The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  This was perhaps the greatest difference between British and German-speaking feminists. While most feminists’ activities consisted in classic activism and lobbying against prostitution and for temperance, for women’s voting rights, for access to education and equality before the law, there was a branch of radical feminism and intellectual ferment that sought to change the foundations of society. We have already quoted Anita Augspurg, one of the most eloquent and uncompromising advocates of women’s rights in Germany. Her life story was inspirational for the many women who felt suffocated by the conventions of male-dominated society and the social expectations of young girls. Born as the youngest daughter of a barrister in a provincial town, Augspurg attended the usual school for höhere Töchter (‘higher daughters’, i.e. middle-class girls), learning the skills that would be useful for a life as a wife and mother. Augspurg’s later lover and long-time companion, the feminist activist Lida Gustava Heymann, gave a vivid sketch of the frustrations of such a girlhood, which the young Anita would have felt as well: ‘Already as a youngster ... I was disgusted by the self-overestimation and the hauteur of men. Their condescending and disdainful way of treating women, especially their own wives - all this disgusted me. When I had become an adult I swore to myself that I would never allow a man to limit my personal freedom - as far as that is possible in the given circumstances, in a men’s state.’

  Cropped short and ready to face the

  world: Dr Anita Augspurg.

  Augspurg, too, began her professional life in a men’s state: she helped in her father’s law practice while following a teacher training course. Soon, however, this very conventional trajectory seemed dispiritingly bleak. She took acting classes and worked in theatres in Germany and the Netherlands but was discouraged by the obvious expectations of acting roles according to established patterns. Abandoning her stage career, she moved to the bohemian Munich of Fanny von Reventlow fame, where she and another woman, Sophie Goudstikker, took a flat together, ran a photo studio and gloried in the scandalous reputation they quickly acquired:

  The fact that two women in their early thirties were living together, were successful in business and claimed their independence, two women with short hair - think of it, in the eighties of the last [nineteenth] century - that they kept stimulating, interesting company in their home and publicly fought for women’s liberation; two women who engaged in sports, rode horses and bicycles, went rambling and generally lived as they pleased - all this caused great consternation in Munich.

  The photo studio, Atelier Elvira, soon became a magnet for the Munich Bohème and for a time it was the most fashionable place to have oneself photographed. Even the Bavarian heir apparent chose to have his portrait taken here. Augspurg, however, was feeling restless once more. Her relationship with Sophie Goudstikker was coming to an end and she was hungry for new challenges. In 1893 she moved to Zurich, home of the only German-speaking university that granted full degrees to women, and read law, graduating four years later and becoming Germany’s first female legal scholar and doctor iuris.

  By this time, Augspurg was already a seasoned political activist who had worked for causes ranging from girls’ education to the regulation of legal prostitution. She moved to Berlin, where she set up house with Lida Gustava Heymann to continue her political work, editing the newspaper Zeitschrift für Frauenstimmrecht (Newspaper for Women’s Suffrage). Augspurg’s activism reflected her admiration for the British suffragettes, which she also expressed by attending the Hyde Park meeting in 1908.

  Augspurg had long understood that rational arguments were falling on deaf ears among Germany’s power elite. So she chose provocation to make her message understood. In 1905, for instance, she publicly called for a marriage boycott, arguing that no self-respecting woman could abide the loss of legal rights to property and self-determination that occurred when she signed a marriage contract: ‘her urge for self-preservation, her self-respect and her claim for respect from her husband make common-law marriage the only option,’ she declared, enumerating the obstacles making it all but impossible to live as a self-determined woman: ‘You want to rent a work space for your professional work and the landlord asks for your husband’s consent and wants to conclude the contract with him ... You go to a bank where you want to pay in your earnings or take out money, and people have the effrontery to demand your husband’s signature.’

  In deciding on key issues for their campaigns, the activists were spoilt for choice. A Swedish art student arrested as a prostitute for walking unaccompanied by a man was one case they publicized (Augspurg managed to get herself arrested by a suspicious policeman just to prove the point); another was the truly horrifying case of a fifteen-year-old housemaid who had been gang-raped by four young men on an island in the river Elbe. The rapists were tried by a Hamburg court and acquitted because the judge found the girl was ‘no longer innocent’, having already had sexual relations with one of her assailants on a previous occasion. Augspurg’s angry public denunciation of the judge as ‘a brutal beast’ resulted in a fine for insulting a court of law.

  Like many radical feminists later in the century, Augspurg regarded sex almost exclusively as a form of male oppression, a ‘sexual slavery weighing directly on some and indirectly on all women’, an analysis that drove her to adopt a position not far removed from that of the Catholic Church: ‘Sexuality is designed by nature exclusively for the purpose of maintaining and improving the race, but in our culture it has become a purpose in itself ... it has become depraved and depraving, ruining and destroying our race.’

  While Augspurg and Heymann were middle-class women claiming their rights not only to full citizenship, but also to full personal, intellectual and sexual self-expression, the problems facing women looked different from a working-class background. German socialism had embraced women’s emancipation ever since socialist leader August Bebel had published his study Die Frau im Sozialismus (Woman under Socialism, 1879), which sold more than 150,000 copies before the War.

