Evolutionary Theory and the Female Scientist in Wilhelmine von Hillern's Ein Arzt der Seele (1869)
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Evolutionary Theory and the Female Scientist in Wilhelmine
von Hillern’s Ein Arzt der Seele (1869)
Lisabeth Hock
German Studies Review, Volume 37, Number 3, October 2014, pp. 507-527
(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2014.0088
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/556266
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Evolutionary Theory and the
Female Scientist in Wilhelmine von Hillern’s
Ein Arzt der Seele (1869)
Lisabeth Hock
ABSTRACT
Between 1869 and 1906, Hillern’s novel about a female scientist, Ein Arzt der
Seele, appeared in six German editions and two English translations. Recent
scholarship categorizes this popular novel as a female Bildungsroman and criti-
cizes its conventional marriage plot. My reading argues that the novel overlaid its
traditional elements with evolutionary theory, ideas, and metaphors informed by
the first edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. In so doing, a genre that
had long explored questions about women’s roles in the public and private spheres
became recast as one in which midcentury scientific discussions informed the
answers to those questions.
With the publication of Origin of Species in 1859,1 Charles Darwin unleashed not only
a scientific theory that rocked the nineteenth-century understanding of life in general,
but also a powerful set of metaphors that scientists and nonscientists alike employed
to articulate their understanding of human nature and the relationship between
individuals and their environments. Victorian scholars have shown how the polysemy
of Darwin’s terminology lent itself to multiple uses in nineteenth-century England,
producing myriad Darwinisms in the process.2 In contrast, although the reception of
Darwin and his followers was greater in the German territories than anywhere else
in Europe,3 the long shadow of National Socialism meant that, with the exception of
Social Darwinism and the dangers inherent in its biologism, German Studies largely
avoided evolution theory. This has slowly started to change, however, as scholars have
begun to document how, in the second half of the nineteenth century, realist and
German Studies Review 37.3 (2014): 507–527 © 2014 by The German Studies Association.508 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
naturalist authors alike engaged with the ideas of natural selection and survival of
the fittest and reflected on the implications of Darwin’s antiteleological world view.4
Still largely unexplored in German Studies are women’s contributions to the
discussion. Middle- and upper-class women may or may not have read Darwin. Yet
like their well-documented Victorian counterparts, they certainly would have been
readers both of the popular press in which his ideas were disseminated and of the
literary texts that engaged with his work. Scholars have documented that, at the turn of
the century, Gabriele Reuter,5 Clara Viebig,6 Berta von Suttner,7 and Helene Stöcker8
incorporated evolutionary themes into their work. These writers receive little or no
mention in broader studies of the topic, however, suggesting that those striving to
trace the network of Darwinian discourse are missing a significant part of the picture.
Among the early German writers to engage with key ideas in Origin of Species was
Wilhelmine von Hillern (1836–1913), daughter of the novelist and playwright Char-
lotte Birch-Pfeiffer. Within a decade of the publication of Origin, she introduced its
key ideas as metaphors and elements of a subplot in a female Bildungsroman. These
included variation of species, environment, struggle for existence and adaptation,
gradualism and evolution, and inheritance and community of descent. In so doing, a
genre that had long explored questions about women’s roles in the public and private
spheres became recast as one in which midcentury scientific discussions informed
the answers to those questions.
Hillern’s 1869 novel, Ein Arzt der Seele (A Physician for the Soul)9 can be read
as a sentimental novel of education that follows the storyline of Hans Christian-
Andersen’s Ugly Duckling and ends with a Cinderella wedding. Far cleverer than those
around her, the orphaned heroine, Ernestine von Hartwich, does not fit in. Having
lost her mother just after her birth, she has been taught nothing about social mores,
including the behavior expected of girls and women. Upon the death of her abusive
father, her Uncle Leuthold takes advantage of the situation. He raises her to become
a workaholic, atheistic scientist and feminist in the hope that she will die young and
unmarried so that he and his daughter Gretchen can inherit her fortune. Given the
fairytale elements, the novel’s conclusion is hardly surprising: Early on, Ernestine
encounters her prince in Johannes Möllner, a handsome doctor and professor of
physiology. Towards the end of four volumes of trials and tribulations, she finds God,
renounces her feminist ideals and professional goals, marries Johannes who declares
she has transformed into the swan he had always seen in her, and contents herself
with bearing a child and supporting her husband’s research.
The novel’s language is sentimental, most of its characters are one dimensional,
and the trajectory of action follows a well-trodden path towards the conclusion one
expects from the marriage plot. Ernestine herself recalls any number of earlier
protagonists of female Bildungsromane.10 Like Sophie von La Roche’s Fräulein von
Sternheim, she finds herself in corrupted and corrupting surroundings. She sharesLisabeth Hock 509
her melancholy traits with Sophie Mereau’s Amanda, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s
Ledwina, and Johanna Schopenhauer’s Gabriele. Recalling Ida von Hahn-Hahn’s
protagonists, she is a well-educated intellectual. With that of Helene Unger’s Julchen
Grünthal, Ernestine’s story warns of the dangers of female education. Similar to
Sarah in Therese Huber’s Familie Seldorf (Family Seldorf ), Ernestine exhibits and
then, following a total crisis, comes to renounce unconventional behavior.11 Yet
the novel shifts the meaning of these traditional elements by overlaying them with
evolutionary metaphors related to the extinction of poorly adapted and the creation
of better-adapted species.
Darwinian elements further influence how the novel presents female develop-
ment. Marianne Hirsch has demonstrated that, in nineteenth-century female Bil-
dungsromane, “structures of repetition rather than structures of progression come
to dominate the plot,”12 making it impossible for women to mature into individuals
with roles in the public sphere. In contrast I propose that, countering the marriage
plot, a Darwinian subplot allows Ein Arzt der Seele to break with the circularity of
the female Bildungsroman. Ernestine is born different from those around her, finds
herself in an environment inhospitable to her unique traits, and must adapt in order
to survive. According to evolution theory, however, life is never static, never circular.
Because Ernestine’s traits and knowledge are passed on to a new generation, and
because a mix-up of families and inheritance lines appears to be leading to the forma-
tion of a new environment, the subplot suggests that someday women scientists and
a hospitable social environment might coexist.
