The German House (Německý dům), which was one of the dominant features of the city centre before the end of World War II and on the site of which Moravian Square Park (Park Moravské náměstí) now stands, became a natural base for the growing German women's movement, especially the middle-class movement, when it was founded in 1891. The German House can be linked to the activities of Jewish and Protestant women in Brno, who founded the "Jewish Women's Association" in 1867 and the "Protestant Women's Association" a year later. Both associations were primarily focused on charitable activities within their own religious communities. The committees of both associations included the wives of important representatives of the municipal and provincial administration and industrial elites. A similarly indirect link to the German House can be seen in the "Brno Women's Craft Association" of 1873, which can be described as the German version of the Czech Vesna. The school had a very good reputation and the association regularly received subsidies from the Ministry of Trade, the Moravian Governor's Office, the Provincial Assembly, the Brno City Council, various nobles, politicians, and savings banks. The German House also hosted events organized by the Patriotic Women's Auxiliary Association of the Red Cross for Moravia, founded in 1879, which was dedicated to health education and volunteerism and brought together district women's associations in Moravia under the Austrian Red Cross.
Traditional school and charity-oriented women's associations, which can be associated with the upper middle class and nobility, were joined in the 1880s by more socially diverse women's groups with a nationalist profile. This was in line with the overall politicization of the public sphere and the emancipation of the peasant, labour and Catholic movements. In 1884, a local branch of the "German School Association" for women and girls was established in Brno, which was later also based in the German House.
The women's branches of the so-called defense associations grew in connection with the advancing political and national polarization of Moravian society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1896, German women in Brno established the women's group "Union of Germans of Northern Moravia," followed in 1905 by a branch of the "Union of Germans of Southern Moravia" and, two years later, a women's cell of the "Union of Germans" called Brunhilde. The last to be established, before 1914, was the gymnastics club "Union of German Girls." The common denominator of their activities was the organization of folk entertainment, charity events, and the cultivation of German identity (e.g., solstice celebrations, commemorative days, support for South Moravian German students). Two umbrella associations did not deny their feminist orientation – first, the "Union of German Women," founded in 1899 in Brno, which played the same organizational role in the German women's movement as the aforementioned Moravian Women's Shelter. The Brno branch of the Vienna Committee for Women's Suffrage, established in 1911 by Leonora Sinaiberger, had explicitly feminist goals. The branch submitted several petitions to the Moravian Provincial Assembly for the granting of active voting rights to women and was also widely involved in other civil and legal issues. In January 1914, this Brno feminist lobby convened a conference of activists from Vienna, Prague, and Opava, at which the "German-Austrian Union for Women's Suffrage" was founded. The diversity and breadth of German women's associations was not affected by 1918—most of the associations mentioned above continued to operate successfully in the interwar period—but it was affected by 1945 and the expulsion of the German population. This explains the extent of our knowledge, or rather ignorance, of the German women's movement, whose materials have generally been preserved in domestic archives either fragmentarily or not at all.
Hana Krutílková, Moravské zemské muzeum
