Nadja Strasser

Nadja Strasser (born Noema Ramm on September 25, 1871 in Starodub , Russian Empire ; died on August 19, 1955 in Berlin ) was a German-Russian feminist , writer and translator .

Life

She was one of nine children in a Jewish family and the older sister of Alexandra Ramm , the wife of Franz Pfemfert , and Maria Ramm , the wife of Carl Einstein .

It is not known exactly when, like her sisters, she left Russia. She was already enthusiastic about Zionist and socialist ideas in Starodub and organized herself in Warsaw , where she apparently lived for a while, in the Jewish Union . Then she came to Vienna, where she began to work as a journalist, so she published an article in Auguste Fickert's magazine “Neues Frauenleben”.

In 1917 she published Die Russin , a collection of historical portraits of important Russian women, by S. Fischer :

• Ekaterina Romanovna Voronzowa-Daschkowa , confidante of Catherine the Great ,
• Marija Nikolajewna Volkonskaja , who voluntarily followed her husband, the Decembrist Sergei Grigoryevich Volkonsky, into exile in Siberia,
• Nadeschda Prokofjewna Suslowa , first Russian doctor,
• Sofja Wassiljewna Kowalewskaja , world's first female professor of mathematics,
• Marie Bashkirtseff , painter and diary writer,
• Natalie hearts, wife of Alexander Ivanovich hearts and
• Wera Nikolajewna Figner and Lyudmila Wolkenstein, who were imprisoned in the Shlisselburg Fortress for many years as members of the left-wing terrorist Narodnaja Wolja .

Using these examples, Strasser tries to prove that the Russian woman is superior to her sex mate elsewhere in terms of independence and progressiveness. She partly thinks in folkish terms ("With childlike fervent love [...] the Russian clings to his clod."), Idealizes and disregards (especially Russian anti-Semitism), but already clearly professes Marxism . She says of the Russian revolutionary:

“He never looked for the object in women for his thirst for power. The historical tradition that would have given him a sham authorization to treat women in a degrading way is missing there. [...] Hardly would a truly revolutionary Russian manage to deny the woman to whom he concedes the duty to fight and die for civil liberty like him, the right to enjoy this freedom that has been won. […] Such behavior is just as lucky for a man as it is for a woman. Because it saved him from the worst of all bondage, the bondage of the slave owner. "

In 1919 - again by Fischer - Das Result appeared , a collection of essays in which Strasser, with expressionist pathos typical of the time, not only called for equal rights for women, but above all strongly criticized the conformist, docile woman to whom she was to blame for the inequality gives:

“You are gentle and gentle, gentle and devoted, docile and tender, you wake up and doze off, you are clever and stupid, just where you need one or the other - you are everything that uninhibited senses and secret desires understand in hidden hours . […] That veil of lies and self-deception is woven that envelops you like a dangerous mountain mist. In this mist there are no distances and no depths, no heights and no valleys; there is only a fearful clinging to a gray piece of stone, a shaky groping for the piece of solid, secure ground: marriage. "

She also indirectly blames the tolerance of women and their enduring unbearable conditions for the catastrophe of the war

“But I - and that must bring you closer to me once - I suffer from you, woman, fellow sufferer. My hands clench in desperation about your nothingness, your animal-egoistic tolerance, your confinement, your inability to understand, your cowardly evasive failure to understand. Who can make it clear to you how much your part of the guilt is that our life produces nothing but poison, from which you and your children perish? "

In particular, the difficulties and deficiencies with which a single woman is confronted at every turn made Strasser finally demand the abolition of marriage: “There is nothing that equates to the loneliness of the single woman. It is a bewitched forest that no one who came in leaves alive. And the woman does not dare utter the only formula that solves this evil spell: Away with civil marriage! "

Her younger sisters Alexandra and Maria had been in Berlin since 1908. From when Strasser also lived there is unclear. It is also unclear from when and why Noema Ramm called herself Nadja Strasser, whether it is just a pseudonym or partly a married name. In any case, the three sisters found themselves in the vicinity of Franz Pfemfert's magazine Die Aktion before 1914 . Alexandra was von Pfemfert's wife, translated and ran a book and art shop as well as a small publishing house and thus co-financed the publication of the magazine, and Maria's two husbands, the art historian Carl Einstein and the teacher Heinrich Schaefer, published in the action . From 1911, works by Nadja Strasser appeared there, namely two essays, a poem and several translations from Russian.

