Lewald, Fanny (1811–1889)

German novelist, essayist, and journalist who was one of the most popular writers in 19th-century Germany. Name variations: Fanny Markus; Fanny Lewald-Stahr; Fanny Stahr-Lewald. Born Fanny Markus in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), on March 24, 1811; died in Dresden on August 5, 1889; daughter of David Markus, later David Lewald, and Rosa (Assing) Markus; had five sisters, two brothers; married Adolf Stahr (a historian), in 1854.

Fanny Lewald lived through a period in European, and particularly German, history that was marked by great change. In 1811, the year she was born, no united German state existed, and the many "Germanies" were suffering under the yoke of a still-triumphant France ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte. Lewald's Jewish family lived in a social regime that saw Jews as religious and cultural outsiders. But in many ways, the tide was turning. Romantic nationalism spread the ideal of a united German people and nation free of foreign control, and the assumptions of the Enlightenment continued to press for the full emancipation of formerly excluded elements in society, including the often-despised and sometimes feared Jews.

At the time of Fanny's birth in Königsberg, East Prussia, on March 24, 1811, her family's name was Markus but would later be changed to the more Germanic-sounding Lewald. The eldest of eight living children, Fanny grew up in solid middle-class comfort, as the daughter of parents from old, established Jewish families in Königsberg. Both her father David and mother Rosa were loving parents. David, a traditional patriarch who expected absolute obedience from both his wife and progeny, was kept busy with his wine business but also determined most details of the family's life. He sought out the best possible education for Fanny, who at age six was enrolled in Königsberg's Ulrich School (which was coeducational in some but not all of its classes). Many of the teachers there were Pietists (members of a Lutheran religious movement), and the school's standards were high. After the Ulrich School closed its doors when Fanny was 15, she was schooled at home, where her education included taking piano lessons which she did not care for. She met and fell in love with a young theology student named Leopold Bock who died before they could be married. In 1828, the entire family, now called Lewald, converted to Lutheranism. At first Fanny was enthusiastic about her new faith, but as she matured and deepened her knowledge of theology and philosophy an inherently skeptical spirit won out. She came to sympathize with the ideas of Baruch Spinoza, who accepted the existence of a supreme deity while denying the superiority of any specific version of organized religious doctrine or practice.

Noting his daughter's discontent within the confining world of bourgeois domesticity, Fanny's father took her with him on an extended trip throughout Germany. In Baden-Baden, where her uncle Friedrich Jacob Lewald was a member of a circle of cutting-edge writers and artists, her intellectual horizons expanded after she met, among others, provocative figures like Ludwig Börne. While in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland), she met and quickly fell in love with her cousin, Heinrich Simon. Although her love was never reciprocated by Simon, who became a major figure in both German national politics and German-Jewish community life, over time their relationship evolved into a close friendship.

Lewald returned home to Königsberg to find her mother in ill health and took turns with her sisters in running the family household. Left with ample free time, she considered taking on a paid position as a governess or companion, but her father disapproved of this plan, feeling that it reflected poorly on his ability to maintain his family in comfort proper to their class. Although approaching the age when she would no longer be considered marriageable, Lewald was adamant on the issue of marrying only a man she loved, and thus she turned down the prospect of a marriage of convenience to a provincial lawyer and magistrate.

Rapidly sinking into the status of a hypochondriacal old maid, a fate not atypical of intelligent 19th-century women of leisure, Lewald was helped onto another path by her cousin August Lewald, editor of the Stuttgart periodical Europa. Encouraged by him, she published in Europa a long letter about a trial in Königsberg, and with this modest debut in print, she launched what would become a remarkable writing career. Starting in 1839, Lewald lived with relatives in Berlin, the city in which she would settle. There she entered the most influential intellectual circles, which included such social and literary luminaries as Henriette Herz, Therese von Bacheracht , and Heinrich Laube. While visiting Königsberg in 1840, Lewald was an eyewitness to the elaborate coronation ceremonies that marked the assumption of the Prussian throne by the new king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. August Lewald requested that she write a comprehensive report of this event for Europa, and Fanny's essay earned her an enthusiastic letter praising her talent and urging her to continue writing. Furthermore, the honorarium from Europa made it clear that writing might provide her with economic independence and thus a life free of her family's often suffocating embrace.