Hillern was keenly interested in science at the time she wrote the novel. It is not
known whether she read Origin of Species, but it is well documented that she knew
and had extensive intellectual exchanges with individuals who had. Living in the
university city of Freiburg im Breisgau, she spent more than a year researching Arzt
der Seele.13 She later wrote that she initially had wanted to pursue a PhD and to this
end had received private lessons from university professors, only to be told by her
husband that a doctoral degree would be unsuitable for the wife of a judge.14 Hillern
maintained close contact with three Freiburg university physiologists influenced
by evolution theory. Adolf Kussmaul (1802–1902) was Hillern’s personal doctor.15
Otto Funke (1828–1879) gave Hillern the “education in the natural sciences that
she needed in order to create a figure like [the heroine of her novel] Ernestine.”16
August Weismann (1834–1914), who corresponded with Darwin and on July 8, 1868
presented his inaugural university lecture, “On the Justification of Darwin’s Theory,”17
frequented the Hillerns’ salon.18 Hillern’s biography and the detailed references in
her novel to nineteenth-century materialist science suggest that she had considerable
familiarity with Darwinism as it was discussed by the leading scientists of her day.
This is not to say that Hillern utilized Darwin’s ideas in any strict scientific manner.
Evolution theory is neither uniform nor static in Arzt der Seele, but rather, as in other510 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
forms of Darwin reception, changes, fragments, and mixes “in very complex ways
with other cultural and social forces.”19 Hillern was after all a creative writer. To an
extent, however, so was Darwin, whose own prose, as Eve-Marie Engels writes, was
full of “fissures and ambivalences” such that one finds side by side with his scientific
arguments “a remainder of metaphysical thinking with roots in traditional natural
philosophy and the Christian doctrine of creation.”20
Relevant for Hillern’s work is Darwin’s ambivalent stance towards the notion
of progress. Underscoring his rejection of teleological notions of development as
indemonstrable, Darwin writes in Chapter Ten of Origin: “The inhabitants of each
successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race
for life and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for that
vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by many paleontologists, that organization on
the whole has progressed.”21 Then, tossing this caution aside, Darwin concludes his
work with the jubilant claim, “as natural selection works solely by and for the good
of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards
perfection.”22 Darwin himself was seduced by the optimism inherent in his metaphors.
This optimism is echoed in Hillern’s subplot.
Variation of Species
Hillern’s novel is set in the decade following the appearance of Origin of Species, and
its heroine is a Darwinian creature through and through. The German word Art has
multiple meanings, including species (the title of the 1860 German translation of
Origin is Entstehung der Arten23), kind, manner or type, and character or constitution.
The novel makes direct reference to Art as species when Leuthold exclaims: “die
Art ist das allein Bestimmende” (1:191). This line is so central to the novel that it
encourages associations with “species” when Art occurs at other points, for example
when Ernestine notes, “Ich bin fremd unter den Menschen, ich verstehe ihre Art
nicht, noch sie die meine” (3:196).
From childhood through her years as a budding scientist and even at the novel’s
conservative conclusion, Ernestine is depicted as different from those about her.
This uniqueness is typical for female heroines of Bildungsromane, but in the wake
of Darwin, it assumes zoological connotations. When Johannes, ten years her senior,
first meets Ernestine as a child, he looks at her “wie man etwa ein seltenes Tier oder
sonst eine absonderliche Naturerscheinung betrachten würde,” and is amazed by
“welch seltsame Mischung dieses Menschen-Exemplar hervorgebracht hat” (1:81).
When he encounters her again twelve years later, despite his objections to marrying
a woman with a profession, he admits that his attraction is a response to Ernestine’s
difference from other women (2:27).
In many ways, recognition of Ernestine’s uniqueness turns out to be a backhandedLisabeth Hock 511
compliment, for it elevates her to a supposed higher evolutionary stage while denigrat-
ing other women. When she applies to pursue doctoral studies, the professors who
support her do so because her genius distinguishes her from other women. Using the
same evidence, Johannes justifies his rejection of her application with his concern
that opening university doors to her would also open them to the majority of women,
whom he places at a lower developmental stage: “Wesen, wie Sie, gehören zu den
seltenen Ausnahmen, im Allgemeinen steht Ihr Geschlecht auf einer zu niederen
Stufe der Entwicklung, um größere Ansprüche machen zu können!” (2:82).24 Yet
while most in her circle consider women like Ernestine the exception that proves
the rule of women’s inferior intellectual abilities, Ernestine employs Darwinian ideas
in her research to prove that exceptions like her demonstrate women’s evolutionary
potential to be the equals of men.
Beyond the language used to communicate Ernestine’s uniqueness, Darwin’s influ-
ence on her thinking is apparent from early on. Already as a ten year old, Ernestine
wants to know where the first humans came from, in response to which her uncle
speculates that she will be reading Darwin in two years (1:200–201). Leuthold then
ensures that this will happen. After her father’s death, he assumes guardianship and
moves with her to the south where he trains her in materialist science and physiol-
ogy. To give himself as much time as possible to make his charge unfit for marriage,
he hides the fact that her father’s will stipulates that his guardianship will end on
her eighteenth birthday. This allows Ernestine to assume that she must follow the
dictate of Prussian law and wait until she is twenty-four to come of age and into her
inheritance (3:271).
Under Leuthold’s tutelage and unrelenting pressure, but also thanks to what the
novel, through its repeated reference to her genius and uniqueness, makes clear are
her own innate abilities, Ernestine develops over the course of twelve years into a
scientist of considerable merit. As such, she is unique not only among heroines of
Bildungsromane.25 Few women anywhere in the world received formal training in the
biological sciences until women began to gain university admittance, something that
did not occur in the German territories until the first decade of the twentieth century.
Yet already in the 1860s Ernestine is working with instruments like the sphygmograph
(3:198), a blood pressure device developed in Germany only in 1854, and studying
cutting-edge physiology.26 Ernestine’s work thus poses a challenge to the fixed ideas
of gender roles held by those around her, and presumably also by the novel’s readers.
