if you only open your eyes you will swiftly see misery in every conceivable form, from spiritual and moral misery parading past hidden behind a show of glamour, down to the misery of the vice that is starving and already marked by death.]

The poverty depicted here is not individualized, as with the figure of the grandmother in the earlier story. The protagonist is a fictional author, caught up in the process of transforming the world around her into literary material. The poor are romanticized; even the vice of the socially deprived is poeticized. The observer forgets that the people she sees are not moral categories, but real people and part of a wider social framework. In the story, the fictional author finds herself in high spirits after her talents have been feted at a gathering of the good and great. On the way home, strolling alone through the streets of Vienna, she gives money to the poor as they pass, rewarding those who in her eyes seem needy yet respectable. In an allusion to Nietzsche, the narrative voice, whose perspective is that of the protagonist, tells us with a hint of sarcasm that sympathy has recently been revealed to be merely reprehensible egotism, yet then indeed reveals that the protagonist takes pleasure in giving to the poor because of the emotional reward she receives in return of their expressions of surprise and gratitude, rather than because of the effect it will have on their lives. (‘Nun, dieses Staunen mit anzusehen, die Freude auf blitzen zu sehen auf dem Antlitz des Kummers, das ist Glück’).29 After giving away all her money, she finds it impossible to pass an elderly woman, wrapped only in a thin shawl. All she has left is her fur muff, which she gives away, carelessly failing to remove her empty purse. Her generosity backfires. The old woman arrives at her house the next morning in the company of a police officer: she has been arrested on suspicion of stealing the muff and the purse, and spending the author’s money. The woman has spent the night in the cells, and now demands financial compensation for her troubles. A short sketch in Ebner’s diary develops a similar theme: a woman gives a poor mother a gold coin, but on her return home, the mother argues with her husband over the use that can be made of it. In the ensuing conf lict, she is badly hurt, and he has to call a doctor. On paying the gold coin to the doctor for his services, he comments, unaware of the irony, that it is a fine chance they happened to have a gold coin in the house.30 The story ‘Der Muff ’ raises questions which cannot be easily solved. The wife does not disprove Nietzsche’s assertion that all sympathy is really selfishness, for the narrator draws attention to the self-centred nature of her motivations. On the other hand, an interchange between the fictional author and her husband draws

Social Injustice and Emotional Truths

25

attention to the importance of the individual for Ebner as a starting point for the bigger picture of social change. The husband is playing a game of cards, and his wife offers advice. She suggests he turn a particular card, and he replies that it is not the particular card which is important, but the strategy for the whole game: ‘Liebes Kind’, entgegnet der General mit männlichem Ernst, ‘nimm mir’s nicht übel, du hast unrecht. Hier handelt es sich nicht um das einzelne, sondern um das Ganze.’ ‘Wenn aber das einzelne den Knotenpunkt des Ganzen bildet?’ ‘Knotenpunkt! Wie du doch bist! wie du doch kindisch bist! Liebe, ich habe allen Respekt vor deiner Schriftstellerei, aber von Knotenpunkten verstehst du nichts.’ ‘Wer weiß, vielleicht doch ... warum sollt ich nicht im Grunde ...?’31 [‘My dear child’, the General replied with manly seriousness, ‘don’t take it the wrong way but you are incorrect. In this case it is not about the individual but about the whole.’ ‘But what if the individual is the nodal point for the whole?’ ‘Nodal point! What are you like? How childish you are! My dear, I have every respect for your scribbling but you know nothing about nodal points.’ ‘Who knows, perhaps nevertheless... why not in principle...?]

Here, as in so many of her stories, Ebner shows how women’s treatment within the family as little more than children is an important barrier to their social emanci­ pation. The wife’s words are suggestive of the idea that small individual actions offer a starting point on which social changes can be based,32 and that attempts to alter society’s superstructure ought not to overlook the immediate needs of individuals close at hand. Yet the husband’s dismissal of the wife’s idea as ‘childish’ closes down further debate. The wife’s idea could be seen as resonating with the narrative strategies Ebner deploys in her fiction. According to Michael Bell’s analysis of sentimentalism in nineteenth-century literature: ‘once the social order comes to be seen as a complex impersonal process changeable only by collective political will, then any appeal to individual feeling begins to seem necessarily, structurally, sentimental’.33 Yet social interventions are often dependent on indi­ viduals’ philanthropic involvement and require some sacrifice on the part of others, whether that is a sacrifice of time, money or the donation of a skill. Ebner’s fiction exhorts the reader not to exercise the power to look away and emphasises the ethical responsibility to try and understand others’ social situation.34 Furthermore it raises the question of whether social attitudes might nonetheless be changed via the individual reader, not through pity in itself but by engaging with what it means properly to understand the lives of others. In Ebner’s short story ‘Die Resel’ (1883: from Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten),35 she again satirizes the sentimental imagination which romanticizes the fate of the poor. The story of Resel, a peasant girl who committed suicide after spending a night with her lover, is told in a narrative frame to a countess by a forester, Resel’s uncle. He has accompanied the newly married countess and her grey-haired husband on a visit to the forest, where they saw Resel’s grave. Later at dinner the countess is bored almost to tears by her husband’s dull conversation about the state of the woods, as can be seen by her reaching for the largest cigar and rising from the table

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to smoke it at the window (‘Resel’, 130). Following the intoxicating diversion of the nicotine, she attempts to find further entertainment by asking about Resel’s gravestone and she sensationalizes the girl’s fate: ‘Umgebracht!’, rief die junge Frau erregt — ‘gewiß aus unglücklicher Liebe, sie hat ihren Geliebten nicht heiraten dürfen, oder er hat sie sitzen lassen, der Lump... Ist’s so? Sagen Sie’s, wenn Sie’s wissen’ (‘Resel’, 132). [‘She killed herself!’, cried the young women excitedly — surely from un­requited love, she couldn’t marry her lover, or he abandoned her, the rascal... Is that right? Tell me, if you know’.]

The countess, hoping for a sentimental tale of unrequited love to spice up her dreary existence, is like an alternative narrator, for whom the details of Resel’s story matter less than the story’s suggestion of drama and transgression, and whose own story is revealed through her frequent interjections. The story is mere entertainment for her, and thus the narrative exposes the moral difficulty of the sentimental discourse. The forester is interrupted frequently by the countess’s self-centred commentary. At first dismissive of the forester’s ability to tell the story, the countess starts to listen with deep concentration, before leaning her head back, closing her eyes, and sighing mournfully, the very model of the sentimental listener. She corrects the forester in his interpretation of his niece’s story, supplies her own experiences and attributes psychological motivations. When told that Resel could not marry Toni because he was barely twenty, the countess wistfully repeats it (‘kaum zwanzig!’), and casts a glance at the ageing features of her husband, who has fallen asleep. On learning that Resel was supposed to marry a friend of the family, she comments: ‘Ja’, sagte die Gräfin wie im Traum, ‘brav und gut... aber er hat graue Haare gehabt’. [Forester:] ‘Graue Haar? daß ich nicht wüßt’. Die junge Frau wurde über und über rot und wandte die Augen etwas erschrocken ihrem Manne zu, der inzwischen fest eingeschlafen war. ‘Alles eins’, sprach sie rasch. (‘Resel’, 136) [‘Well’, said the Countess dreamily, ‘honest and good ... but he had grey hair’. ‘Grey hair? Not that I know of ’. The young woman blushed all over and swiftly cast an anxious glance at her husband, who in the meantime had fallen asleep. ‘It’s all the same’, she said quickly.]

She has no real feeling for Resel, whose story has merely a therapeutic and representative value for the countess; it enables her to indulge in melancholy ref lections on her own pre-marital passion for an unsuitable man and sigh with regret at what might have been if she had not married her grey-haired husband. To the comic bemusement of the forester, she murmurs that it was Resel’s good fortune that she had no governess to prevent her from running away to her lover, while taking over the story herself: Die Gräfin fiel ihm erregt ins Wort: ‘Die Zucht hat ihr gefehlt, die Führung. Sie ist ganz allein dagestanden, Aug in Aug mit der Versuchung... Arme Resel! — Von einer solchen Gefahr wissen wir nämlich nichts; uns wird die Wahl zwischen Recht und Unrecht erspart — die Beschützer laufen uns ja nach auf

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Schritt und Tritt [...] Ach, wie wohl tut das reine Gewissen, das wir uns — nein, das man uns bewahrt hat!’ (‘Resel’, 134). [The Countess excitedly interrupted him: ‘She lacked breeding and guidance. She was completely alone, eye to eye with temptation... poor Resel! — We know nothing of that sort of danger, we are spared the choice between right and wrong — our protectors follow our every step [...] Oh, how precious is the clear conscience that we have — that others have preserved for us!’]

The countess is a sentimental narrator, whose excess of words and sighs enact her own internal dilemma. She partly regrets her lack of opportunity to indulge her own passion for an unsuitable man, and lives vicariously through the sentimental tale, while pragmatically understanding the advantages and protection her position has given her. The lure of the erotic is held at a safe distance by the knowledge of Resel’s death. Furthermore, the simple grave carefully tended in the forest provides the impetus for an anticlerical protest in ‘Die Resel’, through a confrontation between individual conscience and religious dogmatism. Resel, the forester’s niece, runs away to the house of a man she has been forbidden to marry, spends the night with him, and, when he refuses to marry her, she later shoots herself with his pistol. Dying, she is brought to her parents’ home, where she makes a confession to a priest. But before the priest has time to speak the words of absolution over Resel, she is distracted by the arrival of her lover Toni, begging for her forgiveness. Resel considers it her duty to forgive him, as Eda Sagarra explores.36 But she does so at the expense of her own reconciliation with the Church. Accordingly, the priest refuses her burial in consecrated ground. For Doris M. Klostermaier, the priest ‘considers ecclesiastical doctrine more important than a dying person’.37 This critique of the effect of the Church’s religious teaching on women pervades many of Ebner’s stories. These include ‘Das tägliche Leben’ (Daily Life), a sympathetic account of a woman’s domestic suffering told in the wake of her suicide,38 ‘Die erste Beichte’ (First Confession), foregrounding the role of religious indoctrination in the education of young girls,39 and ‘Mašlans Frau’, where a priest tries to persuade a woman to take back her errant husband. Klostermaier has shown how Ebner’s stories confront the conservative power structures of the institution of the Catholic Church, suggesting that ‘ultramontane pastoral analysts, bound by rigid ecclesiasticism, considered her writing heretical and a threat’.40 In one of Ebner’s diary entries, angered by the involvement of Christian organizations in the growing political anti-Semitism in the late 1890s under the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, the author commented that she knew of nothing more abominable than a lack of charity underpinned by Christian dogma (‘Ich weiß nichts Scheußlicheres als christliche Unbarmherzigkeit’).41 Secularism and Ethics in Das Gemeindekind While explorations of modernity often focus attention on the urban poor, in the mid nineteenth century rural poverty also intensified. Traditional methods of farming or fabric production became no longer profitable following industrialization in other parts of Europe, leading to mass emigration to cities. In Ebner’s most

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successful novel, Das Gemeindekind (1887: Child of the Parish, transl. as Their Pavel), the poverty of a rural community engenders resentment of a brother and sister left destitute and helpless.42 A liberal critique of the institution of the Catholic Church forms an important part of the story; the sister grows up in a convent where she internalizes harsh penitential rituals and eventually dies from its strict discipline. Ebner implies in the novel that while an ethical framework is essential for social reform, this is not to be found in religion with its vested interests, traditional power structures, and its focus on life after death rather than on the improvement of the quality of this life. Minna Kautsky, the mother of the socialist leader Karl Kautsky, whose own fiction is examined in Chapter 2, reviewed Das Gemeindekind for the socialist news­ paper Die neue Welt.43 She strongly emphasized the novel’s secularism as a point of intersection between her Marxist readership and Ebner’s own world view. Later, Viktor Adler was to secure a second serialization of Das Gemeindekind in his workers’ newspaper Die Arbeiterzeitung. Minna Kautsky perceived secularism as fundamental to the novel’s realism. For Kautsky, the novel explores faithfully the material causes of social deprivation: it possesses a bold and thoroughly realistic conception of our social circumstances (‘kühne, durchaus realistische Auffassung unserer gesellschaftlichen Zustände’, 403), without recourse to any metaphysical framework. Kautsky writes that Ebner’s novel illustrates with magnificent dialectical thinking (‘mit glänzender Dialektik’) how the ignorant, superstitious and exploitative peasants she portrays are alienated from their natural potential for solidarity with each other (404). As the Marxist term ‘dialectic’ indicates, in Kautsky’s judgement Ebner explores with scientific thoroughness how living conditions inf luence the peasants’ thought-processes and motivation. Moreover Kautsky implies that Ebner’s representation of them allows for some historicization — she does not depict the peasants’ conditions as a timeless state, but rather a historically specific set of circumstances related to the subordination of the rural classes in the earlier days of their serfdom (alluded to by the prominent figure of a Baroness). Interpreting the novel again in a Marxist sense, Kautsky concludes: ‘Es sind hier wirkliche Zustände geschildert, die allerdings vernichtend wären, sobald man von der Voraussetzung ausginge, daß sie unabänderlich seien’ (‘Real conditions are depicted here that would indeed be crushing if you were to start from the premise that they were unalterable’, 416). An emphasis on the alterability of human circumstances is another point of intersection between Ebner’s humanism and Kautsky’s Marxism. Kautsky highlights the optimism which the protagonist Pavel Holub eventually finds within himself; it proves, she asserts, that Ebner is herself a fighter (‘ein Kämpfer’, ibid.). While Ebner’s novel, like Kautsky’s fiction, serves as an important protest against social injustice, there are important differences between Kautsky’s and Ebner’s approaches, which become apparent through Ebner’s particular focus on ethics rather than politics as the driving force for future change. Das Gemeindekind begins with an argument that breaks out when the local priest criticizes the Holub family for working on a Sunday.44 The priest is murdered, the father hanged, and the mother sentenced to ten years’ hard labour for collaboration. The novel passes swiftly over this conf lict, presenting the father as a drunken

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wife-beater and the mother as a passive and God-fearing victim. Yet Ebner clearly intends the reader to notice the irony in the priest’s challenge to Martin Holub over his family’s failure to observe a ‘day of rest’. The reader might recall the story of Jesus defying the Pharisees’ pedantic insistence on Sabbath rest by deliberately curing the sick on that day. Holub, an itinerant tile-maker on a subsistence income, cannot live without working seven days a week. This critical distance from the Church as an institution continues throughout the narrative. After the trial of Martin and Barbara Holub their two children are left in the care of the village community. The local Baroness adopts the ten-year-old girl, Milada, and sends her to be educated in a local convent. There, Milada is brought up to experience her entire life as a work of atonement for her father’s sin of murder. She is told that her father, who has died without being reconciled with the Church, will only go to heaven if she devotes herself to a life of prayer and meditation. His salvation is thus made dependent on her life of self-sacrifice, which she comes to carry out willingly out of love for her father once she has internalized the nuns’ teachings. She tells her brother Pavel on one of his rare visits: ‘just deswegen bin ich die Bravste im ganzen Kloster [...] ... damit der liebe Gott den Eltern verzeiht, damit ihre Seelen erlöst werden ... Denk’ an die Seele des Vaters, wo die jetzt ist...’ (That is why I am the best behaved in the whole convent ... so that our loving God will forgive my parents and so that their souls will be redeemed ... Think of father’s soul where it is now,’ GK, 47). Her life of humility might be seen as resembling the one praised in Stifter’s preface to Bunte Steine. Yet Milada’s sacrifice has been imposed on her as a child, and the nuns’ teachings are a highly effective mechanism of social control. Milada represses any remnants of her old self, and contact with her brother is deliberately limited so that what the nuns call the ‘vagabond blood’ in her cannot surface and make her unruly. They view criminality as hereditary. When Milada is eventually old enough to become a novice, she tells Pavel to write to their mother (the nuns have prevented her from writing herself ), to inform her ‘daß mein ganzes Leben nichts ist als ein einziges Gebet für sie und — noch für Einen, unseren armen unglücklichen Vater...’ (‘My whole life is nothing but a single prayer for her — and also for another, for our poor unfortunate father’, GK, 120). She extends the nuns’ teaching to Pavel by telling him that if he does not make peace with his enemies and live a virtuous life she will have to suffer, since it will be a sign that she has not prayed or repented enough (‘daß ich noch nicht genug gethan, gebetet, gebüßt habe’, GK, 121). The sister is locked up like their mother, but while their mother returns after ten years, with a clear conscience and apparently unburdened by her long imprisonment, Milada works herself to death through penitence and fasting. Milada’s corpse is barely recognizable to Pavel. She seems to him like a saint, but there is a strong suggestion that her death is a mere waste. Ebner’s growing distance from the Catholic Church, so powerful a force in nineteenth-century Austrian society, was strengthened, as Doris Klostermaier points out, by her reading of William Mackintire Salter’s Ethical Religion.45 She read it in a translation, Die Religion der Moral (1885),46 by the philosopher Georg Gizycki — later the husband of the feminist Lily Braun. One of the most significant works to

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emerge from the late nineteenth-century ethical societies, it consists of a volume of collected speeches on personal morality delivered by Salter at the Society for Ethical Culture in Chicago. In a letter of 26 November 1886, Ebner’s close friend Louise von François reports that Ebner had sent her a copy of Die Religion der Moral, calling Salter ‘not a philosopher, a prophet’ and proclaiming herself his newest disciple.47 François reports that Ebner expected great things from Salter’s movement, which had the potential, so she believed, to transform public attitudes. In March 1888, Ebner sent a copy of the work also to her friend Hermine Villinger.48 In 1889, Ebner received a copy of Salter’s next work, Moralische Reden (1889) straight from the translator, Professor Gizycki, with whom she went on to exchange ideas and reading material.49 Salter’s speeches place an emphasis on the independence of morality from religious teaching and the importance of individual conscience: ‘Der Mensch muß für sich selber handeln, oder er ist verloren’ (‘A man should act for himself, or he is lost’, Salter, 65). Someone who merely acts in accordance with conventional morality is not acting ethically, for (in line with Aristotle and Kant), an ethical action, to Salter, is one carried out in full consciousness, born of ethical intentions: ‘Eine moralische Handlung muß unsre eigene Handlung sein’ (‘A moral action must be our own action’, 64). Salter criticizes the failure of nineteenth-century Christian organizations to address the plight of the poor and destitute. The Churches are too closely associated with the civil authorities, he claims (267); they fail to welcome the poor into their communities and show little understanding of symptoms of poverty, such as alcoholism, theft or prostitution. In Das Gemeindekind, the father is an alcoholic, and it has often been noted that Ebner eschews naturalist interpretations of alcoholism as a hereditary disease. Rather, she associates it here, like Salter, with the desperation experienced in a life characterized by working merely in order to continue to live (Salter, 287). Although the manuscript of Das Gemeindekind was completed by the time Ebner recommended Salter’s work to Louise von François,50 similarities with the ideas of the ethical societies51 are evident in the figure of the schoolteacher, Habrecht. From the outset, he recognizes that the young protagonist Pavel Holub is not inherently degenerate, but rather nature’s good intentions had been undermined ‘durch harte Arbeit, schlechte Nahrung, durch Verwahrlosung jeder Art’ (‘by hard work, poor food and deprivation of every kind’, GK, 16). Habrecht exerts a positive inf luence, alongside Pavel’s sister Milada, which helps to transform Pavel from a petty thief into an educated householder (the latter through a benefaction from the Baroness). In the second half of the novel Habrecht leaves the village in order to join an ethical society in the United States. A friend has become one of the keenest ‘apostles’ of the society, whose aim is to spread ‘moral culture’: ‘Bekenner einer Religion der Moral nennen sie sich [...] Ihre Botschaft ist zu mir gedrungen in Gestalt eines Buches, dergleichen noch nie eines geschrieben wurde’ (‘They call themselves disciples of a religion of morality ... Their message came to me in the form of a book the like of which has not previously been written’, GK, 124). Habrecht understands his vocation as a religious one, and after stylizing his conversation with Pavel as a religious ‘confession’, he asks in turn to hear Pavel’s confession. Habrecht, as his

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name implies (recht haben, to be right), embodies some exemplary qualities and Pavel views him as a role model. There is a close link between Habrecht’s morality and conventional Christian teaching, for example Habrecht tells Pavel to forgive his enemies, which reminds Pavel of his sister’s words. At the end of the novel, Pavel wonders what Habrecht and his sister would advise him, and concludes in words he attributes to Habrecht: ‘Kleiner Mensch, bleibe in Deinem kleinen Kreise und suche still und verborgen zu wirken für das Wohl des Ganzen’ (‘Little man, stay in your small circle and try, while silent and hidden, to work effectively for the good of the whole’, GK, 147). The words ‘silent and hidden’ imply a very different kind of protest from the prominent communal activity advocated in Kautsky’s world view. Yet Pavel’s determination to make his life a success, in spite of his treatment by those around him, is nonetheless a protest against those who dismiss the potential of the socially marginalized. On the other hand, when Habrecht parts with Pavel at the railway station, he comically becomes almost rechthaberisch (self-opinionated or dogmatic). He be­comes solemn, not to say sententious, as the time approaches for his train to arrive. Habrecht clearly intends his parting message to Pavel to be a serious speech in the sense of Polonius’s parting words in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (‘This above all: to thine own self be true [...] Thou canst not then be false to any man.’)52 Thus he comes out with a series of maxims, some of which he considers still too deep for Pavel but worth saying just for the sake of it. Yet Ebner interrupts Habrecht’s sermonizing with humour: he almost misses his train, so caught up is he in his own teaching. Words of his which might sometimes be felt to capture the meaning of the whole text (‘Ihr Geringen, Ihr seid die Wichtigen, ohne Eure Mitwirkung kann nichts Großes sich mehr vollziehen’, ‘You little people, you are the important ones, without your collaboration nothing great can be accomplished’, GK 127) are almost lost to Pavel in his anxiety about Habrecht’s train, and he answers them only with the bathetic ‘Herr Lehrer, Herr Lehrer! es ist Zeit’ (‘Sir! Sir! it is time!’, ibid.). Habrecht has to run because he has failed to hear the locomotive. Perhaps too much of a focus on ethical principles in an abstract sense risks distancing him from life and its practical activity. In this way, Ebner’s novel avoids didacticism by gently undermining the educative efforts of the schoolteacher, while nonetheless showing in Pavel how his gradual capacity to make ethical choices provides a foundation for individual liberation from petty concerns: Pavel had previously buried among the foundations of his house a stone which the villagers threw at him when he was once unjustly imprisoned. After saying farewell to the teacher, he digs it up and hurls it into the river, in an act symbolic of his new freedom from resentment. Das Gemeindekind begins with a motto taken from the French author George Sand, whom Ebner and Paoli greatly admired: ‘tout est l’histoire’ (‘everything is history’). This emphasizes the centrality of seemingly insignificant details or individuals.53 Salter also quotes Sand: ‘Le sentiment de la vie idéale, qui n’est autre que la vie normale telle que nous sommes appelés à la connaître’ ( Journal d’un voyageur pendant la guerre), translated by Gizycki as ‘das ideale Leben ist, wie George Sand sagt, kein anderes als des Menschen normales Leben, wie wir es einst kennen werden’ (‘as George Sand says, the ideal life is none other than man’s normal life

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as we will one day recognize it’).54 Salter appears to interpret Sand as meaning that contemporary society, with all its imperfections, needs to be recognized as the ‘plastic material’ that can itself be turned into the ethical ideal. As such, Salter points out that ethics is closer to idealist than to realist art (311). He sees it as like the difference between knowing and understanding: ‘Wissen lehrt, was ist, Gewissen ist der Gedanke dessen, was sein sollte’ (‘Science teaches what there is, your conscience holds the thought of what there should be’, 310). However, it is not by overlooking social deprivation or poverty that this should be achieved, Ebner’s Gemeindekind suggests, but by engaging firmly with its social causes and recognizing the human potential in every individual, whatever the background. The novel combines elements of the socially-critical realistic novel with a sensitive depiction of Pavel’s inner transformation and moral-spiritual growth. Das Gemeindekind can be read as both drawing attention to social conditions within the village community from a realist perspective, as well as gesturing towards future social transformation through its ethical framework. While Minna Kautsky suggested that Das Gemeindekind showed Ebner to be an optimist, its ending was not optimistic enough for the conservative poetic realist Paul Heyse.55 As he puts it in a letter to Ebner: ‘Und ebenso will ich noch bekennen, daß ich ihrem Gemeindekind am Ende noch ein wenig mehr Glück gegönnt hätte, als Sie ihm zuteil werden lassen. Ob Sie daran doch nicht weiser getan haben, als ich...’56 (‘Similarly, I should also confess that I would have wished your child of the parish a little more luck at the end than you allow him. But perhaps you have acted more wisely than I would have done...?’) Heyse’s comments express the contemporary readership’s love of a happy ending, which Ebner had provided in her first novel Božena (1876).57 Here, however, the narrative concludes with an intimation of future problems, as a well as a reconciliation: Pavel’s sister has died only days before his mother’s release from prison, and he takes his mother into his home knowing he will have to confront new prejudices from among his fellow villagers. Peter Pfeiffer points out that the language of the scene in which Pavel is reunited with his mother combines resigned acceptance with a protest against the unnecessary suffering inf licted by patriarchy on subjects of both genders.58 Immediately on Pavel’s catching sight of his mother, the narrative shifts into the discourse of melodrama: ‘Da war sie, ungebeugt von der Last der letzten zehn Jahre, ungebrochen durch die Schmach ihrer langen Kerkerhaft’ (‘There she was, unburdened by the weight of the last ten years, unbroken by the ignominy of her long incarceration’, GK 150). Grandiose language alerts us to the mother’s victimhood and the drama of persecuted innocence. The manner of representation is characterized by extravangance and a heightened rhetoric which for Peter Brooks gestures towards an ethical truth.59 Barbara Holub appears as a heroic figure, whose moral conviction is in keeping with Brooks’ exploration of melodramatic action. Like sentimental heroes and heroines of the nineteenth century, for example the slave Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Barbara has taken consolation in her faith and found strength in renunciation. Her personal Christian faith has been a comfort to her and enabled her to avoid despair and rise above her circumstances. Recourse to a spiritual discourse thus gives voice to the deep

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psychological significance of events for Pavel and his mother. For Jane Tompkins, such novels show ‘that human history is a continual re-enactment of the sacred drama of redemption.’60 On the other hand, Brooks shows how melodrama as a literary strategy can also be read as deriving from a loss of faith in the sacred, in the light of which the existence of moral absolutes is called into question, thus necessitating their emphatic assertion through such hyperbolic language.61 This reasserts the primary significance of the ethical drama which is the site of the novel’s protest against social injustice. Barbara enacted the divinely ordained obedience of a Christian wife towards her husband when she silently accepted her fate and refused to testify against him. Thus her Christianity, though it has been her salvation, is at the same time an internalization of patriarchal values used to entrap women. In his well-known essay on realism of 1853, Ebner’s contemporary Theodor Fontane (1819–98) expressly excludes from realism ‘das nackte Wiedergeben alltäg­ lichen Lebens, am wenigsten seines Elends und seiner Schattenseiten’ (‘the naked reproduction of everyday life and in particular its misery and its dark side’).62 Among Ebner’s close circle, her friend Betty Paoli was also uncomfortable with Ebner’s representation in fiction of the harsh nature of urban life for the poor, including specifically in her story ‘Die Großmutter’ analysed above.63 The taboo on the representation of social questions runs deep in German poetic realism, whose literature participated in the preservation of the fragile political order of an age marked by fear of revolution.64 Fontane points out that it is important not to confuse misery with realism, and implies that emotive images of proletariat suffering are tendentious because they all too easily become sensationalist. Ebner refuses to look away from such social deprivation and also attempts to confront her readers’ prejudices about those who suffer poverty. While this involves an engagement with potentially tendentious images, her works’ realism lies not simply in the depiction of the material conditions, but rather in an inner truth, something inherent in the way such conditions are experienced or interpreted — Fontane indeed suggests that this is the true character of realism in his essay of 1853. Ebner’s representation of social deprivation succeeds, I would argue, because it is characterized precisely by a fascination with the truth that lies in how subjects experience social conditions — as Martin Swales suggests in an essay on realism — rather than merely a representation of material culture.65 This fascination with the psychological enables Ebner not only to look at social questions from the vantage point of different protagonists, but also to engage directly with the readers’ expectations and preconceived ideas. Without tendentiousness or sensationalism, Ebner’s fiction awakens readerly sympathy with her protagonists which reaches across boundaries of class, while at the same time challenging those patriarchal authorities in society whose lack of sympathy places a brake on social reform. Notes to Chapter 1 1. See Karlheinz Rossbacher, Literatur und Liberalismus: Zur Kultur der Ringstrassenzeit in Wien (Vienna: Dachs, 1992). 2. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Meine Kinderjahre: Biographische Skizzen, 2nd edn (Berlin: Paetel, 1907), p. 114.

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3. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher, ed. by Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel, 6 vols (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1989–97), II, p. 315 (Anhang, 1874) (hereafter Tagebücher). 4. See Ferrel Rose, The Guises of Modesty: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Female Artists (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994) and Eda Sagarra, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and the Tradition of the Catholic Enlightenment’, in The Austrian Enlightenment and its Aftermath, Austrian Studies, 2, ed. by Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), pp. 117–31. 5. See for example Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘Er laßt die Hand küssen’, Neue Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten (Berlin: Paetel, 1886), and Eda Sagarra, ‘Herr-Diener-Konstellationen in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs Erzählung “Er läßt die Hand küssen” ’, in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Ein Bonner Symposion zu ihrem 75. Todestag, ed. by K.K. Polheim (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1992), pp. 229–37. 6. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. x. 7. See Martin Swales, ‘ “Neglecting the Weight of the Elephant...”: German Prose Fiction and European Realism’, Modern Language Review, 83 (1988), 882–94. 8. Helen Chambers, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Satire, Physical Comedy, Irony, and Deeper Meaning’, Humour and Irony in Nineteenth-Century German Women’s Writing: Studies in Prose Fiction 1840–1900 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007), pp. 91–124. Marie von EbnerEschenbach comments ‘Was liegt dem rechten Künstler ferner, Roheit oder Sentimentalität?’ (‘what is further from the true artist, vulgarity or sentimentality?’: Tagebücher, V, p. 83 (Anhang 1898). See also Chambers, ‘Humour and Irony’, p. 117 and Charlotte Woodford, ‘Realism and Sentimentalism in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar’, Modern Language Review, 101 (2006), 151–66, which makes the case that some sentimental or melodramatic tropes in the novel Unsühnbar facilitate Ebner’s controversial exploration of adultery from the point of view of the female victim of society’s moral double standards. 9. See Ulrike Tanzer, Frauenbilder im Werk Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1997), and R. C. Ockenden, ‘Unconscious Poesy?: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s ‘Die Poesie des Unbewussten’, in Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, ed. by Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 36–46. 10. See Tagebücher, II, p. 352 (27 June 1875); or Tagebücher, VI, p. 251 (17 Oct. 1911). See also Klostermaier, Victory, pp. 180–81. 11. Herbert Zeman, ‘Ethos und Wirklichkeitsdarstellung — Gedanken zur literaturgeschichtlichen Position Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs’, in Des Mitleids tiefe Liebesfähigkeit: Zum Werk der Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ed. by Joseph Strelka (Berne: Lang, 1997), pp. 111–18. 12. The reception of Ebner’s works was from the outset informed by such gendered preconceptions, as Susanne Kord has shown: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Letzte Chancen: Vier Einakter von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ed. and intro. by Susanne Kord (London: MHRA, 2005), p. 8. 13. Linda Kraus Worley, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of an Austrian Icon: The Reception of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as a Geopolitical Case Study’, Modern Austrian Literature, 41 (2008), issue 2, 19–39 (p. 23). 14. Letter from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach to Theo Schücking (the daughter of Lewin Schücking, a close friend of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff ), 10 November 1882, in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Briefwechsel mit Theo Schücking: Frauenleben im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Edda Polheim (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2001), letter 4/E, p. 13. 15. See Helmut Brandt, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach und die “Deutsche Rundschau” ’, in Die österreichische Literatur: Ihr Profil von der Jahrhundertwende bis zur Gegenwart (1880–1980) (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1989), II, pp. 1001–15, and Doris M. Klostermaier, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: The Victory of a Tenacious Will (Riverside, CA: Ariadne, 1997), pp. 154–55 (hereafter Victory). 16. Peter Pfeiffer, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Tragödie, Erzählung, Heimatfilm (Tubingen: Narr Francke, 2008). 17. Rossbacher sees Ebner as ‘kritikergeschädigt’ (Literatur und Liberalismus, p. 108), and examines Ebner’s sensitivity to positive and negative comments on and reviews of her works (see pp. 366–67).

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18. Die Disokuren. Literarisches Jahrbuch des ersten allgemeinen Beamten-Vereines der österreichischenungarischen Monarchie ran from 1872 for the entertainment and education of the Austrian Assoc­ iation of Civil Servants (Beamtenverein), founded in 1865. See Ferdinand von Saar, Kritische Texte und Deutungen, ed. by Karl Konrad Polheim, VI: Ginevra, ed. by Stefan Schröder (Tubingen: Niemeyer 1996), pp. 116–17. Die Freiherren von Gemperlein was published in Dioskuren, 8 (1879). Ebner’s Krambambuli was published there in 1883. 19. Unpublished letter from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach to Betty Paoli, 17 Aug 1878. Wienbibliothek, HIN 48383, 3r. 20. In Tagebücher, II, p. 567, Ebner reports that it had been rejected by four publications. See Klostermaier, Victory, p. 149. However, its inclusion in 1883 in Paul Heyse’s Neuer Deutscher Novellenschatz made its reputation as one of Ebner’s most widely known stories. See Peter C. Pfeiffer, ‘Geschlecht, Geschichte, Kreativität: Eine neue Beurteilung der Schriften Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs’, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 120 (2001), 73–89 (p. 76). 21. Unpublished letter from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach to Betty Paoli, 3 September 1878, Wienbibliothek, HIN 48386. 22. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘Die Großmutter’, Erzählungen (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1875), pp. 269–78. 23. Adalbert Stifter, ‘Vorrede’, Bunte Steine, in Gesammelte Werke in sechs Bänden, III (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1959), pp. 7–15 (p. 10). 24. Enno Lohmeyer, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach als Sozialreformerin (Königstein im Taunus: Helmer, 2002), p. 10. 25. Günter Häntzschel suggests that many women’s novels are characterized by an excess of sentimentality as a consequence of women’s lack of education, their isolation and limited knowledge of foreign cultures and political processes (‘Das ist die konsequente Folge der reduzierten weiblichen Schulbildung und der späteren Abgeschlossenheit, der fehlenden Kenntnisse von fremden Kulturen und politischen Vorgängen’), Günter Häntzschel, ‘Die Waffen nieder! Bertha von Suttner’s Antikriegsroman: Zur Poetik und Ideologie der Frauenliteratur’, in Poetik und Geschichte. Viktor Žmegač zum 60. Geburtstag, ed by Dieter Borchmeyer (Tubingen: Niemeyer 1989), pp. 102–17 (p. 107). Such a statement leaves out the extent to which fiction, especially commercial fiction, responds to public tastes, as well as shaping it; moreover, for many authors the sentimental discourse was a deliberate literary strategy. 26. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Gesammelte Werke in drei Bänden. I: Das Gemeindekind. Novellen, Aphorismen (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1956), p. 640. See B. J. Kenworthy, ‘Ethical Realism: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar’, German Life and Letters, 41 (1988), pp. 479–87. 27. See Karl Konrad Polheim, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach — neu zu entdecken: am Beispiel ihrer Erzählung “Der Muff ” ’, Jahrbuch des freien deutschen Hochstifts (1997), 235–67, and Chambers, Humour and Irony, pp. 112–14. 28. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘Der Muff ’, in Die schönsten Erzählungen — Neue Folge (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1960), pp. 176–85 (p. 176). 29. Ebner-Eschenbach, Der Muff, p. 177. 30. Tagebücher, III, p. 712 (appendix 1887). 31. Ebner-Eschenbach, Der Muff, p. 180. 32. See also Rossbacher, Literatur und Liberalismus, p. 121 and p. 371. 33. Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 120. 34. See Sarah Colvin, ‘Dancing Through the (Next) Minefield, or How and Why Should we Read the Stories of Women Prisoners?’, German Life and Letters, 67 (2014). 35. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, ‘Die Resel’, in Dorf- und Schloßgeschichten, Neue Dorf- und Schloß­ geschichten, Zwei Komtessen (Leipzig: Fikent, [1928]) [=Hafis Ausgabe], pp. 130–47. 36. Sagarra, ‘Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’, p. 120. 37. Klostermaier, ‘Not recommended for Catholic Libraries’, pp. 165–66. 38. On Das tägliche Leben see Charlotte Woodford, ‘Suffering and Domesticity: The Subversion of Sentimentalism in Three Stories by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 47–61. 39. See Reinhard Thum, ‘Parental Authority and Childhood Trauma: An Analysis of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s “Die erste Beichte” ’, Modern Austrian Literature, 19:2 (1986), 15–31.

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40. Doris M. Klostermaier, ‘ “Not Recommended for Catholic Libraries:” Marie von EbnerEschenbach and the Turn-of-the-Century Catholic Revival Movement’, in German Life and Letters, 53 (2000), 162–77 (p. 163). 41. Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher, V, p.180. 42. Ebner-Eschenbach’s reports acquaintances’ objections to her treatment of the peasant class in Das Gemeindekind. The poet Marie von Najmájer reportedly saw little interest in depictions of peasants (Tagebücher, III, pp. 658–59, 11 May 1887). The philosopher Helene Druskowitz claimed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer that Ebner’s choice of material and subjects alienates him; he would be psychologically incapable of treating similar themes (‘meine Wahl der Stoffe und Personen befremde ihn, er selbst wäre psychologisch unfähig ähnliche Themen zu behandeln’), Tagebücher, III, p.669, 23 June 87. Ebner continues with her own commentary: ‘Er achtet den Bauer, den Dienenden, den Arbeiter gleich dem Vieh’ (ibid: ‘he thinks of peasants, servants and workers as like cattle’). 43. Minna Kautsky, ‘Das Gemeindekind’, Die neue Zeit, 6 (1888), issue 9, 403–16. 44. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Das Gemeindekind: Kritisch herausgegeben und gedeutet von Rainer Baasner (Bonn: Bouvier, 1983), pp. 338–39 [henceforth referred to in the body of the text as GK]; translated as Their Pavel, trans. by Lynne Tatlock (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008). 45. Klostermaier, Victory, p 189. 46. William Mackintire Salter, Die Religion der Moral: Vorträge gehalten in der Gesellschaft für moralische Kultur in Chicago, trans. by Georg Gizycki (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1885). 47. A letter from Ebner’s close friend and confidante Louise von François to the author Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from 26 November 1886 reports that Ebner had written in admiration of Salter, whose work she practically hoped would give rise to ‘a new world order’ (‘eine neue Weltordnung’) and had later sent François his book with the inscription: ‘Kein Philosoph, ein Prophet, dessen demütigste Jüngerin M.E’ (‘not a philosopher but a prophet whose most humble disciple is M.E.’). Quoted by Rainer Baasner in Ebner-Eschenbach, Das Gemeindekind, pp. 338–39, and also by Mechthild Alkemade, Die Lebens- und Weltanschauung der Freifrau Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Graz, Würzburg: Wächter, 1935), p. 229. This might be compared with Habrecht in Das Gemeindekind: ‘ich bin ein Jünger geworden [...] und ein neues Leben beginnt’ (GK, p. 122: ‘I’ve become a disciple and will begin a new life’). Ebner-Eschenbach’s diary entry for 15 November 1886 simply reads ‘Von Louise von François, üb[er] Salter’, Tagebücher, III, p. 609. 48. Villinger replied by saying that Ebner was already everything that Salter in his work could demand of a person (‘Sie sind ja das alles, was der Mensch in “Eine Religion der Moral” vom Menschen verlangt’), Unpublished letter by H. Villinger to Ebner-Eschenbach, 17 March 1888, quoted by Alkemade, p. 229, note 21. 49. ‘Von Herrn Gizycki Moralische Reden v. Salter’, Tagebücher, III, p. 774 (25 August 1889), ‘An Ida: Moralische Reden’, Tagebücher, III, p. 776 (5 Sept. 1889); and Ebner reports sending Prof Gizycki a copy of her Neue Erzahlungen, Tagebücher, III, p. 785 (15 Oct. 1889). Gizycki replies on 21 Oct 1889 (p. 787) and on the following day, 22 Oct 1889, sent her an essay by the feminist Helene Lange (ibid.). 50. Ebner comments ‘fertig mit dem Gemeindekind’, Tagebücher, III, p. 601 (29 Sept 1886); chapters one to nine were sent to the editor of Deutsche Rundschau, Julius Rodenberg, on 7 October 1886. 51. See also Bartell Michael Berg, ‘Nature and Environment in Nineteenth-Century Austrian Literature’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, 2009). Berg also argues for more attention to be paid to Ebner’s engagement with technological change and industrialization in Das Gemeindekind. http://digital.wustl.edu/e/etd/pdf/Berg_ wustl_0252D_10109.pdf [accessed 11/07/12] (Berg, p. 137). 52. Hamlet, I.3.55–81. 53. On the motto for Das Gemeindekind (p. 5), ‘George Sand. Histoire de ma vie. I. p. 268’, see George Sand, Œuvres autobiographiques, I, ed. by George Lubin (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970), p. 78, and Peter Pfeiffer, who suggests that Ebner provides the precise page reference along with her motto in order to indicate that the text is not simply a maxim but needs to be understood in the context of its position in Sand’s autobiography: the line which follows the phrase quoted in Das Gemeindekind points out that even novels which do not seem to attach

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any weight to political situations are nevertheless engaging with them as historical moments. Peter Pfeiffer, ‘Recht, Geschichte und Vaterlosigkeit: Das Gemeindekind (1887)’, in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, pp. 141–50. 54. Salter, p. 285. 55. Gabriele Reuter commented in her memoirs, for example, how on John Henry Mackay’s advice she avoided contact with Heyse when she lived in Munich in the early 1890s, calling him the idol of bourgeois society and a target of wild hatred among all literary revolutionaries (‘Heyse war das Ziel des wildesten Hasses aller Revolutionäre der Literatur’), Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), p. 428. 56. Paul Heyse, letter to Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 1 Nov 1887, quoted in Alkemade, pp. 302–03 (p. 303). 57. Božena (1876) remains loosely within the formula of the romance and ends with a happy family tableau, marking the bourgeoisification of the aristocracy through intermarriage with the middle classes, a frequent trope in liberal fiction, e.g. in E. Marlitt’s Goldelse (1866: Gold Elsie). Ebner notes in her diary that A. J. Mordtmann, editor of Deutsches Familienblatt, which in 1882 became Schorers Familienblatt, requested another novel from her for serialization there, in the style of Božena, Tagebücher, III (5 May 1881). See Rainer Baasner, ‘ “Armes Gemeindekind, Wirst Du noch?”: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Erzählung Das Gemeindekind im Lichte der Tagebücher Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs’, Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, 104 (1985), 554–65 (p. 559). 58. Pfeiffer, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, p. 149. 59. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 24–26. 60. See Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 134. and Bell, Sentimentalism, p. 124. 61. Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, p. 15. 62. Theodor Fontane, ‘Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848’, Deutsche Annalen zur Kenntniß der Gegenwart und Erinnerung an die Vergangenheit, 1 (1853), 353–77 (pp. 357–58), repr. in Realismus und Gründerzeit. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1848–1880, ed. by Max Bucher, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), II, pp. 98–101. 63. Tagebücher, II, p. 307 (29 Dec 1874). On the network of women writers around Ebner and their inf luence on her understanding of art, see Konstanze Fliedl, ‘Auch ein Beruf: “Realistische” Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. by Gisela Brinker-Gabler, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1988), II, pp. 69–85 (p. 73). 64. See also David Jackson, ‘Taboos in poetic realism’, in his Taboos in German Literature (Oxford: Berghahn, 1996), pp. 59–78. 65. See Swales, ‘ “Neglecting the Weight” ’.

Chapter 2

v

Political Literature and Pacifism: Minna Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof and Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! The Austrian writers Minna Kautsky (1837–1912) and Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) are perhaps better known for their politics than for their fiction. However, Kautsky, a former actress and the mother of the Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), was the most successful writer in the late nineteenth century of Socialist fiction and the leading German author of politically engaged novels.1 Suttner, whose name became synonymous with the early twentieth-century peace movement, first signalled her commitment to peace by writing the bestselling novel Die Waffen nieder! (1889: Lay Down Your Arms!).2 The publication of the novel coincided with the First International Peace Congress, held in Paris in June 1889. Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and Minna Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof (1881), with which it will be compared here, transform political discourses into art in order to communicate the ideological commitment of the authors to the wider readership. Suttner’s novel, which takes the form of a memoir, was given authenticity by rumours that it was a true story; the author’s ethical arguments were strengthened by the widespread and erroneous belief that the grief-stricken tale of the protagonist, Martha Althaus, drew on her own experiences. Yet as Nikolaus Wegemann argues, it is important to keep in mind that these texts are literature: through the works’ aesthetic discourse, complex questions are raised which prompt further ref lection on the political ideas themselves.3 The rhetorical devices, plot twists and symbolic structures of these two novels mark them out as artistic and carefully constructed. The novels are easy to read so that they can reach out to the widest readership. And while this admittedly creates a tension with the works’ status as art,4 the novels should not by any means be reduced to their message. Rather, it is more productive to ref lect on the particular contribution made by literary works as different from other forms of political writing. For Wegemann, such texts cast light on social relations in a very particular way, precisely because literature makes a contribution that no other text can equal (‘daß die Literatur uns etwas sagt, was kein anderer Text uns zu sagen vermag’).5 As the novelist Aharon Appelfeld suggests, with reference to the important contribution of art to remembering victims of the Holocaust: ‘art constantly challenges the process by which the individual person is

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reduced to anonymity’.6 These works emphasize strongly the impact of decisions taken in a political sphere on individuals and their families. They engage with the need to change social structures; however, the power of their ethical truths is related to the priority they give to the subjective experience of protagonists with whom readers can identify, while other discourses in the political sphere focus instead on the polity, the state, or the masses as a collective body. If the political text depends for its impact on readability, the representation of the experience of war poses particular challenges. How much of the violence of conf lict is it ethical to represent visually or in a written account? How different is a pacifist account of a realistic battle scene to one glorifying the same conf lict? The emotions of grief and loss, pain and suffering draw attention to the limitations of a realist text, since their representation remains metonymic: they only hint at the whole which is left to the reader’s imagination. Suttner’s novel combines vivid realistic representation of the field of combat and its human suffering with a sentimental discourse through which the ethical meaning of what she depicts is foregrounded. The affective power of her novel may seem out of place to a modern reader. Yet sentimentality in the nineteenth century was an important discourse, enabling readers to confront grief and come to terms with loss. Towards the end of Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959: The Tin Drum), a notorious bar offers visitors the opportunity to slice onions and thereby bring forth the tears which they have hitherto repressed. Such tears, for Grass, are an inadequate response to the magnitude of the horrors of the Second World War: they do not help foster a sense of responsibility or bring visitors any nearer to understanding their own involvement in the past. Nevertheless, that is precisely why the emotional response is so tempting as a form of escape. The nineteenth-century reader weeping over the many deaths in Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! may, in retrospect, seem overly self-indulgent and engaged in escapist entertainment. Yet the emotional response was an important way of making sense of events over which the reader had no power. It is necessary to think ourselves back into that earlier culture in order to do justice to the works which made such a significant contribution to the social and political issues of their time. The bloody fighting of the German wars of the late nineteenth century — Austria’s defeat in the Italian Wars of Unification in 1859, the war between Prussia and Denmark in 1864, the Brüderkrieg of 1866 which demonstrated the military supremacy of Prussia over Austria, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 — resulted in significant loss of life and provided the civilian population with a foretaste of mass casualties still to come in the First World War from 1914 to 1918. In his study of the literary treatment of the Austrian army in the nineteenth century, Ian Foster suggests that ‘the depiction of those bereaved by war’, such as in Die Waffen nieder!, was a rare theme in Austrian literature of the period.7 There is an important social taboo, he points out, ‘surrounding the personal suffering caused by war’.8 In the search for a language to confront the pain of such wars, sentimental tropes foregrounded the humanity of the victims of war, in particular through an emphasis on the continued emotional bond between the soldiers at the front and their families. A brief examination of a widely-read account of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 by the Swiss businessman Jean Henri Dunant (1828–1910) provides some examples

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of how a depiction of the connection between soldiers and their families enabled a contemporary criticism of soldiers’ treatment by the nations who had sent them into conf lict. On 24 June 1859 the Austrian army was defeated in northern Italy by the French troops of the Emperor Napoleon III, at the Battle of Solferino. This was the largest battle to take place on Western European soil since the Battle of Leipzig, known as the ‘Battle of the Nations’, at the climax of the Napoleonic Wars in 1813. At Solferino, the armies of France, Austria and the Italian states, numbering almost 300,000 men in total, were personally commanded by their monarchs for the last time in European history. Jean Henri Dunant, a civilian, had travelled there in the hope of meeting Napoleon III to discuss international trade. He did not expect to end up leading a humanitarian mission to bring water and medical treatment to thousands of survivors of a major battle. Dunant stepped in to co-ordinate the relief efforts in the small Italian town of Castiglione della Stiviere, six miles from Brescia, where dying soldiers were taken to local villagers’ homes; they also filled the churches in their hundreds and lined the streets on beds of straw. After a couple of years, Dunant had come to terms with his experience enough to write Un souvenir de Solférino (1862: A Memory of Solferino), depicting the appalling conditions in which he had found the dead and injured left on the battlefield, and the inadequacy of the treatment of soldiers in the makeshift hospitals, which he could testify had cost thousands of lives.9 Countless survivors, he argued, had been avoidably mutilated as limbs were amputated (without anaesthetic) when wounds went septic through their inadequate treatment in insanitary conditions. Dunant’s horrifying descriptions of what he witnessed had lasting resonance across Europe.10 The French novelist Edmond de Goncourt wrote that Dunant’s account of Solferino left him cursing war (‘avec le maudissement de la guerre’).11 Charles Dickens was highly affected, writing that Dunant narrates events ‘simply, touchingly and heartily’.12 Dickens translated much of Dunant’s work and published it in 1863 in All Year Round, claiming that it would be strange if the appeal for change were not answered by ‘multitudes of benevolent hearts’.13 From Dickens’s words, it is immediately evident that Dunant’s account combines factual reportage with emotive language that allows the extraordinary events to become more readable, since it locates them in an ethical discourse that provides a kind of interpretative framework. Dunant repeatedly emphasizes the humanity of the soldiers who have been injured or killed in Solferino by reminding the reader of their connection with civilian society. He juxtaposes the loving care shown to the men and boys within their families with the horrors of their dying hours. The men are no longer anonymous members of a national community, but acknowledged in their individual humanity: A son idolized by his parents, brought up and cherished for years by a loving mother who trembled with alarm over his slightest ailment; a brilliant officer, beloved by his family, with a wife and children at home; a young soldier who had left sweetheart or mother, sisters or old father, to go to war; all lie stretched in the mud and dust, drenched in their own blood! The handsome manly face is beyond recognition, for sword or shot has done its disfiguring work. The wounded man agonizes, dies and his dear body, blackened, swollen and hideous

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will soon be thrown just as it is into a half-dug grave, with only a few shovelfuls of lime and earth over it! The birds of prey will have no pity for those hands and feet when they protrude, as the wet earth dries, from the mound of dirt that is his tomb.14

In the extremes which are juxtaposed in this excerpt — ‘idolized’, ‘cherished’, ‘drenched in blood’, ‘swollen and hideous’ — is the power of the text as protest. Dunant attempts to combine the horrors he has observed with the difficult thought that every soldier’s death leaves a family in mourning. A connection between the family home and the horrors of the field hospitals is maintained through the physical presence of portraits or letters: The fear of dying unaided developed at this stage, even in soldiers who knew no fear [...]. One of their uppermost thoughts, when their pain was not too dreadful, was the recollection of their mothers, and the fear of the grief their mothers would feel when they heard what had become of them. On one young man’s body was found, hanging round his neck, a miniature of an old woman who was no doubt his mother. His left hand seemed still to be pressing the miniature against his heart.15

The image of the elderly woman, whose picture has been lovingly carried by the man throughout the campaign, stands in stark contrast to the youthful body of her dead son. Nature has been subverted: the bodies of tens of thousands of young men — some barely more than children — lie on the battlefield, while the mothers face an old age robbed of the comfort of their sons. One man’s last thought was the need for Dunant to send a letter to comfort his mother.16 Dunant’s memoir prompted the start of the movement which led to the signing in 1864 of the First Geneva ‘Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field’, and the founding of the International Red Cross. Bertha von Suttner’s protagonist Martha in Die Waffen nieder! praises Dunant’s campaigning work: she has read his memoir, calling it ‘ein herzzerreißender Jammerruf ’ (‘a heartrending cry of misery’), and has followed carefully his part in the foundation of the Red Cross (Waffen, 204). When Suttner wrote the novel she in fact believed Dunant to be dead, for after suffering bankruptcy in 1867 Dunant had retreated to a life of obscurity. But in the mid-1890s she made contact with Dunant and was instrumental in the growing public recognition of his contribution to international relations and his award of the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.17 Dunant hoped his memoir would convey ‘the horror of war’.18 The English poet Wilfred Owen, in his preface to poems written on the Western Front in the First World War, famously wrote: ‘My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity’.19 If Dunant’s realist descriptions of the makeshift field hospitals evoke horror, his descriptions of soldiers as sons, and his allusions to the grief of their mothers, awaken the readers’ pity for the fallen and their families. This theme is also vital in rousing the readers’ opposition to war in the novels of the Austrians Minna Kautsky and Bertha von Suttner. The paintings of the Russian artist Vasilii Vasil’evich Vereshchagin (1842–1904), who had seen active service in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), also had an important impact on contemporary representations of war. For Minna Kautsky,

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reviewing them for the Socialist journal Die Neue Zeit on their exhibition in Vienna, Vereshchagin’s pictures represented ‘eine schreckliche, bisher sorglich verhüllte Wahrheit: Die ganze Scheußlichkeit des modernen Kriegs’ (‘a terrible and up to now carefully concealed truth: the full atrocity of modern warfare’).20 Vereshchagin’s paintings were exhibited in Vienna and Berlin for the first time in 1881, where they were successful beyond all expectations.21 They returned for a second show in 1885, when Kautsky, reviewing them, felt they had enormous power to change social attitudes. In that second exhibition, Vereshchagin famously depicted British soldiers executing Indian protestors by tying them to the front of cannon, a practice used during the Indian Rebellion in 1857 (‘Blowing from Guns in British India’, 1884). Kautsky remarks of the British soldiers carrying out the executions: ‘Das sind keine Menschen mehr, das sind Maschinen’ (‘Those are not people any more, they are machines’, 35). Furthermore, she saw Vereshchagin as liberating himself from tradition, to paint ‘die Natur, die Wirklichkeit, die Wahrheit’ (‘nature, reality, truth’, 28). Kautsky describes Vereshchagin’s painting ‘After the Attack’, which drew on his experience of the Battle of Plevna (1877) and emphasized the inadequate medical care available for the injured: In ‘Nach dem Angriff ’ sehen wir einen Verbandplatz, wo die Menge der Ver­ wundeten so groß ist, daß sie nicht untergebracht werden können. Und nun regnet es, und die schutzlosen Verwundeten schwimmen förmlich im Schmutz und Wasser und Blut. Die Aerzte tun, was sie können, die barmherzigen Schwestern suchen mit bewundernswerther Aufopferung das Elend dieser Armen zu lindern, aber die Leidenden sind zu viele. Sie bleiben ohne Verband, ohne Nahrung, ihrer Qual, der Verzweifelung anheimgegeben, die Meisten schon den Tod in den schmerzverzerrten Zügen. [In ‘After the Attack’ we see a relief station where the mass of the wounded is so vast that they cannot be accommodated. It starts to rain and the unprotected wounded f loat in filth, water and blood. Doctors do what they can. The charitable sisters try to alleviate the misery of these poor men with admirable self-sacrifice but there are just too many who are suffering. They lie without bandages, without food, they have abandoned themselves to their torment and despair and in most of their faces, contorted with pain, you can already see death.]

