Else Feldmann (1884–1942)

Else Feldmann was born to a Jewish family in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, Austria. Her parents were Fanny (Pollak) and Ignatz Feldmann, a Hungarian-born merchant. She grew up with six siblings in precarious economic circumstances. She attended a teacher training college, but after her father lost his job, she left school and worked in a corset factory to help support the family. In 1908, she began publishing short stories and journalism on social fringe topics such as destitute mothers, child poverty, and the city slums, in the newspapers Abend, Neuen Wiener Journal, Neue Freie Presse, and in the magazine Die Frau. She wrote a play called Der Schrei, den niemand hört (The Scream Nobody Heard), which was produced in 1916 at the Volksbühne in Vienna. She also wrote novels, some of which were serialized in newspapers before appearing in book form. These included Löwenzahn: Eine Kindheit (Dandelion: A Childhood, 1921), Der Lieb der Mutter (The Body of the Mother, 1931), and Martha und Antonia (1933). She began working full-time for the Social Democratic Party newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung in 1923. She co-founded the Association of Socialist Writers (Vereinigung sozialistischer Schriftsteller) in 1933 with Josef Luitpold Stern, Theodor Kramer, Fritz Brügel, and Rudolf Brunngraber in response to the rising tide of fascism. It only lasted a year before being dissolved by the Austrian authorities. After the Arbeiter Zeitung also was shut down in 1934, she lost her income and her publishing opportunities. In 1938, following Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, Feldmann's works were banned and she was evicted from her apartment. On June 14, 1942, she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Sobibór extermination camp, where she was murdered. Feldmann's work was rediscovered in the 1990s, thanks in part to the reprinting of the original illustrations for Der Lieb der Mutter by artist Carry Hauser. In 2018, a collection of her articles entitled Flüchtiges Glück: Reportagen aus der Zwischenkriegszeit (Fleeting Happiness: Reportage from the Interwar Period) was edited by Adolf Opel and Marino Valdez and published in Vienna. Opel also edited a collection of her stage works, Else Feldmann: Arbeiten für das Theater, published in 2007.