Asta Nielsen, International Film Sensation
Here’s the deal about “women’s history”: once you’re sensitive to the subject you stumble across references to notable women all the time.*
Take the case of Asta Nielsen:
I first met her in this sentence: “Asta Nielsen, newly arrived in Berlin from Denmark, described her horror when a skeletal horse collapsed in the street.”** For all I knew, Asta Nielsen was just a stray Danish tourist in Berlin, but I am a responsible researcher so I did a quick Google search, just in case. And, poof, once again I was down a research rabbit hole with no immediate link to my book.
Asta Nielsen is often described as the first international film star. Known as “Die Asta” and “the Silent Muse,” she was an international superstar of the silent movies. (In World War I, soldiers on both sides of the trenches carried her picture into battle.)
Nielsen was a working actress with an career that was going nowhere when film director Peter Urban Gad convinced her to work with him on a film. The project, an erotic melodrama titled Afgrunden (The Abyss), released in 1910.
Nielsen used her success to negotiate contract terms with the growing German film industry that gave her a financial interest in her films and considerable artistic and economic control over both her films and her public persona. (Unlike most of her Hollywood contemporaries.) Nielsen spent the next 25 years in Germany, where she made 70 films, including one co-starring Greta Garbo, Die freudlose Gasse (the Joyless Street or The Street of Sorrow). ( Garbo’s assessment of Nielsen: “In terms of expression and versatility, I am nothing compared to her.”) In 1932, Nielson performed in her only sound film, Impossible Love. It was her last film, with the exception of two documentaries that she appeared in decades later.
When the Nazis came into power in 1933, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Nielsen her own studio. She refused, but continued to perform in German theaters until 1937, when she returned to Denmark. When the Nazis occupied Denmark in 1940, they offered her another chance to make films. She refused again.
In Denmark, she continued to perform on stage, became an acclaimed collage artist, and began a literary career at the age of 65.
Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katherine Hepburn all acknowledged her influence on their work. Not a bad legacy by any standard.
*This should surprise no one.
**In Belinda J. Davis’s Home Fires Burning: Food Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin, in case you want to know. An excellent book, though a bit too academic for me to review it here on the Margins.
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Come back Monday for a three questions and an answer with Judy Batalion about Jewish women who fought against the Nazis in the resistance .
How the Titanic Launched* One Woman’s Journalism Career
In April 1912 , a 30-year old seamstress/businesswoman from Louisiana, Missouri named May Birkhead was sailing to Europe on the Carpathia. Her holiday was postponed when the ship halted to pick up survivors from the Titanic.
Birkhead put her seamstress skills to good use, creating clothing for the shipwreck victims from towels and other materials available on board ship. But that would be her last job as a dressmaker.
Several years previously, Birkhead had become friends with Eric Hawkins, a New York Herald reporter who came to Louisiana Missouri to photograph Democratic Senator Champ Clark.. When word reached New York that the Carpathia had picked up survivors, Hawkins remembered that Birkhead was on board. He contacted her over the ship’s radio and asked her for an eyewitness account. She not only got interviews with survivors, she got negatives from Carpathia passengers who took photographs of the disaster and the rescue.**
Birkhead met Hawkins on the dock when the Carpathia arrived back in New York, giving the New York Herald a enormous scoop on the biggest news of the day.
The Herald’s publisher, James Gordon Bennet, was so impressed with her work that he offered her a job.
Birkhead started work as soon as she reached Paris. For twenty-nine years, she reported on fashion and society from Paris, first was a correspondent for the New York Herald and later for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune and then the New York Times. During World War I, she stayed in France and once again proved herself to be a reporter who could handle more than the “woman’s page.” Although she was not an official war correspondent, she wrote feature stories about war news and later reported on the Versailles peace conference.
She left Paris on July 16, 1940—a month after the Nazis took Paris. Birkhead drove out of France toward Lisbon through Nazi-occupied territories with several friends. They quickly discovered that Germain officers refused to allow people who were leaving the country to buy gasoline. They spent five days in Poitiers, trying to get enough gasoline to reach Bordeaux. While in Poitiers, two of the party were arrested by the Nazis on suspicion of spying. The charges were proved to be false and the army officers agreed to give them gasoline as a “form of damages.”
When they reached Lisbon, they discovered that 22,000 people had arrived ahead of them, trying to get passage out of Europe.
Interviewed by the New York Times on her arrival, she told the reporter that the Nazis were stripping the city of all valuables, including food. She reported that before she left the city where she had wined and dined for almost thirty years, she had lived for five days on condensed milk, cocoa, and cereal, the only food left in her cupboards. The interview ended with the optimistic statement that Birkhead had renewed the lease on her apartment before she left and would be “going back after the Germans are thrown out.”
Birkhead did not make it back to her beloved Paris. She died on October 28, 1941. In her obituary, the New York Times said “She probably knew and was known by more cosmopolites and social personages of the two continents than any other reporter in Europe or America.” (On the other hand, the Times also described her as being “a young girl bound for a carefree holiday abroad” on the Carpathia, when in fact she was a 30-year-old woman who had financed her own first-class ticket with her successful dressmaking business.)
* Sorry I couldn’t resist.
**Rubbernecking on a grand scale.
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Come back tomorrow for more juicy Women’s History Month content.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Natalie Dykstra
Natalie Dykstra is the author of Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life, a 2013 Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She received a 2005 NEH Fellowship for her research on Clover Adams and a 2018 NEH Public Scholar Award for her upcoming biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner. She is Professor of English at Hope College and an elected Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Take it away, Natalie:
Writing about a historical figure like Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) requires living with her over a period of years. What was it like to have her as your constant companion?