In the foreground of the painting sits a young man with bandaged arms. Kautsky points out that in his memoirs, Vereshchagin describes how the young soldier had been found with his mother’s letters on him, which bore witness to her tender concern for her beloved son. Again, in the representation of the suffering of war, mothers on the home front are evoked indirectly in the picture through this commentary on the painting. The injured, denied the help they need, are far from the comforts of home, and the army has failed to provide them with the assistance they deserve for having served their country. In her review of Vereshchagin’s paintings, Kautsky ref lects on the relationship between politics and art. She points out that his works represent a particularly provocative viewpoint (Tendenz), especially in their rejection of beauty (‘das Schöne’) in favour of reality (‘Realismus’). In her opinion, art does not consist ‘in

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der Illusion, in der Verklärung des Wirklichen’ (‘in illusion, in the transfiguration of reality’, 36). Furthermore, Kautsky claims, no artistic creation is ever truly without a particular standpoint, yet the artist’s purpose is only worthy of comment when an artist’s own worldview is controversial in the eyes of others. Kautsky admires Vereshchagin so much because he exposes as untruths the illusions behind conventional thinking and generates a consciousness of the need for change. Vereshchagin’s art does not make the viewer dream, she says, but exhorts him to act (‘zum Handeln anzuregen’, Kautsky’s italics, 36). Kautsky finishes her review of Vereshchagin’s work with a statement about the meaning of art for Socialism: ‘Die Kunst ist ihm etwas echt Soziales, nichts Göttliches, Übermenschliches, sondern Faktor und Symptom zugleich der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung’ (‘art, for him, is something truly social, not divine or transcendent but a factor and at the same time also a symptom of social development’, 36). For Kautsky, the purpose of art is not to cast light on the meaning of life a metaphysical context, but rather to ref lect on the social circumstances which have informed its creation, and, importantly, to contribute to the process of social change. Kautsky’s words, dated November 1885, and published in January 1886, echo the sentiments expressed by Engels in praise of Stefan vom Grillenhof, in his wellknown letter to Minna Kautsky of 26 November 1885. There Engels ref lects on the relationship between art and politics: da erfüllt auch der sozialistische Tendenzroman, nach meiner Ansicht, voll­ ständig seinen Beruf, wenn er durch treue Schilderung der wirklichen Verhält­ nisse die darüber herrschenden konventionellen Illusionen zerreißt, den Optimismus der bürgerlichen Welt erschüttert, den Zweifel an der ewigen Gültigkeit des Bestehenden unvermeidlich macht, auch ohne selbst direkt eine Lösung zu bieten.22 [Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instills doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved.23]

Engels praises Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof in the same letter for its masterly portrayal of the peasants, who come to life in the novel as definite individuals. He preferred Stefan, he points out, to Kautsky’s later novel Die Alten und die Neuen (1885: The Old and the New), which treats the life of salt-mine workers, regarding the political tendency of Stefan to be less overtly stated. While Engels, in his letter to Kautsky, expresses reservations about art which has too direct a political purpose, Kautsky’s reception of Vereshchagin’s paintings, almost as if in response to Engels’ letter, suggests that overtly political art also has an important role to play, and that no art is without perspective. She emphasizes strongly the revolutionary potential of art to challenge the complacency of bourgeois society by exposing hidden truths and arousing an understanding of individuals’ potential to bring about change in social and economic relations. And indeed in Stefan vom Grillenhof Kautsky’s Socialist perspective strongly informs her critique of the impact of war on proletariat families.

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War and Socialism in Minna von Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof (1881) Minna Kautsky’s novels are particularly important as works of political fiction, and had a lasting impact on the development of the genre of Socialist realism. Just as the romances of the bestselling author Eugenie John, who published as E. Marlitt, contributed in no small measure to the success of the weekly family magazine Die Gartenlaube, so Kautsky’s novels were sought after by editors of Socialist journals (Karl Kautsky commented that she was known in the movement as the ‘red Marlitt’).24 They reached a wide readership, in particular among the workingclasses.25 Stefan vom Grillenhof, the first of Kautsky’s novels, was initially published in the Socialist journal Die Neue Welt, which provided moral and improving fiction, informed by a commitment to Socialist values. It was also a sufficiently good read to compete with the Kolportage novels, the German equivalent of the English penny dreadful or American pulp fiction, which were peddled in sequels featuring lurid and sensationalist plots.26 In 1884, Die Neue Welt was described by the Oesterreichischer Arbeiterkalender as ‘das einzige Unterhaltungsblatt, welches man dem Arbeiter mit gutem Gewissen empfehlen kann und welches die Schundliteratur aus der Hütte des Proletariers zu verdrängen bestimmt ist’ (‘the only magazine that you can recommend to a worker with a clear conscience and which is destined to replace trashy literature in the huts of the Proletariat’).27 Kautsky became president in 1886–87 of the newly formed Austrian Association for Women Writers and Artists.28 She was friends with Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), another founder member of the association. However, the overt political tendency of Kautsky’s novels and their initial publication in left-wing journals made mainstream publishers reluctant to be associated with them.29 Her later novel Victoria (1884), for example, is a factory novel depicting proletarian workers in a cotton mill.30 Her short story Ein Maifesttag (1907: A May Day Celebration) takes place on 1 May, which the Second International at their workers’ congress in 1889 instituted as a day of protest, and depicts a clash between Socialists and the reactionaries.31 Libraries rarely acquired Kautsky’s works, and as a result few copies remain in existence, though some are now available in digital form. Stefan vom Grillenhof (1881) combines a romantic plot with a socially-critical treatment of the fate of working-class infantrymen in the Battle of Königgratz in 1866.32 Königgratz, also known as the Battle of Sadowa, finally settled the struggle between Prussia and Austria for hegemony in the years preceding German unification in 1871. Around 14,000 Austrian soldiers and around 2,000 Prussian soldiers were killed or unaccounted for after the battle. These figures might seem small when compared, for example, to the 250,000 German casualties at the First Battle of the Marne from 5 to 12 September 1914, one of the most costly battles of the First World War for the German army. Nonetheless the significant loss of life on the Austrian side in 1866 sent shock waves through Austrian society, especially since it was not merely a result of Prussia’s superior firepower, but also because Austria had failed to sign the Geneva Convention, so its medical staff were treated as combatants and unable safely to bring the injured from the battlefield. The plot of Stefan vom Grillenhof is sufficiently unknown to require a brief

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summary, from which its anti-aristocratic tendency will be immediately clear as well as the importance of the theme of mothering. In the opening pages of Stefan vom Grillenhof, a teenage countess, Bertha, is seduced (offstage) by a charismatic French Jesuit priest. She retreats to her family’s summer residence in the sleepy fictional lakeside town of Seekirchen, near Lindau, to bear a child, and, relinquishing all contact, has a servant hide it with a family in the mountains nearby. The child grows up known as Nandl. Her adoptive family’s natural daughter soon dies and Nandl is forever resented by her adoptive mother, Katharina Huber, for surviving in her place. Bertha is later told that it was her own daughter who died; and Nandl has no knowledge of her heritage. The reader, of course, guesses it straight away. Nandl becomes a wild and fearless girl, befriended in Lindau by a miller and social democrat sympathizer Stefan (who secretly publishes Socialist propaganda and supplies it to the workers), and his mentor, the atheist anatomy professor Wüst, who has recently written a pamphlet ‘On Darwin’. When, at the start of the novel’s main action in 1866, Professor Wüst turns out to be the uncle of Miss Valerie, a guest of Countess Bertha’s family, all social classes are brought unexpectedly into close contact, and the scene is set for eventual recognition and revelation. The creation of suspense and the suspension of recognition, in conjunction with a well-constructed romantic plot, are crucial to the effect of the novel on the reader. Valerie, despite much snobbery and prejudice, falls in love with Stefan, thus delaying Stefan’s inevitable realization of his real romantic destiny with his childhood friend Nandl. The reader’s superior knowledge of Nandl’s parentage frequently gives rise to moments of irony: Bertha, her birth mother, for example, on first meeting Nandl, exclaims, ‘es ist unglaublich, daß es Mütter gibt, die ihre Kinder in dieser Weise vernachlässigen’ (‘it is unbelievable that there are mothers who neglect their children in this way’, Stefan, I, 98). In Stefan vom Grillenhof the theme of mothering enables Kautsky to draw attention to social inequalities, through the juxtaposition of two illegitimate children: first Nandl and later Stefan’s best friend Franz, son of the unmarried seamstress Lene. Countess Bertha has renounced every claim to her maternal rights and destroyed the carefully chosen healthy peasant family in which Nandl was placed, since the vast sum of gold which Nandl brought with her has been turned into alcohol, destroying the parents’ marriage. When Bertha eventually realizes that Nandl is her daughter (Stefan, II, 225), she immediately tries to turn her into an aristocrat, first wanting to send her to a convent, and later attempting to engineer her marriage to Hans, Nandl’s cousin. Nandl repeatedly rejects Bertha with hostility. The revelation of the aristocratic origins of a middle-class girl was a common trope in women’s romantic fiction. In Marlitt’s Goldelse (1866: Gold Elsie), the nobility is associated with corruption, sexual incontinence and abuse of power, and the eponymous heroine wants nothing of her newly discovered aristocratic heritage.33 In Marlitt’s Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell (1868: The Old Maid’s Secret), Felicitas or Fee, the daughter of a noble woman who married a circus performer, refuses contact with her mother’s noble family and identifies with the bourgeois values of hard work, sobriety and service to the community embodied in her doctor husband. In Marlitt, these themes point to the need for the embourgeoisement of the

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aristocracy, and the importance of middle-class values for the shaping of the nation. In Kautsky’s novels, it is now the proletariat who embody hard work and progress, while the middle-class Valerie turns out to be a shallow social climber after all. When the strong arms of Stefan rescue Valerie, lost in the forest at night, she falls in love with him immediately. But seeing him again at the mill in his wooden clogs, Valerie is ashamed of herself (Stefan, I, 140). Stefan later proudly puts her straight: ‘Ich werde immer arbeiten müssen, immer! Ob so oder so, das ist alles eins, [...] jeder muß das, jeder, der für sich oder andere etwas Nützliches zu stande bringen will’ (‘I will always have to work, always! Whether in this way or that, it is all the same ... everyone must work, everyone who wants to achieve something important for himself or for others’, Stefan, I, 205). The Darwinist Professor Wüst is such an eccentric figure that he is allowed some extra licence to speak his mind and express some of Kautsky’s Socialist commitment: ‘gerade im Volke schlummern die herrlichsten Kräfte, und hier zeigt sich eine Frische und Originalität, welche die in unseren Schulen Gedrillten, den höheren Ständen Angehörenden nur höchst selten bewahren können’ (‘It is precisely among the common people that the most marvellous energy is dormant and that there is a freshness and originality which is rarely preserved among those who have been drilled in our schools and belong to the higher ranks of society’, Stefan, I, 86). The other illegitimate child of the novel is Stefan’s friend Franz, with whom he publishes a Socialist newspaper. Franz’s mother has suffered abuse and social exclusion as a result of Franz’s father dying before they were able to marry. She has worked hard as a washerwoman and brought up Franz to be respectable. Now he has started work as a carpenter and is able to support her. As a sign of her pride in his achievements, she takes him to the High Mass, populated by the great and the good in their finest clothes, rather than the early Mass, attended by the poor (Stefan, I, 196). He is her pride and joy. But Lene is terrified of losing Franz, because she knows he is of an age to enlist. According to law, a widow with an only son is protected from losing him to the army, because it is recognized that he is her only support. For Lene, there is no such protection. She does not have a widow’s rights, though her situation is as fragile as any widow’s and Franz is all that will keep her from poverty in her old age. Franz asks: ‘Kann man einem Sohn zwingen, seine Mutter zu verlassen, die auf der weiten Welt nichts hat als ihn’ (‘Can you force a son to leave his mother who has nothing in the whole world except him’, Stefan, I, 231). But within the community, there is prejudice against both Lene and Franz. On seeing Stefan, the officers exclaim: ‘Das ist der Demokrat’ (‘That’s the democrat’, Stefan, I, 225), and although they should declare him unfit, they take him out of spite. Franz suffers a similar fate. The officers need cannon fodder: ‘Man braucht ungeheures Menschenmaterial’ (‘We need an enormous quantity of human material’, Stefan, II,1). Franz does not even make it to Königgratz. In one village where the regiment rests, a mother shows Franz kindness and weeps over his sore feet. She treats him as she would her own son, in the hope that somewhere else, her son is being shown a similar kindness (II, 5). Her mother’s love is transferred onto a surrogate, which helps her bear the powerlessness she feels at her son being taken from her. By the

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time Franz’s regiment reaches German soil, the soldiers have marched for days in the burning June heat. They have no water, and Franz collapses and dies of heat exhaustion (II, 11). His death before the battle has even started emphasizes the wastage of life to no military gain. The same officer who declared him fit to enlist now opines: ‘Ganz untauglich zum Kriegsdienst, nicht im Stande, die geringste Strapaze auszuhalten ... Kein Verlust übrigens für die Armee (‘Completely unsuited to war service, not capable of enduring the slightest hardship ... But no loss for the army’, II, 12). Stefan retorts ‘Vielleicht einer für die Menschheit’ (‘Perhaps he is a loss to humanity’, II, 12). The cynical attitude of the officers to the ordinary working-class soldiers greatly heightens the impact of Kautsky’s critique of the cost to the nation of its military ambitions. When Franz and Stefan are compelled to enlist, Nandl urges them to resist conscription and instead go on the run. It was illegal in Austria to exhort men to dodge the draft. But Nandl’s childlike naivety opens up a debate about military service in which even the radical Professor Wüst is forced to explain that no one has freedom of will in this matter. Nandl, ref lecting on the numbers of those enlisting who are likely to be dead within the month, expresses the injustice of it: ‘das ist doch unrecht, es ist grausam’ (‘but that is unfair, it is barbarous’, I, 214). Nandl tries to persuade the mothers outside the recruiting office in Lindau that they should take collective action against the war and refuse to allow their sons to take part. She is shocked by their passivity: ‘Hunderttausende von Müttern geben ihre Kinder hin, und sie haben nichts als Tränen, und sie wissen nichts anderes zu thun, als die Hände zu ringen’ (‘Hundreds of thousands of mothers are giving away their sons and they have nothing but tears, they cannot think of anything to do but to wring their hands’, I, 232). The case for popular opposition to war bears traces of the argument of Kant’s Zum ewigen Frieden (1795: Perpetual Peace), where Kant suggests that a democracy would offer some protection against war, because popular sentiment would always oppose war unless directly in the country’s defence.34 As a ‘child of the forest’, Nandl is an almost picaresque figure, capable through her marginalization of expressing freely ideas which others would repress through selfcensorship. In an echo of Marx’s economic theories — which saw the exploitation of the proletariat through the expropriation of the profits of their labour — Nandl suggests that war is another form of exploitation: denn die, die der Krieg übrig gelassen und denen er nichts geschadet hat, die bekommen den Lohn, aber die, die umkommen sind, die, die gelitten haben, die haben nichts davon, die armen Teufel, garnichts! Ach ja, ihr Lohn sind die Thränen, der Jammer und die Verzweifelung derjenigen, die sie geliebt haben (I, 214). [since those spared and unscathed by war reap its rewards, but those who have been killed, those who have suffered, those poor wretches have none of it, nothing! I tell you, their reward is the tears, lamentation and despair of those who loved them.]

In war, people are used as a means to an end: those who bear the greatest sacrifice receive the smallest payment. Lene only learns of Franz’s death when the priest proclaims it from the pulpit, with no pity for the washerwoman; it is implied that he

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perceives it as a fitting punishment for Lene’s supposed transgression. Lene cannot survive her loss; she immediately perishes of a heart attack (II, 68). By highlighting the soldiers’ powerlessness against the newly developed machinery of war, Kautsky draws attention to how war in the late nineteenth century served the ambitions of newly industrialized nations. In Eric Hobsbawm’s words, it was an integral part of the ‘global capitalist expansion’.35 While Stefan marches towards Königgratz, his regiment meets defeated Austrians returning from the Battle of Skalitz (28 June 1866). Prussia, which had industrialized more swiftly than Austria, employed the new technological invention of breech-loading needle guns, while the Austrians fired older, musket-style muzzle-loading rif les. The soldiers warn of the superior Prussian firepower. No amount of bravery counts against the terrible effects of the needle guns, they say, and tears run down their cheeks as they ref lect on their powerlessness: ‘Gegen das Zündnadelgewehr ist jeder Muth vergeblich’ (‘Every act of courage is as nothing in the face of the needle guns’, II, 17). The men are cannon fodder indeed. Kautsky emphasizes the human side of battle by providing the defeated men with a voice, while drawing attention to the barbarity of sending infantrymen into the firing line against such modern weapons. At the Battle of Königgratz, Stefan saves Hans’s life by rescuing him from the battle field, and is then injured and lies unconscious, wounded by a grenade in his right arm (II, 37). By summoning his last strength to show some sign of life, he avoids being buried alive and is taken to the field hospital, where, despite his hasty clandestine engagement to Valerie before leaving for War, his thoughts are only for Nandl. His wound is sufficiently serious for it to require amputation. Identifying with Stefan, the narrator expresses horror at this mutilation of the hero’s body: ‘Das Schreckliche war geschehen, das Jammervollste, was einen Menschen treffen kann; er war ein Krüppel, ein elender Krüppel sein Leben lang...’ (‘The most terrible thing had happened, the most pitiful thing that can befall a man: he was a cripple, a miserable cripple and would be for his whole life...’, II, 44). Stefan sees his own arm and fingers in a pile of human body parts, still wearing the ring which Valerie gave him, in a grotesque anticipation of their separation. Stefan has no sense of self-worth, and subsequent humiliation when he later fails the school-leaving examination and is not permitted to study at university compounds his mental anguish. Valerie rejects him instantly because of his disability, and he is only saved from suicide thanks to Nandl’s intuitive understanding of his despair. Stefan even considers going to live in the residence for military invalids in Vienna (II, 239), the only form of state help available as a reward for his sacrifice. But Nandl provides Stefan with a purpose, through her market garden, which she runs as a cooperative. Together with her comrades (‘Genossen’), she grows f lowers for sale and sends them by train to rich customers in Salzburg. The profits from the garden are divided equally among all participants (II, 248). Even Countess Bertha’s nephew Hans, who was described from the start of the novel as altogether too free-thinking and casual for the army, abandons his commission and joins the cooperative, cutting off all links with friends in the aristocracy (II, 253). Although the members of Nandl’s cooperative perform different roles, some of them making use of science and technology, others sheer hard work, all of them contribute to the

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common good and they take an equal share in the profits. In typical aristocratic marriage politics, Bertha tries to make her nephew Hans marry her estranged daughter Nandl, but on the revelation that she is his cousin, Hans is delighted to welcome her into his family and allow her to marry Stefan, something the reader had anticipated from the start of the novel. Kautsky contrasts the army’s casual disdain for the life of its proletarian volunteers with the validation of their labour within a future Socialist state. It is not merely through his love of Nandl but through purposeful work that Stefan regains his dignity. Kautsky’s sensitive treatment of the theme of war and its cost to the individual emphasizes the humanity of the working man as soldier. Through the theme of mothering, the novel raises questions about the ethics of military strategies which require mass sacrifice of lives and draws attention to their impact on the home front. Moreover, by contrasting a devoted single mother with a feckless aristocratic one, Kautsky interrogates conventional concepts of morality. Finally, work in the market garden provides meaningful activity and a sense of connection, contrasting the exploitation of the proletariat in the army, where individual soldiers are made even more powerless by the new technologies involved in modern warfare. Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder!: Pacifism and the Power of Sentiment When Suttner’s novel Die Waffen nieder! was translated into Swedish in 1890, a review in Stockholms Dagblad drew parallels with the paintings of Vasilii Vereshchagin, whose impact on Kautsky was discussed above: Wie Wereshchagins künstlerisch ausgeführte, aufrührende Bilder vom Felde des Todes, so können auch diese schrecklichen, meisterlich mit Worten gemalten Kriegsbilder, für uns den praktischen Nutzen haben, daß sie uns die Schrecken und das Elend des Krieges lebhaft vor Augen stellen.36 [Like Vereshchagin’s moving images of the field of war, completed with such artistry, these terrible images of war, masterfully sketched with words, hold for us the practical function of bringing the horror and distress of war to life before our very eyes.]

In Die Waffen nieder! Suttner indeed sketches as vivid and as horrifying a reminder of the miseries of war as Vereshchagin had achieved with his visual representations. Furthermore, just as in Dunant’s description of Solferino and Vereshchagin’s exhibition, the impact of Suttner’s novel resides not merely in its representation of warfare but in its vividly naturalistic representations of the aftermath of war, including the hospital field station and the defeated on the battlefield, which made a deep impression on her readers precisely because it was a view of war not usually reported to civilians. Suttner visited Vereshchagin’s exhibition in Vienna in 1881 and was moved by the experience.37 In Marthas Kinder (1903: Martha’s Children), the sequel to Die Waffen nieder!38 (a novel which lacks the fast-paced plot of the earlier work), paintings by Vereshchagin hang in the study belonging to Martha’s son Rudolf. Suttner also devotes a section to Vereshchagin in her memoirs, describing the pain and bitterness which she felt informed his painting ‘The Apotheosis of War’ (1871), depicting

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ravens encircling a pyramid of human skulls. Suttner does not provide dates for the two Vereshchagin exhibitions which she attended in Vienna (presumably those of 1881 and 1885 mentioned above), and she gives the impression that she was, by the time of the exhibition, already a well-known pacifist, able to greet Vereshchagin as an equal, and receive a personal invitation to have a tour of the exhibition. She recalls that it was on the occasion of the second exhibition (1885) that she asked him to write something for the journal Die Waffen nieder! (founded only in 1893). In fact, although he did write for Suttner’s journal, Vereshchagin was not against war of any kind on principle.39 In her memoirs, however, Suttner reproduces Vereshchagin’s account of his attempt, some months after the Battle of Plevna, to return to the battlefield where his brother had fallen to find his body. Vereshchagin tells how he found the battlefield covered in skeletons and skulls: Welcher von diesen war mein Bruder? Ich habe die Kleiderreste genau betrachtet, die Schädelknochen, die Augenhöhlen und ... Ich hielt es nicht aus — die Tränen f lossen mir in Strömen, und lange konnte ich dem lauten Weinen nicht Einhalt gebieten ....40 [Which of these was my brother? I inspected carefully the skulls, the eyesockets and ... I couldn’t cope any more — tears streamed from me and for a long time I could not stop my loud crying.]

Suttner points out in her memoir that Vereshchagin describes how, although he sketched the scene, he was incapable of producing the planned oil painting from his sketch because of the strength of the emotions provoked by remembering that day. In a similar way, Suttner’s protagonist Martha, after she journeys to the battlefield, ref lects in her memoir on the difficulty of communicating what she has learnt: Nicht wieder erzählen: das ware freilich das einfachste und verlockendste. Man schließt die Augen und wendet den Kopf ab, wenn gar zu Grauenhaftes sich erreignet — auch das Gedächtnis hat die Fähigkeit zu solchem Augenschließen. Wenn doch nichts mehr zu helfen ist — was läßt sich an der starren Vergangenheit ändern? Wozu sich und die andern mit dem Wühlen in dem Entsetzlichen quälen? (Die Waffen nieder!, 255). [Not to tell anyone: that would of course be the easiest and most tempting course. You shut your eyes and turn away when something too terrible happens — even your memory has the capacity to close the eyes in this way — if there is nothing to be done — what can you change about the fixed facts of the past? Why torment yourself and others by raking over something so atrocious?]

These two parallel statements treat the difficulty of remembering and narrating such horrifying events, while at the same time exhorting the reader not to look away. Vereshchagin’s words show his tearful response at the state of the battlefield with its unburied dead, among them most likely his brother. Suttner’s protagonist — for all the emotive power of her fictional memoir — emphasizes here not the emotional response but the compelling need to keep her emotions at one remove in order to be able to convey to the world an impression of what has been witnessed, a theme also echoed in the letters she receives from her husband at the front, who describes himself as like a camera, receiving impressions so that he can transmit the horrors to others (Waffen, 225).

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Die Waffen nieder! was the most important anti-war novel written in German until the publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel set in the First World War, Im Westen nichts Neues (1928: All Quiet on the Western Front). In 1892, on a lecture tour in Berlin, Suttner was introduced by the novelist Friedrich Spielhagen and read chapters from her work to an audience which included many leading names in the Berlin literary scene.41 Suttner had long made a living from fiction.42 In 1876, she eloped to marry Arthur von Suttner, in whose house she had been a governess. Writing supplemented Suttner’s income during the couple’s exile in the Caucasus, where an aristocratic acquaintance had offered some employment. They did not return to Austria until 1884. In 1876, Arthur von Suttner’s mother, in an attempt to separate Bertha, then Countess Kinsky, from her son, had helped Bertha secure a position in Paris as secretary to Alfred Nobel.43 Suttner only stayed a week but later rekindled her acquaintance with Nobel, who in the late 1880s was an inf luential member of the swiftly growing international peace movement, which emerged in response to rising diplomatic tensions as militarization grew across Western Europe. In the wake of the success of her novel, Suttner devoted her life to the work of the peace movement and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.44 The plot of Die Waffen nieder! contains ample melodrama. Countess Martha von Althaus loses her first husband in the Battle of Solferino. Widowed with a young son, her experiences turn her into an opponent of war. She recognizes a fellowtraveller in a disenchanted officer, Friedrich von Tilling, and marries him. Martha’s emotional turmoil at witnessing Tilling’s departure for the Second Schleswig War or Dano-Prussian War in 1864 is the cause of a stillbirth and a lengthy illness. Friedrich returns unscathed, only to fight again in 1866, from which conf lict he sends detailed eye-witness reports to Martha, describing with vivid realism the conditions on the battlefield. After the Battle of Königgratz, when no news of Friedrich can be obtained, Martha leaves in secret for the battlefield to search for him among the wounded. This enables Suttner to provide a powerful eye-witness account of the aftermath of war through civilian eyes. Friedrich is found, though not by Martha, who has to be rescued and sent back to Vienna. In the aftermath of the battle, cholera spreads through Bohemia and kills Martha’s father and sisters. To escape the memories of the past, Friedrich leaves the army in order to devote his life to the study of peace, only to be shot dead as a spy in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 when living in Paris. After his death, Martha vows to carry on his work for peace. Suttner’s novel emphasizes starkly the horrors of the aftermath of war, when in a powerful episode Martha, desperate for news of her husband, secretly decides to join the relief effort salvaging bodies from the battlefield at Königgratz. Suttner interviewed doctors who had been at the front to enhance the authenticity of the passage. Martha’s journey is an act of folly in the extreme; she is overwhelmed by the stench of death and the cries of the injured, and eventually has to be rescued by a Viennese doctor and sent home. Yet these realistic impressions, told with immediacy in the first person and combined with eye-witness accounts from the doctors present at the battle, provide compelling images of an aspect of war which even in the twenty-first century is rarely made visible to the civilian:

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Political Literature and Pacifism Und wieder geht es weiter. An Toten vorüber — an Hügeln von Leichen... Viele dieser Toten zeigen die Spuren entsetzlichster Agonie. Unnatürlich weit aufgerissene Augen — die Hände in die Erde gebohrt — die Haare des Bartes aufgerichtet — zusammengepreßte Zähne unter krampf haft geöffneten Lippen — die Beine starr ausgestreckt, so liegen sie da (Die Waffen nieder!, 235–36). [You go on again. Past dead bodies — past hills of corpses ... many of these dead bear the traces of the most horrible agony. Unnaturally wide open eyes — hands gouging into the earth — the very hairs on beards standing erect — teeth clenched together beneath lips spasmodically open — legs stiff ly outstretched — they lie there like that.]

The fragmented nature of this series of impressions highlights Martha’s inability to take in its full horror, and the impossibility of adequately conveying it in literature. It also brings home the impersonal treatment of the corpses. In a reminder that Austria had not signed the Geneva Convention, a doctor narrates how a grenade attack on a field hospital killed hundreds of wounded, who were already receiving treatment for their injuries (Waffen, 237). He depicts the horror of the mass graves, dug on the battlefield by ‘hyenas’, men who take every opportunity to rob the dead of their boots, or their rings, if necessary by cutting off their fingers (Waffen, 238). This is reminiscent of Vereshchagin’s painting ‘Winners’ (1878–79), where members of the victorious Turkish army swarm over the battlefield, trying on the boots of the Russian dead, while in the foreground Turkish soldiers salute with amusement a comrade wearing a Russian coat and cap. In Suttner’s story, however, the action is transported to a place only a short train journey from Vienna, where German speakers of different nations fight each other rather than an ethnically different enemy. The doctor tells of those who are never found by the relief effort, but who survive for days on the battlefield, in ever greater agony, alongside the dead. Martha undergoes a horrifying trip by night to a village where every structure houses the dead or wounded; the smell of decaying f lesh awakens her from the stupor into which she has fallen through tiredness, as she arrives in the village, and she hears the horrifying cries of the injured. Over a hundred severely injured men lie in the church alone, on the stone f loor, calling out for water, which like bandages is in short supply. Like Dunant’s, Martha’s account is only able to hint at the true horrors of the events witnessed, but she conveys far more than the reader expects, and to an Austrian readership for whom the losses of the previous generation were still fresh the effect was a powerful one. Depictions of the human cost of war such as in Vereshchagin’s paintings had an important inf luence on Suttner’s manner of presentation in Die Waffen nieder! Her novel represents a view of the world polarized between the absolute evil of war and the benefits of peace. Werner Michler points out how Suttner consciously exploits the literary form of the women’s novel, with the memoir form and domestic, even quasi-romantic plot, in order to provoke a more vivid identification with the mimetic representations of war than had been the case with her earlier, essayistic works.45 Richard Laurence sees it as marred ‘by excessive sentimentality’, but there is no doubt that the possibility Suttner offers for vivid identification with her protagonist’s experiences make for a gripping and powerful novel, which is in turn central to its status as a campaigning work.46

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One episode subject to much criticism in this vein is the death of the family dog Puschl in the campaign of 1866, shortly before the battle of Königgratz. Martha’s husband Friedrich, a reluctant and jaded officer, conveys his faithful Puschl’s demise in one of his vivid letters from the front. For Ian Foster, the death of the family dog is a bathetic lapse into sentimentality amid such realistic accounts of hand-to-hand combat in market squares, or soldiers misdirected into marshland by incompetent generals.47 The trope of the dog seems to come straight from Dunant’s memoir of Solferino, where an officer of the Foreign Legion is killed, and his dog, the regiment’s pet, although wounded, manages to ‘drag itself back to die beside his master’.48 When Puschl is wounded, Friedrich reports in a letter to Martha how grief-stricken he was at having to leave him on the battlefield. Just when the emotionally-drained reader is starting to overcome the shock of the dog’s demise, he reappears in the next letter, having dragged himself slowly to join Friedrich’s camp, only to expire in a tender scene at his beloved master’s side. Michler suggests that by the late nineteenth century dogs were seen less as working animals than as pets who belonged to the inner space of the home.49 They serve therefore as extensions of the humanity of their owners. The dog, like letters or photographs found on dying soldiers, is a way of connecting the battlefield and the domestic sphere of the loved ones. The dog emphasizes the continuity between the identity of the men as soldiers in battle and as husbands or sons and shows that the humanity of the men has not been compromised by their becoming soldiers. Animals also offer an oblique way of referring to the pity of the human suffering in war. We might think of the huge success of Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse (1982), now a muchacclaimed film directed by Steven Spielberg (2011), representing the horror and pity of the First World War. Elizabeth Boa, writing about Thomas Mann’s story Herr und Hund (1918), which dates from the final months of that war, suggests that Mann’s depiction of the suffering of the dog, Bauschan, ‘enables the author to look at, and empathize with and above all to write about traumatized creaturely suffering and depression’.50 The innocence of animals makes them a fitting object for our pity and thus sanctions our emotional response. Animals’ silence is perhaps a further element which makes them so compelling. The sociologist Jean Baudrillard suggests: only [animals] remain mute, and for this reason they seem to retreat far from us, behind the horizon of truth. But it is what makes us intimate with them. [...] In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.51

The silent loyalty and suffering of the dog provides a space for the imagination, for the transference of emotions of our own which cannot be fully uttered or consciously formulated. Our response is a visceral one; it goes beyond the rational, and words alone can therefore only be approximate. The extensive and realistic depiction of war and its aftermath in both these novels is a powerful attack on the way in which industrial nations resolve their conf licts. Suttner’s novel calls for politicians to seek alternatives to war, while both texts echo Dunant’s in speaking of the necessity of reform in the way in which conf lict is organized. They helped to popularize the arguments in favour of the Geneva

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Convention and its protection of non-combatants.52 It is surely not just for their political contribution that these works need to be judged. As a peace campaigner, Bertha von Suttner had to move away from the primacy of emotional arguments against war and embrace the rational discourse of a ‘science’ of pacifism, making the case for establishing a league of nations for conf lict resolution.53 But it is in the affective power of her novel as a literary work that its success really lies, and the novel’s focus on mothers’ grief was followed by Clara Viebig’s First World War novel Die Töchter der Hekuba: Ein Roman aus unserer Zeit (1917), a powerful depiction of bereaved mothers.54 Sentimentality, melodrama, the literary form of the memoir, and its engagement with the latest ideas of the age, such as Darwinism and secularism, all played an important role in the commercial success of Die Waffen nieder!. The success of Kautsky’s novel also lies in its convincing characterization, aspirational optimism and its sympathetic depiction of working-class figures. In their accounts of ordinary people’s involvement in conf lict, both authors raise an important ethical question about the human cost of nations’ military ambitions. By using female protagonists to question the cost of war from an emotive standpoint (Nandl and Martha respectively), the authors imply that military leaders are trapped in conventional thinking through their education within a society that has normalized and glorified war, and they raise the importance of women’s role in overcoming this socialization in order for social change to be made possible. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur, 1870–1900: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Jahrhundertwende (Munich: Beck, 1998), pp. 211–12. 2. Stefan vom Grillenhof does not exist in a modern edition, but Die Waffen nieder! (1889) has never been out of print. The edition used is: Bertha von Suttner, Die Waffen nieder! Eine Lebensgeschichte, ed. by Sigrid and Helmut Bock (Berlin: Verlag der Nationen, 1990). 3. Nikolaus Wegmann, ‘Engagierte Literatur? Zur Poetik des Klartexts’, in Systemtheorie der Literatur, ed. by Jürgen Fohrmann und Harro Müller (Munich: Fink, 1996), pp. 345–65 (pp. 348–49). See also Willi Huntemann and Kai Hendrik Patri, ‘Einleitung: Engagierte Literatur in Wendezeiten’, in Engagierte Literatur in Wendezeiten, ed. by Willi Huntemann and others (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), pp. 9–32. 4. Karl-Heinz Huche and Olaf Kutmutz, ‘Engagierte Literatur’, in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, ed. by Klaus Weimar and others, 3 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997–2003), I, pp. 446–47. The authors point out that political engagement is the polar opposite of the term ‘autonomes Kunstwerk’ (‘the autonomous work of art’). 5. Wegemann, ‘Engagierte Literature?’, p. 361. 6. Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, transl. by Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Fromm International, 1994), pp. 22–23, quoted by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, ‘Moral Sentiment and the Ethics of Representation in Holocaust Literature’, in The Enigma of Good and Evil: The Moral Sentiment in Literature (= Analecta Husserliana, 85), ed. by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 455–71 (p. 460). 7. Ian Foster, ‘Bertha von Suttner’, in The Image of the Habsburg Army in Austrian Prose Fiction 1888 to 1914 (Berne: Lang, 1991), pp. 195–231 (p. 206). 8. Ibid. 9. Henry Dunant, A Memory of Solferino: Un Souvenir de Solferino (London: Cassell, for the British Red Cross Society, 1947). 10. André Durand, ‘The Development of the Idea of Peace in the Thinking of Henry Dunant’, International Review of the Red Cross, 26 (1986), 16–51.

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11. ‘Ces pages me transportent d’émotion. Du sublime touchant à fond la fibre. C’est plus beau, mille fois plus beau qu’Homère’ ( June 1863); Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, 9 vols (Paris: Charpentier, 1888–96), II, p. 1282. 12. Charles Dickens, ‘A Souvenir of Solferino’, All Year Round, 16 May 1863, 283–88 (p. 285); an abridged version of Dunant’s story. 13. See ‘A Souvenir of Solferino’, p. 285, and Charles Dickens, ‘The Wounded Soldier’, All Year Round, 22 August 1863, 609–10, where Dickens reports on initiatives for the treatment of soldiers on the battlefield, and declares: ‘May the publicity given by our journal to the existence of such wants help to supply the friendly hands and call for the consoling voice!’ (p. 610). See also Charles Dickens, ‘A Lesson Well Learnt’, All Year Round, 14 May 1864, 328–31, on Dunant’s campaign and Florence Nightingale, in a piece on women’s work in the Sanitary Commission in the American Civil War. 14. Dunant, Memory of Solferino, p. 25. 15. Ibid., p. 34. 16. Ibid., p. 33. 17. For Suttner’s publication of Dunant’s work, see Henry Dunant, ‘An die Presse’, Die Waffen nieder! Monatsschrift zur Forderung der Friedensbewegung, 5 (1896), issue 9; ‘Kleines Arsenal gegen den Militarismus’, Die Waffen nieder! Monatsschrift zur Forderung der Friedensbewegung, 6 (1897), issues 5, 6, 8 and 9, transl. from the French by Countess Hedwig Potting. See Durand, p. 30, note 3. 18. Durand, p. 20, citing a letter by Dunant to Rudolf Miller, 21 August 1900, Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire de Genève, Fr. MS 5203. fol. 220. 19. Wilfred Owen, Poems, introd. by Siegfried Sassoon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920). 20. Wilhelm Wiener [pseud. of Minna Kautsky], ‘Wassili Wereschagin’, Die neue Zeit: Revue des geistigen und öffentlichen Lebens, 4 (1886), issue 1, 27–36 (p. 31). Vereshchagin’s second Viennese exhibition in 1885 displayed paintings from the artist’s recent visits to Palestine and India, including Biblical paintings which aroused the anger of Catholic church leaders in Vienna. 21. Vasily Vasil’evich Vereshchagin, The War Correspondent: A Story of the Russo-Turkish War, intro. by Poultney Bigelow (London: Osgood & McIlvaine, 1894), published at the same time in German as Der Kriegskorrespondent. Erzählung aus dem russisch-türkischen Kriege. 22. Friedrich Engels, ‘Brief an Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885’, in Romanpoetik in Deutschland von Hegel bis Fontane, ed. by Hartmut Steinecke (Tubingen: Narr, 1984), pp. 224–25. 23. Friedrich Engels, ‘Letter to Minna Kautsky, 26 November 1885’, transl. by Andy Blunden, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Literature and Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), pp. 87–89 (p. 88). 24. Karl Kautsky, Erinnerungen und Erörterungen, ed. by Benedikt Kautsky (The Hague: Mouton, 1960), p. 302. 25. For example, Minna Kautsky published in Die Neue Welt, in the Illustrierter Neue-Welt-Kalender, the Österreichischer Arbeiterkalender and in Die Neue Zeit. See Ursula Münchow, Arbeiterbewegung und Literatur 1860–1914 (Berlin and Weimar: Auf bau, 1981), pp. 304–21 (p. 307). 26. On proletariat reading habits, see the memoir by Adelheid Popp, Die Jugendgeschichte einer Arbeiterin von ihr selbst erzählt. Mit einem Geleitworte von August Bebel (Munich: Reinhardt, 1909), p. 14, and on the Kolportage trade, in the context of Karl May’s early stories, see Gustav Frank, ‘Trivialliteratur als “Verlorener Sohn” des Realismus: Zu einem literarhistorischen Ort von Karl Mays früher Kolportage,’ Jahrbuch der Karl May-Gesellschaft, 30 (2000), 271–330. 27. Anon., ‘Was und wie soll der Arbeiter lesen?’, Oesterreichischer Arbeiter-Kalender für das Jahr 1884, ed. by E. T. Doleschall (Vienna: Josef Bardorf, 1884), pp. 91–97 (p. 93), quoted by Werner Michler, ‘Zwischen Minna Kautsky und Hermann Bahr: Literarische Intelligenz und österreichische Arbeiterbewegung vor Hainfeld (1889)’, in Literarisches Leben in Österreich 1848–1890, ed. by Klaus Amann, Hubert Lengauer, and Karl Wagner (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), pp. 94–137 (p. 104). 28. See Eigensinn, ed. Gürtler, pp. 63–70. Also, on the members of the Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen in Wien, see Helga H. Harriman, ‘Women Writers and Artists in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna’, Modern Austrian Literature, 26 (1993), 1–17. 29. Michler, ‘Zwischen Minna Kautsky’, p. 107. 30. A short extract from Victoria is reprinted in Christa Gürtler and Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager (eds), Eigensinn und Widerstand: Schriftstellerinnen der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1998), pp. 71–75.

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31. Minna Kautsky, Ein Maifesttag, first publ. in Illustrierter Neue-Welt-Kalender (1907), 32–42, was reprinted in Minna Kautsky, Auswahl aus ihrem Werke, ed. by Cäcilia Friedrich (Berlin: Akademie, 1965), pp. 123–52. See Christa Pimingstorfer, ‘Zwischen Beruf und Liebe: Minna Kautsky und Lou Andreas-Salomé im Vergleich’, Schwierige Verhältnisse: Liebe und Sexualität in der Frauenliteratur um 1900 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1992), pp. 43–56. 32. Minna Kautsky, Stefan vom Grillenhof (Leipzig: Fink, 1881). The two-volume novel, published in one edition, was the first in a series entitled Neue Welt Novellen. 33. Eugenie Marlitt, Goldelse (Berlin: Sammlung Zenodot Bibliothek der Frauen, 2007), see p. 230 for Goldelse’s programmatic statement ‘ich bin eine Bürgerliche!’ (‘I am a middle-class woman!’) 34. See Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, ed. by Otfried Höffe (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), and Kants Lehre von Staat und Frieden, ed. by Henning Ottmann (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009). 35. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995, first publ. 1975), p. 78. 36. Chère Baronne et Amie, Cher Monsieur et Ami: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Alfred Nobel und Bertha von Suttne, ed. by Edelgard Biedermann (Hildesheim: Olms, 2001), p. 89, in her own translation of the Swedish. 37. Bertha von Suttner, Memoiren (Stuttgart: Deutscher Verlagsanstalt, 1909), pp. 283–86. In Stimmen und Gestalten (1907), 113–20, Suttner also wrote about the effect on her of Vereshchagin’s paintings: Biedermann, Chère Baronne et Amie, p. 129, note 4. See also Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1999), pp. 473–75. 38. In Marthas Kinder, Martha’s son Rudolf loses his wife and child, gives up his title and estate and devotes himself to the cause of peace, albeit only through an ineffectual continuation of the academic studies begun by Martha’s husband in Die Waffen nieder!. 39. Vasily Vasil’evich Vereshchagin, ‘Aus den Erinnerungen eines Schlachtenmahlers’, Die Waffen nieder!, 2 (1893), issues 7–8, 249–52. 40. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 285. 41. Bertha von Suttner, ‘Mein Aufenthalt in Berlin (1892)’, Pazifismus in Deutschland: Dokumente zur Friedensbewegung 1890–1939, ed. by Wolfgang Benz (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1988), pp. 55–62 (p. 58). First published in the journal edited by Suttner, Die Waffen nieder!, 1 (1892), issue 4, 39–43. 42. See the excellent biography by Brigitte Hamann, Bertha von Suttner: Ein Leben für den Frieden (Munich: Piper, 1987). Also Beatrix Kempf, Bertha von Suttner: Das Lebensbild einer großen Frau: Schriftstellerin, Politikerin, Journalistin (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1965). 43. See Bertha von Suttner, ‘Erinnerungen an Alfred Nobel, Feuilleton’, in Die Neue Freie Presse, Morgenblatt, Vienna, 12 Jan 1897, 1–2. 44. Edelgard Biedermann, ‘Nicht nur Die Waffen nieder! Betha von Suttner (1843–1914)’, in Deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen des Fin de siècle, ed. by Karin Tebben (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), pp. 313–29. 45. Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur, p. 469. 46. Richard R. Laurence, ‘Bertha von Suttner and the Peace Movement in Austria to World War I’, Austrian History Yearbook, 23 (1992), 181–201 (p. 188). See also Laurence, ‘Viennese Literary Intellectuals and the Problem of War and Peace’, in Focus on Vienna 1900: Change and Continuity in Literature, Music, Art and Intellectual History, ed. by Erika Nielsen (Munich: Fink, 1982), pp. 12–22, and Regina Braker, ‘Bertha von Suttner as Author: The Harriet Beecher Stowe of the Peace Movement’, Peace and Change, 16 (1991), 74–96. 47. Foster, p. 308. 48. Dunant, A Memory of Solferino, p. 17. 49. Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur, p. 475, note 81. 50. Elizabeth Boa, ‘Walking the Dog: Paths and Thickets in Thomas Mann’s Herr und Hund’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 80 (2011), issue 2–3, 166–79 (p. 176). Mann started writing Herr und Hund in March 1918 and completed it in October of that year. 51. Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Animals’, in Simulacra and Simulation, transl. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 137. 52. See Richard R. Laurence, ‘The Peace Movement in Austria, 1867–1914’, in Doves and Diplomats:

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Foreign Offices and Peace Movements in Europe and America in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Solomon Wank (Westport, CN, and London: Greenwood Press, 1978), pp. 21–41; and Solomon Wank, ‘The Austrian Peace Movement and the Habsburg Ruling Elite, 1906–1914’, in Peace Movements and Political Cultures, ed. by Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), pp. 40–63. 53. On Suttner’s later work in the peace movement, see Der Kampf um die Vermeidung des Weltkriegs (1892–1900 und 1907–1914), ed. by Alfred H. Fried, 2 vols (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1917), and on rational arguments, see Bertha von Suttner, ‘Um die Unvermeidlichkeit des Krieges’, in Der Kampf, ed. by Fried, I: iv. 54. See Caroline Bland, ‘Sacrifice for the Nation? World War One in the Work of Lily Braun (1865–1916) and Clara Viebig (1860–1952)’, in Schwellenüberschreitungen: Politik in der Literatur von deutschsprachigen Frauen, 1780–1918, ed. by Caroline Bland and Elisa Müller-Adams (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007), pp. 249–70.

Chapter 3

v

Truth, Art and Sympathy in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie When Gabriele Reuter’s ground-breaking novel Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens (1895: From a Good Family: The Passion Story of a Girl) appeared, enthusiastic and critical reviewers alike referred to the work as an act of protest: Es ist ein aufrührerisches Buch (Ernst von Wolzogen).1 [It is a rebellious book.] Solch ein Schrei der Entrüstung und Empörung ist dieses Buch — ein Notschrei, wie ihn nur jahrelange, grenzenlose Martern einer Frau erpressen können, und zu dem bis jetzt — meines Wissens — kaum eine Frau den Mut und die Ehrlichkeit gehabt (Helene Stöcker).2 [This book is such a cry of outrage and indignation — and urgent cry such that only long-endured limitless torment would elicit from a woman, and for which up to now — to my knowledge — hardly a woman has had the courage or honesty.] Die Leiden dieser jungen Agathe werden diese Frauen natürlich als eine Prop­ agationsschrift für ihre Sache verstehen und ausrufen (Benno Rüttenauer).3 [The passion of this young Agathe will naturally be understood and proclaimed by these women to be a piece of propaganda for their cause.]

Reuter’s novel, a ground-breaking critique of gender relations in the Wilhelmine Empire, engages with the social problem of the ‘surplus woman’, through a middle-class protagonist, Agathe Heidling, who becomes a lonely spinster.4 When her brother gambles away her dowry, she ends up trapped in her father’s home without any meaningful activity and denied any intellectual stimulation. Agathe is condemned to remain forever a ‘Mädchen’ (girl), in language that signals the impossibility of her emancipation from paternal authority even as an adult woman. The hysteria or madness which ensues is the only form of resistance available to Agathe, and the climax of the novel takes place when she tries to strangle her sister-in-law and utters a hysterical torrent of foul language that no one would have thought she could even have understood. She is sent away to be ‘cured’ with electric shock treatment and returns to her father’s home with her mind broken, able to think only of crochet patterns. The prominent feminist campaigner Helene Stöcker, reviewing Aus guter Familie for Die Frauenbewegung, thought that the gender politics of Reuter’s novel were far

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more important than its poetics: ‘Ich will von dem künstlerischen Wert des Buches gar nicht reden; er interessiert uns hier erst in zweiter Linie — aber auch, wenn er weniger groß wäre, als er thatsächlich ist, würde ihr Buch hochbedeutsam sein.’5 (‘I am not going to speak of the artistic merits of this book; this interests us only in a secondary sense — but even if it was less significant artistically than it actually is, her book would be highly important.’) Stöcker implies that the significance of the novel as a work of feminist protest has barely anything to do with how well it was written, and that Reuter’s treatment of the question of women’s emancipation can somehow be separated from the project of aesthetic innovation. Helene Stöcker appears to be of one mind with Martin Greffinger, the fictional cousin of Reuter’s protagonist. Towards the end of Aus guter Familie, her childhood long behind her and with nothing to look forward to but caring for her widowed father, Agathe pours out her heart to Greffinger, a Social Democrat who f led Germany for Zurich. Her cousin encourages her to reveal her suffering to the world by writing it down, just as vividly as she has explained it to him. When Agathe replies that she has no talent as an artist, Greffinger does not disagree. Rather, he shows that he prioritizes the message of protest over its artistic representation: ‘Ich meine nicht, daß Du damit ein Kunstwerk schaffen wirst. Das ist nur die Sache von ein paar Begnadeten.’ Er sprach langsam weiter. ‘Ich weiß überhaupt nicht, ob es heute darauf ankommt, Kunstwerke zu schaffen ... Wir leben alle so sehr im Kampf! Kümmere Dich nicht um die Form! Sag’ Deinen lieben Mitschwestern nur ehrlich und deutlich, wie ihr Leben in Wahrheit beschaffen ist. Vielleicht bekommen sie dann Mut, es selbst in die Hand zu nehmen, statt sich von ihren Eltern und der Gesellschaft vorschreiben zu lassen, wie sie leben sollen, und dabei kranke, traurige, hysterische Frauenzimmer zu werden, die man mit dreißig Jahren am liebsten alle miteinander totschlüge’ (Aus guter Familie, 250). [‘I don’t mean that you would create a work of art. That is something for the chosen few.’ He spoke on slowly. ‘I’m not really at all sure whether creating a work of art is really so important these days... We are all living in such a struggle! Don’t worry about the form! Just tell your dear sisters honestly and clearly what their life is really like. Maybe they will then have the courage to take it in their hands themselves rather than having parents and society dictate how they should live, with the result that they become sick, melancholy, hysterical females who should all be put to death at the age of thirty.’]

For Greffinger, the age is marked by a Darwinistic struggle for existence, and realistic literature, engaging with the material culture of social relations and their effect on the subject, has an important role to play in the campaign for social justice. Gender politics are secondary to the class struggle for Agathe’s cousin: he has little intrinsic interest in the oppression of women as gendered subjects. In keeping with his Marxist commitment, his primary concern is the raising of the readers’ consciousness: he has gone into exile for writing banned Socialist tracts and become a respected social theorist. While poetic realism was characterized by an avoidance

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of topical issues, Greffinger calls for an explicit engagement in fiction with social questions.6 The most important quality of writing, he says, is that it should be truthful. He suggests that fiction, like such political tracts, can give readers the courage to change their lives, through their identification with protagonists’ situations. However, his reading of the genre of the novel as no different from a political tract is problematic, as the analysis of novels by Minna Kautsky and Bertha von Suttner in Chapter 2 showed. Greffinger suggests that social engagement is not reconcilable with art in a traditional sense. Gisela Brinker-Gabler calls his words a plea for an authentic literature of experience with a social function.7 And as she points out, Greffinger’s cynicism makes it risky to take his artistic statements at face value (ibid.). We should not be tempted, like Stöcker, to consider the form of Aus guter Familie as of secondary importance; neither should we assume that Reuter did not consider her novel a work of art. Reuter, by this time, had left behind her days of writing feuilletons for serialization in family magazines.8 The poetics of Reuter’s novel is in fact essential to its gender politics. As Russell Berman suggests, social transformation was at the heart of the literary project for writers of modernity: ‘the question of modernism is ultimately not purely formal; it is a question of translating aesthetic innovation into strategies of societal emancipation’.9 Reuter shared with her friend the socialist writer John Henry Mackay (often described as an anarchist) a literary tendency she described as: ‘das ehrliche Ringen um die Wahrheit — das Bedürfnis, den Dingen auf den Grund zu gehen’ (‘an honest wrestling with the truth — the need to get right to the bottom of things’).10 Truth is a watchword for literary naturalism, which can be seen as the first expression of literary modernism.11 Reuter was deeply inf luenced by the modern drama of Ibsen and Hauptmann and the naturalism of Zola. Writing in the inf luential Munich journal of literary modernity, Die Gesellschaft, Zola professed: ‘Ich bin für keine Schule, weil ich für die Wahrheit bin’ (‘I’m not for any school because I am for truth).12 He stated famously that literature is ‘un coin de la nature vu à travers un sentiment’ (‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’).13 The phrase, by drawing attention to the perspective from which nature is observed, emphasizes the subjective quality of truth. Words of Zola in Die Gesellschaft in 1885 make this clear: Was ich vom Künstler verlange, ist etwas ganz anderes, als daß er mir anmutige oder grauenerregende Visionen vorzaubere. Ich will, daß er sich selbst und ganz gebe, daß er mir einen starken eigenartigen Geist offenbare, daß er mit kühner Hand mir ein Stück Natur vor Augen stelle, so wie er sie sieht und erfaßt.14 [What I demand of the artist is something quite different from the idea that he should conjure me up charming or horrifying visions. I want him to offer himself to me body and soul, reveal a strong and particular spirit to me and with a bold hand bring a piece of nature before my eyes just as he sees it and understands it.]

