The lives of emperors and kings are extensively documented. However, little is known about the fate of ordinary people. How did a maid live in the imperial era, for example? Oldenburg historian Gunilla Budde explores the lives of these and other everyday heroines.
The spelling is adventurous, the thoughts fly from one topic to the next and punctuation is obviously alien to the author: reading Sophia Lemitz's autobiography requires a lot of patience and imagination. Nevertheless, the notes that Gunilla Budde discovered at the end of the 1980s in the archives of the collector and writer Walter Kempowski are invaluable. "There aren't many maids who have written down their memoirs. I realised straight away that I had a treasure in my hands," recalls the historian, who has been researching the history of the 19th and 20th centuries as a professor at the University of Oldenburg since 2005. Back then, in Kempowski's attic archive, it was already clear to the scholar that the history of the bourgeoisie could not be adequately analysed without including the history of the maids. "The maids are an important part of the bourgeoisie, as they lived with the bourgeois families and documented their bourgeois status through their existence. They were often very close to the children in particular, sometimes even closer than the parents," explains Budde. In the 19th century, being a maid was a woman's job par excellence, usually for a transitional period between leaving school and getting married.
"I was lucky to serve"
This was also the case with Sophia, whose life story Budde researched intensively and later published in a book. Sophia was fourteen years old in 1858 when she accepted a position in the household of a family of ten skippers in the spa town of Hohwacht on the Baltic Sea. In the chapter "I was lucky to serve" in her autobiography, she reports on her first experiences: Physically hard labour, but enough to eat. She also became close friends with Friederike, a maid five years her senior, who taught her all kinds of useful things, such as how to milk a cow or rescue someone from the sea. "Life as a maid was hard: they were separated from their families and had very little free time, at most a Sunday afternoon," says Budde. Added to this was their ambivalent relationship with their masters: Sophia and her peers endeavoured to offend as little as possible. They had to be very adaptable and patiently put up with the whims of their masters. At the same time, other academic appointments for women gradually emerged in the Empire, such as factory work, which was more regulated and better paid. "The masters also had to see to it that they kept the maids warm - also because they often overheard juicy details about the family. They needed each other," summarises Budde.
This also affected another professional group in the middle-class household: the governesses. These were more highly placed than the simple maids, came from the middle classes and were mainly employed in wealthy circles such as business and aristocratic families to take care of their daughters' education. In her research based on various autobiographies of well-known governesses - including Helene Lange and Bertha von Suttner - Budde came across an unexpected picture: instead of the image of the wallflower that no man was interested in, she came across self-confident, cosmopolitan women who had consciously chosen to be governesses as an alternative to marriage. "For many, it was like a liberation - a more self-determined perspective on life than the usual role of housewife, wife and mother," says Budde. According to Budde, quite a few governesses later married anyway, but first enjoyed this self-determined phase with their own money for a few years - in an academic appointment in which they were able to continue their education.
Globetrotter instead of wallflower
Some of them even wrote their own textbooks with helpful tips for new colleagues - historians today can glean important information about the self-image of female tutors from these writings. "For example, there were instructions on how to behave when the family invited you to a social event: only play the piano when asked and dress modestly, i.e. never try to be more beautiful than the daughters of the family," explains the researcher. There were also tips for everyday life, such as how to deal with a sick child or how to organise interesting lessons.
What also made the academic appointment attractive was the opportunity to travel and get to know other cultures. "It was also common for governesses to travel abroad from the 1870s onwards," adds Budde. In England in particular, it was very popular to hire a native German teacher for the children. The polyglot, cosmopolitan women naturally also influenced the development of their protégés with their lifestyle. "The children of the aristocratic families saw their governesses as an alternative role model," says Budde. They realised that there was more to life than just lying on the chaise longue or giving company like their mothers. Suddenly there was a woman who went out into the world and earned her own money. Budde assumes that this is why the image of the governess was deliberately coloured negatively, for example in books. "This counter-image was widely disseminated to make this way of life less attractive. Actually, daughters should still marry - and to the right man."
The ZDF documentary "A Day in the Imperial Era" immerses the viewer in the life of the maid Minna. Gunilla Budde was involved in the production.