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Elizabeth Loentz, Let me Continue to Speak the Truth: Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist

2010; Indiana University Press; Issue: 20 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/nas.2010.-.20.156

1565-5288

Miron,

Psychoanalysis and Social Critique

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 Gluckel 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