Just before Ernestine’s twenty-second birthday, she returns with Leuthold to
the village of Hochstetten in the hope of pursuing a doctoral degree at the nearby
university. Faculty members are divided about admitting her, but Johannes, now a
doctor and professor, persuades them not to do so. His opposition has nothing to do
with her qualifications, which are more impressive than those of many of her male512 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
peers (2:17). Rather, he has seen Ernestine again as an adult woman and has decided
he wants to marry her. First, though, as the novel’s physician of the soul, he must
fulfill his narrative function and cure her of her unhealthy beliefs and ambitions.
Unaware of these plans, Ernestine sets up a laboratory and library in a rented estate
house. When Johannes visits for the first time, he is dismayed to find on her shelves
volumes by Darwin and by German physiologists Johannes Müller (1801–1858),
Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896), and Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894).
Du Bois-Reymond and Helmholtz were students of Müller, all three were influenced
by evolution theory, and all were in the vanguard of significant nineteenth-century
advances in understanding basic life processes.27 Again underscoring the uniqueness
of Ernestine as a Bildungsroman heroine, their materialist thought has influenced her
publications, which include not only atheistic books (2:28) and writings on women’s
emancipation (2:216) but also a prizewinning article on the spatial perception of the
eye (2:35) and a metaphysical tract on the relationship of the physical reflexes to
moral freedom (2:10).
Ernestine’s choice of reading material and her path of study have deep psychologi-
cal roots: The reason she was given for her mother’s having died just after her birth,
and the reason her father, before his death, gives for having abused her physically
and emotionally, were that she was “nur ein Mädchen” (1:18). She therefore wants to
become “gescheit . . . wie ein Mann” (1:227). Leuthold exploits her wish by educating
her as if she were a boy, knowing that this will feed her desire for revenge while at
the same time guaranteeing that no respectable middle-class man will ask for her
hand. He will teach her as long as she promises to focus only on her work. Thinking
she has no other choice, Ernestine agrees to this Faustian pact: “Ich passe nicht zu
[den anderen]. . . . Ganz allein will ich bleiben, allein mit Dir will ich lernen. Dann
sollen sie einst vor mir schämen, wenn ich viel mehr weiß, als sie” (1:228). Believing
herself undeserving of love, Ernestine focuses her energies on winning admiration.
The novel thus makes clear that Ernestine’s professional path is a product of
childhood trauma. Yet it also conveys that she has received substantial education
and become a scientist whose work wins the respect of men working in her field.
Moreover, she pursues her aims not by exercising her feminine charms, as does the
libertine Countess Worronska, but rather by employing the scientific method. Granted,
Johannes, to whom the marriage plot grants ultimate authority, disapproves of her
reading material and her vocational plans. Yet as the novel’s most nuanced character,
and as one who holds her own in its many intellectual debates, she becomes a figure
of identification. The reader is encouraged to support her views and the positive
association the Darwinian subplot establishes between her, her uniqueness, and
evolutionary thought.
As a scientist and a feminist, Ernestine focuses not on the survival of the fittest
but rather on evolution’s promise of change. Her idea of emancipation shares nothingLisabeth Hock 513
in common with a pursuit of the emancipation of the flesh à la Louise Aston (2:245).
Rather, she strives to free women from the limits imposed on the female body and
to expand the societal realms open to them (2:259). Leuthold may be trying to make
a bluestocking of her, but she defines her goals of using her research in physiology
to combat men’s disregard for women and helping women along what she sees as
their evolutionary path, “Wir sollten einen Stolz darein setzen, uns selbst weiter zu
entwickeln, alle tierischen Bedürfnisse so viel als möglich in uns zu bekämpfen”
(3:134).28 Ignoring—or forgetting, as Darwin at times did himself—that there is no
scientific way to define progress, and no way to predict the path of evolutionary change
ahead of time, Ernestine—and through her, Hillern—utilizes evolution theory as a
call for women to develop into the intellectual equals of men.
Ernestine discusses the exact nature of her research during a dinner at which
others dismiss her mention of Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer (1779–1825), who in
1787 became the first—and through Ernestine’s day only—German woman to receive
a doctoral degree. Ernestine explains that her interest stems from scientific query
rather than simple identification or admiration, and she questions the lack of curios-
ity exhibited by the scientists at the table: “Ich dachte, die Leistungsfähigkeit einer
Dorothea Rodde sei mindestens ein ebenso bedeutsamer Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte
der Frauen, als die Beispiele merkwürdiger Instinkte von Tieren, welche die Zoologen
so eifrig aufsuchen. Oder ist die Naturgeschichte der Frauen weniger interessant,
als die der Affen?” (3:84). Like the zoologists and physiologists who, in the wake of
Darwin, research variations among species, Ernestine wishes to study physiological
differences among women. While Darwin argues that individual differences “afford
materials for natural selection to accumulate”29 and as such are of “high interest . . .
as being the first step towards such slight varieties as are barely thought worth record-
ing in works of natural history,”30 Ernestine looks for differences among women to
prove they can pursue vocations outside those of wife and mother. She is therefore
convinced that only physiology can answer the Woman Question: “Wenn es mir von
einer minder skrupulösen Universität ermöglicht wird, die dazu nötigen anatomischen
und physiologischen Studien zu machen,—dann sollen diese psychisch und physisch
gleich wichtigen Untersuchungen der einzige Zweck meines Lebens sein” (3:87).
Johannes fails to see the importance of Ernestine’s planned work. He contends
that the verdict is already in on the question of women’s intellectual capacity, cit-
ing evidence that the female brain weighs less than its male counterpart. Proving
that she is as good a debater as she is a scientist, Ernestine parries that no evidence
supports the claim that brain weight determines intelligence (3:87). She maintains
that such claims, like many so-called scientific truths about biological differences
between men and women, are based more on bias than on accurate research, and
she reiterates her wish to employ the scientific method to find out whether or not
she is right (3:111–112).31514 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
Evolution theory, with which Ernestine has grown up, forms the link between her
laboratory research and her feminist aims. She is a materialist insofar as she believes
that anatomy and physiology hold the keys to understanding human nature. She is a
realist to the extent that she realizes she is fighting an uphill battle and that evolution
sometimes requires the sacrifice of the individual in the interests of the good of the
whole (2:250). Yet she is also idealistic in her association of evolution theory with
the aim of opening universities to women.
