International Women’s Day: You won’t leave me!

Behind every successful man there is a strong woman.” A fool’s wisdom that is “quite outdated because it romanticizes exactly the exploitative role that was intended for women in the past,” says Leonie Schöler and counters: “Behind every successful man there is a system that strengthens him; Above all others there is a system that stops them.” It is true that many successful men in history owe their fame and power to their partners, but they did not choose this role and often fell apart because of it. With her book “Stolen Women”, the journalist, born in 1993, wants to give them attention and recognition that they did not receive during their lifetime.

Certainly, other authors have done this before her, including men. Some of the examples presented by Leonie Schöler are now known, others less or not at all. The abundance of monstrosities and injustices against women in all areas of society over the centuries that the author has brought together here is impressive and shocking.

There is the philanderer Albert Einstein, who met his first wife while studying in Zurich, who admired the independence of Mileva Marić, who came from Serbia and was one of the first women to study mathematics and… She was allowed to study physics, but had to abandon her scientific career before it began. And for a long time it was not known how closely she was involved in her husband’s discoveries. In 1905, Mileva Marić told a friend: “We have recently completed a very important work that will make my husband world famous.” Four years earlier, Einstein himself had expressed his gratitude to his wife: “How proud and happy I will be when we both have victoriously completed our work on relative motion.” But he won the Nobel Prize for Physics alone in 1922.

While he was able to enjoy living out his image as a brilliant mind and eccentric, Mileva Marić had to be content with the role of wife and mother. And on top of that, endure scorn; He defamed her as unattractive, bad-tempered and stupid, which Einstein biographers accepted without hesitation. When, after separating from him (Einstein had now chosen cousin Elsa as his second wife), she wanted to publish her memoirs due to financial difficulties, he threatened her, probably out of fear of losing an ounce of fame: “Are you thinking about it? Isn’t it possible that no cat would care about such writing if the man you were dealing with hadn’t happened to do something special? If you’re a nonentity, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you should be modest and keep your mouth shut.”

The fate of Clara Immerwahr, the first wife of the chemist Fritz Haber and also the first woman in the German Empire to earn a doctorate (1900), was also tragic. With flying colors. Four years earlier, a university professor had told her that he didn’t believe in “intellectual Amazons.” She was also not allowed to live out her calling and had to take care of the household and children after her marriage. She was only granted occasional lectures at the adult education center, where she was allowed to teach young women about “chemistry in the kitchen and at home.” Her contribution to her husband’s work went far beyond proofreading manuscripts. In the foreword to his textbook “Thermodynamics of Technical Gas Reactions,” Haber thanked her for her “silent collaboration,” but that was it. The convinced pacifist suffered above all from the fact that her husband ultimately developed the murderous poison gas used in the First World War. Their appeals to his responsibility as a scientist failed. Shortly before her 45th birthday, she committed suicide on May 2, 1915 – after the German gas victory at Ypres was cheered and celebrated, which had wiped out 1,200 French soldiers.

Of course, there are also other examples that demonstrate equal liaison in science. One of the most famous couples: Pierre and Marie Curie, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity and in Chemistry in 1911 for the discovery of the elements polonium and radium. To date, Marie Curie is the only woman to have received the award, founded by the Swedish inventor and entrepreneur Alfred Nobel, multiple times. Otherwise only five men were able to enjoy this.

The neurologist Cécile Vogt was also lucky enough to have a relationship based on mutual respect. In contrast to her husband, the doctor and brain researcher Oskar Vogt, known, among other things, for dissecting Lenin’s brain, she had no entry in the Brockhaus, even though she was often the main author of the works they wrote together. Cécile Vogt was nominated for the Nobel Prize 13 times, but in vain.

Leonie Schöler devotes separate chapters to the British biochemist Rosalin Franklin, the Austrian nuclear physicist Lise Meitner and the British radio astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, all three of whom deserved a Nobel Prize but did not receive it. In 1962, a trio of men were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for detecting the double helix in our DNA: James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, who never mentioned a word before or after the award ceremony that they were ice-cold about their colleague’s research results Rosalin Franklin stole. It was not until 1968 that Watson hinted at the author in his autobiography, but without any sense of injustice and, on top of that, discrediting her as an unattractive, argumentative woman. Lise Meitner was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics and Chemistry, but Otto Hahn reaped the rewards of decades of joint research. A public controversy arose in the United Kingdom in 1974 in the Bell Burnell case, which was not taken into account when the then Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her colleagues Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle.