From the 1920s onwards, the news about Strasser's life became even more sparse. When the Nazis came to power, life became difficult for the sisters. Alexandra and Franz Pfemfert went into exile in March 1933, Maria stayed in Berlin, supposedly protected by her marriage to the German Heinrich Schaefer. But Schaefer died in 1943 and Maria managed to survive underground.

Nadja Strasser was married to the architect Alexander Levy (1883–1942) in 1919 and planned to emigrate with him to Palestine. In 1920 the couple arrived in Palestine, where Levy was initially able to work quite successfully on building Tel Aviv , but the worsening economic situation at the end of the 1920s forced them to return to Germany in 1927.

Levy, and probably with him Strasser, went into exile in Paris in 1933. When the Second World War broke out , Levy was arrested as a German citizen and subsequently interned in various camps ( Camp de Francillon , Cepoy , Les Milles , Camp de Gurs ). In the last camp, Camp de Noé , he tried to get permission to emigrate to the United States, but to no avail. He was abducted by the Germans and arrived at the Auschwitz extermination camp on August 31, 1942 , where he was murdered.

Nadja Strasser, however, survived the extermination in France and stayed in London in 1948, where she contacted the anarchist Rudolf Rocker , who lived in the United States , with the request that a German manuscript be translated into Yiddish . A fragment of this text and her correspondence with Rocker are today in the holdings of the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam . The title of the text is from From Stage to Stage or One Youth . Strasser tells in a slightly veiled form - the main character is called Nadia Ossipovna and the place Novodub instead of Starodub - of her childhood and youth. The typescript is incomplete. Only the 176 pages that Strasser sent to Rocker with corrections have been preserved, the rest must be considered lost.

In 1951 Nadja Strasser returned to Berlin, where her sister still lived. She died in 1955 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Heerstraße in Berlin-Charlottenburg . Her sister Maria was buried in the same grave in 1975.

Works

• The Russian. Character images. S. Fischer, Berlin 1917.
• The result. Lyric essays. S. Fischer, Berlin 1919.
• From stage to stage. The youth of a Jewish socialist in the shtetl 1871 - 1896. An autobiography. Edited and commented by Birgit Schmitt. Böhlau, Cologne 2019.

Translations:

• Valery Jakowlewitsch Brjussow : The age of victory. 4th century novel. Georg Müller, Munich 1913.
• Andrei Bjaely : Petersburg. Novel. Georg Müller, Munich 1919.
• Shemaryahu Gorelik: Five years in the land of Neutralia. Swiss war experiences of a Jewish writer. Jewish publishing house, Berlin 1919.
• Shemaryahu Gorelik: Jewish minds. Publishing house for Jewish art and culture Fritz Gurlitt, Berlin 1920.
• Leo Isaakowitsch Schestow : Tolstoi and Nietzsche. Marcan Block Verlag, Cologne 1923.
• Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski : Memoirs from a house of the dead. Gustav Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1924.

literature

• Birgit Schmitt: The bewitched world. A memory of the Jewish feminist Nadja Strasser. Jungle World , February 10-25, 2004.
• Hartmut Vollmer (ed.): “The sun dances to death in red shoes.” Poetry by expressionist female poets. Igel, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86815-526-6 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Nadja Strasser in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Strasser: The Russian. 1917, p. 11. Quoted from Schmitt: The bewitched world. 2004.
2. ↑ Strasser: The Russian. 1917, p. 123f. Quoted from Schmitt: The bewitched world. 2004.
3. ↑ Strasser: The result. 1919, p. 19. Quoted from Schmitt: Diehexte Welt. 2004.
4. ↑ Strasser: The result. 1919, p. 14f. Quoted from Schmitt: The bewitched world. 2004.
5. ↑ Strasser: The result. 1919, p. 57. Quoted from Schmitt: Diehexte Welt. 2004.
6. ↑ In the emigration documents, however, a Henia Levy, born in Warsaw in 1884, appears as Levy's wife. Cf. Edina Meyer-Maril: Alexander Levy - a German-Jewish architect between Berlin, Tel Aviv, Paris and Auschwitz. In: Julius H. Schoeps, Karl E. Grözinger, Gert Mattenklott (eds.): Menora. Yearbook for German-Jewish History 1998. Piper, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-8257-0077-1 , p. 325.
7. ↑ Nathan Harpez: Zionist architecture and town planning. The building of Tel Aviv (1919-1929). Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, Ind. 2013, ISBN 978-1-557-53673-0 , pp. 207-232.
8. ^ Nadja Strasser , International Institute for Social History