Bertha Pappenheim was an Austrian-Jewish feminist, a social pioneer, and the founder of the Jewish Women's Association (Jüdischer Frauenbund). Under the pseudonym Anna O., she was also one of Josef Breuer's best documented patients because of Freud's writing on Breuer's case.
Background
Bertha Pappenheim was born on 27 February 1859 in Vienna as the third daughter of Siegmund Pappenheim and Recha Pappenheim. Her father Sigmund, (1824–1881) a merchant, was the son of an Orthodox Jewish family from Preßburg (today's Bratislava, Slovakia), then Austria-Hungary and was the cofounder of the Orthodox Schiffschul in Vienna; the family name alludes to the Franconian town of Pappenheim. Her mother Recha, née Goldschmidt (1830–1905), was from Frankfurt am Main. Her mother came from an old and wealthy Frankfurt family. As "just another daughter" in a strictly traditional Jewish household, Bertha was conscious that her parents would have preferred a male child. Kaplan, M. A. (1979). Both families came from traditional Jewish marriage views and had roots in Orthodox Judaism. Bertha was raised in the style of well-bred young ladies of good class. She attended a Roman Catholic girls' school and led a life structured by the Jewish holiday calendar and summer vacations in Ischl.
Education
When she was 8 years old her oldest sister Henriette (1849–1867) died of "galloping consumption." When she was 11 the family moved from Vienna's Leopoldstadt, which was primarily inhabited by poverty-ridden Jews, to Liechtensteinstraße in the 9th District Alsergrund. She left school when she was sixteen, devoted herself to needlework and helped her mother with the kosher preparation of their food. Her 18-month-younger brother Wilhelm (1860–1937) was meanwhile attending high school, which made Bertha intensely jealous.
Career
In November 1888, when she was twenty-nine and after her convalescence, she and her mother moved to Frankfurt am Main. Their family environment was partially Orthodox and partly liberal. In contrast to their life in Vienna they became involved in art and science, and not only in charitable work. The Goldschmidt and Oppenheim families were well known as collectors and patrons of the arts and lent their support to scientific and academic projects, particularly during the founding of Frankfurt University.
In this environment, Bertha Pappenheim intensified her literary efforts (her publications began in 1888 and were initially anonymous; they later appeared under the pseudonym "P. Berthold") and became involved in social and political activities. She first worked in a soup kitchen and read aloud in an orphanage for Jewish girls run by the Israelitischer Frauenverein (Israelite Women's Association). In 1895 she was temporarily in charge of the orphanage, and one year later became its official director. During the following 12 years she was able to orient the educational program away from the one and only goal of subsequent marriage to training with a view to vocational independence.
In 1895, a plenary meeting of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (ADF) (General German Women's Association) took place in Frankfurt. Pappenheim was a participant and later contributed to the establishment of a local ADF group. In the following years she began—first of all in the journal Ethische Kultur (Ethical Culture) to publish articles on the subject of women's rights. She also translated Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."
Bertha Pappenheim was the founder or initiator of many institutions, including kindergartens, community homes and educational institutions. She considered her life's work to be the Neu-Isenburg orphanage for Jewish girls (Mädchenwohnheim Neu-Isenburg).
After she gave a speech at the Israelitischer Hilfsverein (Israelite Women's Aid Association) in 1901, a women's group was formed with the goal of coordinating and professionalizing the work of various social initiatives and projects. This group was first a part of the Israelitischer Hilfsverein, but in 1904 became an independent organization, Weibliche Fürsorge (Women's Relief).
Starting around 1906 Pappenheim had the goal of founding a refuge to help illegitimate girls and/or Jewish women endangered by prostitution and traffic in women, where she could implement the theories she had developed on Jewish social work. This home was to be operated on the following principles:
In contrast to traditional Jewish charities, modern social work should be undertaken, focusing on education and training for an independent life.
In accord with the principle of "follow-up aid," former home inhabitants' progress through life was to be monitored for an extended period to avert renewed negligence.
The home should not be "an establishment caring for juveniles in the legal sense, no monument in stone to some foundation, with inscriptions, votive tablets, corridors, dormitories and dining halls, an elementary school, a detention room and cells, and a dominating director's family, but rather a home, although it can be only a surrogate for the proper raising of children in their own families, which was preferable."
The residents should become involved in Jewish tradition and culture.
The home should be kept simple, so that the residents become familiar with the realities and requirements of a lower middle class household.
Louise Goldschmidt, a relative of Pappenheim's mother, made available a pair of semi-detached houses where a girl's home could be established in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt am Main with all its clinics and social institutions. In contrast to Prussian Frankfurt, Hessian Neu-Isenburg's less rigid laws also had advantages for stateless persons.
