Agatha Schwartz

“When the Special Girlfriend...”:1 Lesbian Love and Fin-de-Siècle Austrian Women Writers

	Although fin-de-siècle Austrian feminists wrote abundantly on sexuality and fervently criticized the existing sexual practices based on the moral double standard, lesbian love and homosexuality were not addressed by the bourgeois women's movement. As Helga Thorson observed, "most members of the women's movement either spoke out against homosexuality or were silent about the issue" (Thorson, Helga Mae, “Re-negotiating Borders: Responses of German and Austrian Middle-Class Women Writers to Medical Discourses on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality at the Turn of the Century,” Diss. U of Minnesota, 1996: 94, emphasis in the original). This may not be surprising if one bears in mind the representation of lesbians in medical literature of the time as "degenerate" and the fact that feminists themselves were often equated with lesbians. 
	Hanna Hacker has demonstrated that a lesbian subculture, nevertheless, did exist in fin-de siècleVienna, and even more so in the 1920s and 30s. I will briefly present the case of Helene von Druskowitz, who was the first Austrian woman Doctor of Philosophy and a prolific writer of essays, philosophical treatises and plays. Druskowitz openly refused compulsory heterosexuality and was hospitalized in various mental asylums following her unhappy love affair in Dresden with the opera singer Therese Malten. She died in the asylum Mauer-Oehling, although there was no firm evidence that she actually did suffer from a mental illness.  
	In fiction, lesbian love became the topic of several novels in the late 1920s and 1930s (for instance in Grete von Urbanitzky’s Der wilde Garten [1927] and Durch Himmel und Hölle [1932]).  At the turn of the century, there were still very few examples of fictional texts where female homosexuality was thematized, such as Maria Janitschek’s novels Mimikry (1903) and Im Finstern (1910), her novella “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral” (1902), and Grete Meisel-Hess’ novella “Neid” (1912). In all of these narratives, lesbian love represents only an episode in the lives of the protagonists. Women’s attraction to each other is viewed either as a temporary aberration or as the result of a cultural degeneration and of a loss of strictly separated gender identities. In none of these narrative is it presented as an alternative to heterosexual normativity; without exception, it receives a less favourable treatment than heterosexuality. Thus we can conclude that, although a few women writers did venture into touching upon female homosexuality in their fiction, the fate of such fictional love affairs was in no way different than the treatment of real-life lesbians.