As mentioned at the outset, evolutionary theory is fluid: Darwin’s own ideas
changed over time, lending themselves to myriad interpretations and appropriations.
By offering a microcosm of the conflicting meanings associated with Darwinian
thought in the mid-nineteenth century, Arzt der Seele demonstrates how even indi-
vidual texts can reflect multiple takes on the subject. The novel associates Ernestine
with evolutionary notions of change and development: her beauty, her genius, and
her attractiveness for the novel’s strongest male character express her uniqueness.
Her research aims to show that women have evolved alongside men. In contrast, the
novel’s villain, Ernestine’s Uncle Leuthold, embraces and is associated with Darwin-
ism’s pessimistic suggestion of determinism. He views life as a struggle in which
he intends to come out on top. Ironically, however, Leuthold’s lack of traditional
masculine qualities marks him as a man whose traits and views should and will not
be passed on to the next generation.
In this novel that combines science with fairytale motifs, Leuthold plays the
bundled roles of evil stepmother, Mephisto, and serpent bearing forbidden knowledge.
Prior to the beginning scenes, he was dismissed from the university in Marburg for
plagiarizing a colleague’s work. To free himself from personal obligations so that he
can ensure Ernestine will not marry, he insults his wife until she divorces him and
sends his daughter Gretchen to boarding school where she can obtain an education
suitable for a woman of the day. He then sets out to train Ernestine in materialist
science at the expense of her spiritual, social, and emotional formation.
If Ernestine is the novel’s unique female genius, Leuthold is a man shaped by
tainted knowledge who is described, throughout the novel, as snakelike (1:10, 15,
175; 3:287; 4:13). In contrast to Johannes, who represents ennobled masculinity
(2:185–186), Leuthold is a small, thin, and heartless man whose negative qualities
are not passed on—not even to his biological daughter. Indeed, the novel indicates
the extent of its disapproval of his actions by killing him off in the end, the Darwinian
subplot suggesting that he is not fit for survival.
In his interactions with those around him, Leuthold transforms Darwin’s argument
that no evolutionary change will take place in one species that is solely for the good
of another32 into a justification for self-serving actions. When discussing business
transactions with Ernestine’s father, he cites money as his sole motive: “Wir sind
Stiefbrüder, es wäre eine sentimentale Verschrobenheit, wenn wir uns bemühten,Lisabeth Hock 515
einander zu lieben. . . . Es muss doch alles in der Welt einen Zweck haben—das
aber hätte keinen” (1:15–16). Emotions, moral values, and—with the exception of
his daughter—familial ties have no place in Leuthold’s life.
Leuthold compares humans to different animals and is adamant that each is
governed by the characteristics of the species to which it belongs:
Es liegt einmal in der Art,—und wir Menschen haben Alles mit den Tieren
gemein,—warum nicht auch die Eigentümlichkeiten ihrer verschiedenen Arten?
Auch unter uns gibt es Schoßhunde, Füchse und Wölfe, Schmeichelkätzchen und
Tiger! Wie wir uns dagegen wehren und von freier Selbstbestimmung faseln: die
Art ist das allein Bestimmende—was kann ich dafür, daß ich zu der des Fuchses
gehöre? Ein Tor, der nach Moral in diesem blinden Treiben fragt!
Die Tätigkeit der Natur besteht in ewigem Schaffen, Vernichten und aus dem
Vernichteten Wiederschaffen: Pflanzen, Tiere und Menschen, sie sind nur die
Vollstrecker ihres Willens, die Werkzeuge ihrer geheimen Kräfte. . . . (1:191–192)
Annis Lee Wister translates “Die Art ist das allein Bestimmende” as “Each after his
kind” (96), but S. Baring-Gould gets closer to Hillern’s Darwinian inflection: “The
destiny of each is fixed by its innate qualities, and its qualities are fixed by its race”
(1:126). For Leuthold, nature trumps nurture and predetermines how the individual
will develop. If one reads Ein Arzt der Seele only at the level of the marriage plot,
the association between Leuthold, knowledge, and Darwinian language appears to
discredit science in general and evolution theory in particular. Yet if one takes the
novel’s Darwinian subplot seriously and contrasts how different aspects of evolution
are associated with different characters, it becomes clear that the novel discredits not
evolution theory per se but rather those adherents of its dog-eat-dog variant.
Environment
With her emphasis on the developmental aspects of evolution theory and the posi-
tive depiction of her as a unique being, Ernestine offers one corrective to Leuthold’s
interpretation of Darwin. The novel itself offers another, for by insisting “die Art ist
das allein Bestimmende,” Leuthold has forgotten the role of environment in the
Darwinian equation. While most of the other characters assert, and Ernestine herself
comes to accept, that as a woman she is too weak to achieve her intellectual goals,
the novel’s subplot reveals that Ernestine’s surroundings are utterly inhospitable to
her scientific work and to the kind (Art) of woman she is.
All who care about her observe the mismatch between Ernestine and her environ-
ment. Johannes comments upon first meeting her: “Du scheinst wirklich in keiner
besonders zärtlichen Umgebung zu leben” (1:83). Doctor Heim, who tends her after
her father has beaten her nearly to death, realizes: “Du entbehrst eben immer die516 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
Eltern und brauchst Licht und Wärme, Du arme, verkümmerte Pflanze” (1:271).
As an adult, Ernestine befriends a schoolteacher, Leonhardt, who points out the gulf
between her and her environment (2:127), and she herself recognizes her peculiarity
(3:89). Ernestine’s uniqueness evokes admiration and awakens Johannes’s love, but
it also makes survival in her surroundings impossible.
In addition to recognizing her uniqueness, Johannes also sees how difficult it is for
Ernestine to adapt to the world around her: “Es gibt Naturen, die ewig unglücklich
sind, weil sie Anforderungen an das Leben stellen, welche dieses nicht erfüllt, und das
geringschätzen, was es ihnen bietet, was sie in Aller Augen beneidenswert erscheinen
läßt . . . was können sie dafür, daß die Vorbedingungen ihrer innersten Natur der Art
sind, daß sie eben etwas Anderes bedürfen, als ihnen vom Schicksal gewährt wird”
(2:237). Although his emphasis on the need to conform is based on essentialist notions
of what women can and cannot do, Johannes recognizes here that Ernestine was born
in the wrong time and place. Her innermost nature requires a different environment,
and as part of the sociable human race, this environment must be made up of other
human beings. She needs people with whom she has things in common, people who
share her interests. This woman does not need a room of her own—she has that in
her laboratory. Rather, she needs a community of likeminded individuals.
