attractive to all. Jean Paul and Schiller came to her salon
when in Berlin; famous foreigners, like Mirabeau, Madame
de Stae'l, etc., visited her; the celebrities of Berlin were
her constant guests, e.g., the brothers Humboldt, the poet
Arndt, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, the Duchess of
Courland; foremost among all, Schleiermacher, who had a
fantastic devotion and friendship for her; and Borne, who
for a time loved her passionately.
The same personages and many others, especially for-
eign diplomats, artists, and noblemen, enlivened also the
house of Rahel Levin, who in 1814 became the wife of
the author Varnhagen von Ense. Rahel was not beautiful,
or especially scholarly, but she was noble, helpful, and
good; she was original, attractive, had the charm of "Attic
salt" in her conversation, and understood how to listen as
well as how to talk. As she had in her youth studied the
poet Novalis and the patriot-philosopher Fichte, so later
she studied Hegel's philosophy. She won the friendship
of such men as Ranke and Prince Puckler. Her attract-
iveness did not depend upon her youth, for, according to
the word of a lady of highest nobility, Jenny von Gustedt,
"she touched with her philosophy life itself, her thought
became deed, as she aroused with her spirit the spark of
soul-life in others, as she tried to destroy pettiness in all
hearts, as she awakened great things in the hearts of men
without abandoning the delicacy of womanliness, thus she
stood with full practical knowledge in the midst of practical
life, helping, counselling, comforting, careless of thanks or
ingratitude, the genuine, pure, German woman."
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 335
Such was the origin of the modern German salon, and
its origin explains its complex character. The German
salon became a permanency; and even though it never
attained the brilliancy of the French salon, yet it was
more intellectual and had greater literary effect. The
house of Amalie von Hellwig was a centre for courtiers,
scholars, and artists, one of whom, A. B. Marx, wrote an
interesting account of social life in Berlin. Other distin-
guished circles are reported, in which music, a never failing
charm in Berlin, was the principal attraction. The opera
passed through a period of bloom. Spontini's and Weber's
masterpieces were performed by excellent singers, like
Anna Milder-Hauptmann, who, in Berlin, created the r61e
of Fidelio. The theatre brought into popular prominence
the works of the great German dramatists; great actresses
arose, like Sophie Muller, who played in a masterful way
Emilia Galotti and roles from the works of Calderon and
Shakespeare; Amalie Wolff, trained in Goethe's school, a
masterly exponent of Iphigenie; Louise Rogee, later Holtei's
wife, the incomparable performer of Kleist's Katchen von
Heilbronn; Charlotte von Hagen (1809-1891), a beautiful
woman and true artist, who celebrated immense triumphs,
and was adored by the great and beloved by the women.
The greatest of all, however, was Auguste During (1795-
1865), who for fifty years ruled the German stage, "in
the world of boards that signify life." Henriette Sonntag
(1803-1854) was considered the most beautiful and most
gifted singer. By the charm of her voice and the perfec-
tion of her acting she conquered all hearts. In no other
fields has Germany produced so many and so great women
as she has in those of the stage, of music, and of song.
To appreciate, however, the ethical character of Ger-
man woman we must return once more to the years of
Germany's greatest political degradation.
336 WOMAN
At no time did the character of German womanhood
shine in a more glorious light than in the sorrowful years
of political upheaval and the trials of the years of humilia-
tion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When
Germany lay prostrate under the heel of Napoleon, the
standard of national honor was upheld by princely women,
like the never forgotten Louisa of Prussia, and the other
Louisa of Saxe-Weimar, Goethe's friend, who changed
Napoleon's plan of crushing out the existence of her duchy,
and concerning whom Napoleon himself confessed to his
suite: " This is a woman whom our two hundred cannons
could not frighten!" The years of trial, distress, and again
the rising of the nation, the struggle for liberation, saw gen-
uine heroism, superhuman sacrifices by German women of
all estates and of all classes. Nothing but the enthusiasm
and the patriotism of the women at that epoch could have
inspired the men to their heroism, self-abnegation, and
suffering. Niebuhr, the great historian, calls the conduct
of the German women admirable. All pleasures were
given up, tender and distinguished women exposed their
lives to the lazaretto, washed, cooked, mended, laid down
their money, their jewels, nay, even their beautiful hair
on the altar of the fatherland. Mothers sent their sons,
sisters their brothers, brides their bridegrooms, to the holy
war. Many, forgetting their sex, seized rifle and sword,
and fought against the oppressor. Scherr gives many
names: Johanna Stegen, Johanna Luring, Lotte Kriiger,
Dorothea Sawosch, Karoline Petersen, and the heroine
Prohaska, who, in male attire, bravely fought in Lutzow's
famous corps of volunteers. Liitzow and the heroic Pro-
haska were severely wounded in the victorious battle of
the Gorde (September 16, 1813). When she was to be
bandaged on the battlefield, she for the first time revealed
her sex so that her modesty might be spared. She died
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 337
three days later, and was buried amid a concourse of
citizens and maidens in the town of Danneberg, where a
monument was erected at the church in her honor.