With the continuing support and encouragement of her cousin August, Lewald devoted herself to writing. Published by the Brockhaus publishing firm in Leipzig, her first novels Clementine (1842) and Jenny (1843) appeared in print anonymously because Lewald's father did not believe his daughter should pursue such a career. By 1845, when she published Eine Lebensfrage (A Vital Question), a novel in which she argued for divorce and the right of women to choose their own husbands, she had found a loyal audience of readers who were mostly but not exclusively female. Lewald's readers agreed with the liberal views she presented on the changing social position of bourgeois women, particularly in regard to their desire for much greater freedom in matters relating to marriage and divorce. Lewald's success as an author persuaded her father to relent on the issue of her continuing to publish anonymously, and henceforth her works appeared in print under her own name. With her (partial at first) economic independence, in 1843 she moved permanently to Berlin, where she had her own apartment conveniently located near her brother Otto. In 1845, she undertook the obligatory tour of Italy, meeting in Rome such established German writers as Adele Schopenhauer , sister of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ottilie von Goethe , daughter-in-law of the literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. While in Italy, she also met and fell in love with Adolf Stahr, a historian of art and culture. Stahr, the father of five children, was trapped in a miserable marriage; he and Lewald would not marry until 1854, when he was finally able to secure a divorce.

Starting in the 1840s, Lewald's travels took her to many places not only in Italy but also in the British Isles, France, and Switzerland. Her acute observations of these places found their way into print in letters, essays, and book-length travel memoirs that showed her ability to both catch the flavor of various cultures and provide her readers with accurate insights into current political and cultural developments in several of Europe's most important regions.

Lewald's recollections of the 1848 revolution in Germany reflect her keen interest in political and social change while illustrating her ability to present a coherent view of contemporary events. Published in 1850 as Erinnerungen aus dem Jahre 1848 (Memories of the Year 1848), her memoirs, written in an elegant style, provide information of great interest to posterity, thus ranking the volume among the most important eyewitness reports of this crucial period in modern European history. Lewald had visited Paris only weeks after the overthrow of the French monarchy, then followed the tide of revolution to Berlin in the spring of 1848. In the fall of that year, she was in Frankfurt am Main, where German democrats, at first optimistic about their chances of creating a modern constitutional state, eventually frittered away their initial advantages while reactionary forces regained the initiative. In the last two months of 1848, with the revolutionary impulses already fatally divided and weakened, Lewald went back to Berlin to witness the rapid return of conservative power in Prussia.

Fanny Lewald's portraits of individuals from these events remain valuable for historians, and her sympathetic depictions of the revolutionary masses in Berlin and Paris emphasize the people's courage, idealism, and selflessness. At the same time, she makes realistic assessments of revolutionary extremists like the poet Georg Herwegh, whose lack of political balance caused him to seriously misread the temper of the masses. Lewald's first-class reportage was owed not only to her own sharp eyes and ears, but also to her ability to move in the highest revolutionary circles, which enabled her to meet and interview such luminaries as Heinrich Heine, Heinrich von Gagern, Eduard Simson, and the ill-fated Robert Blum. Although her assessments are rationally grounded, Lewald's memoirs of 1848 are by no means a bland or neutral report of current events. She takes a strong advocacy position for the basic aspirations of the revolutionaries, calling for major reforms in the social and economic conditions of the working classes and impoverished peasantry, and she makes clear her demand for a radical extension of the political franchise. Lewald believed that only by initiating such sweeping changes would the propertied classes, of which she was a prosperous member, be able to prevent the almost inevitable eruption of a bloody revolution fueled by class hatred. She made additional comments on the failed revolution of 1848, many of them incisive, in her 1850 novella Auf rother Erde (On Red Earth).

Over the next four decades, Lewald solidified her reputation as Germany's most popular and successful woman writer. By the time of her death in 1889, she had published 27 novels and more than 30 novellas, as well as short stories, more than a dozen travel reports and memoirs, and countless essays in the leading journals of the day, which were then collected in book form. While creating this prodigious body of work, she also wrote a vast number of letters, many of them of literary merit, to family and friends. As she grew older, Fanny Lewald became more politically conservative, although it is more than likely that she would have defended her viewpoints as being based on rational rather than emotional underpinnings. Never a radical democrat or republican, in the 1870s she accepted the unification of Germany into a powerful Reich by Prussia's authoritarian chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

While advocating suffrage for women, Lewald did not believe that all women were qualified to vote. In her essays "Die Frauen und das allgemeine Wahlrecht" (Women and Universal Suffrage, 1870) and "Und was nun?" (And What Now?, 1871), she argued that only those women who could prove themselves to be politically knowledgeable—and thus be capable of voting differently from their husbands—deserved to be granted the ballot. Believing that such reforms were well within reach in her own time, she published articles in favor of the systematic education of women, including the influential "Osterbriefe für die Frauen" ("Easter Letters for Women," 1863).

