Anna Margarete Stegmann

Anna Margarete Stegmann ( born Meyer ; * July 12, 1871 in Zurich ; † July 1, 1936 in Arlesheim ) was a German-Swiss neurologist , psychoanalyst , feminist , member of the Reichstag for the SPD and art collector .

Life

Anna Margarete Meyer, also called Marga, was born as the twelfth child of a farmer in Zurich. At the age of 16 she was an orphan. After passing a post office box exam, she initially worked as a civil servant in the Swiss postal service. a. as a correspondent for the Zurich District Post Office. Having them on the second chance the Matura had acquired, she studied in Zurich and Bern medicine. In 1910 she received her doctorate with a thesis on the psychology of child murder . In it she tried to show how the mother's act was connected to the social circumstances and her victim role as a woman.

In 1910 she initially worked as an assistant doctor at an institution for epileptics in Zurich. In 1911 she went to Berlin and continued her assistantship at the Charité with Alfons Cornelius. In 1911 she married the forensic doctor and psychiatrist Arnold Stegmann (1872-1914), who was an analysand of Sigmund Freud . Her husband died in 1914 as a war volunteer near Verdun , the marriage looks childless. Anna Margarete Stegmann shared an interest in psychoanalysis with him ; together with Mira Gincburg , Tatjana Rosenthal and Karen Horney , she was one of the first female members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association . She probably completed her training analysis with Karl Abraham . After the death of her husband, she became friends with the 18 years younger art historian Karl Adrian. This probably happier relationship was also ended by Adrian's early death in 2015. She continued to have a common interest in contemporary art after his death and made her an important art collector in Dresden.

In 1920 she received her license to practice medicine for Germany and opened a practice as a general practitioner and neurologist in Dresden .

In 1918, Stegmann joined the SPD. Between 1920 and 1924 she was an unpaid city ​​councilor in Dresden. From 1924 to 1930 she was a member of the Reichstag . During the time of National Socialism she went back to Switzerland.

She was a member of the Schopenhauer Society , the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom, and worked in the Dresden women's associations.

Act

As a doctor and psychoanalyst, Stegmann dealt with the psychogenesis of physical illnesses and was the first to draft a psychoanalysis of cancer . With her essay on the representation of epileptic seizures in dreams, published in 1913, she did pioneering work in the field of the psychosomatics of epilepsy . As a doctor and politician, she gave numerous lectures on the problem of alcohol addiction and the harmfulness of tobacco consumption among young people.

As a SPD member, she was one of the first female city councilors in Dresden in 1920. In 1924 she became a member of the Reichstag, where she primarily campaigned for social and women's issues. Documented is u. a. that in the second electoral period of the Reichstag she was committed to the preservation law , which was never enacted , which on the one hand was directed against the inhumane placement of mentally handicapped and " asocial " people in prisons, workhouses and psychiatric hospitals, and on the other hand should regulate compulsory placement.

In the 1925 debate on Section 218 , she argued in favor of women's rights to abortion .

Her work as an art collector and the scope of her collection has not yet been conclusively researched. It is known that - like Ida Bienert - she was one of the few collectors in Dresden who bought works by contemporary artists. She belonged to the Dresden local group of the women's association founded in 1916 by Ida Dehmel and Rosa Schapire to promote German fine arts , which wanted to promote contemporary visual artists and tried to bring their works to museums through donations against the current trend. In 1925 she donated eleven works from her collection to the Dresden City Museum under the title “Karl Adrian Foundation” , six of which were later brought to the “ Degenerate Art ” campaign. These were the surviving works of Heinrich Campendonk's Bathing Women with Fish (1915), Lyonel Feininger's Gelmeroda , Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's Seated Woman (1915), Emil Nolde's Girl in the Green (1915), Conrad Felixmüller's beloved and Eugen Hoffmann's Adam and Eve (1919). Other works from the donation by Robert Genin , Emil von Gerliczy , Edmund Moeller and Wilhelm Lehmbruck are still considered lost.

Using catalogs, a total of 33 oil paintings , five watercolors and two sculptures could be assigned to the Margarete Stegmann Collection by 2006 . These include the painting Recovering Girl (1890) by Lovis Corinth , Landscape with Cows by Heinrich Campendonk, Paul Klee's Nature Theater (1914) and Vogel Reich (1918), Lasar Segall's Kaddisch from 1918 and Pablo Picasso's Veiled Woman . She owned a total of 15 works by Alexej Jawlensky , with whom she was on friendly terms, from the years 1915 to 1935. The works of Emil Nolde were of particular importance, for whose works she was very enthusiastic and with whom she, like other artists, Also in personal exchange was: girl in the garden (1915), girl and lily (1918), youth and girl (1919), landlord (1920) and bouquet of flowers . In her room she had set up a Nolde wall with the artist's works and letters, and her letters to Nolde show a deep personal connection with his works, in which she saw her own life experiences reflected.

Works (selection)

• Contribution to the psychology of child murder. Dissertation Leipzig 1910
• A case of forgetting names. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie 2, 1912, 650f
• A confused dream. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 1, 1913, 486-489
• Depiction of epileptic seizures in a dream. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 1913, 560f
• Identification with the father. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie 1, 1913, 561f
• Sections 218/219 of the Criminal Code. Quarterly publication of the Federation of German Doctors 1 (2), 1924, 27–30
• The psychogenesis of organic diseases and the worldview. Imago 12, 1926, 196-202
• Women's blindness in men - an ancient disease. Comrade 6, 1929, 229f
• Votes against § 218. The Socialist Doctor 7, 1931, 100f

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Müller; Ludger M. Hermanns: Margarete Stegmann - psychoanalyst, member of the Reichstag and women's rights activist. Lucifer-Amor 14 (27), 2001, 36-59
2. ↑ Margarete Stegmann with female psychoanalysts in Germany. Accessed May 31, 2018
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Heike Biedermann: “Most of the latest art is only collected by Ms. Ida Bienert and Ms. Dr. Stegmann ... “: The Margarete Stegmann Collection. In: Heike Biedermann et al .: From Monet to Mondrian: Masterworks of Modernism from Dresden's private collections from the first half of the 20th century. Dresden 2006, pp. 91-99
4. ^ Biography of Anna Margarete Stegmann . In: Heinrich Best and Wilhelm H. Schröder : Database of Members of the National Assembly and the German Reichstag 1919–1933 (Biorab – Weimar)
5. ^ Anna Margarete Stegmann in the database of the members of the Reichstag
6. ^ Biography of Anna Margarete Stegmann . In: Wilhelm H. Schröder : Social Democratic Parliamentarians in the German Reich and Landtag 1876–1933 (BIOSOP)
7. ↑ Stadtmuseum Dresden (ed.): 100 years of women's suffrage . Women vote in Dresden. Dresden 2019, p. 10-11 .
8. ^ Matthias Willing: The Preservation Law (1918-1967). A legal historical study on the history of German welfare. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2003, p. 89
9. ↑ Ingo von Münch: The paragraph full of blood and tears. The time of April 7, 1972. Retrieved June 2, 2018
10. ^ Rainer Stamm: Women's Association in Art: Courageous Realization of Unworldly Plans. Frankfurter Allgemeine from August 20, 2017. Accessed June 2, 2018
11. ↑ Uta Baier: Dresden's unknown patrons. Die Welt vom September 26, 2006. Retrieved June 2, 2018