The Secret Life of Anna O. – Bertha Pappenheim’s Gender Revolution, Religion and Modernity
This latest Snapshot offers a brief introduction to the extraordinary life and work of a most remarkable German-Jewish woman, the feminist, writer, social pioneer and founder of several associations and welfare organisations for Jewish women and girls in Germany, Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936).
World-famous under the pseudonym of Anna O., the most prominent subject of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking Studies on Hysteria (1895), the role she played in the history of psychoanalysis has tended to eclipse her considerable social and feminist activism. Through the intimate lens of a pamphlet featuring a selection of Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘Gebete’ (Prayers), we gain an insight into the thoughts and feelings of this brilliant, dynamic and deeply spiritual woman concerning the things that mattered most in her life: family, feminist activism and Judaism.
