ABSTRACT
A recent reprint, edited with a long essay by Hermann Simon, has brought the memoir renewed and deserved attention. Simon’s essay, “Who was N. O. Body?”, the result of twenty years of painstaking research, fills in most of the historical gaps. In particular, it reveals that N. O. Body was Karl Baer, and that Karl Baer was a Jew. After his becoming legally a man in 1907, Baer served as the director of the B’nai B’rith Lodges of Berlin, a Jewish social and welfare organization for men and women. Baer was by all accounts a gifted and model Jewish functionary. In September 1938, he immigrated to Palestine. Yet despite his importance in Weimar Jewish cultural life, Karl Baer had once been the same legal person – that is occupied the same body – as Martha Baer, a highly accomplished journalist, orator, social worker, feminist, and Zionist. All this transpired before the twenty-two-year-old Martha decided to affect a masculine persona and marry her female lover. This chapter examines Jewish gender and sexuality as “entertainment” in
a bestselling memoir that reveals how the popular concept of “self-hatred” functioned a century ago: as a rhetorical phenomenon, a trope that appealed to a (Jewish) middle-class readership. From a Man’s Girl Years is the product of a complicated dialectic between the textual and the social, which compels a reassessment of German-Jewish history and memory.
