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Grete von Urbanitzky
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.
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.
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.
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 haute bourgeois milieux (like Vienna's).
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 Anschluss, was necessary to preserve sociocultural values and maintain political order.
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Grete von Urbanitzky
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.
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.
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.
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 haute bourgeois milieux (like Vienna's).
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 Anschluss, was necessary to preserve sociocultural values and maintain political order.