Around 1900, three northerners from Husum, Flensburg and Gollnow in Pomerania were drawn to Munich, more precisely to “Wahnmoching”, as Franziska Countess Reventlow (1871 to 1918) Schwabing would later call it.

She is the most well-known of the three women who are the focus of the exhibition “Living Free!” at Munich's Monacensia Literary Archive.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

  • Follow I follow

The least known is Margarete Beutler (1876 to 1949), Emmy Hennings (1885 to 1948) is a house number as a Dadaist.

Beutler stayed in Munich and the surrounding area the longest.

Reventlow roamed Munich for barely seven years, but that was enough to make her an iconic long-running hit here, since 2011 three biographies about the Countess have appeared.

Hennings only stayed five years before moving on to Zurich to co-found the Voltaire cabaret with her husband Hugo Ball.

Women's lives in self-testimonies

From today's point of view, what separates the three unites them, making it possible to classify them in the cosmos of Schwabing bohemianism.

Although they were lone fighters in their time, not part of a women's network, not salon ladies, not members of a club.

But each of them went the difficult way against convention, freed themselves from family constraints, fought oppression in marriage, struggled for a self-determined life.

A lime green, crumpled linen banner reads in capital letters the fanfare that opens the show: “I want and must be free someday;

it's deep in my nature, this excessive striving, longing for freedom ... I have to fight against all chains, all barriers, run up," said Reventlow in 1890 in a letter to a friend.

The curators Sylvia Schütz and Laura Mokrohs have opted for a genuinely female perspective, they show the three women's lives in personal testimony, only when it is absolutely unavoidable do men comment on it, for example when Erich Mühsam praises Margarete Beutler's poems.

In fact, it is the literary business that offers women opportunities to earn money at all.

Magazines like "Simplicissimus" and "Jugend", publishers like Albert Langen and Kurt Wolff are the ones who open the doors here.

Reventlow translated four dozen books from French, Beutler had a job with the "Jugend".

In a fee instruction for a hundred marks dated June 22, 1910, the name line reads "Herr Frau Margarete Beutler".

Munich was already expensive around the turn of the last century, even if Schwabing was the stronghold of anti-bourgeoisism.

Money was always tight.

Beutler switched to the cheaper Dachau hinterland.

One way of earning something was cabaret performances and the subsequent sale of portrait postcards of the artists, another was to become a prostitute.

Not only Franziska zu Reventlow made use of this source of income from financial need again and again.

Emmy Hennings published the novel Das Brandmal in 1920, which also deals with her experiences with prostitution.

It was a dangerous option in every respect: the 1896 version of the Penal Code of the German Reich provided for a prison sentence under paragraph 361 for “commercial indecency”;

the coexistence of unmarried couples was also punished with imprisonment as "facilitation of fornication" and "pimping".

Munich's first shared flat at Kaulbachstrasse 63, where Reventlow lived with Bohdan von Suchocki and Franz Hessel from 1903 onwards – a risk.

Two of the three women heard the “cry for the child”, but it shouldn’t mean that they had to end up in a marriage because of it.

Theoretically.

Those Reventlows with the lawyer Walter Lübke went terribly wrong after three years, the portrait of the couple leaves room for premonitions.

She kept to herself who was the father of her son Rolf, who was born in the year of the divorce in 1897. Ludwig Klages took over the guardianship.

Beutler also raised her son from her first marriage alone.

Bundled misery of disadvantage

Such existences on the brink of ruin also take a physical toll.

Contraception, abortion, venereal diseases, typhoid - women's medical care was in bad shape and it took a pioneer like the Englishwoman Hope Bridges Adams Lehmann, who only received her license to practice medicine twenty-four years after graduating, but still with her husband ran a practice in the Gabelsbergerstrasse.

She published extensively on gynecological topics, her guidebook "Die Gesundheit im Haus" (1899) was widely distributed.

In retrospect, the Munich years seem more like episodes in individual cases, and yet the whole misery of discrimination that women were at the mercy of at the time was concentrated in these years.

In 1910 Reventlow left Munich, she later wrote books in Ascona in the artists' colony Monte Verità;

Hennings went to Switzerland in 1915, Beutler lived in seclusion in Seeheim on Lake Starnberg from 1921 until shortly before her death.

The bohemian attitude seems radical

With this exhibition, which is well worth a visit, the Monacensia is continuing its new Munich project called "#Female Heritage", which aims to draw attention to the twenty percent of the estates managed in the archive that come from women.

Museographically inspired by Art Nouveau, the showcases are accompanied by video essays contributed by actresses from the Kammerspiele.

A digital magazine launched at the same time is intended to deepen the background and collect reactions with blog entries and videos.

In the light of today's organization of arousal in the networks, the attitude of the three negotiated Bohemians seems radical.

Her way of reaching the public for her concerns was much more deprived and risky.

And Emmy Hennings' certainty still applies: "My only job is to learn what I am."

The Women of Bohemia 1890-1920.

Monacensia, Munich, until July 31, 2023. An accompanying reading book has been announced for November by Verbrecher Verlag.