EMANCIPATION OF GERMAN WOMEN
We have shown at length how the cultural, literary, and artistic
grandeur of Germany during the Minnesong period was a direct consequence
of the high elevation of woman, and due to the worship accorded to her
on account of her lofty station. Just so woman was one of the strongest
impelling factors in bringing about well-nigh all that was great and
good in the second period of Classicism. The world-famed Court of the
Muses at Weimar, presided over by Duchess Amalia, "as unique in her way
as Frederick the Great was in his," and her circle of noble women,
aroused all the poetic power of the genius of Goethe, and later that of
Schiller. All the courtliness and elegance of their art, which had been
evolved in storm and stress, sprang from their intercourse with noble
women, a fact which Goethe again and again frankly confessed, and from
which Schiller derived the loftiest inspiration. The ancient
Minnesingers' glorification of ennobling love was renewed by Goethe,
whose highest ideal of feminine perfection was one illustrious woman, in
whom he discovered "all the lofty happiness that man in his earthly
limitations calls with divine names," Frau Charlotte von Stein alas! the
wife of another man at the same court. She and Shakespeare a strange
combination gave Goethe the incentive and stimulus by which were
produced his immortal works. This is proved by his statement: "Lida,
happiness ever present, William, star of loftiest height, to you I owe
all that I am." Goethe's relations with this extraordinary woman, says
Scherer, developed in his nature all the tenderness of which he was
capable. She was frank and true, not passionate, not enthusiastic, but
full of spiritual warmth; a gentle earnestness gave her majesty; a pure,
correct feeling, combined with a thirst for knowledge, enabled her to
share all the poetic, scientific, and human interests of Goethe. In his
numberless letters and fleeting notes to her we find strewn broadcast a
thousand germs of the grandest poetry. Her spirit hovers around him
everywhere; she possesses him entirely, body and soul; his feelings are
expressed constantly in inexhaustible lyrical, frank, and caressing
terms, more concise and natural than those in Werther. But the impetuous
lover in Werther's Sorrows is here a brother and true friend. He becomes
helpful, noble, and good, his own words, eager to cherish his friend, to
smooth her pathway through life; his extraordinary and extravagant
genius is calm and tempered. Frau von Stein brings forth the pure and
religious forces of his nature. His hot blood becomes chastened; he
himself calls the higher inner life that grows and strengthens itself
within him "Purity," and his poesy, too, becomes Purity realized. The
ethereal, ethical world in which his love for Charlotte forces him to
live is reflected in his lofty creations of immortal beauty, in his
superhuman contemplation of the universe, which is subject to change, it
is true, but a change according to firm, logical, and eternal laws. Such
is the influence of Frau von Stein upon Goethe, such her influence upon
the loftiest expression of German thought and feeling, or, briefly, upon
supreme German Classicism. Thus the dramas of the soul arise: _Iphigenie
and Tasso_. In the former, a pure priestess, though of an accursed
house, brings liberation, purification, happiness, not only to her
family, her race, but also to the barbarians, to the world at large. In
the latter, women are again the guardians of culture and morality: in
the character of the princess Leonore d'Este, who had learned toleration
in the hard school of sorrow, who saves the poet Tasso from false and
impure instincts, "as the enchanted man is easily and gladly saved from
intoxication and delusion by the presence of the divinity," Goethe has
united the traits of his guardian angels, Charlotte von Stein and
Louise, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, daughter of the Landgravine Caroline of
Hesse, a great woman, of whom Wieland said, she would be queen of Europe
if he once were ruler of the Fates.
But such exaltation, such freedom from passion could not last forever.
That soul which Goethe knew so well, which "with tenacious organs holds
in love and clinging lust the world in its embraces," in the course of
time began to assert itself. And his intense need of sensual love was at
last satisfied by Christiane Vulpius, a woman strangely inferior to the
other women who had possessed his love, yet handsome, good-hearted,
cheerful, natural, physically desirable, and devoted to him body and
soul. Since the summer of 1788 she was really his wife, though the
Church was not called upon to consecrate their union until October 19,
1806. In the high circles in which he moved, a storm of indignation was
aroused by this union, which also lost for him the friendship of Frau
von Stein, a loss which he deeply regretted. However, Christiane Vulpius
gave him a calm and ordinary happiness that compensated him somewhat for
his ideal losses; she was sufficiently dear to him to move him to the
characteristic simile: "On the bank of the sea I wandered and looked for
shells: in one I found a pearl, it remains well guarded in my heart;"
and again the beautiful allegory of the sweet flower, brilliant as the
stars, which he dug out with all the roots and carried home, where it
continues to blossom.
