Oh What Drama!: Turn-Of-The-Century Women on the German Stage

By Sigrid Scholtz Novak

Sigrid Scholtz Novak was born October 4, 1931 in Reichenbach, East Germany. She went to school in Breslau, Silesia, and after the war in Jever and Wilhelmshaven, North Germany. She studied in London and Paris before coming to America where she completed her studies at the Johns Hopkins University. There she earned an MA in Creative Writing (1968) and the Ph.D. in German (1972).

Images of Womanhood in the Plays of German Female Dramatists: 1892-1918 was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree.

She has taught literature and language at Wilson College in Pennsylvania; Mary Baldwin College, Virginia; the Abadan Institute of Technology in Abadan, Iran; the McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and the State University of Ceara, Brazil.

She is married to Richey A. Novak, Ph.D. Johns Hopkins.They are retired and live in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The couple has two sons, Rick and Walt.

Other books by the author include:

Meine Reise 1805-1812. Edition Temmen, Bremen, Germany, 1993 (in German)
My Travels 1805-1812: Travel Journal of the Clothshearer Johann David Scholtz (translation), AuthorHouse 2005.

Never Too Old for Adventure: Two Octogenarians Abroad. Sigrid Scholtz Novak and Richey Novak. AuthorHouse 2012
Many articles in professional journals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477239872

Sigrid Scholtz Novak

The Johns Hopkins Library holds a large collection of German-language plays which were published and performed between 1880 and 1920. While literary historians claimed that German women writers had contributed little to dramatic literature, this study shows that the opposite was the case: Within the Hopkins collection alone, I found some 50 dramas written by women. This study discusses their considerable contribution to the theatre repertoire of the time, primarily in their depiction of women’s difficult role in family and society, before German women gained the right to vote in 1918.

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© 2012 Sigrid Scholtz Novak. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 8/9/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-3986-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-3987-2 (e)

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Contents flower.pdf

Introduction

Chapter I: Childhood

Chapter II: The Adolescent Girl and the Family

Chapter III: Arranged Marriages

Chapter IV: The adolescent girl and society

Chapter V: From childhood to womanhood

Chapter VI: Marriage

Chapter VII: Selfless surrender or Hingabe

Chapter VIII: Motherhood

Chapter IX: Women employed outside the home

Summary and conclusion

Appendix I:

Appendix II:

Bibliography

I. List of authors and plays examined

II. List of works cited

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Introduction

Introduction

Chapter Page

This study is based on the Loewenberg collection of modern German plays in the library of the Johns Hopkins Universityi and will survey about fifty works by women dramatistsii published between the years 1892 and 1918. The overall aim of the study is to determine how these dramatists characterize women and woman’s role in family and society. Such an investigation seems desirable for a number of reasons: to determine the contributions of woman playwrights to the modern German theatre; to examine their positions within the struggle for woman’s rights in Germany; and to investigate their portrayal of the changing role of women during those crucial years.

Numerous studies have been made of male dramatists’ characterizations of women, but no one has thus far discussed women as seen exclusively from the point of view of female dramatists. Thirty-five dissertations, for example, were written in Germany between 1885 and 1960 on the women characters in plays by Kleist, Hebbel, Grillparzer, Gerhard Hauptmann, Wedekind, Schnitzler and others.iii However, I have been unable to find a single dissertation or study on female characters as drawn by women dramatists. This illustrates a total lack of interest by Germanists in the works of women dramatists. A partial explanation for this indifference is a the general assumption that women have made no significant contribution to the dramatic literature of Germany; indeed, even theorists of the stature of Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt believed in their youth that women by nature were incapable of producing dramatic works of high quality. The article on Frauendichtung in the reputable scholarly reference work Reallexijon der deutschen Literaturgeschichteiv continued to express this negative opinion. Such standard reference works as Wilpert’s recent Sachwörterbuch der Literaturv perpetuate such prejudices and include in their otherwise pertinent bibliography only works sharing their negative opinions.vi

In a later section of the introduction I shall challenge this concept and show that the historical role of women in drama needs revaluation and further study. However, this inquiry is not primarily concerned with large general issues; it will be limited to the dramatic contributions of women during approximately twenty-five years.

