‘Maternal Flapping’: Motherhood and National Sentiment in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Letters to Beatrix von Hirschberg

ABSTRACT

To Elizabeth von Arnim, her experience of motherhood was associated with a particularly German coupling of sentimentality and brutality. This article explores the nexus between sentimentality, motherhood, German ideology, and the concept of Kultur in von Arnim’s letters to her daughter Beatrix von Hirschberg. Spanning close to forty years, this correspondence, read in conjunction with von Arnim’s short sketch ‘Christmas in a Bavarian Village’ (1937), offers a deeper understanding of von Arnim’s political views and her experience of the vagaries of motherhood.

Keywords:

• Motherhood
• sentimentality
• Germany
• Elizabeth von Arnim

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge that the archival research for this article has been financially supported by La Trobe with two travel grants to London and Los Angeles.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Recent milestones include Maddison 2013, Brown 2013, Römhild 2014, special issue Women: A Cultural Review 2017 and Kimber and Maddison 2019.

2 Elizabeth von Arnim also had a son, Henning-Bernd, her youngest child, of whom she was fond in his adult years, but with whom she was not particularly close. However, this article is primarily concerned with her daughters, especially Trix.

3 She occasionally used this term in her letters to Beatrix (Trix) von Hirschberg, notably in her letter from 14 November 1937. This and all following letters to Trix are held by the family in a private collection unless otherwise indicated.

4 In 1914, Felicitas was accused of having stolen money at her German boarding school. Von Arnim punished her daughter severely and when the rebellious Felicitas sided with the Germans after the outbreak of the war, von Arnim broke off contact with her. Felicitas died 1916 of pneumonia in Germany, unreconciled with her mother. Gabrielle Carey speculates that the severity of von Arnim’s reaction was really in response to a concealed teenage pregnancy, but acknowledges that due to lack of archival evidence ‘it is unlikely that the true story will ever be known.’ (Carey 2020, 158–9).

5 For a detailed discussion of the significance of bags and female mobility in modernist fiction, see Ridge 2017.

6 Vicki Baum’s 1928 bestseller Helene Willfüer Stud.Chem. is exemplary here in depicting an unmarried mother who loves her son and, against all the odds, manages to build a career for herself. In the end, she is rewarded with a happy marriage with a paternal professor husband, who respects her as his professional equal.

7 Apropos the impending runoff in the German presidential elections in April 1932, she wrote to Trix, ‘My prayers are all that Hindenburg may finally be elected. Too awful to contemplate what poor Europe will be plunged into if Hitler gets in.’ (17 March 1932).

8 The title of this ‘brochure’ is not mentioned, and I haven’t been able to establish the exact publication.

9 For a political reading of the novel and the role of Wagner’s music in it, see Walker 2013: 374–82.

10 To the best of my knowledge, this short story never published for the English market. A German translation was published together with excerpts from the novels in Weihnachten (von Arnim 2000).