Women's love bore, from the first, quite a different character in the
case of Schiller. He also had a good mother who believed in his genius
and his future greatness, but born and raised in needy circumstances,
and struggling with poverty all her life, she stood at an immense
distance from the patrician and associate of princes, Frau Aja, the
mother of Goethe.
Three widely differing women especially affected Schiller's life and
works. The influence upon his youth of Charlotte von Kalb, an
extraordinary, demoniacal woman, was, according to his own confession,
not beneficent. In later years, this highly gifted and unhappy woman had
the misfortune of affecting the lives of two other great poets: Jean
Paul and Holderlin. The former escaped from the grasp of the "Titanide"
whom he immortalized, nevertheless, in his "_Titan_"; the latter, the
God-gifted poet of "Hyperion," the singer of the passionate,
soul-stirring lyric poems in honor of another love, Diotima, died early
in the darkness of insanity. Schiller's love for Caroline and Charlotte
von Lengefeld, the former of whom was married to Wilhelm von Wolzogen,
presaged a terrible danger, similar to that to which Burger succumbed,
but which was averted by Caroline, who saved Schiller by smoothing the
path to a lawful and happy marriage with her young sister. The
correspondence between the three, Schiller and the Lengefeld sisters,
published by Schiller's daughter Emilie, Baroness von Gleichen-Russwurm,
sheds much light upon the thought and life of Germany's greatest
dramatist and of two noble women. Caroline's biography of Schiller,
which appeared in 1830, collected from reminiscences of the family, his
own letters, and information furnished by his friends, still breathes
her love and admiring affection for her immortal friend. The greatest
record, however, of the powerful influence women exerted upon Schiller
is to be found in his works, not only in the dramas, but especially in
the lyric poems, wherein a wonderful galaxy of noble women appear, and
in which there is not one chord untouched that ever vibrated through
man's heart.
Romanticism, the reaction against Classicism which had become icy and
petrified in the "epigons," or weak successors of the great classical
poets, entered upon its victorious course at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The group of women-authors, who stand, as it were,
in the second zone from classicism, Amalie von Hellwig, Elisa von der
Recke, Louise Brachmann, Agnes Franz, Helmina von Chezy, Johanna
Schopenhauer, all authors of considerable talent and grace, are
nevertheless far surpassed by the versatility and poetic impressiveness
of the literary women of Romanticism. They are the inspirers and
coworkers of the founders of the movement, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck,
Novalis, Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, and others. It is true that the "blue
flower of Romanticism" was not conducive to virtue in love. Romanticists
respected marriage the least of all sacred things, and a marriage _a
trois_, says Theobald Ziegler, was quite a common thing, and the
question only remained whether a marriage _a quatre_ was not even a
pleasanter thing. In this, however, Romanticism was but a reaction
against the Philistinism and prudery of the opposite pole of
civilization at that period, where woman was oppressed, and a different
standard of morality, and even of religion, was demanded from her than
from man. Frederick Schlegel is not far wrong when he says that in the
ordinary wedded life of the time both parties "live on, side by side, in
a relation of mutual contempt." As, at the time of Pericles the great
and superior hetaira, Aspasia, raised the social status of woman in
general, and succeeded in elevating her in culture to the standard of
the most intellectual men, so, during the first decades of the
nineteenth century woman was raised to a higher plane through a long
series of moral aberrations. Emancipation was frequently misunderstood,
and liberty degenerated into the license of the will of the flesh. It
would be impossible to absolve Romanticism from the reproach of license
in thought and life. We owe it to Caroline Schlegel and to Dorothea
Schlegel not to unveil their antecedents, and the way in which they
became the wives of the two romanticists. Their share in the movement of
liberation and in the work of their respective husbands is very
considerable, and, mayhap, is meritorious enough to cover their sins.
Tieck's sister Sophie wrote perhaps the finest novel of the
romanticists, Evremont (published in 1836 in Breslau), and his daughter
Dorothea was a classical translator of Shakespeare.
Bettina von Arnim (died 1859), Brentano's sister, is one of the most
ingenuous of poets. She possessed a rich imagination, but upon her was
the common curse of womanly genius, eccentricity, and inconstancy. These
frustrated her intense desire to attain a lasting fame. Her daughter,
Gisela von Arnim, wife of Hermann Grimm, is a notable writer of fairy
tales, and a dramatist of considerable merit. Another romanticist,
Caroline von Gunderode, who evinces much talent in her Poems and
Fancies, had no time for the development of her genius. An unhappy love
caused her to commit suicide at an early age. Such was also the end of
Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest romanticist, who died with Henriette
Vogel, the wife of another man, whom he killed at her own desire, in
1811. Theodor Korner, the patriot and soldier-poet of _Lyre and Sword_,
died young, on the battlefield, with a pure and noble love in his heart
for Toni Adamberger, a charming actress in Vienna, who was worthy of him
in every respect. Koerner's letter of 1812 to his father, Schiller's
friend, characterizes this noble type of German womanhood: "I may
confess without blushing, that without her I should indeed have perished
in the whirlpool beside me (_i.e._, in Vienna). You know me, my warm
blood, my strong constitution, my wild imagination; imagine this
impetuous soul of mine in this garden of delight and intoxicating joy,
and you will understand that only the love for this angel helped me to
be able to step forth boldly from the crowd and to say: Here is one who
has preserved a pure heart."
In spite of the many eminent women who arose during the first third of
the nineteenth century, there is nowhere in Germany anything like the
salon which has made French society so brilliant, the literary circles
and centres so compact, and the great French authoresses and
epistolographers so world-famed.
Schleiermacher, the philosopher-theologian of that transition period,
said once that society on a grand scale could at that time be found only
in the houses of the Jews. Though still disfranchised in many respects,
their admission to all the rights of citizenship being accorded first in
1812 on account of Stein's reforms, some eminent Jewish families
possessed sufficient wealth and aspirations for culture to form such
social and intellectual circles. Marianne Meyer became the wife of
Prince Reuss, and as such assembled an aristocratic literary society in
her house at Berlin. But the climax of a German salon was realized by
two brilliant women of Jewish origin, Henriette Herz and Rahel Levin.
The former, wife of the famous physician and philosopher Marcus Herz,
formed the first Goethe community in Berlin and scattered his fame
broadcast through Berlin society. Without original talent, she
exercised, nevertheless, great influence by her beauty, her social
skill, and her ability in presenting the intellectual treasures of
others. She was attractive to all. Jean Paul and Schiller came to her
salon when in Berlin; famous foreigners, like Mirabeau, Madame de Stael,
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 foreign 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
attractiveness 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."
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 distinguished 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 role 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 perfection 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 German woman we must
return once more to the years of Germany's greatest political
degradation.
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 humiliation 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 genuine 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 Krueger, Dorothea
Sawosch, Karoline Petersen, and the heroine Prohaska, who, in male
attire, bravely fought in Lutzow's famous corps of volunteers. Lutzow
and the heroic Prohaska 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 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 Jerome of Westphalia
abodes of licentiousness. In German cities, especially in Berlin, where
the conquerors were quartered, German ladies conducted 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 intolerable. 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 carried 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 appeared
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 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 sacrificed 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 antiquated conventionality, and the emancipation of the flesh was
preached. Naturally the emancipation of woman became 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 convention, liberation
from social limitations, was the aim of the advanced women. They
preached the extreme cultivation of their own individuality. They
recognized only the perfection 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 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 preparatory 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 independence 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 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
emancipation.
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 marriage, 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 recommended.
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 influence 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 expiating Magdalena; her work From Babylon
to Jerusalem (Mainz, 1851) presents a wonderfully interesting revelation
of a forceful and original heart. Instead of liberating 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 considerable 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_,
published by her in collaboration with her husband (Leipzig, 1875), is
very 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 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 Buechner,
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 Glueck).
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.
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 insufficient; Hungerlohne became a
technical term; women and children were forced to work in the factories
to supply the deficit in the amount needed for the support of the
family. Acute misery led to outbreaks like that of the Silesian weavers,
whose misery inspired the modern social drama of Hauptmann; typhoid
fever and diseases of starvation raged among the sufferers.
For the first time women entered the arena of the political movement.
Societies of women were formed in many German cities. Names of gifted
women sprang up everywhere. The social and political struggles of the
time are reflected in the memoirs of an idealistic woman, Malwida von
Meysenbug. Though reared in narrow aristocratic prejudices, she
struggled through them to a democratic association with her suffering
sisters of a lower social status. She bore the painful breach with her
family which, owing to her liberalism, became inevitable. She demanded
economic independence for woman, not only because labor ennobles, but
because only the economically independent woman is free to live
according to her convictions, "liberated from the threefold tyranny of
dogmatism, convention, and the ignoble bonds of forced marriage." Woman
is to cooperate in the great work of the regeneration of the nation.
"How could," says she, "a nation regenerate itself and become free, if
one-half of it is excluded from the careful, all-around preparation
which true liberty demands for a nation as well as for individuals." An
institution was already founded which was to accomplish this ideal. A
university for females, at Hamburg, was to give to young women the
necessary preparation for a higher mission than had been theirs.
