Educationist, journalist, charity worker and friend of the arts, Eugenie (‘Genia’) Schwarzwald (1872-1940) was a pivotal figure in Viennese culture during the volatile years of 1900-1938. An extraordinary embodiment of the paradoxes of her age, she remains impossible to pigeon hole. Born in a tiny hamlet in East Galicia, Schwarzwald (née Nußbaum) trained as a teacher in Czernowitz before moving to Zurich to become one of the first women to attain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. She distanced herself from feminist groups at university and, rejecting academia in favour of marriage, settled in Vienna in 1900. Founder of one of the first girls’ grammar schools and of the first ever mixed primary school in Austria, her educational methods were unsystematic, based on individual creativity and the personal happiness of each child. Pupils included Eva Reich, Helene Weigel-Brecht and Hilde Spiel. Brazening out the attendant scandals, Schwarzwald had her girls do sport and hired progressive artists and academics to teach at her institutes. Her untiring support of figures such as Kokoschka, Loos, Musil, Schönberg and Hauer made her summer camps a magnet for the avant-garde.

Portraitphotograph on glass
by Madame d'Ora, Vienna

During and after World War One, she opened a series of communal kitchens and children’s homes in Vienna and Berlin conforming to the latest developments in dietary science and interior design. To finance her charity projects, she wrote feuilletons and ran businesses such as a vegetable farm and a taxi company; she was a notoriously effective and unabashed fundraiser. Her activities attracted the satirical attention of Karl Kraus, who saw in them support for the war. Schwarzwald’s flamboyant personality attracted both literary portrait and satirical caricature, as representations by Musil, Bettauer, Friedell and Polgar, and many others show. Her salon in the Josefstädterstraße was a centre for cultural discussion, and she entertained relations with both sides of Vienna’s interwar political divide, despite her liberal views and Jewish origins. Her wide circle of international friends included the Danish writer Karin Michaelis and the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, contacts which later proved invaluable: when the National Socialists marched into Austria in 1938, Schwarzwald’s property was confiscated and her assets frozen. She herself was in Denmark on a lecture tour and never returned home, moving instead once more to Zurich, where she died of cancer in 1940. Financial worries and future plans filled her brief exile: until the very end she chafed at Switzerland’s refusal to grant her a work visa.

Schwarzwald presents many intriguing problems to the biographer. She has no archive as such, one of the factors which contributed to her subsequent neglect. Her papers were either scattered directly after the ‘Anschluß’ or burned by friends and neighbours in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht’ in November 1938. Eye-witnesses remarked on her vast correspondence; traces of this have to be tracked down in others’ archives. Unlike her contemporaries Montessori and Steiner, she did not regard herself as the founder of an educational movement. She numbered among her personal friends many of the foremost proponents of Viennese Modernism, but was neither muse nor patron in the conventional sense. Tireless in the promotion and encouragement of others, Schwarzwald had a centripetal effect on some of the most innovative and creative sections of Viennese society. Her reflection can be found in the pupils she taught, the works she enabled and the lives she saved, but her individual contours, her background and motivations still await definition. As an Eastern Jew who once described herself as an anti-Semite and an anti-feminist who furthered women’s emancipation, Schwarzwald’s life story throws new light on the contradictions and anxieties of Viennese culture in the first half of the twentieth century.

Contact: Deborah Holmes