Bertolt Brecht’s women have now come into their own: Elisabeth Hauptmann, whose collaboration on the “Threepenny Opera” and “Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses” was largely ignored for a long time, and whose independent piece “Happy Hour” was staged until its revival on the New York Broadway in New York in 1977 was even entirely attributed to his pen; the actress and writer Margarete Steffin, who was involved in “Mother Courage and Her Children”, “The Good Man of Sichuan” and “The Life of Galileo”; the actress Ruth Berlau, who, among other things, recorded the stage performances for posterity and began building the Brecht archive. With emigration to the USA, the “Brecht company” became the “Brecht family,” writes Leonie Schöler, “quite dysfunctional, but highly productive.” Brecht’s wife Helene Weigel was expected to be very tolerant. And his lovers a lot of self-sacrifice and submission, which becomes clear in Ruth Berlau’s quiet complaint: “I wrote to Brecht that I had the opportunity to work in New York. It was also important to me that I was independent and earned my own living and wasn’t always treated as an appendage of Brecht.”

It was a similar story with Pablo Picasso and his “muses”. Marie-Thérèse Walter was 17 when he took her as his mistress (and the reason for his divorce from his wife Olga); The photographer and communist Dora Maar was 29 years old and introduced Picasso to leading intellectuals in Paris in 1937 and documented the process of creating his famous anti-war painting “Guernica”. Both were viewed primarily as objects of his art. It was only after her death in 1997 that Dora Maar was discovered as an independent artist. The only woman at Picasso’s side who achieved public recognition of her own art during her lifetime was the French painter Françoise Gilot, who died in New York last year at the age of 101. When they first met, she was 21 and had curated her first exhibition, he said: “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard today! Girls who look that good can’t be painters!” And when she finally felt that Picasso was suffocating her independence as an artist and insisted on working as an artist again, he threatened: “No woman will leave a man like me!” Francoise Gilot separated from this macho man in 1953.

Even at the avant-garde Bauhaus, things weren’t always fair between the sexes. Lucia Moholy, married to the Hungarian-born photographer László Moholy-Nagy, asked Walter Gropius to save her collection of 560 photo negatives when she had to flee Nazi Germany in 1933. He did this – by taking possession of them, secretly making prints, selling them and even presenting them in an exhibition in New York without naming the photographer. Meanwhile, she suffered existential distress in exile. In the 1950s there was a legal dispute and Gropius reluctantly returned some of the negatives; 330 remained “disappeared”. And although she illustrated and edited almost all of the Bauhaus publications, she was not acknowledged by name by the editors, Gropius and her own husband; she only received a small thank you from Lászlo in a final issue. Incidentally, Lucia Moholy sometimes used a male pseudonym: Ulrich Steffen, like quite a few of her contemporaries in a male-dominated, misogynistic world. Leonie Schöler also deals with this forced escape and refuge due to social injustices in a special chapter.

Karl Marx and his women are not missing from this book. One has to smile at the author’s evidence that even the founder of scientific communism, as it was once called, exploited his wife Jenny and their three daughters Jenny, Laura and Eleanor as cheap family employees. However, the author certainly appreciates the loving relationship between the philosopher from Trier and his people.

Leonie Schöler doesn’t just leave the story about deceived, exploited, disenfranchised women; she classifies their fate historically, starting with the narrative of the man as a hunter and of the woman as a collector and child-bearing woman through the Great French Revolution, as Olympus, which continues to this day de Gouges wanted to supplement the famous “Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen” with a “Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens” in 1791 and died on the guillotine for it, the women on the barricades during the European revolutions of 1848/49 and the British suffragettes to the defenders of the Spanish Popular Front Republic against the Franco putschists, the Resistance fighters, partisans and Red Army soldiers in the Second World War. The author discusses the term feminism and offers current comments, including on the paradox that, especially in Islamic, strictly patriarchal states, the majority of students in science subjects are female. And and and …

In short: the young journalist has achieved a great success with her debut on the book market. A compendium that invites further debate. Speaking of which: It came from a podcast that gave Leonie Schöler 230,000 followers.

Leonie Schöler: Stolen women. Thinkers, researchers, pioneers: the invisible heroines of history. Penguin, 411 pages, hardcover, €22.