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ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-osu13020994782021-08-03T06:02:13Z Negotiating identity: Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) as German-Jewish feminist, social worker, activist, and author Loentz, Elizabeth Ann <p>Since Ernest Jones revealed the identity of "Anna O." in his 1953 Freud biography, scholars have been more interested in "Anna O.," the object of study for the two "founding fathers" of modern psychology, than in Bertha Pappenheim, the author, feminist, activist, and pioneering social worker. The majority of studies of Pappenheim (1859-1936) have focused on her role as the hysteric patient "Anna O." in Freud and Breuer's Studien über Hysterie. Few works have been dedicated to her later achievements as the founder of the Jewish German Women's League and as world-renowned social worker and activist, and almost none to her literary writings. My dissertation redirects attention to Pappenheim's long neglected, yet very extensive literary work, which includes dramas, short stories, parables, aphorisms, a travelogue, poems, prayers, and literary translations.</p><p>Pappenheim's multi-faceted identity, or in other terms, the necessity of "negotiating" between numerous competing or seemingly incompatible self-identifications and/or externally imposed identifications (Viennese, Austro-German, Orthodox Jewish, upper-middle-class, feminist, social worker, single woman, anti-Zionist, recovered hysteric), leads to paradoxes and ambivalence both in her writings and in her personal life and public activism. My project, which is informed by recent theoretical discussions of identity issues in Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Area Studies, Minority Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies, examines the relationship between Pappenheim's literary work and her social work and activism, endeavoring to unpack these moments of apparent contradiction. I examine recurring themes in Pappenheim's work (the status of Yiddish, anti-Zionism, conversion and Catholicism, Eastern European Jewry, women's role in Orthodox Judaism) all of which revolve around and point back to Pappenheim's steadfast insistence on the ideal of German-Jewish symbiosis. The symbiosis Pappenheim avowed, a "culturally German and religiously Jewish" identity, was tenuous throughout Pappenheim's lifetime, at odds with the increasingly dominant nationalist-racist discourse, that reduced religion, language, and culture to racial attributes. In her final years, however, the institutionalized anti-Semitism of National Socialism legally annulled the symbiosis, non-negotiably. For Pappenheim, the symbiosis was equally non-negotiable. At her advanced age, she was unwilling and unable to part with the keystone of her self-understanding and foundation of her life's work.</p> 1999 English text The Ohio State University / OhioLINK http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1302099478 http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1302099478 unrestricted This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.
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