Bertha Pappenheim
Women’s Rights Activist
Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) was a pioneer of the women’s rights movement in Germany. She campaigned for better religious education for Jewish women and equal rights within Jewish institutions.
Through her work as a writer and the live-in director of a shelter for women and girls, among other activities, Pappenheim encouraged Jewish women to demand political, economic, and social rights and assume the responsibilities that came with them.
Anna O.
Born in Vienna as the third of four children in an affluent Jewish family and raised in the Orthodox tradition, Bertha Pappenheim became known as “Anna O.” through the case history published by her physician, Josef Breuer. Her case history was published in Studies on Hysteria, co-written by Breuer and Sigmund Freud, making it one of the foundational texts of psychoanalysis.
League of Jewish Women
In 1904, Bertha Pappenheim and Henriette Fürth (1861–1938) founded the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) at the International Women’s Congress in Berlin. The International Alliance of Women (IAW), which still exists today, was founded at the same congress. Pappenheim served as the League’s chair until her death in 1936. Committed both to Jewish tradition and to women’s emancipation, the association sought to represent women’s interests within Jewish culture while providing a Jewish voice within the German feminist movement.
West German postage stamp commemorating Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936), 1954; Jewish Museum Berlin, accession 2009/48/0. Find more information on this object in the digitized holdings of our collection (in German)
Author and Translator
Alongside political and scholarly writings, such as Sisyphus-Arbeit (Sisyphean Labor), which addressed the trafficking of girls and prostitution in Eastern Europe, Pappenheim also published literary works and translations from Yiddish. These included her 1929 German translation of Maasse-Buch (Book of Stories), a collection of Yiddish stories, folktales, and legends originally printed in Basel in 1602.
A distant relative of the Yiddish memoirist Glikl of Hameln, Bertha Pappenheim rediscovered Glikl’s writings and recognized their historical significance. Her German translation of Glikl’s memoirs, published in 1910, made them accessible to a wider readership for the first time.
Who is Glikl of Hameln?
Glikl of Hameln/Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646–1724), merchant, her memoirs, written in Yiddish, provide a unique account of her 17th-century life
Final Years
In the summer of 1935, Bertha Pappenheim traveled to Vienna, the city of her birth, to donate her valuable collection of 1,125 pieces of lace to the Vienna Museum of Arts and Crafts. Probably under the strain of the political situation, she suffered a severe relapse of the mental illness she had experienced in her youth. After being interrogated by the Gestapo in Offenbach in April 1936, Berta Pappenheim died on 28 May 1936 in Neu-Isenburg.
Bertha Pappenheim, founder of the League for Jewish Women in Germany; photo: Courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York
