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(Bertha Diener Eckstein )
born on March 18, 1874 in Vienna, Austria
died on February 20, 1948 in Geneva, Switzerland
Austrian writer and journalist
150th birthday on March 18, 2024
Biography
Bertha Diener grew up comfortably cared for in a Viennese family of factory owners. She was to be prepared for her later role as a wife in the classical manner, and was thus not allowed to study. In the much older and wealthy private lecturer and bohemian Friedrich Eckstein, she met a man who introduced her to the wider world. As her parents were against this union, Bertha stopped speaking to her father and simply waited in silence for her coming of age. She married Eckstein in April 1898.
Karl Krauss, Adolf Loos and Peter Altenberg were guests in the couple’s home. But the “spiritual refuge” soon became a “spiritual prison.” Her talents lay idle; the wider world was somewhere far away. In 1904, she left her husband and her five-year-old son Percy and began to travel. She traveled to Egypt, Greece and England. An amour fou with the Jewish doctor Theodor Beer almost brought her to the brink of madness. In 1910, her son Roger was born; he grew up in a foster family. Bertha Eckstein never returned to a middle-class existence and was constantly on the road.
At first, she called herself Ahasvera, the eternal traveler. Later, she would write her novels and journalistic works under the pseudonym Sir Galahad, the only one of Lancelot's Knights of the Round Table without a flaw. Depending on her finances, she lived as a permanent guest in luxury hotels, family pensions and Christian hospices. She engaged in winter sports or went on expeditions. She was slender, always elegant and loved haute couture.
From 1914 to 1919, she worked on her novel The Conic Sections of God (Kegelschnitte Gottes,1920) where she sharply criticized the impossible situation of women at the beginning of the Wilhelminian era. Mothers and Amazons (Mütter und Amazonen), the first female cultural history, was published in 1932. Sir Galahad was not a women's rights activist in the narrow sense, but her longing and hope for an improvement for women was obvious in every novel. Towards the end of her life, she would have liked to settle down once again, and she began dreaming of a beautiful old villa near Rome. But on February 20, 1948, in the middle of working on a new book, she died following an operation in Geneva.
(Text from 1997, translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
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