Emma Adler

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Emma Adler (born May 20, 1858 in Debreczin , Hungary , † February 23, 1935 in Zurich ) was an Austrian journalist and writer. She was the wife of the doctor and politician Victor Adler , who founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party in Austria .

Emma and Victor Adler (around 1880)
Emma Adler: The famous women of the French Revolution 1789–1795. Title page

Life

Emma Adler was born as Emma Braun in Debreczin, Hungary. Her father Ignaz was a railway entrepreneur in Austria-Hungary . The family belonged to the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie. Of her five brothers, both the eldest, Heinrich Braun (1854–1927), and the younger, Adolf Braun (1862–1929), became politicians of social democracy in the German Empire and in the Weimar Republic .

At the age of six, Emma claims to have been a victim of sexual abuse and afterwards no longer considered herself a virgin and therefore not marriageable. As a 16-year-old she turned to socialism.

In 1878 she met Victor Adler, who worked as a doctor at the psychiatric clinic of the General Hospital in Vienna and then became a doctor for the poor before he became politically active. The two married in the same year. She gave birth to three children, among whom the first born, Friedrich Adler (1879–1960), later stood out; he was followed by Marie (* 1881) and Karl (* 1885). Emma Adler studied literature intensively. In 1887 she published her work Goethe and Frau von Stein .

From 1882 to 1889 the apartment and doctor's practice were located in the 9th district of Vienna in the house inherited from Adler's father at Berggasse 19. (It then gave way to a new rental house, into which Sigmund Freud, among others, moved in 1891, through whom the address became world-famous) of the couple, according to Susanne Böck, included Engelbert Pernerstorfer , Gustav Mahler and Hermann Bahr .

Victor Adler became the founder and chairman of the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP) in Austria in 1888/89 when he succeeded in merging two left political currents into one party. His fortune was gradually used up in his work for social democracy; Emma Adler felt great insecurity. In addition, there was the anti-Semitism rampant in Vienna , also among friends of Viktor Adler. The family was hostile despite their switch to Protestantism .

In 1891 Emma Adler was no longer able to cope with her multiple roles as mother, supporter of her husband and author. She suffered a mental breakdown. Suffering a nervous crisis appeared in the bourgeois society of that time as a “legitimate protest against adverse living conditions” (Böck). Emma Adler spent a lot of time in mental hospitals and sanatoriums; after two or three years she had recovered. After that she had a productive phase again with translations and journalistic work and worked as a foreign language teacher for English and French in the workers' education association in Gumpendorf .

Emma Adler worked as a journalist and translator for the magazine Die Gleichheit, which was reactivated by her husband in 1886 . Social democratic weekly newspaper and for its successor, the Arbeiter-Zeitung founded by Adler in 1889 , which appeared daily from 1895. She also worked as an editor for the youth supplement of the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung .

Around 1900 it turned out that Emma's daughter Marie Adler had an incurable mental illness. In 1905 Victor Adler was elected for the first time to the Reichsrat , the parliament of Old Austria, of which he was a member until 1918. In 1906 Emma Adler's main work The Famous Women of the French Revolution came out, in 1907 her biography about Jane Welsh Carlyle , the wife of the English historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, appeared .

In 1916, in the middle of the First World War , Emma's son Friedrich shot dead the dictatorial kk Prime Minister Karl Graf Stürgkh . After a sensational trial, he was sentenced to death, pardoned to prison by Emperor Charles I and given amnesty by the monarch on November 1, 1918.

Viktor Adler was one of the most important parliamentarians in the Reichsrat or its House of Representatives in the last ten years of the Austrian monarchy (even if this was postponed from 1914 to 1917). As a prominent member of the Provisional National Assembly for German Austria , from October 22, 1918, despite his heart disease, he was intensively involved in the preparations for the proclamation of the republic on November 12, 1918 and on October 30, he took over the office of Foreign Minister of German Austria, but died on November 11, 1918, on the day the Emperor made a declaration of renunciation of any share in state affairs.

The excitement in the family and especially the early death of her husband, who was to be one of the top politicians in the republic, caused Emma Adler to be deeply depressed , which was only over when she moved to Switzerland.

In 1925 she moved to her son Friedrich in Zurich. The publication of a biography of Victor Adler planned by her for 1933 could only be carried out in 1968 by other authors under the title Victor Adler in the mirror of his contemporaries .

reception

Hermann Bahr dedicated the one-act play La marquesa d'Amaegui to Emma Adler in 1887 . A chat .

