Adele Spitzeder is not the kind of woman literary history usually rescues. She was a mediocre actress, a swindler, and, in a century that had no word for it, a woman who arranged her entire life around other women and never once explained why.
In 1869 she borrowed a hundred gulden from a carpenter and promised him ten per cent a month. He told people. Within three years Munich had given her a fortune: laundresses, farmhands, servants, small farmers, village priests, whole parish councils, some of them selling their land to bring her the proceeds. Pulpits called her the angel of the poor. A newspaper christened her Saint Crispina. She endowed church towers, opened a public kitchen where dinner and as much beer as you wanted cost three kreuzer, kept a house on the Schoenfeldstrasse with a room beside her own for whichever woman was her companion that year, and paid yesterday's interest out of today's deposits, because there was never anything else to pay it with. In November 1872 the police came. Roughly thirty thousand people lost everything they had. Some of them killed themselves. Spitzeder got three years.
Geschichte meines Lebens, published in 1878, is her account of what happened to her, and almost never of what she did to anybody else. She recasts the whole affair as a chain of misunderstandings, incompetent lawyers and press vendettas, and she is a brisk, aggrieved and frequently very funny narrator of her own innocence. Then, describing the breakdown that nearly finished her in prison, she writes a single sentence about the woman she had given fifty thousand gulden, and takes it all back: Rosa had shown her the greatest attachment and self-sacrifice in the days of her good fortune, or had feigned it. She never returns to the subject. In three hundred and forty-one pages it is the only place where she stops arguing.
This is Lavender Octavo's first swindler. Jo McIntosh's translation is a readable one rather than a diplomatic one, and it keeps what a tidier edition would quietly lose: the digressions, the sums that do not add up, the courtroom sentences that run for pages without closing a quotation mark, and the casual antisemitism of her time and place, unsoftened and unexcused. The volume includes an introduction, a translator's note, and an essay on Rosa Ehinger and the women who held her place before and after.
Queer history is not made only of poets and revolutionaries. It is also made of people like Spitzeder, who ruined thirty thousand strangers, shared a bedroom with her companion for years in front of a Bavarian court that kept asking about it, and went to her grave without ever once saying what it was.
