Hildegart Rodríguez

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Hildegart Rodríguez.

Hildegart Leocadia Georgina Hermenegilda María del Pilar Rodríguez (born December 9, 1914 in Madrid ; † June 9, 1933 ibid), known as "Hildegart" or "Fraulein Hildegart", was a Spanish author, socialist and sex reformer. Her reputation as a eugenically conceived child prodigy, her early public appearance and her violent death brought her international fame.

Life

Hildegart Rodríguez grew up with her single mother Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira in Madrid. There is just as little reliable information about her father as about her early childhood.

At the age of eleven, Hildegart Rodríguez wrote her first essays for the magazine Sexualidad and made her first public appearances. At fourteen, she became known to a large audience through articles for the El Socialista newspaper . She took on her first political offices and quickly became one of the country's prominent socialists.

Her intellectual achievements caused a sensation beyond Spain: At the age of 13 she began studying law at the University of Madrid, which she successfully completed four years later. Then she enrolled in philosophy and philology. By 1933 she had published sixteen books and over a hundred and fifty newspaper and magazine articles, most of them on the subjects of sexual reform and socialism. Her books on sex gave her a reputation as the first female sexologist in Spain. In 1932 she was the only female founding member of the Spanish branch of the World Sex Reform League and its first secretary.

Hildegart's life ended suddenly at the age of eighteen: her mother shot her in her sleep.

Myths about Hildegart

With her violent death at the latest, Hildegart became a mythical figure around whom numerous legends have grown up to this day. In many publications she is described as a eugenically conceived child: She was planned and designed by her mother as the future savior of Spain and conceived with the help of a man specially selected for this purpose. However, there is no evidence. The assumption that she was an intellectual child prodigy who learned to read and write at the age of a few months and who had already mastered seven languages ​​within the first few years of her life is also unconfirmed.

The primary source of biographical data on Hildegart is the testimony of her mother Aurora, who initially sat in prison after her daughter's murder and ended her life in a psychiatric institution. She conducted several interviews with journalists that were published as well as her psychiatric files. However, these contain verifiably incorrect information and can therefore not be used for a reliable biography of Hildegart. Incorrect information that cannot be traced back to Aurora is still widespread in the literature, for example that Hildegart would have been baptized with the name "Carmen". In fact, there are only a few reliable facts about Hildegart, which mainly concern her public life from 1929 onwards and which come from the contemporary press.

Career as a socialist

At the age of fourteen Hildegart Rodríguez became a member of the Socialist Youth in January 1929 and only a few months later their Madrid spokeswoman, then vice-secretary. She also joined the socialist union Unión General de Trabajadores in 1929. In the spring of 1930 she became a member of the Socialist Party and soon stood next to party leaders such as Julián Besteiro and Andrés Saborit for lectures and propaganda events. She wrote for the newspaper of the socialist party El Socialista , for the organ of the socialist youth La Renovación and for La Libertad . With the beginning of the Second Spanish Republic , Hildegart was increasingly disappointed in her party and its government actions. Her publicly expressed, sometimes very polemical criticism led to her being expelled from the party in 1932. In the last year of her life, she turned to the federalist party and wrote for the anarchist newspaper La Tierra .

Advocating sexual reform

Hildegart's commitment to sexual reform began at the age of eleven as part of the hygiene campaign ( Campaña Sanitaria ) of the doctor Antonio Navarro Fernández. At the age of sixteen she entered into correspondence with the famous British sex reformer, Havelock Ellis , to seek advice on founding a Spanish branch of the World Sex Reform League . On her decisive instigation, the Liga española para la Reforma Sexual sobre bases científicas was founded in 1932 .

In addition to Hildegart, the founding members included well-known pedagogues, lawyers, medical professionals and writers such as Gregorio Marañón , Luis Jiménez de Asúa, Luis Huerta and Enrique Diego Madrazo. Hildegart became the first secretary of the league and continued to be the editorial secretary of the league's own magazine Sexus . For them she wrote her own articles, translated foreign-language articles into Spanish and interviewed important international sex reformers such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Norman Haire . She was also in contact with other prominent figures in sexual reform, such as Margaret Sanger and Jonathan Leunbach and possibly also Helene Stöcker and Wilhelm Kauffmann. Hildegart was involved in the league's most important public event , the 1933 Eugenics Congress ( Primeras Jornadas Eugénicas Españolas ), with her own workshop on the subject of contraception. In addition, Hildegart was involved in lectures and publications to disseminate and publicize knowledge of sexual reform and suggested the establishment of further sex reform groups. With Hildegart's death just a few weeks after the Eugenics Congress, the league disappeared from the public.

