Olberg, Oda (1872–1955)

German-born journalist and political activist whose successful European career was terminated with the rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany, and Austria. Name variations: Oda Olberg-Lerda; Gracchus. Born Oda Olberg in Lehe bei Bremerhaven, Germany, on October 2, 1872; died in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 11, 1955; married Giovanni Lerda; children: Marcella, Renata, Edgardo, and one other son.

Like many committed Socialists, Oda Olberg was not born into the working class. Rather, she was born in 1872 in Lehe bei Bremerhaven, Germany, the daughter of a distinguished officer of the new German Navy, and grew up in comfortable middle-class circumstances in the early years of Otto von Bismarck's German Reich. As a nurse, Olberg became familiar with misery on a vast scale, including working and living conditions that she believed were caused by capitalism, and she soon began writing for the Social Democratic press. Over the next decades, her articles would appear in most of the important newspapers and journals of the German and Austrian Social Democratic movements. Despite her youth, Olberg was respected for her intellect and dedicated Socialism, and earned a reputation as one of the most talented writers in the German Social Democratic movement. Among others, she impressed and became acquainted with the movement's leader, August Bebel.

In 1896, in fragile health, Olberg moved to Italy. Almost immediately she met, fell in love, and in 1897 married Giovanni Lerda, an up-and-coming Italian Socialist. But anti-government riots during May 1898, in which many lives were lost when martial law was proclaimed in most large Italian cities, made life so precarious for the couple as Socialists that they sought refuge for some months in nearby Switzerland. Having quickly learned and mastered the Italian language, Olberg made a successful career for herself in the world of Italian Socialist journalism. In a short time, she became the foreign affairs editor of the Italian Socialist Party's main organ, the newspaper Avanti! Her articles began to appear regularly in German and Austrian Social Democratic newspapers, including Vienna's Arbeiter-Zeitung and Berlin's Vorwärts, as well as the highly influential ideological journals, Der Kampf, Die Neue Zeit, and the Sozialistische Monatshefte. Starting in 1899, she became the official foreign correspondent of the Arbeiter-Zeitung.

Olberg was one of the first professional female journalists in German-speaking Central Europe. As late as 1927, only about 3% of the full-time journalists in Vienna were women. Even among those few women who had been able to create careers for themselves in journalism, the overwhelming majority specialized in ostensible women's areas such as fashion, society, or home economics. As a highly respected journalist who wrote about politics and world affairs, Olberg was very much the exception. As well, she was able to balance the demands of being a wife and mother of four children with the pressures of a career. Her friends, including Karl and Luise Kautsky, would often express their astonishment at the breadth and depth of her knowledge.

A feminist as well as a Socialist, Olberg argued persuasively in favor of complete social, economic and personal emancipation for women. Her polemics on behalf of this cause within the Social Democratic movement, which was ideologically committed to women's rights but in reality remained deeply patriarchal, gave courage to women and also served to alert receptive men that significant inequities had not been addressed. In 1902, Olberg reacted to a contemporary polemic by Paul Julius Möbius, Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On the Physiological Imbecility of the Female Sex), by publishing the rejoinder Das Weib und der Intellectualismus (The Female Sex and Intellectualism). Olberg's book was widely read and became an indispensable source for Social Democratic women activists, who, writes Luise Kautsky, came to regard it as "one of the most effective weapons in their struggles."

Living as they did in Rome in the early 1920s, Olberg and Lerda witnessed the increasingly violent atmosphere that culminated in the seizure of power by Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party. Fascist blackshirts took over the streets through brute force, and Olberg and Lerda lived in fear. Scores of Communists, Socialists, Catholics and liberals were murdered by Fascist thugs while the police remained indifferent, indeed often sympathizing with Mussolini's followers. Olberg reported the deteriorating situation in the Austrian and German Social Democratic press. In 1923, she also published a comprehensive study on the new phenomenon of Italian Fascism, a book that remains of interest to historians of the movement. By the mid-1920s, as the Mussolini dictatorship was tightening its grip on Italy, Olberg was forced to think of going into exile. Terror directed against her and her husband hastened his death in 1927. That same year, she went to Argentina, where her son Edgardo had settled. But she yearned for Europe and in 1928 returned, settling in Vienna. In Austria, Olberg resumed her journalism, becoming a full-time correspondent for Vienna's flagship Social Democratic newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung.

As an expert on Fascism, Olberg wrote many articles on the topic over the next years. The onset of the world economic depression in 1929 sparked the growth of fascistic movements throughout the world, particularly in Germany where Adolf Hitler's National Socialists (Nazis) menaced an increasingly fragile democratic system. Not only Social Democrats, but liberals and democrats as well, read Olberg's articles for insights into the alarming growth of totalitarian sympathies among the masses of Central Europe. Her short but trenchant study of Nazism, published in 1932, was one of the best analyses of the Hitler movement on the eve of its seizure of power.

Olberg also wrote about the human cost of the economic depression. In an April 1931 article for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, she described conditions at the Simmeringer Obdachlosenheim, a homeless shelter near Vienna. In 1933, she explored the misery of Vienna's beggars ("Das Bettlerelend in Wien"). As well, on many occasions her Vienna apartment, which she shared with her oldest daughter Marcella , became a temporary refuge for politicals who had escaped Fascist Italy.

In 1933, the National Socialists came to power in Germany, creating a reign of terror for liberals, democrats, Marxists and Jews. In February 1934, after the forces of Fascism destroyed the parliamentary government, the Austrian Social Democrats staged a bloody uprising that was doomed from the start. Along with many other Social Democrats, Olberg was forced to flee. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she rejoined Edgardo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Soon, she welcomed her daughters Marcella and Renata .

Olberg attempted to improve the family's finances by resuming her journalistic career in exile. Writing articles in Spanish, she was able to publish in a number of Argentinean journals, including the respected Critica. She also published in the German-language Argentinisches Tageblatt. Despite these successes, Olberg's life in exile was difficult. Since few Central European political exiles had fled there, she was cut off from events back home. While journals and newspapers had been founded in Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain and the United States by anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi political exiles, in the 1930s Argentina was essentially a backwater in the war against Hitler and Mussolini. By participating in the activities of local Social Democratic organizations founded by Argentineans of Austrian, German, and Italian background, in time Olberg was able to overcome at least some of her feelings of isolation. She also began publishing her articles in influential exile journals abroad, including the Neuer Vorwärts and the Pariser Tageszeitung, both published in Paris, the Neue Volks-Zeitung of New York, as well as Das Andere Deutschland, Deutsche Blätter (Chile), Deutsche Freiheit, and the scholarly Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.

In 1937, Olberg was a founding member of the exile organization "Das Andere Deutschland" (The Other Germany), which quickly became one of the most effective anti-Nazi groups in Latin America. Soon after, her health declined precipitously due to a cardiac condition. Even so, Olberg did not stop writing. From 1944 through 1948, she published articles in the journal Das Andere Deutschland. She also wrote a book that was both autobiographical and philosophical, Der Mensch, sein eigener Feind: Betrachtungen über Gerechtigkeit (Humanity Its Own Worst Enemy: Reflections on Justice). Published in Spanish in 1946 by a small Argentine publishing house, the book attracted little attention in a country convulsed by a social revolution led by Juan Domingo Peron and Eva Perón .

As Olberg's health continued to decline, it became clear that she would never again set foot on European soil. Occasionally, she contributed an article to the revived Arbeiter-Zeitung, but the Peronista regime's press and mail censorship complicated her situation considerably. Olberg died in Buenos Aires on April 11, 1955.

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John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia