Die Presse, April 24, 2020
German Original: https://www.diepresse.com/5805144/bdquomaderl-was-fallt-denn-dir-einldquo
She was one of Austria’s first female jurists, fought against repressive approved schools and substantially shaped the reform of criminal and family law together with Christian Broda: Elisabeth Schilder (1904-1983) – Remembering a forgotten woman.
The year 1919 was special. For the first time, women were allowed to enter the University of Vienna to study law. Female jurists? And? What now? “We were allowed to study and earn a Juris Doctor, but making a living with our degree – this is where equality stops,” protested a newly graduated Dr. jur in the Arbeiter-Zeitung newspaper ten years later. To become a judge was unthinkable. “An old judge once answered my question regarding that matter with a fatherly smile: “But girl, what are you thinking!”,” said the jurist. The man would have been surprised what else the girl was thinking about. An education to become a caretaker, for example, completed during her law studies, or a subsequent, second degree in political science. For the young DDr. Elisabeth Schilder all of this was no guarantee for a career. She looked for and found other possibilities.
Elisabeth Schilder, born in Vienna in 1904, was the only daughter of an assimilated, bourgeois Jewish family. Supported by her parents, she had early contact with the social-democratic movement, which became her social and her political home. While she was already politically active in high school (Gymnasium) and soon thereafter engaged with the socialist students, it was Kaethe Lichter who enabled a first job for the young, temperamental jurist in the women’s’ department of the Chamber of Labour (Arbeiterkammer). However, most of Elisabeth Schilder’s professional experience was gained as head of the Women’s Protection Department (Frauenschutzstelle) in Vienna’s working-class Ottakring district from 1930 to 1933. Her direct exposure to the vital questions of everyday life of proletarian women sharpened her perception of economic, political, and legal problems. Hundreds came to ask for help and guidance: beaten women, who had lost their apartment after divorce without rights, single, unemployed mothers, or desperate women, who unsuspectingly agreed to an installment purchase. Schilder: “What was alcohol to the men were installment purchases to the women.” Elisabeth Schilder had the ability to translate complex legal and economic facts into simple language and to make it available journalistically to a larger public – for her entire life. Next to many articles on housing or marital problems and prostitution she published a Guide for Proletarian Women (Ratgeber fuer die proletarische Frau) together with her friend Ella Reiner (later Lingens): “What does every women have to know about the law?”
The political developments in 1933 and 1934 abruptly ended this commitment. Elisabeth Schilder had to go under ground. In this clandestine situation, she mostly worked as a journalist and wrote current economic analyses for the Information Service of the Revolutionary Socialists (Informationsdienst der Revolutionären Sozialisten) under the pseudonym of Lise Zellhoff.
To Paris via Switzerland
With the incursion of the National Socialists no time had to be wasted. Only two days later, Elisabeth Schilder was on a train to Paris via Switzerland, where she involved herself as an escape agent at the foreign representation of the Austrian Socialists. In 1939, she even managed to get her 72-year old mother to Paris – the father had died in 1937. In Paris she fell in love with the escaped Viennese attorney Erwin Pollach. When German troops marched into France in 1940, the three of them fled to Southern France, where the mother was able to hide in a monastery in Fons. Elisabeth Schilder and her partner were interned at the Gurs camp. This captivity lasted over a year. Erwin Pollach was deported to Auschwitz and murdered, while Elisabeth Schilder managed to escape to her mother’s. Schilder returned to Paris in 1945 to work as a caretaker for the Jewish Committee of the Rescue and Parental Custody of Jewish Children (Jüdisches Komitee zur Rettung und Obsorge jüdischer Kinder), where one experience would define her future life.
“The Buchenwald kids are coming,” it resounded through the French public. Schilder’s committee was needed and confronted with a kind of social work that could not rely on any prior experiences. That’s because the “children” were adolescents between 14 and 19 years of age, not pure and virtuous as expected, but “neglected teenagers,” who were without education and marked by their fight for survival in concentration camps - who remained children, at the same time “overripe” and who demanded from society what they had to go without over the past years. The caretakers gave them what the could, affection and any support. One of the teenagers, the 17-year old Heinrich Sokoler from Poland, whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, did find Schilder’s particular affection. She took the boy under her wing and returned with him and her mother to Vienna in the Fall of 1946.
But to do what? In a bombed-out city that experienced a lot, but no zero hour. Many of Schilder’s friends were in exile, many were murdered. Returnees did not find open arms, which made connections among themselves even closer. Elisabeth Schilder described this mood to journalist Trautl Brandstaller: “It felt a little bit like a few doves surfacing from a deluge.” A lonely mood, which she probably also experienced in the City of Vienna’s Youth Welfare Office (Jugendamt), where she found a job as a jurist in 1946. An office where the breeze of the authoritarian spirit from recent history blew continuously and the self-image of many caretakers was characterized by control and the “uniform hat method” (Amtskapperl-Methode). An open exchange of ideas was not the be expected there. She found this exchange with the few students of Freud, who tried to connect to the high time of psychoanalysis during the First Republic.
Leading the way was August Aichhorn, who served as a life-long role model for Elisabeth Schilder because he established a paradigm shift in social work and in dealing with “neglected adolescents.” No beating, not a bad word was his motto, the leading principle was: “Absolute clemency and benevolence, don’t be society’s attorney, but an attorney to the neglected.” A motto that Schilder took for herself, a motto that paired with her temperament was met with only little applause. A prompt reasignment from the Youth Welfare Office to the Central Office for Assets (Zentralstelle für Vermögensangelegenheiten) was the logical consequence. Before that, she did have the opportunity to work on the founding of the first Child-Guidance-Clinic together with Aichhorn and more progressive colleagues – there, the case-work method from the United States with its focus on helping, and on individual relationship work manifested itself as an anti-thesis to the leader principle.
Professionally, Elisabeth Schilder’s career as a jurist at the City of Vienna’s magistrate was orderly and safe: as a Senate Councillor and head of Vienna’s Third District Administration. In private, however, she choose a life plan outside the norm. In the 1950s she adopted two girls, whom she raised with dedication. The working single mother still had the verve to participate in a leading role in judicial matters. A close friendship was important in this matter, as it opened practical and political opportunities for her. Christian Broda, twelve years her junior, who Schilder still knew from her time in illegality was the most important dove out of the deluge, who she could trust completely – and vice versa. In private, Schilder stood by the side of the later Minister of Justice Broda with advice. From a second row seat, she participated in the development of the big criminal- and family law reform. Her engagement was accompanied by her regular publications about it; among friends the relationship was met with an appropriate bon mot according to Dorli Simon: “Broadalein and Schwesterlein” (brother and sister). Their shared political idealism merged into a vision of a future of a society without prisons. No society improves if it has a lot of prisons. Therefore, a jail sentence can only be a matter of very last resort. Specifically, innocent juvenile offenders have to be treated differently. Ever since her experiences with her protégé, the juvenile concentration camp survivor Heinrich, this topic was close to her heart.
In Austria, juvenile offenders did not find mercy, but repressive approved schools. In 1952, hundreds revolted in the notorious approved school Kaiserebersdorf against their overseers. The almost 30-year old psychologist of the school, Sepp Schindler, who knew Schilder from the Child-Guidance-Clinic, understood the revolt as a cry for help and a warning. Elisabeth Schilder supported Schindler and vehemently criticized the institution’s leadership, the lack of training of the educators, and the lack of psychological care of the juveniles. Finally, in 1957, the Working Group Probationary Services (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Bewährungshilfe) was founded and directed by Elisabeth Schilder as of 1961.
Sometimes the Purse was Thrown
This position offered possibilities for change since she knew how to use her connection to Minister of Justice Broda, particularly after 1965 as a pensioner and full-time chairwoman of Probationary Services. Over the course of almost 20 years, her engagement led to several initiatives: a fight against large approved schools, the creation of supervised flat-sharing communities, training courses for probation officers, the establishment of the first drug counseling office, the expansion of probationary services to include adults. In all of this, Schilders resolute leadership style became legend. She protected her employees and made no secret about whom she liked and whom she did not. During heated arguments it was entirely possible that her purse would fly through the room. But one could count on her in case the roof was on fire. Over almost two decades, Elisabeth Schilder personified the social institution of probationary services. Only with a heavy heart would she leave her post during the summer of 1981.
During her life, she insisted on self-reliance and independence and stayed true to her political ideals, also in the face of obstacles and through the catastrophes of the 20th century. She passed away on February 18, 1938 in Vienna and was largely forgotten.
Karl Fallend
Born in Pinsdorf, Upper Austria in 1956, Doctor of Philosophy, social psychologist. Publications on the history of psychoanalysis and on processing national socialism. Lives in Vienna. Co-Editor of the volume Aus der Sintflut einige Tauben – Zu Leben und Werk von Elisabeth Schilder, which will be published by Loecker in Vienna in mid-May.