Raised in isolation, Ernestine fails to understand this need. She begins her adult
life convinced she can go it alone, even though others repeatedly tell her that this is
impossible. Hoping to win Ernestine’s friendship, Countess Worronska makes the
appeal: “Allein sind wir nichts, wir werden erst, was wir sind, durch die Beziehung
zu Andern” (2:252). In response to Ernestine’s comment that she has no desire
to get along with people who do not share her values, Dr. Heim asserts: “Freilich
willst Du’s—mußt es wollen. Denkst du denn, Du bedarfst keiner Hülfe, keiner
Unterstützung—Du kannst Alles allein machen in der Welt? Wie unpraktisch, wie
über alle Maßen ungeschickt!” (3:91). Whereas Worronska and Heim refer to social
interactions in general, Johannes’s mother makes a more gender-specific point: “Bei
jedem, wenn auch noch so behutsamen Schritt, den das Weib über die Grenze seines
Berufs hinaus tut, geräth es in Nesseln und Stacheln, die ihm den ungewappneten
Fuß verwunden, die der Mann hingegen sorglos niedertritt” (3:141). Society expects
men and women alike to conform to its standards, but those standards are much
higher for women. As a feminist and scientist, Ernestine has nowhere to turn for
support, no community in which she can take root. Emotionally and intellectually,
she remains as an adult the withered plant that Heim saw in her as a child.
Ernestine’s poor health, itself a product of her environment, hinders further her
ability to thrive. Leuthold pushes her to her physical limits and encourages her to
repress her feelings in order to ruin her health so that he might come all the sooner
into her fortune. To combat the exhaustion caused by her work and the sadness caused
by her isolation, she should simply work harder (2:62), drink black coffee (3:124),Lisabeth Hock 517
avoid all distractions, and take quinine (2:146). Once again correctly identifying the
problem, Johannes criticizes this treatment: “Du wirst aber doch endlich einsehen,
daß Du Dich bei dieser Lebensweise, wo nur Erschlaffung und Überreizung mit
einander wechseln, aufreiben mußt” (3:124). Yet Johannes fails to see his observa-
tion as a corrective to his unwavering conviction that women are neither physically
nor intellectually suited for scientific study (2:86–87), He sees the harmfulness of
Ernestine’s environment, but ultimately attributes her responses to women’s innate
weakness.
The extent to which the lack of a supporting environment is the main cause of
Ernestine’s ailments becomes clear when one examines other figures in the novel. In
contrast to Ernestine, the men in the novel have others to look after them. Johannes
is encouraged to eat (3:302) and sleep (4:90), and at the end of the novel he has
Ernestine not only to cook and clean and raise his children but also to help him with
his research. When Ernestine returns as an adult to her hometown, we first see her
standing alone in a field. When we first encounter the professors of the University of
N., it is as a group. They decide together, after much debate, not to admit Ernestine
to the university. And when Ernestine falls ill, the doctors on the faculty consult with
one another on how best to treat her. Heim summarizes the men’s guiding principle
as: “Einer für Alle und Alle für Einen” (2:18). Those who do not adhere to this col-
lective approach to practice and scholarship become marginalized, as one sees in the
case of Leuthold’s dismissal for plagiarism.
Two additional examples underscore that the relative strength of men and women
has more to do with environment than physiology. The first is Countess Worronska, a
Mannweib who, like Ernestine, aims to set the physical, moral, and spiritual rules for
her own life (2:204–205). In contrast to Ernestine, she is waited on hand and foot,
her wealth protects her from dependency on others, and she has decided to pursue
the easier path to influence through sexual allure. Her presence in the novel reminds
us that Ernestine would have been much freer to pursue a career had Leuthold not
squandered her inheritance.
References to the German physiologist and comparative anatomist, Johannes
Müller (1801–1858), offer proof that, with the help of environment, even physically
fragile men can get ahead in the world. Müller was one of the inspirations behind
Ernestine’s decision to study physiology: “Die Geschichte war mir gleichgültig, weil
mir die Menschen gleichgültig sind. Die Philosophie ist mir zu dogmatisch, wie die
Religion—in der Natur allein quillt immer neues, greifbares Leben. ‘Da weiß ich doch,’
wie Johannes Müller sagt, ‘wem ich diene und was ich habe’” (2:87). Ernestine cites
here from Du Bois-Reymond’s Commemorative Speech for Johannes Müller,33 a copy
of which she owns. Müller—at least as depicted by Du Bois-Reymond34—appears to
have influenced Hillern’s portrayal of Ernestine. Du Bois-Reymond describes Müller
as a unique genius. Like Ernestine, Müller considered the study of anatomy through518 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
dissection the key to understanding human organization,35 and he, too, wrote a treatise
on the physiology of sight.36 Furthermore, the Müller whom Ernestine would have
known from Du Bois-Reymond was not only a highly talented individual but also one
who made himself ill through overwork.37 This intertextual reference reveals that even
men could wear themselves out, but it also makes clear that, like Johannes and the
other professors we meet in the novel, the historical Müller had a scientific community
and a wife to prop him up during hard times and illness. Johannes insists, Ernestine
comes to accept, and the wedding at the end of the novel underscores that Ernestine
cannot pursue science because as a woman she is too weak to do so. The Darwinian
subplot whispers that it is her environment and not her sex that stands in her way.
Struggle for Existence
Ernestine remains a creature with no environment that meets her needs. In a Darwin-
ian world, there are two possible trajectories for her: She can either succumb, or she
can adapt. The novel’s marriage plot tells us that of course she will adapt, but arriving
at acceptance of this inevitability requires intense struggle. That this process takes
up most of the fourth volume of the novel underscores both the need to make this
move and the difficulty that Ernestine has in doing so. Two things have to happen
for change to occur: Ernestine has to suffer a complete physical breakdown. Then,
she must be confronted one last time with the hostility of her surroundings towards
her attempts to go it alone.
