Women of the Teutonic Nations

by Hermann Schoenfeld

The poisonous plant of the exaggerated emancipation movement appears in the works and life of Luise Aston, who impetuously demanded that all the barriers which custom, tradition, and artificial social contracts had erected should be broken down, for woman could fulfil her mission only in free love. When she tried to turn her theories into practice, she was successively exiled from seven German cities, and finally emigrated to Russia in 1855.

Besides this academic propaganda for woman's emancipation, a practical agitation of the question was carried on by a great number of pure-hearted and clear-headed women. They strove only for the possible. They began to teach that woman cannot emancipate herself by opposing natural laws, by becoming a Mann-weib (man-wife), as it is adequately expressed in German; but that she must retain all the peculiarly womanly traits, charms, and qualities, adding to them some art or science, trade or profession, by which she can support herself independently without being absolutely forced into marriage, good or bad, with or without her will. The leaders of this movement are consequently no fantastic dreamers or theorists, but energetic, earnest women. The novels of Julie Burow, Louise Otto, and others of their school, greatly influenced and aided the movement. Since their day the agitation has become universal: thousands and thousands of strong and earnest champions have arisen; we stand in the midst of the movement, in the smoke of the battlefield; yet, great things have been achieved; able women, like Luise Büchner, Lina Morgenstern, Hedwig Dohm, have not striven in vain. Breaches have been made in the walls of the sanctuaries heretofore reserved for men. Incited especially by American and Russian women, the women of Germany knock, and knock successfully, at the doors of the universities and academies. Even though they do not yet occupy academic chairs in German universities, as they do in America, they will do so in time. A Swedish university was the first to appoint a woman, Sonya Kovalevski, the great Russian mathematician, to a full professorship of this manliest of all sciences.

Thus far the outcome of the entire movement, however successful it has been, is yet undecided, especially owing to the modest reserve and conservatism of millions of women. This conservatism seems to be deeply rooted in the hearts of the vast majority of German women. They are, after all, happy in the old, primeval, original royalty of wifehood and motherhood, in the sweet leaning upon their complement, the beloved husband. Do they fear, perchance, lest their warlike sisters might drag them to the front, to unnatural battle, deprive them of their sweet, foreordained inheritance of man's love, protection, and fostering care? Has not their quiet, calm, and holy circle of activity, upon which all that is eternal in creation rests, which has been sanctified by custom, tradition, morality, and experience for thousands of years, blessed thousands, nay, millions of women, generation after generation? Had Saint Mary any other mission on earth or in heaven but love, infinite love, for the Christ, her Son? Has art ever been able to produce anything more beautiful, more divine, more touching, more powerful, than the Mother of God and the Christ-child, the symbol of every mother and every child? Do not the heavens in glorious constellations perpetuate the memory of great women? Is not the galaxy of women saints rich enough, and can it not be enriched still further for generation after generation to the end of the world? Is not well-nigh all the poetry that flows directly from the heart founded upon love, and indeed upon that love which is spontaneous, original, eternal? Forsooth, if there must be a change, it is a sorrowful change, due to the unnatural, complicated conditions of modern social life, but by no means due to the unanimous will of German women. The demon "physical hunger," the fear that there are not enough good men to go around, are the true motives of the emancipation movement with the masses of German women. The motives of the Ida Hahn-Hahns and the like are potent only with a few of the vast number of the women of Germany.

Thus it is but natural that the dangers of premature and ill-conceived emancipation soon aroused great and good German women who loved the best in the glorious past of Germany, the many models of German virtue, sacred simplicity, and blissful womanhood and motherhood, from Thusnelda to Queen Louisa of Prussia, and who were not eager for untried innovations. The very sight of the habits and nature of the new prophetesses, all of whom were abnormal in some respect, gave food for reflection. The strongest opposition to the movement was formed among women. It was women who warned against the modern gospel, who tried to divert attention from the loud and boisterous street, rostrum, and salon to the innermost recesses of the heart where woman's happiness secretly dwells, and to the bosom of family life where the children enliven the little world which is, after all, the great world in nucleo.

