Affect and Emotion in Bertha Pappenheim's Activism

In a 1932 prayer German-Jewish feminist leader and social activist Bertha Pappenheim, implored God to sustain her rage in the face of injustice: “Grollender Zorn erfüllt mich! Ich will ihn behalten, er soll in mir brennen – solange das besteht, was ihn zu recht erregt.” Friends and opponents alike observed the strong emotions that compelled her activism but judged them differently. What Martin Buber admired as “passion and demanding severity borne of love,” others diagnosed as “man-hating” and “fanatical, almost pathological hate.” 

In dialogue with recent work on the role of affect and emotion in social movements (Penslar on the Zionist Movement and Gould on AIDS activism, among others), I trace the affective rhetoric in Pappenheim’s speeches and writing about two intertwined causes—women’s role in Jewish life and the campaign against the trafficking of women––to argue that anger, outrage, and moral indignation were not incidental to her activism but constitutive of it. These emotions, alongside others such as compassion, hope, and solidarity worked to mobilize others, create an activist community, and sustain their work over decades. I pay particular attention to the gendered double-bind that reframed Pappenheim’s justified rage as pathology, and to what it cost Jewish women to suppress the very emotions that injustice warranted.