[1][2][3] Elisabeth "Lisel" Rupp was born in Ravensburg, a mid-sized town which at that time had still not fully recovered its prosperity following the predations of the Thirty Years War more than two centuries earlier, located a short distance away from Lake Constance in the extreme south of Germany.
[5] It was nevertheless important to the way that her career subsequently unfolded that in 1904 the school she attended had become only the second in the whole of Germany to start preparing girls for the Abitur.
The Abitur was (and still is) the school leaving exam: passing it opened the way to a university-level education which had traditionally been a privilege reserved to men.
[5] He was somewhat placated by her decision to study for a legal degree, though her own autobiographical writings indicate in the event she was also able to find time for other subjects alongside the law course.
[5] In 1913 she received her doctorate in jurisprudence for a dissertation entitled Das Recht auf den Tod (loosely, "The legal right to die").
Several small volumes of poetry appeared, in which she presented scenarios from the world of nature as a contrast to the social conditions created and desecrated by human actions.
In 1922 the need to explore new horizons prevailed over her recurring tendency to home sickness, as Elisabeth Rupp went to Argentina for a year.
There was time for reading and thinking and for close observation: she became very critical of the upper-class social mores she came across in the expatriate community, especially with respect to the subordination of women.
Johannes "Jan" Gerdts' work on transatlantic passenger liners meant that he was frequently away from home for weeks on end.
The couple remained together till Jan Gerdts committed suicide while in command of SS Cap Arcona (by this time, her engines barely working, in use as a prison ship) shortly before the end of the Second World War.
[2] Elisabeth Gerdts-Rupp meanwhile embarked on a new academic career in 1925, attending lectures at the University of Tübingen on Ethnology and Geography.
The work was extensively reworked and published for a wider readership by the (then) Hamburg-based Ibero-American Institute, under the title Magische Vorstellungen und Bräuche der Araukaner im Spiegel spanischer Quellen seit der Conquista (loosely, "The magical concepts and customs of the Araucans as reflected in post-conquest Spanish sources").
[2] Following her husband's suicide she remained in Tübingen till her retirement in 1959, at one stage taking responsibility for both the Geography and Ethnology departments, and living with a "flock" of house-cats in some rooms at the "Tübinger Schloß" (castle).