Energetic Emilie Wustenfeld was the soul of the foundation, Professor
Karl Froebel its head. Its aim was to embrace "all the sciences which
practical, social, and intellectual life in its highest spheres may
require on the part of cultured women." It is a matter of regret that,
owing to the lack of material support, the enterprise failed. Fraulein
Meysenbug was, after the dissolution of the university, exiled from
Berlin, whither she had turned, and went to England. Yet all traces of
her influence are not lost in Germany. Small, slow, and painful
attempts, an advance measured by steps, interposition of legitimate and
illegitimate obstacles, appear everywhere in the movement.
Another eminent woman, Luise Otto, of Meissen, Saxony, a strong and able
champion in prose and poetry for woman's rights, developed a definite
programme for the movement: she demanded a profounder, a more national
education, a closer connection of the German maiden with the affairs of
the fatherland, through instruction in history, her education in schools
of a high order, if possible leading up to the university standard, a
training giving "solid moral strength, a religious mind, German depth of
feeling." And these qualities must be instilled in the maidens of the
people, of the proletariat as well as in those of the middle and upper
classes. Luise Otto demanded that education to the very highest point be
given to those able to receive it; that woman be raised to economic
independence, that she may escape the necessity of a degrading marriage
"for material caretaking only," or downright shame, to which so many
daughters of the people have fallen. In a similar way did Luise Btichner
attempt the solution of the all-important question of woman's
independence. The active Central Union for the Welfare of the Working
Classes, under Lette's presidency, was founded to extend the field of
female activity, but it excluded explicitly the aims of political
emancipation and equality of woman with man. The Universal German
Woman's Association, founded in Leipzig, proposed to itself a broader
scope, namely, the raising of the moral status of the sex. Admission to
the universities and participation in communal or municipal service were
first mooted upon the initiative of Frau Henriette Goldschmidt, Marie
Calm, Auguste Schmidt. Hundreds of other collective societies followed,
and entered upon the discussion of the entire range of sex problems with
marked results.
To protect the poor, especially the women and children, whose supporters
went to the wars, the so-called "popular kitchens" (Volkskucheri) were
founded. This great service was rendered to Berlin by Frau Lina
Morgenstern, aided by noble men like Virchow, Lette, and Holtzendorff.
Intellectual needs came to be supplied by excellent schools of a high
grade: the Victoria School for higher studies, presided over by Frau
Ulrike Henschke; the Victoria Lyceum, founded by a Scotch lady, Miss
Georgina Archer, in 1868, to give courses parallel to those of the
university. These institutions derive their names from the late empress,
then Crown Princess of Prussia, who was their protector.
It was a matter of course that the woman's movement, which was rooted in
liberalism, and which combined the aspects of psychological,
physiological, ethical, and sociological problems, aroused many and
varied opponents, especially in the conservative camp. The greatest
names appear in opposition, even that of one important woman, Mathilde
Reichardt-Stromberg. The discussions of the medical faculties of Germany
for and against (mostly against) the admission of women to the study of
medicine, which would be "an insult and sin against nature," would
"destroy delicacy, modesty, shame" in woman, are to-day, now that women
have attained their desire, of high value to the student of cultural
history. On the basis of "the right to work, the right to free
personality," the privilege was demanded, especially by Hedwig Dohm, who
says: "Woman shall study, because she wants to study, because the
unlimited choice of a vocation is the main factor of individual liberty,
of individual happiness."
The contest for the intellectual and economic advancement of women went
on, almost side by side, with the contest for the moral regeneration of
society. The fight against the cancer of prostitution, the darkest and
sorest spot in the movement, was most arduous and discouraging. The
demand of an equal morality for man with that incumbent upon woman was
tacitly resisted. The puritanical regulations, issued by the German
Culture Alliance, against alleged immorality in art, literature, and
fashion conflicted frequently with the legitimate rights of artistic
presentation. Frau Gertrude Guillaume, nee Countess Schack, was the soul
of the movement for social purity, and she boldly attacked the true
cause of prostitution; she accused the authorities not only of
indifference to the social evil, but of direct connivance with it. She
came into conflict with the police, who considered her activity
pernicious and accused her of socialistic tendencies, into which she was
forced in 1885 by the chicaneries of the police. The fact of the matter
is that her mission is diametrically opposed to that of socialism,
which, according to Bebel's Woman and Socialism, considers "prostitution
a necessary institution for civic society, as police, army, and church."
It is the misery which wrecks so many families of the lower classes that
drives thousands of hungry girls into the arms of prostitution. The
statistics of the Berlin police authorities of a few years ago prove
that of 2,224 registered prostitutes, 1,015 (47.9 per cent) came from
petty artisan families, 467 (22 per cent) from factories, 305 (14.4 per
cent) from poor clerks. In the Union for the Interests of Working Girls,
founded in 1885, the alpha and omega of the discussion of the girls was
again and again "the correlation between hunger-wages and prostitution,
and the necessity of raising the economic condition of the working girls
as a _conditio sine qua non_ for the elevation of morality." Efforts to
abolish prostitution, then as now, were the objects of bitter opposition
on the part of the civil authorities. Frau Guillaume-Schack, unable to
continue her work unhampered by constant police interference, emigrated
to England.