For Mary of the altarpiece of the parish church of St. Mauritius in Nussdorf am Attersee , Emma Adler, who was there on summer retreat, sat as a model for the academic painter Emanuel Oberhauser . Allegedly this was accepted by the village population because Maria was also a Jew.

Friedrich Adler had family papers, including Emma Adler's notes and letters, walled up in a cellar in France during the war. Emma Adler's estate was transferred from Zurich to Vienna in 1960 when her son Friedrich died there. The estate includes correspondence between Emma Adler and Victor and Fritz Adler (1902–1925), as well as with friends of the Braun family (1904–1925). Further correspondence with Anna Pernerstorfer, Adelheid Popp and various others from the period 1898–1935. The majority of the archive material consists of personal documents and notes, mainly of Emma Adler's biographical manuscripts. The nine boxes are in the Association for the History of the Labor Movement .

Works

Emma Adler also published under the pseudonyms Marion Lorm and Helene Erdmann; Lorm's attribution to Victor Adler as an author is erroneous. The comments are taken from a work by Susanne Böck.

  • Goethe and Frau v. Stein , 1887
  • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt: Germinie Lacerteux , 1864; German: Germinie Lacerteux. A maid's novel. Only authorized translation by Emma Adler , Brand, Vienna 1896.
  • Ivan Sergejevic Turgenev : Mercy Bread . Acting in two acts. Translated into German for the first time by Marion Lorm. Schulze, Leipzig 1897.
  • Marion Lorm (pseudonym), translation: Choderlos de Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons , 1899
  • Jane Welsh Carlyle: a biography , Akademischer Verlag, Vienna 1907, Garamond, Vienna et al. 1996, ISBN 3-85306-007-2 ( Adelheid Popp , Heinrich Braun: Indirect processing of their own fate )
  • The famous women of the French Revolution 1789–1795 , Stern, Vienna 1906 ( Edith Saurer : The first work on women's history in Vienna )
  • Memoirs 1887–1892–1912. In: Commemorative Book: 20 Years of the Austrian Workers' Movement , edited by Adelheid Popp on behalf of the Women's Reich Committee, Vienna 1912, pp. 35–51.
  • End of working day. A book for the youth , Ignaz Brand, Vienna 1902.
  • New Book of Youth , Wiener Volksbuchhandlung and Ignaz Brand, Vienna 1912.
  • Cooking school , Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung and Ignaz Brand, Vienna 1915.
  • Workers learn foreign languages. In: trade union calendar , publishing house of the Austrian Trade Union Federation , Vienna 1963.
  • Autobiography (started in 1913, completed in the last years of life, unpublished).

literature

  • Adler, Emma. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 1: A-Benc. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-598-22681-0 , pp. 37-39.
  • Jutta Dick, Marina Sassenberg (ed.): Jewish women in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lexicon on life and work. Reinbek near Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-499-16344-6 .
  • Susanne Böck: Distance from the bourgeois world: Emma and Victor Adler. In: L'Homme. European journal for feminist history , No. 7, Böhlau Verlag , Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 1996.
  • Eva Geber, epilogue, in: Emma Adler, The famous women of the French Revolution , edited and provided with an epilogue by Eva Geber, Mandelbaum Verlag, Vienna 2014
  • Andrea M. Lauritsch: "Nothing is more difficult than being the wife of a famous man." On the life and work of Emma Adler and Helene Bauer. In: Andrea M. Lauritsch (Ed.): Zions Töchter , Vienna 2006.

Web links

Wikisource: Emma Adler  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Felix Czeike : Historical Lexicon Vienna. Volume 1: A – Da. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-218-00543-4 , p. 17.
  2. ^ Julius Braunthal: Victor and Friedrich Adler - two generations of workers' movement . Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, Vienna 1965, p. 29ff.
  3. ↑ Felix Czeike (Ed.): Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 1. Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1992, p. 17.
  4. ↑ equality. In: dasrotewien.at - Web dictionary of the Viennese social democracy. SPÖ Vienna (Ed.)
  5. ↑ Martha Tausk : Emma Adler . In: Tageszeitung Arbeiter-Zeitung , Vienna, May 16, 1948, p. 3, accessed on May 20, 2018.
  6. ↑ Emma Adler's estate . Reference in the Austrian Library Network , accessed on May 20, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Adler, Emma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Brown, Emma; Lorm, Marion (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian journalist, writer, socialist
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1858
PLACE OF BIRTH Debreczin
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1935
Place of death Zurich