In the last decades of her life, Lewald emerged as a powerful role model for women in the German-speaking world. Many of them read and were inspired by her three-volume autobiography Meine Lebensgeschichte (My Life History, 1861–1862). During these years, she often corresponded with young women who hoped that they too might one day live independent lives, earning a living by writing. Although her pen could be wielded in acidic fashion—as when in her 1847 novel Diogena Lewald presented a merciless parody of the artistic weaknesses of Countess Ida von Hahn-Hahn —more often than not she looked at the world with a balance of curiosity and compassion. As a 19th-century woman and intellectual, she believed in both the desirability and inevitability of the continued advancement of human reason and social progress. In addition to advocating a higher level of education for women and their right to choose their own marriage partners, she called for a continuing emancipation of Jews and a general lowering of social barriers. As a confident and successful member of the bourgeoisie, she regarded the ideals and lifestyles of the feudal nobility as outmoded and irrelevant to modern life, and she often satirized them in her books as being little better than social and intellectual fossils.

During her lifetime, Lewald was ranked by the Berlin journalist and novelist Karl Frenzel as a writer of the caliber of George Sand and George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans ). As early as 1850, her literary "energy and virile perception" was highly praised by the eminent Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, even though he did not take to her personally. Among her contemporaries, the respected writers Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach , Theodor Fontane, and Paul Heyse were all influenced by her stylistic and thematic innovations. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach confessed to Lewald, "I have known and admired you from my youth; I have truly followed your bright paths. You have set an example for me, but one far above my reach." In the decades after Fanny Lewald's death in Dresden on August 5, 1889, her reputation declined significantly. The age in which she had lived and flourished came to be seen as the seedbed of the evils that would plague the 20th century, and a bourgeois writer like herself became associated with the failings of her class and epoch. During the Nazi dictatorship, her writings became part of the general ban on the works of Jewish authors. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a significant revival of interest in the life and work of Fanny Lewald in Germany and other Western nations.

sources:

Bäumer, Konstanze. "Reisen als Moment der Erinnerung: Fanny Lewalds (1811–1889) 'Lehrund Wander-jahre,'" in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Marianne Burkhard, eds. Out of Line/ Ausgefallen: The Paradox of Marginality in the Writings of Nineteenth-Century German Women. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1989, pp. 137–157.

Beaton, Kenneth Bruce. "Fontane's Irrungen, Wirrungen und Fanny Lewald," in Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft, 1984, pp. 208–224.

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Fassmann, Irmgard Maya. Jüdinnen in der deutschen Frauenbewegung 1865–1919. Hildeshem and NY: Olms, 1996.

Goodman, Katherine R. Dis/Closures: Women's Autobiography in Germany between 1790 and 1914. NY: Peter Lang, 1986.

Helmer, Ulrike, ed. Politische Schriften für und wider die Frauen. 2nd rev. ed. Königstein-Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1998.

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Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher. "1848 from a Distance: German Women Writers on the Revolution," in Modern Language Notes. Vol. 97, no. 3. April 1982, pp. 590–614.

——. Respectability and Deviance: Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers and the Ambiguity of Representation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Krobb, Florian. "'Und setzten eine Triumph darin, abtrünnig zu werden …': Spiegelungen der Salonepoche in der deutschen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Menora. Vol. 6, 1995, pp. 113–135.

Lewald, Fanny. The Education of Fanny Lewald. Edited, translated and annotated by Hanna Ballin Lewis. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

——. Italienisches Bilderbuch. Frankfurt am Main: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1992.

——. Jenny. Edited by Ulrike Helmer. Frankfurt am Main: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1988.

——. Meine Lebensgeschichte. Edited by Ulrike Helmer. 3 vols. Königstein im Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1998.

——. Prince Louis Ferdinand. Translated by Linda Rogols-Siegel. NY: Edward Mellen Press, 1988.

——. A Year of Revolutions: Fanny Lewald's Recollections of 1848. Edited, translated and annotated by Hanna Ballin Lewis. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997.

Rogols-Siegel, Linda. "Fanny Lewald's Prinz Louis Ferdinand and Theodor Fontane's Vor dem Sturm and Schach von Wuthenow," in The Modern Language Review. Vol. 88, part 2. April 1993, pp. 363–374.

Schneider, Gabriele. "Fanny Lewald und Heine: Sein Einfluss und seine Bedeutung im Spiegel ihrer Schriften," in Heine Jahrbuch. Vol. 33, 1994, pp. 202–216.

Venske, Regula. "Discipline and Daydreaming in the Works of a Nineteenth-Century Woman Author: Fanny Lewald," in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, eds., German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 175–192.

Watt, Helga Schutte. "Fanny Lewald und die Deutsche Misere nach 1848 im Hinblick auf England," in German Life and Letters. New series. Vol. 46, no. 3. July 1993, pp. 220–235.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia