Between Socialism and Feminism: Charlotte Glas (1873–1944)

Abstract

This article explores how Charlotte Glas, a founding member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and a leading figure in the public sphere during the late imperial period, attempted to advance the cause of workers’ rights and women’s emancipation. Charged with lèse-majesté following a public rally in 1893, and tried before a Viennese court, Glas was forced to confront both the repressive policies of the Habsburg state and the patriarchal practices of her society and her party. Ultimately, Glas chose to subordinate the fight for women’s suffrage to the broader socialist campaign for universal male suffrage. Her dilemmas as a woman, Jew and socialist were captured in the character of Therese Golowski in Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Weg ins Freie.

Charlotte Glas is the great unknown figure among those Jewish women who played significant roles in the public sphere during the Habsburg Empire’s last years (cf. [1,2,3]). The epithet “great” is justified not least because she served as the model for an important character in Arthur Schnitzler’s roman à clef Der Weg ins Freie, namely Therese Golowski, the radical political agitator who is a member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (SDAPÖ) [4]. This character assumes a paradigmatic position among the assimilated bourgeois Jews in Vienna, whose range of individual responses to the crisis of liberalism and rising anti-Semitism Schnitzler’s novel explores. Glas is “unknown” because, even within the Social Democratic women’s movement, of which she was one of the founders, her work has been forgotten. Despite the numerous and conspicuous traces of her activities in the historical record, she was neither integrated into the official party narrative nor “rediscovered” by the feminist historical scholarship that emerged in the 1970s. Even the basic dates of her biography are hardly known, and when she makes an appearance in the literature, in her role as the wife of Otto Pohl, the editor and later Austrian ambassador to the Soviet Union, these dates are reported incorrectly [5]. This tension between her prominence as a literary figure and her (current) obscurity as a central but elusive political figure located at various fissures of the Habsburg empire—as a woman, Jew, and socialist—not only raises the question of the contingency of the historiographical process, but also points to a methodological blind spot in the traditional concept of biography, which was first explored by Michel Foucault in his studies on the production of the modern subject [6].

Foucault’s thought focused on the processes and limits of subjectification within a network of social power relations. He conceived of identity formation not as the mere unfolding into the social sphere of an already internally pre-existing, sovereign and autonomous individual, but instead saw the subject as arising out of the interplay of subjectification processes determined by the individual and by others, through practices and discourses in a specific historical formation. Accordingly, rather than follow the model of the bourgeois Bildungsroman, i.e., the story of a protagonist’s maturing into an integrated individual, for which we in any case lack documentation, this article peruses documents and accounts related to Glas’s 1894 trial in Vienna in order to describe the social space in which she was located. These documents will be interpreted as expressions of the power relations that permeated the persons and institutions involved and shaped their words, as well as their actions.

Information regarding the bare details of Charlotte Glas’s life comes from a court record detailing the charges brought against her and a co-defendant, Amalie Ryba, before the Viennese regional court for criminal affairs (k.k. Landesgericht in Strafsachen in Wien). Whereas Ryba was prosecuted under article 305, incitement to illegal activities (Aneiferung zu ungesetzlichen Handlungen), Glas, was accused of lèse-majesté, offending the dignity of the imperial family. About Glas, the record states: Charlotte Glas, 20 years old, born and resident in Vienna, of mosaic faith, unmarried, textile worker (Handarbeiterin) [7]. The report on the trial from the newspaper Neue Freie Presse supplies one further detail, the name of her employer: the company Süß & Pollak [8,9]. The women were charged in relation to public speeches they had delivered at an outdoor women’s assembly on the city’s outskirts on 1 October 1893. This gathering of about 1000 women had been part of the campaign for general, equal and direct suffrage, which had once again become a key goal of the social democratic movement. As will be discussed in more detail below, this women’s assembly had been in support of male suffrage, the struggle for votes for women having been put on hold for tactical reasons.

