↩ Follow-up post to: Frauenspuren Dornbirn – visibility, diversity and a new perspective on a city
Since Tuesday evening, Frauenspuren is on i.appear: a digital walking tour that brings nine women from Dornbirn’s history back to the places where they lived, worked, researched and made their mark. Whoever wants to listen can start straight away: Frauenspuren on i.appear.
What it’s about
Women often don’t appear at all in Vorarlberg’s urban history, or at best as a footnote. That is what’s now changing. The basis of the tour is the book Frauenspuren by the historian Roswitha Fessler, published as Volume 54 of the Dornbirner Schriften – an entire issue of the series dedicated, for the first time, entirely to women’s history. The biographies are researched from the 19th and first half of the 20th century: inventors, entrepreneurs, doctors, traders – women who helped build Dornbirn and yet have disappeared from the collective city memory.
What stands on paper in the book, we bring back into urban space with the tour: to the front door, to the corner of the market square, to the shop that no longer exists today. Audible, readable, visible – at exactly the place where it happened.
The launch
At the launch in the city archive, I was able to present the i.appear network and show the wonderful illustrations by Lisa Althaus with which we made the women and their spaces visible. Roswitha Fessler spoke about her research – and the stories that were recorded for the tour all come from her voice.
Afterwards we set off together into the city centre, to the first locations.
Three locations, three women
The inventor at the Lugerhaus. A woman who developed a cooking stove – at a time when female inventors were simply not foreseen. Whoever passes the Lugerhaus normally walks past a city palace. With Frauenspuren, it becomes the workshop of a tinkerer.
The doctor at the Rotes Haus. Mathilde Bösch-Berger studied medicine in 1924 and thereby became Vorarlberg’s first female doctor. During the NS regime she fled to the USA. When she learned of the hardship in her homeland after 1945, she organised a large aid campaign from there. Her life spans two continents, three political systems and an unbroken will to care for others. The Rotes Haus on the market square was her home.
“Uf om Blatz”. The location about Konstantina Tamanini, daughter of a Trentine immigrant family, who for decades sold delicatessen and southern fruits on the market square. Italian lemons on Lake Constance, long before the word mediterranean became a lifestyle term in Vorarlberg. Konstantina was market square, migration history and food culture in one person.
Fittingly, Melanie from Buongustaio spoiled us with Prosecco and canapés. Konstantina would probably have enjoyed the fact that the dolce vita lives on in her corner of Dornbirn.
Thank you
- To Roswitha Fessler for the fantastic research, the wonderful storytelling and her voice that carries the tour.
- To Lisa Althaus for the extraordinary illustrations that give each location its own visual character.
- To Werner Matt and the team of the Dornbirn city archive for the support, the organisation and the beautifully designed evening.
And to everyone who was there on Tuesday, walked through the city centre with us and listened. That is exactly what we do this for.
Frauenspuren is now available free of charge on i.appear – just listen in, walk along, discover.