The Loewenberg collection contains some 3,000 plays, nearly all first editions, published between 1880 and 1930. It is probably the best collection of its kind anywhere and claims for itself near completeness.vii Nowhere but in this collection could I have had access to so many plays by women dramatists; to my knowledge these plays cannot—with only few exceptions—be found in any American library, and it is doubtful that many of them are readily available even in German libraries. Thus it seemed highly desirable that some of the latent possibilities of this unique collection of German literary works should be exploited.

The time span 1892-1918 was chosen for the following reasons: 1892 is the date of the earliest play by a female writer within the collection; 1918, the year of women suffrage in Germany, was chosen for its importance as a decisive point in the emancipation movement and its being consequently a turning point in the role of the woman in society.

All plays by women authors contained in the collection for that period are included in this study, together forty-seven plays. As I will point out later, the Loewenberg collection, unfortunately, is far from complete in its holdings of plays by German women dramatists. But I trust that it contains at least a representative cross section of the plays written during this period. My efforts to procure additional dramas from other American libraries or through German antiquarian stores have been in vain. Since availability is a real problem, I think it is all the more important to make use of the opportunity that the Loewenberg collection offers.

My method of dealing with these plays will be the intrinsic one of letting the themes emerge of themselves rather than applying predetermined criteria to the works. In other words, I shall try to determine which of the questions peculiar to women these authors discuss, how they portray certain situations, which problems preoccupy them, and with what they take issue. This method of investigation will help me draw a valid larger picture of society and woman’s role in it, as seen by the women playwrights of that society.

The themes that emerge from these plays can be grouped and discussed in a sequence that reflects roughly the chronological succession of events in a woman’s life: first those pertaining to childhood and adolescence of a girl will be discussed (chapters I through IV); then those relating to the adult woman’s life: man-woman relationship, marriage, motherhood, the unwed mother, and child adoption (chapters V through VIII); and finally those concerned with the professional woman (chapter IX).

The dramatists discussed here do not, as a rule, use the stage as an instrument for voicing their opinion or for airing controversial issues. They tended instead to record real life situations which they found problematic or questionable and which they therefore wanted to call to the attention of the audience. Female characters in the plays are therefore not to be identified with the author, neither are their views necessarily hers, nor does the play’s resolution represent the author’s suggestion of an ideal solution. The choice of the subject matter, the perspective from which it is presented, and the tenor of it, however, do convey to the reader the underlying intention of a play; but since these are rather tenuous and subjective criteria for judgment they must be handled guardedly. In order to avoid ambiguities I shall therefore try to state clearly in my discussion whether the author or a character in the play stated something explicitly, or whether I have drawn a conclusion according to what I think the author’s implied intention was.

This will be a thematic study, thus only one particular aspect of the plays will be examined, an approach which presents a certain danger of mistaking the discussed part for the whole play. This is a problem common to all thematic studies and will have to be kept in mind.

To assure a clearer understanding of the larger background of this dissertation I shall discuss at some length in the following pages two important related matters within their historical perspective: female playwrights and the role of woman in society.

The first question is whether women in preceding centuries have ever contributed substantially to the dramatic literature of their time or whether the period under discussion is unique in this respect and therefore represents a breakthrough into a new field for creative women.

Before embarking upon this inquiry I was familiar only with the negative professional opinion about women’s contribution to the theatre. Then I accidentally uncovered in the Loewenberg collection the sizable number of dramas, some of which turned out to be excellent both from a literary and a thematic point of view. Many have been staged by prominent directors viii at major German theatres, and had received favorable reviews by leading contemporary theatre critics.ix Such praise was, however, usually restricted to one particular play at a time, or to one specific woman author, and it usually expresses surprise at the fact that a woman could have written such a good play. Julius Bab’s review in the Schaubühne of U. C. Woerner’s plays is typical. He concludes: Erstaunlicher aber noch ist die (bei Frauen überhaupt so seltene) Kraft der Woerner zu dramatischer Produktion…x In a later issue he remarks on Hanna Rademacher’s latest play: ’Johanna von Neapel’ ist ein merkwürdig begabtes Stück, und wenn man bedenkt, daβ es von einer Frau verfaβt ist, ein geradezu wunderbares Stück… kurzum, es ist in der ganzen mir bekannten Literatur der erste Fall von echtem dramatischen Talent einer Frau.xi

Influenced by such statements I embarked upon my research with the assumption that the plays I was to examine represent an entirely new phenomenon in German literary history: the emergence of women in the world of drama. The article Neunhundert Jahre Frauendrama in the journal Bühne and Welt (1899),xii inspite of its title, served to enforce rather than to contradict this prejudicial view.

