Ottilie Franziska Hoffmann (14 July 1835 – 20 December 1925) was a German educationalist and social reformer who came to prominence as a pioneering temperance activist.

[1] Hoffmann's own pupils during these early years included another daughter of Bremen who would emerge as a prominent feminist social reformer, Hedwig Heyl.

[5] The girls' mother, Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, was an energetic campaigner for women's rights, and even more passionate as an advocate of temperance (abstinence from alcohol).

In England Ottilie Hoffmann was impressed by her aristocratic employers' social commitment against alcohol dependency: she experienced for herself how former hostelries might be transformed into reading rooms and tea shops.

[2] It was also from Lady Carlisle that Hoffmann acquired the habit, which would later lead some of Bremen's more hidebound citizens to question her sanity, of placing a stout box in one corner of a city part and then standing on it to preach abstinence to passers-by.

[5] That was the background to a personal commitment to total abstinance that Ottilie Hoffmann made on 24 November 1882, an anniversary of her mother's death.

In 1874 the "World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union" (WWCTU / "Weltbund Christlicher Abstinenter Frauen") was launched, initially in Ohio.

The construction work for that year's prestigious Trade and Industry Exhibition [de] was being plagued with accidents caused by drunkenness.

On 12 February 1891 she set up the "Bremer Mäßigkeitsverein" ("Bremen Temperance Association"), renamed in 1915 "League for alcohol-free eating establishments" ("Verein für alkoholfreie Speisehäuser").

[7] During this time, a number of alcohol free restaurants and "milk bars" were set up around the city, mainly in working class districts.

In the expanded space on the first floor there slowly evolved a "middle-class kitchen", while downstairs meals were provided for poor and destitute people.

[2] In 1919, Hoffmann acquired the "good middle-class" eating establishment at Katharinenstraße 13 as her own project after she had failed to persuade other league members to back the purchase of a substantial building of this nature in the prosperous heart of the city.

Annual accounts show that it generated good revenues, and even, at times of financial crisis, net returns that could be used to compensate for the habitual deficits reported by the "Ottilie" temperance canteens in the harbour area.

There is the reading room on the second floor, next to a - sadly not very large - roof-garden where we put out deck chairs when the weather is good.

Anna Klara Fischer and Ottilie Hoffmann had first got into conversation in an over-filled express train to Hanover in the early summer ("shortly before Whitsun") in 1913.