Britta Konz

Bertha Pappenheim - A New Look at the Concept of the Family

[German]

Bertha Pappenheim (1859 - 1936) a Jewish women’s rights activist known in the writings of Sigmund Freud as “Anna O”, was one of the co-founders of psychoanalysis. She also made a lasting impression on the history of the women’s movement and the lives of her Jewish women contemporaries. Her comprehensive social work was aimed at strengthening the Jewish community and promoting a return to more traditional ways of life.

With the founding of the Jewish Women’s Union (Jüdischer Frauenbund, the JFB) in 1904, Pappenheim set up an organisation specially tailored to representing the interests of Jewish women. The JFB was to have been an explicitly religious organisation and was, according to Ottilie Schönewald, conceived as a “Mission for the Jewish Woman’s World”. (Blätter des Jüdischen Frauenbundes [BJFB], Nr. 7/8, 1936, p. 8) Bertha Pappenheim was particularly dedicated to the fight against selling young girls and women into prostitution. She travelled to Eastern Europe to gather background information and speak with women directly affected by the problem.

Pappenheim linked her feminist convictions to her orthodox faith. For her, religion was a source of strength, motivation and direction for her work. She viewed her religious heritage as an obligation and a source of enrichment. For her, social work was the way she professed her Jewish beliefs. It was a mitzva, an imperative and duty of the entire Jewish community.

As a childless, orthodox Jewish woman, Bertha Pappenheim was concerned about how she could conform to the requirements in the Torah to establish a home and devote her life to being a link in a chain of dignified generations of families. Like many feminists of her time, Pappenheim accepted the idea that motherhood was a female role and tried to enumerate and expand the tasks related to it. But her views were also more refined. “Motherhood,” she wrote, “is ascribed to women, but this may make a woman unhappy. Motherhood is a primal instinct that a woman has, that even a virgin may experience.” (Denkzettel, 27 April 1919). Pappenheim emphasised that there was no child who could be foreign to a woman, which was why a childless or unmarried woman could experience motherly feelings and as a result had earned the same rights as married women.

Bertha Pappenheim also expanded the role of Jewish women in a religious context. She addressed the tradition of the “Priestess of the House” and the “Guardian of the Family”. She then enhanced the concepts by extending the definition of family to include both the Jewish community and the state, concluding that public life was a “natural sphere” of activity for Jewish women. As she wrote to Martin Buber in 1935, she viewed women as “creators” or “shapers of life”. Through the pain of labour and childbirth, they produced those who would follow, or were “next”. Women were to lead these followers and with untiring love, consciously admonish them to develop the seed of the divine within themselves.

Every child was sacred to Bertha Pappenheim. (BFJB, Nr. 7/8 1936, p. 12) For her, this made it imperative that a child remain whole in body and spirit and follow a godly path. She believed the hope for the Messiah would persist and be carried through the world in this way. The JFB home and orphanage was founded in 1907 in Neu-Isenburg and is said to be the heart of Bertha Pappenheim’s work. Some of her most significant religious and social goals were achieved within its walls. It was where she formulated her basic ideas and tenets for raising children. Pappenheim also donated a great deal of her wealth to the establishment. People on the fringes of Jewish society – former prostitutes, single mothers, young delinquent girls, difficult teenagers, children born out of wedlock and pogrom orphans found refuge in Neu-Isenburg. After the Nazis seized power, the home gained significance as a training centre for home economics and infant and childcare.

The home at Neu-Isenburg is viewed as the JFB’s answer to the process of social change in the nineteenth century. Bertha Pappenheim believed it was the “divine task of the Jews of the world to secure the ‘strength of the family’.” (BJFB, February 1929). She thought life in the home should have the character of a family and kindle longing for a traditional family. For that reason, the upbringing children received at the home was primarily oriented towards existing traditions. The teachers and childcare workers there tried to maintain the character of each Jewish holiday celebration. Life was conducted in strict observance of Jewish dietary rules and the religious calendar. As in a family, the residents of the home gathered around the table. But meals were conducted in a way designed to demonstrate their equality and promote life in a community. Even the girls received religious instruction and learned Hebrew and the traditional prayers.

But Neu-Isenburg also can be seen precisely as an alternative to traditional images of the family. There, women formed a community that did not fit the mores of the time. Jewish family traditions were experienced in a completely new context and, as a result, were being simultaneously reformed “from the inside out”. In contrast to the bourgeois nuclear family, Isenburg was to be a point of departure for, goal and champion of solidarity in the Jewish community. (Bertha Pappenheim, Die jüdische Frau, 1934). It formed a miniature of Beyt Israel or “the house of Israel” set in a larger public context. Bertha Pappenheim viewed the home as a path and the educational objectives pursued along it were to be continually analysed and revised.

On 28 May 1936, this path was violently disrupted when Bertha Pappenheim died shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo. More than two years later, on 9 November 1938, one of the complex’s four buildings was burned to the ground as the children looked on. In 1942, the children remaining at the home and their educators were deported and murdered in the concentration camps. The remaining buildings were placed at the disposal of the Hitler Youth. Today, the complex is a seminar center and memorial site.

Britta Konz (1972) studied Protestant theology in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. She currently is working on a dissertation about the piety and religious and political activities of Bertha Pappenheim and the Jewish Women’s Union (JFB).