At the end of volume three, Ernestine is in a state of complete physical and emo-
tional exhaustion when she discovers that Leuthold not only has deceived her about
when she would come of age but also has squandered the inheritance that should
already be in her hands. To make matters worse, Johannes warns her she may have
a heart ailment. Consumed with worry, she tears through her medical books for
information about her condition, and in the process knocks a lab skull off a shelf. It
hits her on the head, serving as a memento mori that shakes her into a fearful belief
in God (3:345–346).
Ernestine falls into a faint and remains unconscious, hallucinating about dissec-
tions, her uncle’s machinations, and the flames of hell. When her fever finally breaks,
her doctors fear it has left behind a mental illness. Yet while her doctors diagnose
Ernestine with a textbook case of Monomanie, the hallucinations she suffers reveal the
psychic struggle she must undergo to become integrated into the world around her.
As her hallucinations begin, Ernestine’s earlier assertion about brain size and
intelligence has morphed into the fear she has been thinking too much: “Helft mir
doch, wo soll ich denn mit den zwei Köpfen hin? . . . Wenn ich nur den einen los
werden könnte! Ich habe es ja immer gesagt: das viele Denken—davon Hab’ ich die
zwei Köpfe bekommen” (4:84–85). Once again demonstrating that those around her
will never understand a woman scientist, Ernestine’s caregivers insist these hallucina-Lisabeth Hock 519
tions stem from her anatomical studies and atheism.38 They fail to see that Ernestine
is torn between two souls: one wishing to finally find a home, a community in which
to rest, the other desiring to pursue higher learning. Society leaves no space where
women can establish a synthesis of these two desires; survival requires that Ernestine
separate from the latter. The process is arduous. She resists but her subconscious
tells her that she doesn’t have the energy to continue her double life (4:86).
Her hallucinations lead Ernestine to believe that she needs Johannes to carry her
(4:89)—and when her fever breaks, her desire to work as a scientist literally has been
burned away: “So, nun bin ich verkohlt, nun ist mir besser. Nur die Seele, die ist
noch, wie sie war, die ist unvertilgbar!” (4:90). She has been reduced to her essence,
which as the conclusion will confirm, is a very traditionally feminine one. One must
not overlook the difficulty of Ernestine’s struggle, however. The first three volumes
of the novel make clear that Ernestine the scientist has no place on earth. It is only
by adapting to her environment that she has any chance of survival in the time and
place in which she lives.
Adaptation and Evolution
Upon regaining consciousness, Ernestine is changed. Her fear of a death with no
afterlife, as well as her discovery that, contrary to what Leuthold has told her, not all
intellectuals are atheists, have led to newfound religious faith. Yet while Ernestine
renounces her atheism, she renounces neither her scientific work nor its feminist
implications. She disagrees with Johannes’s mother, who frets that she has wasted
the past twelve years of her life, insisting: “keine Zeit ist verloren, in der man nach
Wahrheit gestrebt hat!—Aber das Maß meiner Kraft ist erschöpft” (4:148). Ernestine
continues to assert the value of her work, but in keeping with the popular under-
standing of Helmholz’s law of thermodynamics, she feels she has already used up
the energy available to her.
Nor, as one might expect of a nineteenth-century heroine who has returned to
God, does Ernestine reject Darwin. Rather, she now understands him better: “Ja,
mein alter Darwin—Dein erlauchter Name glänzt mir noch einmal entgegen—jetzt
erst verstehe ich Dich ganz und ahne etwas von dem hehren Grabesfrieden Deiner
Lehre!” (4:170–171). Without her inheritance, Ernestine is forced to fight “den Kampf
um’s Dasein!” (4:170). Yet although she has given up all dreams of a doctoral degree,
Ernestine is not yet ready to fall willy-nilly into the arms of a fairytale conclusion.
Penniless, she cannot bear the thought of marrying Johannes for money (4:152). She
therefore sets off to earn a living, accompanied by Leuthold’s daughter Gretchen,
who helps her cousin in order to atone for the sins of her father.
Unfortunately, Ernestine lacks the training to engage in this new struggle. While
Gretchen makes use of her boarding school education to find work as a tutor so the
two can scrape by, Ernestine sits in their rundown apartment daydreaming. Initially,520 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
this depiction frustrates the reader, who asks what happened to the smart Ernestine
with her coherent arguments about science and women’s place in society. A closer look
reveals that the symbolic meaning of the daydreams matters as much as that of her
hallucinations. Ernestine may be born again, but her thoughts about the end of time
come not from the Book of Revelation but from a combination of materialist science
and Hans-Christian Andersen. The Snow Queen confirms that evolution will change
the world, albeit slowly and gradually: “Du gehörst zu Denen, die an die Zukunft
meines Reiches glauben, die da wissen, das es sich in tausend und aber tausend Jahren
über die ganze Erde verbreiten wird, wenn all’ die kreisende Kraft umgesetzt und
alles Leben in ein anderes umgelebt ist!” (4:179), and she reveals an image of the end
of the world as imagined by Helmholtz and described by Du Bois-Reymond, a world
sentenced by “das jüngste Gericht einer ewigen Eiszeit” (4:179).39 This daydream
leaves Ernestine with an intense feeling of melancholic loss. Then, her sadness gives
way to a more optimistic question: “Aber wo, wie, in welcher Gestalt regen sich nun
die verwandelten Kräfte dieser verbrauchten Welt, . . . denn verloren geht ja nichts
im All?!” (4:181). Combined with Ernestine’s deep sense of loss is the materialist
optimism that something will come of the chaos in the world, and more personally,
that the energy she has lost will be transformed into something else. There is, at this
point in her life, no opportunity for her to use her talents any more than there was
at this point in German history any space for women to pursue university study and
original scientific research. Genre dictates that the heroine marries at the end of the
romance, thus completing the circle prescribed for women in the Bildungsroman.
The laws governing evolution and the conservation of energy—at least as they are
metaphorically employed in this novel—tell Ernestine, however, that if she can find
another path through life she might be able to pass on her traits.
