Eugenie Schwarzwald

Doing good and doing yourself good

24 November 2010 to March 2011

Eugenie Schwarzwald (1872-1940) was born in Galicia and is one of the most fascinating women of her generation. She devoted her persuasive personality and indefatigable energy to reforming the education system, in particular schools for girls, and to social work in the form of community kitchens and holiday camps. She was also a journalist and had what in many respects was the most progressive salon in Vienna. She founded the first coeducational primary school in Austria, which was notable for its realistic curriculum and absence of repressive measures. She thought that school should be fun and that boredom was "poison", as she put it. Through her contacts with artists and Modernist pioneers she was able to summon the assistance of the likes of Adolf Loos, Hans Kelsen, Helmuth James von Moltke, Arnold Schönberg and Oskar Kokoschka. The education authority, however, found that "genius does not belong in the curriculum". Pupils included well known women such as Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel, Hilde Spiel, Helene Weigel-Brecht and Emmy Wellesz. It was not until after 1918 that many of her initiatives were included in the school reform by Vienna city councillor Otto Glöckel. Until 1938 authors like Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Sinclair Lewis and his wife Dorothy Thompson, Egon Friedell and Franz Theodor Csokor, and musicians like Josef Matthias Hauer, Rudolf Serkin and Egon Wellesz frequented not only her house in Vienna but also her villa on Grundlsee. The exhibition is being organised in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, in which Deborah Holmes is currently preparing a comprehensive biography of Eugenie Schwarzwald.