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Eva Ibbotson
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Elisabeth Granier
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Karola Bloch
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Jeanne Hébuterne
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Dorothy Wordsworth
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Trude Fleischmann
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Born 23 January 1890 in Hanover
Deported 22 or 24 June 1942, date and place of death unknown
German Economist, Professor of Economics, Regierungsrätin (Government official )
Cora Berliner, fifth and last child of a prominent intellectual Jewish family in Hanover, studied mathematics for two semesters before shifting to political economy (political science and economics). In 1916 she earned her doctorate and took a position as department head (Dezernentin) in the city administration of Schöneberg.
In December 1919 she entered the national civil service, becoming an official in the Reich Economics Ministry (Reichswirtschaftsministerium) of the Weimar Republic. Her high level of expertise and confident manner soon made her a sought-after colleague. Ministerialrat Dr. Hans Schäffer, whom she had met in 1920, took her into his department, where she helped shape the National Economic Council (Reichswirtschaftsrat). In 1923 Berliner became a Regierungsrätin (government official) and one of the leading figures in the national Office of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsamt). In her various functions she had dealings with the most important persons of the…read more
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born on January 23, 1935 in Aachen, Germany
died on May 2, 2019 in Konstanz, Germany
German writer
90th birthday on January 23, 2025
Marlene Stenten was born in Nazi Germany, grew up during the war, and came of age in Aachen in the 1950s. The second of three daughters in a family that ran a grocery store, she trained as a bookseller in 1957. She worked in this profession before she moved to Berlin in 1969. Luchterhand published her first novel, Grosser Gelbkopf (t: Big Yellowhead), in 1971, which recounts the homosexual awakening of a primary school teacher. The volume of short stories that followed, Baby, was also praised by literary critics. Women were not yet at the center of her works. Marlene Stenten was considered highly talented and received literary scholarships.
This changed abruptly when she submitted her first lesbian novel: the Luchterhand publishing company rejected the text. The same thing had happened to Johanna Moosdorf who received a similar rejection from Suhrkamp when she submitted a manuscript about lesbian love after having published two novels.
By that time, the magazines and novels…read more
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Mary Ward
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You can find the German version here.
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born September 2, 1821 in Watertown, Massachusetts
died January 23, 1915 in Boston, Massachusetts
American sculptor and poet
110th anniversary of her death on January 23, 2025
Henry James referred to the group of American sculptors (Harriet Hosmer, Emma Stebbins, among others) who had made a pilgrimage to Rome around the middle of the century as a “strange sisterhood of American 'lady sculptors' who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock.” Anne Whitney traveled to Europe four times and spent a total of five years there, but she stayed away from the flock.
Born in a venerable Boston family, she had received her education from private tutors. She was not allowed to marry the man she loved as there had supposedly been mentally ill people in his family. She weighed the options open to her as an unmarried woman with her sister. It was Adeline Manning, an artist who was fourteen years younger than Whitney, who would later become her partner.
Whitney first tried her hand as a teacher, then as a poet. While playing around with wet clay one day when she was in her mid-thirties, she discovered that she had a talent for…read more
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Barbara Stanwyck
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Rose Stoppel
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Else Lasker-Schüler
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born on October 29, 1903 in Leipzig
died on January 25, 1975 in Hannover
German dancer, choreographer and ballet mistress
Along with Gret Palucca and Hanya Holm, Yvonne Georgi belongs among the best-known students of Mary Wigman; in her roles as dancer, choreographer and ballet mistress she exercised a decisive influence on the field of dance for decades. During the 1920's she and Harald Kreutzberg delighted audiences on their tours in the USA and inspired young dancers such as José Limón.
Yvonne Georgi was born in Leipzig, the daughter of a respected physician and a French mother who was more than twenty years her husband's junior. It is rare and in fact amazing that the talent of this great artist, who had no dance instruction as a child, was discovered almost by chance during a pantomime performance at the home of a friend. She was seventeen years old at the time, finished with school and beginning her training to become a librarian at the famous German Library in Leipzig. At this point she began to study dance on the side and was soon performing her own self-created dances at the variety…read more
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Harriet Backer
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Chiara Lubich
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born June 7, 1907 in Chrzanów (Schidlow), Galicia, Poland
died January 21, 1975, in Zurich, Switzerland
Polish-German-Jewish poet
40th anniversary of death January 21 2015
Made famous at an early age by her witty satirical verses in the tradition of Heine and Tucholsky, Mascha Kaléko lived out the fate of many of those forced to give up their home and career by the Nazis. After publishing two highly successful volumes celebrating and satirizing urban life in the late Weimar Republic, Kaléko, a Jew, was forced into exile. Although she was later able to write again, her comeback in the 1950´s was short-lived, and her later years were marked by disappointment and isolation.
Kaléko knew the feeling of being a homeless outsider from an early age, when her family emigrated to Germany from poverty-stricken Galicia (in Poland), and she successfully assimilated by learning to speak the local Berlin dialect, as her first poems reflect.
Kaléko left school at around 16 and worked as a secretary; she delightfully captured the trials and tribulations of this work in her early poems, published first in newspapers, then by Ernst Rowohlt as Das lyrische…read more
