Page - 303 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Gender and Identity 0 religious education. Her memoirs, written in Vienna in 1940 shortly before she was deported to Theresienstadt at the age of 77, do not even mention her Jewish origins, despite the fact that she had even lost library privileges due to her non-Aryan status. Although it is not clear that she was ever baptized, Richter certainly did not identify openly as a Jew. Lise Meitner, the physicist who co-discovered nuclear fission, was born in Vienna in 1878 and grew up in a highly assimilated, Liberal household. She received Prot- estant religious instruction, but the fact that she was nominally Jewish is indicated on her university registration forms. Although she never denied her Jewish origins and her biographers constantly refer to her as Jewish, she was baptized soon after she left Vienna in 1907 ; she is buried in a Protestant cemetery in England. 9 Meitner undoubtedly spoke for many of her colleagues when she commented late in life that “I feel like an impostor when American Jews praise me especially, because I am of Jewish descent. I am not Jewish by belief, know nothing of the history of Judaism, and do not feel closer to Jews than to other people.” 0 Those who left the Jewish community usually came from the most assimilated backgrounds and identified least with their Jewish roots in childhood. Some academic women, like Richter and Meit- ner, attempted to shed their Jewishness for purposes of career advancement ; others accepted formal baptism as adults in order to facilitate their marriage to Christians. Social Democrats and Communists became konfessionslos for political or ideological reasons. Unlike in the cases of Edith Stein and Alice Salomon in Germany, however, Austrian Jewish university women rarely converted out of strong religious convic- tion. Most Jewish university women had become secular humanists ; they were more likely to be agnostics than believers in any religion, including Judaism. Their political beliefs were generally stronger than their religious faith. A few women of the older generation (born before 1900), like Elise Richter, considered themselves Liberals or Democrats ; most of the younger women, like Käthe Leichter, defined themselves as Social Democrats or Communists ; the remainder were generally apolitical, although some were Jewish nationalists. Ethnicity, like religion, was a problematic category for Austrian Jewish university women. Marsha Rozenblit has argued throughout her book, Reconstructing a National Identity, that “Jews in Habsburg Austria developed a tripartite identity in which they were Austrian by political loyalty, German (or Czech or Polish) by cultural affiliation, Elise Richter, Summe des Lebens, Wien 1997. Charlotte Kerner, Lise, Atomphysiker : Die Lebensgeschichte der Lise Meitner, Weinheim, Basel 1986, p. 33 & 126 ; Gertrude Enderle-Burcel, “Lise Meitner“, in Waltraud Heindl and Marina Tichy, eds. „Durch Erkenntnis zu Freiheit und Glück…“ : Frauen an der Universität Wien ab 1897, Vienna 1990, p. 235. 0 Ruth Lewin Sime, Lise Meitner : A Life in Physics, Berkeley 1996, pp. 315–316.