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Toby Axelrod
Prayers by "Anna O" - See Light
of Day
As hundreds of thousands of Christians prepare to converge on Berlin for an historic ecumenical conference, a small volume of Jewish prayers -- in German and English -- is awaiting them.
The book, “Bertha Pappenheim: Gebete / Prayers,” represents a new lease on life for the mystical writings of a German Jewish activist better known to some as the famous "hysterical" patient of Sigmund Freud, “Anna O.” Today, she is credited by some as a co-creator of the so-called “talking cure” of psychoanalysis. To others she is remembered as a founder of the Jewish women’s movement in Germany. Pappenheim died in 1936 at the age of 67.
Two years before her death, and one year after the Nazis came to power, Pappenheim wrote a "Prayer of Fear," in which she said she did not fear death but rather that life "be cut short (God forbid) with evil intent, before it has looked up, once at least to the eternal God."
“Bertha Pappenheim is really a figure in Jewish history of importance in her time and today,” said Elisa Klapheck, who edited the volume together with Lara Daemmig. Newly released by the publishing company Hentrich & Hentrich, based in Teetz, Germany, the bilingual book was launched in time for the third Bet Debora conference for Jewish Women in Europe, which Daemmig and Klapheck also organized.
It was years ago that Daemmig “stumbled on the prayers of Bertha Pappenheim in the library” of the Berlin Jewish community center. “They hit a nerve.” She said she had always been inspired by American Jewish feminists, but was moved by the discovery that “there was also a feminist movement in Germany, before the Shoah, to which we could relate.” Pappenheim, who practiced traditional Judaism -- founded the precursor of Germany’s Jewish welfare council, and was a champion of women's right to vote as synagogue members. She was “single, self-sufficient, and incredibly productive,” Daemmig said.
Pappenheim’s prayers are more like poems, expressing a mystical bond to Judaism and a commitment to Jewish causes. In one, she prays for “the strength to protest, again and again, in angry indignation, against every injustice!” In another, she asks for the “strength to serve, in speech, silence and action, as long as I live, so that I may be honorably entitled to the small bit of earth beside your grave, Mother! Amen”
The prayers deserve to be well-known, said Daemmig and Klapheck. Pappenheim’s prayers were published three times, but only after her death in 1936. A German-English version came out in New York in 1946. In all, she wrote some 2,000 prayers and mystical texts. Most were lost when Hannah Karminski, the friend and collaborator who inherited Pappenheim’s archive, was deported and murdered by the Nazis in 1942.
Among Pappenheim's published works were a translation into German of the diary of the 17th century German Jewish woman Glueckel von Hameln, and of the “Tsena U’reena,” a so-called “Bible for women,” originally written in Yiddish.
The current volume is based on the first publication of 1936.
For information about the book contact HentrichHentrich@aol.com
(Berlin, May 26)
Toby Axelrod - Germany correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Jewish Chronicle, lives in Berlin