build a stable nest and make yourself useful. Then you will have reason to sing.”7
The bird brooded and soon became overcome with sadness at her isolation:
The nightingale began to sing again, but softer and with a deeper tone and the song sounded like a question: Why, why am I alone? And she thought about who might answer her if she called out. The thought never left her…Then a hot pain seized the nightingale. “Wherever I look, I see couples,” she sobbed softly. “Only I am forsaken.” And she felt a longing as if her pounding heart would break, and it would have broken in pain if she did not sing. But she sang; she sang as never before. The song welled up mightily…it sounded tender and sweet as a harp…In this way the nightingale lightened her heart and consoled herself, until she thought, “Even if I am alone, I am rich in my pain, for I have my song, my song!”8
Companionship soon alleviated her despair: “One evening…a hesitating, twittering sound answered her. The nightingale trembled, she did not know why and did not want to believe her ears. But the tone resounded louder and louder and the guest flew nearer and nearer until he was sitting right next to her: yes, her companion was there!” The nightingale and her partner built a nest together and “her longing was filled, her pain quieted. She was no longer alone.”9
After some time had passed, the frog was awakened in the midst of a sunny day's nap by a sudden movement in the trees:
Was he seeing right? Yes, really and truly, a bird flew over the water directly toward the old willow: it was the nightingale! “Hello! Hello, dear nightingale!” the frog called out happily…But after he had observed her for a little while, he added uncertainly: “You are looking around so restlessly, is something wrong? Can I get you a fly or something?”
“No, oh no,” whispered the nightingale, “I thank you, but I have everything I would wish: I am full, I am full.”
“But you look around so strangely, as if lost…are you looking for something?”
Then the nightingale gave a loud sob. “I have lost my song. I seek my pain and my song—my song.”10
Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne's nightingale grapples with the contradictory chords of her natural calling amidst the censure of bystanders. The bird at first thrived in her solitude, never considering it to be isolation. Solo and unburdened, she fulfilled her natural calling by offering to the world her gift of song. But once faced with outside judgment, she began to question herself and to envy all around her. Only song brought solace; her music became a vessel to fill a life judged as empty. Indeed, her gift to the community became ever more beautiful and stirring, as her Lied (song) was enriched by her Leid (pain). The pain lingered on until it ultimately was soothed by the companionship of a mate. The nightingale created a home and dedicated herself to a new life—but at great cost. In assuaging the pain wrought by isolation, the song of the nightingale had forever been quieted.
Gnauck-Kühne considered this fairy tale to be an allegory of the experience of single women at the turn of the century.11 Like the nightingale, unattached women had unique contributions to offer society. But in attempting to share their talents, they invariably faced criticism and rebuke. Just as the frog derided the bird's song, single women also confronted charges of uselessness. Yet mockery and ridicule could become a source of empowerment for alleinstehende Frauen (women standing alone),12 just as suffering enhanced the splendor of the nightingale's call. The very particular nature of an unmarried woman's loneliness had the potential to infuse society with beauty and generosity. When Gnauck-Kühne's protagonist mates, readers are meant to lament the loss of the nightingale's singular song. Gnauck-Kühne hoped that the tale would also compel its audience to hear and respond to the gifts of those solitary nightingales whose Leid might never be quelled by a mate, yet who nonetheless ever attempted to transform the world through their Lied.
The History of European Single Women
Life without marriage: anxiety about such a fate plagued many middle-class German women at the turn of the century. The notion of a demographic crisis called the Frauenüberschuß fueled discussion of women's rights in Imperial Germany. Both contemporary observers and historians have described the German Frauenfrage (woman question) as a Ledigenfrage (singles' question) and the Frauenbewegung (women's movement) as a Jungfrauenbewegung (movement of virgins, connoting old maids).13 The distaff surfeit served as both discourse and demographic concern in considerations of the female role in society and culture. Helene Lange's description of the disrupted domestic hearth and Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne's fantasy of the solitary life are both representative of a central theme of the debate regarding German women's rights. Recounted in speeches, petitions, newspaper articles, prescriptive literature, demographic studies, fiction, journals of sexual science, attacks against the women's movement as well as apologia in favor of it, and even in fairy tales, the plight of the single woman informed and formed discussion of German women in the Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany).
The importance of the female surplus in Germany is made clear in the 1902 Handbook of the Women's Movement14 Edited by Helene Lange and her companion, Gertrud Bäumer, the work asserted that one of the primary causes of the German woman question was “the numerical ratio of the sexes…A tremendous surplus of women developed in the cities of the Middle Ages. Not to such an extent, but nevertheless also perceptibly, the same unfortunate condition exists in the nineteenth century…It has further intensified in the course of the nineteenth century due to emigrations…but also from the greater mortality [of men].”15 While the description relies upon vague demographic assertions, it is firm in its contention that a perceptible increase in the majority of females plagued the late nineteenth century. A 1911 encyclopedic entry on the Frauenfrage further described the displaced female: “the number of unmarried women is increasing…They must create an existence. The oft-repeated saying: ‘the woman belongs in the house’ is a foolish and empty cliché as long as each woman cannot be given a husband and a home.”16 The notion of a surplus of unmarried women was a central pillar of debates surrounding the changing nature of society throughout the Kaiserreich.
This book investigates the ways in which anxiety about too many single women served as a leitmotif in the German culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By identifying single women as the focus of study, this work fits into a growing body of historical scholarship.17 The interest in marital status as a subject of historical investigation has increased alongside the development of the field of women's history. Marital status provides both a social category and a descriptive arena by which female experiences can be examined. As Judith Bennett and Amy Froide have noted in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, “the histories of European women, European families, and European societies look very different when single women are a part of the story.”18 The essays edited by Bennett and Froide identify class, age, sexuality, religion, and region as key factors that differentiate the experiences of single women of the pre-modern era.19 But even among widely disparate circumstances, Bennett and Froide note important similarities among single women, both positively in regard to single women's ability “to use their meager resources—cash, goods, credit, property—with fewer restrictions” than married women, as well as negatively in that unwed women were more vulnerable to persecution and ridicule because of their “unprotected” status.20 Still, the prospect of marriage itself served to connect both single and wedded women, as did stringent limitations on autonomy based upon sex rather than marital status.
Books by Martha Vicinus, Elaine Showalter, Rita Kranidis, and Mary Louise Roberts have examined the distinct experiences of unwed women in modern Europe. These works portray the modern unmarried woman as playing an important role in reconfiguring understandings of gender. By identifying single women as a cohort meriting scholarly consideration, these authors show
