Teacher and/or Mother: Personal and Political Transformations in Hilde Maria Kraus's Nine Months.

Published in 1931, Hilde Maria Kraus's Nine Months (Neun Monate) defies both social and literary norms in that the novel's protagonist, Olga, chooses to continue her teaching career after the birth of her child. Kraus's novel, however, draws on a concept of "spiritual motherhood," whose conservative, essentialist elements appear to relativize the novel's emancipatory potential. In this article, I examine the protagonist's complex process of personal transformation: she experiences how the personal intersects with the political, as she begins to critique social and political inequalities based on class and gender. I show that while Olga eventually embraces the teaching profession as a means for social reform, she differs from the more traditional proponents of spiritual motherhood in that she challenges bourgeois concepts of marriage, morality, and class privilege. I argue that her version of spiritual motherhood is infused with socialism and a more radical type of feminism, thus making her decision to combine both career and motherhood truly exceptional. (EK)

In her overview of women's literature of the Weimar Republic, Heide Soltau notes that many female protagonists find themselves standing before two supposedly irreconcilable paths, namely career or family. She indicates that while "this decision for the one and against the other is difficult for these female figures, the authors consistently value marriage higher than a career" ("Anstrengungen" 222).(1) In her attempt to identify examples that countered this conservative trend in women's literature, Soltau uncovers a novel that she briefly describes as an "exception" to the rule of depicting women either as wives and mothers or as career women: Nine Months (Neun Monate, 1931) by Austrian writer Hilde Maria Kraus.(2) Kraus's novel tells the story of Frau Doktor phil. Olga Calvius-Lenz, a 34-year-old history teacher who, alter ten years in a childless marriage, is unexpectedly pregnant. The novel traces the nine months of pregnancy, during which the physical changes of the protagonist are accompanied by a political awakening as well. Thus while Olga initially loathes her pregnancy and is indifferent toward social inequalities based on class and gender, by the novel's end she has embraced motherhood and become an advocate for social and political reform. Having rediscovered during this period of transformation the value of her work as a teacher, Olga is committed to returning to her profession after the birth of her child. Rather than choosing one over the other, as her husband and her society expect her to do, Olga plans to fulfill both roles simultaneously.

In order to show this novel's uniqueness, I will explore the ways in which class and gender, the notion of spiritual motherhood, and the representation of the personal as political intersect in a complex way. Not only does Kraus imagine a synthesis of mother and career woman, two roles previously kept separate from one another, but she also depicts a growing solidarity between women across class boundaries. For these reasons, Nine Months is a novel that deserves the attention of feminists and scholars of women's literature.(3)

Through her depiction of a bourgeois woman who chooses to be both a mother and a teacher, Kraus not only breaks the mold of so many other Weimar novels, as Soltau suggests,(4) but also challenges the prevailing political and social attitudes regarding women's right to employment. For, despite the growing number of women in white-collar and professional jobs in the first part of the century and the legal guarantees of equal rights for men and women, most Austrians and Germans continued to view employment for women only as a temporary phase between school and marriage, at which point they would embark upon their true careers as wives and mothers. This conservative attitude is reflected most clearly in the regulations concerning female civil servants.

With the introduction of equal rights for men and women in 1919, women employed in both the Austrian and German civil service, including teachers, could now marry and continue in their profession.(5) This new provision, although guaranteed by law, was compromised or suspended during periods of economic decline. Already in July 1920, the Austrian Pensionsbegunstigungsgesetz (Law to Promote Retirement) offered financial incentives to employees who resigned. Although the law itself made no specific reference to female employees, the General Association of State Pensioners argued that no wives or mothers should be employed by the state; these women could easily find new employment in which their feminine characteristics could better and more appropriately be used (Appelt 111).

As inflation escalated, both the German and Austrian governments attempted to avert financial collapse by reducing the number of employees. In both versions of the staff reduction law (the Austrian Angestelltenabbaugesetz of July 1922 and the German Personalabbauverordnung of 1923), married women were offered a settlement or "marriage premium" if they resigned. Austrian widows who received a state pension were fired immediately, and the German government eventually issued an emergency decree on 27 October 1923, in which Article 14 stipulated that married female civil servants could be fired, despite their lifelong contract, if they were financially provided for by someone else (Reichsgesetzblatt 1923, 1006). After the German government lifted this restriction in 1929, debate resumed almost immediately on the need to reinstate it. By May 1932, all parties except the Communists voted in favor of the Law on the Legal Position of Female Public Servants, which permitted the state, once again in violation of its constitution, to release married women from their duties at any time, with or without their consent, if they were economically supported (Reichsgesetzblatt 1932, 245).

Although the Austrian national government passed no law during the 1920s that explicitly denied married women the right to employment, regional governments did, as in the 1922 case of the Salzburger Landtag reintroducing the celibacy clause for female teachers (Appelt 113). This law caused fear and outrage among professional women that such restrictions might spread to other regions or professions. Their concern was substantiated, for as the decade progressed, drafts of laws that did not specifically address the income of married women came under increasing criticism, until a national law was finally passed in December 1933 that stipulated that women must leave the civil service when they marry, or if they already are married, that they must resign if their husbands earn at least 340 Schillings monthly from the state (Appelt 119).