Bertha Pappenheim Map

The Jewish women’s rights campaigner and social activist Bertha Pappenheim is the focus of the sub-project at the Frankfurt site. This extraordinary woman arrived in Frankfurt in 1888, in the company of her mother, who was born and raised in the Hessian city’s large Jewish community. Bertha Pappenheim, who has gone down in history primarily as the patient Anna O. in Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, was in fact a complex and talented personality: she wrote stories for children as well as poems and plays, and translated political feminist writings and literary works from Yiddish into German. In 1904 she founded the Jewish Women’s Association of Germany in Frankfurt. Among other things, the Women’s Association opened a home in nearby Neu-Isenburg, to provide shelter and support to Jewish young women and girls who were illegitimate and/or menaced by trafficking and forced prostitution. The house was Bertha Pappenheim life’s work and she remained its director until her death in 1936. It is now an educational center and memorial site: the Bertha Pappenheim House.

The project aims to use diverse artistic media to focus public attention on historical research into the life and work of Bertha Pappenheim, the people of Frankfurt’s fight to end trafficking in women, and the flourishing local Jewish community around 1900. Interdisciplinary project seminars held with students of Jewish Studies, Art Education and Gender Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt culminated in the decision to develop a professional app (software application) that provides users with a virtual tour of “Pappenheim’s Frankfurt.” During development of the app, the public space of the city served as an open stage: art actions took place at various stations of the tour and are now documented on the Bertha Pappenheim Map. The app thus visualizes history artistically and makes it tangible in public space through a medium that is accessible to a broad group of users with no previous knowledge of the subject. The project closely cooperates with Frankfurt’s educational, social and cultural institutions.

The audio walks of the Bertha Pappenheim Map, optimized for smartphones and tablets, are available online for free in German and English without prior download:https://berthapappenheim.com/

The Bertha Pappenheim Map was developed at the Seminar for Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt by Prof. Dr. Rebekka Voß and Dr. Marion Keller in collaboration with the Bremen artist Elianna Renner.

Kooperationspartner und Förderung: Adickes-Stiftungsfonds der Goethe-Universität; Anne Frank Fonds, Basel; Cornelia Goethe Centrum für Frauenstudien und die Erforschung der Geschlechterverhältnisse, Goethe-Universität; Fazit-Stiftung; Frauenreferat Frankfurt; Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt; Junge Akademie, Berlin; Historisches Museum Frankfurt; Kanton Basel-Stadt; Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt; Seminar- und Gedenkstätte Bertha Pappenheim, Neu-Isenburg; Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft; Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Goethe-Universität