The artistic project therefore is at the same time self-exploration and the repre­ sentation of an external reality. As Karin Tebben suggests, Reuter too places an important emphasis on the subjective involvement of the artist when transforming

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reality into literature.15 Her work combines the two elements Zola saw as significant for all fiction: ‘das allgemeine Element, d.h. die Natur, und das individuelle Element, d.h. den Schöpfer’ (‘the general element, i.e. nature, and the individual element, i.e. the creator’, ibid.). Reuter had eagerly read the poetics of the realist novelist Friedrich Spielhagen (1883), yet Spielhagen’s strictest observance of the laws of objectivity (‘strikteste Observanz des Gesetzes der Objektivität’) needed, for Reuter, to be matched by emotional depth:16 Man sage mir was man wolle von Objektivität als höchstem Ziel in der Kunst ... Gewiß, ich kann ihre unsterblichen Meisterwerke bewundern, bestaunen — aber ins Herz greift mir nur die Dichtung, in der eine Persönlichkeit mir etwas von ihrem eigensten Geheimnis enthüllt.17 [Say what you will about objectivity as the highest goal of art ... Certainly I can admire their immortal works of art and wonder at them — but the only poetry to touch my heart is that in which a personality reveals something to me of its most private secrets.]

Reuter rejects cold, scientific objectivity in favour of an emotional engagement that comes through the sensitive exploration of the depths of personality as well as the hidden secrets of the milieu (Vom Kinde, 432). Reuter writes in her memoirs of devouring Zola’s novels, reading the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle and carefully concealing the books from her mother.18 She was friends with Rudolf Steiner, who went on to found the theosophy movement; she stayed in Friedrichshagen on her trips to Berlin in 1890–91 and moved in circles inhabited by Wilhelm Bölsche, the Hart brothers, and members of the Freie Bühne für modernes Leben, where she also became acquainted with Gerhart Hauptmann. Zola’s idea of the novel of experimentation (Experimentalroman) in particular had an inf luence on Reuter’s novel. In his Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie (1887: The Scientific Basis for Poetry), Bölsche describes such a novel as follows: ‘Der Dichter [...] ist in seiner Weise ein Experimentator, wie der Chemiker, der allerlei Stoffe mischt, in gewisse Temperaturgrade bringt und den Erfolg beobachtet’ (the poet is in his own way an experimenter, like the chemist who mixes all sorts of materials, raises them to a particular temperature and watches the results’).19 In 1901, Reuter commented that when writing Aus guter Familie, she gave up poetry (dichten), by which she meant the creation of imaginary people and worlds, and turned to writing about what she knew and could observe.20 She had a passion for observing, through her fiction, how a particular social situation or character is driven to extreme and tragic results (‘nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt davon plastisch bis zu seinen äußersten tragischen Konsequenzen darzustellen’).21 Naturalists’ commitment to the depiction of truth was an important part of their rejection of the ethos of bourgeois family literature, with its sexual prudery and optimism. Descriptions of family literature, expressed in strongly gendered terms, show the difficulty for the woman writer of participating in literary modernism. The first edition of Die Gesellschaft, edited by Michael Conrad, opened in 1885 with the words: ‘Unsere Gesellschaft bezweckt zunächst die Emanzipation der periodischen schöngeistigen Litteratur und Kritik von der Tyrannei der “höheren Töchter” und der “alten Weiber beiderlei Geschlechts” ’ (‘Our [ journal] Die

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Gesellschaft has the pur­pose of emancipating serialized imaginative literature and criticism from the tyranny of “well-bred daughters” and “old women of both sexes” ’).22 The modernist aesthetic itself was thus stylized in masculine terms and in such a way as to exclude women’s writing. The prudery of bourgeois literature was described as intrin­si­cally feminine: Wir wollen die von der spekulativen Rücksichtsnehmerei auf den schöngeistigen Dusel, auf die gefühlvollen Lieblingsthorheiten und moralischen Vorurteile der sogenannten ‘Familie’ (im weiblichen Sinne) arg gefährdete Mannhaftigkeit und Tapferkeit im Erkennen, Dichten und Kritisieren wieder zu Ehren bringen.23 [We want to save manliness — severely endangered — and boldness in per­ ception, poetry and criticism, and restore its honour by rescuing it from forever kowtowing speculatively to an intellectual befuddlement and to the emotive follies and moral prejudices of the so-called ‘family’ (in its feminine sense).]

Masculinity and boldness, as cardinal virtues, are for Conrad the guiding principles of modernism and are perceived as threatened by feminine literary conventions. He presents these as dominating the mass market, reiterating a long association between women’s writing and commercial literature, which would later be damaging to the long-term reception of women’s novels. Conrad, in the same piece, uses the terms ‘Backfisch-Literatur’ (literature for teenage girls) and ‘Altweiber-Kritik’ (old wives’ criticism) to refer to the antithesis to his modernist aesthetic. As a middle-class young woman herself, and having made her living writing for such family journals, Gabriele Reuter interrogated her own need to transcend the literary and social conventions which had informed her upbringing, and wrote of her need to liberate herself from its preferred style, which she describes as characterized by sugar-coating and sweetness (‘das Schönfärberische, Süße’, Vom Kinde, 433). Reuter abandoned the Christian religion which she had practised fervently as a teenager; she rejected the ideology of renunciation which characterized so much women’s fiction (not to mention poetic realism), and worked hard to overcome the sentimental language of the romance. Reuter deliberately distanced herself from the prettification of life which she saw in the women’s romance and the poetic realist novella alike: ‘Will man das graue Alltagssein schildern, darf man nicht Karmesin, leuchtendes Himmelsblau und dunkle Goldtöne auf die Palette nehmen’ (‘If you are to paint the greyness of the everyday you must not choose carmine, the luminescent blue of the heavens and shades of dark gold for your palette’, Vom Kinde, 434). Poetic realism, for Reuter, is characterized by pastel hues. It was dominated by figures who adapt to their circumstances and bravely accept their fate.24 Male modernist writing is often seen as having prioritized ‘hardness, toughness, a terse cerebral economy’.25 Conrad indeed writes of the need for manly achievements in prose (‘männliche Leistungen’).26 Reuter, by contrast, nevertheless attempts to arouse sympathy for her protagonists in the readers so that they appreciate the full tragedy of their situation: ‘Jedes Sentiment vermeiden und doch im Leser das Gefühl für die Tiefe des Gegenstandes wecken!’ (‘To avoid every sentimentality and nevertheless awaken in the reader a feeling for the depth of her subject’, Vom Kinde, 433). In an essay in Conrad’s journal Die Gesellschaft in 1892, Reuter wrote: ‘Die

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Wahrheit reden ist nicht so leicht, als man glauben möchte, die Wahrheit schreiben ist für einen Mann schwer, für eine Frau noch schwerer und für ein schriftstellerndes Mädchen am allerschwersten’ (‘speaking the truth is not as easy as you think. Writing the truth is difficult for a man, still harder for a woman and hardest of all for a girl trying her hand at being an author’).27 For the Mädchen or unmarried woman, who was not supposed to have any sexual knowledge, still less experience, writing about sexual desire in fiction took her out of her comfort zone. Reuter’s novel explores critically the timeless ideals of feminine chastity which dominate her female subject’s self-understanding and shows the conf lict raging within her as she discovers the inner truth of her sensual imaginative world. Even before the novel’s publication, Reuter was horrified by the ‘Zweideutigkeiten und Obszönitäten’ (ambiguities and obscenities) which characterized the discussion when Reuter’s male literary circle in Berlin read and discussed her novel. She writes that she nearly burnt her work in shame.28 The woman writing about sexuality was laying her soul bare to the world; nevertheless confronting the taboo on the expression of female sexuality was fundamental to the re-writing of women’s lives and an integral part of the protest against the prudery of family literature.29 Retrospectively, Reuter claimed she had not thought of her work expressly as a piece of politically engaged literature. She suggests that in the early 1890s she had little to do with the women’s movement and that it was the human story that captivated her (‘mich fesselte an dem Stoff rein das Menschliche’).30 Through extensive self-analysis, Reuter was fascinated by the construction of the modern subject as a gendered being. It was an artistic endeavour based on close observation of the bourgeois milieu in which she lived, and the restrictive code that had informed her own upbringing. Within Reuter’s novel, faithful attention to the material culture of the bourgeois world is used to explore the damaging effect of its ideology on her female subjects. Her novel pays faithful attention to the physical surroundings of its urban setting, to the division of space within both the bourgeois home and the modern city, and to the role played by clothes and physical appearance in the constitution of identity. This she combines with a psychological exploration of her protagonist’s subjective experience of the prevailing social relations. Her protagonist, Agathe Heidling, is not only physically confined within the bourgeois milieu which Reuter so masterfully sketches, but also unable to free herself from its mentality. As Linda Kraus Worley argues: ‘The clichéd phrases of bourgeois life [...] have become the language with which she speaks and, more devastatingly, thinks’.31 Thus Reuter is able sharply to show the internal conf licts experienced by her protagonist, as a result of the fact that bourgeois society is not something material and external to the subject but rather it is deeply embedded within her own psyche. Reuter claims to have eschewed many naturalists’ focus on the lives of the proletariat (‘aus literarischen Gründen ins Volk hinabsteigen und das Elend des Proletariats studieren, war mir ein greulicher Gedanke’; ‘it seemed a dreadful thought to me to descend among the common people for literary reasons and study the misery of the proletariat’).32 Yet through Agathe’s relationship with her servant Luise, Reuter’s novel also reveals a wider social agenda, highlighting the damaging nature of the bourgeois family’s

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repressive attitude towards sexuality for the middle-class daughter and proletariat alike. This gulf between servant and mistress is visible through the division into the spaces occupied by the two women, first within the home and later within the wider city landscape. Fashion and the Topography of the City For the sociologist Georg Simmel fashion is a product of class distinction (‘ein Produkt klassenmäßiger Scheidung’).33 He emphasizes the role of fashion as a marker of social class and a creator of distinctions between different classes, contending that fashions begin in the upper classes and signal their surplus wealth. As soon as the lower classes gain the means of imitating their trends, their social superiors find something new. According to Simmel’s analysis, fashion provides opportunities at the same time for conformity and individualism. It is a way of demonstrating the subject’s belonging to a certain group, but also the means by which a subject within a particular group can be distinguished from others. Fashion can also be a mask behind which the person is concealed, and for women who have been historically denied power and full participation in society, fashion offers an outlet through which they could make an impact as individuals. In Aus guter Familie, Reuter’s attention to the material culture of the bourgeoisie extends to the role of fashion in the creation of such social distinctions, something which both allows for a demonstration of middle-class superiority but at the same time emphasizes the precarious nature of middle-class prestige in a society where an ethos of conspicuous consumption required constant new investment of money and energy. The novel opens with Agathe Heidling’s confirmation: the social superiority of Agathe’s family over the rural working classes is made clear through fashionable dress. Symbolically in nineteenth-century society confirmation marked the point at which a girl became old enough to marry and Agathe is sent to relatives in the countryside to absorb their simple piety as a form of antidote (in the eyes of her father) to the pretensions of high society. But the city travels to meet her in the manners of her well-dressed relatives present at the ceremony. Agathe’s sense of distance from the peasant children is physically present in the separate spaces occupied by them and her family in the church and materially represented through the fashionable clothing she wears. Such externals also confirm a feeling of spiritual superiority that corresponds with her social advantage:34 she cannot avoid betraying by a look on her face her arrogant disdain for the peasant girls whispering excitedly in church about the arrival of a newly born calf (13). Agathe thereby becomes more secure in her conviction of her own piety and seems fit for a higher purpose than the farming children whose ceremony she shares.35 While Agathe sweeps by in a silk dress, they are surrounded by the smell of cheap cologne. Their hair has been neatly combed, their faces scrubbed clean, and they lack any elegance. Their mothers gaze in wonder at Agathe’s mother, who wears a black satin dress (Atlaskleid) with full skirts and a train, and is draped a lace shawl. However, Agathe’s mother is made nervous by such a mark of distinction. Simmel comments on the way conformity to a particular social group offers security to the vulnerable, protection

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from the gaze of others: ‘Denn der Schwache vermeidet die Individualisierung, das Auf-sich-ruhen mit seinen Verantwortlichkeiten und seiner Notwendigkeit, sich ganz allein mit eigenen Kräften zu verteidigen’ (‘A weak person steers clear of individualization; he avoids dependence upon self with its responsibilities and the necessity of defending himself unaided’).36 In the city, the mother’s dress would have blended into the background. Here in the simple country church she feels too conspicuous; it is too blatant a demonstration of her superior wealth and status. She holds its train timidly and meets the gaze of others with some embarrassment. Throughout Aus guter Familie, conspicuous adherence to the latest fashions marks out those in possession of wealth and status. In Agathe’s relationship with her close friend and later sister-in-law Eugenie clothes play a significant role. At the girls’ first ball, Agathe, like her friends, has a beautiful new dress: nur lange Handschuhe wollte die Mama nicht spendieren — in ihrer Zeit trugen die jungen Mädchen niemals so lange Handschuhe, wie sie jetzt Mode waren. ... Aber Eugenie hatte wunderbare Handschuhe — bis an den Ellenbogen — und kaufte sich gleich mehrere Paar, falls eins davon einen Riß bekäme. Es war ordentlich eine Qual, daß Agathe fortwährend an die Handschuhe denken mußte (61). [But Mother did not want to splash out on long gloves — in her day, young girls never wore such long gloves as were now in fashion ... Eugenie on the other hand had wonderful gloves — up to her elbows — and bought several pairs at the same time in case one of them developed a tear. It was sheer agony that Agathe could not stop thinking about those gloves the whole time.]

When her mother objects to the purchase of fashionable gloves she neglects the importance that they serve for Agathe as an act of conformity and display. Changing fashions, for Simmel, are necessary to permit the acquisition and display of new objects as a demonstration of economic power. With her extravagance, Eugenie is thus signalling to the others her family’s surplus wealth and hence her desirability as a marriage partner. Agathe’s mother chooses economy, but in doing so reduces Agathe’s own market value. This is clear in other ways too. Agathe has to walk to the ball, despite falling snow, casting envious glances at carriages as they pass. In contrast, Eugenie’s own outfit is the result of two special trips to Berlin.37 It stands out from the other dresses in its figure-hugging simplicity; she cuts an exotic figure. By arousing Agathe’s envy, it is clear that the purpose of Eugenie’s investment in her appearance has been achieved: she stands out from the crowd. Eugenie refuses to follow the fashions of the other girls, who all wear oval garlands in their hair, and instead of a gold necklace she wears a delicate scarf of fine tulle silk. It is tied beneath her ear. Agathe knows that Eugenie has an ugly scar there, which she is at pains to conceal (66). Fashion, then, is a mask, an act of concealment of the real self. Eugenie, who has little inherent power at her disposal, knows how to exploit her body to gain power over men. However, the insincerity it necessitates is abhorrent to Agathe. Eugenie is characterized by her ability to be ahead of the latest trend or at the very least to conform with elegance: in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, she wears military fashion, adopting a Paletot coat which almost resembles a

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military uniform. After her marriage all the town envies her fashionable toilette, and officers deliberately accompany her husband home at night to catch a glimpse of her making coffee wearing a negligee and lace bonnet. But the novel reveals such a fascination with clothing to be a focus on externals that merely distract from and perhaps even impede real communication. Agathe and Eugenie discuss every aspect of their physical appearance, but their emotional lives are kept hidden: ‘Was aber im Innern ihrer zukünftigen Schwägerin vor sich hin ging, blieb Agathe eine so fremde Welt’ (‘But what was going on in the mind of her future sister-in-law remained a foreign country for Agathe’, 79). Similarly, Agathe’s mother was at pains over every aspect of Agathe’s appearance down to the toothbrushes, heels of her shoes and corsets. Yet she had no understanding of her daughter’s temperament. Clothes also form part of a material culture of bourgeois life extending to furniture and household fashions. A well-appointed linen cupboard is a status symbol; Agathe’s mother cannot resist buying lace to decorate pillows for her trousseau, even when Agathe will clearly never marry. When Agathe’s family, after her father’s retirement, move to a smaller apartment, the family’s straitened circumstances are visible in how the mother rolls up the living room carpet every evening in order to stop it from fading, something Agathe finds humiliating, though she faithfully keeps up the habit after her mother’s death (AGF, 213). The bourgeois class is able to collect a personal history consisting of cherished objects. They have no practical use or economic value, but are part of ‘the “fetishism” of the commodity’ which for Marx represented ‘a reintroduction of pre-modern religious consciousness into the modern’.38 Such commodities are perhaps reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, for they represent ‘the delusional expression of collective utopian fantasies and longings’.39 The small apartment at the end of the novel is crammed full of items from the family’s history, such as her grandmother’s glass cabinet (‘die ganze Welt war vollgestopft mit Heiligtümern, an die man nicht rühren durfte’; ‘the whole world was crammed to bursting with relics that you were not allowed to touch’, AGF, 212). In the attic of Agathe’s home — and carefully transferred to different attics over the years — discarded but much-loved objects are preserved with piety: photographs, an old rocking horse, and the mother’s old dance shoes (53). In the attic are also the baby clothes worn by Agathe, her brother and several siblings who died in infancy: Das alles wurde auf bewahrt bis zu dem Tage, wo es Agathe einmal heraus­ nehmen durfte zum Gebrauch für ihre eigenen lebendigen kleinen Kinder. Neugierig hob sie die rosenrote Decke ein wenig und zog ein feines, winziges, spitzenbesetztes Hemdchen hervor. Nein — wie süß! Wie süß!’ (53). [They were all being carefully preserved until the day when Agathe would at last take them out and would be allowed to put them to use for her own small, living children. With curiosity she raised the reddish pink lid of the casket a little and drew from it a tiny fine shirt edged in lace. Why — how sweet! How sweet!]

In Agathe’s teenage years, the baby clothes had an allure of mystery as she contemplated her future role as mother, putting away memories of dead babies or lifeless dolls in the hope of her own living offspring. Reuter uses the motif of the

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clothes to explore Agathe’s bitter disappointment at her childlessness. Agathe has to fight to hold back her tears when she unpacks the same fine shirt edged in lace (‘feine[s] spitzenbesetzte[s] Hemdchen’ 225) many years later. It is to her sister-inlaw Eugenie that she must hand over ‘die lieben Sächelchen’ (‘lovely dainty little things’: the double diminutive indicating their value to Agathe but also perhaps warning of her own sentimentality towards them, ibid.). Eugenie just remarks on places where the clothes are damaged and implies that many of them are not good enough for her. She disregards the ones which are not fashionable and her dismissive words that Agathe can now embalm them again with piety (‘die kannst Du Dir pietätvoll einbalsamieren’, 226) belittle Agathe’s fate. Agathe feels a terrible rage within her which prefigures the act of physical violence towards Eugenie at the climax of the novel. Reuter’s novel confronts the sexual double standard of conventional morality while also critically implying that a physical separation from the lower classes, as a result of the geography of the modern home and the modern city, is connected with middle-class indifference to their fate. When in Agathe’s youth her father moves back to the local capital as a senior civil servant, they occupy the second f loor of an elegant and correspondingly expensive house in a fashionable new district, in the process of being built between the narrow roads of the old town and what will become the central station. Their street is half finished and wind blows dust and sand from the building sites. They can smell ‘den durchdringlichen häßlichen Geruch des Asphalt, der in großen schwarzen Kübeln auf offenen Feuern erhitzt und für die Pf lasterung der Trottoire zubereitet wurde’ (‘the penetrating and ugly smell of asphalt being heated over open fires in great black tubs and prepared for lining the pavements’, 51–52). Modernity is on its way to their small provincial capital of the late 1860s. The broad streets of their newly tarmacked roads distinguish them from the dark areas of the city inhabited by the lower classes. Andrew Webber points out that the city is however not merely the exterior spatial organization but also ‘an agglomeration of interiors’.40 The separation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is visible in interior, private spaces. Agathe’s family occupy separate rooms from the servants (who in some households in this era might just sleep in a makeshift bed in a corridor, behind a curtain, or even in the kitchen). When the family cook celebrates twenty-five years of service, there is no intimacy between her and the Heidlings. She is invited to dine with the family to celebrate the occasion, but quickly retreats back to her own space afterwards: ‘eine Fremde war und blieb die alte Küchendorte ihnen doch’ (‘Old kitchen-Dotty was and always would be a stranger to them’, 197). The affixing of the word ‘kitchen’ to the shortened form of her Christian name shows her identity to be determined by the space she occupies. In her depiction of spaces in the city and home, Reuter provides a fascinating insight into the damaging ideology of the bourgeois world and the effect of her protagonist’s social complacency. One of the servants in Agathe’s home is a girl from the country, Luise or Wiesing Groterjahn, who was confirmed alongside her. Agathe is entrusted with her servant Wiesing’s moral welfare, urging her to read Emil Frommel, a theologian who also wrote stories for the Volk, and Marie Nathusius, a well-known writer of morally

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uplifting fiction for women,41 and lecturing her on the dangers to be found at dances. As Wiesing weeps with homesickness, Agathe tries to tell her how much better off she is serving in a comfortable house where she had no worries and would know nothing of the calamities that might befall women working in factories (‘wo keine Sorge und nichts von dem Elend, welches die Arbeiterinnen in Fabriken erwarte, an sie herantreten könne’, 80). However, Wiesing and Agathe discover that moral dangers also exist within the bourgeois home. Later, through Wiesing, Agathe journeys into the slum, to experience social conditions from which she has been protected and which allow her to place the values of her own class under some scrutiny. Her eyes are opened to the precarious nature of life for women beyond the familiar bourgeois milieu and the indifference of the middle-classes to their fate. The home is not a sanctuary, but rather a place where hidden desires surface clandestinely. Wiesing’s space in the home is separated from her social superiors, but it is hardly her own. Agathe’s brother has visited her there and he has taken away the key so that he can repeat his sexual advances to her. Chris Weedon suggests how Agathe is marked by ‘a profound hostility to sensuality and physical contact’, which conf licts with her desire for emotional closeness and hence contributes to her later mental illness.42 Her hostility towards any suggestion of physical sexuality manifests itself in a sudden alienation from Wiesing and aggression towards her when she learns of her abuse by her brother. When Wiesing tells Agathe of the brother’s visit her first instinct is to accuse Wiesing of lying. Agathe repeatedly tries to defend her brother and distances herself from the servant by resorting to the formal ‘Luise’ rather than ‘Wiesing’. In contrast, Wiesing’s composure breaks down to the extent that she lapses into dialect: ‘ach mien leiwer Gott — ick wet mie jo gor nich mehr tau helpen!’ (‘dear God — I don’t know what to do any more’, 81). The use of dialect reminds the reader of Wiesing’s country origins and emphasizes Wiesing’s vulnerability: she is friendless in the city, having been brought by Agathe’s mother as a domestic servant in the hope of some kind of social advancement. When Agathe buys a bolt to fit onto Wiesing’s door she enters Wiesing’s personal space for the first time. She links the disorder and lack of cleanliness in Wiesing’s room to her moral condition: Wiesing hatte das Fenster in dem engen Raum seit dem Morgen noch nicht geöffnet, es war eine abscheulich dumpfe Luft darin. Schmutziges Wasser stand in der Schüssel, ausgekämmtes Haar und allerlei armseliger Plunder lag auf dem Boden herum. Und Walter — ihr peinlich sauberer, eleganter Bruder, in seiner glänzenden Uniform war hier gewesen ... wie war es nur möglich? Es schüttelte sie ein Grauen, ein Ekel (85). [Wiesing had not opened the window all morning in her pokey room and the air was sickeningly stale. There was dirty water in the basin, and lying around on the f loor were strands of hair and all kinds of pitiful junk. And Walter — her painstakingly clean and elegant brother — he had been here in his immaculate uniform ... how could that be possible? She was overcome by horror and revulsion.]

In this paragraph, the disgust Agathe experiences at her brother Walter’s attraction for Wiesing is expressed through her horror of the servant’s dirty room. The

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unclean room, symbolic of unclean desires, is projected onto its occupant: Wiesing now seems somehow base or disreputable (85). By contrasting the squalor of the servant’s room with the brother’s pristine appearance, Agathe dwells on the mystery of the erotic, on the power of desire over the subject, which leads the brother to step outside the bourgeois world into territory forbidden to Agathe. In Émile Zola’s Nana (1880), the pious Count Muffat finds the dirty dressing rooms of the disreputable theatre girls more of a sexual attraction than any milieu associated with his own class. Regina Schulte argues that bourgeois men, who had been brought up by servants in the home, associated physical intimacy with lower class women and hence with social contempt.43 While Agathe recoils from Walter, as from sexuality itself, she blames Wiesing. She has internalized the double standards of her own class and experiences ‘eine heftige Abneigung gegen das Mädchen, durch welches sie ihren Bruder verloren hatte’ (‘a vigorous aversion towards the girl through whom she had lost her brother’, 83). Wiesing wistfully resigns herself to the attentions of ‘So’n fiener jung’ Herr’ (‘such a handsome young man’, 82), but Agathe’s coolness towards the servant continues with an indifference to her when she is later dismissed after it is discovered she has become pregnant by a man of her own class. Four years later, Wiesing is living in a slum on the edge of the city, near a barracks. When Wiesing’s child dies and she writes to Agathe imploring her to provide money for the child’s burial, Agathe leaves her fine district and journeys into the slum to witness the condition of squalor to which Wiesing has fallen through her own and her mother’s feelings of moral superiority towards her: Entschulden Sie, wenn ich mich an Ihnen wende, mit meiner kroßen Not, hochgeährdestes Frölen mein Kleines is mich gestorben und wollen sies auf die Anadomie schicken bei die Studenten und ich bin zu liegen kommen wer soll den Sarg bezahlen (199–200). [Please forgive my turning to you in my great need, good mistress, but my little one has died and they want to take him to the anatomy institute to the students and now that I am sick too who will pay for the coffin.]

If Wiesing cannot find the money for a coffin, the child’s body will be given to the anatomy department for the students to dissect and she will be denied the slight consolation of knowing he received a Christian burial. For four months, Wiesing, now a prostitute, has been unable to work through illness. The woman who delivers Wiesing’s message boasts of her own Christian kindness towards the former servant, who is two months behind with her rent. But she puts on an overblown performance of pity, talking of Wiesing’s dead child with unpleasantly false sentimentality. The landlady has watched the child starve while the girl was too ill to continue working. The anatomy institute symbolizes the misery and indignity of proletariat life, as we saw in the case of Ebner-Eschenbach’s ‘Die Großmutter’ (1875) in Chapter 1. We will encounter it again in Chapter 4 in Helene Böhlau’s Halbtier! (1899), and in Chapter 8 in Ilse Frapan’s Arbeit (1902), where in both cases the authors confront the inhumane and unethical power of the medical profession over the very bodies of the poor. The cook ref lects on the injustice of a society in which the poor are exploited for medical gain, with no thought for their feelings: ‘die armen Leute — da fragt keener nach, ob die sich die Seele aus’n Leibe heulen’

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(‘the poor people — no one is interested in them even if they were to weep their soul from their body’, 200). Agathe is tortured by her conscience (208). To find Wiesing, Agathe journeys to the city boundary, where there is a large barracks providing the customers for Frau Krämer’s brothel. The shop windows are no longer elegant. Many of the shops provide food and beer for the soldiers. A pale child with a newborn baby in her arms represents the suburb’s deprivation. Her origins are a mystery: perhaps she and her sister are unfortunate children of prostitutes. Agathe enters a dark and foul-smelling hall, and ascends via steep stairs, slippery with damp filth. She weeps on finding Wiesing, kisses her, and strokes her hand. When Agathe returns next day with a wreath to adorn the child’s grave, Wiesing — so ill as to be indifferent to Agathe’s appearance — sheds a silent tear. The narrator comments: ‘Agathe hatte nun das Elend gesehen — das tödliche Elend’ (‘Now Agathe had come face to face with squalor — deadly squalor’, 208). While Agathe thought Wiesing would be protected from such a calamity while working in a respectable household, the family’s failure to protect the servant left her vulnerable, as Agathe is all too aware: ‘Und sie und ihre Mutter waren schuldig. Ja — ja — ja — sie waren schuldig’ (‘She and her mother were guilty. Yes — yes — yes — they were guilty’, 208). As in Margarethe Böhme’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1904: Diary of a Lost Woman) bourgeois men are implicated in working women’s descent into prostitution: the sexual attention Wiesing receives from Walter is the beginning of her decline.44 As Richard Evans points out, many prostitutes were indeed former servants at the end of the nineteenth century, and had been dismissed by employers as a result of falling pregnant.45 Prostitution was a last resort for girls who felt unable to return to the countryside as a result of the stigma of their pregnancy. The effect of visiting Wiesing tears down the protective barriers separating Agathe from the non-bourgeois world. Agathe feels threatened by the lascivious gazes she excites from men she encounters in the tenement housing and has a horror of returning. She enters a brief depression and justifies her inertia with the idea that Wiesing is beyond hope: ‘Ihr Vater hatte doch recht, ihr die Armenbesuche auf eigne Hand zu verbieten. Furcht und Hoffnungslosigkeit senkte sich wie ein Nebel über ihr Denken’ (‘Her father was right to forbid her to visit the poor herself. Fear and hopelessness descended on her thoughts like a mist’, 205). Also, back in the safety of her bourgeois home, Agathe ref lects on Wiesing’s career as a prostitute and her imagination is aroused. Agathe cannot prevent herself from examining her own sexual fantasies.46 In wondering what it would be like to be Wiesing, Agathe falls prey to a sensationalization of the prostitute’s life: Ja — aber — zeigte das nicht erschreckende sittliche Verderbtheit, daß sie oft wahrhaftig beinahe wünschte. ... So weit war sie schon gekommen. ... Wer weiß, wie schnell es da weiter ging — hinab — Hinab... ohne Halt — ohne Wiederkehr! (AGF, 209) [Yes — but — was it not a sign of terrifying moral depravity that she often truly nearly wished ... she had gone so far ... who knows how quickly you would fall — down — Down ... with nothing to stop you — no return!]

In the slum, Agathe was horrified when intoxicated men leered at her and invited her to share their meal, but in the comfort of her safe home she fantasizes about

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becoming a fallen woman herself. It is several days before Agathe can bring herself to revisit the slum, and by then Wiesing is dead. In Aus guter Familie, Reuter reveals the damaging power of bourgeois ideology over its female subjects. She shows how the bourgeois world contains and def lects potentially rebellious subjects, and tames them into conformity.47 She notes in her memoir, however, a particular sympathy towards middle-class women whose experience she considers neglected by naturalists: ‘Waren denn die Mädchen des Mittelstandes weniger als die Kellnerin, die Prostitutierte, die fortwährend in ihrem leiblichen und seelischen Elend verherrlicht wurden? (‘Were middle-class women less important than serving girls or prostitutes whose spiritual and physical hardship was continually glorified [in naturalist writing]’, Vom Kinde, 432–33). This is evident from Reuter’s focus not on the servant Wiesing per se but on the middle-class Agathe in a nexus of spaces and things, the fixed system which the city represents.48 Agathe in Aus guter Familie understands her small provincial city as a fixed space whose social divisions she is powerless to heal, just as its physical divisions into separate districts are immutable. When she delays her visit to the dying Wiesing until it is too late, she confirms the boundaries of her own world. For Georg Simmel, however, physical borders are a sociological phenomenon: ‘die Grenze ist nicht eine räumliche Tatsache mit soziologischen Wirkungen, sondern eine soziologische Tatsache, die sich räumlich formt’ (‘the border is not a spacial certainty with sociological results but a sociological certainty that manifests itself as space’.)49 The urban environment — both the interior world of Agathe’s home and the geography of her home town — is shaped by its subjects, and thus Agathe herself is also ultimately complicit, Reuter critically reveals, in accepting and thereby strengthening the physical and social boundaries that separate her from others. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Ernst von Wolzogen, ‘Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. Der Münchner Kunstbriefe siebentes Stück’, in Das Magazin für Litteratur, 64 (1895), issue 51 (21 December), Sp. 1673–1682 (Sp. 1680–82), and cited in Gabriele Reuter, Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens: Studienausgabe mit Dokumenten, ed. by Katja Mellmann, 2 vols (Marburg: LiteraturWissenschaft.de, 2006), II, p. 334. 2. Helene Stöcker, ‘Gabriele Reuters Aus guter Familie,’ in Die Frauenbewegung, 2 (1896), issue 4, 37–39, cited in Aus guter Familie, ed. by Mellmann, II, pp. 356–57 (p. 356). 3. Benno Rüttenauer, ‘Agathe’, in Die Nation. Wochenschrift für Politik, Volkswirtschaft und Litteratur, 13 (1895–96), issue 52, 784–86, cited in Aus guter Familie, ed. by Mellmann, II, pp. 339-44 (p. 344). 4. Catherine L. Dollard, The Surplus Woman: Unmarried in Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009), and on Aus guter Familie, see pp. 26–28. 5. Stöcker, in Aus guter Familie, ed. by Mellmann, II, p. 357. 6. See David Jackson, ‘Taboos in Poetic-Realist Writers’, in Taboos in German Literature (Oxford, 1996), pp. 59–78. 7. Gisela Brinker-Gabler, ‘Perspektiven des Übergangs: Weibliches Bewußtsein und frühe Moderne’, in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1988), II, pp. 169–205 (p. 174). 8. See Charlotte Woodford, ‘Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie: Sentimentality and Social Criticism’, in The German Bestseller in the late Nineteenth Century, ed. by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), pp. 206–23 (pp. 210–11). 9. Russell Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 286.

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10. On John Henry Mackay, see Walter Fähnders, Anarchismus und Literatur: Ein Vergessenes Kapitel deutscher Literaturgeschichte zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987). 11. Alan Bance, ‘The Novel in Wilhelmine Germany: From Realism to Satire’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, ed. by Graham Bartram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 31–45 (p. 32). Bance compares Aus guter Familie to Fontane’s Effi Briest and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, reading all three as responding to the conditions of modern Wilhelmine society with ‘a new and confident sense of critical purpose’ whose corollary is ‘increasing technical mastery of the modern novel form’ (pp. 32–33). 12. Émile Zola, ‘Aussprüche über die bildende Kunst’, in Die Gesellschaft, 1 (1885), issue 3, 55–56 (p. 55). 13. Émile Zola, ‘Prudhon et Courbet’, in Zola, Mes Haines, Causeries littéraires et artistiques. Mon Salon. Edouard Manet, étude biographique et critique, ed. by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Slatkine, 1979), pp. 21–40 (p. 25). First published in Le Salut public, 26 juillet 1865. See also Brian Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–18 (p. 4). 14. Zola, ‘Aussprüche’, p. 56. 15. Karin Tebben, ‘Psychologie und Gesellschaftskritik: Gabriele Reuter’, in Deutschsprachige Schrift­ stellerinnen des Fin de Siècle, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), pp. 266–89 (p. 267). 16. Friedrich Spielhagen, Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1883), p. 62. See also Georgia A. Schneider, Portraits of Women in Selected Works of Gabriele Reuter (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1988), pp. 12–13. 17. Gabriele Reuter, ‘Im Spiegel. Autobiographische Skizzen’, in Das litterarische Echo, 3 (1900–01), issue 9, Sp. 592–96 (Sp. 592–93), also cited in Aus guter Familie, ed. by Mellmann, II, pp. 574–79 (p. 575). 18. Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), p. 427. On this topos of secretive reading, see also Jennifer Drake Askey, ‘ “I Read It Secretly” ’: Clara Viebig’s Struggle with Naturalism’, Excavatio: Emile Zola and Naturalism, 15, (2001), issues 3–4, 120–33. 19. Wilhelm Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie: Prolegomena einer realistischen Aesthetik (Leipzig: Reissner, 1887), p. 8. 20. With these comments, Reuter might well be alluding to Spielhagen’s essay ‘Finden oder Erfinden?’ (1871), in his Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans, as well as perhaps Zola’s objection to the term ‘Kunst’: ‘Kunst treiben — heißt das nicht etwas schaffen, was außer dem Menschen und der Natur steht?’ (‘to be an artist — does that not mean to create something that stands apart from humans and nature?’), in Zola, ‘Aussprüche’, p. 55. 21. Reuter, ‘Im Spiegel’, in Aus guter Familie, ed. by Mellmann, II, p. 578. 22. M. G. Conrad, ‘Zur Einführung’, Die Gesellschaft, 1 (1885), issue 1, 1–3 (p. 1). 23. Conrad, ‘Zur Einführung’, p. 1. 24. Gabriele Reuter, Ebner-Eschenbach (Berlin, Leipzig: Remer [1905]), p. 48. See Charlotte Woodford, ‘ “Eine Dichtung vom Dichter — ein Phantasiebild, aus Schauen, Erleben und Träumen zusammengefügt”: Gabriele Reuters Aufsatz über Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’, in Die Biographie — Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. by Wilhelm Hemecker (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 105–21. 25. Marianne DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. by Michael Harry Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 174–93 (p. 182). 26. Conrad, ‘Zur Einführung’, p. 1. 27. Gabriele Reuter, ‘Mein liebes Ich. Skizze’, Die Gesellschaft, 8 (1892), issue 3, 283–85 (p. 284). It is perhaps for this reason that the essay begins with a defence of Reuter’s work in gendered terms, which draws on the science of heredity: ‘Wirklich, ich kann nichts dafür! Es ist bei uns erblich — wie in andern Familien das Trinken oder der Selbstmord — das Schriftstellern der Frauen nämlich’ (‘Truly, I cannot do anything about it! Women’s attempts at writing are hereditary in our family, like in other families drinking or suicide’, ‘Mein liebes Ich. Skizze’, p. 283). 28. Reuter, Vom Kinde, p. 470. 29. See Chris Weedon, ‘Of Madness and Masochism: Sexuality in Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Century’, in Taboos in German Literature, ed. by Jackson, pp. 79–95.

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30. Reuter, Vom Kinde, p. 434. Reuter’s commentary in Vom Kinde zum Menschen on the writing of Aus guter Familie appears to respond — albeit at some distance in time — to inf luential reviews of the work, and especially criticisms of the novel in such reviews. The comments cannot therefore necessarily be taken at face value. On the other hand, Reuter’s distance from the organized feminist movement in the 1890s is consistently emphasized. 31. Linda Kraus Worley, ‘Gabriele Reuter: Reading Women in the “Kaiserreich” ’, in Autoren damals und heute: Literaturgeschichtliche Beispiele veränderter Wirkungshorizonte, ed. by Gerhard P. Knapp (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), pp. 419–39 (p. 433). 32. Reuter, Vom Kinde, pp. 431–32. See also Faranak Alimadad-Mensch, Gabriele Reuter: Porträt einer Schriftstellerin (Berne: Lang, 1984). 33. Georg Simmel, ‘Philosophie der Mode’, in Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Ottheim Rammstedt, 10 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), X, pp. 7–38 (p. 12). Hereafter, ‘Mode’. Previously published as Georg Simmel, ‘Zur Psychologie der Mode. Sociologische Studie’, Die Zeit. Wiener Wochenschrift für Politik, Volkswirtschaft, Wissenschaft und Kunst, 5 (1895), issue 54 (12 October 1895), 22–24. 34. For Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Agathe’s experience through religion of the mystical love of Christ informs her understanding of love, in particular as something powerfully platonic and removed from base sensuality, see Gisela Brinker-Gabler, ‘Selbständigkeit oder/und Liebe: Über die Entwicklung eines Frauenproblems in drei Romanen aus dem Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Frauen sehen ihre Zeit (Mainz: Ministerium für Soziales, Gesundheit und Umwelt, 1984), pp. 41–53 (p. 44). See also the connection between religious experience and hysteria explored by Lilo Weber, Fliegen und Zittern: Hysterie in Texten von Theodor Fontane, Hedwig Dohm, Gabriele Reuter und Minna Kautsky (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1996). 35. As Chris Weedon suggests, Agathe’s religious education acts ‘as a channel for sexual feelings’ and her Confirmation is followed in a later section of the novel by ‘a habit of displacing sexual needs and feelings into religious pietism’, Weedon, ‘Sexuality in Women’s Writing,’ p. 81. See also Ludmila Kaloyanova-Slavova, Übergangsgeschöpfe: Gabriele Reuter, Hedwig Dohm, Helene Böhlau, und Franziska von Reventlow (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1998), pp. 46–48. 36. Simmel, ‘Mode’, 22; English translation from Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, International Quarterley, 10 (1904), 130–55 (p. 143), see , last accessed on 11.9.2013. 37. On Berlin fashion see Uwe Westphal, Berliner Konfektion und Mode 1836–1939: Die Zerstörung einer Tradition (Berlin: Hentrich 1986), also Gudrun Liegl-Raditschnigg, Kleidung und Mode vom Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert (Oldenburg: Isensee, 1996). 38. Max Pensky, ‘Method and Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 177–98 (p. 183). 39. Pensky, ‘Method and Time’, p. 184. 40. Andrew Webber, ‘Introduction’, in Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis, ed. by Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (London: Wallf lower Press, 1988), pp. 1–13 (p. 4). 41. In ‘Mein liebes Ich’, Reuter disparagingly mentions Marie Nathusius, along with Wildermuth and the illustrated family magazine Die Gartenlaube, as her only sources of reading material in her teenage years in Weimar, Reuter, ‘Mein liebes Ich’, p. 284. 42. Weedon, ‘Sexuality in Women’s Writing’, p. 82. 43. Regina Schulte, Sperrbezirke: Tugendhaftigkeit und Prostitution in der bürgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1979), p. 151. Marie Janitschek plays ironically with the expression of sexual desire and social contempt in her story ‘Scham’ in Vom Weibe (1896: Shame), where in an act of role reversal a teenage girl decides to lose her virginity to her contemptible riding master, rather than pollute her relationship with her fiancé. 44. Richard Evans, ‘The Life and Death of a Lost Woman’, Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 166–212 (pp. 178–80). 45. Evans, ‘The Life and Death of a Lost Woman’, pp. 179–80. 46. See Kaloyanova-Slavova, Übergangsgeschöpfe, pp. 55–56. 47. On nationalism and Agathe’s masochistic relationship with her father, see Richard L. Johnson,

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‘Men’s Power Over Women in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie’, in Gestaltet und Gestaltend: Frauen in der deutschen Literatur, ed. by Marianne Burkhard (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980), pp. 235– 53, and Gabriele Rahaman, ‘Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie in the light of Klaus Theweleit’s concept of “Entlebendigung” ’, German Life and Letters, 44 (1991), 459–68. 48. See Webber, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. 49. Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologie des Raumes’, in Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), VI: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, ed. by Rüdiger Kramme and others, pp. 132–83 (p. 141).

Chapter 4

v

The Exploitation of Women’s Bodies for Sex and Science in Helene Böhlau’s Der Rangierbahnhof and Halbtier! Elisabeth Bronfen, in her study Over Her Dead Body, uses the painting ‘The Anatomist’ by the Munich artist Gabriel von Max, on the theme of dissection, to raise some important questions about the representation of women’s bodies.1 Von Max’s painting, exhibited for the first time in 1869, represents female beauty as precarious: the anatomist will cut into the body and destroy it in the process of dissection. He will map out the female body, and the process results in a text, a dissection report containing his findings. He asserts his control over the body, and the texts he produces are also about ‘his signature, his gaze, his masculinity’.2 What happens, however, when the dead woman’s body is articulated by a woman writer? In Halbtier! (1899: Half-Beast!) Helene Böhlau transforms this motif of the dissection of the female body by the male anatomist to protest against the abuse of women’s bodies by powerful male subjects. In particular, she juxtaposes the cold, objective gaze associated with the scientist and also with masculinity with a poetics of sympathetic identification. Within her two novels, Halbtier! and Der Rangierbahnhof (1896: The Shunting Yard), a further source of women’s oppression within patriarchal society is located in women’s lack of control over the experience of pregnancy and birth. In the novels of Helene Böhlau, motherhood on the one hand appears as a potential source of fulfilment. Nonetheless, it is at the same time instrumental in women’s oppression, as indicated by the fact that the body of the woman being dissected in Halbtier! has just died in childbirth. Increasing concern about population growth within industrial European countries in the late nineteenth century contributed to more widespread medical discussion of birth control, and the significance of these debates for Böhlau’s fiction will be discussed in this chapter.3 The Ambivalence of Mothering in Helene Böhlau’s novels Discussion of the nature of ‘public and private motherhood’ was central to German feminism from the early nineteenth century onwards, as the historian Ann Taylor

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Allen has shown.4 Around the turn of the century, however, many women regarded motherhood and childrearing with some ambivalence, especially when it conf licted with their own intellectual ambitions or desire for a career.5 Moreover, the population in Germany, which had risen over the course of the nineteenth century, began to decline overall from the 1890s onwards.6 A lower birth rate was apparent across all Western industrialized nations, caused principally by women bearing fewer children within marriage. In fiction and drama, unwelcome pregnancy traditionally tends to befall women out of wedlock, such as the woman who dies in childbirth in Halbtier!, the mistress of the protagonist’s brother. One thinks of Friedrich Hebbel’s protagonist Klara in Maria Magdalene (1843) or Frank Wedekind’s Wendla Bergmann in Frühlings Erwachen (1890: Spring Awakening). However, in Böhlau’s two novels considered here, unplanned pregnancies are also lamented by married women. Mothering is the only role required of them, yet for the protagonists of Böhlau’s novels it stands in the way of self-fulfilment and their cultural and intellectual equality with men. Neo-Malthusianism, a birth control movement which linked the welfare of children to smaller family size, was widely debated towards the end of the nine­ teenth century and forms an important context for Böhlau’s novels.7 Commercially available contraceptives began to play a role in limiting family size, alongside the traditional method of coitus interruptus.8 Doctors Arnold Meyerhof and Wilhelm Peter Johann Mensinga patented a diaphragm in 1878, available from midwives and pharmacies, and known as the ‘Mensinga’sche Versch­lußring’. Condoms were marketed to men in the fight against syphilis, and rinses or douches could make use of inexpensive household detergents. Advert­ise­ments for contraceptives were placed in magazines or in pharmacists, using euphemisms such as ‘mothers’ help’ or ‘hygiene products’ to circumvent censorship. The entrance of women into the medical profession led in the fin de siècle to some of the first modern women’s writing on contraception. The gynaecologist Hope Bridges Adams (1855–1916) was the first woman to take exams in medicine in Germany. She had completed a school leavers’ certificate at Bedford College in London, founded in 1849 as the first higher education institution for women in the United Kingdom. She then studied medicine in Leipzig from 1876, where she cut her hair short and dressed like a man in order to avoid attention. Adams took the Staatsexamen (State Examination at degree level) in 1880, twenty years earlier than any other German woman (she was not accredited the examination until 1904), and practised medicine using the title of ‘gewerbsmässige Heilkünstlerin’ alongside her doctor husbands, first Otto Walther and from 1896 Carl Lehmann.9 Adams ran a medical practice in Schwabing, Munich, from 1896 and was the first female gynaecologist in Munich, distributing contraception and emphasizing the right of the individual to limit family size.10 Adams’s writings on women’s health constituted an important act of protest against a misogynistic male medical profession. In a similar way to women’s novels in this period they were an attempt to transmit knowledge to women that had been damagingly withheld from them out of a misplaced sense of the need to preserve their innocence. Adams wrote that every person, whether man or woman, had

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the moral right to avoid parenthood. Furthermore, there existed a duty to do so ‘wenn das Wohl des zu erzeugenden Kindes oder von schon vorhandenen Kindern es verlangt’ (if it is necessary for the good of the child to be conceived or those children already born’).11 This encapsulated a debate which would become more prominent in public discourses in the later 1900s: limiting family size was both the subject’s right, but also, for certain individuals, a duty to the nation — for example, in the case of the knowledge of parental illnesses such as syphilis, or conditions such as alcoholism — and a duty to those children who have already been born, if the parents’ ability to care for them would be weakened. Giving women access to knowledge about birth control, therefore, was an important priority for Adams. In 1896, Adams published a manual on women’s health in twenty-six chapters, covering topics from contraception to the detrimental effect of wearing corsets on women’s lungs, from menstruation to sexually transmitted diseases.12 In two volumes, it ran to 1,828 pages with over 700 illustrations, including vivid pictures of the effect of congenital syphilis on babies and children. At a price of either 20 Marks for the two bound volumes, or 8 Marks a month in instalments, over 40,000 copies were sold within the year, according to the book’s publicity. It was a revolutionary work that put women’s health firmly on the agenda. The Arbeiter-Zeitung welcomed it as a necessary work in response to the needs of thousands, written by a woman with a love of the truth (‘Wahrheitsliebe’). The Stuttgarter Beobachter stated that, like a cookery book, there should be a copy in every household, and that every parent should buy it for their daughter when she married. Reading material for the family market carefully concealed sexual knowledge from the female reader, just as Agathe Heidling’s father in Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895) locked his books away in a glass cabinet to prevent his daughter from accessing morally dangerous scientific knowledge.13 But Das Frauenbuch spells out the facts about women’s bodies, for the benefit of the whole family, whose health was thought to be so crucially determined by the mother’s. Böhlau’s two novels, both set in fin de siècle Munich, explore the damaging effect on women of being denied the knowledge of how to avoid pregnancy. In Der Rangierbahnhof an aspiring modern artist, Olly, wants to delay motherhood until she has established a professional reputation.14 She has been cultivating her talent as a painter throughout her teenage years, fashions herself as a work of art and treats her art almost as a religious cult. The hours when Olly is working are sacred ones, and during her engagement she forbids her future husband to interrupt her until the evening (Rangierbahnhof, 85). Her husband Friedel Gastelmeier cannot understand why Olly works so hard. Even as a newly married woman, Olly is in the studio all morning, and then suddenly realizes that the time for lunch has past and there is no food on the table. Gastelmeier admonishes her, telling her that she needs to remember to wear a watch, so that she can stop work punctually before lunchtime (Rangierbahnhof, 124); Olly however has let it slip down behind the bed and left it on the f loor because she has no interest in the hour or the day. Olly is a self-confessed avant-garde artist. Authenticity of feeling is everything; beauty is no longer a guiding principle: ‘Häßlich ist’s oft genug, was ich mache, abstoßend, aber es lebt — ja es lebt eben’ (‘What I make might seem quite ugly,

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repellent, but it is alive — yes that’s right, it is alive’, Rangierbahnhof, 111). On the other hand, in artist circles, she is confronted with old-fashioned sexism. When she asks her husband what his friends think of her art, she is told they really wouldn’t even begin to take notice of a woman painter (‘Weißt Du, wenn wir zusammenkommen, simpeln wir grundsätzlich nit Kunst ... Und ehe sie sich um die Arbeit von einem Frauenzimmer kümmern, ja, das stellst Du Dir ganz anders vor,’ ‘Listen, when we get together we generally don’t chatter about art ... and the time when my friends will take any notice of anything by a woman — well, you’re missing the point’, Rangierbahnhof, 109). Traditional and avant-gardist concepts of art are also juxtaposed: Olly’s husband Gastelmeier is an artist, but he has no talent; he paints landscapes in the manner of Munich painter Franz von Lenbach, a nineteenth-century artist well known for reproductions of famous paintings by others. It is implied, therefore, that his work is derivative, while Olly’s is authentic and groundbreaking. Gastelmeier has always thought that both art and women should be inoffensive (‘harmlos’) and unthreatening; he longs for a homemaker wife, and expects Olly to conform to a traditional model of domesticity and mothering. She repeatedly asks him for permission to carry on working after their marriage, but he projects maternal feelings onto her and expects that time and nature will transform his artist into a mother. After her marriage, therefore, Olly is working against her biological clock: ‘Und da war etwas, das in Ollys Seele, als unsägliche Bangigkeit aufstieg, das wie eine dunkle Furcht nachts über ihr lag, wie ein geheimnisvolles Grauen [...] “Mein Gott, mein Gott! Nein — nein, noch nicht!” ’ (‘And then something welled up in Olly’s soul as an unspeakable anxiety; at night it came on her like a dark fear, a secret terror [...] “My God, my God! No — no, not yet!” ’, Rangierbahnhof, 100). Olly, only twenty years old, wishes to delay life and happiness — and pregnancy and motherhood — in order to achieve professional success. But as her pregnancy becomes more and more of a certainty (‘es wurde ihr mehr und mehr zur Gewißheit,’ ibid.) Olly redoubles her efforts to work, doing so like a person under a death sentence, as her husband observes presciently, without knowing why (ibid.). When she reluctantly admits the pregnancy to him, he feels that the age-old gender roles have been fulfilled, and his house will become a traditional home. Yet Olly feels helpless; her powerlessness within patriarchal society is suddenly made acute through her lack of control over her own body. Her image of the future and Gastelmeier’s diverge markedly: he envisages a child will bring domestic harmony, she sees conf lict and turmoil ahead: ‘Sie sah nur Unglück und Trostlosigkeit, Kampf und Qual — und Gastelmeier war glückselig’ (‘She could see only unhappiness and disconsolation, struggle and anguish — and Gastelmeier was blissful’, Rangierbahnhof, 102). Gastelmeier’s happiness is short-lived. Olly catches a fever from exhaustion and cold. It is brought on by overwork, and indirectly also by travelling across the city in the snow to her art classes. She miscarries. She brief ly wonders whether she should feel guilty; in her lethargy, she had not bothered to remove her damp clothes or shoes to look after herself. But she soon (too soon for Gastelmeier) casts off such doubts and welcomes the time that has been restored to her for work: ‘Jetzt hatte

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ihr das Schicksal Zeit gegönnt. Wie sollte sie diese Zeit ausnützen!’ (‘Fate had given back some time. How she would exploit the days!’, Rangierbahnhof, 103). Although permitted this extra time to work, Olly is struck down by a hereditary throat cancer, and dies on the point at which her work is starting to be received with acclaim by the outside world. Her death does not seem to be a punishment, however, for her unmotherly feelings. Rather, Olly gains a heightened sense of authenticity through an understanding of her own mortality and transforms this into artistic innovation. She is also able to share her artistic insights with an avant-garde artist, Köppert, who learns to love Olly not to the extent to which she conforms to traditional models of femininity, like Gastelmeier does, but instead in a way that transcends gender altogether. Their unconsummated love for each other is expressed through their work, in their mutual understanding of their ideas, and it offers an antidote to the individualistic distancing of the self from others, which Olly feels had prevented her from embracing pregnancy. Köppert describes Olly on her death as ‘eine Heldenseele [...], eine Prachtseele, die bis zum Tod voller Schaffenskraft und Feuer war, die alles überwand’ (‘A heroic soul [...] a glorious soul who was full of creative energy and fire and overcame any obstacles’, Rangierbahnhof, 185). The theme of reluctant motherhood recurs again in the figure of Marie Mengersen in Böhlau’s Halbtier!. Marie is the sister of the protagonist, Isolde Frey, and she has married the artist Friedrich Mengersen, with whom the young Isolde had fallen in love at the start of the work. Mengersen preferred the passive Marie over the lively and artistic Isolde. A mere six months after her first child by Mengersen nearly cost her life, Marie discovers she is pregnant again. She confesses news of the pregnancy to her sister, Isolde Frey, then throws herself onto the grass, and is consumed by tears: ‘Siehst du, daß ich wieder Mutter werde das ist so eine Schmach — so ein Elend für Leib und Seele’ (‘You know, I feel such shame that I am to be a mother again — it is such physical and mental torment’, Halbtier!, 140). Her words betray shame at her husband’s treatment of her as a sexual object, and at his exploitation of her reproductive abilities. She has not yet come to terms psychologically or physically with becoming a mother at all, and senses that she is turning into someone other than herself. Indeed, she fears being like her own mother, for whom mothering meant ‘schwere Entbindungen, lange, qualvolle Schwächezustände, kranke Kinder, Geldsorgen, große Müdigkeit’ (‘difficult deliveries, long, painful periods of weakness, sick children, financial worries, overwhelming lethargy’, Halbtier!, 179). Mrs Frey (who is denied any Christian name or identity beyond that of wife and mother) has been brought low by the relentless struggle of her domestic duties. She has lost any sense of self, and for Isolde, it is as if her mother’s status within patriarchy is little more than that of an animal, hence the provocative title of the novel: Nach jeder Geburt die ungeheure Arbeitsanhäufung, der sie widerstandslos matt in größter Schwäche gegenüberstand! [...] Und das alles Tag für Tag — nie ein Aufatmen, nie, daß die Seele sich ihrer selbst einmal bewußt geworden wäre — nie eine Erholung — nie eine Anerkennung. [...] Ein Tier! Ein armes, armes Tier!’ Drei Kinder waren ihr gestorben nach langer Krankheit. Alle Qual umsonst. Für den Tod hatte sie sie geboren.

