Until 1933, Hamburg-based Hertha Herrmann (1897–1970)) was a respected sports journalist and a passionate motorcycle sportswoman in her spare time. In the early 1930s, she was considered Germany’s most successful female motorcyclist. At the end of 1937, she was attacked and mistreated by SA men; shortly thereafter, she fled Hamburg for New York. This article appeared in the Altonaer Nachrichten on April 1, 1931, on a supplement page entitled “Die moderne Frau in Beruf und Leben” [“Modern woman in work and life”] and subtitled “Sie erobert sich immer weitere Gebiete – und bleibt doch Frau” [“She conquers more and more areas – and yet remains woman”]. In the piece, Hertha Herrmann, as a self-proclaimed representative of women driving cars, addresses men who drive cars. She amusingly describes their desperate attempts not to let women driving cars or motorcycles take away their “supremacy” on the roads and ends with an appeal to all readers to recognize women as competent drivers in road traffic. Undoubtedly, the text was based on Hertha Herrmann’s own experiences. At the same time, the article, preserved in the Hamburg State and University Library and accessible via Europeana, represents a contemporary historical document that provides insight into social discourses and issues of equality.
Hertha Herrmann was the daughter of Gustav and Elise Behrens, née Halberstadt. She had five siblings, including twin brother Max, also a sports journalist. Her father worked as an editor at the high-circulation Hamburger Anzeiger, and the family lived in the Grindel quarter. After attending a commercial academy, Hertha Behrens found a job as a secretary with August Herbold, a chemicals broker, and subsequently, with the engineer Hans Kretschmer. In 1920, she married the engineer Oscar Herrmann; their child died immediately after birth. The divorce followed in 1929. As early as 1925, Hertha Herrmann had given up her secure office job for the insecure position of a “permanent freelancer” in the sports section of the Hamburger Anzeiger, which her father had arranged for her. He obviously encouraged the change of profession.
Hertha Herrmann specialized in motorcycle and automobile sports. If she already belonged to a minority as a journalist, this was true even more so for the field of motor sports, which required an interest in technology and in which women were the absolute minority. Soon she wrote not only for the Hamburger Anzeiger, but also for other newspapers in the German Reich, such as the Danziger Tageblatt or, as this article shows, for the Altonaer Nachrichten, which appeared daily from 1850 until it was banned in 1941. She received further assignments from the Central and Northern European Motorists Association Mittel- und Nordeuropäischen Kraftfahrer-Verband for its trade journal PS; she also worked regularly as a sports reporter for North German Radio Nordischer Rundfunk. Because she was known as a successful motor sportswoman by car and motorcycle companies such as Opel and Zündapp, they provided her with new products, which she expertly tested, then reporting on them in a lively and spirited style. With her specialization, she was an absolute exception among professional women at the time. Toward the end of the Weimar Republic, the proportion of women in journalism was only five percent, and the few female journalists still wrote almost exclusively for the “soft” departments of culture, entertainment, and social affairs. In the sports department, they were almost not represented at all. Cf. Susanne Kinnebrock, “Frauen und Männer im Journalismus. Eine historische Betrachtung,” in: Martina Thiele (ed.), Konkurrierende Wirklichkeiten. Wilfried Scharf zum 60. Geburtstag, Göttingen, 2005, pp. 101–132, here pp. 118–119; cf. Marcus Bölz, Sportjournalistik, Wiesbaden, 2018, p. 73.
Hertha Herrmann used her public impact as a respected journalist to also directly address female readers through texts written in feuilleton style on the “women’s pages” of various newspapers, encouraging them to break away from gender-typical role attributions and “conquer new territories.” Thus in the subtitle of the women’s page, Altonaer Nachrichten, April 1, 1931. In 1931, for example, under the headline “Away with the ladies’ prizes!”, she complained in the Altonaer Nachrichten initially about the unequal treatment of women in motor sports competitions: “Do we need to simply be condemned by the board of a respective club or association as ‘separate’? […] We entered a competition in which equal ability is required of all. We have the entitlement to compete only if we feel strong enough to stand up to male competition. Otherwise, get out of the sport! Sitting in the car as an ornamental doll is appropriate for a beauty contest, not for a serious automobile sports performance.” Altonaer Nachrichten, May 13, 1931. Finally, she called on Hamburg’s female motorsport athletes – albeit very few – to join forces with the associations to abolish “ladies’ prizes.”
