How do you put that together? In the biography and the body of work of the Austrian painter Stephanie Hollenstein, contradictions press in that are almost unbearable and even harder to comprehend. Hollenstein was born in 1889 into a precarious peasant and sticker family in Vorarlberg and allegedly painted her first pictures while herding cattle with a cow-tail brush and berry colors. In 1907 she set off alone to Munich, the then most progressive art city with a bubbling Bohemian scene, where she had numerous lesbian affairs and was regarded as an ice-cold heartbreaker.
Rejected as a Red Cross nurse, she went to World War I disguised as a soldier named Stephan. In the 1920s she earned her living as an expressionist painter, openly expressed her homosexuality, was a co-founder of a proto-feminist group of female artists, and a shrewd networker who knew how to cleverly use her contacts in all directions.
All of this, which from a contemporary vantage point could make her an icon of early gender fluidity, did not prevent her from joining the NSDAP rather hastily and from publishing writings as a fanatical admirer of Adolf Hitler, which bear witness to her ardent antisemitism. How can a person reconcile such extreme polarities within herself, progressive, aesthetically at the cutting edge of her time, and at the same time deeply reactionary?
The Vienna cultural journalist Nina Schedlmayer has researched these psychological, ideological and not least aesthetic contradictions with meticulous care. She quotes from Hollenstein’s letters and records, from contemporary reviews of Hollenstein’s work, but also from the literature and journalism of that time and develops a panorama of almost bewildering complexity.
Nina Schedlmayer: „Hitler’s Queer Artist – Stephanie Hollenstein – Painter and Soldier“. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2025, 320 pages, 29.95 Euro.
Disturbingly, she casts light on the fault lines of a past that remains unresolved and that stretches into the immediate present, and today is perhaps best grasped with the term cognitive dissonance. In the foreword, Schedlmayer writes: “Suddenly LGBTQIA+ activists fight against so-called TERFs (‘trans-exclusionary feminists’), old-68ers against ‘wokeness’. Former Greens demonstrate shoulder to shoulder with identitarians against COVID measures. The overview of who is against or for whom has long since been lost.”
Holding the Ambivalences
Factual and richly sourced, Schedlmayer depicts Hollenstein’s life without pushing her glittering figure into a corner, without morally judging her or denouncing her artistically as inferior; on the contrary: “Hollenstein was, technically speaking, a brilliant painter: her portraits are psychologically penetrating, her landscapes impress with intense coloration and expressive force.”
Schedlmayer honors her brave stubbornness, her assertiveness, and her willpower, and avoids kitchen-psychology speculation about Hollenstein’s turbulent private life. This ability to bear the ambivalences of this figure leads Schedlmayer to a punchy yet elusive formula: “a modern reactionary and a reactionary modern”—between Dirndl and Bauhaus, which was ahead of its time in many respects.
Livened with documentary-fiction passages and brisk prose, the distinctive strength of Schedlmayer’s study lies in developing Stephanie Hollenstein’s biography consistently against the backdrop of the present. In that present, after all, a lesbian woman is the chair of a right-wing party who vehemently rails against queerness.
