Frau Vater - The story of Maria Einsmann
A woman puts on men’s clothes to find work. It happened in Mainz, in the years 1919 to 1931. For twelve years nobody suspected that the caring family father Joseph Einsmann was in truth a woman whose name was Maria.
After the end of the First World War Maria Einsmann lost her job; she had been working in a munitions factory in Pforzheim. And other work was, at first, reserved for men: those returning from the war had to be given preference in hiring.
Maria’s marriage to Joseph Einsmann had failed as well, and she was living apart from her husband. Her friend Helene Müller was in a similar situation, and so the two women decided to risk a new start. Together they went to Mainz. But there, too, they found no work. Then they had an idea: in Maria’s luggage was her husband’s suit, which she had taken with her when they separated because she had paid for it with her own money. And in the jacket pocket the two women happened to find his papers. Trying it on showed that the suit fitted Maria. Helene cut her hair – and Maria applied successfully with her husband’s papers.
Maria took on the male role in private life as well. The two women passed themselves off as a married couple, which made it easier to find a flat. And behind this respectable façade they could lead a relatively carefree life. How consistently Maria lived the role of Joseph shows in this: when Helene Müller gave birth to daughters in 1921 and 1930, Maria registered the children at the registry office and assumed the father’s role. After the exposure the two women were charged with ‘child substitution’. When Einsmann was to receive a pension after an accident at work, it came to light that the invalidity card in this name existed twice – and that the real Joseph Einsmann was not the father of Helene’s children.
A stroke of luck for the film: there were still two contemporary witnesses in Mainz who had known Einsmann and were willing to share their memories. Even though she was a child at the time, Christine Daschmann remembers Maria Einsmann well. Her grandmother owned the house in Mainz’s city centre in whose attic flat the Einsmann family lived. Her grandmother told her that Einsmann behaved like a man, in the tavern too, where she played cards with the men. “Everyone thought this was a man!”
Especially vivid and moving are the memories of Petra Erkens. She is the granddaughter of Helene Müller, the woman Maria Einsmann lived with. She tells how, after the exposure, Maria Einsmann came to be called ‘the aunt’ in the family – and that she always looked after the children. Even after the exposure the two women went on living together. “It was a truly grown relationship,” the granddaughter remembers. Without Helene, Maria could not have lived her role as a man so perfectly. “She gave her the support she needed to be so strong and to see it through,” says Petra Erkens. And cut her hair and washed her clothes.
The swapping of clothes is a motif literature is fond of. Anna Seghers, who was born in Mainz, turned this true story into literature in 1934. By then she was already in exile in Paris, where shortly afterwards she wrote ‘The Seventh Cross’. Presumably she had seen a newspaper article from her old home town. She often worked that way, taking true stories as her starting point. Together with Hans Richter she then wrote a screenplay about the story of the woman in men’s clothes. In her version the protagonist is called Katharina.
Barbara Trottnow, too, could not let go of the story. In 1995 she filmed excerpts from Anna Seghers’ screenplay for her film ‘Katharina oder die Kunst Arbeit zu finden’ in Mainz, at the original locations. Even then she took up the story of Maria Einsmann and had an actress slip into her role. For the new documentary she was able to draw on that footage and combine it with new research and the accounts of the contemporary witnesses. The true story is well documented in numerous newspaper articles. When it was discovered in 1931 that the popular colleague Joseph Einsmann was a woman named Maria, it caused a huge media sensation worldwide. Einsmann tried to turn her popularity to some small profit by selling cards showing her with her family.
The film was released on Equal Pay Day 2021 – a day that still draws attention to the pay gap between women and men. In 1919 Maria Einsmann found work only because she lived as a man. But do women really have to go so far as to take on a man’s identity? Hopefully not! Yet unusual ideas are evidently still needed to change things. The film wants to encourage that. The story of Maria Einsmann and Helene Müller shows how surprising, contradictory and many-faceted real life can be. You could not invent it. But a documentary film can tell it.