Grete von Urbanitzky (9 July 1891 – 4 November 1974) was an Austrian-born novelist, journalist and translator. A prolific writer of "entertainment novels", a label that has contributed to her neglect by scholars of "serious" literature, she explored the position of women, especially artists, in society and the public sphere. Prominent themes included female homosexuality set against the sexual ethics of mainstream, middle-class society.
Life Background and education Grete von Urbanitzky was born in Linz (a regional capital between Salzburg and Vienna), the first of five daughters. Her parents, from further east in Austria-Hungary (father: Transylvania; mother: Cisalpine Banat), spoke German. Her father's birthplace, Sibiu, and her mother's, Arad, became part of Romania under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.
Close to her father (a bond echoed in her positive literary portrayals of patriarchal authority), she was also shaped by pan-German nationalism, then eroding the Empire's monarchically sustained Austro-Slavism. In World War I sketch stories she stressed her "Germanness" (though in the 1960s she highlighted her French grandmothers, perhaps to distance herself from earlier nationalist ties).
She attended the pioneering Körnerschule Lyzeum, a secondary school for girls in Linz, and a gymnasium in Zürich, gaining an unusually solid academic grounding for a girl of her time. She then attended University of Zürich lectures, particularly enjoying those in the natural sciences and philosophy. After her first literary successes, she left her studies and in 1909 moved to Vienna.
Marriages and partnership In Vienna, Grete von Urbanitzky married twice (first Ludwig Woluszuk, then Peter Johann Franz Passini). Both marriages ended quickly in divorce, the first at her father's insistence over debts. More significant was her informal literary partnership and lasting friendship with her second husband's younger sister, Maria "Mia" Passini. They lived together from 1934 and remained close until Mia married an Englishman in 1945.
Pre-war publications Urbanitzky's first publication, Sehnsucht (Yearning, 1911) compiled youthful writings exploring a romanticised view of the artist, a recurring theme in her work.
Her more substantial and structured Wenn die Weiber Menschen werden ... Gedanken einer Einsamen (If Women Became People ... Thoughts of a Woman Alone, published 1913), drew on what she called the "gender dichotomy" from Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). She proposed a third archetype alongside Weininger's "whore" and "mother": the woman-as-artist, condemned to forgo love and motherhood. Commentators see this as her attempt to claim a respectable role within conservative milieux (like Vienna's).
World War I and aftermath Amid World War I and its aftermath, Urbanitzky wrote for nationalist-leaning newspapers and magazines (e.g., Neue Grazer Tagblatt, Alpenland, Die Saat, Die Deutsche Nation, Großdeutschland, Vierburgenland), making arguments described as populist-nationalist and racist, and dedicating her work to "deutsches Volkstum und die Rasse der Erdlinge" ("German folkdom and the race of earthlings"). She said that pan-Germanism, including a German Austria or , was necessary to preserve sociocultural values and maintain political order.
She also wrote on economics and finance, contributing regularly to economic journals in 1917, and now-forgotten poems, song lyrics, and operetta libretti, while working in cabaret.
During this period, Urbanitzky was closely aligned with the populist-nationalist mindset through her cultural-political activity. She organised readings for the Deutscher Schulverein, an organisation dedicated to preserving the German language in parts of Europe where its hegemony was increasingly challenged by alternative nationalisms and resurgent regional languages. She contributed a major piece, a call to arms for the nation's poets, to Arthur Trebitsch's anthology Deutscher Geist aus Österreich (German Spirit from Austria, 1920).
In 1920 she published her novel Das andere Blut (The Other Blood), followed by Die Auswanderer (The Emigrants, 1921) and Die goldene Peitsche (The Golden Whip, 1922). These works mark her most vehemently populist phase. Commentators regard the books as openly racist and antisemitic, forcefully emphasising the "biological" ideology fundamental to German nationalism at the time.
Red Vienna After the headline grabbing aggression of her three novels between 1920 and 1922, such populist-nationalist outpourings were less openly to the fore in her published work. In 1923 she teamed up with other younger leading lights of the Vienna literary establishment, including the writers Arthur Schnitzler, Raoul Auernheimer and Siegfried Trebitsch, along with the publisher Ernst Peter Tal, to set up the Austrian section of the recently established PEN International authors' association. She herself accepted appointment as "General Secretary" of the Austria branch.
In 1924, Karl Kraus mocked Urbanitzky in Die Fackel as a "kulturellen Verbindungsdienst zwischen der Reichspost und der Neue Freie Presse" ("cultural liaison between the German Reich postal service and the New Free Press," Austria's bourgeois liberal newspaper of record), or a pan-German nationalist voice aligned with the mainstream. His jab reflected her prominent, politically ambiguous position in the cultural life of the First Austrian Republic.
