Writing from the edge. Else Feldmann

Unerforschlich tief und in tausend Geheimnisse verstrickt sind die Wege menschlicher Not , writes Else Feldmann in one of her first feature pages, of which she was to write numerous for various newspapers and magazines in the course of the 1920s and early 1930s. In her work Elisabeth Debazi gives attention to life and work of the long-forgotten Jewish journalist and author of the interwar period, who knew the multiple forms of human misery too well from her own experience. Born in 1884, Else Feldmann had moved as a child with her parents and siblings from Hungary to Vienna, the capital of the Austro -Hungarian empire at the time, and grew up there in the Leopoldstadt ghetto. Her father, a merchant, was unemployed time and again. By working from home, her mother contributed to the living of the family, which was additionally burdened by Elses diseased older sister. A teacher training course which Else attended for a short time, had to be cancelled because the money for her professional training was no longer sufficient and instead everything that was still available had been invested in the training of Elses younger brother. Nevertheless, she managed to gain recognition in a profession that was largely male dominated before the First World War. Furthermore, Else mastered to assert herself as a journalist and writer. In her work Else Feldmann describes the realities of life in suburban zones of society: prostitution, juvenile delinquency, unemployment, marginalization, exploitation. She pays particular attention to young mothers and women from the proletariat who mostly work under exploitative conditions while their children grow up largely unattended in the backyards of the narrow air- and lightless tenements or are left at home as infants stunned with brandy so that their mothers can work in the factories. As a chronicler of her time, dedicated to relentlessly showing social grievances and injustices, Else Feldmann found her ideological home in the 1920th Arbeiterbewegung where she wrote most of her reports for the Arbeiter Zeitung. However, her dedication did not preserve her from the emerging fascism. When the Arbeiter Zeitung was banned in 1934, Else Feldmann lost her main publication platform. She increasingly got troubled both professionally and privately and was deported to Sobibor. In 1942 she had been murdered there. Else Feldmann is one of the authors who enriches our conception of the period between the two World Wars, for which the catchphrase Tanz auf dem Vulkan has become proverbial with the facet of impressive descriptions regarding the lives of marginalized social groups, which Elisabeth Debazi fully assembled for the first time and edited in literary studies.