Ida Dehmel

[3] Ida Coblenz was born in Bingen, along the left bank of the Rhine, into a prosperous well established Jewish family.

Simon Zacharias Coblenz, their father, was a wine grower and leading member of the local business community who inflicted a strict rule based upbringing on his motherless children.

In what may have been a deliberate rebellion against her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, Ida "Isi" Auerbach combined the life of an Imperial German wife, mother, and polite society hostess with patronage of Berlin's Literary Bohemia; which is similar to upper class members of the Radical chic, Bionade-Biedermeier, and Bobo subcultures during the late 20th and early 21st-centuries.

Members included the poet-writer Richard Dehmel, whose wife, Paula, was also a writer (and sister to the distinguished sociologist-economist, Franz Oppenheimer).

[1] That arrangement proved brittle, but according to one source the three of them lived virtually together till April 1899, occupying two adjacent houses in what later became Parkstraße (Park Street).

They would have stayed there longer, but Ida fell ill with Typhus and the local doctor recommended that she return to Germany to convalesce.

Unable to know the nightmarish horrors that the new century would bring to Europe and indeed to her own family, Ida wrote of this time that she had wanted to create a new heaven and a new earth.

[2] They met or corresponded regularly with leading figures of the time, such as the artist Max Liebermann, the architect Henry van de Velde, the publisher Harry Kessler and the poets Detlev von Liliencron, Alfred Mombert and Paul Scheerbart.

Ida Dehmel quickly made the new home a centre of activity for the leading lights of the Hamburg artists' set.

Alice, based in Mannheim, was a leading proponent of women's education and by now was also increasingly involving herself in other aspects of the feminist agenda.

She was also an active member of the National Liberal Party and chair of the newly founded "Women's League for the promotion of German Visual Arts" ("Frauenbund zur Förderung deutscher bildender Kunst") which she set up with Rosa Schapire.

That year she entered into a deal with the municipality and Hamburg University Library which involved selling Richard's literary archive to them, while for the time being retaining possession of the papers at what was by now known as the "Dehmel House", where she could readily access them.

Despite the many difficulties she experienced with the authorities after 1933, arrangements concerning her late husband's papers survived till 1939 when, with the outbreak of war, they were physically transferred to the library buildings for security reasons.

This was the context in which in 1926 she set up the League of female artists associations of all genres ("Gemeinschaft Deutscher und Oesterreichischer Künstlerinnenvereine aller Kunstgattungen" / now known as "GEDOK").

During the years of persecution her first priority remained the care of the Dehmel House, and this was the reason why, unlike others, she rejected any thought of emigration.

[3] After her sister Alice died in March 1935 she took two lengthy ocean cruises, visiting the United States, Central America and the West Indies while it was still possible for her to travel.

Although few were able or willing to foresee the scale and horror of the Shoah a few years later, there was a clear sense of the net tightening on those Jews who had been unwilling (or for financial reasons unable) to leave Germany.

In 1938 the government imposed a requirement that Jews should assume "old testament names", and from this point she is identified in official documents as "Jedidja".

[12] Through the intervention of her friend, Mary von Toll, with Prince Friedrich Christian of Schaumburg-Lippe, who had been working closely for many years with the Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, she was permitted to remain at the "Dehmel House" and spared the indignity of being forced to wear a "Jew star" sewn onto her outer garments.

[3] Her outlook became progressively more threatening, although there were still many friends and acquaintances, both in Germany and from overseas, intervening with the authorities to try and keep her away from the looming holocaust, which it was becoming impossible to overlook.

In September 1942, aged 72, Ida Dehmel was still in her home, but she believed she was incurably ill, and even if she were to be spared deportation she feared becoming dependent on others.