Frida Uhl

Who was Frida Uhl?

Frida Uhl was an Austrian writer and translator, who was closely associated with many important figures in 20th-century literature. She was married to Swedish playwright August Strindberg. She was the daughter of Friedrich Uhl, editor of the Wiener Zeitung, and Maria Uhl, a Catholic. She met Strindberg in early 1893, when she was only 20; they soon married and she at once tried to organize a production of his work in England, and took his financial affairs in hand. They had a daughter, Kerstin, together. Strindberg did not approve the active role Frida was taking in his business affairs, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1895.

Frank Wedekind was the father of Frida's second child. She sent her children to be cared for by her parents. With a later lover, the poet Hanns Heinz Ewers, she started the first German cabaret in 1900. She was closely involved with several writers of the Young Vienna movement, such as the poet Peter Altenberg for whom she organized a subscription, and the journalist Karl Kraus, whom she convinced to sponsor a reading of Wedekind's Pandora's Box.

Her affair with the writer Werner von Oesteren was particularly stormy.