After her mother died in 1905 Bertha Pappenheim lived alone for many years without a private attachment. "Mir ward die Liebe nicht" ("Love did not come to me"), she lamented in a poem dated 1911. In 1924 a close friendship began with the 40 years younger Hannah Karminski when Hannah took over the leadership of the Jüdischer Mädchenclub (Jewish Girl's Club). Both women spent their free time together as far as possible. When in 1925 Karminski moved for a time to Berlin, they wrote to each other almost daily.
Whilst on a trip in Austria in 1935, she donated two of her collections (lace and small cast iron objects) to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. From Vienna she traveled on to Ischl. While traveling her general condition deteriorated and she was taken to the Israelite Hospital in Munich. During an operation which took place there it was determined that she had a malignant tumor. Despite her illness she traveled, at the end of 1935, to Amsterdam in order to meet Henrietta Szold, the head of Youth Aliyah, and again to Galicia, to advise the Beth Jacob Schools. After returning to Frankfurt her suffering increased and she became bedridden. She also had jaundice.
During her last few days of life, she was summoned for questioning by the state police station in Offenbach, the reason being denunciation by a Christian employee of the home. A feeble-minded girl had made a derogatory comment about Adolf Hitler. Pappenheim refused to appear at the hearing because of poor health. After the hearing on 16 April 1936, for which she calmly but firmly supplied information regarding the accusation, no further steps were taken on the part of the police.
She died on 28 May 1936, cared for until the end by her friend Hannah Karminski, and was buried next to her mother in the Rat Beil Strasse Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt.
After the death of Bertha Pappenheim the work in Neu-Isenburg could continue essentially unhindered until the 1936 Olympic Games. In 1937 the children residing in the home were no longer allowed to attend the Neu-Isenburg elementary school and had to be transported daily to the Jewish school in Frankfurt. In 1938 the Isenburg branch of the NSDAP instigated the closure of the home.
On 10 November 1938, one day after the November Pogrom (Reichskristallnacht), the home was attacked. The main building was set afire and burned down, and the other buildings were wrecked. On 31 March 1942 the home was disbanded by the Gestapo. The remaining residents were deported to the concentration camp in Theresienstadt, where many died. On 9 December 1942 Hannah Karminski was brought to the extermination camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau where she was murdered on 4 June 1943.
Politics
At the first German conference on combating traffic in women held in Frankfurt in October 1902, Bertha Pappenheim and Sara Rabinowitsch were asked to travel to Galicia to investigate the social situation there. In her 1904 report about this trip, which lasted several months, she described the problems that arose from a combination of agrarian backwardness and early industrialization as well as from the collision of Hasidism and Zionism.
At a meeting of the International Council of Women held in 1904 in Berlin, it was decided to found a national Jewish women's association. Similar to the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (BDF) (Federation of German Women's Associations) co-founded by Helene Lange in 1894, the intent was to unite the social and emancipatory efforts of Jewish women's associations. Bertha Pappenheim was elected the first president of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, JFB (League of Jewish Women) and was its head for 20 years, contributing to its efforts until her death in 1936. The JFB joined the BDF in 1907. Between 1914 and 1924 Pappenheim was on the board of the BDF.
On the one hand the goals of the JFB were feminist—strengthening women's rights and advancing the gainful employment of Jewish women and on the other hand they were in accordance with the traditional goals of Jewish philanthropy practical charity as a divine precept. Integrating these different objectives was not always easy for Pappenheim. A particular objection was that in her battle against traffic in women she not only spoke openly about Jewish women as victims, but also about Jewish men as perpetrators. She criticized how women were perceived in Judaism, and as a member of the German feminist movement she demanded that the ideal of equal rights for women be realized also within Jewish institutions. She was particularly concerned about education and job equality.
A statement she made at the first JFB delegate assembly in 1907 – "under Jewish law a woman is not an individual, not a personality; she is only judged and assessed as a sexual being" – prompted a violent nationwide reaction on the part of Orthodox rabbis and the Jewish press. The existence of the conditions Pappenheim criticized — traffic in women, neglect of illegitimate Jewish orphans — was denied, and she was accused of "insulting Judaism." Also politically liberal and emancipated Jews had a patriarchal and traditionalistic attitude about women's rights.
Views
What is known of Bertha’s early development comes largely from Joseph Breuer’s famous essays in Studie in Hysteria
(1908), compiled with Sigmund Freud. In one essay Pappenheim is identified as “Anna O.,” a case-study of hysteria — a young woman suffering from psychosomatic paralysis following the stress of nursing her father during his final illness. The care she received from Breuer ended inconclusively; his understanding of the transference that had taken place during treatment was limited.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Between 1880 and 1882 Bertha Pappenheim was treated by Austrian physician Josef Breuer for a variety of nervous symptoms that appeared when her father suddenly became ill. Breuer kept his then-friend Sigmund Freud abreast of her case, informing his earliest analysis of the origins of hysteria.