  Bebel’s insight that ‘woman became a slave before the first slave existed’ was a challenge to society and defined the approach the German socialist movement would take on this question. It would not be enough to fight for women’s rights in isolation, for: ‘the true nature of society and its laws, which are at the bottom of this development, must be understood before a movement for the elimination of these unjust circumstances can be envisaged with any chance of success.’ The emancipation of women, in other words, was only a detail of the great class struggle, and to follow it too singlemindedly was nothing but a bourgeois distraction from the central question. The socialist activist and labour leader Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) followed Bebel’s analysis. Socialism, she said, demanded first a classless society which would quite naturally bring about the emancipation of women. Zetkin dismissed feminist activists as bourgeoises, clinging on to their class privilege instead of joining the fight for universal justice, but her own engagement for women’s rights and fairer women’s legislation and her position at the head of the 175,000-strong socialist women’s movement made her the leader of Europe’s largest feminist organization in all but name.

  While the political effectiveness of feminists in the German Reich was hampered by the split between women’s campaigners and socialist thinking on women’s rights, feminists in Habsburg Vienna were able to push the boundaries of debate even further. Despite considerable opposition, feminism flourished in Austria-Hungary. The culture of the Danubian empire was characterized by an unusual intensity of debate, and Viennese society (much like its Paris equivalent) gave more prominence and cultural presence to extraordinary women, be it the peace activist Bertha von Suttner, the scandalous and scandalously attractive Alma Mahler, the feminist novelist Rosa Mayreder, the educationalist Eugenie Schwarzwald, or intellectual hostesses and patronesses such as Berta Zuckerkandl - not to mention Eleonora Duse and other stars of theatre and opera who were followed with almost idolatrous fervour.

  The feminist
thought growing out of this climate was often radical, and directed not only against women’s social, economic and legal inequality but also against their ideological preconceptions. The spirited writer Grete Meisel-Hess (1879-1922), for instance, took the fight to the opposition by attacking the two gods of anti-feminists, Otto Weininger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Born into a wealthy Prague family and trained (as a guest student, the only possibility open to women) at Vienna University, Meisel-Hess took the fight to the opposition by analysing male attitudes. The more questionable passages in the works of Nietzsche, whose hatred of women had had a profound effect throughout Europe, were given short shrift: ‘Even great minds have an experience no more than five fingers broad; directly next to it, thinking stops and the indefinite empty space of stupidity begins.’

  A capable philosopher, Meisel-Hess attacked the pillars of anti-feminist received opinion. She wasted no time in deconstructing the often deranged mixture of anti-semitism, misogyny and pseudo-science underpinning Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, and launched into her own ambitious analysis of sexuality in Western society. Weininger and Nietzsche were prime witnesses, if not in the sense they themselves would have wished. ‘The greater part of civilized humanity,’ she wrote in her path-breaking study, Die sexuelle Krise (The Sexual Crisis, 1909), ‘suffers ... from this laborious suppression of a natural emotional state…Sexual psychosis is thus also the most widely spread pathological consequence of our sexual misery.’

  Spirited opposition: Grete Meisel-Hess

  had little trouble taking apart

  Weininger’s bestselling rant.

  Western culture, Meisel-Hess argued, had steered humanity away from a natural approach to sexual impulses untainted by power and property relations. The same system, teaching children humanist values and moral purity, yet separating emotion from action, also forced women into sexual slavery or abstinence. At the same time, it pushed men into sexual relations with prostitutes, which were not only dangerous to their health but also morally barren. All sexual relations were thus tainted by the logic of possession and the suppression of women, and even the act of creation itself was turned into dead lust: ‘Capitalism permits the young man to save up a few marks to be able now and then to go to the prostitute and pour his healthy, live-giving seed into her artificially sterilized womb ... [Capitalism] quite simply emasculates the citizens of this society.’

  Like Gretel Meisel-Hess, the feminist writer Rosa Mayreder (we have encountered her already) thought that the resolution of the ‘sexual question’ lay in overcoming modern stereotypes. This would result in full sexual emancipation for women and men who were each, in their way, victims of a harmful and unnatural moral system. Mayreder was the daughter of an innkeeper who was wealthy enough to send his children to good schools and who encouraged his precocious girl to study with her brothers. A striking photograph shows the sixteen-year-old girl in a conventional 1880s studio pose, standing between the unavoidable potted palm complete with ornamental muse and a monstrously historicist writing table, her body strapped into a dark velvet dress and turned away to display her hip-long hair, chastely woven into a plait. Her face radiates inquisitive intelligence. Mayreder’s own artistic interests - she was an accomplished watercolourist and wrote several novellas as well as the libretto for an opera by the Viennese composer Hugo Wolff - quickly led her to realize the strictly limited circle of activities allowed to a bourgeois girl, whose ambitions might be indulged, but never taken seriously. Her energetic engagement in both socialist politics and the women’s movement soon made her an important exponent of both, and her articles in national newspapers established her as a fierce debater.

