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The “Revolutionary Girl with the Titus-Head”: Women's Participation in the 1919 Revolutions in Budapest and Munich in the Eyes of their Contemporaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Eliza Johnson
Eliza Johnson*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, U.S.A.
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Extract

The First World War represents a watershed in European women's history. The process of female integration into the industrial economy was both speeded up and given official endorsement as the massive mobilization of soldiers created great manpower shortages. The war seemed to accelerate and legitimate the process of female political integration as well, as most postwar European governments met the basic aims of the women's suffrage movement. Despite these advances, the First World War and the interwar years comprised an era which was fraught with conflicts over women's roles, rights, and responsibilities.

Type
Forum: Gender, Nation, and Memory
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , September 2000 , pp. 541 - 550
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. There is a great deal of fascinating literature on the gendered nature of many anti-Semitic stereotypes and images, see especially the work of Sander Oilman. In considering Munich and Budapest in 1919–1921, anti-Semitism is clearly the main theme of counter-revolutionary politics and ideology. This paper will turn the tables a little and examine not the use of gender stereotypes in anti-Semitic polemics, but the use of the ever-present interwar anti-Semitic stereotypes as they were applied to the women who had participated in the revolutions.Google Scholar

2. Staatsarchiv München (Hereafter StaM), Akten der Polizeidirektion München, “Kätzler, Gabriele” 10.087, Letter from Stadtkommandantur, Fahndungs-Abteilung, p. 75.Google Scholar

3. On 16 June 1919, the family lawyer, Philipp Theilhaber, wrote the Polizeidirektion inquiring as to the whereabouts of his clients, who were still in custody, but were not listed on any of the inmates' lists. StaM Pol. Dir. 10.087, p. 82.Google Scholar

4. “Die Sekretärin des Stadtkommandanten,” Münchner Neuste Nachrichten, 1 August 1919, p. 303, clipping in police file (StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087).Google Scholar

5. StaM, Akten der Staatsanwaltschaft, Fasz. 153, 2106/1–“Leviné” (Ebert), p. 230.Google Scholar

6. Cecile Tormay, An Outlaw's Diary: Revolution (Volume 1), with forward by the Duke of Northumberland (London: Philip Allan & Co., 1923).Google Scholar

7. For a description of the founding of the Association, see Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, p. 229.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 173.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., pp. 236–237.Google Scholar

10. The plot of the wildly popular Hungarian 1919 best-selling novel, Az elsodort falu, by Dezsö Szabo, focuses similarly on the “infection” of a young nobleman in cosmopolitan Budapest and his eventual “rescue” through the return to the village of his birth and his marriage to a peasant girl.Google Scholar

11. “Revolutionsdamen vor dem Standgericht,” Münchner Augsburger Abendblatt, 31 July 1919, p. 131, clipping in police file (StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087).Google Scholar

12. All quotes here, Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, p. 281.Google Scholar

13. Politikatörténeti Intézet Levéltar (Archive of the Institute for Political History), Budapest (PTL), Személyi gyütemények, visszaemlékések (personal collections and memoirs), 822. f. “Berzeviczy Gizella.”Google Scholar

14. PTL “Berzeviczy,” pp. 1–2, the defense speech of her lawyer, Dr Béla Gonda, is also published in Hubert-Müller, Perbeszedek gyüjteménye (collected trial speeches), p. 373.Google Scholar

15. Ibid. Google Scholar

16. Münchner Augsburger Abendblatt, 31 July 1919, p. 131, clipping in police file (StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087).Google Scholar

17. Ibid. Google Scholar

18. StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087, police typed copies of confiscated correspondence seized in the Kätzler home at the time of their arrest–undated and unnumbered letters.Google Scholar

19. “Revolutionäre Frauen,” Bayerischer Kurier, 1 August 1919, p. 63, clipping in police file (StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087).Google Scholar

20. “Die Sekretärin des Stadtkommandanten,” Münchner Neuste Nachrichten, 1 August 1919, p. 303, clipping in police file (StaM, Pol. Dir. 10.087).Google Scholar

21. Ibid. Google Scholar

22. Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, p. 236.Google Scholar

23. Oscar Szollosy, “The Criminals of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, Vol. 2, Appendix 226; originally published in The Anglo—Hungarian Review. Google Scholar

24. This mix of cue-words, calling up a variety of already present stereotypes and prejudices, allows Szollosy to create the following illogical character: “One of Korvin's hangmen, a Russian Jew, with a limp and curly hair, named Gerson Itzkovitch, laughingly vaunted that he was in the habit of gouging out a bourgeois' eye with a single turn of his Cossack knife …” (Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, p. 226).Google Scholar

25. Zeitschrift für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 9 January 1920, clipping in police file (StaM Pol. Dir. 10040, Egelhofer), p. 144.Google Scholar

26. Letter from Amtsgericht München, Jugendgericht, 24 July 1920 (StaM Pol. Dir. 10147 Schollenbruch).Google Scholar

27. Tormay, Outlaw's Diary, Vol. 2, pp. 226–227.Google Scholar