The reactionary spirit which in 1851 prohibited by ministerial decree
Frobel's kindergartens of Prussia as socialistic and atheistic exists
even to-day in the German parliament, especially through the
conservative and clerical parties. These stigmatize many of the most
legitimate aspirations of women as "unwomanly." The word of Saint Paul,
"woman shall be silent in church matters," is applied to her most
appropriate activities. Yet, superior women, foremost among them Frau
Henriette Schrader, Frau Marie Loeper-Housselle, and the eminent
sociological writer Helene Lange, against great odds, forced the
government to make provision for the higher education of girls. Not that
the Ministry of Public Instruction was favorable to the demand, but that
the extensive discussion by the daily press, the interest taken by the
Crown Princess Victoria in the movement, and the formation of the
Universal Women Teachers' Association, which has more than sixteen
thousand members, compelled the powers that be to consider the movement
as elemental and irrepressible. The first public "gymnasium" (Latin
school) for girls was founded in Carlsruhe, Baden, in 1893; later
another was established in Leipzig, and the higher courses for girls
that had been established in Berlin by Helene Lange, were also
consolidated into a gymnasium.
On the other hand, the Bavarian ministry refused its consent for such a
school in Munich, and Dr. Bosse, former Minister of Public Instruction
in Prussia, rejected a similar petition from the Breslau magistrate.
Upon an interpellation in the Prussian Diet (Landtag) he declared
himself "against any step in the direction of the modern woman's
movement; the aspirations of women to appear as rivals of men are wrong;
this was the opinion of the entire Prussian Ministry of State."
Elsewhere the movement was branded as a mere "matter of fashion." But
the aspirations of women are too genuine and deep-rooted to be disposed
of by ridicule and abuse. New fields of labor open before women, the
domains of letters and sciences lie before them, even though the honor
of state recognition is withheld from the treasures of knowledge and
thought which they have acquired. Reformers of both sexes, who have the
influence and the will to bring the issue to a successful conclusion,
are not wanting. All the divisions and sections of the movement for
morality, temperance, legal protection, right of coalition, girls'
homes, march separately, but fight with a united front in the campaign.
The Society for Ethical Culture, led by the late Professor von Gizycki
and his wife Lily, of Berlin, realized within the society the idea of
absolute equality of the sexes. Excellent women, as Jeanette Schwerin,
Minna Cauer, and many others worked for woman's economic improvement as
a basis for their enfranchisement; others, like Frau Hanna Bieber-Bohm,
for the protection of young homeless girls by the foundation of homes,
and by assistance in cases of need. Several periodicals edited by women
for women also carry on a lively and successful propaganda for
enlightenment and progress. That the various religious denominations
participate in the movement more or less successfully, according to
their various dogmatic or liberal standards, goes without saying. That
there is frequently a painful exaggeration on the part of the women who
stand in the midst of the struggle is but natural. Revolution is
preached instead of evolution. Passionate cries too often are heard
against men in general, as if the war were raging between brutal and
oppressive men and oppressed and abused women. The ridiculous Utopia of
emancipation from men, the foundation of a "manless" Amazon empire is
being preached by some radical women crazed by their mad prejudices.
Womanliness is lost all too often; manly garb imitated, the customs of
male students, which are not always aesthetic, and which are downright
disgusting in woman, are aped. Some women try to force their way by
elbow power, by loud screaming for their alleged rights; some "literary"
women without tact, training, or moderation, create prejudices against
their judicious sisters who try to win their way by the peculiarly
womanly, refined and aesthetic qualities in literature. No wonder that
thousands of the very best women instinctively shrink back from the
movement, and thus withdraw their support from what is legitimate and
needful and desirable to woman.
In similar circles, with equal difficulties and drawbacks, moved the
progress of women in Holland and the Scandinavian countries. Multatuli
(pseudonym for E. Douwes Dekker, 1820-1887), through his genius and
originality, attained in Holland well-nigh the importance of a Goethe
for his nation. He considered the prevailing opinion regarding the
inferiority of woman as the result of her long oppression, and preached
her self-determination to the point of free love. He is the father of
the movement for the liberation of woman in conservative Holland, and
Mina Kruseman and her friend Betsy Perk, the first champions of the
woman's movement, are his direct disciples. Frau Storm van der Chijs
(1814-1895) attempted to introduce educational reforms and higher
scientific culture into Holland. Fraulein W. Drucker sought and obtained
the support of the Dutch women in the agitation against the abuse of
woman, and child labor in the factories, as hod-carriers; for the
protection of illegitimate children, and for a higher training of women
for skilled labor. Frau Klerck, nee Countess Hogendofp, profoundly
touched by the social misery of fallen women, founded with the aid of a
number of noble women, the Woman's League for the Elevation of Morality.
About five hundred societies are scattered through the kingdom and exert
their beneficent influence in all the domains of female activity. The
Netherlandish universities opened their doors wide to female students
after the graduation of the first woman, Alletta Jacobs, as "M. D." in
1879. Many Dutch women are active and successful in arts and letters;
Minka Bosch Reitz is favorably known as a sculptor, Theresa Schwarze as
a painter, Fraulein Oosterzee as the composer of an oratorio, and
Catharina van Rennes as a composer of children's songs.
An exposition of the works of Dutch women at The Hague in 1898, planned
by Frau Pekelharing-Doijer, presided over by Frau Goekoop, gave an
admirable survey of the entire domain of the activity of Dutch women.
The exposition aroused the feeling of solidarity among women, which
resulted in the formation of associations composed wholly of women; the
nation, the government, and the queen took a lively interest in the
achievements of the Dutch women, whose enfranchisement, though just
begun, is moving rapidly to completeness.
The same progress is visible everywhere in the other Teutonic countries,
Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Excellent abstracts of that progress are given
by Kirstine Frederiksen, Maria Cederschioeld, and Gina Krog,
respectively, and in Helene Lange and Gertrude Baumer's admirable
_Handbook of the Woman's Movement_ (two volumes, Berlin, 1901). We must,
however, regretfully forego the pleasure of enumerating even the
foremost of the thousands of women with their varied talents, many of
the highest order, who belong to the knighthood of the spirit, and who
labor bravely in the realm of advancement of the human race in general,
and of the Teutonic family in particular.
This chapter would, however, be incomplete and unsatisfactory were we to
conclude it without mentioning a few German women who, preeminent and
royal, have wielded an immense influence, and in whom, as it were, are
crystallized German virtues, German qualities, and German intellect.
The first German empress, Augusta, the daughter of Carl Frederick of
Saxe-Weimar and of a Russian princess, was reared in the atmosphere of
the Court of the Muses at Weimar; so that the image of Goethe hovered
around her throughout her life, and influenced her artistic, literary,
and humanistic tastes. At the age of eighteen, in 1829, she was married
to Prince William of Prussia, little dreaming at that time of the great
future in store for Germany and for herself. By her intellectual
qualities, her humanity, and her charity, she soon acquired a highly
privileged position at the Prussian court. It was she who inculcated
into the soul of her only son, later Emperor Frederick III., those
qualities which secured for him the historic title "Frederick the
Noble." After her consort ascended the throne in 1861, and especially
after the great wars, she became the soul of the great charitable
movements of Germany. She took an active part in bringing about the
establishment of the Geneva Convention, a most beneficial event in its
effects upon the humanization of war and its consequences. She was an
angel of mercy to the wounded soldiers of both friend and foe, and to
their widows and orphans, and was active in the Society of the Red
Cross, founded in 1864, and the Patriotic League of Women, founded after
the Austrian war in 1866. The Augusta Hospital, the Langenbeck House in
Berlin, named after the great surgeon of that name, and the Augusta
Foundation in Charlottenburg, were created by her. She was deeply
religious and broadly tolerant; so that the so-called Kulturkampf, _i.
e._, the struggle between the Prussian state and the Roman Catholic
Church, was profoundly distasteful to her, a fact which precipitated a
silent, but bitter, feud between the empress and her party, on the one
hand, and Prince Bismarck, on the other. While her political influence
cannot at all times be considered to have been beneficent, her
cultivation of the arts certainly enriched the national life of Berlin,
and indeed of Germany. She was a cultured musician, and composed several
marches, an overture and the music to a ballet _The Masquerade_. She
died in January, 1890, in Berlin, and was buried beside her great
consort in the Mausoleum of Charlottenburg. Beautiful monuments have
been erected in her honor at Baden-Baden, at Berlin, and at Coblenz, her
favorite resort. The memory of the noble empress is engraved upon the
hearts of her people.