The case against Glas focused not on the central points of her speech but rather on a rhetorical aside. Whilst speaking to the women’s gathering, the twenty-year-old working woman had commented on the bourgeois newspapers’ polemical attack against the social democratic women activists’ ways of dressing, in particular their efforts to present a well-groomed appearance. The careful elegance cultivated by the socialist women, intended to demonstrate both their respectability and their universality, was redefined by the newspapers as a bourgeois habitus which divided them from real working-class women. Their political engagement was denounced as a kind of luxury, or mere “sport”, utterly removed from the real needs of the female proletariat. It was to this cultural travesty that Glas referred in her remarks, which involved the imperial house and its political representatives in parliament. As the archdukes were generally accepted as models of social elegance, were they also—she asked rhetorically—rendered unable by their fashionable apparel to understand, and sympathize with, the interests of the people? [10].

The Habsburg Empire’s notorious restrictions on freedom of speech make it difficult to understand what really happened. The prosecution’s case rested on the report of the government official whose duty it was to observe public gatherings and who had the right to disperse them if he witnessed anything he deemed to be an offence against the law. The police officer present at the women’s assembly of 1 October 1893, claimed that he had heard the sentence “thus we have in parliament archdukes who have no heart (i.e., no sympathy) for the people.” This remark was interpreted as an insult to members of the imperial house, which led—and this, too, was part of the framework and conditions of political action at the time—to the trial being held behind closed doors. For purposes of comparison, we can consult the written version of Glas’s speech as printed in the social democratic Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (Women workers’ newspaper). Given the fact that it appeared in the edition of 6 October 1893, before the charges against Glas were made, it is unlikely that the passage in question was subject to tactical alteration. However, an exact reconstruction of the speech remains impossible because of other persistent restrictions placed on public expression by the political system. The article was censored exactly at the point in the speech where Glas referred to the parliamentarians’ elegant dress. Nevertheless, if the grammatical construction of the printed speech followed that of its spoken form, then the incriminating half-sentence cannot have been uttered in the way alleged by the prosecution. The fragmentary sentence reveals that the rhetorical question asked must have been if the representatives in question had “a better heart (i.e., more sympathy) for the people” than the social democratic women.

Presiding over the court was the Vice-president of the Viennese regional court for criminal affairs, Ferdinand Holzinger, who had become notorious during the period of emergency law (1884–1891) for his tendentious, politically motivated judgments. During the trial, Glas denied having made the alleged remarks at all. According to a revealing report on the proceedings by the Neue Freie Presse—to which we shall return below—she expressed herself “with a facility and education clearly exceeding her rank.” Because of the density of the argument, the passage merits quoting in full: “The defendant asserts not to have spoken the words against the archdukes of which she stands accused. For she would have had no occasion to do so, as the archdukes were not a political party and to her knowledge had only once appeared in parliament. Speaking at a women’s assembly in support of universal suffrage, she had only emphasized that workers had as much “heart” for the people as the barons, counts, big landowners and archdukes. Any different report was incorrect. It was not part of social democracy’s tactics to speak against members of the imperial house, nor did this represent her own views. She would have had to be terribly excited to have said what she was accused of. She had certainly been excited, but only as much as was usual for her when speaking publicly, even if she did so seventy times during an assembly” [8].

Charlotte Glas’s defense is revealing in a number of different ways. She follows a line of argument pointing directly to the key aporias of the Habsburg monarchy’s political system. The aristocracy’s position in the House of Lords (Herrenhaus) represented an autocratic anachronism within the liberal constitutional principle, which, at the same time—and this explains Glas’s reference to the archduke’s rare presence—was not taken seriously. The ironical subtext of Glas’s defense strikingly exposed the theatrical and fictional character of parliamentary life under the Habsburg monarchy. At the same time, she utilized the very vagueness and ambiguity of the term “excitement” (Erregung) and its use in criminal law for her own purposes. If criminal law was to be applied so harshly in her own case in order to restrict guaranteed basic political rights such as free speech, she could in her turn lay claim to “excitement” as it existed as an extenuating circumstance in non-political cases. At the same time, Glas cleverly preempted the possible interpretation of her excitement as revealing a character flaw; or, to put it into the context of contemporary debates on women’s suitability for political action, Glas undermined the possibility of her affect being denounced as a typically female inability to control her emotions. It was, after all, the alleged lack of objective, measured rationality, which was the main justification for the legal exclusion of women from politics [11].

