Let me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist (review)

The complexity of reconstructing the life story and legacy of Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) was expressed in an academic conference held in Jerusalem in February 2009, marking the 150th anniversary of her birth. Pappenheim, founder of the Jewish Women’s Union in Germany and one of the most prominent and active women in modern German Jewish history, is even better known within the psychiatric and psychoanalytic academic community as Anna O.—the first case study in the Studies on Hysteria of Freud and Breuer. The conference, entitled “From Anna O. to Bertha Pappenheim,” aspired to connect these two figures. Still, one could discern two or even three distinct research communities: The therapists who were interested in Anna O. attended mostly on the first day, while the historians interested in Pappenheim’s social and cultural activities and the feminist activists seeking the current significance of her legacy attended mostly on the second. Not by chance, the second day commenced with the lecture of Elizabeth Loentz, author of Let me Continue to Speak the Truth.

Loentz opens her book by announcing her intent to direct attention from Anna O. to Bertha Pappenheim, whose achievements, argues Loentz, are especially impressive in view of her recovery from Anna O.’s illness. Loentz’s book is not just another addition to the several biographies already written on Pappenheim. Instead, turning to cultural history, she devotes most of the book—five out of seven chapters—to presenting Pappenheim’s approaches to topics on the German Jewish agenda of the time. Loentz’s findings expose an interesting pattern: On each of these five topics, Pappenheim’s positions, as expressed in her political and cultural activities as well as her publicistic writings, were ambivalent.

The first chapter deals with Pappenheim’s relationship with Yiddish. Pappenheim, well known as the translator from Yiddish into German of the memoirs of Glückel of Hameln, the Mayse bukh (a collection of stories from the Talmud and midrash) and other works, had probably heard Yiddish in her family. Her grandfather had studied in the Pressburg Yeshiva, and her father was an Orthodox activist in Vienna. Loentz presents the oscillation of German Jews between viewing Yiddish as a bastardized, corrupt form of German and recognizing its authenticity as a cultural language. Thus, Loentz shows that Pappenheim expressed deep disrespect for Yiddish speakers, using the insulting word mauscheln for their language, but on the other hand found them trustworthy. The connection between her endeavor to translate Glückel’s book and her feminist positions is explicit in her portrayal of Glückel as “one woman who . . . stood out by virtue of her exceptional intellect, and who remained true to her religion, her people, her family and herself” (p. 45). Loentz compares Pappenheim’s translations from Yiddish with those of Martin Buber, mostly of east European sources, and concludes that “Pappenheim looked for traces of indigenous and specifically female Jewish culture” (p. 46). Loentz also cites critics who related to her work as creating “a watered-down pseudo-Yiddish that was accessible to German Jews” (p. 52).

Pappenheim was similarly ambivalent in relation to Zionism, the topic of the second chapter. She was a well-known anti-Zionist, and she continued to hold this position even after the Nazis took power in 1933. Still, as Loentz shows, in parallel to her rejection of Zionist ideology and her critique of many Zionist initiatives, Pappenheim was aware of the growing impact of Zionism in central Europe and Galicia. She respected many of the Zionists’ deeds and even credited them for their success in the field of social welfare. In 1911–1912, Pappenheim traveled to Palestine to gain a direct impression of the developments there. Her book Sisyphus-Arbeit, published more than ten years later, criticized the Zionists for their indifference towards social and women’s issues and asserted that they were spreading false promises among east European Jews. On the other hand, as Loentz relates...