01.2. Hist 20 podcast: Hedda 1900-1909

an introduction to ProfLevy's great-grandmother and the first decade of the 20th C

Transcript

History 020: Podcast 1.2 

Testing. Testing again. Hi. Juliette Levy again-- well, I'm going to say again. And this is the last time I said it, because you're going to hear a lot more from me. So we don't need to do that. 

Podcast number two. 

You might have already seen a folder in your intro module called Hedda Silbermann Segal. No-- the other way around—Hedda Segal, née Silbermann. née means born. 

Hedda Silbermann was my great-grandmother. 

And since I think history is not just a sequence of events, but it's about the people that live through these events, I thought I could tell you about my great-grandmother who was born on August 10th, 1900. 

Whether we decided or you decided that the 20th century starts in 1900 or in 1901,or if it starts with World War I, my great-grandmother experienced most of the events that we're going to be talking about over the next 10 weeks. 

And you should feel free to take this as an example of the type of research you can do for the next 10 weeks. 

You can look at the world history by looking at events that matter to the world. Or you can try to trace it through a person or a family or a collection of people, and see that the history of a people-- you know, define it any
 which way you want-- can tell you a lot about the history of the time during which you're looking at them. 

And so my great-grandmother, Hedda-- and you spell that H-E-D-D-A-- was born on a really warm day in August 1900. She was born in her parents' house on the Viktoria-Luise-Platz in Berlin. That's in Germany. The house, apparently,
 is still there. I don't have the number of the house, but you can find that platz-- which means square-- on Google Earth. 

You could imagine, as I like to do, that on that day, the house windows were open because it was so hot, and that Hedda's mother—her name was [? Jeanette, ?] which is by no means a very German name-- bore her first child with the windows open to a warm summer's day. 

Yes, I'm completely romanticizing it. Because it might have been so lovely for her. Like most women at the time in Berlin, and pretty much elsewhere, [? Jeanette ?] delivered her first daughter at home. 

And she probably didn't do it with a ton of pain killers. She probably did have the help of her nurse or a midwife. But she would have done it at home, you know, which was the way most children were born. And it's really not until a few decades later that women would deliver in hospitals. And there's sort of a connection between the medicalization of childbirth and the fact that there were more medicines available to reduce pain-- but also reduce the risk of childbirth. 

So that's how, you know, once we start thinking of childbirth as something that can be risky to the mother, and that there's something we can do about that risk, that sees more women-- sort of, essentially, that [INAUDIBLE], that most normal of [INAUDIBLE], shifting from the household into the hospital. 

Hedda was born into a fairly well-to-do family. Her father, [? Alexander ?]
 [? Silbermann, ?] came from a family of traders and lawyers and doctors and a couple of diplomats, who had all been in Germany for a couple of generations. 

They were Jewish, and they were German. And they were part of a cultural and social intelligentsia in Berlin. 

Hedda and her sisters,[? Eva and ?] [? Thea, ?] who were born two and
 four years after her, grew up in a very cosmopolitan environment. They had—there were music tutors and there were parties with musicians coming around. 

The house had a housekeeper. 

They were Jewish in Germany at a time when that was not really an exception-- or in the sense it was not a problem, really. It was not a marker of anything. I mean, Germany itself was a very recent construct. They've not been a unified, solidified Germany before. The empire, or the union of German city-states, doesn't exist until 1871. So the notion of a German culture, while it existed in a literary sense, but certainly not in a political sense, it certainly didn't include a specific ethnic or religious context. 

So [? Alexander ?] [? Silbermann's ?] family ended up in Berlin after leaving Breslau, which is currently Poland, around the time the German empires formed. 

[? Jeanette's ?] family-- their last names were both [? Liebenthal ?] and
 [? Ziemann-- ?] they migrated from Hanover, which is still Germany, and Koenigsberg, which is now Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea in Russia. 