Without a doubt, Glas’s primary aim at the trial was to avoid a guilty verdict and keep out of jail. Her defense attorney argued for the acquittal of both Glas and Ryba on the grounds of errors in the description of the meeting produced by the attending government official (Regierungskommissär). This strategy stood little chance of success in an authoritarian society in which the individual perceptions of the government’s representative acquired the status of official truth. Glas was given the unexpectedly harsh punishment of four months’ incarceration (Kerker); Ryba, on the other hand, who had actually confessed to being in favor of a general strike as a means of revolution, was sentenced only to three weeks’ custody (Arrest) [12]. Glas’s sentencing can only be described as politically motivated, and emphasizes the grotesque distortion of the case’s political substance by the authorities. Reframing the conflict around universal suffrage in terms of lèse-majesté could be seen as the preemptive demarcation of the narrow limits within which—in the court’s opinion—women’s politics were to operate. Glas’s line of defense, however, also revealed that the question of the role of women in her own party was far from resolved. Contrary to the Social Democratic Party’s usual strategy of using court appearances for political statements despite the clear risk of imprisonment, in the case of Glas and Ryba’s trial the emphasis was clearly put on de-escalation [13]. The official party paper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (The Workers’ Paper) gave the trial an uncharacteristically cursory treatment, only reporting on it after it had been concluded. The paper’s commentary focused largely on the hated figure of the presiding judge, Holzinger; Amalia Ryba’s charge and trial were not even mentioned in the paper. Charlotte Glas herself was described as a “harmless girl” (harmloses Mädchen) [14]. In complete contrast to the stress on the heroism and willingness to sacrifice of comrades who had been sentenced by the courts, the charge brought against Glas was played down just as much as her motives and her performance during the trial. The event was represented as a calamity rather than an exemplary case of political activism. It is impossible to know how far the social democratic women’s paper, the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (The Women Workers’ Paper), was prepared to deviate from this party line, as its report on Glas’s and Ryba’s trial was confiscated by the police.

Unlike the trial reports, the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung’s article on the political gathering which had resulted in the charges being brought against the two women allows us more detailed insights, both into the events and into the scope of action available to Glas and other female social democratic activists. As already indicated, the assembly had been called in support of the social democratic party’s campaign for universal male suffrage, which had gained momentum during the ongoing governmental crisis. The conservative ruling prime minister (Ministerpräsident), Eduard Graf Taaffe, who had been in office since 1879, had proposed a bill of electoral reform, which included universal male suffrage in an effort to break through the Nationalists’ politics of obstruction. Ironically, this indirectly linked the interests of the social democrats with those seeking to preserve the empire; in 1893, it still seemed as if transnational class interests might overcome nationalist and separatist tendencies, and a community of interest with the ruling dynasty was emerging. The Social Democrats supported the proposal, and sought to promote it through extra-parliamentary forms of mobilization. However, they restricted themselves to campaigning for male suffrage. What then might have been the purpose of mobilizing women in its support? Why should women take part in a campaign, which did not seek to grant them equal political rights? It is undoubtedly not easy to explain why women would have been active in a cause requiring the denial of their own interests and actions and how such self-exclusion could have been reconciled with the claim to universality which the Social Democrats insisted on in other areas. Unintentionally, the campaign not only tested the social democratic movement’s understanding of, and commitment to, the female worker, it also questioned the relation of the struggle for general political emancipation to gender more generally. Social democracy could not respond to this challenge from its usually monopolistic position as the only party representing the interests of the proletariat in social conflicts. In the case of women’s rights, it was confronted with an established and autonomous women’s movement, which had already been active for some time and which drew its members largely from middle class and intellectual circles. This movement had women’s suffrage as one of its key demands. In reaction to the debates on electoral reform, in January, 1893, it coalesced into the Allgemeiner österreichischer Frauenverein (General Austrian Women’s Association), campaigning for women’s economic independence, votes for women, and access to secondary and tertiary education [15]. The women workers’ movement had thus gained a competitor that was not to be underestimated, one which insisted on the difference between the sexes and the need for an autonomous women’s movement. It should thus not surprise us that the social democratic women put forward a paradoxical argument in order to remain—or become—an accepted part of the larger social democratic workers’ movement. They did so by following two asymmetrical lines of argument: Firstly, by proposing universal male suffrage as a revolutionary means for social change, and secondly, by distancing itself from the so-called bourgeois women’s movement, whose demands for female suffrage were presented as untimely or even illegitimate.