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The Exploitation of Women’s Bodies Wie gut war es ihr, als sich so eine schwere Dumpf heit über sie gelegt hatte — wie gut war das, als fast nichts mehr weh that! [....] Um aber diese Gleichgültigkeit zu kaufen, hatte sie alles hergeben müssen was Leben heißt, was Denken heißt, was Menschsein heißt (Halbtier!, 196–97). [After every birth there was the enormous volume of work that she confronted without resistance, feebly and with great weakness! And that is what it was like day in day out — never a moment to breathe, never a moment for the soul to become conscious of itself — never any respite — never any recognition. [...] A beast, a poor, poor beast! After long periods of sickness three children had died on her. All that torment wasted. She had borne them for death. How much good it did her that now she was consumed by a heavy dullness — how good it felt when suddenly she could hardly notice the pain. [...] But this indifference was bought at a cost: she had to sacrifice everything that we call life, thought, humanity.]

Mrs Frey lacks consciousness of her own condition. Isolde must diagnose it for her, and the novel is the artistic fashioning of Isolde’s arrival at awareness of women’s oppression, and their alienation from any ‘natural’ maternal instincts. Reducing women merely to their biological function as sexual objects and childbearers deprives them of their essential humanity, Böhlau argues powerfully. And it goes hand in hand with women’s exclusion from the realm of ideas, both in science and the arts. Isolde’s sister Marie, over the course of five pregnancies in as many years, learns to renounce her own needs and longings and slides into a similar state of resignation and indifference to their mother. In the end, she learns to invest the most trivial household matters with importance and to share her sorrows with her children. But this is merely a surrogate for the intellectual ideas she had hoped her artist husband would allow her to share. In an essay, Hope Bridges Adams argues that treating a woman as if she is simply a sexual creature, rather than a person with interests beyond the household and motherhood, makes her incapable even of fulfilling her role in the home:15 Die Frau ist ebenso wenig wie der Mann lediglich Geschlechtswesen. Sie ist auch Mensch, der Mensch in ihr kann nicht vernachlässigt werden, ohne daß auch das Weib mitleidet. Nach zwei Wochenbetten ist sie allzu oft gebrochen, wenn sie es nicht schon vor der Ehe gewesen ist. Amme, Kinderfrau und Gouvernante füllen ihre Stelle bei den Kindern aus, und der Mann geht seine Wege, ohne daß die Frau an seiner Arbeit oder an seinen Erholungen teilnimmt (‘Das Weib’, 744) [ Just like a man, a woman is by no means simply a sexual subject. She is also a human being and the human being in her cannot be neglected without the woman suffering too. After two pregnancies all too often she is broken, if she was not already so before her marriage. A nurse, a nanny and a governess take her place with the children and her husband goes his own way without his wife participating in his work or his leisure.]

Adams’ socialist tendencies are evident in this diagnosis of the bourgeois woman as abdicating mothering to her domestic servants. In the Frauenbuch, Adams also

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suggests that it is damaging to a woman’s humanity to entrap her with biology: ‘Die Frau ist nur dann ganz Weib, wenn sie ein ganzer Mensch ist, und nur ein ganzer Mensch, wenn sie ganz Weib ist. Es besteht kein Gegensatz zwischen Kraft und Leidenschaft, zwischen Denkfähigkeit und Mutterliebe’ (‘a woman is only fully feminine when she is a complete human being and only a complete human being when she is fully feminine. There is no contradiction between energy and passion, between the capacity for thought and motherly love’).16 Drawing on the authority of her profession, Adams attacks the medical scientific discourses that suggest education could damage a woman’s reproductive ability.17 Böhlau’s Halbtier! powerfully shows women as mothers treated without the respect owing to them as human beings. Difficult childbirths are rarely represented in nineteenth-century realism. But after Marie’s fifth child is born, she sends a letter to Isolde: ‘Todesqual, vierundzwanzig Stunden lang — wie jedes Mal, von Anfang bis zu Ende entsetzlich. Nur mein Wille, meine armen Kinder nicht zu verlassen, erhielt mich am Leben’ (‘Agony for twenty-four hours — as it is every time — terrible from start to finish’, 143). In contrast, her husband writes to his father-in-law: Alles vortreff lich! Das kleine Ungeheuer ist, was man so einen ‘prächtigen Jungen’ nennt! Schwere Entbindung, wie wir das nun einmal in der Gewohnheit haben. Marie befindet sich nach ihren Strapazen jetzt mehr als gut. Der Arzt ist außerordentlich zufrieden (Halbtier!, 144). [Everything marvellous! The little monster is what we might call a splendid boy! A difficult delivery — we are now used to those. After her exertions, Marie is now as well as ever. The doctor is extraordinarily pleased.]

The discrepancy between the two letters is obvious. Mengersen focuses on his son, glosses over the difficult labour, and draws attention to the opinion of the male medical expert, while Marie’s short lines betray her horror of the whole painful process. Her letter contrasts markedly with the sanitized version of childbirth so often found in popular romance. The uncomfortable reading made by these refer­ ences to the pain of childbearing, particularly alongside the death in childbirth (to be explored below) of a proletarian woman in a public hospital, is clear from Julius Rodenberg’s request to Böhlau on serializing the novel in Die Deutsche Rundschau in 1898 that some of the repeated depictions of the horrors of childbirth (‘wiederholte Schilderungen der Entbindungsqualen’) be watered down.18 Even within literary realism, the combination of emotions accompanying pregnancy and childbirth — tiredness, uncertainty, fear — and the relentless work involved in bringing up an infant, are rarely to be seen, even if there is sometimes an intimation of the risks involved to the health of mother and child. When Halbtier! was serialized, Rodenberg changed the title, to Böhlau’s great dismay, to Adam und Eva, less provocative than ‘Halbtier’, but also def lecting attention away from its exploration of the physical nature of women’s lives as mothers, and the reduction of women to their bodies. Yet the exploitation and callous disregard for women as mothers in Halbtier! does not prevent Isolde from regarding motherhood as potentially an important part of a woman’s happiness. On a visit to a meeting of feminist campaigners, Isolde is weary

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of the narrow legal questions being discussed, and dreams of the bigger picture where a woman would have work to expand the mind and a child to make her happy (Halbtier!, 168). And at the end of the novel, she herself longs for a child: Sie sehnte sich nach Leben von ihrem Leben, nach dem süßen Körper von ihrem Körper — nach dem Ende der großen Einsamkeit, nach dem Wesen von ihrem Wesen, nach der Verkörperung einer großen Liebe, nach einer so all-einigen Liebe, so eng aneinandergedrängt, so trostreich — so zwei-eins wie Mutter und Kind sind. [She so longed for some life from her life, for the sweet body made from her body — for an end to the great loneliness, for a being made from her own being, the embodiment of a great love, for an all-encompassing love, the extreme physical closeness which would be so comforting — the symbiotic closeness of mother and child.]

Motherhood promises an almost utopian closeness here which surpasses that of any relationship with a man; it offers a mystical union to contrast with the alien­ ation of the sexes in modern gender relations. Within the prevailing patriarchal system depicted in Böhlau’s fiction, however, there is no place for such a bond to thrive. The Clinical Male Gaze in Böhlau’s Halbtier! In Halbtier!, the cost women must endure as a result of men’s exploitation of their bodies is emphasized further through the fate of a destitute woman who dies in childbirth and whose corpse ends up in the anatomy theatre. The young shop assistant, whose lover has abandoned her in pregnancy, has neither medical insurance, nor money, and has failed to take the only course of action to ensure some support in her labour, namely to offer her services as a servant to a midwife in late pregnancy, in lieu of the cost of her medical care. In Berlin in 1910, 16% of all registered births took place without a midwife; and likewise 15.8% of all births in Cologne.19 Many of these women giving birth alone might well have been unmarried mothers taking refuge in the anonymity of the city; women who did not dare, or could not afford to seek support. In urban areas in Germany, there were also not enough midwives to tend to the growing population. While infant mortality still stood at the relatively high level of 20 in 100 live births in Germany (it was 13.2 in 100 in England),20 maternal mortality rates had fallen since the 1880s as a result of an increased understanding of infectious agents and the need for proper hygiene. In the regions of Saxony and Baden around 1880, approximately seven women in 1,000 births died during their confinement (a reduction on earlier in the century); by 1900 this had been reduced further to five in 1,000 births in Saxony and three in Baden. We are to understand, therefore, that the death of the young shop assistant during her labour in Halbtier! is the result not only of her abandonment by her lover but also by the callous medical treatment she receives in labour. The indignity of her death reaches its climax in a shocking scene when her corpse is dissected under the gaze of male medical students, a procedure which before the early nineteenth century had been reserved for executed criminals. The beginnings of state provision of medical insurance in 1883 — often praised

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as one of Bismarck’s great achievements — extended only to certain professions, such as factory workers. So it was above all the poor who provided the training received by medical students when, often reluctantly, they sought help in university hospitals. In Ilse Frapan’s novel Arbeit (1903) examined in Chapter 8, a woman medical student provides a very different and altogether more sympathetic response to the working-class patients she encounters in her training. That novel is a Socialist protest against the abuse of the proletariat that was almost certainly inf luenced by Böhlau’s Halbtier!.21 Hope Bridges Adams, practising in Munich where Halbtier! is set, spoke out against the treatment of the destitute as medical guinea pigs, calling for proper provision in all hospitals for students to learn from patients who gave their consent. She also called for the right for all women to receive adequate maternity care, whether married or unmarried, wealthy or poor. Adams writes critically of ‘die Armen, die jetzt mit Aufgabe des Verfügungsrechtes über ihren Körper die ärtzliche Behandlung erkaufen müssen’ (‘the poor who have to buy medical treatment by allowing access to their bodies’).22 In 1902, another woman doctor in Munich, Dr. Anna Fischer-Dückelmann, expressed her horror of public medical procedures carried out on the poor: Ich habe ganz einfache und ältere Frauen zittern, beben und krampf haft schluchzen sehen, wenn sie auf dem Untersuchungsstuhl angeschnallt, ihren nackten, kranken Leib von etwa 100 jungen Burschen, die, Einer nach dem Anderen, an ihr vorbeidefilierten, mußten betrachten lassen.23 [I have seen ordinary elderly women tremble, shake and sob spasmodically when they were strapped to the investigation chair and had to bear their naked, sick body being looked at by around 100 young fellows who, one after the other, paraded in front of her.]

The bodies of the poor were treated as public property, left to the mercy of the male students. Marita Krauss, Adams’s biographer, writes that the mistreatment of mothers giving birth under such conditions was well documented, with births, including internal investigations, taking place before a large audience.24 In Halbtier! Böhlau also ref lects on the gender ideology that excludes women from the realm of the artist, unless as powerless models or muses, and reduces them to mere physical bodies — to be sketched, exploited for sex, or reduced by doctors to objects of scientific curiosity. Death in childbirth is a theme introduced early in Halbtier! in an image by the fictional artist Friedrich Mengersen that makes a powerful impression on Isolde as a young girl. His paintings aestheticize suffering and emphasize the glory of female sacrifice, leading Isolde to exclaim: ‘das Herrlichste auf Erden, ist Weib sein! — sich opfern!’ (‘The most glorious thing on earth is to be a woman — and to offer yourself in sacrifice!’, Halbtier!, 149). The painting which made the strongest impression on her depicts a woman who has died in childbirth: Ein Kind war geboren. Das Weib lag langgestreckt und tot. [...] Der Mann kniete und hielt den Kopf des toten Weibes in seinen Händen und seinen Kopf hatte er ganz vergraben. Hinter beiden aber stand der Tod, riesig wie eine mächtige Wand, wie ein Fels und auf seinem Arm lag das eben geborene tote Kind, gleich einer welken

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The Exploitation of Women’s Bodies Blüte, die zufällig ein Sturmstoß auf den Arm des Todes geweht hat, so hing es formlos zusammengefallen (Halbtier!, 53). [A child had been born. The woman lay outstretched and dead. [...] The man knelt and held the head of the dead women in his hands and he had buried his head completely. Behind both of them loomed death, giant as a mighty wall, like a rock and on his arm lay the dead child who had just been born, it seemed like a wilted blossom that had been wafted by accident by a gust of storm wind into the arms of death, it lay so formlessly crumpled.]

This description of the painting suggests its counterpart is the etching ‘Tod’ by Max Klinger (1857–1920), from the cycle ‘Eine Liebe, Opus X’ (1887), in which the figure of Death has come to claim both mother and child, while the lover mourns.25 The poetic description of the dead child stands in contrast to the scientific approach to realism advocated by Wilhelm Bölsche in Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie. There, Bölsche suggested that fiction should de-mystify death: authors should not depict death using poetic language to mask the biological nature of the process, but rather should observe dispassionately the symptoms of death and present them to the reader (p. 48).26 Such clinical observation also characterizes Gustave Flaubert’s literary style, as exemplified by a letter to Louise Colet (1852), where he compares his dispassionate detachment from the subject of his literature to the act of dissection.27 He claims that he undresses his subjects in his mind; he knows their bodies and delves into their psyche — he uses the metaphor of the cold scalpel for the process of artistic production, and he turns the scalpel on himself too. Such scientific objectivity leaves little room for compassion. Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks (1901), in his two-fold presentation of Hanno’s death, explores the limitations of the scientific aesthetic: the onset of the tuberculosis which kills Hanno is first depicted scientifically, in terms of the clinical symptoms, then poetically, through the psychological effect of the disease on the subject. Mann juxtaposes the cold detachment which characterizes Flaubert’s fiction with sympathetic engagement, while managing ‘to hold sympathy and critical distance in balance’ in order to leave a space for moral ref lection.28 By introducing the poetic analogy with Mengersen’s painting into the dissection room, Böhlau is contrasting the ethical discourse foregrounded in a work of art with the clinical nature of the scientific setting and doctors’ mentality. The dead bodies of the woman and child become a site of resistance to the ethical crisis of modernity symbolized by the dissection room. For Bölsche, the purpose of poetry is ‘den Menschen gesund zu machen’ (‘to make people well again’).29 By contrast, the medical interventions have brought death rather than healing. Sympathy in art provides an ethical compass which also functions as a discourse of consolation in the wake of social injustice. However, Flaubert’s image of undressing women in his head in order to use them in his fiction also provides a fascinating connection with the fictional author of the painting of the woman and child, Henry Mengersen. Mengersen exploits Isolde’s desire for self-sacrifice, which his own painting has cultivated in her. Enthralled by the painting of the death in childbirth, and its glorification of women’s sacrifice, Isolde agrees to pose naked for Mengersen, hoping thereby to win his love. The act

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is compared to the folk story of a virgin sacrificing herself for her master: ‘Lebend wollte sie sich für ihn das Herz aus der Brust schneiden lassen’ (‘She wanted to let him cut her heart from her breast while she was still alive’, Halbtier!, 96). Isolde is ‘totenbleich’ (‘as pale as death’, Halbtier!, 97). The virgin is dissected just as Isolde’s body is written by the artist. Again, the act of male artistic creation is linked to the scalpel and to death. Mengersen seeks knowledge of her body — he wishes to map it out with his paint brush — without engaging with her as a subject. He resists any temptation to express warmth or passion and confronts her with a cold, clinical gaze. The motif of dissection is continued in Böhlau’s novel when the artistic representation of the woman who has died in childbirth is transformed into a powerful physical image in the novel, and the dispassionately scientific male gaze is juxtaposed with a sympathetic feminine one. Her body is written twice, first by the anatomist with the scalpel, and then through the poetic imagery used by the female narrative voice in an attempt to provide an ethical discourse through which the woman’s death can be understood. The image of the dissection table in the anatomy theatre becomes a metaphor for men’s possession of women’s bodies; the woman’s penetration by the scalpel approximating men’s knowledge of her through the sexual act. When Isolde receives a begging letter from a lower-class woman who is about to give birth alone, Isolde suddenly feels as if she is physically present in the room: ‘Das, was aus dem Briefe aufgestiegen, erfüllte es ganz und gar, war leibhaftig da, so weh, so hilf los, hilfesuchend’ (‘The room was filled with the physical presence that had stepped out of the letter, it was so pitiful, so helpless, so imploring’, Halbtier!, 151). The woman has been threatened with being sent to the maternity clinic on the Sonnenstrasse in Munich (‘sie will mich in die Anstalt in der Sonnenstraße schaffen’),30 a public institute with provision for the destitute where poor women give birth naked in front of the male students (‘so nakt und bloß vor aller Augen’), and in return the doctors are allowed their bodies if they do not survive the experience (Halbtier!, 150). In birth, they are exposed to the penetrating male gaze of students who rob them of their dignity. As Isolde hurries to her assistance, ‘ihr Herz klopfte der fremden Not entgegen’ (‘her heart beat in response to the stranger’s need’, ibid.). Isolde gives no consideration to the moral question of how the author of the letter has become pregnant, in contrast to the judgemental midwife whom Isolde encounters on going to the stated address. The midwife states bluntly that she is not there to take the rap (‘um alles auszubaden’) for girls who get into trouble. She has left it to the last minute to find help, the midwife says, and so the public maternity hospital is for the likes of her (‘Möcht wissen für wen sonsten, wenn net für die!’) The midwife has already sent the pregnant woman to the Sonnenstrasse; her lack of sympathy and desire for self-justification is obvious. Isolde is immediately prepared to take her carriage and fetch the woman back again, when it is revealed that the woman is her brother’s mistress, in labour with his child. The midwife, on realizing who Isolde is, changes her tune, describing the mistress as a decent sort of girl who looks after herself (‘ganz a sauberes Madel, das was auf sich hält’, Halbtier!, 153). Isolde is turned away at the iron gates of the birthing institute: she is already too late, the woman cannot be moved. She passes a sleepless night before returning,

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only to discover that the woman has not survived the ordeal of labour: the bodies of the mother and her child have been taken to the anatomy theatre.31 Around 1900 there was still public access to morgues and anatomy theatres where the human form was on display for observers’ morbid curiosity. The figure known as the inconnue de la Seine, the beautiful woman pulled from the river Seine in Paris, became famous around 1900 for a death mask made as a result of her beauty having impressed the large crowds who often filed through the Paris morgue.32 Ignoring advice to stay away, Isolde finds that a group of male students gathered around the table on which her brother’s mistress and his child are laid out: ‘Da lag ihres Bruders Weib nackt vor kalten Blicken’ (‘Her brother’s girl lay naked exposed to their cold gaze’, Halbtier!, 157). The description of their cold objectivity emphasizes the clinical detachment of the male students, in contrast to Isolde’s empathy. The bare room and grey walls convey the chill, dispassionate nature of the medical practitioners. The imposing walls of the neo-classical building tower over the woman just as death towered like a mighty wall behind the dead woman in Mengersen’s painting. The dead child is described in imagery that reminds the reader of death holding the wilted form of the infant in the painting: ‘Neben der Mutter ihres Bruders Kind, wie eine welke Blütenknospe, formlos, schlaff ’ (‘Next to the mother her brother’s child, like a wilted bud of blossom, formless, limp’, Halbtier!, 157). The poetic image, which once so captured Isolde’s imagination, entrancing her with its mystery of female sexuality and glorious renunciation, has come to life in a horrifying way before her own eyes. When she had gazed at the picture, she felt that she participated in the woman’s fate; now in the anatomy department, she feels at one with the dead mother, and the poetry of the moment lies in her empathy. As Isolde watches, the woman’s body is dissected by a male surgeon in front of his male pupils: da fuhr ein furchtbarer Schnitt über Brust und Leib des toten Weibes. Das stille reine Gesicht mit den schweren, starren Augenlidern lag teilnahmslos, voll rührender Hoheit über all dem Entsetzen, dem blutigen Gräßlichen, was da geschah (157). [A terrible incision ran across the breast and body of the dead woman. Her still pure face with heavy, stiff eye-lids lay unresponsive, and seemed to rise with touching majesty above all the horror, the bloody abomination that was taking place.]

The power of the surgeon over his subject seems enhanced by Isolde’s powerless spectatorship. The scene is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s famous painting ‘The Anat­ omy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’ (1632). In Rembrandt’s painting, a male corpse is displayed before the gaze of watching men. In Böhlau’s novel, the idea of the female body dissected under the male gaze intensifies the gender ideology that attributes intellectual enquiry to men and reduces women to their bodies. In Rembrandt’s painting of the anatomy lesson, the male spectators’ faces wear a look of respectful awe. Here, in contrast, Isolde hears the men laugh and make a joke at the woman’s expense, as the body is dissected. The students sense their own power over women through this control of the naked body: ‘Die Weißbeschürzten fühlten sich im Besitz strotzender Kräfte, strammer Jugend. Da lag der ganze Jammer des Weibes

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vor ihnen, war ihnen preisgegeben’ (‘The men in white coats felt in possession of powers bursting from them, vigorous youth’, Halbtier!, 157). By contrast, the woman has been robbed of her humanity. For Isolde, she symbolizes women’s status in the world; women seem to accept their subservience humbly ‘ohne Gegenwehr wie der blutige Leichnam dort’ (‘without resistance like the bloody corpse over there’ Halbtier!, 159). Without ceremony, the woman’s body is thrown into a box, and the baby dropped on top of the mother, to be taken away for a pauper’s burial. The young woman’s stillness and purity makes the undeserved nature of her public humiliation the more poignant; in Isolde’s eyes, her dignity is untouched by the unjust nature of her suffering. She sees the body as a symbol of femininity itself: ‘vom Leiden des Weibes, von seinem Opfer’ (‘of woman’s suffering, of her sacrifice’, Halbtier!, 157). For Isolde, it is as if the woman has overcome the pain of the world and achieved greatness far beyond those who torment her. The sight of the woman’s face gives her comfort: ‘sie hätte sterben mögen vor Ekel und Entsetzen, wäre dies stille Gesicht nicht gewesen’ (‘she would have wanted to die of horror and revulsion had it not been for the presence of that silent face’, Halbtier!, 158). Isolde feels an overwhelming sense of participation in the woman’s fate, through their common femininity, and perceives something victorious in the woman’s face, which shines like a light among the coarse faces of the men (ibid.). The paintings by Von Max and Rembrandt, by focusing on the moment soon after death and just before the destruction of the mortal body, raise questions about the relationship between the soul and the body and nature of existence after the body’s destruction. Böhlau’s novel shocks the reader into a recognition of the appropriation of women’s bodies by male subjects, whether for sex, science or art. However, in the description of the fate of the woman in the anatomy theatre there is also an elevation of death which can perhaps be understood through the Buddhist motifs in the novel.33 Böhlau expresses the possibility of life after death in the form of reincarnation as a way of finding meaning in suffering. She seeks consolation through an ethical discourse of sympathetic engagement as an alternative to the cold scalpel. By reinterpreting Max Klinger’s painting, Böhlau turns the beautiful female corpse from a signifier of human transience into a symbol of injustice. It had captivated Isolde by its allusions to the mysteries of the erotic and of motherhood, but the death of the mother awakens her consciousness of social stigma imposed by men on those whom they ruin. Der Rangierbahnhof and Halbtier! offer an important voice of protest which reson­ ated long after publication. Isolde in Halbtier!, as the lens through whom we absorb the stories of her mother’s marriage, her sister’s difficult childbearing years, and the death of her brother’s mistress and child, links women together across the classes and considers them as connected in a timeless cycle of female oppression. At the heart of women’s oppression in the patriarchal system, in both novels, is the inevitability of their role as mothers; emancipation, for Böhlau, depends on women overcoming their reduction to their physical bodies. At the end of Halbtier!, Isolde avenges herself and her sister by shooting Mengersen dead with his own revolver when he attempts to rape her, though this will certainly be at the cost of her own life. Her violence contrasts with the passive acceptance of suffering which Isolde perceived in the face of her brother’s dead mistress. Helene Böhlau was described

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by the Swiss critic Joseph Viktor Widmann as ‘eine für ihr Geschlecht kämpfende Penthesilea’ (‘a Penthesilea fighting for her sex’).34 Penthesilea in the myth was also reduced to her body, raped after her death by the Greek hero Achilles. Widmann continued: ‘das ganze Werk [ist] von wahrhaft ingrimmigen Amazonengefühlen durchdrungen und gewiß der wuchtigste Angriff, der in der Sache der sogenannten “Frauenbewegung” jemals mit poetischen Waffen versucht worden ist’ (‘the whole work is permeated with truly angry Amazonian feeling and is certainly the most powerful attack that has been attempted with poetic weapons in the cause of the so-called “women’s movement”’.)35 To the reader Isolde’s certain death after the end of the story might seem a pointless sacrifice, despite the references to Buddhist thought indicating that she hopes for reincarnation. However Isolde’s calm embracing of death reinforces the novel’s socially critical message. Within the novel, Isolde’s death would make only a small impact on a narrow circle, yet the artistic treatment of her fate — and the fate of her brother’s proletarian mistress — resonated powerfully with a sympathetic readership. It was an inf luential model for novels in the 1900s on the theme of women’s emancipation, as can be seen by the use of the motif of the dissection room in Ilse Frapan’s Arbeit (1903), examined in Chapter 8. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Man­ chester University Press, 1992). 2. Ibid., p. 12 3. It is perhaps noteworthy that Helene Böhlau herself only had one child, in 1895, when she was aged 39, even though she had been married to Friedrich Arndt since 1885. Arndt, after his conversion to Islam, was known as Omar al Raschid Bey. 4. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 5. Ibid., pp. 150–51. 6. Cornelie Usborne, Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 2–3. 7. See Frank Albert Fetter, Versuch einer Bevölkerungslehre ausgehend von einer Kritik des Malthus’schen Bevölkerungsprincips ( Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1894). 8. See Anneliese Bergmann, ‘Frauen, Männer, Sexualität und Geburtenkontrolle. Die Gebärstreikdebatte der SPD im Jahre 1913’, in Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Karin Hausen (Munich: Beck, 1981), pp. 81–92. 9. Marita Krauss, ‘ “Die neue Zeit mit ihren neuen Forderungen verlangt auch ein neues Geschlecht”: Die Ärztin Dr. Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann und ihre Forderungen an die Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Medizin, Geschichte und Geschlecht: körperhistorische Rekonstruktionen von Identitäten und Differenzen, ed. by Frank Stahnisch und Florian Steger (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), pp. 119–35 (p. 120). 10. See Usborne, Politics of the Body, p. 7. See also Olga Zschommler, Wesen und Kritik des Malthusian­ ismus. Verhütung der Empfängnis und ihre gesundheitlichen Folgen. Ein Mahnwort an die Frauen (Berlin: Borggold, 1905, first publ. 1891). Interestingly, earlier editions were simply referred to as ‘ein Wort an die Frauen’, and the shift to the term ‘Mahnwort’ (a ‘word of warning’ or an ‘exhortation’) in 1905 suggests a growing sense of urgency in the light of a more widespread social debate on contraceptive use and population control in the 1900s. 11. Hope Bridges Adams, Eheglück! Die Hygiene des Geschlechtslebens (Geschlechtsverkehr — Unfruchtbarkeit — Verhütung der Empfängnis — Prostitution — Geschlechtskrankheiten) von einer prak­ tischen Aerztin (Berlin: Schwarz, [1899]), p. 26.

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12. Hope Bridges Adams, Das Frauenbuch. Ein ärztlicher Ratgeber für die Frau in der Familie und bei Frauenkrankheiten, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Süddeutsches Verlags-Institut, 1896), I: Körperbau und Gesundheitspflege; II: Krankenpflege. 13. See Jennifer Drake Askey, Good Girls — Good Germans: Girls’ Education and Emotional Nationalism in Wilhelminian Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013). 14. Helene Böhlau, Der Rangierbahnhof. Roman, ed. by Henriette Herwig and Jürgen Herwig (Mellrichstadt: Turmhut, 2004, first publ. 1896). 15. Dr H. B. Adams-Lehmann, ‘Das Weib in seiner Geschlechtsindividualität’, Die Neue Zeit, 15 (1896–97), 741–50. 16. Marita Krauss, Hope: Dr. Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann — Ärztin und Visionärin. Die Biografie, 2nd edn (Munich: Volk, 2010, first publ. 2009), p. 81. 17. See for example Carol Diethe, Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), pp. 42–43. 18. Henriette Herwig and Jürgen Herwig, ‘Nachwort’, in Halbtier!, by Helene Böhlau (Stockheim: Turmhut, 2003), pp. 217–61 (p. 259), quoting a letter of 24 January 1898 from Julius Rodenberg to Böhlau. 19. Renette Brandt-Wyt, ‘Zur Hebammenfrage’ in Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibes als Mutter, ed. by Adele Schreiber (Munich: Langen, 1912), pp. 395–403 (pp. 399–400). 20. Brandt-Wyt, ‘Zur Hebammenfrage’, pp. 395–96; Allen, Feminism, p. 179. 21. See Ilse Frapan, Arbeit (Berlin: Sammlung Zenodot Bibliothek der Frauen, 2007, first publ. Berlin: Paetel, 1903). 22. Krauss, Hope, p. 144: Adams produced plans for her own maternity hospital, pp. 140–51. See also Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann, ‘Das Frauenheim in München’, in Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, 56 (1909), 1622, and her ‘Mutterschutz’, in Sozialistische Monatshefte, 15 (1911), 1242– 45, where Adams expresses her hope for a future where all women would have unrestricted access to birth control. 23. Krauss, Hope, p. 144. Anna Fischer-Dückelmann was also the author of a successful medical work for women: Die Frau als Hausärtztin: Ein ärtzliches Nachschlagebuch für die Frau (Stuttgart: Süddeutsches Verlags-Institut, 1901). Like Adam’s own health manual for women, mentioned below, it was a great success, and the 11th edition, published in 1911, notes that it celebrates the printing of the 750,000th copy of the work. Fischer-Dünckelmann, Die Frau als Hausärtztin, pp. 255–61 provides contraceptive advice, with numerous illustrations of different contraceptive devices and tips for their usage. See also Johanna Bleker, ‘Die ersten Ärztinnen und ihre Gesundheitsbücher für Frauen. Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann (1855–1916), Anna FischerDückelmann (1856–1917) and Jenny Springer (1860–1917)’, in Weibliche Ärzte. Die Durchsetzung des Berufsbildes in Deutschland, ed. by Eva Brinkschulte (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994), pp. 65–83. 24. Krauss writes: ‘Untersuchungen wurden wie eine Vergewaltigung erlebt’ (‘investigations were experienced like rape’), Krauss, Hope, p. 144. 25. See Hans Wolfgang Singer, Max Klinger. Radierungen, Stiche und Steindrucke: Etchings, Engravings and Lithographs, 1878–1903 (San Fransisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 1991), illustration 166, also Henriette Herwig and Jürgen Herwig, ‘Erläuterungen zum Text’, in Halbtier!, by Helene Böhlau, ed. by Herwig and Jürgen Herwig (Stockheim: Turmhut, 2003), pp. 202–16 (p. 207). The etching stands in the tradition of ‘death and the maiden’ images which in the early modern period drew attention to the brevity of life, as well as the dangers of sensuality. 26. Wilhelm Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie: Prolegomena einer realistischen Aesthetik (Leipzig: Reissner, 1887), p. 48. 27. See the letter by Gustave Flaubert to Louise Colet, 3–4 July 1852, Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, 9 vols, II, 1847–1852, ed. by Caroline Franklin-Grout (Paris: Conard, 1926), pp. 454–58 (p. 547). See also Martina King, ‘Der romantische Arzt als Erzähler — medizinisches Wissen in Stifters Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (1868)’, in Realism and Romanticism in German Literature, ed. by Dirk Göttsche and Nicholas Saul (Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2013). 28. See Judith Ryan, ‘Buddenbrooks: Between Realism and Aestheticism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. by Ritchie Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 119–36 (pp. 119, 133). 29. Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie, p. 93.

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30. Helene Böhlau (Frau al Raschid Bey), Halbtier! Roman (1899), ed. by Henriette Herwig and Jürgen Herwig (Stockheim: Turmhut, 2003), p. 150. Further quotations are given in brackets after the quotation to the page number in this edition. 31. The anatomy theatre at the University of Munich opened in 1825, with public access. It was an impressive piece of civic architecture, designed by Leo von Klenze. Böhlau describes it as beyond Sendlinger Tor; it was on the present-day Schillerstraße, not far from the Neue anatomische Anstalt (now the Königliche Anatomie) which replaced it 1907 on the grounds that the original building was too small. See Hans-Dieter Nägelke, Hochschulbau im Kaiserreich: Historistische Architektur im Prozeß bürgerlicher Konsensbildung (Kiel: Ludwig, 2000), p. 46. 32. See Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, p. 206. 33. Gisela Brinker-Gabler links Isolde’s ideas to the Buddhist principle ‘Tat tvam asi!’ (‘Das bist du!’), quoted on p. 93 of Böhlau’s novel, as an idea inf luential for Frau Lu, Isolde’s friend and mentor. The principle exhorts the fortunate to identify with the common humanity of those who suffer. The inf luence of Buddhism is also clear from Isolde’s own portrait of the Buddha, which bears the features of Lu’s husband: Gisela Brinker-Gabler, ‘Perspektiven des Übergangs: Weibliches Bewußtsein und frühe Moderne’, in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Gisela BrinkerGabler, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 1988), II, pp. 169–205 (p. 180). See also Sandra L. Singer, Free Soul, Free Woman?: A Study of Selected Fictional Works by Hedwig Dohm, Isolde Kurz, and Helene Böhlau (New York: Lang, 1995), p. 43. Singer suggests that the idea of ‘Tat tvam asi!’ became widely known via the essay ‘Tat twam asi’, Die Zukunft, 17 (31 Oct 1896), 193–203, presumably by the editor Maximilian Harden. Indeed, there Harden notes with pleasure the publication of a translation by Karl Eugen Neumann of the Buddha’s writings. The work referred to must be Die Reden Gotamo Buddho’s aus der mittleren Sammlung Majjhimanikāyo, transl. Karl Eugen Neumann (Leipzig: Barth, 1896). Harden uses these teachings and their resonances in Schopenhauer to explore the need for compassion when dealing with cases of social deviancy, citing recent criminal activity in Berlin and exploring sympathetically the human need that might drive a man to murder. See also Helene Böhlau, ‘Halbtier! Roman (Selbstrezension)’, Die Zukunft, 28 (12 August 1899). 34. Joseph Viktor Widmann, review of Halbtier!, 11 June 1899 in Bund (Berne), 24, p. 191, quoted in Herwig, ‘Nachwort’, p. 227. 35. Widmann, cited in Herwig, ‘Nachwort’, p. 227.

Chapter 5

v

Morality and Maternalism: Vera’s Eine für viele and Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland When confronting the social problems of urban modernity, women’s campaigns often embraced the idea of ‘extended motherliness’ (erweiterte Mütterlichkeit), which held that social work was a way of transferring women’s domestic and caring skills into the public domain in order to re-shape modern society and address its fundamental inequalities. Ute Frevert documents how modern industrial society itself was associated with masculinity, as were its negative corollaries such as alco­ holism, prostitution, family breakdown, slums, and indifference towards others: For the bourgeois women’s movement, the ‘pathology of the Modern’ was [...] an intellectual and spiritual disorder whose symptoms could be summed up as mechanisation, objectification and the obliteration of the soul and the individual. Modern technology and industry seemed to be the incarnation of masculine principles. [...] Women were like foreign bodies in this object world of machines and bureaucracies.1

Ulla Wischermann has shown the centrality of moral campaigns to the work of the women’s movement around 1900.2 Many women’s associations based their cultural and moral mission on a concept of gender difference which allowed women to distance themselves from the origins of many of the problems of urban life. The idea of ‘extended motherliness’ offered women an important opportunity to make the transition from the private to the public sphere without giving up their feminine identity.3 As Ann Taylor Allen argues, motherliness or maternalism became the basis for ‘a concept of social morality that linked the self to the other and the individual to the community’.4 Emphasizing women’s special aptitude for social intervention through motherliness sounds like a conservative remnant of a patriarchal ideology. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble (1990), alerts us to ‘how the category of “woman”, the subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures of power through which emancipation is sought’.5 An ideology of gender difference seemed to legitimize women’s participation in public life, precisely by suggesting that women, through their emancipation from the domestic sphere, would offer skills and ideas over and above those already supplied by men, as Georg Simmel suggests in his essay Die

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weibliche Kultur (1902: Female Culture).6 Alice Solomon, ref lecting in 1913 on the history of social work, suggested that women’s philanthropic work was capable of transforming modernity and she identifies conventionally feminine qualities including charity and forbearance (‘Milde und Nachsicht’) as central to the idea of extended or organized motherliness.7 She defines Mütterlichkeit as, ‘die Fähigkeit, die Mutterliebe vom Haus auf die Gemeinde zu übertragen, auf die Welt, die dieser Kraft so dringend bedarf ’ (the ability to transfer motherly love from the home to the community, to a world that has such need of her energy’).8 Nevertheless, the recourse to traditional gender categories in the language used to describe the effect of women’s emancipation on society should not blind us to the tremendous potential located in this ideology of ‘extended motherliness’ to transform women’s lives and society’s institutions. ‘Extended motherliness’ was often accompanied a refusal to be defined by the constraints of actual mothering as women increasingly sought an identity beyond the family. Irene Stoehr suggests persuasively that whereas Weiblichkeit — the con­tem­porary term most commonly used in German to describe femininity — drew attention to women’s sexual identity, and therefore located femininity in an opposi­tional relationship with men, the term ‘motherliness’ as a gendered identity liberated women from their dependency on men and their function as sexual objects.9 It provided women with a source of power without their having to take on the negative associations of masculinity commonly associated with it. With its emphasis on ethical co-existence and communality, it also seemed to offer an antidote to the cold egoism of modern thought and the reserve (‘Reserviertheit’) or indifference towards others (‘Gleichgültigkeit’) that Simmel associated with the rise of the metropolis.10 This chapter will explore how ideas expressed in the political sphere of feminist activism about the importance of women’s moral inf luence on society find their expression in literature. In an age when women were excluded from mainstream politics, the role of mass-market fiction for the dissemination of ideas was of great importance. In the anonymous fictional diary Eine für Viele (1902: One for Many) and the novel Christa Ruland (1902), by Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), young women attempt to resist the paths conventionally mapped out for them by their families. Eine für Viele, published under the pseudonym ‘Vera’, is a polemical work calling on men to change their sexual behaviour, written by Betty Kurth (1878–1948, née Kris), one of the first Austrian women to train and work as an art historian and also the wife of a Viennese member of parliament. The diary claimed to have been published posthumously after its fictional author’s suicide in the wake of her disgust at her fiancé’s pre-marital sexual activity. In a letter prefacing the diary, its fictional author calls for other girls to read of her experience so that they can learn before marriage of the dangers to their own and society’s health caused by the sexually transmitted diseases to which their fiancés are exposed. The novel caused a scandal which brought the issue of men’s moral conduct firmly under the spotlight. In Christa Ruland, the eponymous protagonist, whose early life has been constrained by social convention, explores the new roles and possibilities available to women in the new century, before seeking an ethical framework through maternalism

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which offers an opportunity to contribute to social reform. Both novels share a moral dimension that is closely linked to the authors’ concept of women’s difference from men and an engagement with society’s imperfections that is predicated on an understanding that the reader is herself part of a movement of social change. Male Celibacy and Sexual Hygiene — Eine für Viele The early twentieth-century Viennese bestseller, Eine für Viele: aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens (1902: One for Many: From a Girl’s Diary), provoked a scandal that resonated widely and led to extensive debate on the question of women’s education and sexual morality.11 It was a commercial success, reprinted a dozen times in 1902 alone. Its publisher Hermann Seemann Nachfolger almost immediately printed responses to it: Christine: Eine Mutter für Viele (Christine: A Mother for Many); and a parody Verus: Einer für Viele (Verus: One Man for Many).12 Another parody, Georg: Einer für Viele. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Jünglinges. Ein aufrichtiges Wort an Vera (George: One Man for Many. From the Diary of a Youth. A Sincere Word to Vera), was published by a rival firm.13 It is clear from these responses that the novel generated considerable public debate about sexual morality. The diary popularizes contemporary questions about the rise of urban prostitution by raising arguments through the voice of a young girl discovering its existence for the first time. Vera starkly contends that men need to put an end to their philandering: women will reject men for their pre-marital sexual incontinence. Public debate on prostitution tended to hold as an uncontestable truth the idea that the existence of sexuallyavailable women could be justified because of its role in the protection of girls of the middle and upper classes from men’s sexual urges. Yet Vera’s diary exposed its damaging nature for the girls it is supposed to protect. Eine für Viele makes for light reading, and part of its attraction for younger female readers is its account of Vera’s initiation into the secrets of love. It begins as Vera is about to become engaged to a man of her own class, Georg, for whom she feels a genuine attachment. It describes her gradual sexual awakening as she starts to imagine her future union with Georg: Wenn Georg meine Sehnsucht empfinden würde und zu mir käme ... [...] Wenn er leise die Thür öffnete — und meinen Namen f lüsterte ... [...]. Wie ich ihm entgegenf liegen würde — und mich in seine Arme schmiegen und an seiner Brust vergraben ... Wie ich innerlich jauchzen würde in seiner Umarmung ... wie ich seine Küsse in mich trinken wollte. Ich glaube, ich müsste mich ihm geben, ganz und gar. ———14 [What if Georg were to sense my longing for him and come to me ... [...]. If he were to open the door quietly — and whisper my name ... [...], how I would f ly towards him — and melt into his arms and bury myself in his chest ... How I would rejoice inwardly in his embrace ... how I would drink in his kisses. I believe that I would have to give myself to him completely ———]

The reader infers Vera’s sexual arousal from the breathless syntax.15 Vera questions why she and Georg need wait for their marriage to consummate their love. She feels their mutual attraction alone sanctifies their union, rather than the narrow band of

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gold that is the wedding ring, and that there is something degrading about entering into sexual adulthood so inevitably and thus so publicly on the night of her marriage. There are echoes here of Engels’s Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884: The Origins of Family, Private Property and the State) or Ellen Key’s writings suggesting that love alone sanctioned the sexual union.16 The naturalness and innocence of Vera in her growing longing for Georg are abruptly interrupted, however, when she becomes aware of an older woman looking pointedly and lustfully at her fiancé. Revelations follow about men’s love life before their marriage which are also intended to be educational for the young woman reader. Georg admits that a woman they encounter after the opera is not his only past lover. In the diary Vera notes her distress that he reveals his past liaisons in the matter-of-fact way that he might mention what he had eaten for dinner (EFV, 55). The scene enacts a similar conf lict to that in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), when Levin, who cannot imagine entering into an untruthful relationship with Kitty, shows her his diary narrating frequent visits to prostitutes. Levin wishes to repent of his past, and while Kitty is devastated by Levin’s revelations, she comes to accept that there are differences between male and female sexuality that normalize pre-marital sexual encounters for men. For Vera, however, it is a different story. Georg’s revelations fill her with disappointment, anger and jealousy. She feels foolish for having naïvely assumed his purity (EFV, 56). She regards Georg as having squandered his virginity on women of the street and adulteresses, with no thought for his future wife (EFV, 62), and she challenges his justification that sexual continence is damaging to a man’s health: ‘Ist die Notwendigkeit der geschlechtlichen Befriedigung in jüngsten Jahren nicht ein wohlorganisierter Schwindel?’ (‘Is the necessity of sexual satisfaction in their earliest years not just a well-organized con-trick?’, EFV, 66). The question of sexual hygiene also looms large in her mind: she is angry with Georg for his lack of concern for the hideous diseases he might contract through his visits to prostitutes (EFV, 67). Every time Georg tries to caress her, she imagines him with these other women, and recoils from him. The dangers of the brothel threaten respectable society. While moral contamination is foremost in Vera’s mind, the question of sexual hygiene is also present between the lines, and thus the novel aligned itself with contemporary debates on the prevention of disease. In a pamphlet on women’s health published in 1899, the Munich gynaecologist Hope Bridges Adams (see Chapter 4) draws attention to the widespread incidence of gonorrhoea among the female population of Germany. It is more of a threat to young women than syphilis, she claims. While she admits it is no surprise to find the disease prevalent among prostitutes, she asks: ‘woher stammte sie bei Frauen, welche unberührt in die Ehe gingen, mit scheinbar gesunden Männern sich verheirateten und diesen die ehelichen Treue gehalten haben?’ (‘where did it come from among women who entered marriage as virgins with seemingly healthy husbands and who have always remained faithful to them?)17 At the end of the nineteenth century, the recent discovery of infective agents focused attention more than ever before on the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, together with the source of the problem, the sex industry. The issue of what Adams calls ‘unterschiedsloser Geschlechtsverkehr’

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(multiple sexual partners) was brought into the public eye, and confronting the problem of prostitution was central to the campaigns of radical feminists in the late 1890s.18 Adams claims gonorrhoea to be one of the most common infectious diseases of any kind to be carried by women at the end of the nineteenth century. A French doctor, she tells us, has noted it informing young female patients’ reluctance to marry, for their friends’ health deteriorates so markedly even on their honeymoon.19 Gonorrhoea, suggests Adams, often lies dormant in male patients or is so silent that a doctor would miss it, but it destroys a man’s hopes of fathering children and turns the beautiful young girl he has married into ‘eine kränkelnde, frühzeitig alternde, manchmal schwer leidende Frau’ (‘a sickly, prematurely aging women who often suffers serious pain’, 40). Later symptoms of such illnesses included arthritis, anaemia, and tuberculosis as a result of the patient’s weakness. The effect of sexually transmitted disease on female patients’ quality of life (as opposed to their role as future mothers of the nation) was not always taken seriously by the male medical establishment. The feminist historian Hannah Decker, for example, has shown how Freud dismissed the illnesses suffered by his patient Dora’s mother while treating the father for tertiary syphilis: yet the mother’s own chronic condition was almost certainly passed on by the father.20 The answer to the rising concern over the spread of sexually transmitted diseases at the end of the nineteenth century appeared to be the state regulation of the industry of prostitution, with attempts made to subject prostitutes to regular health examinations. Registered prostitutes in Germany were known as Kontrollmädchen, though only a fraction of sex workers were ever registered.21 The German Society for the Fight against Sexually Transmitted Diseases (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten) founded in 1902 was to intensify German society’s resolve to combat disease. But for radical feminists, the official regulation of prostitution, including state-registered brothels, seemed the epitome of patriarchal society’s moral double standards: prostitutes, who were regarded as protecting ‘respectable’ (read ‘middle-class’) women from men’s sexual desire, were penalized for supplying sex, while men escaped the arm of the law altogether.22 As Adams asked: why subject only women to a fortnightly health examination?23 Feminist campaigns in the late 1890s against the state regulation of prostitution were inf luenced by the British feminist Josephine Butler (1828–1906), the leader of public opposition in Britain to the power of the police to arrest and examine prostitutes under the Contagious Diseases Act.24 Butler founded the International Abolitionist Federation, which challenged the state regulation of prostitution. Among its aims were the promotion of male chastity and self-restraint, through moral education.25 The first German branch of the International Abolitionist Federation was founded in Hamburg in 1899 by Lida Gustava Heymann, with Anna Pappritz leading a Berlin branch in the same year.26 The German abolitionist campaigns in the early 1900s echo the international movement’s call for universal chastity as well as its focus on the sexual education of girls.27 Their work aimed to raise awareness among young people of the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases. They were also angered by the fact that women suspected of being sex workers could be apprehended and subjected

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to humiliating inspection, including genital examinations. The ‘Koeppen Case’, which arose in 1898 after a respectable engaged woman was arrested as a prostitute and forcibly examined for sexually transmitted disease, enabled abolitionists to emphasis strongly the dangers of the current law for any young woman.28 While Miss Koeppen was successful in bringing to justice the man who had falsely accused her, the trial revealed to the world that she was no longer a virgin and her accuser received a milder sentence as a result, a manifestation of the sexual double standard which incensed feminist campaigners. The police’s power over women was moreover seen as a threat to ordinary women’s right to walk in the city whenever and wherever they pleased without a male chaperone.29 Adams’s pamphlet on sexual hygiene calls on female readers to cast aside religious scruples and moral prudery in the fight against sexually transmitted disease.30 She sees women’s ignorance as a contributory factor in perpetuating society’s moral double standards with regard to sexual behaviour. Vera’s diary is a fictional attempt to contribute to women’s education on sexual health, an education which abolitionists considered should precede the onset of sexual activity, thus also allowing women to inf luence the sexual behaviour of their suitors. In Vera’s diary, which in a phrase reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert she calls her ‘seelischer Seziertisch’ (‘psychological dissection table’, 77), this process of education is documented, as Vera reads books about men’s sexual lives and on sexual diseases. Rather than conclude that there should be no stigma attached to women also indulging in pre-marital sexual encounters, Vera, like the members of the International Abolitionist Federation, argues that men should remain chaste until they find a life-partner and claims that society’s dreadful sexual squalor is the result of a misguided educational philosophy (‘das furchtbare Geschlechtselend ist eine Folge der verkehrten Erziehung’, 89). She advocates celibacy for both sexes, and an end to what she calls state-sanctioned polygamy (‘das fürsorglich vom Staat organisierte polygamische Leben’, 79) of society turning a blind eye to prostitution and men’s extra-marital affairs. The melodrama of Vera’s suicide makes her a martyr figure in the battle between virtue and evil.31 Alexandra Millner calls Vera’s suicide an instrument of social revolt.32 On the other hand, suicide is hardly a path to recommend to other readers, and is a reminder of the conventional killing-off of the female protagonist in many male-authored novels — Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895), for example. The demise of the heroine was simply a convenient literary device to provoke a sensation that would bring Vera’s writings to readers’ attention, since the notoriety of the diary derived partly from its claims to be true.33 The melodramatic sentimentality of the work makes it problematic for a modern readership, but as a literary commodity, the rhetoric of protest contained in the diary’s emphatic and exclamatory style had widespread resonance and its emotive power appealed to a wide female readership. The work gave its name to the moral campaign in the 1900s in favour of male pre-marital chastity, known as Veraismus.34 The Viennese author Else Jerusalem, whose novel Der heilige Skarabäus (1909: transl. as The Red House) is examined in Chapter 8, gave a lecture for young women in the wake of the publication of Eine für uns, entitled Gebt uns die Wahrheit (1902: Give us the Truth). She called for women to be educated effectively about the facts of life, so that they did not need

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to find the information secretly from trashy novels and imperfectly through friends: ‘litterarische Detektivs haben überall Haussuche gehalten und überraschendes Material ans Tageslicht gefördert’ (‘detectives of literary material have searched houses everywhere and brought astonishing material to light’).35 Jerusalem draws attention to the power of a young woman reader’s identification with fictional figures such as Vera, even though she implies that the sentimentality of such stories might provoke a smile from a more experienced reader: ‘Ja, überall wo unsere Mütter heimlich lachten, da haben wir heimlich geweint [...]. In jedem diesen Mädchen [...] erkannten wir unser Schicksal’ (‘Yes, at every place when our mothers secretly laughed we secretly wept [...]. We recognized our own fate in every one of these girls’, 16–17). She exhorts girls no longer to be ‘stumme Trägerinnen unserer naiv-sentimentalen Rollen’ (‘silent performers of our naïve and sentimental roles’, 1), but rather to open their eyes to the lies they are being told and take their fate into their own hands. Alongside the essays and speeches which emerged from the women’s movement itself, fiction such as Eine für viele which took up its ideas and provoked widespread debate played a crucial role in generating support for the reforming visions of feminists. Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland and the Search for an Ethical Compass Women’s emancipation from such ‘naïve and sentimental roles’ is a theme which powerfully informs the fiction of Hedwig Dohm. In her essays and her fiction, Dohm attacks extensively patriarchal society’s subordination of women. The early essay Der Frauen Natur und Recht (1876: The Nature and Rights of Women) refutes universalizing ideas about woman’s nature by outlining its dependency upon socialization processes. Dohm also calls for women to be given the right to vote, writing passionately about the British suffrage campaign. Her later essay Die Mütter: Beitrag zur Erziehungsfrage (1903: Mothers: A Contribution to the Question of Edu­ cation) opens with frank scepticism of the idea that motherliness is a natural instinct. She attacks the stif ling nature of women’s confinement to the home in terms similar to Betty Friedan’s inf luential work The Feminine Mystique (1963), except that Dohm’s women are unmarried daughters of the servant-owning classes, rather than mothers single-handedly juggling housework and the care of small children: im Gespräch mit zwei jungen, nicht mehr ganz jungen Mädchen [...], erfuhr ich, daß der Vormittag ihnen oft so lang wäre, man wüsste ihn nicht recht hinzubringen: baden, Blumen begießen, sticken, ein bisschen dies, ein bisschen das, — es wäre nicht genug. Sie wären immer froh, wenn man um zwölf das Lunch servierte. Nachmittag — da ginge es besser. Kommissionen in der Stadt, Besuche machen und empfangen, ein Kunstsalon u.s.w., das reiche schon bis zur Dinerstunde.36 [I learned through a conversation with two young — or rather not so very young — women that the mornings often felt so long to them that they did not really know how to pass the time: bathing, watering f lowers, embroidery, a bit of this, a bit of that — it was not enough. They were always glad when lunch was served at noon. Afternoons — that was better. Shopping in the town, visits to receive and make, an art salon etc., such things saw them through until dinner.]