Victoria, princess royal of England, born November 21, 1840, daughter of
Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort Albert, became eighteen years
later the wife of the Crown Prince of Prussia, finally, for ninety-nine
days, Emperor Frederick III. (1888). She came to Prussia when the dawn
of its future greatness was scarcely visible. The king, Frederick
William IV., was hopelessly ill, his mind affected; her father-in-law,
Prince William of Prussia and in 1861 king, was regent for him. The
times were gloomy: constitutional conflict, political struggles
threatening the monarchy itself, then a seven years' war as it were with
Denmark, Austria, and France until 1871, agitated the country and tried
the soul of its rulers. This was the time when Victoria appeared
greatest and dearest to the German people. From the royal palace to the
poorest cottage, there was no household then that had not sent its best
and bravest to defend hearth and home and fatherland. The heir to the
throne, following the traditions of his race, had gone forth ready to
yield up his life, if need were, for the safety and honor of his
country. The princess, waiting wearily in her home, shared the anguish
of every German woman during that autumn and winter. With her clear
insight into political complications, she could realize more vividly
than those who were less well informed the frightful contingencies that
might arise. She felt deeply her obligations toward the support of her
countrywomen. The crown princess as such, in her own name, addressed an
appeal to Germans all over the world, in behalf of the families that
sacrificed their supporting fathers, brothers, sons:
"Once more has Germany called her sons to take arms for her most sacred
possessions, her honor, and her independence. A foe, whom we have not
molested, begrudges us the fruits of our victories, the development of
our national industries by our peaceful labor. Insulted and injured in
all that is most dear to them, our German people for they it is who are
our army have grasped their well-tried arms, and have gone forth to
protect hearth, and home, and family. For months past, thousands of
women and children have been deprived of their bread-winners. We cannot
cure the sickness of their hearts, but at least we can try to preserve
them from bodily want. During the last war, which was brought to so
speedy, and so fortunate a conclusion, Germans in every quarter of the
globe responded nobly when called upon to prove their love of the
Fatherland by helping to relieve the suffering. Let us join hands once
more, and prove that we are able and willing to succor the families of
those brave men who are ready to sacrifice life and limb for us! Let us
give freely, promptly, that the men who are fighting for our sacred
rights may go into battle with the comforting assurance that at least
the destinies of those who are dearest to them are confided to faithful
hands.
"VICTORIA, Crown Princess."
A truly German woman and princess indeed! She was worthy to be the
consort of Frederick the Noble, and the mother of William II., who has
imbibed her genius, her versatility of mind, her fine artistic feeling.
Politically she was broad-minded and strictly constitutional; in her
home, a true German housewife and mother. She loved the arts, sciences,
and letters, and was herself no mean painter. Charity was her chosen
domain; the education of the lowly her passion. The Pestalozzi-Froebel
House is her monument; the Museum of Industrial Arts in the Koniggratzer
Strasse is perhaps more representative of her artistic efforts than any
other institution in Berlin. It is said that the princess chose, if she
did not design, each of its sculptured groups, its metal castings, its
fine mosaics and ornaments. Hans Holbein the Younger and Peter Visher,
the famous brass founder, stand at its portal; life-sized figures round
the building represent the mechanical arts: the loom, the printing
press, the potter's wheel, the student's desk; the frieze above
represents the great epochs of art and sculpture. The Victoria Lyceum,
which we have mentioned above, testifies to her great interest in the
higher culture of women. Space forbids us to follow the years of peace,
of achievements, of joys and griefs in the princely household, the loss
of the beloved young Prince Waldemar; the political controversies which
followed the princess's disapproval of many measures, in the inner
policy of Prussia, taken by Bismarck; and at last the long and hopeless
illness of her consort, her touching sympathy and devoted care of him
until his death on June 15, 1888, and certain medical altercations that
disturbed her years of sorrow and mourning.
It would hardly be proper to speak at length of Augusta Victoria, the
present Empress of Germany, who stands now in the prime of her life and
activity for her nation and her own family. She is a princess of
Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, who became the consort of
the ruler of the German Empire instead of becoming a ruling princess of
a petty grand duchy, the rightful inheritance of her house, which became
part and parcel of the empire by two great wars. Married in February,
1881, to the present emperor, she is the mother of six sons and one
daughter, all of whom are worthy scions of the Hohenzollern race, which
has furnished the world with more great rulers than perhaps any other
dynasty that ever ruled over the fate of a great nation. The empress is
the crystallized type of a noble German wife and mother on the throne.
She is profoundly religious and especially active in the duties of a
devout Christian; she has built many churches; she is the protectress of
the Elizabeth Children's Hospital, of several great Evangelical
missions, and of the Patriotic Women's League. It is difficult to
emphasize sufficiently the great influence upon the morality of the
entire nation of an empress so womanly and pure in her simple greatness,
just as we cannot estimate the influence for evil by bad examples on the
throne on every woman in the land during the eras of the Catherines of
Russia, the Pompadours and the Dubarrys in France, the Lichtenaus in
Prussia.
