Preliminary Programme

Gudrun Goodman, an Icelandic midwife who had practiced in Saskatchewan, Canada from 1887 to 1922, saved a baby after the mother had been gored by an ox, and then raised the child, Gudbjorg Eyolfson, as her own. This story was rescued from obscurity by an Icelandic-Canadian historian, Walter Lindal. But traces of Gudrun Goodman also reside in the materiality of the gravestone, in written texts such as the obituary, in the stories recounted by a descendant, and in ‘the afterlife’ of a photograph. These sites of memory generate a narrative about the life of Gudrun Goodman. But her story is refracted through a variety of forms, conventions, cultural assumptions and discursive practices of a particular time and place, and as a result, Gudrun Goodman’s story is inflected with many meanings.
Uncovering the conventions, as well as reflecting on the omissions and silences, tells us less about Gudrun Goodman and more about the social contexts of recall and commemoration. In this paper, I illustrate the ways in which the story of Gudrun Goodman has been resurrected several times over the years to fulfill the needs of the present. Because her story reflects well on her family, her community and her national identity, the ‘troubling’ elements of her biography—those that contradict the image of Gudrun Goodman as heroine or as the embodiment of the pioneer spirit--are omitted or euphemistically recalled. The act of commemoration—both in these formal accounts and materialized on her gravestone—simultaneously valorize Gudrun Goodman and conceal the conventions through which her biography is constructed. (Show less)

During almost four decades of women’s history, women have been “added in” to history in a number of ways. Women’s lives have been retrieved from obscurity or invisibility, women’s perspectives have been revealed, and many women’s voices heard. Women can now better understand our own history, and women and men the history of a world populated by both. Although we have moved past the first wave of women’s history, there is still much that can be learned from the biographies of women which provides a necessary and useful lens through which to view social history.

This paper is about Dr. Frieda Nora Heilberg, born during the Wilhelminian (Kaiserreich) era in 1894 in Breslau, Germany into a middle-class German-Jewish family. She was the second child of Rosa (nee Frankenstein) and Adolf Heilberg, who was a successful lawyer and city councillor. Frieda Heilberg’s life in Germany spanned the period of the subsequent Weimar Republic, and the first 5 years of National Socialism. At the age of 44, she emigrated to the United States, where she lived until 1986 when she died shortly before her 92nd birthday.

She was among that relatively small group of women of her time who went on to higher education. She received her doctorate in economics in 1923 from the university in Breslau. Some 15 years later and about 4000 miles away she went back to school to earn a diploma from the prestigious New York (later to become Columbia) School of Social Work. She spent the remainder of her life helping those in need, specialising in immigration problems.

Dr. Frieda Heilberg was my great-aunt. I knew her for the more than forty years during which our lives overlapped. Since childhood, I had heard family stories, primarily about my male forebears. I wondered why, since there seemed to me to be so many strong and accomplished women as well. To find out more, I began in the 1980s to interview members of the family - among them Frieda Heilberg. Those interviews serve as one source of data for this paper. Other sources of information include letters, photographs, a journal, other interviews and secondary materials.

This work combines a scholarly approach with a personal one. Writing family biography presents a particular challenge to the scholar. It tests the boundaries between objectivity and subjectivity. It places added responsibility on the researcher to constantly question “how do I know that?” It puts the social scientist into her own test tube and sets the demanding task of seeing out and in at the same time. This is also an advantage as it provides both an inside and outside perspective on the subject, allowing for a reflective and reflexive approach. There is the additional benefit of having access to materials not yet in the public realm.

The story of Dr. Frieda Nora Heilberg and the methodological issues in reconstructing it are the subjects of this paper. (Show less)

Take two nineteenth-century German women who were prominent, cultured, intelligent and
resourceful. The elder was the wife of a well-known economist-statistician professor who was an
associate of the Kaiser’s circle as well as Vice-President of the Reichstag. He was chairing the
Reichstag the day in 1914 that the diverse parties overcame their differences to vote
appropriations for the new war. His wife, my subject, lectured throughout Germany and in the
U.S.A. on temperance. She also traveled around the world, crossing Canada en route to Japan,
where she and her husband were welcomed at the imperial court. She wrote on public matters
before and after WWI.