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Dohm sought the solution in woman’s emancipation from her role within the family, and in particular she speaks out against what she sees as a belief that woman’s usefulness is coexistent with her youthful sexuality (‘daß ihr Daseinsrecht nur auf dem Geschlecht beruhe’).37 In Dohm’s essay Die Antifeministen (1903: The Anti­ feminists) Dohm also criticizes feminist narratives which focus too exclusively on women’s erotic development: Ach! Und was wird aus den vielen ältlichen und alten Frauen, die dem Ideal des erotisch geschwollenen Weibes nicht mehr entsprechen und nun bis an ihr unseliges, leider viel zu spätes Ende, traurig vegetieren müssen [...]?38 [Well! And what will become of the many elderly and aging women who no longer correspond to the idea of an erotically rounded woman and will now have to vegetate sadly until their unfortunate and greatly belated demise.]

The aesthetic of protest in Dohm’s fiction needs to be read in the context of the liter­ ary conventions through which women’s lives have been represented in nineteenthcentury fiction. She responds to the plots of the popular romance, which Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres describes as ‘the perils of noble womanhood met and overcome by the strength and persistence of the heroine’, revealing marriage to be merely the exchange of one patriarchal authority for another.39 It is sometimes suggested that Dohm’s literary protagonists are too cautious and tentative, rarely living up to the example set by her own essays.40 However, her depiction of the damage inf licted on women protagonists through the conventional process of gendered socialization is intended to raise the consciousness of the present generation of young readers, who possess greater opportunities to shape their lives differently. In Dohm’s novella Werde, die Du bist (1894: Become Who You Really Are), the widowed protagonist, Agnes Schmidt, ref lects on her past life: ‘War ich denn wirklich so brav und pf lichtgetreu? Ich hätte ja gar nicht anders sein können! Ich war vielleicht nur deshalb so zahm, weil man mich von Kindheit an gezähmt hatte’ (‘Was I really so well behaved and conscious of my duties? I couldn’t really have been anything else. I was probably only so tame because from childhood onwards people had tamed me’).41 Within the novella Agnes is unable to find an identity beyond family or sexual relationships. Dohm ref lects on the constraints society places on women whose children have grown up and who no longer have any practical function in society. Agnes ends her life in a sanatorium, where through madness and visions recorded in a diary she challenges women’s treatment by the patriarchal establishment.42 In the end, imprisoned in an aging body and judged by those around her for her physical frailness and fading beauty, Agnes seeks spiritual transcendence. However, through her diary, Agnes is able to give voice to a powerful protest, which like Vera’s diary is intended to exhort other women to change their own lives, leading Joeres to conclude that the text is both tragic and optimistic at the same time.43 In a short dialogue entitled ‘Mutter und Großmutter’ (1909: Mother and Grandmother), Dohm explores the ideology of ‘extended motherliness’ as a way of giving meaning to women like Agnes Schmidt beyond their role in the family, and for providing women with an identity which was about more than simply sexuality. In contrast to the widow and grandmother in Werde die Du bist, the grandmother in

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Dohm’s dialogue has rejected self-definition through how she appears to the opposite sex and instead embraces an active identity in society through philanthropic work which liberates her from the family.44 Rejecting ideas that she should move in with her daughter and take life easy, the ‘new grandmother’ welcomes the opportunity at the age of sixty to turn her attention to the world outside the narrow domestic sphere, and she emphasizes that ‘die Großmütter junger Enkel sind ja oft noch wahre Springinsfelde, blühende, junge Frauen, zu jedem Lebenswerk noch bereit, im Alter kraftvoller Reife’ (‘the grandmothers of young grandchildren often still have real zest for life; they are ready for any kind of life’s work, at an age of powerful maturity’, 650). She works in the city for an association for abused children (Verein für mißhandelte Kinder), and her past experience as a mother provides the foundations for her compassionate treatment of less fortunate children: ‘Hätte ich mit dir und durch dich nicht die Mutterliebe kennen gelernt, wer weiß, ob ich die rechte Liebe für die armen Kinder meines Vereins aufgebracht hätte’ (‘If I had not learned motherly love with you and through you, who knows whether I would have been capable of finding the right love for the poor children of my Association’, Mutter, 659). The widowed grandmother resists being defined by any dominant maleauthored narrative and shapes a future for herself where she will set the agenda. Christa Ruland is the third in Dohm’s series of novels, which the author perceived as representing women’s development over three generations, through three unconnected female protagonists representing the choices available to women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first two are Schicksale einer Seele (1899: Fates of a Soul) and Sibille Dalmar (1896). Throughout these works, Dohm ref lects on women’s gradual awakening from their subordination under patriarchy. For example, in Schicksale einer Seele, the protagonist Marlene enters into marriage to escape from an unfulfilling home life, yet endures an unhappy marriage and the loss of a beloved daughter before finally she has the strength to leave her husband and Germany. The novel ends with her following to India a fictional version of Helene Blavatsky, the founder of the theosophy movement. Dohm’s fascination with theosophy can also be seen in Werde, die Du bist, where the young doctor to whom Agnes Schmidt is attracted wears a passion f lower symbolizing his supposed commitment to the theosophy movement, and Agnes hopes for reincarnation after her death — as does the widow in ‘Mutter und Großmutter’. Reincarnation was one of the ideas from Buddhism popularized by Helene Blavatsky. In Christa Ruland, the protagonist has educational aspirations which her mother will not accommodate: she has to give up her evening classes because they clash with the family’s evening meal. She is persuaded to marry, but the husband turns out to be the illicit lover of her married sister. He has no affection for Christa — loveless marriages are a key theme of Dohm’s — and the marriage is childless, something Christa welcomes. He also resents her attempts to get an education. Christa Ruland is partly told through letters, and in one letter Christa ref lects with amusement to her sister on how charitable work on behalf of the poor has suddenly become fashionable in Berlin.45 Even their mother, she says, dresses down and takes a cab to the poor industrial districts of Berlin to serve temperance drinks — chocolate, tea or coffee — to workers to tempt them away from alcohol (pp.

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88–89). Christa’s mother enjoys her excursions into the working districts, regarding the experience as a form of masquerade. It makes her feel better about her own privilege. In the second half of the novel, however, Christa, whose marriage has broken down, explores different philosophical responses to the modern world before eventually embracing such charitable work herself. Her transformation from sceptically observing women’s philanthropy to engaging sympathetically with it might seem at first sight like a reversion to conventional thinking. However, since Christa first explores the cold objectivity of modern male thought, her return to the ideology of maternalism seems instead to be the optimistic discovery of a life outside of bourgeois family structures which permits a satisfying integration of the self and society as an antidote to the isolation of the city. Christa Ruland recognizes her own search for freedom in a depiction of the New Woman (die Neue Frau) outlined in an essay by her friend Maria Hill, an aspiring author. Maria suggests that the young women of the 1900s are characterized by an internal conf lict (‘Zwiespalt’) between the ideas she has internalized in her youth and attractive new ones: ‘Was seit so vielen Generationen Recht und Brauch war, hat sich unserer Gesinnung einverleibt, es ist beinah Instinkt bei uns geworden. Wir haben noch die Nerven der alten Generation und die Intelligenz und den Willen der neuen’ (‘the customs and laws that have existed for so many generations have become one with our mentality, become almost instinctive for us. We still have the nerves of the old generation and the intelligence and the will of the new one’, 83). Christa herself experiences the ‘longing and impatience’ of the age of modernity. She seeks to participate in the frenetic pace of change: Alles muß rauschen, schäumen, f liegen, splittern, lodern oder wenigstens radeln. Und wer keine Flügel hat und kein Automobil, und kein Geld, um in Luxuszügen die Welt zu durchrasen, der kann sich begraben lassen. Aber das thue ich noch lange nicht (88). [Everything needs to hiss, fume, f ly, shiver, blaze, or at the very least cycle. And if you don’t have wings or a car, if you don’t have money to race through the world in a luxury train, you might as well be dead in your grave. But I won’t let that happen for a long time yet.]

Christa’s search for a ‘modern identity’ is not merely a search for freedom, but a gendered engagement with the ethical questions that arise from the possession of free­dom. After her marriage has broken down, Frank Richter, one of her husband’s rivals for her affection, lends her Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (1844: The Individual and his Property) by the anarchist thinker Max Stirner (1806–56). It is an alarm call for Christa, which awakens her from the ethos of renunciation which she had internalized from her earliest years (114–15). She summarizes Stirner’s individualism to her sister as follows: Die Quintessenz seiner Menschheitsauffassung ist, daß der Einzelne, das ‘Ich’, der Zweck, die Gesellschaft nur das Mittel zur Erreichung dieses Zweckes ist, daß der Glaube an irgend welche Autoritäten, die mir heilig sein sollen (Staat, Familie, Kirche, der Mensch), ein Spuk, ein Sparren, ein Gespenst ist. [...] Du mußt das Buch selbst lesen, und es wird Dir sein, als hättest Du den Hals aus einer Schlinge gezogen (115).

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[The quintessence of his conception of humanity is that the individual, the self is the end and society merely a means by which this end might be achieved; the belief in any kind of authority, however sacred it might seem to me (the state, family, the church, humanity) is a phantom, a hollow phrase, a spectre. [...] You had better read the book yourself and you will feel as though you have removed your neck from the noose.]

Society is but a means to achieving the individual’s ends: the idea overturns Kant’s central maxim that one should never use another person as a means to an end. Such an overturning of Kantian ethics is aligned with the instrumental reason of modern capitalism and stands in opposition to any kind of collectivist movement for the amelioration of social conditions. Christa, who in marriage exchanged the authority of her parents for that of a husband, finds Stirner’s thought liberating; she regards him as a Messiah, and attempts to place herself beyond social convention. But the more deeply she is inf luenced by Stirner, the more she adopts the coldness and objectivity which women writers in this era associated with male power in society: ‘Eine kühle Vornehmheit kam in ihr Wesen. Ihre Worte, ihre Urteile wurden klar, kalt, kurz, überhebend’ (‘She developed a cool sense of distinction. Her words, her judgements became clear, cold, short and high-handed’, 122). Her social relations become characterized by scornful feelings of superiority. She lets her friend Julia König, who has fallen on hard times, go on her way in shabby clothes. She considers offering her something new to wear but suppresses any pity for her with the idea that Julia has chosen her own path: it would be like giving a beggar smelling of alcohol some money, knowing he would spend it on brandy, she says (126). She visits another friend, the artist Anselma Sartorius, and is horrified by the state of desperation in which she finds her. She considers going back the next day, worried that Anselma is on the verge of suicide. But she thinks again: Anselma has set her heart on fame and love, she says, and has lost both — she should be allowed to commit suicide. That very afternoon she receives news that Anselma’s burnt remains have been found at her home. Even her new friend Frank Richter fails her through his own egoism, the logical consequence of his thought: in the woods in Wannsee, Christa and Frank are surprised by a terrible storm and Frank abandons her because he wants to be at one with the elements. Christa has to return alone in the pouring rain and is confined to her bed for a week. Stirner’s freedom is isolating and fails to offer Christa a purpose in life. The example of her friend Daniel Rainer’s religious aestheticism also fails to convince her, although she shares his longing for spiritual transcendence. Instead, Christa seeks to make a difference in the world, deciding that it is through pity and identification with others rather than cold indifference to them that she herself will be able to find meaning. She is overwhelmed with pity (‘erschüttert von Mitleid’, 154), on seeing a group of sick city children recovering in the countryside from scrofula, a tubercular infection of the neck. Although she has no children herself, she feels that it is through care for the next generation that she might change society and herself at the same time: Das Recht des Kindes hat das Herz der Welt noch nicht erobert. Sie hielt es für wahrscheinlich, daß das neue Jahrhundert, an dessen Schwelle sie stand, das Jahrhundert des Kindes sein würde.

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The narrator alludes here to Ellen Key’s recently published essay Das Jahrhundert des Kindes (1902), but Christa’s decision to devote herself to the care of these children goes firmly against the sentiments of Key’s essay. Key engages with the science of Social Darwinism and theories of racial hygiene; she claims that the future belongs to ‘healthy’ children, and that the Christian state is too sympathetic already to psychologically or physically sick children, who have no place in the future of the country. In Dohm’s novel, the scrofulous children are transfigured by the natural world; they walk under a rainbow which to Christa seems like the entrance to paradise. Scrofula was commonly thought to be a hereditary illness, and moreover one which affected the children of parents with syphilis.46 Christa’s sympathy for congenitally sick children from the city is a moment of ethical resistance to those who would prefer only to save the ‘healthy’. The maternalist tendency at the end of Christa Ruland is not, I would argue, to be read as a reversion to an old bourgeois ideology but an engagement with a humanitarian discourse through which the individual can play a role in the reform of society and at the same time find a meaning to life through purposeful activity. Christa explicitly rejects the idea that women’s highest calling is motherhood and does not regret that she has no children of her own. Her tentative wish at the end of the novel to work with children suggests that her own emancipation is to be found in the context of the contribution she can make in the re-shaping of modernity, rather than through individualism. In Eine für Viele and Christa Ruland, the authors’ treatment of the protagonist’s emotional journey draws attention to the damaging nature of many prevailing social conventions. In both cases their development takes them away from those closest to them but eventually reunites them with the collective — in Christa’s case through deprived urban children, in Vera’s case through the ‘posthumous’ publication of her suicide note appealing to a collective of female readers. Vera’s diary is a sentimental piece whose heightened rhetoric galvanizes the empathetic reader to action. Perhaps there is also some sentimentality in Dohm’s closing tableau of pitiful children rescued from urban factories, and Christa Ruland’s conversion at the sight of the children is certainly sudden, which might lead us to wonder how much weight we can place on this resolution of the narrative. But while Dohm’s essays engage insightfully with the injustices of misogyny and women’s lack of civil rights, her fiction additionally asks what the ultimate purpose might be of women’s emotional journey towards full self hood. Her novels engage with the need for transcendence amid the spiritually barren landscape of the city and allude to the spiritual possibilities of new ways of thinking: Buddhism and theosophy, for example. It is in the light of these that Christa’s decision can perhaps be read. For Dohm, it seems, motherliness is by no means a natural feminine instinct, but its expression through philanthropy is more

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than just an expression of a personal morality, it is a wider part of a search for moral truth. The protagonist’s search for spirituality (which features also in parts of Werde, die Du bist and Schicksale einer Seele) might be seen as a watering down of the socially critical vigour displayed in Dohm’s essays. I would argue, however, that her novels’ foregrounding of the need for a personal system of ethics within the modern world is in itself an important part of Dohm’s protest against social injustice, and also a way of empowering women to re-shape their lives in the future. Notes to Chapter 5 1. Ute Frevert, ‘Middle-Class Women and their Campaigns in Imperial Germany’, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation (Oxford: Berg, 1988), pp. 107–30 (p. 127). 2. See Ulla Wischermann, Frauenbewegung und Öffentlichkeiten um 1900: Netzwerke — Gegenöffent­ lichkeiten — Protestinszenierungen (Königstein im Taunus: Helmer, 2003), especially pp. 64–73 and pp. 90–106. 3. On ‘extended motherliness’ (erweiterte Mütterlichkeit), also referred to as organized motherliness (organisierte Mütterlichkeit), see Frevert, p. 105; Irene Stoehr, ‘ “Organisierte Mütterlichkeit”: Zur Politik der deutschen Frauenbewegung um 1900’, in Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Karin Hausen (Munich: Beck, 1983), pp. 221–49; Dietlinde Peters, Mütterlichkeit im Kaiserreich: Die Bürgerliche Frauenbewegung und der soziale Beruf der Frau (Bielefeld: Kleine, 1984); Christoph Sachße, Mütterlichkeit als Beruf: Sozialarbeit, Sozialreform und Frauenbewegung 1871–1929 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1986). Sachße highlights the important potential of Mütterlichkeit for feminists at the end of the nineteenth century ‘als Kritik der (männlichen) kapitalistischen Prinzipien von Konkurrenz, Eigennutz, Spezialisierung und Bürokratisierung’ (‘a critique of the [male] capitalist principles of competition, self-interest, specialization and bureaucratization’, p. 101). 4. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 3. 5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 1999, first publ. 1990), p. 5. 6. Georg Simmel, ‘Die weibliche Kultur’, in Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, 1, ed. by Rüdiger Kramme and others, in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), vol. 7, pp. 64–83. 7. Alice Salomon, ‘Die Frau in der sozialen Hilfsthätigkeit’, in Handbuch der deutschen Frauenbewegung, ed. by Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer, 5 vols (Weinheim: Beltz, 1980, first publ. Berlin: Moeser, 1901–15), II, pp. 1–122. 8. Salomon, p. 5. 9. Stoehr, pp. 225–26. 10. Georg Simmel, ‘Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben’, in Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), VII: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, 1, ed. by Rüdiger Kramme and others, pp. 116–31. 11. Vera [Betty Kurth], Eine für Viele: Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902). 12. Christine [Thaler], Eine Mutter für viele. Brief an die Verfasserin von Eine für Viele (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902); Verus: Einer für Viele (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902). See Alexandra Millner, ‘Wenn Sex zur Sprache kommt: Ein repräsentativer Schlagabtausch zwischen Vera und Verus’, in Frauenbilder, feministische Praxis und nationales Bewusstsein in Österreich-Ungarn 1867–1918, ed. by Waltraud Heindl, Edit Király, and Alexandra Millner (Tubingen: Francke, 2006), pp. 87–118 (p. 103). 13. Georg: Einer für Viele. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Jünglinges. Ein aufrichtiges Wort an Vera (Trieste, Leipzig, Vienna: Schimpff, 1902). This spoke out emphatically against Vera’s call for male celibacy. 14. Vera, Eine für Viele, pp. 38–39.

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15. See Anne Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 16. Ellen Key, ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, Dokumente der Frau, 1 (1899), issue 7, 171–84 (p. 171). 17. H. B. Adams, Eheglück: Die Hygiene des Geschlechtslebens (Berlin: Schwarz, [1899]), p. 39, and see also Anna Pappritz, Herrenmoral (Leipzig: Verlag der Frauenrundschau, 1903), as well as Kerstin Wolf, ‘Herrenmoral: Anna Pappritz and Abolitionism in Germany’, Women’s History Review, 17 (2008), 225–37. 18. See Richard J. Evans, ‘The Life and Death of a Lost Woman’, Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 166–212. 19. Adams suggests that one study, by Dr Sänger, found the sure signs of gonorrhoea in 28 of 100 women in labour; another found 12 showing signs of illness in 100 female patients: Eheglück, p. 41. It is not clear, however, how the patients in the study were selected. 20. Freud refers to Dora’s mother disparagingly as suffering from ‘Hausfrauenpsychose’, Sigmund Freud, ‘Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse,’ in Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1940), VI, pp. 163–286 (p. 178); see Hannah S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991). 21. Evans, ‘Life and Death’, pp. 194–98. 22. See Evans, ‘Life and Death’, p. 203. 23. Adams, Eheglück, p. 47. 24. See Wolf, ‘Herrenmoral’. 25. Richard J. Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany 1894–1933 (London: Sage, 1976), p. 43. 26. See Wischermann, pp. 94–99. 27. See the call for male chastity by Lida Gustava Heymann, Aufklärung über das sexuelle Leben und hygienische Ratschläge für die heranwachsende Jugend (Hamburg: [the author], 1902), pp. 12–16. On the other hand, the call for mutual celibacy as a solution to the moral double standard was criticized by Ellen Key, ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, pp. 173–74. 28. Wischermann, pp. 238–39. 29. The Sittenpolizei (literally ‘morals police’) had the right to carry out an internal examination on women suspected of prostitution, see Evans, ‘Life and Death’, p. 205, and for an exploration of similar concerns by London women, see Judith R. Walkowitz, ‘Police Attacks on Women’, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 127–31. 30. Adams, Eheglück, p. 45. 31. See Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 32. Millner, ‘Wenn Sex zur Sprache kommt’, p. 103. See also Sigrid Schmidt-Bortenschlager, ‘Vera — ein Literaturskandal der Jahrhundertwende’, in Lulu, Lilith, Mona Lisa ... Frauenbilder der Jahrhundertwende, ed. by Irmgard Roebling (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1989), pp. 199–215. 33. Publicity for the novel by the publisher likened it, for example, to the genuine published diary of the Ukrainian sculptor Marie Bashkirtseff, published in 1887. Bashkirtseff ’s confessional writings, in diaries which she kept from her teenage years until her death of tuberculosis aged 25, inf luenced Helene Böhlau’s depiction of the artist Olly in Der Rangierbahnhof (1896: The Shunting Yard). See, for example, the advertisements for Eine für Viele at the end of Else Jerusalem, Gebt uns die Wahrheit (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902). 34. E.g. Dezső von Buday, Das Recht der Liebe im vorehelichen Leben: eine sozialethische Studie über die Frage des Veraismus (Berlin, Leipzig: Frauen-Rundschau, 1905). 35. Jerusalem, Gebt uns die Wahrheit, p. 15. 36. Hedwig Dohm, Die Mütter: Beitrag zur Erziehungsfrage (Berlin: Fischer, 1903), see last accessed on 8.1.2014. 37. Ibid. 38. Hedwig Dohm, Die Antifeministen: Ein Buch der Verteidigung (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Arndtstrasse, 1976, first publ. Berlin: Dümmler, 1902), p. 104. 39. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 226.

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40. See Gaby Pailer, ‘Intertextualität und Modernität im erzählerischen Werk Hedwig Dohms’, in Deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen des Fin de siècle, ed. by Karin Tebben (Darmstadt: Wissen­ schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), pp. 138–61 (p. 155). 41. See Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, ‘Die Zähmung der alten Frau bei Hedwig Dohm’, Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung: Studien zur bezwungenen Weiblichkeit in der Literatur vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. by Sylvia Wallinger and Monika Jones (Innsbruck: Universität Innsbruck, 1986), pp. 217–27. Also Gaby Pailer, Schreibe, die du bist: die Gestaltung weiblicher ‘Autorschaft’ im erzählerischen Werk Hedwig Dohms: zugleich ein Beitrag zur Nietzsche-Rezeption um 1900 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1994). 42. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, first publ. 1979), pp. 88–92. 43. Joeres, ‘Zähmung’, p. 220. 44. Hedwig Dohm, ‘Mutter und Großmutter’, in Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibs als Mutter, ed. by Adele Schreiber (Munich: Langen, 1912), pp. 649–61. 45. Hedwig Dohm, Christa Ruland (Berlin: Sammlung Zenodot Bibliothek der Frauen, 2007, first publ. S. Fischer, 1902), pp. 88–89. 46. Roger K. French, ‘Scrofula (Scrophula)’, The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. by Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 998–1000.

Chapter 6

v

Pregnancy and Ambivalence in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus Lou Andreas-Salomé is perhaps a paradigmatic case for how women writers fared in twentieth-century literary criticism. Critics often referred to her not by surname but by her first name ‘Lou’, with its echoes of the femme fatale Lulu in the plays of Frank Wedekind (a rejected suitor).1 Interest for many years focused on her life rather than her works, and on her relationships with important men, especially Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.2 Her extensive literary oeuvre tended to be reduced to two novellas, ‘Fenitschka’ and ‘Eine Ausschweifung’ (both 1898: Fenitschka and Deviations). So while at a glance Andreas-Salomé appears to have enjoyed more attention from feminist scholars than other writers in this study, many of the articles written about her literary works concentrate on those two stories.3 Her novels published after 1898 were until recently seldom reprinted and hard to find. Also, Muriel Cormican suggests that they did not fit neatly into either traditional or feminist definitions of the canon of literature worthy of detailed attention: they ‘were labeled either trivial as literature or not radical enough as feminism’.4 As Cormican has shown, Andreas-Salomé’s extensive literary oeuvre is deserving of far greater critical attention.5 Her works bear witness to a fascination with psychology, which gave rise also to her highly regarded contribution to modern thought in essays such as ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ (1899: The Human Being as Woman), ‘Anal und Sexual’ (1916), and ‘Narzißmus als Doppelrichtung’ (1921: Narcissism as Double Direction).6 Andreas-Salomé trained as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud between 1911 and 1912 and opened her own practice in 1915. In her essay, ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, Andreas-Salomé writes that she considers women to be particularly receptive to the metaphysical uncertainty inherent in modern thought: ‘Daß das Wesen der Dinge letzten Endes nicht einfach unlogisch, sondern vielfach und alogisch ist, — für diese Wahrheit hat das Weib besondere Resonanz’ (‘women have particular insight into the truth that the essence of things in the end is not merely illogical but multiple and alogical’).7 In her fiction, in a stylistically complex modernist aesthetic, Andreas-Salomé exploits the linguistic possibilities of the novel to explore the formation of gendered identity. As Laura Deiulio points out, the complexity and ambivalence of Andreas-Salomé’s literary works derives from her fascination with the unconscious mind and ‘may be exactly what is most compelling about them’ for today’s readers.8

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This chapter offers a close reading of Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts (1919: The House: Story of a Family from the End of the Last Century’).9 I will argue that the novel’s aesthetic programme of concealment and veiled suggestion deliberately renders opaque a challenging depiction of a woman’s ambivalent response to her first pregnancy. First published in 1919 but drafted initially in 1904, the novel juxtaposes pregnancies experienced by a mother and daughter. Studies have commonly neglected the suggestion in Das Haus that the daughter Gitta’s initial reaction to the early loss of a pregnancy is to welcome it as the postponement of motherhood and its resp­ onsibilities. Andreas-Salomé’s narrative fascinatingly preserves a sense of discretion on the surface, disguising the events in such a way as to make it possible to overlook them. A careful reading of the uncanny in the novel and motifs connected with repression suggests that Gitta’s reluctance to become a mother is deeply embedded in her unconscious mind, something she cannot adequately explain, and which leads to inner conf lict. Some similarities with Andreas-Salomé’s later novel Ródinka (1923), which she dedicated to Anna Freud, contribute to this interpretation. Before turning to Gitta, however, Andreas-Salomé’s understanding of pregnancy as a liminal moment of profound significance will be explored first through the example of her early short story ‘Die Schwester’ (1902: The Sister) and through her essay ‘Der Mensch als Weib’. Pregnancy and Liminality Andreas-Salomé’s short story ‘Die Schwester’, in the collection Im Zwischenland (1902: On the Threshold), opens with the poem ‘Ich war ein Kind und träumte viel / und hatte noch nicht Mai’ (‘I was a child and often dreamed / and it was not yet May’) by Rilke, with its theme of the seduction of a young girl through song.10 The poem dates from Andreas-Salomé’s relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) in 1898. Two sisters sit reading the poem; motherless, they enjoy an emotional closeness echoed by their Russian names: Mascha and Dascha. Mascha is drawn silently away from her sister, like the girl in the poem, and through Dascha’s eyes we eventually see her pulled from the river, drowned in an unexplained suicide, the result of despair at an unplanned pregnancy. Her lover, recognisable to Dascha as a man who once approached her in error, mistaking her for Mascha, is seen leaning against the wall of their house, his face filled with fear and anguish. She makes eye contact with him, but cannot bring herself to speak to him. The narrative focuses on Dascha’s sense of confused betrayal as she is initiated through this sudden trauma into a revelation of the mysteries of the adult world: Mascha hatte sie zurückgelassen. Sie hatte sich allein vorausgeschlichen, — leise, heimlich, — in das Leben hinein, durch das rätselhafte, unbegreif liche, und hinein in den Tod, in den geheimnisvollen Tod. Sie hatte alles schon für Dascha voraus­genommen. Vorauserfahren. Vorausgelebt (‘Die Schwester’, 333–34). [Mascha had left her behind. She had crept out ahead on her own, — quietly, secretly, — into life, through the mystery, the unfathomable, and beyond into death, into the mysteries of death. She had done it all ahead of Dascha. Experienced it for her in advance; lived it ahead.]

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With this masterly use of prepositions of direction in the German, Andreas-Salomé shows Mascha to have been a step ahead of Dascha all the time; she has quietly crossed the threshold into sexual experience, then into death, leaving her sister alone, caught between childhood and adulthood. It has left her in a liminal state, literally ‘im Zwischenland’, as the title of Andreas-Salomé’s collection suggests. It is almost as if Mascha has acted for Dascha too; her experience will be internalized by Dascha, whose own future attempts to cross the threshold into adult life will now be forever affected by the terrible mystery of Mascha’s death. The story is compelling in its structural simplicity, with poetic patterning that points from the outset towards the crisis, yet intricate in its use of language, which hints at the veiled psychological narrative that emerges as such a surprise to younger sister Dascha. This multivalency or possibility of dual reception enables the story to satisfy a more intellectual readership, while still being accessible for a younger female reader for whom its nuances might well remain elusive. In Andreas-Salomé’s novel Das Haus, the protagonists Anneliese and Gitta, mother and daughter, experience moments of liminality in pregnancy as a heightened sense of inwardness and self-ref lection. Andreas-Salomé sets the subjective world of women’s experience against a background of the rationalist discourses of the medical profession, in a powerful exploration of women’s psychological responses to their changing bodies. Both women’s husbands are gynaecologists, and Gitta’s husband Markus Mandelstein conducts medical experiments on great apes. The word Überschwang (exuberance) — a term Andreas-Salomé uses in her memoirs for Rilke’s poetic imagination — is used frequently in exchanges between Anneliese and her husband, Frank Branhardt to characterize the female imagination, which Branhardt perceives as a somewhat destabilizing exuberance in contrast to the rational and the ‘real’ on which he bases his life and work. Caroline Kreide explores how the title of the novel Das Haus refers to the positive realm of female sovereignty.11 But, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar explore in The Madwoman in the Attic, ‘for many a woman writer these ancient associations of house and self seem mainly to have strengthened the anxiety about enclosure which she projected into her art’.12 The house in Andreas-Salomé’s novel has its elements of strangeness, since for Anneliese it is associated with all the ambivalent emotions of mothering — with its joys and also its sorrows, and for Gitta, it seems like a trap. A stay in her parental house evokes troubling associations for Gitta between the confinement of pregnancy and gendered social constraints, while the perimeter wall of the garden in her husband’s house is also a symbol of social confinement (Das Haus, 119, 141). In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892), as Elizabeth Boa explores, the motif of enclosure in a room conveys ‘the imprisonment of woman in the social roles of Wife and Mother’.13 In Gilman’s short story, a mother confined by her husband to the nursery experiences an uncanny double in the form of a woman trying to emerge from behind the yellow wallpaper. In Andreas-Salomé’s novel too, the house (and even the rose wallpaper) seem at times to be uncanny (unheimlich). The familiar domestic environment is made unfamiliar, associated with things kept secret (heimlich), inhabited by ghosts of the past and other hauntings. These suggest a particular narrative of women’s psychological

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development, in which the imaginative response to the traditional female world is not clear cut but deeply ambivalent. In Andreas-Salomé’s essay ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, the transition from maiden to mother is described in terms which indicate it to be a threshold moment, bringing about an important change in the inner life of the subject. This is not an abrupt change, however, but a sense of being caught between two different states of being: Die Verbindung zwischen der Jungfrau und der Mutter ist seelisch eine viel tiefere, als es im Übergang von der Jungfrau zur Mutter deutlich werden kann. Die Übergangsperiode zwischen beiden, auch wenn sie zufällig nicht in der leiblichen Mütterlichkeit mündet, erhält ihr stärkstes Innenleben durch diese beiden Seinsgewalten....14 [The connection between the virgin and the mother is spiritually a much deeper one than can be made apparent from the transition from virgin to mother. The period of transition between the two, even if it by chance does not result in physical motherhood, experiences its heightened inwardness from these two states of being.]

The period of transition from girlhood to motherhood — Andreas-Salomé appears here to be referring to pregnancy, not merely the onset of sexual activity — is for her a transformative moment psychologically, even if it does not result in giving birth to a child, as she puts it. Andreas-Salomé’s essay appears to suggest that she views pregnancy as a defining period which enables a different kind of ref lection on motherhood and its meaning. Moreover, the uncertainty of pregnancy is perhaps paradigmatic for the non-rational and chaotic nature of modernity, for pregnancy results ‘in der Zeugung einer dritten hochkomplizierten Welt’ (‘in the creation of a third highly-complicated world’, ‘Mensch als Weib’, p. 15), a world the subject can no longer control. As Anneliese and Frank Branhardt discover in the figure of their artist son Balduin, who refuses to participate in the rational scientific world of his father, parents cannot determine their children’s character and in the end have only limited inf luence over their destiny. Anneliese’s pregnancy in Das Haus carries with it the ghosts of the past. She lost her beloved daughter Lotti aged eight after she fell from a swing, and gave birth to stillborn twins after a difficult delivery. When her husband first brings up the idea of their having another child, the memory of their delivery, and his role in it as doctor, makes the idea too painful for her: Hätte er — er also wirklich wünschen können — er, der sie so entsetzlich, unmenschlich leiden gesehen — ja, als Arzt notgedrungen leiden gemacht — . War sie denn feige — war er brutal in seinen Wünschen? Liebte er sie denn nicht zu sehr für eine solche Wiederholung [...]? (Das Haus, 14). [Would he really be capable of wishing for that — he, who had seen her suffer so terribly, so inhumanely — in fact who as a doctor had been forced to make her suffer so — . Was she a coward? Was he brutal in his wishes? Did he not love her too much to wish such a recurrence?]

But as Kreide points out, Branhardt describes the twins’ birth as an isolated accident, a ‘one in ten thousand’ accident, which Anneliese should put behind her,

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looking bravely forwards.15 While the male, rationalistic response is to forget the past, Anneliese finds that it accompanies her everywhere, and this is no more true than in pregnancy, when all around her she finds reminders of the past mingle with hopes for the future. When Anneliese encounters some recently uncovered rosepatterned wallpaper in a room that was Gitta’s as a child, but which is now to be made ready for her new baby, she is reminded of the lost paradise which was her domestic happiness before Lotti’s death: Ein ganzer Rosengarten, so blühte es vor ihr auf, umfing blühend alle ihre Sinne, ein großer, großer Garten, darin sie sich verlor — kein Garten: ihr Paradies. ‘Dieses! Dieses! Wiedererleben! Leben! Es leben! Nicht nur schon erinnern!’ Ihre Lippen bewegten sich. Sie wollte es schreien: Es hörte niemand. Kahl stand, teilnahmslos vor ihr das leere Zimmer, wie ein verödetes Haus, wie ein entleertes Dasein. Mörtel lag zu ihren Füßen, sie atmete grauen Staub. Und Vergänglichkeit rührte sie an mit dem Stachel des Todes (Das Haus, 215). [The wallpaper blossomed in front of her eyes like an entire garden of roses; blossoming, it took hold of all of her senses as a great big garden in which she could lose herself — this was no garden — it was her paradise. ‘Paradise! To relive it! To live again! To relive paradise! Not just to have it as a memory!’ Her lips moved. She wanted to shout it out loud. No one would hear. Impassive, the empty room stood before here, barren, like an abandoned house, like an empty being. The mortar lay at her feet. She breathed in grey dust. And transience touched her with death’s sting.]

The familiar is rendered strange, as the wallpaper pattern provokes emotions which Anneliese cannot bring herself to voice. In her daydreaming she crosses boundaries and what is no longer there seems almost real; the past becomes present to her, in the shared physical sensation of the here and now. The empty room and the grey dust seem to evoke Anneliese’s emptiness without children to care for; the room’s indifference to her emotions represents how little insight others have into her fears. She cannot bring Lotti back, although she is always present in the love she expresses towards her other children: ‘Vergangenes und Zukünftiges drängten ineinander. Als sei, was fremd heißt, ausgelöscht, und was tot heißt, ausgelöscht unter dem Anhauch derselben allgegenwärtigen Liebeskraft’ (‘The past and the future surged together. It was as if what is called strange had been extinguished and what is known as death had been extinguished amid the breath of this same all-present power of love’, 223). The power of Anneliese’s attachment to her children cannot be fully understood by the rational discourses of Branhardt and the medical profession, and it brings the past and the future, the living and the departed into a powerful relationship with one another, informing her whole sense of self. The Cultural History of Birth Control Muriel Cormican notes how motherhood in Andreas-Salomé’s writings is ‘a state of uniquely mystical wholeness that eludes all women who cannot or do not

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reproduce’.16 Carol Diethe suggests, however, that, when ref lecting on AndreasSalomé’s own biographical circumstances, we ‘are entitled to view as inconsistent some of the instructions she laid down for other women but manifestly failed to follow herself, such as her recommendation for women to follow their maternal calling’.17 She further suggests that Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her intellectual work seemed incompatible with the vocation of motherhood that she so emphatically recommended to others.18 Andreas-Salomé remained childless throughout her life. Biographers suggest that she lost or terminated two pregnancies, one by her first lover Rainer Maria Rilke and one by a later companion, the Viennese doctor Friederich Pineles.19 E. M. Butler concludes that Andreas-Salomé was pregnant during Rilke’s absence in Italy in 1898.20 Rilke refers in his Florentinisches Tagebuch (Florentine Diary) to an awareness of Andreas-Salomé’s reluctance to have children, while appearing not to rule out the idea that she might change her mind. He writes to her of the author Franziska zu Reventlow, whose life was transformed in 1897 by the birth of her illegitimate son Rolf, as she depicted in her novel, Ellen Olestjerne (1903): ‘Heute schreibt mir eine Mutter, die tief in vieler Bangigkeit war, ehe das Wunder ihr geschah... Ich lese das wie eine Hymne, Lou. Und ich ersehne den Augenblick, da ich es vor DIR lesen werde; da wird es Melodie empfangen’ (‘a mother wrote to me today who was deep in anxiety before the miracle happened to her ... I read it like a hymn, Lou. And I am longing for the moment when I can read it to you; then it will find its melody’).21 In her memoirs, addressing Rilke, Andreas-Salomé alludes to an unmentionable crisis which took place around this time: Unsere Zusammengehörigkeit, bereit und gewillt — um Deinen Ausdruck zu gebrauchen — für aller Jahreszeiten Hell und Dunkel, hatte sich an unabänderlich obwaltenden Lebensumständen zu erproben, die sogar die dichterische Äußerung davon fast verboten oder beseitigten. Aber ob wir das Recht hatten, damals Gedichtetes so zu zerstören, wie wir es getan? Es besaß, gegenüber Späterem, so sehr die Züge, das Antlitz Deiner Reinmenschlichkeit, Nurmenschlichkeit, die sich gleichsam noch nicht so endgültig durch dein vollendetes Dichtertum sanktioniert fand, daß Dir das Gedichtete der Erhaltung künstlerisch wert genug erschienen wäre.22 [Our sense of belonging together, willing and eager — to use your expression — for the light and darkness of every season, was tested by prevailing irreversible circumstances such that even their expression in poetry was almost forbidden or to be effaced. But did we have the right to destroy as we did what had been written in poetry at that time? Compared with later verse it bore so acutely the traces and countenance of your pure humanity, your bare humanity, which at the same time was not ultimately so sanctioned by you as a mature poet that its preservation might have seemed artistically valuable.]

This extract from her memoirs is characterised by a strong desire to maintain a sense of discretion but also a need to give expression to long-preserved memories. Written a year on from the reunion of Andreas-Salomé and Rilke after Rilke’s return from Italy,23 Rilke’s poem, ‘Die Engel’, dated 22 July 1899, seems to evoke the theme of the souls of unbaptised children:24

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Pregnancy and Ambivalence Sie haben alle müde Münde und helle Seelen ohne Saum. Und eine Sehnsucht (wie nach Sünde) geht ihnen manchmal durch den Traum. Fast gleichen sie einander alle; in Gottes Gärten schweigen sie, wie viele, viele Intervalle in seiner Macht und Melodie. Nur wenn sie ihre Flügel breiten, sind sie die Wecker eines Winds: als ginge Gott mit seinen weiten Bildhauerhänden durch die Seiten im dunklen Buch des Anbeginns. [They all have tired mouths and bright boundless souls. And a longing (as for sin) sometimes passes through their dreams. They are all similar to each other; in God’s gardens they are silent like many, many intervals in his power and melody. It is only when they spread their wings that they bring forth a wind: As if God with his broad sculptor’s hands had fanned the pages of a book, the dark book of beginnings.]

The popular German term for a lay abortionist is ‘Engelmacherin’ (literally ‘angelmaker’). In this poem, the angels’ indeterminate longing ‘as for sin’ could allude not merely to original sin but to the transgressive nature of the angels’ conception as a formative dream-memory. The second stanza contains the particularly evocative image of the angels as intervals of silence in the divine melody who exist as an absence, like the pauses between musical notes. In the Catholic church, in which Rilke was brought up, the souls of the unbaptized were regarded as in ‘limbo’, the threshold between heaven and hell. The final image, the book of the origins of life, seems to evoke poignantly the idea of souls sent straight back to the dark pages of the book of beginnings from which they had come. The image is reminiscent of the sympathy shown by Anneliese in Das Haus for the unwanted children of Frau Baumüller, her cleaner, ‘die allein, vor der Zeit, ins große Dunkel zurückgehen aus Not’ (‘who are compelled to progress prematurely back into the great darkness’, Das Haus, 9). As Andreas-Salomé’s memoirs suggest, ref lecting on so sensitive a theme was only possible through a discourse of concealment, something echoed further by Andreas-Salomé’s treatment of the character of Gitta in her novel Das Haus. A glimpse at the cultural history of birth control enables us better to understand the choices women of Andreas-Salomé’s generation were making with regard to their reproductive lives. As explored in Chapter 4, by 1900 the birth rate was falling,

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and women of all classes were developing an understanding of their bodies that enabled them to limit the size of their families in different ways.25 The Bund für Mutterschutz founded in 1905 was ‘the first major feminist organi­ zation, not only in Germany but in the Western world, to place the issues of birth control, abortion, and eugenic legislation on its public agenda’, according to Anne Taylor Allen.26 Helene Stöcker, one of its founders, promoted a sexual liberation movement known as die neue Ethik,27 which called for sexual equality for women, as well as ‘personal autonomy’ over issues of reproduction.28 Within the women’s movement, discussion on the possible legalization of abortion was prompted by widespread opposition to §218 and §219 of the Civil Code, where the sentence was given as up to five years’ hard labour, with similar draconian punishments for anyone found assisting a woman with an abortion. Campaigns for what Gabriele Reuter calls ‘die Beseitigung der gefährlichen Paragraphen’ (‘the abolition of the dangerous laws [on abortion]’),29 were motivated in different ways. Marie Stritt defended women’s right to choose to have sexual relationships and children outside of marriage, a radical position.30 In 1908, Stritt, Stöcker and others on the Legal Committee of the Federation of German Women’s Organizations (BDF), submitted a resolution to the Federation, advocating the abolition of §218 of the German Civil Code prohibiting abortion.31 The resolution did not succeed, and for Richard Evans its defeat is a turning point after which the ‘moderate’ women’s movement became ever more conservative.32 As tensions among the European powers and the threat of war grew, the debate on the decline of the population seemed all the more urgent, and opposition to the use of birth control was motivated by a fear of the implications for the nation of a low birth rate.33 In 1913, the sociologist Max Marcuse published the results of a study in which he interviewed one hundred female working-class patients on their use of contraception and lay abortion as methods of birth control.34 The patients almost all used some form of contraception, but he was astonished by their attitude towards very early pregnancy, in this era before the availability of fully reliable contraception. Among the group, they admitted freely to deliberately causing seventy-six early miscarriages through methods including visits to midwives, medicines costing 5 marks advertised in the newspaper, hot baths, and herbal tea sold in secret by a friend.35 Cornelie Usborne, in pioneering work on birth control in Germany, has investigated women’s attempts to avoid pregnancy in the early years of the twentieth century.36 Usborne shows, through cases from the Weimar years, that women also did not necessarily differentiate clearly between contraception and the attempts they made to end a pregnancy, and talked of treating ‘blocked menses’ (Blutstockung) and ‘obstruction of menstruation’ (Regelstockung), resisting the medical narratives of the judicial code.37 Usborne comments that for women in an era of economic uncertainty who feared an increase in their family size as a result of their poverty, a missed period was ‘like an illness’.38 For the Munich gynaecologist Hope Bridges Adams (see Chapter 4), who later carried out medical abortions in a Munich clinic, effective contraceptive use by women gave them control over their fertility and contributed to social prosperity; it allowed women to preserve their strength to look after existing family members. But

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Usborne shows how, in this period, ‘discussion of class-specific reproduction trends was permeated with an inegalitarian eugenic ideology’.39 She demonstrates that Adams was known to have sterilized proletarian women without their knowledge or consent, and that no official sanctions were taken against her for doing so. An episode in Das Haus echoes contemporary critiques of overpopulation in the working classes. Frau Baumüller, Anneliese’s daily cleaner, has just lost a recently born baby. Anneliese is saddened by her loss, but Frau Baumüller has ten children already, and at Anneliese’s, where everyone knows her, she does not even have to pretend to express a grief which she does not feel. Rather, she is ‘mütterlich froh im Herzen, tief befriedigt, dass kein Neuangekommenes nun einstweilen ihren Kindern das Brot vom Munde fortessen werde’ (‘her mother’s heart rejoiced with the satisfaction of knowing that no new arrival would now, for the time being, eat the bread from her children’s mouths’, Das Haus, 9). She resented the new addition, and heartlessly failed to look after it in case it took away resources from her existing family. The cleaner’s maternal feelings are confined to her existing, older children, whom she jealously guards, and she has neither food nor motherly love left over for the new arrival. Anneliese pities the neglected and unwanted babies to whom Frau Baumüller gives birth every year: ‘Fast in jedem Jahr gebar sie und begrub auch ein Kleines — erst letzter Tage das Letzte. Gesund geboren, starb es den übrigen nach, um die sich nie jemand recht kümmerte’ (‘Almost every year she gave birth to and also buried an infant — the last one was only a few days ago. Born healthy, it followed the others to its death without anyone properly looking after him’, Das Haus, 8–9). Frau Baumüller is dependent on Anneliese for employment and for the leftover food with which she feeds her brood on returning from work each evening. Anneliese’s husband, in his heart, would love to be surrounded by a pack of sons. But while Anneliese and her gynaecologist husband deliberately restrict the number of children they have, the Baumüllers in their ignorance just keep on reproducing and are reliant on the charity of others. Lacking any access to birth control, the robust and fertile Frau Baumüller appears ‘in ihrer gebärtüchtigen Mächtigkeit eine nicht enden könnende, sich selbst im Wege stehende Kraft’ (‘in her powerful fertility to be a force that stood in her own way because of her inability to stop’, Das Haus, 9). Anneliese compares her lasting sorrow at her loss of her third daughter Lotti with Frau Baumüller’s indifference to her own children, and pictures the grey and wizened little faces of the Baumüller infants (‘sie sah die paar Nächstjüngsten vor sich mit ihren grauen, greisenhaft ergebenen Gesichterchen’, 9) as well as the spirits of those mentioned earlier who fade back into the darkness. The children resign themselves to their fate, suffering the effects of their parents’ poverty. Anneliese thinks of their brief stay on the earth and their returning to the ultimate darkness as lonely as they have been during their short life. In contrast, her own lost child is remembered daily, her birthday commemorated, and she is rescued from oblivion, for she seems always to be a presence accompanying Anneliese: ‘Nicht darum allein waren die Kleinen der Baumüllers tot, weil sie gestorben waren’ (‘the Baumüller children were not only dead because of the fact that they had passed away’, 10).

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Spooked by pregnancy?: Gitta in Das Haus While Anneliese’s pregnancy forms a prominent theme in Das Haus, her daughter’s pregnancy is often overlooked by critics.40 In the case of Gitta, the theme of pregnancy vividly highlights the tension between the emotional ties of love and the desire for individual freedom. Andreas-Salomé explores powerfully the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious self in imagery conveying the emotional divisions within Gitta in her attitude towards impending motherhood. In Das Haus, Markus Mandelstein experiences a deep longing for fatherhood on seeing a portrait of Gitta as a child (91). Yet his wife Gitta pities her parents for their decision to have a new baby just when their two adult children have left home, giving them back their freedom (189). The narrator implies strongly that Gitta is also pregnant when she spends time in the parental home during her husband’s absence at a conference. Despite the fact that, on returning from her honeymoon, Gitta described to her mother how she and her husband occupied separate beds each enclosed by mosquito nets (p. 114), tropes conventionally employed in realist fiction to intimate pregnancy are applied to Gitta: she is tired, yawns, falls asleep in broad daylight when the others are there and is distracted in the extreme when she wakens (138). A close family friend, Renate, smiles knowingly, and others tease Gitta about her inactivity. But her mother, Anneliese, says nothing and asks no questions: ‘denn sie hatte eine zarte Scheu davor, zu Unwahrheiten zu veranlassen’ (‘for she had a tender shyness of being the occasion for an untruth’, 138). Anneliese suspects Gitta might deny their suspicions. The issue of Gitta’s unconscious ambivalence towards her domestic responsibilities is raised in the narrative in the form of a daydream betraying a desire for escape, as Gitta returns to her marital home. Her mother in the daydream represents the idea of confinement and restriction, forcing her back to her husband, refusing her a longed-for adventure of being carried elsewhere. Is it motherhood itself which Gitta experiences as a threat to her freedom? The daydream also conveys an almost enjoyable sense of danger: Nur behielt sie während des ganzen Wegs das merkwürdige Gefühl, wie wenn ein wildes Wasser, das sie mit sich fortgerissen hatte zu unbekannten Ufern, auf das Geheiß der Mumme [=der Mutter] unversehens zugefroren sei unter ihren Füßen, sodass sie wirklich nirgends anders mehr hingelangen konnte, als nur eben gerade in die Villenstraße zu Mandelsteins. Daneben genoss sie jedoch die prickelnde Vorstellung von ganz, ganz dünner Eisdecke über tiefem, tiefem Wasser. — Schlittschuhlaufen hätte man jedenfalls noch nicht dürfen darauf (p. 140). [All the way home, she had the strange feeling as if a wild water, which had carried her away to unknown shores, had frozen unexpectedly under her feet on the command of her mother so that it was impossible for her ever to go anywhere other than to the Villa Straße, to Mandelstein’s. And she nevertheless enjoyed the tingling sensation of really, really thin ice over deep, deep water — you would never have been allowed to skate on it!]

The home is not welcomed here as the return of familiarity, rather it is the unfamiliar that attracts Gitta, though she has a sense thereby of skating on thin ice.

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In her mother’s house she has been kept awake by worries, but, alone in her own home, she runs a hot bath, and as she stretches out in the bath, she appears to have no other thoughts but for the wonders of modern plumbing, and the hope of a good night’s sleep (Das Haus, 140). In fiction of this period, a woman in the bath is an unusual detail, to which the narrator devotes an undue amount of attention at this point in the narrative. Moreover, a change takes place while Gitta is in the bath, and it is as if all her worries have left her. It seems beyond doubt that the narrator is describing the onset of a missed menstrual period. The sudden and singular event which takes place in the bath suddenly energizes Gitta and makes her forget all that has gone before: Aber da geschah das Eigentümliche, dass ihr war, als gäbe es solche Reize und Störer gar nicht: als könne sie sich auf keine mehr besinnen. Gitta sprang aus der Wanne; saß nass und erwartungsvoll: War es vielleicht nur im Wasser so gewesen –? Nein: auch am Lande (140). [But then a most peculiar thing happened and it was as if there were no longer any such irritations and disturb ances: as if she could not even recall what they were. Gitta leapt out of the bathtub; she sat wet and expectant: was it perhaps only like that in the water -? No, on dry land it was the same.]

Gitta’s reaction is not of shock, or even fear, as might be expected, but rather she finds it difficult to take what is happening seriously: ‘Dabei kam es ihr selber doch halb spaßhaft vor. Denn so was Gewisses — fast gewisser ihr zu eigen als das Blut in ihren Adern — das sollte hinweg sein, als sei es nie gewesen?’ (It seemed almost a joke to her. Could something so certain — almost more certain to her than the blood in her veins — could it have vanished, as if it had never been?, 140). These words point to only one thing: the pregnancy, which had seemed so certain and final, has vanished as if it had never been there. When her immediate relief wears off, the narrator tells us: ‘Nur die Gewissheit blieb: ihr zu eigen war es gewesen wie nichts, nichts anderes auf der Welt’ (‘only one certainty remained: it had been her own like nothing else, nothing in the world’, ibid., L.A.-S.’s italics). The early phrase is repeated here with an altered meaning: while the first sentence emphasized the certainty of her pregnancy, here the emphasis is on her ownership of her body. In ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, Andreas-Salomé bases her arguments for sexual differ­ ence between women and men on recent evolutionary science. She also considers the science of sexual hormones, then in its infancy, and ideas about their effect on women’s menstrual cycle. The effect of the latter on women’s lives is too often politely ignored, Andreas-Salomé suggests, even by women: Über diesen Punkt wird meistens möglichst konventionell hinweggesehen, und gerade von Frauen, weil sie es gern so darstellen, als ob überhaupt nur kränkelnde weibliche Wesen von den wechselnden Dispositionen ihres körper­ lichen Organismus etwas bemerken (‘Der Mensch als Weib’, 26–27). [Most people tend in keeping with convention to overlook this issue, including women who would prefer to give the impression that it is only sickly feminine creatures who remark on the changeable disposition of their physical organism.]