Thus when Johannes appears—he has been summoned by Gretchen out of concern
for Ernestine’s frail health—and gives Ernestine a choice between marrying him
and assuming a teaching position in Saint Petersburg, she chooses her prince. This
decision to marry should be read neither from an antifeminist standpoint as inevi-
table, nor from a feminist-affirmative standpoint as an afterthought or the author’s
concession to midcentury cultural norms. The Darwinian subplot suggests, rather,
that the survival of Ernestine and her traits—and thus the opportunity to create a
fissure in the circularity of the female Bildungsroman—depend on her adaptation to
her surroundings. Read through the lens of evolution theory, Ernestine’s marriage
becomes neither an inevitable goal nor a predetermined plot element, but a survival
tactic to guarantee that her talents not only are inherited by the next generation whose
first member is, notably, a girl, but are also passed on to the only person capable of
pursuing her research agenda at the present time, a young man.
Richards is therefore not entirely correct when she writes, “illness sets the rebel-
lious heroine straight, and in doing so ensures the social status quo.”40 A lot hasLisabeth Hock 521
changed by the novel’s end. Not only has Ernestine recovered from her Seelenkrank-
heit and learned to love and do housework (more efficiently and thoroughly than other
women, of course). By its final chapter the novel has allowed a combination of nature
and nurture to radically reconstitute the families whose stories it tells, thereby laying
the groundwork for future change.
Inheritance and Community of Descent
Darwin concludes Origin of Species by contemplating an “entangled bank” whose
“elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each
other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”41
These laws include—and here we see one of Darwin’s concessions to Lamarckian
notions of the inheritance of acquired traits—“inheritance, which is almost implied
by reproduction [and] variability from the indirect and direct action of the external
conditions of life.”42 Levine writes of Darwin’s world as one in which “everything is
always or potentially changing,” “nothing can be understood without its history,”43
and “survival ultimately depends on variation and diversification.”44 Here, nature and
nurture work together in complicated ways that favor group cooperation. The families
formed by the end of Arzt der Seele represent their own tangled evolutionary bank
in which the combination of reproductive inheritance and variability caused by the
external factors of life creates a more cohesive group. While the strongest characters
in the novel, Ernestine and Johannes, marry and produce offspring, a number of
biological parents in the novel have failed, and the most egregious violators of the
social order are killed off. Orphans find new homes. Some children take after their
mentors or educators rather than their biological parents. New families are created
not by blood or class lines but rather by the external conditions of life and shared
moral values.
Although the minor characters of the novel tend to be drawn in broad strokes,
their trajectories support the novel’s Darwinian subplot. Daniel Pick notes that many
readers derived from their readings of Origin of Species “an upbeat interpretation of
‘natural’ historical progress . . . All was possible, only the mad and bad were doomed
to sink without trace.”45 The mad and bad certainly sink here: Leuthold kills himself
both to avoid legal prosecution and to protect Gretchen from the shame of association
with him, and the Countess Worronska dies in a racing accident. These negatively
defined specimens of masculinity and femininity, and the (lack of) values they rep-
resent are thus taken out of circulation.
At the same time, while the bourgeois-patriarchal environment into which she
is born leaves no space for Ernestine’s unique Art, environment—in the form of
education—also affects nature in positive ways. Gretchen’s father is a plagiarist and
a swindler, yet formal education allows Gretchen to overcome any biological destiny
that may have been in store for her. She atones for the sins of her father by helping522 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
Ernestine. She marries Hilsborn, the son of the man whose work her father had
plagiarized, who was adopted by Dr. Heim upon his father’s death, and who then
himself became a doctor. This new relationship symbolically exorcises her father’s
bad blood and bad influence from the world.
The burgeoning relationship between two other minor characters, Walter and
Kätchen, suggests another mixed family tree. Kätchen, the daughter of poor, unedu-
cated, and superstitious parents, loses her arm in a carriage accident, but then uses
the settlement money she receives to attend a boarding school. Walter, whose father,
the schoolteacher Leonhardt, goes blind and cannot pay for his son’s studies, contin-
ues his education with Ernestine’s assistance. The reader is left to assume that this
couple will also marry, and in so doing overcome both the ignorance of her parents
and the modest living standard of his. As with the family of Gretchen and Hilsborn,
that of Walter and Kätchen will be defined not by biological lineage but by the implied
hope that these acquired characteristics will be passed on to the next generation.
Ernestine and Johannes signal the greatest potential for change. Although
Johannes expresses traditional views about the place of women, his upbringing and
his choice of career and spouse signal a break with the past. His father appears to
have died when he was young, and he and his sister Angelika were raised by their
mother, the Staatsrätin Möllner, who handles her children and her estate with
competence. The Staatsrätin makes no bones about her disapproval of Ernestine’s
feminism and atheism, yet she also views critically the sexism of Angelika’s husband
(2:27). Perhaps it is due to his mother’s upbringing that Johannes is different from
his brother-in-law, who insists that women’s emancipation threatens the existing
order. The Staatsrätin also seems to support Johannes’s pursuit of a medical degree,
which constitutes a rejection of the professional path that the neighbors consider
most suitable for his station (1:48). Although today’s reader might see Johannes as
sexist, Blackwell astutely observes that he changes over the course of the novel in a
manner untypical of male heroes of nineteenth-century Bildungssromane.46 Raised
in an unusual environment, Johannes turns out to be an unusual man.