At first, it was very intimidating. She was a remarkable woman who lived a long life, knew a wide range of people, collected important art, and created a magnificent museum that bears her name in Boston. She knew how to dress and dance and didn’t suffer fools. She could be unpredictable, saying whatever was on her mind. Her wealth unnerved me initially. And at first I found it hard to lay aside my need to have her like me or approve of me in some kind of retroactive way. As I’ve gotten to know her, slowly over several years, I see a tender side that she protected very carefully. She’d lost her only child early in her life; Bostonians mocked her; she knew the men around her would get most of the credit for what she accomplished with her museum. Yet she persisted. There’s a scene from a trip she and her husband, Jack Gardner, took on the Nile in 1874 that I loved thinking and writing about. They’d spent months on the river, coming on shore for various expeditions. She filled her travel album with descriptions and sketches of the scenery along with an elaborate key for the hieroglyphics. On one of their last days, she woke up very early to say “goodbye to one of the old worlds’ wonders” at Abu Simbel. She got there first, before anyone else, and lay on the warm sand to watch the sun rise in the sky as it lit up the “benign calm of the great Ramses.” Someone who does that is a lot of fun to write about!
*Mrs. Gardner at Fenway Court, 1903, by John Singer Sargent, ISGM.
Has your experience of writing about Gardner been significantly different than writing about Gilded Age hostess and photographer, Clover Adams, who was the subject of your previous book?
The two women knew each other. Gardner was three older than Adams, and their social circles overlapped. I first took on Clover’s attitude toward Mrs. Jack – that she was a lot of work to be around. I gradually let that go, agreeing more with Clover’s husband, Henry Adams, who thought otherwise and marveled at her energy. I’ve said elsewhere that Clover’s story was a kind of chamber piece; she died young and tragically by suicide. Her world started to close in around her, even as she grew to be a gifted photographer in her last years. Isabella’s story is a full orchestra with innumerable instruments and choirs. And her life became larger and larger as she got older. Her museum opened to the public when she was about to turn sixty-three years old. That’s part of what drew me to the story. I find the shape of her life – an early promise, terrible losses, a long quiet, and then a coming to fruition, a blooming, much past the time otherwise expected—to be fascinating, unexpected, immensely moving. And she lived long enough to fully realize and enjoy what she’d accomplished. That’s rare and particularly so for a woman of her generation.
How would you describe what you write?
I write biography. I like thinking a long time about a single person in relation to a time period and cultural context. Virginia Woolf has a simple phrase for this interweaving of an intimate story with larger historical forces: “a fish in the stream.” What I like so much about the genre is that it defeats preconceived ideas of what happened. People are never the sum of our theories about them. So there are always surprises or eddies in how a story moves that I can’t anticipate ahead of time. I’m not a fiction writer. I like the constraint of fact that biography imposes, and within that constraint, one can use the tools of fiction, such as setting, character, detail, metaphor, and voice.
I think, too, I write biography for the same reason I read biography: to feel less alone. Biography assuages as no other kind of writing or reading.
My question for Pamela: I’d love to know how you choose your writing projects – what combination of sources, characters, or storylines get you to say: “that’s next.”
In my experience, writing projects choose the author, and not the other way around.
In the case of Women Warriors, I had literally been collecting the material for years, just because, before my then-agent asked “Would you be interested in writing something about women warriors?” My response could be summed up as “Who dropped that hat?” (It was another two years, another book, and another agent before it found a home.)
But that’s the exception.
Usually a project (large or small) starts by my stumbling across something I don’t know that catches my imagination. I almost never have the luxury of thinking about it immediately. So I start a page in my ideas notebook* and move along. A lot of ideas die in that notebook. But if a subject continues to poke at me, eventually I start down the rabbit hole: What already exists on the subject? What sources are available? What shape would the book take? Why should anyone else care?
All of those are practical questions. They are important questions. But they aren’t the decisive question. At least twice I have abandoned perfectly viable book proposals halfway through. (It hurts.) In one case, I realized that if I was that bored writing the proposal, writing the book would be even worse. In the other case, I thought it was a important book, that someone should write it—and I wasn’t the right person. That word “should” is critical. In a recent newsletter, biographer Alexis Coe drew a distinction between a book she wanted to write and a book she thought she should write. It is the crucial distinction. And it doesn’t happen in your head. Or at least it doesn’t happen in mine.
Two years ago, an article that referred to my current book topic popped up in my newsfeed. I was already deep in the process of exploring an entirely different subject. I’d done some interviews. I’d traveled to meet with a group of enthusiasts. I wasn’t quite sure about the shape of the story, but I was sure there was a story. I just needed a little more time to find it. While I struggled to find what the story would look like, decided to spend some time with the new idea, just to see what was there. And just like that, I had my next project.
Superficially, the two subjects looked very similar. Both are under-told stories about women who were well known in their time and were not quite forgotten. Both had available archival sources. But one story demanded to be told NOW and the other didn’t.
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Interested in learning more about Natalie Dykstra and her work?
Check out her website: nataliedykstra.com
Follow her on Twitter: @natalieanneDY
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Come back tomorrow for more juicy Women’s History Month content.
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If you’re interested in the process of writing and thinking about history, you might enjoy my newsletter, which comes out roughly every two weeks. The content is totally different from History in the Margins. In recent months I’ve discussed cliffhangers, the odd experience of reading history “in real time” in the form of old newspapers, the question of “first-naming” the subject of a biography, and , well, women photojournalists. (You can tell where my mind’s been lately.) If that sounds like your glass of chianti, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/dIft-b .(When you subscribe, you’ll get a link for a very cool downloadable timeline of the Roman emperors and the women who fought against them or supported them, which I created with the people behind The Exploress podcast.)