That deeds of heroism were done by German women
outside of the battlefield, appears from many sources and
particularly from Goethe's song of praise for the glory of
Johanna Sebus, a maiden of seventeen years, who, during
the flooding of the Rhine, January 13, 1809, saved first
her mother, then returned to save a neighbor and her
children, and then was herself swept away by the flood.
In the face of such proofs of heroism, we count but
lightly against German womanhood a number of degraded
women of noble, even princely birth, who helped to make
such courts as that of Jer6me of Westphalia abodes of
licentiousness. In German cities, especially in Berlin,
where the conquerors were quartered, German ladies con-
ducted themselves "with much dignity, and such reserve
as was becoming them toward the enemies of their fathers,
husbands, and brothers." Only the dregs of society were
at the disposal of the invaders. Voss reports that "the
frequentation of the temples of lust was so great that
the number of Venus's priestesses was found to be too
small." The shamelessness of vile women became in-
tolerable. Unnatural vices arose, and continued despite
the severity of the law, which the police strove to enforce
rigidly.
During the years of reconstruction, however, which car-
ried with them the social liberation of the peasant-serfs
and the Jews, the autonomy of the communes unavoidably
produced a mighty advance in the emancipation of women.
The frivolity and immorality of Romanticism, which ap-
peared barefaced in Schlegel's Lucinde and in the lives of
almost all the romanticists in their intercourse with women,
was indignantly rejected in those troubled times, and a
338 WOMAN
return to simple virtue, chastity, and housewifely qualities
was preached and inaugurated. German youths began to
yearn for pure and pious women, such as had fought in
male attire for the fatherland, or healed the wounded
patriots in the hospitals, or worked, suffered, and sacri-
ficed fortune, comfort, and personal interests for the holy
cause.
In the thirties of the nineteenth century, however, there
was again, in the so-called Young-German movement, a
retrogression to the lax morality of the first romanticists.
The moral code of abstinence was represented as an anti-
quated conventionality, and the emancipation of the flesh
was preached. Naturally the emancipation of woman be-
came a principle of the new doctrine. Again Rahel Levin,
the spirited Jewess, and Bettina Brentano (wife of Arnim),
the free patrician, led the campaign, and added to arts and
letters the fields hitherto alone accessible to women
politics and religion. Freedom from the bonds of conven-
tion, liberation from social limitations, was the aim of the
advanced women. They preached the extreme cultivation
of their own individuality. They recognized only the per-
fection of love and beauty. The most earnest exponent
of that exaggerated doctrine was Charlotte Stieglitz, who,
to arouse her weakling husband from his indifference,
committed suicide. By her voluntary death she wished
to elevate him to activity, to heroism; desiring greatness
for him, she thought she must inflict upon him a profound
pain. Such exaltation and unnaturalness proves what an
abyss threatens even the noblest woman when she once
leaves the path of the normal. But to the Young Germans
Charlotte Stieglitz became the heroine of the movement in
which she had part. Theodor Mundt (died 1861) became
the principal exponent of that unsound movement in Berlin.
He was an author of repute, but is to us more important as
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 339
the husband of the celebrated authoress Luise Muhlbach,
a serene, active, inspiring hostess, whose house became
in the forties a centre of literary sociability in Berlin. She
was also the writer of many historical novels, all of which
are of great interest, though some are of doubtful value.
How confused the moral code of that time was appears,
for instance, from Gutzkow's recommendation of a reform.