Ernestine, too, is a child of mixed lineage. The novel provides little information
about her mother other than that she was physically and emotionally frail. Her
father’s title, “von Hartwich,” stems from her grandfather, but Ernestine’s paternal
grandmother was of lowly origins (1:44). While Gretchen’s difference from her parents
appears to be a product of her education, the novel suggests that Ernestine’s lack
of resemblance to her parents is a feat of a nature that occasionally produces new
varieties. An outsider, she marries someone who has pursued a career path outside
the norm for his station. Thus, the two individuals who come together at the novel’s
conclusion differ greatly from those who have come before them, and the birth of a
daughter, who will be raised by a mother working in her father’s laboratory, signals
the potential for future change and evolution.Lisabeth Hock 523
Ernestine also passes on her talents to Walther, whom she has supported and
mentored. Forced to drop out of the university when his father goes blind, he can
continue his research and attain his doctoral degree because Ernestine gives him her
books and instruments and maintains a correspondence with him. Walther is well
aware of the debt he owes his mentor:
“die Wissenschaft, nach der ich strebe, wird mir immer in Ihnen verkörpert
bleiben, wird immer nur Ihre Züge tragen. Und wenn etwas aus mir wird,—dann
haben Sie es aus mir gemacht. Wie Sie mir äußerlich die Utensilien liehen, ohne
die ich meine Studien nie fortsetzen gekonnt hätte, so streuten Sie mit Ihrem
schöpferischen Geist tausend Gedankenkeime in mir aus, die, wie ich hoffe, mit
der Zeit zur Reife kommen sollen.” (4:171)
The flipped metaphor matters here: Ernestine has become the inseminator who
passes her intellectual seed to future generations. Her work has not been in vain. The
Darwinian struggle, which grows out of the tension between the individual and the
collective, is resolved in the interest of a collective that changes over time. The same
holds true for Ein Arzt der Seele. Ernestine’s own path of development may have led
her to matrimony, but in passing on her unique genes to her daughter and her ideas
to Walther, the novel’s subplot leaves us with the hope that, in a more hospitable
environment, women will have more paths open to them.
Teasing out the evolutionary elements of Hillern’s novel does not necessarily leave
the reader with a sense of satisfaction at its conclusion. In its final line, Ernestine
admits that Johannes was right all along: “Du treuer Arzt der Seele, Deine Arzneien
waren bitter, aber sie haben mich gerettet” (4:242). Moreover, Hillern became increas-
ingly conservative over the course of her career, and in 1906 she wrote a forward to
the novel’s fifth edition that underscored her now unequivocal view that women’s
highest vocation was to love and make others happy.47 The Darwinian counternarra-
tive that irritates the marriage plot from the beginning to its happy end thus leaves
the reader with a sense of loss for the Ernestine who might have been and a sense
of longing for changes at which the novel only hints. Yet the fact that Hillern felt
compelled, almost four decades after she first wrote the novel, to provide her read-
ers with guidance, suggests that at least some of them were taking away from it an
emancipatory message. As Ernestine would say, “verloren geht ja nichts im All.” Ein
Arzt der Seele offers an example of early engagement with Darwinian theory, and its
Darwinian subplot invites the reader to imagine alternate endings to the story of a
scientist heroine who was far ahead of her time.524 German Studies Review 37 /3 • 2014
Notes
This article was completed with support of a Wayne State University Career Development Chair.
Many thanks to Anne Duggan, Marsha Richmond, Lynne Tatlock, and the anonymous German
Studies Review readers for their generous feedback.
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 1st ed. (London: John Murray, 1859), http://darwin
-online.org.uk.
2. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot & Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Patrick Dassen and
Mary G. Kemperink, eds., The Many Faces of Evolution in Europe (Leuven: Peeters, 2005);
George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
3. Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 5; Eve-Marie Engels, “Biologische Ideen
von Evolution im 19. Jahrhundert und ihre Leitfunktion,” in Die Rezeption von Evolutionstheorien
im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Eve-Marie Engels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 13–15.
4. Scholarship suggests Wilhelm Raabe was the first German writer to engage with Darwin’s ideas.
“Hungepastor” (1863/1864) and “Drei Federn” (1864/1865) offer “literarische Antworten auf die
geistige Herausforderung darwinistisch-evolutionärer Deszendenz-Zoologie und Anthropologie.”
Eberhard Rohse, “‘Transzendentale Menschenkunde’ im Zeichen des Affen. Raabes literarische
Antworten auf die Darwinismusdebatte des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Raabe Gesellschaft 29
(1988): 169. “Die Leute aus dem Walde” (1863) similarly engages with Darwin, writes Katharina
Brundiek in Raabes Antworten auf Darwin. Beobachtung an der Schnittstelle von Diskursen
(Göttingen: Universitätsverlag, 2005). According to Nicholas Saul, Wilhelm Jensen deals with
“acute post-Darwinian issues of racial identity, racial hybridity and racial extinction” in novellas
such as Unter heißerer Sonne (1868) and Die Braune Erica (1869), and he offers in Das Erbtheil
des Blutes (1869) “a model example of an early German evolutionary aesthetic.” Nicholas Saul,
“‘Once in Human Nature, a Thing Cannot be Driven Out’: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Wilhelm
Jensen’s The Legacy of Blood (1869). An Early Response to Darwin,” The Evolution of Literature:
Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, eds. Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2011), 247. Philip Ajouri describes in Erzählen nach Darwin how Gottfried Keller’s
reading of Darwin influenced the changes made to the 1897/1880 second edition of Der grüne
Heinrich. Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischen Realismus. Friedrich Theodor Vischer und
Gottfried Keller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).
5. Lisabeth Hock, “Shades of Melancholy in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie,” The German
Quarterly 79, no. 4 (2006): 444.
6. Barbara Krauss-Theim, Naturalismus und Heimatkunst bei Clara Viebig. Darwinistisch-
evolutionionäre Naturvorstellungen und ihre ästhetischen Reaktionsformen (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Peter Sprengel, Darwin in der Poesie. Spuren der Evolutionslehre
in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Wurzburg: Königshausen &
Neumann, 1998), 17.
7. Christine M Klapeer, “Evolutionstheorien als emanzipatives und geschlechterkritisches Artiku-
lationsarsenal bei Bertha von Suttner,” Ariadne 52 (2007): 34–41.
8. Ann Taylor Allen, “German Radical Feminism and Eugenics, 1900–1908,” German Studies Review
11, no. 1 (1988): 31–56.
9. Wilhelmine von Hillern, Ein Arzt der Seele, 4 vols. (Berlin: Otto Janke, 1869). Unless otherwise
noted, all German quotations are from this edition. I cite the English title from Wilhelmine von
Hillern, Only a Girl or A Physician for the Soul, trans. of Ein Arzt der Seele by Annis Lee Wister
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1871). As I will indicate when relevant, the translator S. Baring-Gould
comes much closer than Wister to capturing the novel’s Darwinian inflections. Wilhelmine vonYou can also read
