1 Bertha Pappenheim and Jewish Women from Eastern Europe1

There are two ways of writing about Bertha Pappenheim (1859-1936), and seldom is there any success in merging her two life histories into a single unified biography.2 First, there is discussion of her youth in Vienna, when she was a hysterical ‘indirect ’ patient of Sigmund Freud, while under treatment by Dr. Josef Breuer, who kept his friend Freud abreast of her case, under the pseudonym of ‘Anna O’. Freud is said to have discovered psychoanalysis as a therapy through the reports on her illness and the therapeutic method she developed herself, the ‘talking cure.’3 The second Bertha Pappenheim emerges active as an adult, emancipated woman in Frankfurt am Main. More than anything else, she is remembered as the founder of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women, established 1904),4 which she headed for some 20 years as its president, and which inter alia also campaigned for the right of women to vote in the Jewish Communities (Gemeinde).5 This ‘later ’ Bertha Pappenheim, the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish middle-class family, who had been brought up to marry well and then spend a leisurely life doing absolutely nothing, became a hardworking, highly engaged social worker. Her entry into social work began as a volunteer distributing soup i