The forty-seven plays to be discussed here were written by twenty-two women authors. While trying to establish the status of present research on them and to collect their biographical and bibliographical data (the latter being practically non-existent) I found that many of my writers were hard to locate in standard reference works, especially under the heading of playwrights or drama. Josef Körner’s Bibliographisches Handbuch xiii is typical. Körner lists only Elsa Bernstein under the dramatists of the Wilhelminisches Zeitalter (pp. 493-508). Nine of the other writers are listed, but buried away in places where one would not normally look for dramatists. And even when mentioned, their contributions to the stage are either totally overlooked or referred to only in passing; Marie delle Grazie appears under regional literature, Else Lasker-Schüler only under Lyrik und Versepos and seven others are listed under Frauenliteratur (pp. 515-518). In the Neue Deutsche Biographie,xiv which so far covers only the names from A through F, three of the six women dramatists within this alphabetical range are discussed, two under their own name (Anna Croissant and Juliane Deutsch), but for reasons other than their dramatic achievements, and a third, Elsa Bernstein, a truly great dramatist whose plays had considerable influence on the development of the German theatre, is mentioned only within the article on her husband, Max Bernstein. Woman dramatists are also largely overlooked in more detailed and more comprehensive studies of the dramatic activities of the period. The only name of the twenty-three authors that reappears with some constancy is that of Elsa Bernstein.xv

Thus most of the literature on the drama of the Wilhelmian era leads one to believe that women, with only a few exceptions, contributed almost nothing to it. And yet I have found in one collection some fifty good plays for a period of twenty-five years, a number which represents only a fraction of the total dramatic output by women during this period. For I have found meanwhile that many more plays were written during these years than are contained in the Loewenberg collection. For the year 1907 the theatre journal Die Schaubühnexvi shows under premieres on major German stages at least seventeen plays written by women; for the year 1908 there are at least fifteen more new and performed plays. Elsa Bernstein’s Maria Arndt is among these and was performed at the Munich Schauspielhaus on October 17, 1908; but this is the only play contained in the Loewenberg collection out of a total of at least thirty-two new plays by women that had their premieres during those two years.

Contemporary theatre journals such as Freie Bühne and Neue deutsche Rundschau,xvii Schaubühne or Bühne und Welt give ample additional evidence that numerous woman writers made valuable contributions to the repertoire of the German theatre of the time. Otto Brahm’s journal Freie Bühne is particularly rich in contributions by women and about women. Laura Marholm-Hansson, for example, who has the largest share of them in the year 1892, contributed in that one season six articles on the theatre and four more on questions of aesthetics and on social problems. Three plays were actually first published in these journals: Dämmerung, Der heilige Nepomuk, and Die Wupper.xviii

Finding the achievements of women dramatists of the immediate past so poorly documented and underrated by literary histories, I began to question the reliability of statements about women’s contributions in more remote times. A thorough examination of the subject would be the work of a whole dissertation in itself. May it suffice here to point out briefly that evidence indicates that German women for the longest documentable time have been involved in playwriting. Even the first known German dramatist, in the tenth century, was not a man, but a woman: Hrotswitha von Gandersheim.