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However, the regular monthly menstrual cycle, she points out, affects women’s moods (‘seelisches Leben’) as well as their physical wellbeing. She suggests that the regular appearance of the menses should not be greeted with indifference, but should be celebrated, for it conjures up ‘den Gedanken an Feier und Sammlung, an eingestreute Sonntage, an Stunden tiefen, heitern Friedens’ (‘the thought of holidays and gatherings, leisurely Sundays, hours of deep and cheerful peace’, ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, 27). And moreover, she continues, it repeats something fundamental for the woman’s inner essence. Andreas-Salomé’s discussion of menstruation and its important effect on women’s psychic lives in ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ provides a helpful context for Gitta’s reaction on emerging from the bath. The power of Andreas-Salomé’s prose in Das Haus lies in her intriguing exploration of Gitta’s psychology through language implying that she enters a state of cognitive dissonance as a result of her loss of pregnancy. For example, when Gitta looks in the mirror, a doubling takes place; two Gittas — one joyful, and the other more censorious, suggest deep divisions within the self: Unwillkürlich hatte Gitta den Kopf abgekehrt; aus in die Wand eingelassenem Spiegel ihr gegenüber, worin wohl Kranke sorgenvoll prüfend sich sollten beschauen können, starrte ihr Gesicht ihr wie Fremdes entgegen — eigentlich ein ganz liederliches, zerknirschtes Gesicht — Und die eine Gitta maß die andere Gitta mit missbilligenden Blicken. Aber nicht allzulange: Ihr Glück war doch zu groß (143). [Gitta had inadvertently turned her head away; from the mirror embedded in the wall opposite her, in which sick people perhaps would gaze with care at their appearance as a test, her face stared at her as if it were a stranger’s — really it was quite a wanton, remorseful face — and the one Gitta measured up the other with a look of misgiving. But not for too long: her joy really was much too great.]

The mirror is described as like one in which a sick person might examine her face for signs of illness, yet Gitta does not seem unwell.41 The ‘dissolute’ face staring at her from the mirror implies she is partly censorious of her own actions: ‘liederlich’ could mean immoral, or wanton, and is most often used to describe sexual behaviour. The use of ‘zerknirscht’ implies strongly, however, that the face bears some regret or sign of repentance. The mirror reveals her conf licting emotions. A further indication of Gitta’s loss of pregnancy is provided by Gitta’s thoughts in the early hours of the next morning, when she hears a noise in the house, and wonders if it might be a burglar. She wonders what he might steal, and then her recent loss occurs to her again: ‘War sie nicht ganz kürzlich erst ausgeraubt worden und hatte dann alles weit schöner und vollständiger wiedererhalten?’ (‘had she not just now been robbed completely and got everything back again much better and more perfectly than before?’, 147). However, some weeks later, grief at the recollection of what Gitta has lost collides with relief at the freedom she has re-gained, leading to an inner turmoil through which Andreas-Salomé suggests Gitta’s earlier behaviour cannot be thought of as wholly rational or conscious. Gitta bursts into tears when she accidentally comes across some medical papers which seem to refer to the pregnancy, and she embarks

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on a brief separation from Markus, telling her parents how much she resents him (173): Dabei kamen ihr Papiere zu Händen, aus denen es sie anblickte wie aus anderer Welt: engbeschriebene Papiere mit Arztstempel. Dass das noch existierte, ganz unbekümmert um sie selbst — dass es nicht plötzlich aufgehört hatte zu sein vor Wochen! Nein: — es bestand (161; italics in original). [She came across papers and it stared her in the face as if from another world. They were densely written papers with a doctor’s stamp. How could that still exist without any care for her at all — she was shocked that weeks ago it had not suddenly ceased to be! No — it remained.]

The objects have an uncanny effect, as Gitta gives them a kind of agency in themselves, and feels as if they should have known to vanish discreetly along with the pregnancy. Gitta’s thoughts, on reading the papers, suggest that her pregnancy, so certain from a rational viewpoint, and attested to in this medical evidence, was not real in Gitta’s imagination; she had not been able to come to terms with it (‘im Grunde bestand es doch nicht, so wenig davon zu verwirklichen, zu formen hatte sie verstanden’; ‘basically it had not existed, she had understood so little how to actualize it, to give it shape’, 161). Indeed, her husband Markus later describes her as having been pferdescheu (‘spooked’, 199) when she left him temporarily after discovering the medical papers. The German phrase suggests that Gitta has shied away like a nervous or skittish horse, and this implies that her f light from her marriage and pregnancy was informed by an irrational instinct, perhaps even for self-preservation. Earlier, Markus had used the term ‘Pferdekrankheit’ (literally ‘horse sickness’, 119) to describe her uneasy relations with him, implying that she suffers from a nervous condition where, like a horse, she is easily frightened. Plato, in Phaidros, uses the horse as a symbol for human desires and emotions, to be controlled by the rider, symbolizing human reason.42 The metaphor is taken up by Schopenhauer, who suggests: Denn was, für ein unbändiges Roß, Zügel und Gebiß ist, das ist für den Willen im Menschen der Intellekt. [...] Im höchsten Zorn, im Rausch, in der Verzweif lung, hat er das Gebiß zwischen die Zähne genommen, ist durchgegangen und folgt seiner ursprünglichen Natur.43 [For the will, the intellect in a human being is like the reins and bridle for an unruly horse. [...] In moments of extreme anger, intoxication, despair, the human being takes the bit between his teeth, bolts and follows his original nature.]

For Freud, for example in Das Ich und das Es (1923: The Ego and the Id) the image of the horse came to represent the unconscious instincts over which the conscious mind or ego had only limited control: the rider attempts to control the horse, but sometimes is forced to go where the horse leads, thus symbolizing the lack of unity in the modern subject and revealing the strong effect of the id in determining actions. The use of the image in Das Haus reinforces the idea of Gitta’s behaviour as ‘alogisch’ (to use Andreas-Salomé’s phrase), or as motivated by deep-seated emotions which she does not understand. Markus’s use of the word pferdescheu (‘spooked’) in Das Haus, to suggest that Gitta has bolted instinctively, anticipates the prominence

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of the motif of the horse in Andreas-Salomé’s story set in Russia, Ródinka: Eine Russische Erzählung (Ródinka: A Russian Story, 1923).44 Family relationships are at the centre of that narrative too, which focuses in particular on the Oedipal motherson bond between a sensitive artistic figure and a mother who treats him almost like a lover, and whom he appears to love and need to escape from in equal measure. Ródinka opens with horseplay in the form of childhood games: a brother and sister, Boris and Margot, are pretending to be horses on parade, galloping vigorously around the room, and are interrupted by the slightly older Witalii, who takes a keen interest in them, as well as appearing to show signs of latent sexual interest in Margot by commenting on her shapely legs. Boris appears jealous of Witalii’s attentions towards his sister, and insists on his right to be the carriage driver to his sister’s horse: ‘Es ist meine Pf licht, meine Schwester selbst einzufahren!’ (‘It is my duty to drive my sister myself ’, 14); Witalii, on the other hand, wishes to be a horse alongside her: ‘Zwei echte Steppenpferde werden wir sein — zwei solche, die den Schlitten umwerfen’ (‘We will be two true horses of the Steppe — two of the sort that throw over their carriages’, 14). Many years later, the group are reunited on the country estate where Witalii is living with his mother, his pregnant wife, and the wife and children whom his brother has rejected. Witalii’s troubled relationship with his mother, understood as an unresolved Oedipal complex, informs his behaviour from the very start of the story to his final f light, manifesting itself in behaviour which he cannot logically explain. The galloping horses in the children’s game anticipate the end of the story. Witalii, driving the horse-drawn carriage in which he and Margot are travelling, becomes the galloping horse of their youth. He hands her the reins, jumps from the carriage and f lees across the fields, running away from his responsibilities towards his pregnant wife and child: ‘Dies ist das letzte, was ich in dieser Welt von Witalii sah: wie er blindlings ins Feld lief ’ (‘that is the last I saw of Witalii in this world: he was running blindly into the field’). It is an escape from his mother and from responsibility, but at the same time a return to the mother people, to the Russian Volk. He is ‘spooked’ (pferdescheu) — shying away from the family in a way which defies logic or reason. The recurrence of the Freudian image of the horse in both stories suggests a fascination with the repressed and with the idea of cognitive dissonance manifested in a simultaneous fascination with, and fear of, parenting. In the case of both Gitta and Witalii, this finds its expression in a puzzling or irrational f light. The emotional ties of mothering are deep-rooted in the unconscious mind, Andreas-Salomé suggests. Anneliese, Gitta’s mother, expresses a sense of the uncertainty and the lack of control they accompany, as she tries to explain to her childless friend Renate why she relishes motherhood: Ja — Zwittergeschöpfe, das sind wir — die gebären, ohne zu wissen was, erziehen, ohne zu wissen wen, verantworten müssen, ohne zu wissen wie, und doch weder ihre Macht noch ihre Angst lassen können [...] Dies gerade ist ja aber das Herrlichste wiederum [...] — Wer wollte wohl aufs Leben verzichten da, wo es am meisten Leben ist (57). [Yes — we are hybrid creatures — who give birth, without knowing to what; who educate, without knowing whom; who must take responsibility, without

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For Anneliese, a combination of the joys, burdens and sorrows turns mothers into hybrid creatures, not fully comprehensible within rationalist discourses. Even within this positive affirmation of the role of the mother, we can perhaps also gain a glimpse of her childless friend Renate’s ambivalence towards it, with its parallel in Gitta’s own deep-rooted fears about the changes it will bring about in her. Gitta’s relationship with her husband has begun to improve as the novel ends and it is left for the reader to imagine that she too might eventually wish to become a mother. Das Haus, with its sensitive exploration of liminal states of being, is itself on the threshold between realism and modernism. Andreas-Salomé explores the newly-married protagonist’s instinctive fear of the path conventionally regarded as a woman’s destiny. Informed by her own work as a psychoanalyst, she uses the themes of the uncanny and doubling to explore her subjects’ divergent responses to motherhood. Through the motif of the horse she implies Gitta’s f light from motherhood to be not something logically chosen, but rather an action driven by unknown forces deep within the self. While the relationships with Gitta’s husband or Gitta’s father, which this chapter has not space enough to explore, might provide further answers to the puzzle of Gitta’s behaviour, the power of the novel lies in the depiction of the hybrid figures of Gitta and Anneliese and the powerful effect on the self of their experiences of pregnancy. Notes to Chapter 6 1. Frank Wedekind, Erdgeist (1895: Earth Spirit) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904: Pandora’s Box). 2. Muriel Cormican, ‘Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, Women in German Yearbook, 14 (1999), 127– 42, suggests that literary scholars have been ‘more interested in Andreas-Salomé’s sexual exploits than in her works’ (p. 128). Russian born, Lou Salomé attended university in Zurich; travelling in Italy she befriended Nietzsche and Paul Rée (1849–1901), and after rejecting Nietzsche she cohabited with Rée in Berlin until her marriage to Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930) in 1887, a marriage reputedly never consummated. See H. F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andres-Salomé (Toronto: Vail-Ballou Press, 1962), transl. as Lou Andreas-Salomé: Das Leben einer außergewöhnliche Frau, 7th edn (Munich: Heyne, 1983, first publ. 1964), and his essay ‘Rilke’s Love Poems to Lou Andreas-Salomé’, Modern Language Quarterly, 21 (1960), 158–64. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Die Dokumente ihrer Begegnung, ed. by Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt: Insel, 1970), and Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). More recently, see Cornelia Pechota Vuilleumier, ‘Lou in Cosmopolis: Rilkes Freundin aus komparatistischer Sicht’, Blätter der Rilke-Gesellschaft, 25, (2004), 231–34. 3. E.g. Brigid Haines, ‘Masochism and Femininity in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Eine Ausschweifung’, Women in German Yearbook, 10 (1995), 97–115; Laura Deiulio, ‘A Tale of Two Cities: The Metropolis in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Fenitschka’, Women in German Yearbook, 23 (2007), 76–101. 4. Cormican, ‘Lou Andreas-Salomé’s Das Haus’, pp. 139–40. 5. Muriel Cormican, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé: Negotiating Identity (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009). 6. See Ursula Welsch and Michaela Wiesner, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Vom ‘Lebensurgrund’ zur ‘Psycho­ analyse’ (Vienna: Verlag für Internationale Psychoanalyse, 1988), and Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé (New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2012).

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7. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib: Ein Bild im Umriss’, in Die Erotik: Vier Aufsätze (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1979), pp. 7–44 (p. 26); first publ. in Neue Deutsche Rundschau 10 (1899), 225–43. 8. Deiulio, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, p. 77. 9. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts (Bremen: Europäischer Literaturverlag, 2011, first publ. by Ullstein 1919). 10. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Die Schwester’, Im Zwischenland: Fünf Geschichten aus dem Seelenleben halbwüchsiger Mädchen (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1902), pp. 263–334 (p. 263). 11. Caroline Kreide, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Feministin oder Antifeministin? Ein Standartbestimmung zur wilhelminische Frauenbewegung (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 105. 12. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, first publ. 1979), p. 88. 13. Elizabeth Boa, ‘Creepy-Crawlies: The Metamorphosis and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper’, in Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and the Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 120–33 (p. 122). 14. Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, p. 19. 15. See Kreide, Lou Andreas-Salomé, p. 107. 16. Cormican, Women in the Works of Lou Andreas-Salomé, p. 4. 17. Carol Diethe, Towards Emancipation: German Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998), p. 185. 18. Diethe, Towards Emancipation, p. 185. 19. Angela Livingstone, Lou Andreas-Salomé: Her Life and Work (New York: Bell, 1984), p. 131. 20. E. M. Butler, Rainer Maria Rilke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), p. 22. Binion, p. 226, and Livingstone, Lou Andreas-Salomé, p. 131, also refer to the author’s possible pregnancy. 21. Rainer Maria Rilke — Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel, ed. by Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1975), pp. 30–31. See Peters, Lou Andreas-Salomé, pp. 265–66 who suggests that Rilke’s depiction of von Reventlow’s unexpected enjoyment of life with her young son was intended to encourage Andreas-Salomé to expect similar maternal happiness. 22. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Lebensrückblick: Grundriss einiger Lebenserinnerungen, ed. by Ernst Pfeiffer (Zurich: Niehan, 1951), p. 174. 23. Rainer Maria Rilke — Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel, p. 32. 24. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, ed. by Manfred Engel (Frank­ furt a.M.: Insel, 1996), I: Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, pp. 264–65 (see also p. 806). In view of the date of the poem, it could perhaps be marking the anniversary of Andreas-Salomé’s loss of the pregnancy. 25. Cornelie Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women’s Reproductive Rights and Duties (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 3. Anneliese Bergmann, ‘Frauen, Männer, Sexualität und Geburtenkontrolle’, in Frauen suchen ihre Geschichte: Historische Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Karin Hausen (Munich: Beck, 1981), pp. 81–92. 26. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 188. 27. See Heide Schlüpmann, ‘Radikalisierung der Philosophie: Die Nietzsche-Rezeption und die sexualpolitische Publizistik Helene Stöckers’, Feministische Studien, 1 (1984), 10–38; and Gudrun Hamelmann, Helene Stöcker, der ‘Bund für Mutterschutz’ und ‘Die Neue Generation’ (Frankfurt a.M.: Haag, 1998). 28. Usborne, Politics of the Body, p. 7. 29. Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), p. 462. Reuter notes in passing that she took part in Munich in public action against ‘the dangerous paragraphs’. This euphemism is clearly recognisable to a Weimar readership as referring to the campaigns against the draconian sentences passed down for abortion. 30. Marie Stritt, Das bürgerliche Gesetzbuch und die Frauenfrage: Vortrag gehalten auf der General­ versammlung des BDF in Hamburg (28 October 1898), see Elke Schüller, Marie Stritt: eine ‘kampffrohe Streiterin’ in der Frauenbewegung (1855–1928); mit dem erstmaligen Abdruck der unvollendeten

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Lebenserinnerungen von Marie Stritt, ed. by Kerstin Wolff (Königstein im Taunus: Helmer, 2005). 31. Allen, Feminism and Motherhood, p. 188, and Bergmann, ‘Frauen, Männer, Sexualität,’ p. 94. 32. Richard Evans, The Feminist Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London: Sage Publications, 1976), pp. 134–36. 33. See Max Hirsch, Fruchtabtreibung und Präventivverkehr im Zusammenhang mit dem Geburtenrückgang: eine medizinische, juristische und sozialpolitische Betrachtung (Würzburg: Kabitzsch, 1914), an antibirth control pamphlet from an opponent of socialism. 34. Max Marcuse, ‘Zur Frage der Verbreitung und Methodik der willkürlichen Geburtenbe­ schränkung in Berliner Proletarierkreisen’, Sexual-Probleme, 9 (1913), 752–80. See also Max Marcuse, Der eheliche Präventivverkehr, seine Verbreitung, Verursachung und Methodik: ein Beitrag zur Symptomatik und Ätiologie der Geburtenbeschränkung (Stuttgart: Enke, 1917). 35. Marcuse, ‘Zur Frage’, p. 774. 36. See Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Berghahn, 2007). Other cultural historical studies on abortion include Geschichte des Ungeborenen. Zur Erfahrungsund Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Schwangerschaft, 17.–20. Jahrhundert ed. by Barbara Duden, Jürgen Schlumbohm, and Patrice Veit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 37. Usborne, ‘“Blocked menses” (Blutstockung) as a popular lay concept’, Cultures of Abortion, pp. 148–54 (p. 146). 38. Ibid., p. 161. 39. Usborne, ‘Medical Termination of Pregnancy: Theory and Practice’, in Cultures of Abortion, pp. 64–93 (p. 64). See also Kevin Repp, ‘“Sexualkrise und Rasse”: Feminist Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle’, in Germany at the fin de siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas, ed. by Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 102–26, which examines Lou-Andreas Salomé’s Die Erotik (pp. 116–20) and Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen. 40. Discussion of the suggestion of pregnancy is absent from the relatively infrequent discussions of Das Haus in secondary literature. Possibly, Gitta’s reference later to her reconciliation and sexual union with Markus Mandelstein as ‘eine Vermählung’ (marriage) has led readers to assume that she had not consummated her marriage before that night, making her pregnancy less likely (though this does not, of course, make it impossible by any means, given that Gitta before marriage was a student enjoying freedom not commonly afforded to nineteenth-century heroines). See, for example, Muriel Cormican, p. 141, note 14. 41. Miscarriage in other stories of this period, such as Gabriele Reuter’s novel Liselotte von Reckling (1904), is described euphemistically as a sudden illness. See Charlotte Woodford, ‘NineteenthCentury Sentimentality and its Discourse of Renunciation in Marlitt’s Goldelse and Gabriele Reuter’s Liselotte von Reckling’, in German Women Writers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Helen Fronius and Anna Richards (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), pp. 84–98. 42. See Ritchie Robertson, ‘Modernism and the Self, 1890–1924’, in Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, ed. by Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 150–96 (p. 176). 43. Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Vom Primat des Willens im Selbstbewußtseyn’, Werke in zehn Bänden. Zürcher Ausgabe, 10 vols (Zurich: Diogenes, 1977), III, pp. 234–86 (p. 248). See Robertson, ‘Modernism’, p. 176. 44. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ródinka: Russische Erzählung (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1985, first publ. 1923).

Chapter 7

v

The Unmarried Mother in Clara Viebig’s Die Schuldige, Das tägliche Brot and Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus In the 1890s and 1900s, the idea that only marriage could legitimize a sexual rel­ ation­ship was being gradually undermined. Friedrich Engels’s damning indictment of the marriage of convenience in Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats (1884: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) was inf luential in weakening marriage as a social institution, as we saw in Chapter 5 with the novel Eine für Viele (1902: One for Many). It was often contended that arranged marriages, whose purpose was so intimately connected with the acquisition of property, were immoral, while so-called illegitimate relationships based on mutual attraction were not. Ellen Key wrote that marriage was immoral unless based on love, and consensual sex based on attraction was moral even outside marriage (‘die Liebe ist sittlich auch ohne gesetzliche Ehe, aber diese ist unsittlich ohne Liebe’).1 Women also argued that no woman should become a mother except in a relationship based on mutual love. Adele Schreiber, for example, put forward a widely held view among members of the Bund für Mutterschutz (League for the Protection of Mothers) when she suggested that any baby conceived through love should be regarded as legitimate.2 The German Civil Code, published for the first time in 1896, persisted in stigmatizing women who gave birth out of wedlock, and enabled men to evade responsibility for their children, for example by the simple allegation that other men had potentially fathered the child.3 Unmarried mothers often worked right up to the birth, and so did many married women living in poverty. Mothers sometimes returned to work within days, even though working women were entitled to a two-week maternity break.4 Lily Braun, who joined the Social Democratic Party in 1896, saw the necessity of work as endangering the health of working-class women and as a consequence also that of their children.5 Feminists’ campaigns focused extensively on the figure of the unmarried mother,6 with Adele Schreiber sketching her situation in emotive terms: Im Alltag, da sehen wir die Mütter des Volkes erliegen unter der dreifachen Last von Überarbeitung, Entbehrung und Mutterschaft, wir sehen die Schwangeren bis zum letzten Augenblick, die Not an ihre Fersen geheftet, schwere Arbeit

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Middle-class women, however, were also vulnerable, for the restriction of certain popular professions such as teaching and nursing to unmarried women led to dismissal in the case of pregnancy.8 In the 1890s and 1900s, the motif of the unmarried mother is prominent in women’s novels of social protest, as can be seen by its appearance in Minna Kautsky’s Stefan vom Grillenhof (1881), Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895), and Helene Böhlau’s Halbtier! (1899), considered in earlier chapters.9 The treatment of such a motif, especially by women writers, was in itself a challenge to the literary conventions of the family novel. It is notable that among Marlitt’s romances, only the first, Goldelse (1866: Gold Elsie), features a woman — Bertha — who becomes pregnant out of wedlock, and she is swiftly married to a man who is not the father and sent to live abroad. In her novel Es lebe die Kunst! (1899: Long Live Art!), Clara Viebig (1860–1952) ref lects on the problem of publishing a short story sympathetic to a working-class unmarried mother. The novel’s protagonist is told by a publisher: das ist nichts für uns! Gott bewahre! Ein uneheliches Kind!!! Wie kann ich das meinen Leserinnen zumuten, Damen aus den besten Kreisen. [...] Schreiben Sie mal was aus dem wirklichen Leben, was allgemein interessiert. Am Liebsten was Nettes, was Fesches, ’ne Humoreske zum Beispiel; Tragisches will kein Mensch lesen. Und dann nicht diese Bauernatmosphäre!10 [we don’t want anything like that! Heaven preserve us! An illegitimate child!!! How could I impose that on my female readers, women from the best circles. [...] Write about something from real life, something that would be of general interest. Preferably something nice, something smarter, a comedy, for example; nobody wants to read a tragic plot. Especially not with this peasant setting.]

The story in question is Viebig’s ‘Die Schuldige’ (Kinder der Eifel, 1897: The Guilty Woman). Viebig had written it in only two days, shortly after reading Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885).11 Zola’s novel had transformed her aspirations as a writer and informed her aesthetic protest against the conservatism and prudishness of the middle-class literary market. She comments: ‘Ganz nackt meinetwegen sollten die Gestalten dastehen, nur ehrlich, ehrlich!’ (As far as I am concerned, my subjects could be completely naked, as long as they are honest, honest!)12 Such an ethos also informs her novel Das tägliche Brot (1900: Our Daily Bread), a powerful depiction of a working-class woman’s attempt to bring up a baby on her own. Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus (1908: House of Tears) weaves together the stories of several pregnant women, who meet in a home for unmarried mothers where they have f led to have

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their babies in secret. It shares with Viebig’s stories a commitment to unf linching social realism, and is similarly informed by feminist campaigns in the 1890s and the 1900s for legal protection for unmarried mothers and their children. Additionally, Reuter justifies her support for unmarried mothers through new scientific and eugenicist ideas which call for a new morality based on the health, rather than the marital status, of the parents. Clara Viebig’s ‘Die Schuldige’ is based on a true story and makes extensive use of the local dialect of the Eifel, a mountainous region on Germany’s border with Belgium and Luxemburg. The maid and farmhand Barbara Holzer has an illegitimate child and is forced into hiding by the child’s father, whom she later brutally murders when he tries to separate her from their son. Viebig made it the subject of her first drama, Barbara Holzer (1897). Das tägliche Brot focuses on the desperate need of a servant in Berlin who becomes pregnant when she seeks companionship amid the loneliness of urban life. In both stories, religious motifs legitimize the figure of the unmarried mother, while the naturalness of the powerful connection between a mother and her child is explored through animal imagery. Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus is a fiction born of personal experience, in which the motif of telling stories plays an important role in creating solidarity and mutual support in the face of social marginalization. Reuter’s protagonist, a notable feminist, rejects bourgeois marriage and has entered freely into a relationship of sexual equality. Reuter and Viebig emphasize the moral nature of their protagonists’ decisions to embrace motherhood by suggesting and dismissing alternative paths, namely abortion and infanticide. Clara Viebig and the power of maternal instinct A memoir written by Viebig in the 1900s describes how reading Zola’s Germinal changed the way she wrote: ‘Germinal’ wurde mir eine Offenbarung. Ich las es heimlich, meine Umgebung hätte durchaus keinen Gefallen an dieser Lektüre gefunden. Aber ich, aber ich! Ich fieberte, ich zitterte, ich war wie niedergedonnert [...] aber — jetzt sah ich. O diese Kraft, diese Größe, diese Glut der Farben, diese Gewalt der Sprache, diese Fülle der Gesichte, diese Leidenschaft der Gefühle! So muß man schreiben, so! Ohne Rücksicht, ohne Furcht, ohne scheues Bedenken.13 [Germinal was a revelation to me. I read it secretly for those around me would have not taken any pleasure in my reading it. But I did, oh yes! I felt feverish, trembled, I was as if struck by lightning [...] and now — now I could see. Such energy, such greatness, such a blaze of colour, such power of language, such expansive story-telling and passionate feelings! That was how you should write, like that! With no consideration for others, no fear and without timidity.]

The comment is reminiscent of Gabriele Reuter’s admission that in 1890 she had read the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle of twenty novels by Zola and made sure her mother did not catch her reading them.14 In Viebig’s early years as a writer, naturalist fiction such as Zola’s, with its exploration of human passions and drives, led her to write boldly about the working classes and their living conditions, as well

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as about sexuality, albeit safely located at a distance in a proletariat milieu.15 At first her work lay in the drawer, and she insisted she would carry on writing provocative fiction even if no one would print it.16 But with her marriage to the publisher Friedrich Cohn in November 1896 these worries were over.17 Caroline Bland points out how Viebig later distanced herself from Zola’s fiction.18 As is examined in more detail in the following chapter, the First World War began to change attitudes within the cultural establishment towards foreign models such as Zola or even Tolstoy, and the engagement with social problems which is so prominent in their works. As a result, Viebig seems to have played down the importance of naturalism as a model for her own early work. Her connection to the Heimat movement of regional literature was an important part of her continued success in the Weimar years.19 At the start of her career, however, naturalism was an important stimulus for her protest against the way the transfiguration of reality in bourgeois realism led to a damaging misrepresentation of society and human nature. In the two fictional works considered here, naturalism informs her fascination with the powerful and instinctive connection between mother and child, which in desperation drives her female protagonists to consider extreme measures. Viebig’s short story ‘Die Schuldige’, dramatized as Barbara Holzer, is set in a village not far from Trier. Visitors arrive on the train and seem to regard it as a rural idyll. But it cannot escape the economic pressures of modern life. At the start of the story, a gypsy family trudging through the snow meets with little sympathy from villagers. The Pfalzel family where Barbara Holzer works as a maid begrudge her a good meal, and Lorenz, their son, is repeatedly spoken of in terms of his economic value. He is known as ‘der schöne Lorenz’ (‘handsome Lorenz’) and his good looks have currency: a marriage has been arranged for him to Anna, the only child of a rich neighbour, in order that his father should be able to meet his financial obligations. Despite some apparent attachment to Barbara, he sends her and their illegitimate child into hiding in order not to damage his chances with his fiancée. But when he tells Barbara he wants to take the baby and leave it on the pious Anna’s doorstep, Barbara stabs him to death in a desperate act of protest. The father’s reaction to Lorenz’s death underlines the way money has distorted their relationship: he repeatedly alludes to the boy’s function in the family’s business: ‘Nau gieht ales kaput, nau es ale Müh omme sunst, nau kann ech betteln giehn — Lorenz, Lorenz!’ (‘Now everything is ruined, now all our efforts are wasted, I might as well go begging now.)20 The play Barbara Holzer was performed in 1897 in the Berliner Freie Volksbühne, and was Viebig’s first dramatic work.21 In Es lebe die Kunst, a fictional version of the play is performed, and the text meets with considerable opposition from the theatre director, who dislikes the dialect, is suspicious of the plot, and writes his own more optimistic ending, which fails to please the audience. The best writers of works for the stage, he claims, need ‘eine Rücksichtnahme auf die Wünsche des Publikums’ (‘to consider the public’s wishes’, Es lebe die Kunst, p. 220), for a director’s prime concern is to fill his seats. The actors grumble about being asked to speak in authentic Eifel dialect, claiming that they always use Viennese indiscriminately. Kitsch, rather than tragedy, is the order of the day. Significantly,

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Viebig’s dramatic version transforms Barbara’s aunt Katrein into a sinister figure, who chastizes Barbara for not having come to her for a herbal concoction to get rid of the pregnancy. Barbara rejects the idea of abortion out of hand. She looks forward to the arrival of her child for the human warmth and closeness he brings in an uncaring world. Moreover, the ending of Barbara Holzer waters down a powerful moment in the novella when Barbara, who has been arrested for murdering Lorenz, and has had her child taken away, repeatedly cries out for him like a wounded animal. Refusing to accept that she will never see him again, she is driven away to prison in Trier and the sound of her cries harrowingly emanates from the cart: ‘mein Könd! Mein Könd’ (‘my child, my child’). It is an affecting ending to the novella which draws attention to how motherly love drove Barbara to extremes, and highlights the uncertainty of the fate of the child, now parentless and rejected by society. Rather clumsily, the drama has the child die during the night of Barbara’s arrest, and when she is given the news her mood changes to one of resignation. Of the changes which Viebig made to the substance of Die Schuldige when rewriting it for the stage, another of the more significant is the watering down of the role played by the state prosecutor, a fictionalization of Viebig’s Uncle Matthieu, a friend of the family on whose experience the story is based.22 In the prose version of Barbara’s story, he is the observer whose perspective is central to how the reader sees and interprets the fate of the unmarried mother. Die Schuldige opens with Barbara Holzer’s act of kindness to the gypsy family whom others have sent away empty-handed. Moved by the sight of a starving mother with nothing to feed her infant, Barbara secretly gives her some bread, as well as a thick cloak, which she has been using to conceal her pregnancy. Immediately the central theme of compassion is introduced, and the incident shows Barbara to be independent-minded, sympathetic towards others, fearful of her impending motherhood, but proudly determined to look after her child. When Barbara is forced to leave the Pfalzels’ farm and go into hiding, however, she also withdraws from the narrator’s gaze: in an aesthetic manifestation of her marginalization from society, she becomes a non-person. Her fate is presented to us only indirectly, mostly through the sympathetic gaze of the state prosecutor. He shares Barbara’s compassionate nature, hence his name ‘Milde’ (clemency). The technique recalls Zola’s description in his essay ‘Le Roman expérimental’ (1880) of naturalism as ‘a corner of nature seen through a temperament’, and it allows us to ref lect both on the story of the mother and also on the middle-class professional’s response to it.23 Barbara Holzer goes to hide in St Genovefa’s cave with her child. Milde is curious to learn why the villagers think the cave is haunted, and so through Milde we secretly spy on Barbara in hiding with her child and witness her transfiguration through motherly love into a figure who could be confused with the saint. The folk legend of St Genevieve is the story of innocence wrongly accused: a mother, falsely suspected of adultery, hid in the cave with her child for years.24 The story of the innocent mother is mapped onto Barbara by Milde, who relishes the sight of her singing lullabies to her child, seemingly at one with nature. But what if we step back from Milde’s romanticization of Barbara’s isolation? Is Barbara’s cave a rural idyll, or a last refuge for one who is cold, starving and abandoned by the village?

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Through the device of the observer, who keeps the secret but offers no help, the symbolic patterning is given precedence over the material conditions. This state prosecutor’s sense of what is just and unjust is confused by the sight of Barbara and the child: Das Gesetz spricht sein “Ungiltig” über die Verbindung, der das junge Menschen­wesen entsprossen, es drückt mit starker Hand den Stempel des Makels auf die Stirn der Mutter und wirft das Kind zu den Namenlosen; es ist grausam, aber — Gesetz bleibt Gesetz, die Sitte muß bestehen [...]. Und doch — (p. 199). [The Law pronounces that the relationship which resulted in this young human being is ‘illegitimate’ and thus with a strong hand it brands a stain on the forehead of the mother and casts the child to the nameless; it is brutal, but — the law is the law, morality must prosper [...]. And yet — ]

Milde questions the nature of justice and society’s condemnation of the unmarried mother. Even though he speaks the words, he cannot assent to the brutally simplistic idea that the law is the law. He tells us elsewhere that this is why he will never progress any further in his chosen career. But he cannot go against the law in his professional actions. Later, he must arrest Barbara and her beautiful golden hair, which seemed to surround her like a halo when he saw her the first time, now seems to him like poisonous snakes. The saint-like figure has become the gorgon, Medusa, whose beauty is associated with lethal dangers. In Milde’s imagination the locks of Barbara’s hair turn into the rope that will be used on the murderess. She haunts his imagination and he feels helpless, without agency or freedom; he is in fate’s hands (‘ein hilf loser Mensch, ein Nichts in der Hand des Schicksals’, p. 216). While the Barbara of Ebner-Eschenbach’s Das Gemeindekind, a mother convicted of assisting her husband in killing a priest, is given a second chance after her prison sentence, and will live out her old age with her son, there is no place in the law for leniency towards Viebig’s Barbara, or for any humane intervention on her behalf. She will hang for Lorenz’s murder and her child will be orphaned. Later, Milde listens to Barbara’s story, saying he is acting like a confessor, and can merely express a hope that God will show mercy where none has been forthcoming from man (p. 231). While Viebig’s story breaks boundaries thematically, as well as formally with her use of Eifel dialect, the main act of protest in the text is that of Barbara, who impulsively kills Lorenz, just as impulsively as she had entered into a sexual relationship with him. Milde feels unable to protest, for he believes that he is powerless to alter Barbara’s situation. Yet through the power of its aesthetic discourse to expose the structures which result in injustice, Viebig’s text enacts a protest which is denied Milde in his daily work as the strong arm of the law. In Viebig’s drama, his counterpart comments: ‘das hier war kein geplanter Mord, das war Notwehr! Glauben Sie mir, die Gerechtigkeit weint hier, wo sie verdammen muß — sie kann nicht verzeihen, aber sie versteht!’ (‘that was no premeditated murder, it was selfdefence! Believe me, justice weeps where it should condemn — it cannot forgive but it understands’).25 This strong statement echoes Viebig’s comment on her play prior to its performance: ‘Ich möchte die Magd Barbara Holzer, die Geringste der

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Geringen, das mühselig beladene Weib, vor die Augen des Publikums führen — es soll sie nicht freisprechen, wohl aber verstehen’ (‘I want to bring before the eyes of the audience the maid Barbara Holzer, the lowest of the low, a woman burdened by troubles — the public should not forgive her but they might well understand her’).26 Barbara’s culpability lies in her desperate murder of Lorenz, not in her illegitimate pregnancy, and the contrast between the transfigured mother at one with nature and Barbara as hunted animal, cowering at the back of the cave to avoid discovery, starkly makes clear the marginalization of the single mother by the village community. The story’s exposure of the social conditions which led to the murder offers hope for the future transformation of society. In the preface to the serialized version of her novel Das tägliche Brot, Viebig also encourages her middle-class readership to pity and understand the proletarian subjects of her novel by graphically depicting the hardships they endure. The protagonist, Mine, a girl in her late teens, is sent from the countryside by her family to find a position as a servant in Berlin, but is so isolated there that she turns for friendship to the son of a lower-middle-class shopkeeper and becomes pregnant by him. On learning of Mine’s pregnancy, her lover Arthur initially refuses to marry her. She therefore has to leave her job as a maid and give birth without the services of a midwife in a friend’s apartment. Only a fortnight later she sets out to find another position as a servant, and for a year conceals all knowledge of the child from her employer, leaving her baby Frida with an unreliable friend and visiting her only once a fortnight. During the mornings, Frida is left alone while the friend goes out to work. Viebig writes that she deliberately appealed to the better nature of her female readers in Das tägliche Brot. She appears to f latter them by suggesting that they are capable of a sympathy not found in the novel within the proletarian and pettybourgeois milieu Mine inhabits. Ich habe versucht, liebevoll all den weiblichen Empfindungen nachzugehen, die keinen Ausdruck finden bei jenen armen Stummen, jenen Weibern, denen für einen anderen Gedanken nicht Muße bleibt, kaum einmal Zeit zu einer anderen Sorge als der ums tägliche Brot.27 [I tried lovingly to cultivate all the feminine emotions that find no possibility for expression among those poor silent folk, those women who have no leisure for such thoughts, hardly any time for anything except their worries about their daily bread.]

Viebig goes on to suggest that among the lower classes, material poverty goes hand in hand with intellectual poverty and by implication a lack of insight into moral choices. Both contribute to the paths taken by her protagonists, where impulsive behaviour frequently leads to a deterioration in already desperate social conditions: Ein sich menschlich Nähertreten ist nötig, um diese Kluft zu überbrücken, die jetzt tiefer denn je zwischen Dienenden und Bedientwerdenden klafft. Vor allem aber möchte ich zum Ausdruck bringen, wie traurig das Leben im Grunde ist, in dem sich geistige und leibliche Armut paaren, und wie notwendig es für uns ist, alles zu verstehen, um vieles zu verzeihen (ibid.).

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The telling ambivalence of that phrase ‘alles zu verstehen, um vieles zu verzeihen’ (‘to understand everything and forgive much’), rather than its usual form (tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: ‘to understand all is to forgive all’) underlines the existence of a moral universe in Viebig’s fiction in which there are boundaries that should not be crossed. Viebig provides an insight into the social problems faced by workers in the city, but we sympathize all the more with Mine because she succeeds through honesty and hard work in avoiding the traps of alcoholism and prostitution. Negative models include the servant Bertha, who accompanies Mine on her journey from the village to the city and aspires to rise quickly through the social classes, through whatever means available. Godela Weiss-Sussex has examined how the characterization of Mine and her friend Bertha are ‘morally determined’.28 Bertha steals luxury sweetmeats from one employer, spurred on by a voracious appetite which Weiss-Sussex interprets as a manifestation of her sublimated sexual desires.29 It leads to her dismissal. The resulting black mark against her in her reference book makes it difficult for her to find another position, and when she finds employment she takes to drinking alcohol. She calls the bottle ‘der Süße’ (‘sweet one’).30 But when she is fired she seems to have no option left but to work in the sort of café where prostitution makes up most of the women’s wages. Arthur’s beautiful sister disappears suddenly from her home and job in a department store; she is later glimpsed in a bar accompanied by a rich man. She no doubt sees the glamour of a kept mistress as a swift route to social advancement, but the reader is left wondering how long it will be before such transient pleasures can no longer provide her with security. Viebig does not condone such behaviour. In contrast, Mine keeps her family from starvation by delivering newspapers from her daughter Frida’s pram, her life made bearable by small acts of human kindness. In Das tägliche Brot, Viebig again uses the full power of naturalistic prose to foster identification with the protagonist, and the novel contains moments of harrowing insight into the extent of her despair. One of the most vivid is the episode in which Mine travels home to the countryside in desperation, taking her child with her. One Sunday, she has only narrowly managed to pay her fortnightly visit to Frida, and discovers that the baby has been left alone and in distress; the friend looking after the baby has disappeared, perhaps to commit suicide. She thus turns to her family for help. But in her home village, Mine’s parents are dismayed by the shame of her illegitimate pregnancy and refuse to take the baby. Mine must return to Berlin where she anticipates that they both might starve. In a feuilleton from 1912, ‘Die Mütter’ (Mothers), the Viennese journalist Karl Kraus comments on the fate of a mother, Anna Werner, convicted in 1908 of infanticide.31 Anna was a servant, and had tried to find someone to look after her eleven-month-old daughter Hedwig. But in every village community she was eventually turned away, for the communities feared they were setting a damaging

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precedent by caring for the child of an unmarried mother. She tried to find someone to care for the child, at great cost to herself, while she continued to work as a servant, but on each occasion met with disapproval. Eventually, out of despair, Anna killed her own child and hid the evidence. A year later, the body of the child was found and Anna Werner was given a death sentence. Kraus juxtaposes the communities’ indifference to the fate of the infant with a piece satirically depicting the efforts of the Catholic church to find methods for baptising infants in utero. The Church, he implies, concerns itself more with eternal salvation than social deprivation, and the community conceals economic motivations behind a veneer of supposed morality. The case of Anna Werner was a well-known one: Ruth Bré, a prominent figure in the radical feminist organization Bund für Mutterschutz, organized a petition of thousands of signatures which resulted in the death penalty being commuted to a lengthy custodial sentence.32 Viebig in Das tägliche Brot anticipates that particular case with a fictional depiction of a similar kind of despair. As Mine slowly makes her way across country from the village to the railway station in Schwerin, she has reached a state of indifference: ‘Ihr Herz war tot. Es lag in ihrer Brust wie ein harter, kalter Stein. [...] Ihr Not war zu groß; sie fühlte nichts mehr’ (‘her heart was dead. It lay in her breast like a cold hard stone. [...] Her need was too great; she felt nothing more’).33 Her attention is drawn to a still, dark pond. She stands there, captivated by it, leaning over it with curiosity. She realizes that her immediate problems would be solved if she were to throw her child into the pond: Was man da hinein warf, das — war weg. Sie sah sich um. Alles leer. Nichts auf der Welt, als sie und dieses Kind. Dieses arme Kind! Ihre irren Blicke richteten sich wieder auf den Tümpfel. Immer irrer, immer wirrer. Mit einem grellen Schrei warf sie den Kopf hintenüber, daß ihr der Hut herunterglitt und der Wind ungehindert mit ihren Haaren spielte. Er peitschte ihr die feuchten Strähnen ins Gesicht. Jetzt kniff sie fest die Augen zu. Ihre Nasenf lügel blähten sich, sie biß die Zähne aufeinander — mit beiden Armen hob sie das Kind in die Höhe — da, ein Rascheln! Zusammenschreckend fuhr sie herum. Da stand ein Tier, ein Reh, wenige Schritte von ihr; mit blanken Augen äugte es sie an. [...] Jetzt kam ein Junges angesprungen [...] Die Ricke stieß einen warnenden, pfeifenden Laut aus, fort sprang der Junge, und die Alte setzte pfeilgeschwind hinterdrein, ihr Kind mit dem eigenen Leib gegen vermeintliche Gefahr deckend (pp. 237–38). [Whatever was thrown in there, that was gone. She looked around. Everything a blank. Nothing in the world but herself and this child. This poor child! Her wandering eyes were again directed to the pool. More and more wandering, more and more confused. With a shrill scream she threw back her head, her hat slipped off, and the wind played unhindered with her hair. It drove the damp locks into her face. Now she closed her eyes tightly, inf lated her nostrils, clenched her teeth — held her child up with both arms — there, a rustling!

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This emotionally charged passage echoes the moment from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament when Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac. As Abraham raises the knife to strike the fatal blow, a sound in the bushes distracts him and he sees an animal provided by God to take Isaac’s place. Here, the animals are not to be killed, but they nevertheless arrive at a crucial moment to save Frida from a meaningless sacrifice. In the passage, Mine, with the wind in her hair, her nostrils f laring and teeth clenched, physically resembles a scared animal, and the repetition of ‘immer irrer, immer wirrer’ emphasizes the confusion of her senses which make her lose all reason. We feel she really could kill the child. One frightened animal is disturbed by another, and Mine’s motherly instincts resurface as she sees the deer protect her kid. Retrieving her hat, and wrapping the child in a blanket to protect her, she re-enters the human world. In Berlin, she tries to abandon Frida as a foundling, but cannot go through with it. Frida speaks the word ‘Mama’ for the first time and her entry into the realm of human speech galvanizes Mine to find the moral courage to take Frida home to her employer, announcing her presence proudly to the family, and refusing to leave Frida again. They help her to persuade Arthur to marry her. While Mine’s hard work and determination shows her to be deserving, her fate is largely made or broken by the sympathetic intervention of her social superiors. Michel Durand emphasizes the problematic nature of literature designed to arouse pity to the social problems which Viebig’s fiction depicts, suggesting that there is a tension between the progressive nature of Viebig’s aesthetic project and a conser­ vatism with regard to her social outlook.34 Käte Schultze suggested in 1913: Clara Viebig weiß, daß die Menschen, die ohne Gegengewicht der Bildung in beschränktester Umgebung bei harter Arbeit darin leben müssen, ein vorwiegend primäres Triebleben haben, das plötzlich, wild und ungezügelt mit elementarer Gewalt hervorbricht, und daß ihre Ethik nur die sein kann, die das Leben sie lehrt.35 [Clara Viebig knows that people who live in straightened circumstances without education as a counterbalance are possessed of an instinctive life which determines their behaviour and breaks forth suddenly with elemental power, wild and untamed. Their only moral code is the one that life teaches them.]

The working-class figures in Viebig’s novels, Schultze implies, are more prone to instinctive behaviour and do not share the ethical code of their social superiors. However, through the powerful theme of mothering, Viebig bridges the gap between the social classes by emphasizing the intrinsic morality of marginalized women’s struggle to protect their infants. The emotive power of the symbolic structure and narrative techniques in Viebig’s Das tägliche Leben also makes it difficult to read the novel as merely a depiction of proletarian women. Rather the novel reveals convincingly the material circumstances that lead not only to social deprivation but also which blind others to the fate of the marginalized; it is a call

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for an ethical and sympathetic response to the figure of the single mother, and also a striking representation of the strength of motherly love to overcome adversity. Maternity and Propaganda?: Gabriele Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus Gabriele Reuter’s novel Das Tränenhaus is a campaigning work that manages at the same time to be a powerful work of art. The novel transforms into art the author’s personal experience: in 1897, the unmarried Reuter had given birth to her only child Lily. In her fictional account, Reuter succeeds in reinterpreting her own birthing narrative in the context of an urgent humanitarian problem and investing it with political meaning. Around 1905, Gabriele Reuter joined the newly formed Bund für Mutterschutz, devoted to providing support for unmarried mothers and children born out of wedlock. Later, Reuter drew attention to the difficult task of reconciling politics and art which she took on at this time: ‘dieser Kampf, mit ganzer Seele und aus allen Kräften geführt, bedeutete Verzicht auf jede dichterische Tätigkeit, oder erniedrigte sie zur Propaganda-Magd. Die Kunst ist eine strenge Göttin — sie fordert den ganzen Menschen’ (‘this struggle, fought with the entire soul and all my strength, necessitated the renunciation of every artistic activity or it would reduce art to the service of propaganda. Art is a strict goddess — it demands the whole person’).36 The passage from her memoir sounds like a renunciation of political art, yet in Das Tränenhaus, Reuter manages to let her subject speak for itself through carefully drawn characters whose experiences are narrated movingly and with some humour. Reuter’s commitment to the Bund für Mutterschutz is evident from a piece written in its house journal.37 In the essay, Reuter opposes the treatment of illegitimate children as second-class citizens by attacking the narrow-mindedness of a moral code based on religious arguments, and justifies her own position scientifically with ideas drawn from evolutionary science (‘die neue Lehre von der Entwickelung des Menschen aus dem Tier’, ‘the new theory of the evolution of humans from animals’).38 Reuter’s interest in evolution could already be seen in Aus guter Familie (1895) in which Agathe Heidling attentively reads Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. Reuter argues for the importance of protecting all healthy human life, regardless of the circumstances of the subject’s birth, in order to improve the state of the nation. Furthermore, she suggests that Darwinism reveals moral norms, just like species, to be ‘etwas sich fortwährend Auf lösendes, Umbildendes und den Bedürfnissen der sich entwickelnden Kultur Anpassendes’ (‘something which perpetually break down in order to reform and adapt to the needs of the developing civilization’, ibid.). The Bund für Mutterschutz was strongly inf luenced by the emerging science of eugenics, regarded then by many as a progressive idea for improving the health and the future of the nation.39 Eugenics was connected with attempts to improve the reproductive health of the nation by the treatment and elimination of sexually transmitted and hereditary diseases. In such theories, the nation’s future was intimately bound up in how society cared for the next generation, beginning with the choices women made in and even before pregnancy. Members of the Bund für Mutterschutz such as Ruth Bré contended it was also for the good of the nation to take care of healthy unmarried mothers and their children.

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Reuter’s essay similarly bears traces of eugenicist ideas. She claims that those who understand the science of evolution observe with dismay wieviel Elendes, Krankes, Todgeweihtes in der Gesellschaft mit krampf hafter Mühe erhalten und grossgezogen wird, damit es weiter und weiter Unheil zeugend, fortwirkt. Und sie erblicken dagegen eine Fülle von kraftstrotzendem Leben, das beschmutzt, verdorben, zertreten wird — um einer Sittlichkeit willen, die einst lebensfördernd war und nun lebensfeindlich geworden ist. Und sie wollen eingreifen, auf klären, retten, helfen.40 [how many sick, miserable and dying people are raised and preserved in our society with convulsive effort only to beget further disaster and so carry on affecting the future. And at the same time they glimpse at a wealth of life in defiance of the odds that is sullied, spoilt and trodden to the ground — in the name of morality, something that once fostered life and is now inimical to it. And they want to step in, to enlighten, to save and to help.]

The idea, expressed here, of the wasted energy expended by the state in caring for socially unproductive life, is not taken any further by Reuter, though it is a common trope in eugenicist thought in the 1900s. Ellen Key (1849–1926) in her inf luential essay Das Jahrhundert des Kindes (1902: The Century of the Child), provocatively suggested that contemporary society devoted too many resources to caring for the sick.41 The central argument of that work contends that only those who are fit to do so should procreate at all. One of the founders of the Bund für Mutterschutz, Helene Stöcker (1869–43), wrote in its house journal of how birth control might offer possibilities to restrict the reproduction of those society deemed unhealthy: ‘man wird Mittel und Wege finden müssen, um unheilbare Kranke oder Entartete an der Fortpf lanzung zu hindern’ (‘we will need to find ways and means of preventing the incurably ill or degenerate from reproducing’).42 Reuter, however, uses the analogy between healthy illegitimate children, spurned by society, and the sick whom society protects, to show how vital, energetic elements of society are being overlooked and allowed to perish as a result of an outdated and, she contends, socially damaging concept of morality. Eugenics discourses in the 1900s were embraced as progressive by many modernizers because of the way they seemed to support their demands for the transformation of society. Yet they were accompanied from the outset by the suggestion of limiting society’s support for those who did not conform to their ideal of health.43 In Das Tränenhaus, Reuter’s protagonist Cornelie Reimann, an educated feminist with a reputation for writing pithy and provocative tracts, has freely entered into a sexual relationship with a bohemian figure, Rudi Irmgart, and eschewed marriage. On becoming pregnant, she has been let down by her lover and sought a reclusive existence in the countryside in an institution for unmarried expectant mothers. It is run by a coarse and gossipy midwife, a comic figure whom Reuter successfully uses to interrupt the pathos provided by the stories of the pregnant women. Telling stories is a natural human instinct and it is also a motif that runs through this novel. The midwife attempts to reassure Cornelie of her discretion, yet immediately begins to gossip about the tales she has learnt through her work (‘da könnte ich Geschichte erzähle’; ‘the stories I could tell’).44 The villagers know she will be down in the

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evening to tell them all about Cornelie. Just as Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) contains one hundred stories told by Florentine citizens f leeing from the plague, in order to make the days of their exile pass more quickly, so the women in Reuter’s Das Tränenhaus tell stories to pass the months of confinement and exile from respectable society before their babies are born. Sharing such tales is an important part of their growing in solidarity with one another and supporting each other through their pregnancies and birth. It empowers them to make sense of their experiences and move forwards towards motherhood. At the start of Das Tränenhaus, Cornelie, whose essays on the condition of femi­ ninity have supposedly been an inspiration for modern women, retreats from the public gaze, indifferent to the world around her. She is initially overcome by apathy, as Anna Richards has explored.45 While Cornelie continues writing, her work is characterized precisely by its lack of connection to the personal and especially to her own experience of pregnancy and marginalization. Nevertheless, on her arrival she is captivated by the sight of a beautiful new mother weeping, illuminated by a landscape reminiscent of Biblical illustrations. Rose’s child has been taken from her to be brought up by a foster mother in the village. She will not be comforted by the idea that she can visit every weekend and cries that all she wants is a father for her child. Her boyfriend’s parents want him to marry a wealthier woman. In her first night in the house, Cornelie smells in her room the traces of blood and wounds from women who have gone before her. She hears weeping, and it is as if the noise comes from herself but she soon believes it to come from more than one voice. She feels it to be a voice from distant times, resounding across the centuries. This process of identification with other pregnant women and mothers eventually leads to a political awakening. Cornelie realizes that only by making her own and others’ experiences known to the world can she start to bring about a change of public attitudes. The midwife, Frau Uffenbacher, entertains the girls with tales of terrible deliveries, and seems to live vicariously through the sensational events of the house, yet among the inhabitants there is a sense of consolation in a shared fate, which comforts Cornelie in her self-imposed exile. All the women in the house pay the price for a transgression which is not theirs alone: sixteen-year-old Toni, who had inherited money, was raped by a fortune hunter who hoped to be allowed to marry her. The friends help her overcome the experience by listening attentively as she explains that he enticed her to his room by promising her a singing parrot (pp. 130–31). Another young woman, Annerle, is about to give birth to her second child by the same man, Hans, whose parents will not let him marry her. Her first child is being looked after by her parents. As soon as she has given birth, the father’s uncle appears and attempts to bribe her never to see Hans again. However, she refutes the idea that Hans is the father in order to protect him and their relationship (pp. 196–97). The repeated moment of labour and birth also brings the women in the house into close proximity to death. For the sixteen-year-old Toni, Cornelie is a substitute for the mother who has sent her away to suffer among strangers, and her assistance helps Toni have the strength to deliver her child:

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Later, a young feminist arrives at the house with her best friend, only to see her friend die in childbirth through a combination of disappointment and exhaustion. The woman recognizes Cornelie and professes to be one of her followers. Cornelie is horrified by the idea that her writings should have led the young women down the path which took them to the House of Tears: they are art students, and Anneliese is pregnant by her art teacher, someone whose name Cornelie is told she would immediately recognize, but who refuses to acknowledge his child. Anneliese’s family have abandoned her; she is weak and in despair and dies before she can deliver the child. The other women in the house adorn her body with roses, and pay their respects, but her brother, arriving to arrange removal of the body, coldly tells them he will let it be known that she has died on a mountaineering trip. No one must know of her fate. The anger of the feminist friend contrasts at this point in the novel with Cornelie’s resigned and melancholy acceptance. The friend begs to be allowed to stay and take care of Cornelie, but Cornelie replies: ‘Das Schicksal hat manche unter uns ausersehen zu Symbolen der Zeit’ (‘fate has called some of us to be symbols of our time’, p. 162). She sees hers as a fate imbued with purpose: Einmal mußte wohl alles dieses von einer Frau gelitten werden, die es nicht nur dumpf quälend fühlt, sondern die es in Erkenntnis umwandeln wird ... jetzt noch nicht — einmal in der Zukunft ... Das geschieht nur, wenn die Zeit dafür gekommen ist (p. 163). [For once this all needed to be suffered by a woman who would not just feel its dull pain but would transform it into insight ... not yet — sometime in the future ... that will only happen when the time is ripe for it.]