It was in this spirit that the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung began its report on the assembly of 1 October 1893, with an attack on the middle-class women’s movement, though the social democratic women’s own paradoxical position on universal suffrage rendered the paper’s argumentation rather incoherent. Surprisingly, the social democratic women took their own assembly as proof of the unbridgeable distance between themselves and the bourgeois movement. One of their arguments was that the middle-class women fought only for the equality of middle-class women with middle-class men – a claim for which it would have been difficult to find any evidence. In their rivalry with the General Austrian Women’s Association, the social democratic women did not shy away even from disparaging the Association’s commitment to universal female suffrage as “a few puny paragraphs […] meant to sanction the equality of bourgeois women—for it can only be these women who are the concern of the bourgeois women activists—with the bourgeois men” (ein paar armseligen Paragraphen [...] welche die Gleichstellung der bürgerlichen Frauen—denn nur um diese kann es sich den bürgerlichen Frauenrechtlerinnen handeln—mit den bürgerlichen Männern sanktioniren [sic!] sollen). It was only consistent, then, that the first sentence of Glas’s speech—as reported by the paper—should have been a disclaimer. According to the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, Glas deemed it necessary first of all to emphasize that the gathering was not the result of any “separatist tendencies” within the workers’ movement. As her speech went on, Glas made only a very vague promise that universal suffrage restricted to men would also benefit the women’s cause. The rest of her speech consisted of a spirited, if rather long-winded, denunciation of the bourgeois public’s cynical hostility toward social democratic women. This was the context for the comment on archdukes and their possible lack of “heart” for the people, which resulted in Glas being charged with lèse-majesté. She then went on to attack a number of liberal figures who opposed universal suffrage because they saw it as the first step toward a socialist coup.

The other women speaking at the assembly also tried to avoid the issue of women’s suffrage. One established strategy for doing so was to take the position—originally developed against the “maximalists” within the social movement—that universal suffrage in a class society was not an end in itself, but only the precondition for the historically necessary development of social power relations and a means of widening the social movement’s political room for maneuver. Unspoken beneath these words lay a conflict within the social democratic workers’ movement which had been sparked by the establishment of an independent organization of women. Earlier in 1893, the Arbeiterinnen-Bildungsverein (Women Worker’s Educational Association) “Libertas” had been founded in Vienna and was met with much mistrust by the rest of the social democratic movement. This mistrust was certainly bizarre, since the accusation that women’s participation would lead them to neglect their duties toward the general workers’ associations stood in direct contrast to the practice of numerous such associations, particularly unionized craft workers, of barring women from membership [16].

The campaign for universal male suffrage coincided with Charlotte Glas’s first public appearances for the social democratic cause. Her first known article in the Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung, dated 15 September 1893, was devoted to this topic [17]. In the following two years, nearly every article exploring fundamental political questions published in the paper was penned by Glas. These texts demonstrate the high degree of literary and social-critical reflection Glas brought to these issues. She became one of the social democratic movement’s most sought-after female public speakers, which led more than once to her being brought before the courts. In May 1894, she stood trial in Wiener Neustadt for a speech held at a women’s gathering earlier that year. This time she was acquitted of the charge of “promoting illegal activities” (Anpreisung von durch das Gesetz verbotenen Handlungen). In August, a Viennese court sentenced her to 14 days’ custody for her cheers (Hochrufe) for social democracy at a district rally on 1 May [18,19]. In November of the same year, she was found guilty by a jury in Steyr, Upper Austria, where she had once again been charged under article 300 and article 305 (with incitement against public authorities and incitement to a criminal act, again in the form of cheers for social democracy at an assembly in May). The jury cleared her of these main charges, which had been based on a 50-page long report (Relation) by two police clerks who had recorded what was said at the assembly in shorthand, but found her guilty of the lesser charge of “insulting honor” (Ehrenbeleidigung), which resulted in one month’s imprisonment [20,21].