Heinrich Gross in his work Deutschlands Dichterinen und Schriftstellerinen (1880) has collected a wealth of information about women’s literary work and their contributions to all genres, including the drama.xix Gross’s book unfortunately covers in depth only the 18th and 19th centuries; for that period it is a great scholarly contribution on women authors. His facts are compiled systematically and are thoroughly documented; they should therefore provide an excellent base for further research. Gross lists 47 female dramatists born between 1700 and 1800; and he lists 90 for the following 50 to 60 years. Many of these dramatists were very versatile writers: e.g., Sarah Meyer (died 1828), Maria Anna Lohn-Siegel (pseud. Lork Alban, born 1830), and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916). Some contributed to the German repertoire through original writings as well as through translations: e.g., Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched (1713-1762), Amalie Berg (1757-1827), Amalie Heiter (1794-1870). Friederike Caroline Neuber (1697-1760) and others were important not only for their plays but even more so for their influence on the development of the German stage by practical application of new standards of excellence to directing and staging. Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer (1800-1868) achieved a level of popular success which was equaled in the entire history of the German theatre only by Kotzebue. The standard reproach against her work is that she has too much sense of the dramatic and of what is effective on the stage and too little poetic sensitivity, an accusation which is quite possibly justified but which nevertheless is amusing because of the otherwise standing denial to women of precisely that dramatic gift. A number of dramatists were given literary distinction in the form of awards for their plays. In the generation of writers directly preceding the group under study Laura Steinlein (pseud. Arthur Freese), for example, was thus honored in 1867 for her tragedy Das Haus Censi, and Elise Levi née Henle in 1878 and again in 1880 for her comedies Durch die Intendanz and Der Erbonkel.xx

All the plays listed by Gross had been commercially published and many were performed, often on major German stages. Goethe produced a number of plays by women writers with his Weimar theatre group: for example, those by Friederike Helene Unger (1751-1813), by Karoline Pichler (1769-1843) and above all those of Johanna Veronica Franul von Weissenthurn (1772-1847), of whom he staged at least nine plays, usually performing them for several consecutive sessions at a time.xxi

A remark from Heinz Kindermann’s Theatergeschichte der Goethezeitxii offers a striking illustration of the fact that women dramatists were often quite successful in the past in outdoing male competition, in this case regrettably so. Kindermann writes: Zur Siegesfeier von 1813 aber wurde bezeichnenderweise unter all den vielen Hermann-Dramen des Befreiungsjubels nicht Kleists ‘Hermannsschlacht’… sondern das vorher schon bei Sonnenleithner eingereichte Hermann-Drama der Schauspielerin Weiβenthurn aufgefuehrt. Das eigentliche Befreiungsdrama des Burgtheaters (Wien, unter der Direktion Schreyvogels) jedoch war Karoline Pichlers ‘Heinrich von Hohenstaufen’, das seit dem 27. Oktober 1813 oft und oft wiederholt wurde und sich noch bis 1818 hielt.

It is regrettable that Gross’s book, the only competent work on the subject, has been so completely overlooked by scholars and that it has been consistently omitted from pertinent reference lists except by Arnold’s Allgemeine Bücherkunde.xxiii

This is not the place to speculate why literary critics and literary historians continue perpetuating their bromides on the non-existence of dramatic productions by women, in full view of facts to the contrary. It can only be hoped that additional research on women as dramatists - such as the present study - will eventually help set the record straight.

The second topic to be discussed here by way of general historical background for this study deals with the social setting of the nineteenth century, particularly with the condition of women during that time and with the role that was assigned to them in family and society by moral and social conventions and by laws.

Generally speaking, the 19th century was a period of important cultural changes. During that century the established modes of life for all classes of society were being challenged by changing technological, scientific and communicative conditions in Europe. Exterior changes were reflected in the mood of the time, which shows a growing concern for individual happiness, an increasing need for private values, a deeper longing for authenticity, for that which is genuine and relevant to the individual in his new and increasingly mechanized and urbanized world. This led to a general revaluation of inherited values and a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary conditions. The attacks had first polarized around the feudal class system, by now thoroughly obsolete and inadequate. They were then directed primarily against the new class of industrialists and the wealthy bourgeoisie. The whole pattern of inherited social stratification was being challenged, above all by the underprivileged and exploited classes. It is not surprising that this general atmosphere of candid re-examination of traditional values with its insistence upon the rights of the individual also effected the attitudes of women and eventually brought about changes in their status.

The general opinion on the role of the woman in family and society was by tradition that her primary function was to serve and please man. Little had changed by the late nineteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s views were still widely respected; he had said in L’Émile or a Treatise on Education some hundred years earlier: The whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to council them, to console them—these are the duties of women at all times, and what should be taught them from their infancy.xxiv Such an attitude was of course reflected in the conventions of the times and accounted in large part for the unjust double social and moral standards for men and women.

Laws, not necessarily common