Frau Geheimrat Paasche had one son, who married my other subject, Ellen Witting. This
younger woman was the daughter of the Lord Mayor of Posen, Richard Witting, a banker and
Prussian government official who was one of the drafters of the Weimar Constitution. She was
close to her uncle, Maximilian Harden, the most prominent German journalist for the period,
1892-1922, who wrote so vigorously against the Kaiser's policies during WWI that his journal
was shut down periodically. Ellen, soon after her marriage to Hans Paasche made a ten-month
wedding trip to German East Africa, where they trekked to Lake Victoria. Hans had spent two
years in the colony as a naval officer. He wanted to share with his wife the place he loved most
in the world, the highlands of East Africa. In 1910 she was possibly the first European woman to
visit the source of the Nile, an expedition that she soon wrote about.

Each woman published enough to provide a certain image of herself for future generations. They
may be remembered mainly in terms of their husbands, but they were articulate of their own
ideas and positions, and to that extent, each sat for her own careful self-portrait. Although their
destinies first mingled amicably in the person of the handsome youth, divergent world views,
and matters of war and peace, precipitated a falling out of monumental proportions. At a critical
point in German history, 1918, Elise was the embodiment of the old Germany struggling to
survive, Ellen of the new Germany struggling to be born. The rancor that came over the mother-
in-law, for reasons of politics, lifestyle and prejudice, sundered their bond. Then the younger
woman died in December 1918 at the age of 29, long before her mother-in-law. Soon enough, as
history neglects and overrides human intentions, the Germany of the 30s and 40s forgot their
good parts as well as their bad. Strong women both, they espoused no common gender cause.
Can their individual values be separated from the men they were linked to? Was self-
construction a viable tool for a married woman in their time and place? Through their individual
writings, published and unpublished, photographs and family tradition, I will explore their
practice of self-construction, as well as the limits that intractable personality and circumstance
imposed on their achievement. (Show less)

The Marie Louise, Maria Therese and Helga von Hammerstein were the oldest daughters in a prominent military family. Their father was the Chief of Staff of the German Army from 1932 to 1934 and their mother was the daughter of General Walther von Luettwitz who had tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1920. They came of age in the late 1920’s in Berlin. In the gymnasium, university, and beyond, they participated actively in social and political movements. Two became members of the Communist Party and engaged in clandestine work. The third, involved her self in education reform movements. All three were subsequently able to help those who fell victim to Nazi state terror soon after January 30, 1933. While they were often lumped together as the “von Hammerstein Sisters”, they saw themselves as different from each other, and in fact lived different lives, though they were united in their opposition to Nazism. The biographies of these three women were exceptional because of their family position and individual characters. They were also paradigmatic of the German experience in the 20th Century because of the historical and personal discontinuities shared by so many in Germany. Two of these women are my aunts and one is my mother.

Drawing on archives, secondary literature, and on oral history preserved within my family, I will examine broadly the ways in which their stories have been told. First, I will examine the motives ascribed within the larger family and by the public to their actions. The tendency was to ascribe their politics and their actions to “female weaknesses”, e.g., being susceptible to the seductive wiles of men, and other personal characteristics reputedly related to their sex. (Their father, however, was quoted in the Reichstag as saying in their defense “I have three Republican daughters”). The second issue is their invisibility has in the post war period and during the Cold War. Their political actions were often reduced to gossip, and eclipsed by the part their younger brothers played in the failed 20th of July, 1944 Putsch against the Nazi regime. During the long Cold War period, having been Communist and doing clandestine work for the Soviets in the 1930’s was anything but respectable. Maria Therese went into exile in 1935 and after the war moved to the United States. Marie Louise and Helga remained in Germany during the war. In the 1950s, Marie Louise moved to the German Democratic Republic.

I will begin by sketching the “facts” of these lives and the ways in which they were perceived in 1930s Berlin. I will then examine the ways in which their stories were told across time - - in Nazi Germany, the immediate post War years, the years of the Cold War, and finally in the Germany of today. My paper will be multi - layered, taking account gender issues, the particular circumstances of their lives, and the historical periods and events, which impinged upon them. (Show less)