Hjertets kalejdoskop: En biografi om Karin Michaëlis by Beverley Driver Eddy (review)

It is good news indeed that a biography of the Danish writer Karin Michaëlis (1872–1950) has finally been published in her own country, thanks to Karin Michaëlis Selskabet. But it is both bittersweet and ironic that it took an American scholar, professor emerita of German literature Beverley Driver Eddy, to write it. Driver Eddy wrote the first comprehensive biography of Michaëlis, Karin Michaëlis: Kaleidoskop des Herzens. Eine Biographie (Edition Praesens, 2003) after having gone to the trouble of learning to read Danish. The present volume is an updated and extended version of that earlier work, competently translated into Danish by Kirsten Klitgård.

Michaëlis was arguably one of the best-known Danish writers and quite possibly the most popular and widely read European woman writer of her time as well, thanks largely to her controversial 1910 novel Den farlige Alder (Gyldendal; The Dangerous Age, Northwestern University Press, 1991). As Driver Eddy points out, no other writer since Hans Christian Andersen had been as internationally recognized and admired as Michaëlis was during the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to her popularity as a writer, Michaëlis was also a moral icon, who never shied away from speaking out against humanitarian and political injustice. She tirelessly supported those who fought such injustice, frequently donating most of her considerable earnings to the causes and people in whom she believed. She came to the aid of starving Austrian children during the First World War, placing as many of them as she could with Danish families. On the eve of the Second World War, she helped Jewish refugees, many of whom, including Bertolt Brecht and his family, she housed and fed, landing her on Hitler’s most wanted list, thus endangering her own life. This also meant that she lost her main income, which came from book sales in German-speaking countries, and ultimately was forced into exile in the United States until the war was over.

Michaëlis was also a sought-after lecturer in Europe. She once remarked that the only European countries where she had not given a speech were Greece and Portugal. That part of her career followed in the wake of the publication of Den farlige Alder, which dealt frankly with such taboo subjects as menopause and older women’s sexuality, scandalizing and intriguing readers all over Europe, who came to listen to her in droves. Some German booksellers even offered caricatures of her for sale. But women worshipped her for her insights into the female psyche and her down-to-earth advocacy of feminist causes. By the 1920s, she would take up such controversial subjects as compassionate euthanasia, unmarried women’s right to have children, birth control, and a different and more liberal way of educating children, as exemplified in Glædens Skole (Gyldendal, 1914; School of Joy), which was inspired by her friendship with Eugenia Schwarzwald and her philosophy of education. In addition to these activities, which meant that she was continually travelling all over Europe, she produced a steady stream of novels and newspaper articles. All of her books were translated into German, in addition to many other languages, and her articles appeared in Danish as well as German-language newspapers and magazines. But as Driver Eddy points out, in spite of her involvement with political issues, Michaëlis’s outlook was not particularly political. She was first and foremost a humanitarian who wanted to rectify poverty, persecution, and injustice wherever she encountered it.

Michaëlis had a quirky and at times overly trusting, not to say naïve, side to her personality, which led some people to take advantage of her. The steady stream of refugees from Nazi Germany who came to stay with her on Thurø, the small Danish island where she had settled and acquired several houses, received free board and lodging. Although residents were expected to help run her unofficial...