Hildegart took socially very controversial positions: Against the prevailing Catholic morality, she campaigned for a new, scientifically based sexual morality. This should produce responsible, enlightened individuals who would behave respectfully towards other people and society. On the one hand, this meant demanding economic, family and sexual equality. In free love relationships and with the help of the most modern contraceptive methods, men and women should be able to satisfy their sexual and emotional needs. On the other hand, Hildegart subordinated every individual need to a eugenic social ideal. Above all, she propagated relationships that should produce eugenically valuable offspring. She advocated forced sterilization, euthanasia and forced abortions, and considered homosexuality to be pathological and socially damaging. Compared to sex reformers like Magnus Hirschfeld, she displayed significantly more repressive attitudes with regard to homosexuality and government coercive measures. At the same time, however, she took more liberal positions than other bourgeois Spanish sex reformers on questions of contraception and free love.

Works

Hildegart published sixteen monographs until her death. All writings except the literary study Tres amores históricos (“Three historical love affairs”, 1930), the short story ¿Quo vadis, burguesía? (“Bourgeoisie, where are you going?”, [1932]) and the settlement with socialism ¿Se equivocó Marx? (“Errte Marx?”, 1932) are devoted to the topic of sex.

Some texts are only a few dozen pages long and primarily served to educate and educate the workers, such as La limitación de la prole (“The restriction of the offspring”, 1931) and Educación sexual (“Sexual education”, 1931). Others were aimed at professionals and laypeople alike and were supposed to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge at the time, such as Malthusismo y Neomalthusismo (“Malthusism y Neomalthusism”, 1932) and Cómo se curan y cómo se evitan las enfermedades venéreas (“How to cure and prevent venereal diseases”, 1932 ).

Hildegart's contemporary and in some cases posthumous reputation as a sexologist is based primarily on the last-mentioned monographs. In fact, however, these are knowledge-popularizing writings, not scientific papers. They are not based on our own studies or the comparison of current research, but consist largely of copies of the works of other contemporary sexologists and sex reformers such as Marie Stopes , Iwan Bloch and Havelock Ellis, without this being stated.

Hildegart published the following monographs during her lifetime:

Several of the books were also reprinted posthumously. However, this is less due to her extraordinary quality than to the popularity of the author.

reception

Hildegart's story, especially in connection with the story of her mother Aurora, has become the subject of many cinematic and literary works. Well-known novels are La vierge rouge (1987) by Fernando Arrabal and Auroras Anlaß (1989) by the Austrian Erich Hackl . The Spanish director Fernando Fernán Gómez brought the film Mi hija Hildegart to the cinemas in 1977 . The story has also been filmed repeatedly in recent years, for example in 2014 by Sheila Pye with The red virgin and in 2016 by Barbara Caspar with Hildegart or: Projekt Superwoman . There are also at least six theater adaptations from the Spanish-speaking area. The story of Hildegart and her mother Aurora found its way into anthologies on famous criminal cases as well as in television programs. Newspapers, magazines, and private websites also revisit the story at regular intervals.

literature

  • Kyra A. Kietrys: Hildegart in the 1930s: Her Politics and Her Image . In: Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Vol. 92, Issue 3, 2015, pp. 255–281.
  • Alison Sinclair: Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain. Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform , University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2007, ISBN 978-0-7083-2017-4 .
  • Jana Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda. Strategic knowledge popularization in the work of the Spanish sex reformer Hildegart Rodríguez , transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3855-4 .

Web links

Sheila Pye: The red virgin . Retrieved April 25, 2017 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rosa Cal did the most detailed research on the father. The information scientist suspects that it was the clergyman Alberto Pallás, cf. Cal, Rosa: A mi no me doblega nadie. Aurora Rodríguez, su vida y su obra (Hildegart) , Ediciós do Castro, Sada, A Coruña 1991, pp. 44-54.
  2. ↑ In some places there is also talk of a medical degree, which, however, cannot be proven, cf. Cal, A mi no me doblega nadie 1991, p. 64.
  3. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 331–338.
  4. ↑ Sinclair: Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain 2007, pp. 1-2.
  5. ↑ Guzmán, Eduardo de: Aurora de sangre (Vida y muerte de Hildegart) , G. del Toro, Madrid 1973; Lapena, Alfonso: Hildegart, el ídolo destrozado , [Manila, México undated ]; Rendueles Olmedo, Rendueles Olmedo, Guillermo: El manuscrito found en Ciempozuelos. Análisis de la historia clínica de Aurora Rodríguez , Endymion / Las Ediciones de la Piqueta, Madrid 1989.
  6. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 46–47.
  7. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 31–34.
  8. ↑ Sinclair: Sex and Society in in Early Twentieth-Century Spain 2007, pp. 43–95.
  9. ↑ Sinclair: Sex and Society in in Early Twentieth-Century Spain 2007, pp. 157–159.
  10. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 227–292.
  11. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 140–142.
  12. ↑ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 316–323.
  13. ↑ Hildegart or project: Superwoman. Retrieved April 25, 2017 .
  14. ^ Wittenzellner: Between Enlightenment and Propaganda 2017, pp. 58–63.
personal data
SURNAME Rodríguez, Hildegart
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rodríguez, Hildegart Leocadia Georgina Hermenegilda María del Pilar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish daughter of Aurora Rodríguez
DATE OF BIRTH December 9, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Madrid
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1933
Place of death Madrid