This unusually impressive career before the courts and in prison, exceptional even in comparison to the activists of the early, only semi-legal founding years of the party, clearly belied the Arbeiter-Zeitung’s characterization of Glas as a “harmless girl.” That this was untrue in every sense was further demonstrated by Glas’s performance in court. Here she did pose a clear threat—not so much to public order as to established stereotypes of class and gender. Speaking in her own defense, Glas cunningly used the latest scientific discourses to call into question current gender and class roles, and forced the male jury to treat her as an intellectual equal and deal with a politically highly reflective woman. It was exactly this that the courts strove to undermine by representing her as a naive and exploited puppet in the hands of the male party leaders: Not least because of her poverty, which saved her from ruinous financial penalties [21]. An impressive example of Glas’s unusual rhetorical skill is provided by the reports on the trial at Wiener Neustadt in May 1894 mentioned above. The charge of “promoting illegal activities” referred to Glas’s comments on the arrest of a Viennese juvenile gang which had attracted much public attention shortly before; she had used the incident to indict the ruling social order. The court charged her in relation to the sentence “We see in the crime of the individual only society’s crime.” Glas defended herself by saying she had only been expressing a scientific insight in easily accessible language, and cited a range of scholarship on the state and society to back up this claim. Central to her argument was the work of Alexander von Oettingen, a moral theologian and the author of books on Die Moralstatistik und die christliche Soziallehre (“Moral statistics and Christian social theory,” 1874) and Die Moralstatistik und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialethik (“Moral statistics and their significance for social ethics,” 1868) [22,23]. She also referred to Ernst Engel, the Prussian social statistician; Franz von List, an expert on criminal law; and the economist Karl Menger. On this collection of respected—and deliberately not socialist—thinkers she based her argument that social probabilism and lack of access to education were the causes of certain types of crimes often associated with the working class. How far Glas (and social democracy in general) had moved away from an orthodox Marxist theory of the state is thus of only secondary importance to the questions of gender, performance and the public sphere which concern us here. The Arbeiter-Zeitung’s report on the trial reveals some of the provocative force of Glas’s speech. It describes the angry reactions of the officers of the court, who repeatedly interrupted Glas to censure her for presuming to educate the jury; though, ironically, some of these disruptions unintentionally gave Glas the opportunity to expand on her references in response to questions about the titles of the works on which she relied. Thus, the trial turned into a kind of intellectual duel in which the male claim to suzerainty over the intellectual canon was at stake [18].

Charlotte Glas’s daring act of public self-assertion made an impact on contemporary writers and served, it seems, as a source of inspiration for Arthur Schnitzler. It is likely that Schnitzler met Glas in mid-1894 through his friend, the writer Felix Salten. At the time, both were members of a “clique” of young, mostly Jewish writers living a bohemian lifestyle in Vienna. Glas had probably been introduced into the circle of the coffee house literati of “Young Vienna” (Jung-Wien) by Karl Kraus, and quickly became Salten’s lover. When she became pregnant, he forced her to go the bourgeois route of having the child anonymously in a Viennese house for unwed mothers. The baby was then sent to a foster mother in Lower Austria but died shortly afterward. Salten claimed to have derived inspiration from his child’s funeral; he wrote to Schnitzler that the event had provided him with ample material for an impressionist novella. Glas and Salten’s relationship came to an acrimonious end in late 1895. Their separation also led to open hostility between Salten und Karl Kraus, a long-standing supporter of the radical women’s movement who took Glas’s side [24]. Schnitzler’s diary entries show his involvement in these dramatic occurrences and are the best source from which to reconstruct these intimate events. When working on his roman à clef Der Weg ins Freie years later, he made extensive use of these diaries, and the constellation of Glas/Salten is likely to underlie the core conflict of the novel, though Schnitzler shifted it to a different social milieu. The narrative revolves around the unhappy love affair between Baron Georg von Wergenthin and the lower-class Anna Rosner. This couple is exceptional within the novel in that they are the only two protagonists in a relationship without a Jewish background. While Therese Golowski, Anna Rosner’s friend, assumes the character of the socialist agitator in Schnitzler’s novel, the manner in which the ambitious young musician Wergenthin betrays Anna Rosner and experiences the death of their child as an act of emotional liberation mirrors both the circumstances and the outcome of Charlotte Glas’s affair with Salten.