Cornelie suggests that by experiencing pregnancy, birth and marginalization alongside such women, she will eventually be able to take up their cause. The young art student feels that Cornelie should not wait to communicate her fate to the world; she is critical of Cornelie’s decision to hide away in the countryside, rather she should proudly parade her pregnant body among the crowds as an example to other feminists. Cornelie is horrified, regarding this as ‘Mütterlichkeit als Propagandamittel’ (‘maternity as a means of propaganda’, p. 164). She explains: ‘Geschrei und Kampf und Wut, das zerstört doch nur. Alles natürlich Werdende wächst still und langsam’ (‘The cries and struggle and anger will just be destructive. Everything that emerges naturally grows silently and slowly’, p. 164). But by listening to the art student’s anger, she develops a sense of solidarity with her, and after a near-death experience during the delivery of her own child, she gains the strength to go out into the world and stand up for their collective rights.

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When it is Cornelie’s turn to give birth, her labour pains are emphasized by the broken syntax: Ob dies der Tod war, der in ihrem armen Leibe wütete — ? Nun — so würde sie ihm widerstehen! Sie erhob sich, sie stand in der dunklen Nacht ihm Auge in Auge gegenüber, die Hände geballt, jede Muskel gespannt — jede Kraft der Seele und des Willens hell wach — zum äußersten Kampfe gerichtet... Sie wollte ihre Kind nicht allein lassen! Sie wollte es küssen und an ihrem Herzen halten — sie wollte leben — leben — leben! [...] Und die Qualen stiegen — stiegen — stiegen — bis alles in ihre und um sie nur noch wie eine wirbelnde Hölle war (pp. 222–23). [Was this death raging within her poor body —? Well — she wasn’t going without a fight! She rose, and stood eye to eye with him in the dark night, fists clenched, every muscle tense — every strength of her soul and her will was wide awake — ready to fight to the death... She did not want to leave her child alone! She wanted to embrace it and draw it to her heart — she wanted to live — live — live! [...] And the pains grew stronger — stronger — stronger — until everything in her and around her was simply a turbulent hell.]

Cornelie is overwhelmed by a sense of isolation; the midwife has gone to tend to a woman in the village. Her pains seem like the beginning of a dance with death, but the quiet preparation of the months that she has passed in the House of Tears have given Cornelie the strength to survive. The later stages of labour are narrated in less detail, mirroring how Cornelie finds it hard to retain a sense of the world around her and eventually loses consciousness (p. 224). She wakes to hear her daughter cry, and sees a bucket full of water coloured red by her own blood. Ironically, amid the congratulations the voice of one male doctor praises another for his success: ‘Meinen Glückwunsch,’ sagte auch der fremde Arzt. ‘Der Doktor Schwärzle hat heut’ sein Meisterstück vollbracht. Eine Leistung, die unseren ersten Professoren zur Ehre gereichen würde’ (‘My congratulations’, says the unknown doctor. ‘Doctor Schwärzle has pulled off a master stroke. An achievement that would do honour to the best of our professors’, pp. 226–27). The love that Cornelie finds for her child finally gives her the courage to return to her previous life, together with her child, to expose herself to potential hostility. She owes it to the others: ‘Zeugnis mußte sie ablegen für sich und für die anderen, denen sie sich durch unzerreißbare Bande verbunden fühlte’ (‘She needed to bear witness for herself and for the others to whom she felt bound by bonds that could not be dissolved’, pp. 239–40). The fate of all the soon-to-be mothers in the House of Tears is contrasted with that of a visitor, Lucie Bubenberg, whom Reuter introduces to make a strong pronatalist statement. While the residents await the births of their children, Lucie conceals from them that she is on her way to an abortion in Switzerland. Juxtaposing Lucie’s story with that of the residents allows Reuter to call into question society’s perception of the unmarried mothers as immoral. Instead, they appear to be natural and healthy compared with Lucie, the favoured mistress of a count, who chooses pleasure over motherliness. Lucie points out that she cannot understand why Cornelie is having

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the baby, and asks her pointedly: ‘wie kann man nur so klug ausschauen und so blitzdumm sein, sich hier in die Spelunk’ zu setzen! Da gibt’s doch andere Mittel und Weg’ (‘how can someone look so intelligent but be so totally stupid as to stay here in this dive! There are other ways and means’, p. 129). These ‘other means’ are apparently debated among the girls with trusting frankness (‘mit zutraulicher Offenheit’, p. 129), although the text upholds the taboo on the discussion of birth control by suppressing the details. The methods of contraception are of course all too late for the women, though Lucie tells them proudly: ‘ich probier’ alles, ich hab’ vor nix Furcht’ (‘I’ll try anything, I’m not afraid of anything’, p. 129). The Bavarian Annerle believes it is all a matter of luck (p. 130). Toni admits that her parents deliberately ruled out abortion as the solution to her unwanted pregnancy: her father is a pious Protestant, and so opposed it on religious grounds, as well as because it would be breaking the law (p. 132). Cornelie interjects: ‘Es ist doch auch Mord’ (‘After all, it is murder’, p. 132). While Lucie turns pale, Cornelie continues: ‘Und gerade an dem einen Geschöpf, das uns vielleicht noch das Glück geben kann, das für uns aufgehoben ist. Darüber wär’ ich nie hinweg gekommen’ (‘And to the one creature in particular who might still be able to give us happiness, who has been kept especially for us. I would never have been able to get over that idea’, p. 133). Cornelie admits that she is not especially looking forward to motherhood, but rather she is looking forward to the time when she will be able to take pleasure in her child, and trusts that such a time will come. Shortly after Lucie has left for Switzerland, her mother passes through the village on the train and halts brief ly to pass on bad news to Annerle: Lucie’s operation has gone wrong, the doctors fear for her life and say if she survives, it will be as an invalid (p. 146). In Das Tränenhaus, the availability of contraception and abortion prompts a revisiting of old concepts of morality. Lucie’s fate reveals Reuter’s pronatalism and intensifies her message that it is misguided to stigmatize the girls and women who chose to give birth out of wedlock: they are fulfilling their natural destiny. Ellen Key in Das Jahrhundert des Kindes suggests how a combination of youth and sexual selection through inclination might transform the nation’s future: ‘die Rasse, die entstehen würde, falls jungen Männern und Frauen die Möglichkeit gegeben wäre, sich zu vereinigen, wenn die erste Liebe von ihnen Besitz ergreift — [...] diese Rasse würde gesund und stark und eine andere werden, als die unsere ist’ (‘the race which would emerge if young men and women were allowed the possibility of a union with each other — this race would become healthy and strong and a different one from our own’).46 The offspring of young girls like Annerle represent the nation’s healthy future. In 1923, Das Tränenhaus was republished in a shortened form, with sixteen rather than twenty-four chapters, and the discussion of abortion and contraception described above was watered down, among many other cuts. One effect of the alterations is a weakening of Cornelie’s objections to abortion. Only her private thoughts (‘Mir scheint es Mord’; ‘to me it seems like murder’), recollected later, remain of the discussion, turning them from a programmatic statement to a subjective position.47 The reason for the cuts is unclear. However, Socialist and feminist campaigns for the legalization of abortion were prominent in the early

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Weimar years, and then again during the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash in 1929. When the Bund für Mutterschutz campaigned in the years before the First World War against §218, its members spoke out in particular against the harsh sentences imposed on those convicted of abortion, which were overwhelmingly used to punish women from the lower social classes. However, its principal goal was to put an end to the stigma attached to illegitimacy. In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the debate on birth control became altogether more heated and shifted towards a pro-choice call for women’s reproductive rights as part of a campaign against social inequality.48 In Weimar literature and film, women resorting to or considering abortion are overwhelmingly depicted as victims of society, for example in Karl Schönherr’s play Es (1923: It) or Marieluise Fleißer’s Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (1924: Purgatory in Ingolstadt). An image by Käthe Kollwitz of a prematurely aged proletarian woman with a look of despair, cradling an infant while holding a small child in the other hand, was issued by the Communist Party in 1924 as a powerful poster in the campaign against §218. When Reuter prepared the new version of Das Tränenhaus for publication in 1923, her revision of its clear pronatalist statements was most likely informed by this changing social context of the debate on women’s reproductive rights. Motherhood gives Cornelie Reimann the strength to protest at the damage inf licted on future generations by society’s withholding support from the most vulnerable. The near-death experience of giving birth symbolizes for her the destruction of the old self: ——— Unbegreif lich schien es Cornelie, daß Mädchen und Frauen zu Müttern wurden im gegebenen alltäglichen Verlauf der Dinge. Nein, in Trümmer das bisherige Dasein — zerscheitert alle Vergangenheit — verbrannt alle Schiffe — so war es recht — so mußte es sein! (p. 232). [——— It seemed inconceivable to Cornelie that women and girls became mothers in the ordinary course of everyday events. No, it was amid the ruins of all previous existence, by destroying every remnant of the past — burning all boats — and that was right — it had to be thus!]

Without sentimentality, all these works explore the empowering nature of mother­ hood, which gives the protagonists courage to confront social barriers. In Viebig’s work, aesthetic protest is the mode used to convey the message of social injustice: no solution is offered, but the poetically affecting depiction in both her stories of the threat to the mother-child bond captures the reader’s imagination. Reuter, with her novel Das Tränenhaus, embraces the power of imaginative literature to change public opinion in the political context of the campaigns of the Bund für Mutterschutz. Das Tränenhaus and Das tägliche Brot, perhaps as a result of their powerful social message, have become hard to find even in libraries, and still await a long-overdue modern reprint. Nonetheless, they deserve to be much better known. They are complex, well written, and capture the readers’ attention with their poetic insights into the question of single motherhood at the start of the twentieth century, by showing the vitality of the children cast out by society and the powerful nature of maternal instinct.

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Notes to Chapter 7 1. Ellen Key, ‘Weibliche Sittlichkeit’, Dokumente der Frau, 1 (1899), issue 7, 171–84 (p. 171). 2. Adele Schreiber, ‘Die Ansätze neuer Sittlichkeitsbegriffe im Hinblick auf die Mutterschaft’, in Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibs als Mutter, ed. by Adele Schreiber (Munich: Langen, 1912), pp. 163–85 (p. 172). 3. See Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany 1800–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 142–43. See also Horst Herrmann, Die Stellung Unehelicher Kinder nach kanonischem Recht (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1971). 4. See Ute Frevert, ‘Proletarian Women and Their Allies: Men of the Proletariat or Women of the Bourgeoisie’, in Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. by Stuart McKinon-Evans (New York: Berg, 1989), pp. 94–106. 5. See Richard Evans, Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 104–12. 6. See Allen, Feminism, pp. 137–47, Karl Leydecker, ‘Unmarried Mothers in German Society and German-Language Drama around 1900’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38 (2002), 37–48, and Steffen Baumgarten, Die Entstehung des Unehelichenrechts im Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuch (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), pp. 62–68, who attests to the higher infant and child mortality rates among illegitimate children around 1900. For contemporary discussions of the relationship between unmarried mothers and the state, see Marianne Weber, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung: Eine Einführung (Tubingen: Mohr, 1907). 7. Adele Schreiber, ‘Uneheliche Mütter’, in Mutterschaft: Ein Sammelwerk für die Probleme des Weibs als Mutter (Munich: Langen, 1912), pp. 257–77 (p. 258). 8. See Allen, Feminism, p. 143. 9. See also Helene Böhlau’s Das Recht der Mutter (1896) and Franziska zu Reventlow’s Ellen Olestjerne (1903). On this motif, see Godela Weiss-Sussex, ‘Reformprogrammatik und Romanästhetik: Romane aus dem Umkreis des Bunds für Mutterschutz’, in Protest and Reform in German Literary and Visual Culture 1871–1918, ed. by Godela Weiss-Sussex and Charlotte Woodford (Munich: Iudicium, forthcoming). 10. Clara Viebig, Es lebe die Kunst! Roman (Berlin: Fontane, 1899). The novel was reprinted in the Weimar era under the title Elisabeth Reinharz’ Ehe, and the edition used here is Elisabeth Reinharz’ Ehe: Es lebe die Kunst, 22nd edn (Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, [c.1920]), pp. 31–32. All quotations are taken from this edition, and given as Es lebe die Kunst, plus the page number. 11. Clara Viebig, ‘Wie ich Schriftstellerin wurde’, in Almanach von Velhagen & Klasings Monatsheften (Berlin: Velhagan & Klasing, 1908), 24–39. 12. Clara Viebig, ‘Vom Weg meiner Jugend’, in Clara Viebig: Mein Leben 1860–1952: Autobiographische Skizzen, ed. Christel Aretz (Mosel: Eifel, 2002) pp. 37–54 (p. 54). 13. Clara Viebig, ‘Vom Weg meiner Jugend’, in Aretz, Clara Viebig: Mein Leben, pp. 37–54 (p. 53). Aretz cites a text published in 1916. It is important to note, however, that the piece was written long before the First World War, since it is the same text published by Viebig as her contribution to Als unsere grossen Dichterinnen noch kleine Mädchen waren, ed. by Ida Boy-Ed et al. (Berlin, Leipzig: Moeser, 1912), and was published in 1908 as Viebig, ‘Wie ich Schriftstellerin wurde’, in Almanach, pp. 24–39 (the passage quoted forms pp. 37–38). 14. Gabriele Reuter, Vom Kinde zum Menschen (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), p. 427. 15. Barbara Krauß-Theim, Naturalismus und Heimatkunst bei Clara Viebig: Darwinistisch-evolutionäre Naturvorstellungen und ihre ästhetischen Reaktionsformen (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1992), p. 111–12. 16. Ibid., p. 113, note 96, citing Clara Viebig, ‘Lebenserinnerungen’, untitled typescript with hand­w ritten corrections and additions, no date [c. 1947], 25 pp. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin — Preußischer Kulturbesitz Nachlaß-Kretschmer, p. 14. Here, Viebig also points out her mother’s opposition in the late 1890s to her chosen themes, especially with regard to the representation of sexuality (Krauß-Theim, p. 112). 17. Cohn was a partner in F. Fontane publishing house, and later moved to Egon Fleischl & Co., taking Viebig’s works with him. Viebig’s extensive oeuvre was republished frequently until the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. In 1921, Cohn sold Fleischl Verlag to the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt,

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and from 1934, the publishing house was controlled by the Nazis. Krauß-Theim suspects that at this point the contract with Viebig was terminated (Krauß-Theim, p. 137). 18. See Bland, ‘Clara Viebig’, p. 81, who shows how Viebig’s attitude changes in the light of growing nationalism towards the end of the Weimar period in particular, citing as an example Clara Viebig, ‘Lebensabriss’, Berliner Tageblatt, 12.07.1930, reprinted in Clara Viebig: Mein Leben, ed. by Aretz, p. 30. 19. See Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman, ‘Heimat at the Turn of the Century,’ in Heimat: A German Dream. Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German Culture, 1890–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 30–57. See also Gisela Ecker, ‘ “Heimat” als Diskurs: Wo alle einmal waren und manche immer bleiben wollen. Zum Beispiel Viebig, Beig und Walser’, in Kein Land in Sicht: Heimat, weiblich? (Munich: Fink, 1997), pp. 129–42. Caroline Bland suggests that Viebig’s distancing of herself from the Heimat movement around 1930 was a response to its growing anti-semitism and nationalism. See Bland, ‘Clara Viebig’, p. 81, citing Clara Viebig, ‘Lebensabriss’, reprinted in Clara Viebig: Mein Leben, ed. by Aretz, p. 30. 20. Clara Viebig, ‘Die Schuldige’, Kinder der Eifel (Berlin: Fontane, 1897), pp. 155–241 (p. 215). 21. See Sarah Colvin ‘Women and Drama at the Turn of the Century, or Thresholds of Gender and Genre’, in Schwellen: Germanistische Erkundungen einer Metapher, ed. by Nicholas Saul (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1999), pp. 265–78 (pp. 275–76), who points out that the play depicts ‘fate of a young woman who dies for nothing and nobody, simply because she is poor and a woman’ (p. 275). 22. Aretz, Clara Viebig: Mein Leben, p. 45. 23. Brian Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Zola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 1–18 (p. 4). See also David Baguley, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 24. E.g. Ludwig Tieck’s Leben und Tod der heiligen Genoveva: Ein Trauerspiel (1799). 25. Clara Viebig, Barbara Holzer, 2nd edn (Berlin: Fleischl, 1903, first publ. 1897), pp. 67–68. 26. Clara Viebig, ‘Voranzeige zu der Barbara Holzer-Aufführung’, in Auftakt zur Literatur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts: Briefe aus dem Nachlaß von Ludwig Jacobowski, ed. by Fred Stern, 2 vols (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1974), II, p. 244. 27. Clara Viebig, Foreword to Das tägliche Brot (1900) on its serialization in the Deutsche HausfrauenZeitung, cited by Sascha Wingenroth, Clara Viebig und der Frauenroman des deutschen Naturalismus (unpublished doctoral thesis, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1936), pp. 73–74, and by Michel Durand, Les Romans berlinois de Clara Viebig (1860–1952): Contribution à l’étude du naturalisme tardif en Allemagne (Berne: Lang, 1993), p. 301, note 5. 28. See also Godela Weiss-Sussex, ‘Two Literary Representations of Maidservant Life in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin: Clara Viebig’s Das tägliche Brot and Georg Hermann’s Kubinke’, German Life and Letters, 51 (1998), 342–59 (p. 346). See also Marilyn S. Fries, ‘The Plight of the Proletariat: Clara Viebig’s “Das tägliche Brod” (1900)’, in The Changing Consciousness of Reality: The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from Raabe to Döblin (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), pp. 74–100. 29. Weiss-Sussex, ‘Two Literary Representations’, p. 347. 30. Clara Viebig, Das tägliche Brot, 38–40 edn (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922, first publ. 1900), p. 352. 31. Karl Kraus, ‘Die Mütter’, in Die Fackel, 11 (1910), 294–95 (31 January 1910), reprinted in Die chinesische Mauer (Munich: Langen, 1964), pp. 275–78. 32. Schreiber, ‘Uneheliche Mütter’, p. 265. 33. Das tägliche Leben, p. 236. English translation from Clara Viebig, Our Daily Bread, transl. Margaret L. Clarke (London: Lane, 1909), pp. 222–23, cited henceforth as Daily Bread followed by the page number. Consulted online at , last accessed 16.9.2013. 34. Durand, Roman berlinois, p. 265, says that pity does not solve the complex social questions raised by Viebig. 35. Ernst Heilborn, ‘Echo der Zeitungen’, Literarisches Echo, 16 (1913–14), 1486–1493 (1493), quoting comments by Käte Schultze, in which Schultze also goes on to describe the cover illustration to the first edition of Das tägliche Brot by the well-known cartoonist Heinrich Zille, which featured a woman treading a path behind a child’s pram laden with infant and newspapers (‘ein

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schwer dreinschreitendes Weib hinter dem mit Kind und Zeitungen bepackten Kinderwagen’). A reproduction of the illustration can be found in Stephanie Günther, Weib­lichkeitsentwürfe des Fin de Siècle: Berliner Autorinnen: Alice Berend, Margarethe Böhme, Clara Viebig (Bonn: Bouvier, 2007), p. 305. 36. Reuter, Vom Kinde, p. 462. 37. Gabriele Reuter, ‘Rückblicke und Ausblicke’, Mutterschutz, 1 (1905), issue 2, 51–57. 38. Reuter, ‘Rückblicke’, p. 54. 39. See Kevin Repp, ‘ “Sexualkrise und Rasse”: Feminist Eugenics at the Fin de Siècle’, in Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics and Ideas, ed. by Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), pp. 102–26. 40. Reuter, ‘Rückblicke’, p. 55. 41. Cf. Ellen Key and her inf luential bestselling essay, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes (Berlin: Fischer, 1902) whose eugenics agenda is expressed through sentiments such as the following: ‘die christliche Gesellschaft [ist] in der “Milde” so weit gegangen, dass sie das Leben der psychisch und physisch unheilbar kranken und misgestalteten Kindes zur stündlichen Qual für das Kind selbst und seine Umgebung verlängert’ (‘Christian society has gone so far with its clemency that it prolongs the life of deformed children or those suffering from incurable psychic and physical conditions to the hourly torment of the child himself and those around him’), p. 31. 42. Helene Stöcker, ‘Zur Reform der sexuellen Ethik’, in Mutterschutz, 1 (1905), 3–12 (p. 9). See also Ann Taylor Allen, ‘Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,’ German Studies Review, 23 (2000), 477–506. 43. See Detlev Peukert, ‘The Genesis of the “Final Solution” from the Spirit of Science’, in Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945, ed. by David F. Crew (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 274–99 and Caitríona Ní Dhúill, ‘ “Ein neues, mächtiges Volkstum”: Eugenic Discourse and its Impact on the Work of Gerhart Hauptmann’, German Life and Letters, 59 (2006), 405–22. 44. Gabriele Reuter, Das Tränenhaus: Roman, 12th edn (Berlin: Fischer, 1909, first publ. 1908), p. 37. 45. See Anna Richards, ‘ “Die bleichen, vom Nichtsthun, von Sehnsucht und Enttäuchung verzehrten Mädchen”: Repression and Apathy in Gabriele Reuter (1859–1941)’, The Wasting Heroine in German Fiction by Women 1770–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 169–93 (pp. 160–62). 46. Key, Jahrhundert, p. 35. 47. Gabriele Reuter, Das Tränenhaus, revised edn (Berlin: Fischer, 1923), pp. 72–73. 48. On the campaigns in the Weimar Era by women’s groups and working-class women against the statutes on abortion, see Cornelie Usborne, Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007), p. 3. See also Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Chapter 8

v

Ilse Frapan, Else Jerusalem and the Reception of Women’s Novels in the Early Twentieth Century The novel Arbeit (1903: Work) by Ilse Frapan (1848–1908) provoked widespread outrage for its depiction of the medical profession in Zurich.1 Else Jerusalem’s Der heilige Skarabäus (1908: transl. as The Red House) also created a furore, and is sometimes misremembered as a pornographic novel as a result of being set in a brothel.2 In both novels, the emancipation of a prominent female protagonist is closely connected with the protagonist’s work for social justice for marginalized groups, for Frapan the working classes, for Jerusalem, prostitutes. Social questions and literary ones coincide in these works, which respond simultaneously to literary antecedents and political debates. For Jerusalem, a sympathetic depiction of prostitutes as damaged young women longing for a decent family life combats the image of fictional femmes fatales — one thinks of the eponymous protagonist of Émile Zola’s Nana (1880). Frapan’s fictional representation of a mature female medical student sets itself apart from narratives focused on love or sexual liberation, and suggests that women’s empathy will contribute effectively in the medical profession to combatting the social problems of modernity, more so than a male over-reliance on science and reason. The reception history of both novels shows that the social questions they raised overshadowed their literary qualities. Frapan had to answer the critics’ angry assertion that her book was a ‘Tendenzschrift’ (political tract) with no literary merit. One sympathetic reviewer defends Der heilige Skarabäus against similar accusations: ‘es ist keine Tendenzschrift; es läßt die Dinge selbst sprechen, aber die Dinge, die es schildert, sprechen eine entsetzliche Sprache’ (‘it is not a political tract; it lets facts speak for themselves, but the facts it depicts speak a terrible language’).3 Jerusalem also responded to criticisms of her book’s engagement with social questions by downplaying its call for social reform: ‘Mein Buch ist keine Anklageschrift; beileibe kein reformatorischer Versuch’ (‘my book is not an accusation, still less an attempt at reform’).4 This chapter will show how, in the later 1900s and around the time of the First World War, provocative topical fiction came under renewed scrutiny in Germany and Austria. The association of the social problem novel, or as it was popularly known, ‘naturalist’ fiction, with figures such as Zola contributed

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to a sense, amid the growing nationalism of the era, that the novel of female emancipation was not fully German. Furthermore, the popularity of such fiction — and its association with Jewish publishing houses and newspapers — contributed still further to its marginalization as the gulf widened in the later 1900s between literature perceived as artistic (usually apolitical and formally experimental) and novels for the mass market. In Arbeit, Frapan narrates how a female student training at the University of Zurich encounters the widespread abuse of working-class patients by powerful male professors. Her protagonist Josefine Geyer is married to a doctor, who at the start of the story is convicted of an unnamed offence and sentenced to five years’ hard labour. Josefine’s parents urge her to divorce him because of the disgrace of his conviction for an unspeakable crime (has he been caught carrying out abortions?). Yet Josefine, a mother of four, decides to train as a doctor — renting out rooms in her home to other students — in order to take over her husband’s medical practice. By the time Geyer is eventually released from prison, a shadow of his former self, his wife has replaced him, using his own surgery to treat patients, and he suffers the further indignity of emasculation and loss of authority within the home. The novel thus confronts difficult questions connected with a married woman’s entrance into the workforce and its effect on her relationship with her children and husband. When Josefine returns home from the dissection room, smelling of preserving f luid, she cannot bear to see her children straight away and is often too tired to respond to their demands. In order to train as a doctor, Josefine has to send her youngest daughter away to live with grandparents in the countryside. Nonetheless, work, in the novel, is emancipatory for Josefine, providing both economic security and a means of self-fulfilment. Through work, Josefine learns to use her skills and emotional sensitivities to make an important contribution to society. Work is also an escape: when her child dies of a sudden illness, Josefine returns to Zurich immediately after the funeral and takes solace in her work, which acts as a kind of therapy for her, numbing the pain of her loss. The novel’s initial title ‘Arbeit mein Opium’, echoing Marx’s famous phrase that religion is the opiate of the people, is drawn from Josefine’s reaction to her beloved child’s death, and on other occasions too, she takes refuge in work from the difficulties of her family life. On the other hand, work itself is depicted as in need of reform, something to which the emancipation of women will contribute: Josefine’s work takes a toll on her mental health and her relationships are compromised by her professional dedication, and in the novel this is used to suggest that to the organization of work within contemporary patriarchal society is itself unsatisfactory. In Der heilige Skarabäus, Jerusalem chronicles extensively the personal development of a girl born to a prostitute and raised in a slum. Milada manages in the early chapters of the novel to remain in a state of naivety and innocence — quite different from depictions of prematurely sexualized young girls from the slum in the pornographic novel Josefine Mutzenbacher: Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt (1906: Josefine Mutzenbacher: The Life-Story of a Viennese Prostitute Told by Herself ), constantly watching and imitating adults’ sexual behaviour, or the childhood of Zola’s prepubescent and curious Nana in L’Assommoir (1877).5 Milada

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enters the brothel as a teenager and rises through hard work and careful observation of the business to a position where she is able to inf luence its management and attempt to ameliorate conditions for the girls working there. She falls in love, but her past history as a prostitute intervenes. The novel ends with Milada gaining her liberation from the slum to found a hostel where she will take care of single mothers. She takes Julie, one of the young prostitutes, with her. Julie has conceived a child by Milada’s lover, and Milada hopes to provide an alternative to prostitution for unmarried mothers like Julie. Jerusalem and Frapan aimed to capture the emotional sympathy of the reader and make it socially productive, without resorting to sentimental clichés. Jerusalem argues for the importance of such sympathy for effecting social change: ‘Reformiren: Das heißt, die Welt fühlen machen, wie ich fühle’ (‘to reform: that means to make the world feel as I do’).6 Her novel is less a programme for social reform than an attempt to raise the readers’ consciousness, to make them perceive reality through a different lens. Significantly, when attacked for their choice of subject, both women defended their novels as art, and claimed for themselves the artistic freedom directly to represent reality, however unsettling. Indeed they perceived their novels as a means of emancipating women from fictional discourses that objectify women or limit their agency. This chapter will explore how Frapan and Jerusalem positioned their own novels alongside contemporary works; it will analyse the emotive appeal of motherliness as a strategy common to both women’s works, and it will go on to show how socially critical novels later met with increasingly nationalistic protests from the literary establishment. Literary Positioning: Arbeit and Der heilige Skarabäus in their Contemporary Context Ilse Frapan (pseudonym of Elise Therese Levien) began her literary career with short works of poetic realism set in Hamburg, or occasionally in a village milieu. These were published in Julius Rodenberg’s Deutsche Rundschau and in collections for a bourgeois market with reassuring titles such as Enge Welt (1890: Narrow World) or In der Stille (1897: In the Silence). Frapan depended on the income from these stories for her living and so was intent on pleasing the conservative readers of the Rundschau. She complained to Rodenberg, on whose good will she depended, that male writers were able to make a living in one of the professions; they did not, like her, need to live entirely on the proceeds of their fiction.7 Such dependency on the market determined the type of fiction Frapan could write. She never married and lived with a Russian-born artist, Emma Mandelbaum. The couple was constantly short of money and in the 1890s moved to Zurich, hoping that Frapan, by furthering her education, could find paid work as a scientist. At that time, Zurich was the only German-speaking university to open its doors to women. Women were allowed to matriculate in Germany at the Baden Universities of Freiburg and Heidelberg in 1901, though in Prussia not until 1908. In company with some of the first women to study in Zurich, Frapan read courses in law, comparative anatomy, pathology and philosophy. She encountered socialist thinkers and admired Käthe Schirmacher,

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a pioneering campaigner in the abolitionist movement.8 In 1898, the feminist campaigner Anita Augspurg and the Socialist Rosa Luxemburg also matriculated there as students of law. Frapan’s experiences of student life inform several of her short stories, and the titles of her novels on student life make prominent reference to the author’s Socialist sympathies: Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland (1899: We Women Have No Fatherland) echoes Marx’s slogan from the Communist Manifesto ‘die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland’. In 1901, Frapan and Mandelbaum set up home with an Armenian writer, Iwan Akunoff.9 Frapan’s literary account of the student experience was in part born of her frustration at the widespread treatment of female sexual emancipation within fin de siècle fiction. Narratives of sexual emancipation, she claimed, emphasize women’s supposed nature as irrational beings in thrall to the sexual drive and are inad­ vert­ently detrimental to female emancipation in a social and political sense.10 She intended her novel’s depiction of a woman’s economic independence as a literary protest against such narratives: ‘Ich mußte Protest erheben im Namen meiner eigenen Empfindungen u[nd] derer aller aufstrebenden Frauen’ (‘I had to protest in the name of my own feelings and those of all women with aspiration’).11 She described her protagonist as a fighter (‘eine kämpfende Frau’), and expressed the urgent wish to show in fiction women’s positive strengths.12 Frapan sought to mobi­lize the power of fiction at a time when women were still campaigning for the right to higher education in order to emphasize its life-changing potential.13 Her novel highlights the need for women to fight for the right to enter the professions so that they are not reliant on men’s income and at the mercy of men’s errors of judgement. By focusing on the medical profession, Frapan chose an area in which the importance of women’s contributions was gradually being acknowledged. In his essay ‘Die weibliche Kultur’ (1902: ‘Female Culture’), Georg Simmel explores critically the extent to which women’s involvement in the public sphere can offer society something new.14 For Simmel, there is no merit in women’s participation in art or politics unless they are able to add a new dimension to it by virtue of their gender difference. He particularly highlights women’s capacity to bring reform to the medical profession and to further scientific discovery by their alternative viewpoint. The idea rests on an essentialist understanding of women as instinctive and better able to empathize with their patients’ needs: ‘die objektiv-klinischen Untersuchungsmethoden kommen oft an ein frühes Ende, wenn sie nicht ergänzt werden durch ein entweder unmittelbar-instinktives, oder durch Aeußerungen vermitteltes, subjektives Wissen um den Zustand und die Gefühle des Kranken’ (‘objective-clinical methods of investigation often come quickly to the end of their usefulness if they are not supplemented by a subjective knowledge of the condition and feelings of the patient derived either from direct instinct or conveyed through their remarks’, ‘Weibliche Kultur’, 70). Simmel highlights the limitations of objectivity, and the importance of an intuitive approach to the patient’s unspoken needs. Frapan’s understanding of the importance of women doctors is similarly based on gender difference, and she too justifies their existence through their greater capacity for empathy: ‘Sie erkennt nicht nur: sie fühlt auch’ (‘she does not

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merely identify, she also feels’).15 Such intuition also gives women a keen sense for social injustice: ‘Nur wenn sie Frau bleibt, mit ihren besonderen Augen, mit ihren besonderen Kräften, kann die Frau ein revolutionirendes Element in der einer Wandlung bedürftigen Gesellschaft werden’ (‘it is only if she remains a woman, with her particular gaze and particular strengths that a woman can become a revo­lu­ tionary element in a society so in need of change’).16 But for Frapan this is not simply biological, but also cultural: it is women’s perspective as outsiders that also enables them to see more clearly than men where the medical profession needs reform. Jerusalem’s novel engages critically with the way in which prostitutes have been represented in literature. The image of the scarab beetle used in Jerusalem’s title Der heilige Skarabäus (‘The Holy Dung Beetle’) is an allusion to the golden f ly (la mouche d’or) from Zola’s widely read novel Nana (1880): Une mouche couleur de soleil, envolée de l’ordure, une mouche qui prenait la mort sur les charognes tolérées le long des chemins, et qui, bourdonnante, dansante, jetant un éclat de pierreries, empoisonnait les hommes rien qu’à se poser sur eux, dans les palais où elle entrait par les fenêtres.17 [a golden f ly, the colour of sunshine, escaping from its dung-heap and bringing with it the deadly germs of the carrion allowed to fester by the roadside; dancing and buzzing, as dazzling as a precious stone, it would slip through the windows of palaces and poison the men inside merely by settling on them.]18

In Zola’s compelling novel, the ‘golden f ly’ image is introduced at the centre of the work in a feuilleton for the newspaper Le Figaro written by the journalist Fauchery, who thus ref lects publicly on the notorious figure of Nana as femme fatale. Nana destroys every man whom she seduces, including Fauchery himself, whose obsession with her brings him financial ruin. She is the ‘golden f ly’, dazzling in appearance, who rises from the dung and spreads poison to everyone on whom it rests; in turn, she herself is a metaphor for the fall of the Second French Empire, revealing to the reader the corruption of society. In the penultimate chapter of Zola’s novel, the image of the golden f ly is reprised amid a list of those men destroyed by her — or by their own folly and weakness. Nana sits surrounded by the riches they have provided, which in baroque fashion emphasize the very transience of power and worldly goods when juxtaposed with the corpses of her victims. The sacred scarab beetle of Jerusalem’s novel, however, is given a very different interpretation. Introduced by the would-be philosopher, Horner, who seeks out prostitutes for drink and companionship, the decorative f ly in Jerusalem’s novel makes bearable the inherent corruption of the world (192). While Fauchery’s ‘golden f ly’ is the catalyst for the downfall of a decadent and corrupt society, the dung beetle, for Horner, is a mere symptom of society’s degradation: ‘Misthaufen braucht ihr ... Und was wären die doch häßlich ohne mich ...’ (‘Everyone needs dung heaps ... and wouldn’t they be ugly without me ...’, Heiliger Skarabäus, 192). For Horner, the prostitutes are not to blame for society’s decline; they merely fulfil a need which will always be present. Horner seeks out the sacred beetle, an elusive creature different from a mere dung beetle (193). The sacred beetle is a figure who can arrive at a consciousness of the degradation and social exclusion faced unfairly by the girls in the brothel and rise above such circumstances. She is the figure who will start

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to bring about change. The protagonist of the novel, Milada, the child brought up in the brothel, is such a figure because she is not confined by conventional ways of thinking. The brothel is the social norm for her, and from her earliest years she has observed it silently (15). Horner exhorts her: ‘Mache aus dem Proletariat der Dirnen bewußte Menschen! Organisiere sie, lehre sie kämpfen!’ (‘Make conscious human beings from the proletariat of prostitutes! Organize them, teach them to fight!’, 235). He uses the analogy of Plato’s cave: Milada is the one who sees beyond the shadow figures on the wall, and observes life as it really is.19 For Jerusalem, then, prostitutes are not femmes fatales, but damaged girls, excluded from bourgeois society as a result of its double standard. Milada demonstrates her own consciousness of injustice when she ref lects to Horner on the cruel social exclusion of unmarried mothers: ‘Das Weib ist physisch so organisiert, daß sie Kinder empfangen muß. Warum fällt die Verachtung euerer Welt und die Rache des Gesetzes auch auf die, deren gesunder, reifer Körper nur seine ehrbare Verpf lichtung erfüllt?’ (‘Woman is built physically to conceive children. Why does the law condemn and the world despise those whose healthy, mature bodies are only fulfilling their honest duty’, 280). Unmarried mothers, the novel shows, are easy prey for the managers of brothels who exploit their desperation and enslave them in the sex trade. Milada’s emotional and intellectual development takes her from a youthful observer of life in the slum to a mature woman who uses the wealth she has earned in the brothel to found a home for such mothers and a way out of prostitution. Notwithstanding the sentimentality inherently attached to the discourse of motherliness, which is a running theme throughout Der heilige Skarabäus, Jerusalem wrote critically about sentimental depictions of prostitution. In the journal Die Zukunft, she distances her novel from the bestselling Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (1905: Diary of a Lost Girl), published anonymously and attributed to Margarete Böhme. This fictional diary of a girl, whose seduction by one of her father’s assistants leads to pregnancy, caused a sensation for its depiction of its middle-class heroine’s descent into prostitution. Thymian is a motherless girl who becomes a grieving mother: her child is taken away and adopted and then later dies. She is unable to re-enter respectable society, yet finds kindness and sympathy in the demi-monde. As Elizabeth Boa argues, the novel’s popularity came in large measure from its reception as the diary of a real person rather than as fiction: readers were moved both by the sentimental portrait of a good woman, who through all her suffering retained her maternal nature, as well as by the well-documented protest against abusive male power, enshrined in law, both in the family and in society at large.20 Richard Evans comments on its significance as a contribution to the social debate on prostitution: ‘for the first time in Germany, the problem of prostitution had been discussed from the point of view of the prostitute, who appeared not as a wicked or evil seductress, but as a victim of social hypocrisy and discrimination’.21 However, for Jerusalem the heroine’s early death of consumption in Böhme’s depiction of prostitution, just like in Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias, 1848), restores the established patriarchal order too easily. Von dem heroischen Elend der Marguerite [in La Dame aux camélias] bis zur Tragoedie der sterbenden Thymian hat noch keine hüstelnde Dirne vergebens

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an das Mitleid der erschütterten Galerie appellirt. Unter der Protektion der treff ­lichen Tuberkulose, die [...] dem Autor wie dem Leser das häßliche Bild der altern­den, armsäligen, hart gewordenen Prostituirte unter dem Leichentuch weg­stiehlt, [...] läßt man sich also die Sünderin willig bieten (‘Selbstanzeigen’, 211). [From the heroic misery of Marguerite [in La Dame aux camélias] to the tragedy of the dying Thymian, no consumptive prostitute has ever appealed in vain to the sympathies of the shocked spectators. Felicitous tuberculosis hides under a shroud the ugly sight of an aging, pathetic and bitter prostitute, sparing the author and the reader; under its protection they are glad to accept the sinner.]

The success of Böhme’s novel ensured a wide reach for its quasi-documentary treatment of the demi-monde. It brought the problem of prostitution more sharply than ever into the public eye. Even though Thymian, in Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, complains that Dumas’s Marguerite is portrayed through male eyes and lacks inner truth, Jerusalem criticizes the very fact that the work is from the outset presented as the diary of a prostitute who has died, since for Jerusalem this weakens the moral questions raised within the story. In her essay Gebt uns die Wahrheit (1903: Give us the Truth), a plea for girls to receive proper sex education, Jerusalem laments that the ‘right’ thing for a jilted pregnant girl to do is throw herself in the river; the correct course of action for an adulteress is to die of guilt: in such a way, society’s laws are restored, the transgressors are purified, and society can weep with a clear conscience over the deceased.22 The problem of accommodating transgressors within society, or confronting the patriarchal structures to which the women fall victim, comes second to the more straightforward emotion of pity. Prostitution, she writes, ‘scheint mir kein Bühnenspektakel zu sein, [...] kein wollüstiges Ergötzen für die Thränendrüsen guter Bürger’ (‘seems to me no theatrical spectacle [...] no salacious feast for the tear ducts of good citizens’).23 Here, Jerusalem draws attention to the ethical dilemma of the sentimental novel, whose pleasure for the reader is provoked by sensationalizing another’s distress, something she attempted to avoid in her own novel. Motherliness and Identification In Frapan’s Arbeit, Josefine Geyer is not simply a student: it is crucial to Frapan’s manner of presentation that she is also a mother.24 Josefine’s emotional sensitivity as a mother provides her with empathetic skills which allow her to diagnose social injustice within the medical profession. As in Helene Böhlau’s Halbtier! (1899), the trope of the dissection of the female body by the male scientist is used by Frapan to protest against the abuse of women’s bodies by powerful male subjects. However, in Frapan’s novel, the protest is more clearly rooted in left-wing politics and extends more overtly to the treatment of all working-class subjects. Moreover, in Arbeit the dissection of the female corpse by the anatomist has an added twist, since the observing female gaze is also a student doctor, an outsider as a result of her gender but at the same time participating in the scientist’s power over the human form. Josefine suggests that the medical profession lacks all concept of the value of human life, and treats patients as guinea pigs in the service of scientific progress. Frapan confronts the way working-class subjects suffer loss of dignity in order to access medical treatment. At the start of Book 2 of Arbeit, in one of the most

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provocative sections of the novel, the body of a proletarian mother appears in the anatomy theatre, just like the corpse of the brother’s mistress in Böhlau’s Halbtier!, a novel which Frapan admired.25 Here, the mother committed suicide the previous day by jumping into the river with her child. First the woman’s corpse is dissected by one of the professors for the students to watch. The professor offends Josefine with a personal remark about the woman, to the amusement of some male observers. While in Halbtier! only the students’ laughter is overheard by the observer, here Josefine hears his callous remark: ‘Sehen Sie her, es ist, wie ich sage. Wir haben noch keine Proletarier seziert, der nicht auch sein bißchen Fett gehabt hätte’ (‘Look everyone, it is as I say: we have never yet dissected a proletarian who did not also have a bit of fat on him’, 32). As well as insulting, the remark characterizes the consultant as insensitive to the very poverty which had led to the mother’s despair. Her body is then literally divided among the students: Josefine is to learn from the woman’s hand, which identifies her as a seamstress from the needle pricks visible in her fingers. This confrontation with the individuality of the woman’s corpse makes Josefine suddenly identify with the woman’s fate and she has to leave the room because she feels faint. The experience intensifies her resolve to study so that she can make a difference: ‘Lernen, um nachher helfen zu können! Kann ich — kann ich helfen? Solchen armen Müttern, die in die Siehl springen müssen mit ihrem Kinde im Arm?’ (‘I must study so that afterwards I can help! Can I — can I help? Help these poor mothers who need to throw themselves in the river Siehl with their child in their arms?’, 33). Others seek to cure physical illnesses, but for Josefine medicine is a way of confronting public hygiene and social welfare. While her thoughts stray from sympathy with the dead infant to the need to buy her own daughter a birthday present on her way home, one of the men detaches the stomach from the woman’s corpse and inf lates it like a set of bagpipes. Josefine’s motherly feelings of compassion are juxtaposed with the cold and impersonally scientific minds of the male students and doctors, for whom the corpse is merely a means to an end. She expresses an audible noise of disapproval, but a female colleague is upset that she is drawing attention to herself and her sex: the position of women students is precarious and to speak out against the powerful male authorities risks reprisals. Later in the novel, Josefine challenges a professor about his insensitivity towards a patient: he has told a dying man to turn his face towards them so that they can all watch him in his last moments. The dying man — too poor to afford proper medical care — is merely a tool for the students to learn from, and his corpse will be exploited for their research. Again Josefine expresses an audible noise of discontent. The professor is soon able to take his revenge, making Josefine carry out an unnecessary, painful and embarrassing examination of a naked male patient, again a member of the proletariat. She comments on the depersonalization of patients by doctors, in words which highlight the oppressive culture of instrumental rationality within the profession: ‘Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch für uns, ein Mensch ist Material. Ein Mensch ist eine Spitalnummer und “ein Fall” ’ (‘A human being is not a human being for us. A human being is material. He is a hospital number and a “case” ’, 58). Doctors seek to name illnesses, asserting their power of reason over them, reassuring each other by their insight into the ‘cases’ before them.

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They cannot admit to a case which presents with incomprehensible symptoms; it would be a threat to their power. Working-class victims, with no ability to afford medical care, have to submit to the power of the professors over their very bodies (see pp. 58–60). The narrator calls the exploitation of the proletariat by the medical profession the ‘slavery of the weak’ (60). The author’s Socialism is made apparent by both the manner and the vocabulary of Josefine’s questions: ‘Dieser Frevel, dieser Jammer, dieser Unsinn — ist er unabänderlich?’ (‘This outrage, this misery, this nonsense — can it not be changed?’, 62) With the word ‘unabänderlich’ Frapan draws on a central idea of Marxism, the changeability of society. In contrast, for example, to the scientific determinism found in some works of Naturalism, such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889: Before Sunrise), Frapan emphasizes the role of changeable social relations in the medical histories of Josefine’s patients. Again, there is a conf lict between her emotional connection with the patients and the cold rationality of their treatment as merely objects of an experiment or learning process: the scientific profession has an impersonal interest in the acquisition of knowledge, but according to Josefine has little connection with life. Life, for Josefine, relates to the quality of patients’ lives, and the social conditions that could bring about improvements in public health. She looks through the medical history of a woman on whom countless male consultants have operated. The woman asks what the point of it all is: the surgical interventions have not cured her and her life is still not worth living (pp. 64–66). While the professors have been looking for physical symptoms that they can understand and treat, Josefine can see the social causes of the woman’s ill-health, which require different interventions in public hygiene and welfare to make any difference. As soon as Frapan’s work was drawn to the attention of the Zurich medical faculty, it was like a red rag to a bull. The surgeon and professor of anatomy Ulrich Krönlein was sent the novel by a colleague who had innocently picked it up as holiday reading. He was incensed and saw Frapan’s work as a personal insult. The colleague had been so disgusted with Frapan’s novel that he had not even finished it, and wrote to Krönlein telling him that, even taking into account the author’s clear Socialist sympathies, he found it ‘schmutzig-tendenziös’ (tendentious filth), and thought Krönlein might like to find a way of silencing her (‘Man muß sich doch füglich fragen, ob der frechen Schreiberin das — Mündchen nicht geschlossen werden sollte’).26 Krönlein attacked the novel in a lengthy and prominent review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 23 May 1903. He tried to suggest that Frapan was an unfit person to judge the medical profession, calling her protagonist a weak woman, even a sick woman (‘krankhaft’), with clear hysterical-epileptic tendencies. He draws attention to Josefine Geyer’s nerves, fainting fits, tears, and need to calm herself with sedatives and cigarettes, and said that it would have been better if her request to matriculate had been turned down. Krönlein fails to realize the irony of discrediting a fictional protagonist as a way of rebuffing an author’s critique of his profession. Josefine Geyer is clearly not a depiction of the author, and indeed the element of fictionality is what Frapan draws on in her own defence, writing in Die Zukunft that the examples of mistreatment of the proletariat have not necessarily even taken place in Zurich. She has invented and embellished, she claims, and used

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anecdotes from other medical faculties. She emphasizes that the novel importantly captures the mentality of the profession through incidents drawn from life. In particular, it reveals the cynicism towards human life which for Frapan characterizes the medical establishment, and she saw Ulrich Krönlein as condemning himself with his own words by responding with such a vigorous attack on her character and showing how clearly the attack had hit its mark. Krönlein, as reported in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, instigated a protest gathering of students to air his complaints against their depiction in the novel, and received a standing ovation in his surgical clinic. Representatives of the (male) student body expressed their thanks to Krönlein for defending the profession against ‘unjustified attacks’ on its honour with lengthy, resounding applause.27 However, the case polarized local views. At the same time as Krönlein was feted as a hero, a gathering of Socialist doctors defended Frapan’s account of the faults in their profession. In July 1903 a whole number of the satirical Socialist journal for Swiss workers Neuer Postillion — humoristisch-satirisches Monatsblatt der schweizerischen Arbeiterschaft was devoted to the novel and to the conditions in German and Swiss hospitals.28 The dissection of the seamstress who committed suicide was depicted with a cartoon of grotesque figures of rotund grinning men standing over the emaciated naked body of a woman. Motherliness is similarly a central motif of Jerusalem’s novel Der heilige Skarabäus. Throughout the 700 pages of the novel, the reader is drawn closer to a series of different prostitutes by identifying with their longing for a model of bourgeois motherhood. Milada, in the later stages of the novel, falls in love with a young doctor, Gust Brenner, who visits the brothel initially in his professional capacity. He cannot overcome his own prejudices towards the women and claims: ‘Die Dirne ist durchaus unmütterlich, — sie will kein Kind, sie haßt es. — Die echte Frau aber ist vor allem und über alles Mutter’ (‘The prostitute has no motherly feelings, — she does not want a child, she hates children. — A real woman is a mother first and foremost’, 440). Throughout the novel, however, this commonly held prejudice is repeatedly revealed to be a false assumption. The first brothel madam, Carlotta Goldschneider, has a child, Anna Lucie, who is the same age as Milada. Anna Lucie has been brought up in a convent in a distant town. Goldschneider visits her fondly every month and protects her from any knowledge of her trade. Eventually, it is a longing for Anna Lucie that makes her sell up (203). Goldschneider herself, however, has repeatedly been responsible for separating mothers from their own children. She takes women from maternity hospitals and gives away their illegitimate babies, deceiving herself ‘daß die Meisten herzlich froh waren, die drückendste Last vom Halse zu haben’ (‘that most of them were thoroughly glad to lose the burdensome weight from around their neck’, 131). One women, Martha Dubbe, had become pregnant out of wedlock: she was a teacher, and so would have lost her job if she had married. Goldschneider offered her a way out of poverty through prostitution, but gave the baby up for adoption.29 The child haunts Martha day and night: ‘Mach’ ich die Augen zu, dann sehe ich das Kind; es weint, es ruft mir ... Glaubst du mir? Es ruft mich alle Nacht...’ (‘When I close my eyes I see the baby; it is crying, it calls for me ... Can you believe me? It calls for me every night’, 239). She sobs in Milada’s

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arms when she tells her that she did not even see the child’s face; she is consumed by longing for the child (250). Jerusalem contends that society’s callous rejection of unmarried mothers and its refusal to allow women to remain in professions such as teaching when married plays into the hands of the sex trade. Life in the brothel alienates mothers from their children, however.30 Both the prostitutes and their children are victims of the trade. At the start of the novel, Milada’s mother, Katerine, continues receiving customers while her child huddles, cold, in a doorway. Betrayed by a rich lover whom she had hoped to marry, Katerine brought his child up in the brothel out of spite. Yet she has become apathetic; Milada has to fend for herself, even before Katerine’s inevitable decline, but she renounces any claim on the reader’s pity: ‘Die Straße nahm mich auf — Die Straße ist meine Mutter — Hab’ ich nicht tausend Schwestern so? (‘The street took me in — the street is my mother — and don’t I this way have a thousand sisters?’, 503). Milada’s identification with the girls in the brothel, and reluctance to abandon them to their fate, is the result of her loyalty to the streets where she roamed as a child: Diese Luft atmete ich ein. Der Himmel erzählte mir die ersten Märchen. Wenn es regnete, trank ich die Tropfen mit offenem Munde. Den Blättern lief ich nach, spielte mit ihnen, zankte, wenn sie mir entglitten. — Wenn ich fror, hieß es, such’ dir deine Decke! (503) [I breathe in this air. The sky told me my first stories. When it rained I drank the drops with my open mouth. I ran after the leaves, played with them, scolded them when they got away. When I was freezing people just told me to get a blanket!]