In contrast to the happiness of the present Empress of Germany stands
the fate of the late martyred Empress of Austria (1837-1898). A daughter
of Duke Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria, she became the consort of the
present Emperor of Austria under the happiest auspices. Exceedingly
beautiful and intelligent, a Greek scholar of a high order, a lover of
nature and of all that is beautiful, fond of horseback riding and of
every sport tending to produce that symmetry of intellectual and
physical beauty called by the Greeks _kalokagathia_; the happy mother of
daughters and of one son, the ill-fated crown prince, Rudolf, she
adorned the Habsburg throne with beauty and brilliancy instead of the
ancient formal etiquette and Spanish grandest. But sorrow came to her in
its most terrible form: the tragic and mysterious death, while on a
hunting expedition, of her son Rudolf and Countess Vetsera, whom he
loved, though he was married to Stephanie of Belgium, broke her heart.
Her entire life changed, she hid herself in her Greek palace on the
Island of Corfu, or travelled restlessly through Europe. On a visit to
Geneva, while walking from her hotel to the ship, she was assassinated
by a miscreant Luccheni, an Italian anarchist (September 10, 1898). One
of the vilest deeds in the history of criminology ended the brilliant
life of the greatest woman martyr on a throne since the Austrian
archduchess Marie Antoinette who shed her royal blood on the guillotine,
as Queen of France in 1793, for the crimes of preceding royal
generations.
Among the German women authors of the last quarter of the nineteenth
century who are really gifted with great poetic talent we meet with a
poetess, a German princess on a foreign throne: Princess Elizabeth of
Wied, Queen of Rumania, famous under the name of Carmen Sylva. She
belongs to a family which for many generations has produced remarkable
men. Her great-grandmother, Louise von Wied, was a poetess of
considerable talent; other members of her family had excelled as
naturalists, poets, and painters; three of her granduncles fell during
the Napoleonic wars. The genius of her family seems, however, to have
been concentrated in Carmen Sylva. She was exceedingly beautiful in her
youth, and is charming to-day at the age of sixty. As a child of seven
in Bonn, she frequently sat on the lap of the aged patriot-poet Ernst
Moritz Arndt, who inspired the little princess with his patriotic tales.
Her youthful sorrows, the loss of a beloved brother and of her father,
and the protracted illness of her mother had a deep and melancholy
influence upon her. Extended journeys to the south, to Sweden, and to
Russia widened her poetic horizon. In 1869, Prince Carol of Rumania
wooed the "Forest Rose," as she was called poetically; in 1870, all the
wondrous feelings of a happy mother and a great poet were opened to her
by the birth of a daughter; four years later she lost her child, and
then she sings the words of despair: "For what purpose the great royal
castle, we are but two!" She translated into German verses the Rumanian
songs that had pleased her child, and later she translated many of the
great Rumanian poems. There is in them the wild melancholy and
simplicity of true popular ballads; there is the ring of a poetic
sympathy with nature. They come straight from the heart of the people,
and the translation is full of the same poetic feeling. Her _Thoughts of
a Queen_ (Paris, 1888) are worthy of a Pascal in their depth and
earnestness and wide range, covering life, humanity, love, happiness,
sorrow, pain, spirit, and art. She is of a wonderful intellectual and
spiritual fertility. She wrote _Pilgrim Sorrow_, which has reached its
fifth edition, and has been translated into English by Helen Zimmern.
_Sappho, Hammerstein, Storms, Some One Knocks_ (translated into French,
prefaced by Pierre Loti), _From Two Worlds_, and _Astra_ are universally
recognized.
It is indeed a strange phenomenon that the two most gifted German poets
are a queen and a peasant woman: Johanna Ambrosius. It is true that the
refinement, the melody and sweetness of Carmen Sylva contrast with the
painful plaints of poor Johanna, who suffered physical want many times
during her life. Yet both have been in their way chastened in the school
of pain and sorrow, only it was in one case the sorrow of the hut, in
the other the sorrow of the royal palace.
Of the other women who have excelled in letters in recent times, the
great majority exerted their influence through novelistic literature:
Wilhelmine von Hillern, spirited, though somewhat too sensational;
Louise von Francois, who skilfully characterizes higher sodety; Adelheid
von Auer (pseudonym for Charlotte von Cosel), who depicts the social
sins of the higher classes; Emmy von Dincklage, the painter of the life
and nature of the low-lands on the Ems; E. Vely, Helene von Hiilsen,
Fanny Arndt, Eudemia von Ballestrem, and scores of others whom in the
evolutionary process of the present time we must not attempt to describe
prematurely.
Indeed, life wells forth with ever increasing strength from the
inexhaustible fountains of women's hearts, leaving the problem in the
mind of the observer where all this activity is to end, and reminding us
of the _Earth-spirit's chant_ in _Faust_ with reference to the "Creative
Power" which eternally works and weaves:
"In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing.
Thus at time's humming loom 't is my hand prepares
The garment of life which the Deity wears."