  With the power of reason: Rosa

  Mayreder, one of the most lucid critics

  of male values.

  In 1905, Mayreder published Kritik der Weiblichkeit (Critique of Femininity) in which she summarized her thinking on female and male sexual identities. While Mayreder’s eloquent analysis of the social and sexual subjugation of women and their necessary emancipation followed a conventional pattern, her understanding of the role given to men made her argument all the more controversial. The present situation, she argued, let men have the whip hand, but at the price of distorting their emotional life to a terrible degree and forcing them, and ultimately all society, into a blind veneration of a long-superseded, heroic masculinity: ‘Like an old divine idol which is still publicly venerated and honoured with the necessary sacrifices even if it has long since ceased to perform its miracles, the concept of masculinity still holds its place in our modern culture. The conceptual content connected with this idol is filled with remnants of past times, with leftovers of former circumstances.’

  Men, Mayreder wrote, were selectively blind when it came to analysing this feature of their minds: ‘many outstanding men, whose spiritual tendency is usually liberal, are Philistines when it comes to women. The reasons for this lie in the nature of a particular kind of masculinity; it is an eroticism [i.e. a sexual, gender identity] which is conducive to normative violence.’ Man the warrior was simply no longer needed in a modern society, in which even manual labour often required little physical prowess, and yet men were required to adhere to an ideal they could no longer fulfil:

  Even the work of a man has been replaced by the machine. The machine worker is a mere executor of a particular movement, which could just as well be done by women and children ... The ‘strong fist’, which under other conditions was crucial and formed the legal foundation of his dominion, has become entirely superfluous. But even while modern life is restricting the effectiveness of primitive masculinity more with every passing day ... the barbaric evaluation continues to exist in our morals and social norms. The military is still regarded as the first social order.

  To be masculine ... as masculine as possible ... that is the true distinction in their [men’s] eyes; they are insensitive to brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if only it coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.

  We will only know what women really are once we stop imposing on them what they are supposed to be.

  Civilization feminized men by making the lives of men and women more alike: ‘culture and education close the gap between men and women, feminize men, make him anti-virile. The more culture grows and grows sophisticated, the more the anti-virile influences are on the increase.’

  Mayreder evoked the worst nightmares preached by the philosophers of degeneracy and the theoreticians of male strength: ‘civilization - almost exclusively the work of male intelligence - has been a process in which men themselves worked for the destruction of masculinity,’ she concluded, and connected this analysis with the sickness of the day: ‘The office, the workplace, the professional practice, the atelier - they are all coffins of masculinity. But the monumental mausoleum is the city itself ... all influences of city life are conspiring to increase the sickness most opposed to the character of masculinity: nervous exhaustion.’

  Backlash

  Society is never static, and the balance of freedom and power between the sexes has swung throughout history, from the relative independence women enjoyed in the Elizabethan age, to their almost total repression two centuries later; but never before had so much changed so suddenly and with such force. It was a transformation that was as sweeping as it was pervasive, affecting the personal relationships and lives of each and every one, and all the more powerful as it was not immediately and conveniently conceptualized within traditional frameworks of reference. It did not express itself in the rise of a new religion, a new state or a new prophet; instead, it transformed societies and individuals from within, and all the more lastingly.

  This hidden revolution had occurred with astonishing speed, accelerating the pull into the cities and the creation of new social realities that had begun in the middle of the nineteenth century and had become an entirely new force towards the 1890s and the early 1900s. Within less than a generation, most received truths about the social order and
the roles of the sexes had been invalidated. Among the millions of women who did not become feminists or who were even hostile to feminist ideas, there was hardly one whose life was not affected, whether by taking a job, by having access to a rudimentary education, or by choosing to have fewer children than their mothers and grandmothers had.

  There was a backlash, of course. The number of anti-feminist tracts and associations (some of them actively supported by women) was legion, and many careers were made by raging against the new ‘unwomanly’ breed of women, against a loss of traditional values, against modernity in all its forms. In the eyes of its opponents, women’s emancipation became associated with other perceived ills of the new order.

  The main exponent of the scientific line of attack on women’s newly awakened ambitions was the German psychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius (1853-1907), whose magnum opus Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the Physiological Imbecility of Women, 1900) went through several editions before the War. Relying on measurements of male and female brains and their different parts, Möbius claimed that nature herself had created women exclusively for birth and childcare, rendering their little brains so feeble in other respects as to be almost useless. This argument was hardly new, but its scientific discourse and the depth of supposed proof was greeted as a breakthrough by those who wished to consign women to Home and Hearth.

  The most vicious opposition to women came from Vienna. We have already encountered the misogyny of the brilliant journalist Karl Kraus and his resentment against Eugenie Schwarzwald, but it was as nothing compared to the mania of Otto Weininger (1880-1903), a Jewish doctoral student who one day (probably in 1902) appeared on the doorstep of the Jewish doctor Sigmund Freud and asked him to read a manuscript, a book based on his dissertation. Freud was shocked by what he read and counselled the young man never to publish his work. Weininger published the book anyway, under the title Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). His chaotic and hate-fuelled diatribe became an instant bestseller.