With motor sports, Hertha Herrmann had chosen a hobby extremely unusual for women. After the First World War, at least in bourgeois circles, physical training for women was recognized only for the purpose of preparing for marriage and motherhood. Cf. Gertrud Pfister, “Frauen in Bewegung,” in: Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, online at: digitales-deutsches-frauenarchiv.de/themen/frauen-bewegung [accessed on February 8, 2023]. This once prompted the motorcyclist Hanni König, when asked whether motorcycling was harmful to women, to reply ironically, “Undoubtedly! Especially for the character. It trains the woman to be independent.” Central Garage Automuseum (ed.), Frauen geben Gas. Mutige Frauen mit Benzin im Blut, Bad Homburg, 2016, p. 40, PDF download from central-garage.de/drucksachen.html [accessed on January 20, 2023]. Hertha Herrmann took part in many races, in which women always started alongside men, and often took first or second places. In 1929, for example, she won a 400-kilometer circuit through Schleswig-Holstein. Almost a thousand enthusiastic spectators were waiting at the finish line near Hamburg’s central train station. Or in 1930, the “Rund um Lübecks Türme” [“Around Lübeck’s Towers”] orienteering race: 230 riders, including very few women, fought their way through mud, over bumpy pavement and “slushy […] dirt roads in pouring rain.” Hamburger Anzeiger, April 28, 1930. There were many crashes. Competitors also had to repair their own motorcycles when they broke down or had accidents. The Israelitische Familienblatt, in turn, celebrated her in 1932 under the headline “Eine Jüdin Deutschlands erfolgreichste Motorradsportlerin” [“A Jewish woman Germany’s most successful motorcycle sportswoman”] as proof against the antisemitic prejudice that Jewish women and Jews were physically weak, and especially highlighted her successes in reliability (endurance) rides against “strongest male competition.” “These reliability rides are closer to general riding practice than the races, for they require, in addition to courage, the ability that the riders, after riding hundreds of kilometers, by day and night, must arrive at their checkpoints on time, on the minute, after having to find their own way, often as solo riders, through frequently unfamiliar territory, as Mrs. Herrmann always did.” Israelitisches Familienblatt, January 21, 1932.
In particular, outstanding female motorsports athletes like Herrmann increasingly became competition for their male colleagues. Their successes refuted the allegedly medically verifiable argument that women were not suitable for motorsports because of their physical constitution. Cf. Anke Hertling, “Motorisierte Amazonen. Frauen im Autosport,” in: Freiburger Zeitschrift für GeschlechterStudien, vol. 23 (2009), pp. 173–188, here p. 178. At the same time, many motor sportsmen were just as unwilling to put up with this attack on the domain that was supposedly theirs as were many everyday drivers – something Hertha Herrmann makes clear in an ironic way in this article: “If a man passes you on the street, it doesn’t matter! But woe if a car passes you by and you see a woman sitting at the wheel! Now you think that you have been personally insulted. […] Past, only past this woman again who dared to pass you!” An exception was apparently, in addition to her father, her husband Oscar, who occasionally rode with her as a sidecar passenger. For Zündapp GmbH in Nuremberg, on whose machines Hertha Herrmann competed in many races, her successes even made her an excellent “advertising ambassador.” Hamburg State Archives, StaHH 351–11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung [Office for Restitution], 19931, no pagination. It was in the interest of the car and motorcycle manufacturers of the time for female drivers to become socially acceptable, because this helped to popularize the automobile in everyday life.
Less than three months after the transfer of power to the Nazis in 1933, the Hamburger Anzeiger was brought into line and Hertha Herrmann was dismissed for being Jewish. Orders from other newspapers and magazines subsequently failed to materialize as well. Presumably, by then, she lived primarily on savings. In 1935, she moved temporarily to Breslau, where one of her sisters was living in the meantime. There she was able to work for Paula Busch, the director of the Busch Circus. She also wrote articles for the Breslauer Nachrichten and the Breslauer Zeitung. When that was no longer possible either, she returned to Hamburg.
There, at the end of 1936, an “ordeal” began for her, as she later called it. She was insulted and spat on in the street. An attack by SA men in 1937 tipped the scales in favor of her escape from Germany: “One evening […] a few steps from my house, I was insulted as a Jew and badly mistreated. I received blows on my body and face. I managed to free myself […]. For me, however, it was certain that my life was now in danger […].” StaHH 351–11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung, 19931, no pagination. She fled to New York, where another sister resided. Scars on her face and missing teeth were visible signs of the assault. In addition, because of the blows to the head, she suffered from epileptic seizures associated with memory and word-finding disorders.
In New York, Hertha Herrmann learned to sew gloves, but because of her physical impairments, she was unable to earn a living doing so. Her sister supported her. On June 11, 1938, she married Alfred Klein, a native of Vienna. In 1947, the couple separated again. Once again, she received financial support from her sister. She had escaped the Nazi terror, but it had destroyed her life plan and her self-esteem. A courageous, emancipated journalist and athlete had become a traumatized woman who needed permanent welfare and financial assistance. Hertha Herrmann died in New York at the age of 72. Her article has survived the times as a testimony to her journalistic activity and her skills as a motor sportswoman.
Frauke Steinhäuser works as a freelance historian, history didactician and exhibition curator in Hamburg. She is the author of "Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Hohenfelde. Biografische Spurensuche" (2016), "Stolpersteine in Hamburg-Grindel I. Biografische Spurensuche" (2017) and ",… bis zu seinem freiwilligen Ausscheiden im April 1933’. Jüdische und als jüdisch verfolgte Sportler:innen im Nationasozialismus in Hamburg“ (2022). Her research interests lie in the fields of gender studies, the history of marginalised persons and groups, the Holocaust, Nazi perpetrator research and remembrance culture.
Steinhäuser, Frauke, Beyond Role Clichés – Motorcycle Sportswoman and Journalist Hertha Herrmann (translated by Erwin Fink), in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, December 15, 2023. <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:article-292.en.v1> [December 21, 2024].