During this possibly more liberal phase she published her novel "Der wilde Garten" in 1927. The book focuses on the contentious theme of lesbian love, something of which Urbanitzky by now had significant personal experience. It formed the basis for the reputation that she subsequently enjoyed (or, depending on the circumstances, not) in that it established her as a novelist willing to deal with "slippery" sexual themes that others preferred not to address.Christa Gürtler/Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager: Grete von Urbanitzky ... Erfolg und Verfolgung. Österreichische Schriftstellerinnen 1918-1945. Fünfzehn Porträts und Texte. Salzburg: Residenz 2002, pp. 135-144. There was no express distancing from the populist-nationalism and antisemitism of her previous novels, however. The novel "Mirjams Sohn" (1926) is often portrayed as philosemitic, in that it takes a theme from Jewish history as its starting point. The book is, in reality, sufficiently nuanced to provide for a range of conflicting interpretations. It deals with the appearance of a "leader" figure in the Amsterdam ghetto during the seventeenth century, but it nevertheless employs an anti-messianic plot structure - the murder of a messiah figure by Jews - and includes glimpses of antisemitic and indeed misogynistic ideologies.Viktoria Pötzl: Antisemitische und philosemitische Geschlechterkonstruktionen im historischen Kontext am Beispiel von Grete Urbanitzky's Mirjams Sohn (1926). Konferenzvortrag zu „Historische Romane von Frauen in der Ersten Republik Österreich“, Österreichisches Kulturforum, Warschau, November 2018. [Publication planned)
Urbanitzky was most productive in the 1920s, when many of her 32 (by 1943) novels were published in often rapid succession, with high print-runs. She combined her writing with a job as press officer for the Vienna Volksoper, at the same time running her own literary agency. She was also publishing the magazine "Roman der Millionen" (loosely, "Novel for the millions") which was intended to produce a first German-language translation of a fresh novel each month. Unfortunately the magazine ceased production after the appearance of just four editions, probably for financial reasons. Between 1925 and 1928 she worked as a contributing editor with the liberal-left daily newspaper, Der Tag. She was also working for the aggressively anti-Marxist Neues Wiener Journal. Her private circle reflected a growing political ambivalence. She was in regular contact with high-profile members of the populist-nationalist faction, such as Arthur Trebitsch and Robert Hohlbaum, but her friends also included liberal authors - both Jewish and non-Jewish - such as Richard Specht, Herwarth Walden, Nelly Sachs, Gertrud Isolani and Felix Salten.Ursula Huber: „Frau und doch kein Weib“. Zu Grete Urbanitzky. Monographische Studie zur Frauenliteratur in der österreichischen Zwischenkriegszeit und im Nationalsozialismus. Wien 1990.
As the 1920s drew to a close Austria was badly impacted by the backwash from the Wall Street Crash. A return to widespread acute economic hardship was accompanied by a retreat from moderation on the political front. With politics in both Austria and Germany ever more polarised, Grete von Urbanitzky managed to sustain a strange level of political ambivalence in her novels. In 1931 and 1933 "Eine Frau erlebt die Welt" ("A Woman experiences the World") and "Karin und die Welt der Männer" ("Karin and the World of Men") were both highly successful in commercial terms. In stark contrast to the novels she was producing ten years earlier, neither can be unambiguously defined politically. Certainly both of them include clearly National Socialist position statements and both are sometimes seen as "confessional books", but they both entirely lack the strident racism that was characteristic of Austrian (and German) National Socialism at the time, and when it comes to plot development it is striking that, notably in the second of the two, fascist ideology is uncompromisingly subverted.Christa Gürtler/Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager: Grete von Urbanitzky. In: dies.: Erfolg und Verfolgung. Österreichische Schriftstellerinnen 1918-1945. Fünfzehn Porträts und Texte. Salzburg u. a.: Residenz 2002, p. 140.Ursula Huber: Die Frau als „Künstlerin“. „Klugrednerei“? Fragen der weiblichen Identität und Macht in einigen Romanen Grete Urbanitzkys. In: Zeitgeschichte 16, 11/12, 1989, pp. 387-395.
National Socialism Although Austria was only integrated into Germany in 1938, the country underwent savage political ructions of its own several years earlier, and acquired its own National Socialist post-democratic one-party dictatorship in 1933. If her novels were politically ambivalent, when it came to her own life choices and events, von Urbanitzky evidently retained her "nationalist" beliefs. During 1933 she attended a PEN International congress at Dubrovnik when a motion to condemn Nazi book burnings was discussed. The German delegation walked out in protest during the discussion. Grete von Urbanitzky, who was attending as a representative (and the General Secretary) of the Austrian section, promptly left the conference hall in sympathy with the German group. When she returned to Vienna the Austrian section of the PEN International association broke apart, and von Urbanitzky faced widespread media criticism for the position she had taken in Dubrovnik. She also faced personal risks in Vienna on account of her open commitment to the German National Socialists. Fearing arrest if she remained any longer in Austria, in 1933 she relocated to Berlin. Once in Berlin she published a series of newspaper articles and gave a number of radio interviews, in which she called for a boycott of Austrian-Jewish authors and of other "liberal" Austrian authors. This seems to have contributed to extending significantly the German government's schedule of authors whose works were banned from publication in Germany, which traditionally had been an important market for Austrian authors.