He says: "Be not ashamed of passion, and do not take
morality as an institution of the State! . . . The sole
priest who shall bind the hearts, shall be a moment of
rapture, not the Church with its ceremonies and well-
groomed servants. . . . "
Saint-Simonism carried those licentious maxims to the
extreme. Thus, the legitimate aspirations of woman to
be freed from the fetters of the Middle Ages were, from
the beginning, severely injured by lack of moderation.
Instead of a claim for a systematic raising of the standards
of education, impossible demands were made: immediate
admission of women to the universities (without prepara-
tory training), political equality with men, participation
in the administration of the state, and even abolition of
the fetters of marriage. Of course, opposition arose
everywhere, and has neutralized or delayed even rightful
claims to this day. The aspirations for material indepen-
dence on the basis of free work succeeded to a certain
extent: women entered many walks of life hitherto closed
to them.
The most thoughtful and impressive champion of a
reasonable emancipation of woman was Fanny Lewald.
High moral earnestness and a clear intelligence pervade
her writings, which are, however, lacking in poetic feeling.
But she is a truly patriotic German woman who sees the
need of a practical evolution of woman's education and
activity in the interest of the entire nation. Her doctrine
340 WOMAN
is the assurance that the spread of culture will wipe out all
artificial differences of caste, religion, and sex, and thus
solve all the questions of a genuine, legitimate emanci-
pation.
Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn illustrates an opposite tendency
in the emancipation of woman. Born in a high sphere and
miseducated by a perverse father in the prejudices of her
station, she has a perverted view of her sisters of the people,
of their struggles and desires and possibilities. Only the
"noblesse," which is free from the cares of physical
needs, is to her worthy of higher endeavors. The world
of highborn womanhood alone attracts her attention. Her
study of this world culminates in her opposition to mar-
riage, which is to her an oppressive fetter, handicaps
the enjoyment of life, and, therefore, is in almost all her
novels the object of ridicule, and its abolition is recom-
mended. Her heroines are, therefore, sensuous egotists
who according to her own words seek nothing, wish for
nothing, desire nothing but their own satisfaction, without
regard to others. Thus, her novels, with their gospel of
barefaced selfishness, are frequently offensive, but the
atmosphere of "high society" has never been depicted
with such masterly and many-colored vivacity as by Ida
Hahn-Hahn.
The revolutionary year of 1848, which shattered many
cherished idols which she had formerly deemed eternal,
made a profound impression upon her. Under the influ-
ence of the eloquent Baron von Kettler, later Bishop of
Mainz, who explained to her the great social questions of
that stirring time, she became converted to Catholicism.
The haughty spoiled child of the world became an ex-
piating Magdalena; her work From Babylon to Jerusalem
(Mainz, 1851) presents a wonderfully interesting revela-
tion of a forceful and original heart. Instead of liberating
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 341
woman from the yoke of man, she now endeavors, through
the influence of the Catholic Church, to liberate sinful,
passionate mankind from earthly shackles. When she
died, in 1880, she left an immense amount of literature,
more or less valuable, but always intensely interesting to
the searcher of woman's soul and achievements.
Ida von Duringsfeld was a poet and novelist of consider-
able force. Her novels present strong characters and fine
descriptions of landscape and architecture; her translations
of Czech and Italian popular songs are excellent; her work
on Proverbs of the Germanic and Romance Peoples, pub-
lished by her in collaboration with her husband (Leipzig,
1875), is verv meritorious. What type of woman she
must have been appears from the fact that when she died
suddenly on a journey, her husband, unable to live without
her, killed himself the next day, to be buried beside her.
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 emanci-
pation, 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 ade-
quately 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
342 WOMAN
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 ener-
getic, 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 Biich-
ner, 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 univer-
sities 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,
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 343
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 per-
petuate 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 un-
natural, 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
344 WOMAN
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 re-
cesses 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 per-
meate 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 Gliick). 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 mar-
ble 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
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 345
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 Ger-
man 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
346 WOMAN
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 abso-
lutism 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 revo-
lution. Johanna Kinkel, wife of the excellent poet and
university professor Gottfried Kinkel, who was incarcer-
ated 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 hus-
band 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 encour-
agement of their husbands.
The changes in industrialism which began in the middle
of the nineteenth century began to produce the mass misery
of machinery with which the state was unable to cope.
Crises were inevitable. The workingmen, grouped in
industrial circles, deprived of the right of association for
common protection, were often abused by employers, who
had them entirely at their mercy. Wages were entirely
EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN 347
insufficient; Hungerlohne became a technical term; women