While Milada, damaged by her work as a prostitute, is later unable to have children of her own, her motherly feelings are aroused for the younger girls whose families have abandoned them. Rosine, who had been raped at the age of 15 and suffered brutality at the hands of a lay abortionist (391), seems to Milada ‘ein Kind, ein kleines Mädchen, das lacht und weint in einem Atem’ (‘a child, a little girl, who laughs and cries in the same breath’, 593). Julie, another child victim, was sold into the brothel by her father. An innocent child, she falls prey to Gust Brenner, the doctor with whom Milada falls in love. When Julie becomes pregnant by Brenner, Milada, who had already decided to leave the brothel to found a home in the mountains for unmarried mothers and their babies, decides to take Julie with her. Milada is overjoyed by Julie’s pregnancy: she will treat the child as if it were her own. Jerusalem suggests that only by confronting the social stigma of illegitimate motherhood can vulnerable girls can be saved from prostitution. The Representation of Sexuality in Der heilige Skarabäus Zola’s novel Nana reveals all society to be obsessed by sex. The novel Der heilige Skarabäus, in contrast, highlights prostitutes’ longing for bourgeois respectability and family life. For Leopoldine Kulka, reviewing the novel in Neues Frauenleben in 1909, Milada is characterized by ‘Energie, Ordnungs- und Arbeitsdrang, Sparsamkeit und Unternehmungsgeist’ (‘energy, a thirst for order and work, thrift and an enterprising spirit’.31 Indeed, Kulka complains that such is the focus in the

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novel on the sobriety of the commercial transaction in Der heilige Skarabäus that she is left with no greater understanding of why men visit the brothel than she had before. The economy of desire has been eliminated from the novel. However, the reticence with regard to the treatment of sexuality in Der heilige Skarabäus is important for the novel’s social critique. In his study of Berlin prostitution, Jerusalem’s contemporary Hans Ostwald was captivated by the luxury and sensationalism of the sex trade, which for him seems almost part of the glamour of the city, the human equivalent of the department store window.32 Ostwald repeatedly associates prostitutes with shop windows, a motif later taken up by Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis).33 The windows display luxuries such as jewellery or chocolate, while next door in the café, luxurious women promise sexual adventure: ‘so bunt wie die Wände und wie die Auslagen der Schaufenster — so bunt ist das Menschengewimmel’ (‘the throng of people is as colourful as the walls and the selection in the shop windows’, Ostwald, 29). Jerusalem eschews both such objectification of the female body and such glamourization of the sex trade. Sex in the novel usually takes place behind a closed door, or under cover of darkness: ‘dann verschluckt die Finsternis, was sich in ihrem Bereiche gepaart hat’ (‘dark­ness consumes those who pair off in its realm’, 10). Jerusalem documents the need for a steady inf lux of new victims in the brothel, while focusing on the living conditions of the prostitutes, their business agreements with the brothel madam and the desperation which leads them to squander money on drink in order to escape reality. When Milada is a mere fifteen years old, Carlotta Goldschneider begins to regard her as ‘brauchbares Material’ (‘useable material’, 177); she is ‘promoted’ from her housework, and sent out into Vienna to learn her trade with other girls working the cafés on the Prater. There, however, Milada learns for the first time to be ashamed of her position in society. She feels a sudden loneliness as she looks at herself through the eyes of the respectable customers with whom she rubs shoulders in such places: ‘Das erstemal in ihrem Leben blickte sie mit Bewußtsein in dem Abgrund, der ihre Sphäre von der Welt der andern schied’ (‘for the first time in her life she was conscious of looking into the abyss that separated her world from the rest’, 188). There is no depiction, however, of Milada’s sexual experiences, at least not until much later, when Milada begins to fall in love with the young doctor mentioned earlier, Gust Brenner, who visits the brothel to help her nurse its inhabitants. Gust develops an attachment to Milada and invites her to his home. But when he attempts to initiate a sexual relationship with Milada, she feels betrayed: ‘Der Leib nur, der arme, willenlose, war es, den er begehrte, um den er stöhnte und zitterte. ... Er und die anderen’ (‘It was only her body that he desired, her poor body with no will of its own; he groaned and trembled for it’, 464). Gust, for all his seeming emotional intimacy with Milada, is all too ready to treat her like a prostitute. The illusion that she might be able to find freedom with him from her life in the brothel is broken. Milada wants to refuse him sex, and for the first time, the novel provides us with a f lashback to the trauma of Milada’s loss of virginity: Schrecklich deutlich sah sie vor allen anderen — den alten, hageren Herrn vor

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sich, den ihr die Goldschneider, als sie fünfzehnjährig war, zugeführt hatte. Eine rosa Rose steckte damals an ihrer Brust ... Der Erste war das. Und dahinter ein Zug von Männern, von jungen, alten, — freundlichen und widerlichen rohen. Ein Laut des Ekels drang von ihren Lippen. Sie hielt die Arme zur Abwehr emporgestreckt (464). [With a terrible clarity she saw before all the others — the old, haggard figure of a man whom Madame Goldschneider had brought to her when she was fifteen years old. She was wearing a pink rose corsage... that was her first man. And after him a train of men, from young to old, — amiable to hideously coarse. Her lips emitted a noise of disgust. She held her arms up to fend him off.]

In the context of Milada’s resistance to Gust’s desires, her earlier horror of her sexual experiences is suddenly revealed. When he forces her to have sex with him, she feels ‘nur Eiseskälte und Grauen’ (‘only ice-cold and horror’, 487). But she also realizes that she has nothing to offer the man whom she loves; and for the first time, therefore, she feels like a prostitute (487). In the moments, however, when she does later give in willingly to Gust’s desires, she longs for a child to care for, which she can love without pain or regret (488). In the love of a child she longs for an affection based on emotional intimacy and mutual need, where she will be valued for herself and not for her body. When Gust’s horrified family, fearful that his attraction to Milada is serious, approach her to offer a financial settlement if she will leave him, she decides it is in his interest for her to take the money and go. She uses it to found the home for unmarried mothers. The critic Eva Borst sees this as a sublimation of Milada’s sexual desire into charitable work, but it could also be argued that Jerusalem, like Frapan, and Hedwig Dohm (whose Christa Ruland is analysed in Chapter 5), places a greater value on women’s agency and their non-sexual relationships than on their expression of sexual desire.34 By caring for Julie and her baby, Milada is promised a glimpse of the family life which she has previously been denied. Milada’s planned home for unmarried mothers is, for Eva Borst, a critique of patriarchal social structures, and tantamount to a utopian space where women’s needs can be fulfilled.35 As a resolution of the story, it is an admission that the brothel is intrinsically an exploitative institution where commercial considerations are always at odds with humanitarian ones. Milada cannot reform such a place, and to run it herself would merely be to become complicit in its injustice. The Marginalization of Women’s Socially Critical Fiction In a literary history written in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the novel of female emancipation is compared negatively to writing by Jewish authors in a manner informed by contemporary anti-Semitism: ‘Der Naturalismus der modernen emanzipierten (...) Frau ist dem des modernen Juden nach seinen literaturhistorischen Voraussetzungen und allzu menschlichen Grundlagen wesensverwandt’ (The naturalism of the modern emancipated woman [...] is of a similar nature to that of the modern Jew in its literary-historical conditions and in its human background).36 For its author, Karl Borinski (1861–1922), a professor of German studies in the University of Munich, socially critical realist fiction was a destabilizing threat to the German state. Moreover, Borinski saw women’s success

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as authors as an ‘unnatürliche Herrschaft’ (unnatural mastery; 607, Borinski’s italics). Peter Fritzsche emphasizes that the First World War ‘created new circumstances’ in which a sense of responsibility towards the nation was intensified among people from ‘diverse political backgrounds’.37 Borinski’s literary history represents a growing tendency in those years to regard socially critical fiction as a foreign import associated with decadence and moral decline, and its corollary, political decline. The foreignness of its models — Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Ibsen, Tolstoy — became viewed with suspicion. Literature engaging with the problems of the modern urban world was juxtaposed negatively with the dominant German idealist tradition with its vision of harmonious wholeness and its representation of provincial life. For the rabidly anti-Semitic literary historian Adolf Bartels, for example, the predominant purpose of literature was to transmit German values. In a third volume (Die Jüngsten) of his inf luential account of recent German literature, produced shortly after the First World War, Bartels identifies German values with masculinity, while by implication women are identified with sensationalist popular fiction: Was national schädlich, ja, selbst was national indifferent ist, muß heute bekämpft werden, nicht das Talent allein entscheidet, sondern fast mehr noch der Wille, der hinter dem Talente steht. [...] Mehr als jede frühere Zeit fordert die unsrige, daß der Künstler vor allem ein Mann sei — und: deutsch sein heißt eine Sache um ihrer selbst willen, nicht des Erfolges wegen tun.38 [Everything that is damaging to the nation or even merely indifferent to its needs must now be fought. It is not a matter solely of talent but concerns still more the will that lies behind the talent. [...] More than at any previous moment our times demand that the artist be above all a man — and: to be German means to do something for its own sake not merely for the sake of popularity.]

Bartels’s anti-Semitic view of German literary history and his opposition to the literature of the modern city had been slowly growing in inf luence throughout the 1900s. His account of present-day literature in 1901 already indicates his distaste for naturalism and decadence. By 1909, he refers to Böhme’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, the fictional diary of a prostitute mentioned above, as an example of cultural degeneration (‘Sensationalismus’, 49). He suggests that such cultural decline in the field of literature parallels the damaging decline in Germany’s birth rate, a phenomenon which began to preoccupy nationalists increasingly in the war years. After the Social Democratic election success in the Reichstag in 1912, rising anti-Semitism and pan-German nationalism were voiced more assertively.39 Bartels quotes a writer in the Kölnische Zeitung, suggesting in 1912 that the Jews were f loating ‘in einer anglo-gallisch-skandinavisch-slawischen Allerweltskultur’ (‘in an Anglo-French-Scandinavian cultural internationalism’, ‘Sensationalismus’, 68). In 1921, he even expresses some reservations about the sensationalism and eroticism of Clara Viebig, though he concedes that she always retains a certain authentic ‘Germanness’ which compensates somewhat for these problematic qualities.40 Her mistake was to have a Jewish husband. The third volume of Bartels’s history of recent literature appeared in 1921 with two successive print runs of 10,000 copies each.41 And between 1901 and 1942 his

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more wide-ranging Geschichte der deutschen Literatur ran to eighteen editions. His biographer Steven Fuller emphasizes Bartels’s vehement dislike of Zola, whom he associated with the evils of the new urban centres and the pollution of German cultural life by French degeneracy.42 In the wake of the First World War, his call to eliminate the Jewish elements in German literary life was more vehemently expressed, and although Bartels’s position is an extreme one, nonetheless the association between Jewish writers, women writers, and popular, rather than artistic, fiction, was more widespread. It played on a long-standing distinction in German tradition between the apolitical poetic tradition of the genius and the fiction penned by the dilettante for a mass-market readership. Hence the socially critical novel was attacked as un-German sensationalism. It was characterized, its opponents claimed, by a perverse eroticism, closely linked to a ‘foreign’ tradition of decadent literature, in which Jewish writers, such as Arthur Schnitzler, were particularly implicated. As we saw in Chapter 1, women’s rise to prominence in the literary establishment was linked to their promotion by figures such as Julius Rodenberg in his journal Deutsche Rundschau, and Samuel Fischer, in both the Neue Rundschau (formerly Die Freie Bühne) and his publishing house, with its particular preference for problem fiction. These very institutions, from the years leading up to the First World War, were now the subject of anti-Semitic attack: Borinski describes Rodenberg as ‘Julius (Levy aus) Rodenberg’ (Borinski, 583). Bartels states that at least half of the Fischer authors ‘are Jewish’ and attacked even those who merely had a Jewish-sounding name. The house of Ullstein, another important promoter of women’s fiction,43 especially in the Weimar era, publishing the successful writers Vicki Baum and Irmgard Keun, was in Jewish ownership, and for national-conservative figures such as Bartels, a pernicious link could be drawn between commercial literature, women’s emancipation, and Jewish power in German society (‘Sensationalismus’, 54). Bartels blames the Jewish ownership of newspapers such as Berliner Tageblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung and Neue Freie Presse and the prominent literary journal Das literarische Echo for long promoting a cultural life dominated by foreign inf luences (‘Sensationalismus’, 53–54). Emancipated women come in for similar criticism. In 1910, Bartels attacks Helene Böhlau’s ‘häßliche moderne Überweiblichkeit’ (‘ugly modern heightened femininity’),44 though on the whole he commends her poetic ability, and includes even her late work Das Haus zur Flamm (1906: The House of Flame) among those he praises. By contrast, the literary critic Hermann Hölzke in 1913 writes pointedly that Helene Böhlau’s novel was welcomed only by her friends and ‘die Schriftgelehrten des “Literarischen Echo” ’ (‘the scribes of the Literary Echo’), in an anti-Semitic remark intended to taint the feminist writer by association with the newspaper’s Jewish ownership.45 By the time of the Nazi era, any such feminist novels of emancipation were unwelcome, and a conservative image of literary history was restored with traces of such fiction removed, as one critic welcomed: Nun wird die Frau wieder Ruhe, Trost, der stille Hafen, den auch der stürmischste Lebensschiffer mal braucht. [...] Und die Frau ist endlich wieder die Mutter des Hauses, die Mutter der Kinder, die aus ihrem Schoße, aus ihrem

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With the propagation of this national-conservative image of womanhood, novels of women’s emancipation were removed from contemporary German literary histories. The inf luential Gabriele Reuter, author of Aus guter Familie, is entirely absent from a literary history by Werner Mahrholz (1930), who only mentions women whose works form part of the Heimat movement of regional literature: among them Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Clara Viebig.47 Mahrholz omits entirely Helene Böhlau’s major works Der Rangierbahnhof and Halbtier!, while praising her less important Weimar tales as a faithful representation of the atmosphere of German provincial life. Christian Jenssen’s Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart (1936: PresentDay German Literature) condemns Überrealismus (extreme realism) in German literature around 1900 for its internationalist tendencies, and does not mention one single female writer.48 Even the front cover of his literary history bears an image of a heroic man, naked but for a helmet and sword, standing like an iconic image of St Michael the Archangel over the body of a serpent. The reception of the fiction of Ilse Frapan and Else Jerusalem was tainted by antiSemitism. Frapan was conscious an early age that her maiden name Levien seemed Jewish and attempted to explain it as of ‘French Huguenot’ origin.49 Opponents made much of her supposed Jewish heritage without any particular evidence beyond this Jewish-sounding name. On 2 December 1908, when Frapan was dying of an incurable stomach cancer, she requested that her long-term companion, Emma Mandelbaum, shoot her. Her doctor had said she had only two days to live. Mandelbaum did so and then turned the weapon on herself.50 Borinski, in his literary history, writes about Frapan’s ‘suicide’ (ignoring her illness) as symbolic of the self-destructive nature of social criticism, as well as symptomatic of Jewish naturalism; it shows what happens when a Jewish woman becomes a naturalist writer (‘wenn die Jüdin zur Naturalistin wird’, p. 607). Bartels describes Else Jerusalem’s Der heilige Skarabäus as the most extreme example of tendencies which threaten to undermine decent society, with potentially far-reaching political consequences (‘Sensationalismus’, 79). Max Geißler, in his history of contemporary literature in 1913, asks: ‘erwachsen Bücher wie “Der heilige Skarabäus” aus dem Mitleid oder der Lust an Sensation? Oder der krankhaften Veranlagung der Verfasserin?’ (‘do books like The Red House come from pity or from a thirst for sensation? Or the pathological tendency of the writer?’)51 The provocative nature of Jerusalem’s novel was enhanced by the author’s Jewishness. Geißler points out that by 1913 Jerusalem had left with her new husband to settle in America as a result of the abuse she

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received in Vienna, where people threw more than just unkind words and harsh looks at her (‘[man] bewarf sie schließlich nicht nur mit Blicken und Worten’).52 The increasingly narrow definition of what it meant to be German had a significant effect on the long-term reception of novels written by women in this era. In 1904, Thomas Mann expressed his view that the novel should legitimately offer multiple perspectives on German society by comparing women writers with Jewish writers, making the point that women’s writing is not alone in representing a consciousness different from the Protestant middle-class male norm.53 He drew attention in particular to the novels of Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), suggesting that Wassermann is right to express a different sort of experience in his fiction as a result of his Jewishness. However, after the publication of Wassermann’s autobiographical work Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921: My Path as a German and a Jew), Thomas Mann wrote to Wassermann asserting his conviction that the tradition of idealist literature and philosophy in Germany was so prevalent that there is no place in German literature for an artistic, socially critical novel: Wenn es nach mir geht, so bleibt das Erlebnis der idealistischen Philosophie für Deutschland ebenso typisch, ebenso seelisch bestimmend und entscheidend, wie für Frankreich das Erlebnis der Revolution. [...] Der hohe deutsche Roman wird niemals vom demokratisch-mondänen Typ, also sozialkritisch-psychologisch, Instrument der Zivilisation und Angelegenheit einer abendländisch nivellierten Öffentlichkeit sein. Er ist persönliches Ethos, Bekenntnis, Protestantismus [...] Bildung, was Sie wollen, aber keine Gesellschaftskritik.54 [If you ask me, the experience of idealist philosophy remains just as typical, decisive and determines just as thoroughly the character of the German soul as the experience of the Revolution did for France. [...] The high German novel will never be of the democratic and gentrified sort, which is a socially critical and psychological instrument of civilization and a levelling agent for the public sphere in the West. It is a personal ethic, a confession, Protestantism, culture, whatever you like, but not social criticism.]

Mann asserts that the idealist tradition exerted an increased power over the cult­ ural institutions of the 1920s. The tradition had informed strongly the ‘literature of conf lict denial’ of the nineteenth century.55 The values it espoused and its predominantly inward-looking, rather than political, character now offered an attractive vision of a Germanic heritage in opposition to the socially critical realism of France, Russia or Scandinavian. While Wassermann blamed the negative reception of his works on anti-Semitism, Thomas Mann attempted to suggest that Wassermann was exaggerating the effect of his Jewishness. For Todd Kontje, Mann in this letter demonstrates his general tendency at this time ‘to minimize the threat of German anti-Semitism’.56 Mann looks instead to the German character for trends that he regards as defining its literature. By doing so, he unwittingly also overlooks the extent to which the German character in this era, and thereby also its literature, was increasingly defined on racial grounds. Fiction which attempted at the same time to be both art and protest was made problematic both by the resurgence of the idealist tradition and by the association of any literature outside of that tradition with non-German political enemies. The engagement of women’s fiction with urban modernity and its protest movements such as feminism and Socialism made it

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at the same time popular with readers and deeply questionable for the establishment figures who in Germany had such an important inf luence on the writing of literary histories and the long-term reception of works. The perception of women’s protest fiction as sensationalist, politically questionable, and not adequately German, was greatly to the detriment of women’s attempts to be accepted by the literary establishment. Its legacy was to be long lasting. Notes to Chapter 8 1. Ilse Frapan, Arbeit (Berlin: Sammlung Zenodot Bibliothek der Frauen, 2007, first publ. Berlin: Paetel, 1903). 2. Else Jerusalem [née Kotányi], Der heilige Skarabäus (Berlin: Fischer, 1908). 3. Christine Touaillon, ‘Der heilige Skarabäus’, in Neues Frauenleben, 21 (1909), issue 7, 186–88 (p. 187). 4. Else Jerusalem, ‘Selbstanzeigen’, in Die Zukunft, 67 (8 May 1909), 210–12 (p. 212). 5. On Josefine Mutzenbacher, see Elizabeth Boa, ‘Taking Sex to Market: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen: Von einer Toten and Josefine Mutzenbacher, die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt’, in The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century, ed. by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), pp. 224–41. 6. Jerusalem, ‘Selbstanzeigen’, p. 212. 7. ‘Männern stehen soviel Ämter offen, die sie mit dem notwendigsten versorgen, und ihnen doch Muße für die Muse lassen; uns Frauen ist das alles so erschwert, Sie wissen ja!’ (‘men have so many positions open to them and this lets them acquire the necessities while still allowing them leisure for the muse; for us women this is so difficult. Well, you know that!’, letter from Ilse Frapan to Julius Rodenberg, 8 December 1890, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Weimar, Rodenberg VII,3,3, quoted by Christa Kraft-Schwenk, Ilse Frapan, Eine Schriftstellerin zwischen Anpassung und Emanzipation (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985), p. 53. 8. See Käthe Schirmacher, ‘Zürcher Studenten’, Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 6 (1895), issue 2, 817–25, and her Die Libertad. Novelle (Zurich: Verlags-Magazin, 1891). Schirmacher studied in Zurich from 1893–95. 9. Frapan’s other stories on student life include: ‘Das Schönste und das Schrecklichste’, in Auf der Sonnenseite (Berlin: Paetel, 1906), pp. 93–168; ‘Blaues Land. 4 Skizzen’, in Auf der Sonnenseite, pp. 213–63; ‘Die Preisarbeit’, in Schönwettermärchen (Berlin: Paetel, 1908), pp. 165–96; ‘Fräulein Doktor’ (Skizze), in Schönwettermärchen, pp. 109–200. See also Ella Mensch, Auf Vorposten. Roman aus meiner Züricher Studentenzeit (Leipzig: Frauen-Rundschau, 1903). On Frapan’s student fiction, see Romana Weiershausen, ‘Programmatische Ansätze: Erzählprosa von Studentinnen der ersten Generation’, 2: ‘Revisorinnen im Dienste der Menschlichkeit: Ilse Frapans Arbeit (1903)’, Wissenschaft und Weiblichkeit: Die Studentin in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), pp. 97–124. On Frapan’s Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland, see Inge Stephan, ‘Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland: Ilse Frapan (1894–1908) und ihre “Vaterstadt” Hamburg’, in ‘Heil über dir, Hammonia’: Hamburg im 19. Jahrhundert. Kultur, Geschichte, Politik, ed. by Inge Stephan und Hans-Gerd Winter (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1992), pp. 369–94. 10. Ilse Frapan-Akunian, ‘Pro domo’, Die Zukunft, 44 (25 July 1903), 164–66 (p. 168). 11. Ilse Frapan to Julius Rodenberg, 27 August 1901, Goethe- und Schillerarchiv Weimar, VII,3,3, cited by Kraft-Schwenk, Ilse Frapan, p. 77. 12. Ilse Frapan to Julius Rodenberg, 24 June 1899, Goethe- und Schillerarchiv Weimar, VII,3,3, cited by Kraft-Schwenk, Ilse Frapan, p. 76. 13. See Moritz Necker, ‘Ilse Frapan und die Aertze’, in Neues Wiener Tageblatt, issue 154 (6.6.1903), 3, cited by Kraft-Schwenk, Ilse Frapan, p. 77. 14. Georg Simmel, ‘Die weibliche Kultur’, in Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), VII: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908, 1, ed. by Rüdiger Kramme and others, pp. 64–83. 15. Frapan-Akunian, ‘Pro domo’, p. 168. 16. Ibid., p. 168.

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17. Émile Zola, Nana (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1968), p. 215. 18. Émile Zola, Nana, transl. and intro. by Douglas Parmée, first publ. 1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 190. 19. See Eva Borst, Über jede Scham erhaben: Das Problem der Prostitution im literarischen Werk von Else Jerusalem, Margarete Böhme und Ilse Frapan unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Sittlichkeits- und Sexualreformbewegung der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1993), pp. 91–98. See also Eva Borst, ‘Ichlosigkeit als Paradigma weiblichen Daseins: Prostitution bei Margarete Böhme und Else Jerusalem,’ in Deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen des Fin de siècle, ed. by Karin Tebben (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1999), pp. 144–37. 20. Boa, ‘Taking Sex to Market’, p. 233. 21. Richard Evans, ‘The Life and Death of a Lost Woman’, in Tales from the German Underworld: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 166–212 (p. 168). 22. Else Jerusalem, Gebt uns die Wahrheit! (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902), p. 33. 23. Jerusalem, ‘Selbstanzeigen’, p. 211. 24. On Josefine Geyer and motherliness, see Weiershausen, pp. 100–03, and pp. 113–15. 25. Frapan, Pro Domo, p. 165. 26. Ulrich Krönlein, ‘Arbeit’ in Die Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23.5.1903, title page (‘Zweite Beilage zu Nr. 142’). 27. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25.5.1903, p. 2. 28. See Kraft-Schwenk, pp. 80–83, especially illustrations 8 and 9, reproducing the satirical cartoons on the theme of Arbeit. 29. As Richard Evans has indicated, there was indeed a strong connection between illegitimate motherhood and women resorting to prostitution: Evans, ‘The Life and Death of a Lost Woman’, pp. 78–80. 30. See Eva Borst, who analyses the role of alienation from the self through sexual abuse in the failed mothering in the novel: Borst, Über jede Scham erhaben, p. 83. See also Karin Jušek, ‘Ein Wiener Bordellroman: Else Jerusalems “Heilige Skarabäus” ’, in ‘Das Weib existiert nicht für sich’: Geschlechter­beziehungen in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Vienna: Verlag fur Gesellschaftskritik, 1990), pp. 139–47. 31. Leopoldine Kulka ‘Noch einmal der heilige Skarabäus’, in Neues Frauenleben, 21 (1909), issue 8, 216–18 (p. 217). 32. Hans Ostwald, Prostitutions-Märkte, Das Berliner Dirnentum, 6 (Leipzig: Fliedler, n.d.), see pp. 30 and 51. 33. In a well-known scene in Walter Ruttmann’s film Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927), a young woman meets the gaze of a man through a shop’s window and leaves with him. She is often taken to be a prostitute. Ostwald’s Prostitutions-Märkte describes how women in Berlin pretend to look at the wares in a shop window but are waiting to pick up clients, like the woman who inspects the tram timetable, both examples of how Ostwald shows prostitution to be ever present in the city for those who can recognize its subtle manifestations (p. 28). 34. Borst, Über jede Scham erhaben, p. 96. 35. Borst, Über jede Scham erhaben, p. 98. 36. Karl Borinski, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols (Stuttgart: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1921), II, p. 587. 37. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 42. 38. Adolf Bartels, ‘Der Sensationalismus und die Herrschaft des Judentums’, in Die deutsche Dichtung von Hebbel bis zur Gegenwart (Die Alten und die Jungen): Ein Grundriß. 3 vols, 10–12 edn (Leipzig: Haessel, 1922), III: Die Jüngsten, pp. 47–81 (p. 81). Many of the key ideas in the chapter are already present in Adolf Bartels’ ‘das Judentum in der deutschen Literatur’, Kritker und Kritikaster: Pro domo et pro arte. Mit einem Abhang: Das Judentum in der deutschen Literatur (Leipzig: Avenarius, 1903), pp. 102–24. See Wolfgang Benz (ed.), Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4 vols (Munich: Saur, 2008), II, pp. 57–58; also Steven Nyole Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather: Adolf Bartels and Cultural Extremism, 1871–1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1996). 39. Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 45–51.

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40. Bartels, ‘Sensationalismus’, p. 79. Bartels’s admiration for Clara Viebig is reported in the Literarisches Echo: ‘sie hat sich durch die fremde Atmosphäre, in die sie, wie so viele neuere deutsche Talente, geraten ist, ihre völkischen Instinkte nicht ganz verwirren lassen,’ in Das Literarische Echo, 16 (1913–14), 920 [‘she never completely allowed her Germanic instincts to be confused, by the foreign atmosphere, into which she had veered, like so many other recent German authors’]. On Viebig’s relationship with the Heimat movement of regional literature, and Bartels’ nationalism, see Caroline Bland, ‘Clara Viebig: Using the Genres of Heimatkunst und Großstadtroman to Create Bestselling Novels’, in The German Bestseller, ed. by Woodford and Schofield, pp. 77–94 (pp. 81–82). Bland suggests that in later years, Viebig preferred to emphasize her connection to the German realist tradition and distance herself from Zola (pp. 86–87), citing Clara Viebig, ‘Aus meiner Werkstatt,’ first publ. in the St. Galler Tageblatt, 15.07.1930, reprinted in Clara Viebig: Mein Leben (1860–1952): Autobiographische Skizzen, ed. by Christl Aretz (Hontheim: Mosel-Eifel-Verlag, 2002), p. 59. 41. Fuller, The Nazis’ Literary Grandfather, p. 154. 42. Ibid., pp. 65–66. 43. Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988). See also Peter de Mendelssohn, Zeitungsstadt Berlin: Menschen und Mächte in der Geschichte der deutschen Presse (Berlin: Ullstein, 1969). 44. Adolf Bartels, ‘Helene Böhlau’, Die Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart: Die Alten und die Jungen, 8th edn (Leipzig: Avenarius, 1910), pp. 291–92 (p. 292). Böhlau’s feminist tendencies notwithstanding, in 1910 Bartels considered her novel Der Rangierbahnhof (1896) the best modern women’s novel to date. 45. Hermann Hölzke, ‘Die Emanzipationsromane’, Die Deutsche Literatur von den Anfängen der Moderne bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Gerstenberg, 1913), pp. 184–90 (p. 188). Hölzke singles out Helene Böhlau, Gabriele Reuter and Ilse Frapan as the most prominent writers of ‘moderne Anklageliteratur’ (‘modern accusatory literature’, p. 186), which he perceives as lacking in objectivity, prone to exaggeration and marred by unf latteringly one-sided portrayals of men. 46. Albert Soergel, ‘Zur Einführung’, Dichter aus deutschem Volkstum: Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit. Eine Schilderung der deutschen Literatur der letzten Jahrzehnte, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1935, first publ. 1934), pp. 11–21 (p. 18). On the importance of masculinity and heroism for German national literature under Nazism see also H. G. Atkins, German Literature through Nazi Eyes (London: Methuen, 1941), pp. 18–24, and Hellmuth Langenbucher, Volkhafte Dichtung der Zeit, 3rd edn (Berlin, 1937, first publ. 1933), p. 29. 47. Werner Mahrholz, ‘Die Heimatbewegung’, Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart: Probleme — Ergebnisse — Gestalten (Berlin: Sieben-Stäbe-Verlag, 1930), pp. 143–50 (p. 148). 48. Christian Jenssen, Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart (Leipzig: B. B. Teubner, 1936), p. 5. (‘Zuvor aber muß gesagt werden, daß wir diese Literatur [=die Literatur des Überrealismus] nicht eigentlich als aus deutschem Seelenleben gewachsen empfinden können’; ‘it must first be stated that we do not hold this literature [of extreme realism] to have really sprung from the German psyche.’) 49. Kraft-Schwenk, Ilse Frapan, p. 13. Frapan lived with Emma Mandelbaum (b. 1858), a painter, until their suicide. Frapan writes of her friendship with Mandelbaum in Ilse Frapan-Akunian, ‘Im Spiegel: Autobiographische Skizze, XXVII’, in Das litterarische Echo, 10 (1907–08), issue 8, 544–48 (545). 50. See Frapan’s obituary, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 339, 6 December 1908, and ‘Notizen zu Ilse Frapans Tode’, Litterarisches Echo, 11 (1908–9), 532–33. 51. Max Geißler, Führer durch die deutsche Literatur des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Weimar: Alexander Duncker, 1913), p. 252. 52. Geißler, Führer durch die deutsche Literatur, p. 252. Such reports of anti-Semitism are reminiscent of Schnitzler’s noting in his autobiographical writings ‘was für eine Bedeutung, seelisch fast noch mehr als politisch und sozial, zur Zeit, da ich diese Zeilen schreibe, der sogenannten Judenfrage zukam. Es war nicht möglich, insbesondere für einen Juden, der in der Öffentlichkeit stand, davon abzusehen, daß er Jude war, da die andern es nicht taten, die Christen nicht und die Juden noch weniger’ [‘the importance [...] that was assigned to the so-called Jewish question [in 1912]. It was not possible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew;

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nobody else was doing so, not the Gentiles and even less the Jews’], Arthur Schnitzler, Jugend in Wien [1912] (Berlin: Fischer, 1968) p. 327, transl. by Ritchie Robertson, The Jewish Question in German Literature, 1749–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 94. 53. Thomas Mann, ‘Gabriele Reuter’, in Der Tag (Berlin), nos 75 (14 Feb. 1904) and 79 (17 Feb. 1904), cited in Gabriele Reuter, Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens, Studienausgabe mit Dokumenten, 2 vols, ed. by Katja Mellmann (Marburg: LiteraturWissenschaft.de, 2006), II, pp. 466–76 (p. 472). 54. Letter from Thomas Mann to Jakob Wassermann on the publication of Wassermann’s Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), in Thomas Mann, Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe: Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, ed. by Heinrich Detering et al. (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2002-), vol. XV, part 1, pp. 54–57, and also quoted in Jakob Wassermann, Deutscher und Jude: Reden und Schriften 1904–1933, ed. by Dierk Rodewald (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1984), pp. 266–67. 55. Russell Berman, The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 63. 56. Todd Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), p. 12. Kontje suggests that Mann, inf luenced by völkisch thinkers, expresses in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen the importance of German art through his ‘understanding of the artist as a medium for the collective expression of the people’ (pp. 70–71). See also Jacques Darmaun, Thomas Mann: Deutschland und die Juden (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 2003), pp. 123–24.

Conclusion v

In the age of literary modernism, artistic ambition and social engagement were regarded by many as irreconcilable. In protest fiction, the communication of a reforming agenda might at a glance seem intrinsically at odds with literary experimentation. Among those who held such a view around 1900 was Lou Andreas-Salomé, who in her essay ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ (1899: The Human Being as Woman) is censorious of literary protests: [...] wie selten haben Frauen ‘sich’ gedichtet. [...] Was es davon gibt, ist verschwindend wenig, und in diesem Wenigen ist auch noch wieder manches von heute durch den Protest hervorgetrieben worden, durch die Abwehr der männlichen Meinungen und Zeichnungen, also auf einem unkünstlerischen Wege. 1 [How rarely have women written ‘themselves’. [...] What there is of this kind is dizzyingly small and in this small amount there again much has recently come about in protest, through a defence against male opinions and representations, and therefore in an unartistic fashion.]

Andreas-Salomé suggests that works of protest are intrinsically unartistic through their very commitment to challenging women’s position in society and culture. In her essay ‘Ketzereien gegen die moderne Frau’ (1899: Heresies against the Modern Woman), Andreas-Salomé singles out Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895) as a specific example of literature as mere documentary: ‘alle “Dokumente”, [...] die mit einigermaßen unkluger Plauderhaftigkeit recht interessante Berichte über das Weib erstatten, sind schon diesen innersten Motiven nach unkünstlerisch’ (‘all “documents” providing a somewhat salacious and full account of women’s issues with unwise confabulation are unartistic as a result of precisely these inner motives’).2 Andreas-Salomé conf lates Reuter’s realism with reportage. For her, works like Reuter’s are ‘Frauen-Wiederholungen’ (‘replications of the feminine’); and even perfect replications do not, for Andreas-Salomé, increase the value of the original (568). The idea that art must be intrinsically detached from the topical issues of the day, and from the artist’s own existence as a member of a particular gender, class, race or nation is for Marianne DeKoven a key premise within ‘male Modernism’ and a part of its ‘self-imagination as a mode of masculine domination’.3 And as Suzanne Clark has shown, the inf luential nature of such opinions has contributed to the exclusion of women’s writing from the literary canon.4 Andreas-Salomé highlights an issue which has dogged the reception of women’s writings from this period. Yet such an opinion overlooks the extent to which literary as well as social protest informed women’s fiction, and furthermore how social protests informed the literary experiments of women writers. A desire for thematic

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innovation, and the ambition to confront social questions, informed the aesthetic choices made by women writers, as has been seen repeatedly in this study in women’s rejection of a style considered coldly masculine — a distanced objectivity — in favour of a poetics of sympathy. Women also sought to write not for an intellectual elite, but for a wide reading public who came to relish the genre of the novel of women’s emancipation as thematically challenging yet at the same time readable. Indeed, the novels depended on that very readability to engage their readers with the topical issues that informed their works. And the translation of many of these works into English soon after their publication in German is a reminder of their close connection with the more readable Anglo-American social novel. In 1899, the writer of colonial fiction Frieda von Bülow (1857–1909) spoke out against critics like her close friend Andreas-Salomé who give preference to writing by women in which the gender of the author is indiscernible.5 She draws attention to the misogyny inherent in reviews which use the term ‘frauenhaft’ (womanly) as a negative attribute. Bülow asks why women should write as if they were men. It leaves her with the impression ‘daß die Lebensauffassung des Mannes, auch in künstlerischer Verbildlichung, die unbedingt werthvollere sei, so daß also das Weib um so Besseres zu Tage fördere, je mehr es sich von seiner besonderen weiblichen Auffassung entferne und der männlichen nähere’ (‘that men’s view of life, including the visualization of it through art, is unconditionally the more valuable, and that women produce much better work to the extent that they distance themselves from their particular feminine viewpoint and take on that of a man’).6 Bülow contends, however, that women who try to write from a masculine perspective are merely producing poor imitations of the master work, in the manner of the pupils in an artist’s studio. She argues that the value of women’s works is precisely in their development of an alternative perspective. Thomas Mann, in a review in 1904 of Gabriele Reuter’s works, concurs with such a view, and defends the literary qualities of fiction engaging with social reality.7 The penetrating gaze of the artist, he suggests, sees beyond mere appearances, and so far from merely documenting material reality, he or she explores deep insights into human culture which remain otherwise hidden from view. Art is: ‘erkennen und gestalten: tief erkennen und schön gestalten’ (‘recognition and creation: depth in recognition and beauty in creation’, 469). He continues, ‘Modernität ist Bewußtsein’ (‘modernity is consciousness’, 471): art is the autonomous expression of the artist’s experience of modernity as a gendered subject or a person of race, to use Mann’s examples. Only by exploring women’s writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in its material and cultural context is it possible fully to appreciate the artistic contribution made by these novels as an expression of their particular consciousness of modernity. Women’s important contribution to the development of the German novel in this era is located precisely in their challenge to powerful male-authored narratives and patriarchal authorities. While some novels were written first and foremost to provoke public debate, the vast majority came from writers who, in a tradition of Ibsen, Tolstoy or Zola, sought by self-consciously literary means to confront social issues repressed within the German idealist tradition. Suzanne Clark suggests that fully to appreciate women’s writing in this

Conclusion

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period, ‘we need, perhaps, not an aesthetics of literary autonomy but forms of commitment.’8 Mann’s discussion of Reuter’s novels, however, is an attempt to reconcile an aesthetic of literary autonomy with a deep engagement with a social and cultural context. Formal and thematic experimentation at the turn of the twentieth century quite simply changed the shape of the women’s novel in German. As Chapter 8 has shown, its exclusion from the canon of German literature has less to do with the power of these fictional works than the particular tradition in which they were received. It was indeed the compelling nature of these works as fiction and their challenging combination of female emancipation and social criticism that led to their disappearance from mainstream literary histories. Notes to the Conclusion 1. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Der Mensch als Weib’, in Die Erotik: Vier Aufsätze (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1979), pp. 7–44 (pp. 20–21), first publ. in Neue Deutsche Rundschau, 10 (1899), 225–43. 2. Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘Ketzereien gegen die moderne Frau’, in Jahrhundertwende: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1890–1910, ed. Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), pp. 566–69 (p. 566), first publ. in Die Zukunft, 7 (1898–99), issue 26, 237–40. 3. Marianne DeKoven, ‘Modernism and Gender’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Harry Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 174–93 (p. 176). 4. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 5. Frieda von Bülow, ‘Männerurtheil über Frauendichtung’, in Jahrhundertwende, ed. by Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch, pp. 563–65, first publ. in Die Zukunft, 7 (1898–99), part 26, 26–29. On Bülow, see Katharina von Hammerstein, ‘Race, Gender, Nation: Colonial(ist) Constructions of Alterity and Identity in Frieda von Bülow’s Autobiographical Writing from German East Africa’, in German Women’s Writing of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. by Helene Fronius and Anna Richards (London: Legenda, 2011), pp. 155–68. 6. Bülow, ‘Männerurtheil’, p. 27, quoted in Jahrhundertwende, p. 564. 7. Thomas Mann, ‘Gabriele Reuter’, in Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens, by Gabriele Reuter, Studienausgabe mit Dokumenten, ed. by Katja Mellmann, 2 vols (Marburg: Liter­ atur­Wissenschaft.de, 2006), II, pp. 466–76 (p. 468). First publ. in Der Tag (Berlin), nos 75 (14 Feb 1904) and 79 (17 Feb 1904). 8. Clark, Sentimental Modernism, p. 199.

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INDEX ❖ abortion 3, 111–13, 125, 127, 137–39 Adams, Hope Bridges 76–77, 80–81, 83, 94–96, 113–14 Allen, Anne Taylor 76, 91, 113 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 3, 5, 12, 106–20, 165–66 Eine Ausschweifung 5 Fenitschka 5 Das Haus 3, 107, 108–10, 112, 115–20 ‘Ketzereien gegen die moderne Frau’ 165 ‘Der Mensch als Weib’ 106, 109, 116–17, 165 Ródinka: Eine Russische Erzählung 119 ‘Die Schwester’ 107–08 anti-Semitism 155–58 Appelfeld, Aharon 38–39 Aristotle 30 Augspurg, Anita 2, 146 Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice 8 Austrian Literature Online 5 Ariadne Project 5 Bahr, Hermann 12 Balzac, Honoré de 156 Bartels, Adolf 156–58 Bashkirtseff, Marie 104 n. 33 Baudrillard, Jean 53 Baum, Vicki 157 Bebel, August 2 Becker-Cantarino, Barbara 4, 6 Benjamin, Walter 66 Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt 154 Berman, Russell 60 Bernstein, Elsa (also known as Ernst Rosmer) 7, 12 Dämmerung 7 Birch-Pfeiffer, Charlotte 7 Bland, Caroline 126 Blavatsky, Helene 99 Boa, Elizabeth 53, 108, 148 Boccaccio, Giovanni 135 The Decameron 135 Böhlau, Helene 3, 5, 6, 10, 77–88, 157–58, 162 n. 45 Halbtier! 5, 10, 69, 75–76, 79–88, 124, 149, 158 Das Haus zur Flamm 157 Der Rangierbahnhof 5, 10, 75, 77–79, 104 n. 33, 158, 162 n. 44 Rathsmädel stories 10 Das Recht der Mutter 10 Böhme, Margarethe, see also: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen 70, 156 Bölsche, Wilhelm 61, 84

Borinski, Karl 155–58 Borst, Eva 155 Brachvogel, Carry 11, 12 Braun, Lily 29, 123–24 Bré, Ruth 131, 133 Brigham Young University 5 Brinker-Gabler, Gisela 4, 60 Bronfen, Elisabeth 75 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 8, 16 n. 40 Brooks, Peter 32–33 Buddhism 87, 88, 90 n. 33, 99, 102 Bülow, Frieda von 166 Bunsen, Marie von 11, 17 n. 54 Butler, Josephine 95 Butler, Judith 91 Castiglione della Stiviere 40 Catholic Church 12–13, 19, 27, 28–30, 112, 131 Chambers, Helen 19 Christine: Eine Mutter für Viele 93 Clark, Suzanne 165–67 Cohn, Friedrich Theodor 10–11, 126 Colet, Louise 84 contraception 3, 75–77, 81, 89 n. 23, 112–14, 134, 138–39 Cormican, Muriel 106, 110 Darwinism 45–46, 54, 59, 102, 116, 133–34 Decker, Hannah 95 Deiulio, Laura 106 DeKoven, Marianne 165 Deutsche Rundschau 9–11, 21, 81, 145, 157 Devrient, Eduard 7 Dickens, Charles 9, 40, 55 n. 13 Diethe, Carol 111 dissection 22–23, 69, 82, 84–87 Dohm, Hedwig, 3, 91–93, 97–103, 155 Die Antifeministen 98 Christa Ruland 3, 99–103, 155 Die Frauen Natur und Recht 97 Die Mütter: Beitrag zur Erziehungsfrage 97 ‘Mutter und Großmutter’ 98–99 Schicksale einer Seele 99, 103 Sibille Dalamar 99 Werde, die Du bist 98–99, 103 drama by women 7–8, 126–28, 139 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von: Bertha oder die Alpen 7 Die Judenbuche 7

188

Index

Druskowitz, Helene 36 n. 42 Dumas, Alexandre 148–49 Dunant, Jean Henri 39–41, 49, 52, 53 Durand, Michel 132 Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von 1, 3, 7, 9–10, 14, 19–37, 158 Božena 20, 32 ‘Die erste Beichte’ 27 Die Freiherren von Gemperlein 21–22 Das Gemeindekind 9, 27–33, 128 ‘Die Großmutter’ 22–23, 33, 69 ‘Die Kapitalistinnen’ 20 Lotti, die Uhrmacherin 9 Maria Stuart in Schottland 7 Marie Roland 7 ‘Mašlans Frau’ 27 Meine Kinderjahre 19 ‘Der Muff ’ 23–25 ‘Poesie des Unbewussten’ 20 ‘Die Resel’ 25 ‘Das tägliche Leben’ 27 Unsühnbar 9–10 Zwei Comtessen 20 Eckstein, Emma 11 Eigler, Friederike 4 Engels, Friedrich 2, 43, 94, 123 Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staates 2, 94, 123 Evans, Richard 70, 113, 148 eugenics 3, 101–02, 114–15, 133–34 Exner, Emilie (also known as Felice Ewart) 11 fashion 64–67 Fickert, Auguste 11 First World War 3, 4, 39, 53–54, 113, 126, 139, 143–44, 156–57 Fischer, Samuel 7, 9, 11–13, 157 Fischer-Dückelmann, Anna 83 Flaubert, Gustave 21, 84, 96, 156 Fleißer, Marieluise 139 Fliedl, Konstanze 4 Fontane, Friedrich 10–11 Fontane, Theodor 33 Effi Briest 9, 72 n. 11, 96 Frau Jenny Treibel 9 Foster, Ian 39, 53 Franco-Prussian War 39, 45–48, 51–54, 65 Frapan, Ilse (also known as Ilse Frapan-Akunian) 3, 6, 11, 143–46, 149–53, 158, 162 n. 45 Arbeit 3, 6, 69, 83, 88, 143–46, 149–53 Wir Frauen haben kein Vaterland 6 François, Louise von 5, 30 Die Freie Bühne für modernes Leben 11–13, 157 Freud, Sigmund 95, 106, 118–19 Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse 95, 104 n. 20 Das Ich und das Es 118

Frevert, Ute 91 Friedan, Betty 97 The Feminine Mystique 97 Fritzsche, Peter 156 Frommel, Emil 67 Fuller, Steven 157 Die Gartenlaube 7–8, 10, 17 n. 43, 44 Gemberg, Adine 13 Geneva Convention 41, 44, 52, 54 Georg: Einer für Viele. Aus dem Tagebuch eines Jünglinges 93 Die Gesellschaft 60–63 Gilbert, Sandra M. 108 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 108 The Yellow Wallpaper 108 Gizycki, Georg 29–30, 31 Gnüg, Hiltrud 4 Goncourt, Edmond de 40 Grass, Günter 39 Die Blechtrommel 39 Gröger, Fannie 12–13 Gubar, Susan 108 Haeckel, Ernst 133 Harden, Maximilian 90 n. 33 Hauptmann, Gerhart 60, 61, 151 Hebbel, Friedrich 76 Maria Magdalene 76 Heimat literature 11, 126–27, 158–59, 162 n. 56 Heimburg, Wilhelmine (pseud. for Bertha Behrens) 8 Lumpenmüllers Lieschen 8 Herminghouse, Patricia 4 Hesse, Hermann 9 Heymann, Lida Gustava 95 Heyse, Paul 32 Hobsbawm, Eric 48 Hölzke, Hermann 157 Huch, Ricarda 11 Ibsen, Henrik 7, 12, 60, 156, 166 idealism 1, 12, 32, 156, 159, 166 Idström, Ellen 11 L’Inconnue de la Seine 86 infanticide 125, 131–32 Janitschek, Maria 13, 73 n. 43 ‘Scham’ 73 n. 43 Jenssen, Christian 158 Jerusalem, Else (née Kotányi) 3, 96–97, 143–55, 158–59 Gebt uns die Wahrheit! 96–97, 149 Der heilige Skarabäus 3, 14, 143–55, 158–59 Jesuits 45 Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher 4, 5, 98 Josefine Mutzenbacher: Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne von ihr selbst erzählt 144

Index Kant, Immanuel: influence of 30, 101 Zum ewigen Frieden 47 Kautsky, Karl 28, 38 Kautsky, Minna 3, 6, 28, 31, 32, 38–49, 54 Ein Maifesttag 44 Stefan vom Grillenhof 3, 38, 43–49, 54, 124 Victoria 44 Keller, Gottfried 9 Kerr, Alfred 7 Keun, Irmgard 157 Key, Ellen 12, 94, 102, 123, 134, 138 Das Jahrhundert des Kindes 13, 102, 134, 138 Klemperer, Victor 1 Klinger, Max 84, 87 Klostermaier, Doris M. 27, 29 Kollwitz, Käthe 139 Kontje, Todd 5, 6, 159 Königgratz, battle of 46–48, 51–54 Kord, Susanne 4, 7, 34 n. 12 Kraus, Karl 130–31 Krauss, Marita 83 Kreide, Caroline 108, 109 Krönlein, Ulrich 151–52 Kulka, Leopoldine 153 Kurth, Betty (née Betty Kris, writing as Vera) 3, 91–97, 102 Eine für Viele 3, 91–97, 102 Kurz, Isolde 11 Laurence, Richard 52 Lehmann, Carl 76 Leffler, Anna Charlotte 11 Lueger, Karl 27 Luxemburg, Rosa 2, 146 Mackay, John Henry 60 Mahrholz, Werner 158 Mandelbaum, Emma 145, 158 Mann, Thomas 9, 53, 159, 166–67 Buddenbrooks 72 n. 11, 84 Herr und Hund 53 Marcuse, Max 113 Marholm, Laura 12 Marlitt, Eugenie (pseud. for Eugenie John) 5, 7–8, 14, 20, 124 Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen 8 Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell 8, 45 Goldelse 8, 45, 124 Schulmeisters Marie 8 Marx, Karl 3, 66, 144 Marxism 3, 28, 47, 59, 144, 146, 151 Mataja, Emilie 21 Die Familie Hartenberg: Roman aus dem Wiener Leben 21 Max, Gabriel von 75, 87 Maynes, Mary Jo 4 Mayreder, Rosa 11, 12

189

Mensinga, Peter Johann 76 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 36 n. 42 Meyer-Förster, Elsbeth 12 Meyerhof, Arnold 76 Michler, Werner 52–53 Millner, Alexandra 96 Möhrmann, Renate 4 Morpurgo, Michael 53 War Horse 53 mothering 75–82, 85–87, 97–99, 109–10, 114, 123–39, 152–53, 157–58 erweiterte Mütterlichkeit (extended motherliness) 3, 91–93, 98–102, 153, 155 infant mortality 82 mothers and war 40–42, 47, 49 pregnancy 3, 107–11, 115–18, 120 unmarried mothers 3, 44–46, 69–70, 85–87, 123–39, 148, 150, 153 Mühlbach, Luise 5 Najmájer, Marie von 36 n. 42 Nathusius, Marie 67 nationalism 4, 141 n. 18, 144, 155–60 naturalism 7, 60–64, 71, 123–33, 155–59 Nazism 5, 140–41 n. 17, 157–58 cultural memory of 38–39 neo-Malthusianism 76, see also: contraception Neue Deutsche Rundschau 12 Neue Zürcher Zeitung 151–52 Nietzsche, Friedrich 106, 120 n. 2 influence of on women writers 12, 13, 24 Nobel, Alfred 51 Nobel Peace Prize 41, 51 Olfers, Marie von (also known as M. Werner) 11 Ostwald, Hans 154 Owen, Wilfred 41 pacifism 3, 38–54 Paoli, Betty 21–22, 33 Pappritz, Anna 95 Pataky, Sophie 6 Pfeiffer, Peter 21, 32, 36 n. 53 Plato 118 political literature 38–39, 42–43, 49–54, 143–44 problem novel 1, 4, 8–14, 59–60, 143–60, 165–67 prostitution 2, 3, 10–11, 70, 93–96, 130, 143–45, 147–55 Koeppen Case 96 realism 1, 6, 7, 19–37, 39–40, 49–54, 81, 115, 124–25, 155–60 domestic fiction 6, 7–8 family literature 61–63 poetic realism 9–11, 21–23, 32, 59–60 Remarque, Erich Maria 51 Rembrandt van Rijn 86, 87 ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp’ 86

190

Index

Reuter, Gabriele 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 37 n. 55, 58–74, 113, 124, 133–39, 158, 162 n. 45, 165–67 Aus guter Familie 5, 13, 58–74, 77, 124, 133, 158 Ellen von den Weiden 14 Liselotte von Reckling 14 Das Tränenhaus 3, 6, 133–39 Richards, Anna 135 Rilke, Rainer Maria 106, 107, 108, 111–12 Die Engel 111–12 Rodenberg, Julius 9–10, 21, 81, 144, 157 Russo-Turkish War 41–42, 52 Rüttenauer, Benno 58 Ruttmann, Walter 154 Sagarra, Eda 27 Salter, William Mackintire 29–32 Ethical Religion 29–30 Sammons, Jeffrey, 6 Sand, George 31–32 Schirmacher, Käthe 145–46 Schnitzler, Arthur 9, 12, 13, 14, 157 Schönherr, Karl 139 Schopenhauer, Arthur 118 Schreiber, Adele 123 Schultze, Käte 132 sentimentality 19, 23–24, 35 n. 25, 39–40, 49–54, 62, 67, 69, 96–97, 102, 148 sex education for girls 2 sexually transmitted disease 7, 94–97 International Abolitionist Federation 95–96 Simmel, Georg 64–65, 71, 91–92, 146 Skram, Amalie 12 social deprivation, literary treatment of 22–25, 27–33, 68–71, 82–87 Socialism 2, 3, 28, 38, 43–49, 59, 80–81, 83, 123, 138, 145–46, 151–52 Solferino, battle of 39–41, 51 Solomon, Alice 92 Sophie Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women 5 Spielberg, Steven 53 Spielhagen, Friedrich 51, 61 Steiner, Rudolf 61 Stifter, Adalbert 22–23 Bunte Steine 22, 29 Stirner, Max 100 Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum 100 Stöcker, Helene 12, 58–59, 60, 113, 134 Stoehr, Irene 92 Storm, Theodor 9 Stritt, Marie 113 Suttner, Arthur von 51 Suttner, Bertha von 3, 38, 39, 41, 49–54 Marthas Kinder 49 Die Waffen nieder! 3, 38, 39, 41, 49–54 Das Tagebuch einer Verlorenen 10–11, 70, 148–49, 156

Tebben, Karin 60 theosophy 61, 99 Tolstoy, Leo 20, 94, 156, 166 Anna Karenina 94 Tompkins, Jane 33 Troll-Borostyáni, Irma von 12 Turgenev, Ivan 20 Ullstein 5, 157 Usborne, Cornelie 113–14 Vera, see Kurth, Betty Veraismus 96–97 Vereshchagin, Vasilii Vasil’evich 41–43, 49–50, 52 Verus: Einer für Viele 93 Viebig, Clara 3, 5, 6, 10, 54, 124–33, 139, 156, 158, 162 n. 40 Barbara Holzer 125–28 Es lebe die Kunst 124, 126 ‘Die Schuldige’ 3, 124–29, Das tägliche Brot 3, 6, 124–25, 129–33, 139 Die Töchter der Hekuba: Ein Roman aus unserer Zeit 54 Das Weiberdorf 10 Villinger, Hermine 30 Walther, Otto 76 Wassermann, Jakob 159 Watanabe-O’Kelly, Helen 4 Webber, Andrew 67 Wedekind, Frank 76, 106 Die Büchse der Pandora 106 Frühlings Erwachen 76 Weedon, Chris 68 Wegemann, Nikolaus 38 Weiss-Sussex, Godela 130 Werner, Anna 130–31 Werner, E. (pseud. for Elisabeth Bürstenbinder) 8 Wischermann, Ulla 2, 91 Wolzogen, Ernst von 58 women’s movement 1–2, 11, 12, 58–59, 63, 73 n. 30, 81–82, 88, 95–96 admission of women to university 2, 76, 145, 150–52 Bund deutscher Frauenvereine 2 Bund für Mutterschutz 2, 113, 123, 131, 133–34, 139 right to vote 2, 97 women as artists 77–79, 83 women doctors 3, 76–77, 83, 150–52 Worley, Linda Kraus 21, 63 Zeman, Herbert 20 Zola, Émile 60–61, 69, 124–27, 144, 147, 153, 156–57 L’Assommoir 144 Germinal 124, 125 Nana 143, 147, 153 Zurich, University of 2, 6, 145–46, 150–52