So just by looking at the names of the cities-- and they've changed, now, so you know, Koenigsberg is Kaliningrad. The fact that these cities used to be Germany, and are now in Poland or in Russia--that in itself tells you that just by looking at my great-grandmother, we've already touched upon some aspects of the history of Europe. 

So over the course of the 19th century, the [? Ziemanns ?] and the [? Liebenthal ?]and the [? Silbermanns ?] all, for one reason or another,migrated to Berlin--as many other people did-- to join in a rich, really vibrant life in Berlin,which was the capital of the German empire. 

Now, like most women of the time, [? Jeanette ?] did not have the right to vote.
 So she had her child at home. She did not vote. But in 1918-- so whe Hedda turned 20, so-- actually in 1920 is when she would have voted for the first time-- but in 1918, German women over the age of 20 were given the right to vote. 

So by 1933-- the 1933 elections were the ones where Hitler was voted to be Chancellor of Germany-- all the [? Silbermann ?] girls would have had the right to vote in that election. And I like to think that they didn't vote for him. 

Now, by comparison, English women also got the right to vote in '19, but they had to be 30 years old to vote. 

So if my great-grandmother had been born in England, they wouldn't have voted until much, much later. 

And in France, women didn't get the vote until 1944. In Mexico, they didn't get the vote until 1958. 

The US gave women the right to vote in '19, but they gave white women the right to vote. So it's not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all Americans acquire the right to vote. 

So this sort of an important thing to think about-- that when we think about the right to vote, and when we think about equality-- when you think about the way in which those words were used at the beginning of the century, they may not mean the same thing then as we would take them to mean today. 

The summer Hedda was born was also the summer of the first modern Olympic games outside of Athens. They were in Paris. And I don't really know whether anyone in the household in that summer-- you know, right before my great- 

th 

grandmother was born and right after, because the game started on May 14 

. and ended on October 8. 

You know, we can barely get two weeks of Olympic Games, today. They got, what, four months? Five months? There was no way for them to find out what was going on. They would get the news via newspapers-- was a significant delay. There was no radio. I mean, they weren't telegraphing results. So the experience of these first modern Olympic games outside of Athens would have been really quite different at that time. 

By the way, Germany placed seventh in number of medals. France placed first.They were the host country-- not that that's necessary. The US placed second in terms of medals-- so not entirely unlike what's going on still today. 

Just as Hedda was learning to sit up by herself-- hopefully, I assume, somewhere in early 1901-- oil was discovered in Texas. And so began a pretty important chapter in US history and probably in world history. And it really affected the rest of the world, because in the immediate aftermath of the Texas oil discovery, mass production of cars started in the United States. Because once you've got the fuel, you can build more cars, because there's no point in building a lot of cars when nobody can fuel them. 

And soon, if you imagine the scene of the house on Viktoria-Luise-Platz, where Hedda was born, with the windows open to a beautiful square where horse hooves can be heard, and chariots are passing by, and people are walking slowly-- that was replaced by transmission engines and the sound of blaring horns. 

This is not the only thing that changed over the course of those 10 years when my great-grandmother was born. She was also born at a time when large empires were teetering on the edge of their existence. The Russian empire, the British empire, the Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian empires all were European strongholds f monarchical power. 

Even in Germany, where Hedda was born, there was a Kaiser who had-- extremely, by that time-- by 1900-- some pretty strong designs of territorial power. 

All that's going to change very soon. 

In the second decade of the 20th century, most of those monarchies disappear. The British empire
 is the one that pretty much the only one-- that survives. All other countries will have their territory radically reorganized. And their political structures will be destroyed and replaced by something resembling democracies. 

But there's more on that on your materials for this week. There's a great Khan Academy video that does a really good job of explaining a very complicated European situation before the World War. So I recommend you go take a look at that. 

You could go take a lookat pictures of Hedda-- I'll be talking about her more-- and start on your first assignment. All right, great talking with you.
 I hope to see you soon. Bye.