Schnitzler completed Der Weg ins Freie in 1908, though the events of the novel are said to occur over a few months in 1893–1894. In the intervening 15 years, the Habsburg political system had undergone some fundamental changes. 1895–1896 had seen the openly anti-Semitic Christian Social Party take power in Vienna’s municipal government; two years later, the excesses of nationalist representatives during the so-called “Badeni-riots” turned parliament into a circus. Mark Twain, who happened to be present in Vienna at the time, marveled at the spectacularization of Austrian politics. The year 1907 saw the advent of universal male suffrage, but parliamentary sessions were once again suspended due to the nationalists’ politics of obstruction. These events only served to intensify Schnitzler’s notorious skepticism toward institutionalized politics, which no doubt colored the portrayal of Charlotte Glas/Therese Golowski in the novel. Golowski is not a historical portrayal of Glas, but she provides, fifteen years after the event, Schnitzler’s ambivalent perspective on the protagonist’s dilemmas. As such, she helps us reconstruct the discursive field that circumscribed Glas’s actions as woman, Jew, and socialist in the years 1893–1894.

While a peripheral character in Der Weg ins Freie, the personal and intellectual dilemmas faced by Therese Golowski in fact lie at the heart of the novel [25]. The very first sentences spoken about her by various protagonists reveal a fundamental ambivalence, and many doubt the sincerity of her political commitments. Put in general terms, it is female desire for subjective performance that is at stake. The only public position commonly available to women was on the theatre stage, and Therese’s initial romantic enthusiasm for a career as an actress is referred to more than once in the novel (e.g., [4], p. 31). However, on the theatrical stage, women can only speak the borrowed logos, controlled by the playwright and the director. In real life, female public speech bears a risk. Thus Therese is described as “risking her head” with her public pronouncements. This remark is made by Berthold Stauber, a Jewish party comrade and member of the Reichsrat. Therese’s and his fates are entwined in the novel in two ways. When Berthold speaks in parliament in support of Therese, who had been sentenced for lèse-majesté, he, a physician, is subjected to anti-Semitic insults so vituperative in tone that he decides to resign his mandate in personal disgust at such politics. However, Therese and Berthold are also structurally related in the novel through the theme of the gender-based legitimacy of political action. Berthold finally finds a way out of the morass of ordinary day-to-day politics by turning his political program into a scientific project with wide social repercussions. Doctor Berthold Stauber, it is announced at the end of the book, will develop social eugenics and declare political control over reproduction the key solution to society’s problems. Schnitzler is here referring to the late enlightenment projects of so-called “human economy” which had gained popularity across party lines as a fantasy of governmental social engineering. Put succinctly, Berthold Stauber stands for the political utopia of a biopolitical welfare state that renders all special party interests obsolete.

Therese’s options are developed by Schnitzler asymmetrically to those of Berthold. If she stays in politics, she will only ever be serving in a subordinate role, never in a position of leadership. But she endangers even this subaltern position by her unreasonableness and lack of caution, which repeatedly result in her arrest and trial. Insufficient rhetorical control over her passions renders her liable to sabotaging her own chances. Berthold Stauber also predicts another possible direction in which she might head. Therese might be carried away by her enthusiasm, give in to temptation after all and marry an aristocrat, be it a baron or even—and this is a still more explicit reference to the irrational phantasms preying on women—a prince. The novel does not reveal whether this prediction will come true in Therese’s affair with the elegant officer and major landowner Demeter Stanzides.

At various points in the novel, male protagonists denounce the inauthenticity of female politics. Bermann, a writer, reports how he has told Therese to her face that she and her fellow women activists were not committed “to the depth of their souls” to the cause which they promoted ([4], pp. 204–5). Twice Therese even seems to admit, in response to such charges, that she is not following an internal imperative. She does not contradict the allegation that she is moving and acting as if in a dream state. Another time, she concedes that her political engagement might represent a flight, though the novel does not reveal from what she might be fleeing ([4], pp. 223, 358). Yet another passage suggests that it is all a continuous masquerade. Therese plans to visit shelters and warming houses dressed as a beggar, and to write about her experience, that is: To invent social reportage as a literary genre. Schnitzler is unlikely here to have been unaware that the famous contemporary books on proletarian misery in Vienna did not derive from investigative journalism, but were instead a travesty of colonial journeys of discovery and missionary zeal.

