Non-fiction
Nina Schedlmayer
Hitlers queere Künstlerin. Stephanie Hollenstein – Malerin und Soldat
[Hitler's Queer Artist. The Painter and Soldier Stephanie Hollenstein]
Translation Grant Programme
For this title we provide support for translation into the Polish language (2025 - 2027).
From Bohemia to the Nazi Bigwigs
Stephanie Hollenstein, born in 1886, was the daughter of a farmer and embroiderer from the Vorarlberg region of Austria. As a child she was a cowherd. Her great artistic talent, however, soon led her down a different path than the prescribed one that was somewhere “between an embroidery machine and a milking stool.”
In 1904, she was accepted into Munich’s Royal School of Arts and Crafts, which had started training and also hiring female artists very early on. In the artistically progressive Munich of those years, the rustic farmer’s daughter started living a life that she didn’t really want her family at home to know about. The art historian Nina Schedlmayer discovered numerous love letters in the archives that indicate Hollenstein’s promiscuous lesbian lifestyle in Schwabing, the heart of Munich’s art scene at the turn of the twentieth century, where Hollenstein, an up-and-coming expressionist painter, even ran her own art school until 1910.
Schedlmayer’s biography is titled “Hitler’s queer artist.” Although the word “queer” was not yet used in Hollenstein’s time, it aims to demonstrate that this is about a young woman who lived as she wished, openly out and self-assured. She therefore traveled in circles that were open to the colorful gender carnival. It is rather fascinating to read about how Stephanie Hollenstein used her talent and sense of adventure to paint her way upward in the avantgarde circles of her time, all the while getting one lover after another to be dependent on her and then casting them off in an agonizingly long drama. “Everything seems to indicate that she withdrew whenever the object of her affection did not act as she wished or else hurt her – whether willfully or not,” according to her biographer, thereby offering us some glimpses into her ambivalent personality.
It becomes clear on the very first pages of this intriguing portrayal that Hollenstein must have been a very charismatic, although also domineering person. She knew early on how to win people over and use them for her purposes. Her excursion with the Austrian soldiers of the First World War was certainly spectacular. Disguised as Stephan Hollenstein, with her hair cut short and dressed in a soldier’s uniform, she smuggled herself among the Standschützen (non-regular soldiers) of her hometown of Lustenau, who then took off for the southern front from the Dornbirn train station. She remained incognito for a while, living a soldier’s life in South Tyrol in order to go to war for God, the Emperor, and the Fatherland: “Then came the great battle between nations,” she reported in a letter. She participated in part out of patriotism and in part from an artistic interest. And at the front she did in fact create pictures of soldiers in the field that became famous.
Hollenstein’s patriotism was already fervent at that time, but her famous painting that is also on the cover of the book shows a melancholy soldier – it could also be a tomboyish woman. Today we might think it was the portrait of a lesbian with a man’s haircut. Could it be a self-portrait? The sad expression leaves very little room for speculations: The initial war euphoria of the often-cheering artists, which clearly started waning shortly after 1915, had basically become a thing of the past.
The extended initial story of an obviously very nonconforming woman evolved into an absolutely surprising political ideologization: Stephanie Hollenstein became an ardent antisemite and passionate supporter of Adolf Hitler. This is summed up concisely toward the end of the biography: “From Bohemia to the Nazi Bigwigs.” This contradiction in her interests is what caught the attention of the author beyond the historical framework of the narrative, since it appears to be a constant in authoritarian systems that the propagated purity requirements often do not apply for the elites. Opposites are melded together when it serves the fanatical goal. Today as well, there are politicians in Germany who combine a progressive notion of family, in which queerness and multiculturality play a significant role, with a racist worldview and a pronounced sense of a master race.
Stephanie Hollenstein painted expressionist images, as did her colleague Emil Nolde, also an antisemite. Like Hollenstein, Nolde joined the banned Nazi Party in Austria in 1934, and he decorated his home with swastikas directly following Austria’s annexation. These actions notwithstanding, he was nevertheless rehabilitated after the war, since his works had been designated as “degenerate” despite his fascist attitudes.
As this biography clearly shows, Nazi cultural policies were permeated with inconsistencies, which makes the case of Stephanie Hollenstein suddenly seem less exotic. Stating that “a person’s art could simultaneously be considered traditionally German and degenerate,” the author offers a few examples. Similar contradictions must be acknowledged also regarding the artistically progressive and openly lesbian Stephanie Hollenstein. She was ahead of her time and at the same time obsessed with a reactionary masculinity cult that offered her a stellar career under the Nazis. She did not have an opportunity to distance herself from these views after the war, as she died in 1944.
Nina Schedlmayer reminds us with her vibrantly written biography that careerism, charisma, and a fascination with power can form a sinister triad in which the laws of reason no longer apply and even an emancipated lifestyle does not protect against blind hate toward other minorities or marginalized people.
Translated by Allison Brown
By Katharina Teutsch
Katharina Teutsch is a journalist and critic. She writes for newspapers and magazines such as: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, die Zeit, PhilosophieMagazin and for Deutschlandradio Kultur.
