Partner Klara Schleker
Queer Places:
University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zürich, Switzerland
Evangelischer Friedhof Meran, Via Marlengo, 17, 39012 Merano BZ
Käthe Schirmacher (August 6, 1858 - November 18, 1930) was a prominent and complex figure within the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century international women’s rights
movements, operating as an active journalist, transnational lecturer, scholar, and later a radical nationalist.
Born on August 6, 1858 (with some archival sources noting her birth year as 1865) in Danzig (Gdansk) into a once-prosperous liberal merchant family, Schirmacher pursued extensive higher education at a time when academic paths for women were heavily restricted. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris between 1885 and 1887, and later attended the University of Zurich, where she earned her doctorate in 1895, making her one of the first German women to achieve a doctorate.
Throughout the 1890s and 1900s, Schirmacher positioned herself on the radical wing of the European and international women's movements. She co-founded key organizations such as the Association of Progressive Women's Associations and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, working tirelessly as a multilingual speaker, writer, and interpreter across congresses in Europe and the United States. However, her political trajectory underwent a sharp and controversial transformation around 1904, when she increasingly gravitated toward völkisch, anti-democratic, and anti-Semitic ideologies, aligning herself with aggressive Germanization policies through groups like the German Eastern Marches Society. By 1913, she formally broke away from the bourgeois-liberal women's movement, spending the First World War as a fervent nationalist war propagandist before helping to establish conservative political networks post-war.
During her final years, Schirmacher suffered from declining health. Like many Europeans of her social standing seeking relief or recovery, she traveled to the mild climate of Merano (then part of the province of Bolzano in South Tyrol) for a spa/health stay (Kuraufenthalt). Her condition worsened during the trip, leading to her death at the age of 65. Because she passed away in Merano, she was interred locally in the town's Protestant cemetery, where her grave remains today.
Schirmacher's personal life and historical intersections with early LGBTQ history are deeply intertwined with her long-term domestic partnership with Klara Schleker, whom she met in 1903. In 1910, Schirmacher moved her permanent residence to Marlow, Mecklenburg, to live with Schleker, who managed the household chores and provided crucial secretarial support while Schirmacher maintained her demanding travel and publicist schedules. Surviving correspondence between the two from periods of separation reveals an intensely passionate bond characterized by explicit discussions of physical attraction, emotional reliance, and mutual desire.
Because of these dynamics, historical and modern queer scholarship—beginning with researcher Amy Hackett and later highlighted in anthologies by Ilse Kokula—has identified Schirmacher and Schleker as a prominent lesbian couple within the early feminist movement. When pioneering activist Anna Rühling delivered her historic 1904 speech before Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee arguing that homosexual women were uniquely positioned to lead the fight for women's equality, she was widely believed by contemporaries and modern historians (such as Mineke Bosch and Marilyn Rupp) to be pointing directly to prominent movement figures like Schirmacher and Schleker, alongside Anita Augspurg and Lida Gustava Heymann. While Schirmacher herself rarely addressed personal sexual politics explicitly in her public journalism, her life and partnership remain a crucial benchmark for examining the intersections between female emancipation, alternative domestic models, and the early twentieth-century discourse surrounding same-sex love.
References:
 Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women (Intersections, 15) Paperback – January 28, 2011 by Leila J. Rupp |
Other references:
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