Schnitzler also drew on late nineteenth-century stereotypes of Russian female social revolutionaries as an inspiration for the figure of Golowski/Glas. Thus, Therese is rumored to have been politically “awakened” by a Russian revolutionary and musician, the son of an impoverished aristocratic family. Demeter Stanzides’ desire for Therese develops not least because she looks like “a Russian student”; Schnitzler makes it clear that her erotic effect derives above all from the contrast between the severity of her intentionally unfashionable dress and the whiteness of her complexion—made even more striking by her full, red lips. Therese thus finally comes close to the fantasy of the cool but sensuous Jewess, which represented a significant object of male desire in the Habsburg cultural context [26].

In his seminal work on Viennese modernism, Jacques Le Rider emphasized that Der Weg ins Freie provides no answers to the crisis of assimilated Jewry, contemporary insecurities regarding masculinity, or women’s search for identity. The novel has “no ‘message’ except the awareness of the contradictions and deficits of the assimilated Jews’ responses to anti-Semitism” [27]. In the intellectual culture of the Habsburg monarchy, according to Le Rider, simultaneous doubts about the essentialism of ethnic and of gender identities overlapped, serving to promote the emergence of new symptoms such as hysteria. The figure of Therese Golowski seems to share some of these characteristics. Most strikingly, perhaps, Therese is hardly ever allowed to speak. Instead, her figure is constructed out of the conversations of men talking about her. On the other hand, she retains at the end of the book her sovereign position of autonomy vis-à-vis the men. In what is likely the key passage on this enmeshment of autonomy and heteronomy in which Therese is caught, Salomon Ehrenberg, the industrialist and declared Zionist, warns Therese of her precarious position in the party. He prophecies that the social democrats will betray and abandon her as a Jewish woman, just as the liberals and nationals had previously abandoned the politically engaged Jews who had actively supported them because of these parties’ earlier advocacy of universal emancipation ([4], p. 78). Did the Jewishness that Schnitzler discerned as Golowski’s liability, the anti-Semitism he feared, constrain Glas’s feminism?

A price that Charlotte Glas had—and was willing—to pay was the subordination of the cause of women’s suffrage to the social democratic party’s strategy. She and her fellow women activists did not only accept the SDAPÖ’s rule that prohibited a separate, centralized women’s organization. They also defended the subaltern position to which the Austrian party, against the criticism of German and international social democratic women’s organizations, had relegated them. An anti-patriarchal gender morality and the early feminist ideas of Lebensreform (the alternative social movement which promoted natural medicines and nutrition, as well as rational dress and “free” body culture in reaction to industrialization and urbanization) did not make it into the mainstream of the Austrian social democratic women’s movement.

Another price to be paid was the utter divergence between the position of leadership, which Glas held at public assemblies and in front of the courts in 1893–1894, and the subsequent loss of significance she suffered in the women worker’s movement. The party decided on Adelheid Popp as the female figurehead of social democracy. Without wanting to denigrate Popp’s achievements, the reasons for her ascendancy over Glas are not obvious. We do, however, have clear evidence of the reservations the social democratic party had about Jewish comrades in leadership positions, whether male or female. In an impressive study, Jack Jacobs has described the considerations, which led a party leader like Victor Adler, not only to deny the (relevance of the) so-called Jewish question for social democracy, but to render it in effect invisible. Non-Jewish party and union leaders’ latent feelings of competition, the identification of the bourgeois class enemy with Jewish industrialists, the fear of denunciation by anti-Semitic populists—all of these factors led Victor Adler to avoid promoting highly qualified party members with Jewish roots. Jack Jacobs cites a letter of Adler written in 1897 as a representative example: “a ‘Jewish doctor’ causes the party embarrassment for years, if he is not content to slave away discretely but wants public recognition” [28]. This same logic must have applied, to an even greater extent, to a woman who was on friendly terms with the bohème, who had the rhetoric skill and knowledge to put men in their place, and who disagreed with the views of her party’s leaders that a woman’s contribution to politics was to take care of the every-day minutiae of the household and in that way enable her husband to be active in the service of the party [29,30].