Foremost among the intellectual guardians of the noble traditions of old German life was Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff. Simplicity and an ardent religious feeling permeate her poetry, which she produced in abundance in spite of many obstacles put in the way of her intellectual pursuits by a prejudiced, bigoted, aristocratic family. Her poetry is rooted in the desire to induce the new "stormers" to cling to the old and tried German traditions of morality, faith, and patriarchal institutions. "Cling to thy friend, cling to thy word, cling to thy faith, cling to thyself," is her creed. "Who would exchange his blood for strange ichor (even though it were the blood of the gods)! Do not reject the Cherub of thy cradle; his wing will rustle to thee from every leaf! Do not suck dry the blood of thy heart, to animate therewith a bastard of thy soul."

Next important in her noble mission is Betty Paoli (Elizabeth Glück). Her thesis was: Church and society, fame and honor are the proper domain of man; woman can find her supreme happiness only in true, faithful, pure love for one man, and only once in life. Betty Paoli writes: "God has not sent me out, and has not given me the strength to aspire gloriously with a consecrated hand for the palm of victory. Let him be immortalized in marble and in brass who won them: I am nothing but a heart that has loved much and suffered much; and all my poetry is but an audible revelation of all the quiet pains of which a woman's soul is capable." According to her it is woman's destiny to subject her life to the magic charm of love, to sacrifice all her desires and inclinations to love: "My proud head defied boldly the lightning of the storm; but when thou saidst: 'I love thee!', I sank quiet and weeping at thy feet How weak am I!" In reality her happiness in love was short; the beloved one betrayed and deserted her; the deep sorrows of her heart find eloquent expression in touching and passionate melodies.

Luise Hensel's poems are simple and melodious, and are filled with a childlike humility. God and heaven are the motives of her song. There is a long series of women poets and novelists, who are defenders of the old faith, and whose works, though frequently insignificant, are yet noble monuments for German women of our own time who have offered a bold front to emancipation gone mad.

The impossibility of mentioning even the most eminent names of the German authors and poets is manifest when we consider the vast array of German women writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, catalogued by Schindel in a biographical work, published in Leipzig in 1823-1825; and in the two volumes of a Lexicon of German Women of the Pen by Sophie Pataky, which was issued in Berlin in 1898. A. Ungherini's Biography of Famous Women (Turin and Paris, 1892), also furnishes thousands of names of famous German women.

The inexhaustibleness of our theme leads us thus to abandon, even in the most general manner, the attempt at defining the impulses given by women to the poetry of the pure Suabian school of poets, to Uhland's veneration for woman, to Justinus Kerner's idealization of his wife Rickele, a model type of German hostess in whose vine-covered cottage many a weary poet's soul rested, as the deeply gifted, but profoundly unhappy Nicolaus Lenau. We forego to discuss the return of Mysticism which appears in Friederike Hauffe, the Seer of Prevorst; in the lives and loves of Heine, who was tossed on the storm waves of life by woman's love and hate, of Platen, of Immermann, whose passionate love for Elisa von Lutzow was finally converted to an almost ideal and platonic friendship; in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who, though an atheist himself, was led by his argumentation well-nigh to Saint Augustine's doctrine of woman being the vessel of sin.

We have to descend to the lower grades of society, and observe woman in poverty and degradation, to learn of the need of the endeavors to elevate her, to free her, and to put her on her own feet intellectually, socially, and morally. When the Revolution of 1848 knocked at the gates of absolutism in Germany, German women began to assert their inalienable rights. The struggles of men in higher domains were shared by many women, among them Frau Struve and Frau Herwegh, the wife of the passionate poet of the revolution. Johanna Kinkel, wife of the excellent poet and university professor Gottfried Kinkel, who was incarcerated as a revolutionist and clad in the striped clothing of a criminal, until rescued by his faithful student Karl Schurz, now a great American statesman, endured with her husband the martyrdom of want and exile. Johanna Scherr, wife of the historian of culture Johannes Scherr, is also one of the noblest types of able and modest women and heroines, who are strong in endurance and even in encouragement of their husbands.