Emma Adlers Memories and Ego-Documents

The aim of this research project is to transcribe and analyze the literary remains of Emma Adler - which have to date received no adequate attention from historians and scholars of gender - with the ultimate goal producing an annotated and critical edition of Adler`s memoirs and journals. This project starts out from the basic assumption that the only way to fully understand a historical actor`s particular self-fashioning - her self-construction through retrospective refelction - is to analyze the web of relations to which that construction owes its existence. In this way, subjective experience and retrospective reflection are both understood as process and product. On the one hand, they represent dynamically evolving schemas of perception, interpretation and action, each of which corresponds to specific fields of social relations and power dynamics. On the other hand, they are products, in which historical experiences - handed down collectively and subjectively - are condensed into a matrix of thoughts, perceptions and actions. Thus the research project seeks to provide a radical contextualization of Alder`s writings, focusing above all on questions of gender, jewish identity, migration, assimilation and acculturation, modes of citizenship, modernism, avant-garde, enlightenment, social utopias, egalitarianism, and finally psychopathology and trauma. In this understanding, the historical (re-)construction of the self is the object of cultural history, relational, reflexive and critical in its categories. With this framework in mind, we also propose to produce a collection of essays exploring the methodological and theoretical basis of the project, in which experts from different disciplines will explore and debate various aspects of Adler`s life and work. It must be considered as a unique historical fortune that Emma Adler`s literary remains could survive the chaos of war and fascism - and were preserved making their way through half of Europe - to be housed today at the Adler Archives of the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung. As a paradigmatic female figure of Viennese Modernism, Emma Adler embodies a series of moments and breaks within European modernity. Her autobiographical writings can be seen as one effort to construct, through retrospective reflection, an image of woman as historical subject. These documents allow researchers today to understand, from the point of view of an exemplary female intellectual, the experience and construction of bourgeois femininity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within the tension of tradition and emancipation. Precisely because our understanding of Viennese modernism has been largely defined by the texts of dominant masculine figures, the case of Emma Adler offers the rare possibility of opening up another view onto this epoch, so central to the entire course of 20th century history.

The aim of this research project is to transcribe and analyze the literary remains of Emma Adler - which have to date received no adequate attention from historians and scholars of gender - with the ultimate goal producing an annotated and critical edition of Adler`s memoirs and journals. This project starts out from the basic assumption that the only way to fully understand a historical actor`s particular self-fashioning - her self-construction through retrospective refelction - is to analyze the web of relations to which that construction owes its existence. In this way, subjective experience and retrospective reflection are both understood as process and product. On the one hand, they represent dynamically evolving schemas of perception, interpretation and action, each of which corresponds to specific fields of social relations and power dynamics. On the other hand, they are products, in which historical experiences - handed down collectively and subjectively - are condensed into a matrix of thoughts, perceptions and actions. Thus the research project seeks to provide a radical contextualization of Alder`s writings, focusing above all on questions of gender, jewish identity, migration, assimilation and acculturation, modes of citizenship, modernism, avant-garde, enlightenment, social utopias, egalitarianism, and finally psychopathology and trauma. In this understanding, the historical (re-)construction of the self is the object of cultural history, relational, reflexive and critical in its categories. With this framework in mind, we also propose to produce a collection of essays exploring the methodological and theoretical basis of the project, in which experts from different disciplines will explore and debate various aspects of Adler`s life and work. It must be considered as a unique historical fortune that Emma Adler`s literary remains could survive the chaos of war and fascism - and were preserved making their way through half of Europe - to be housed today at the Adler Archives of the Verein für Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung. As a paradigmatic female figure of Viennese Modernism, Emma Adler embodies a series of moments and breaks within European modernity. Her autobiographical writings can be seen as one effort to construct, through retrospective reflection, an image of woman as historical subject. These documents allow researchers today to understand, from the point of view of an exemplary female intellectual, the experience and construction of bourgeois femininity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within the tension of tradition and emancipation. Precisely because our understanding of Viennese modernism has been largely defined by the texts of dominant masculine figures, the case of Emma Adler offers the rare possibility of opening up another view onto this epoch, so central to the entire course of 20th century history.