Thekla Schild

[1] Schild was born in Karlsruhe and spent much of her youth in the Black Forest, where her father worked as a civil servant surveyor.

As her artistic inclinations and sense of beauty were considered incompatible with the training of doctors and tasks such as the dissection of corpses, her mother suggested she study architecture.

Schild earned the friendship of some of her fellow students and took part in social activities that were sometimes perceived as inappropriate for women in the society of the time.

Occasionally her role as the only woman in a male-dominated environment brought complications, such as during an excursion in Switzerland, when one of her professors took a relative so that Schild was not the only female participant.

After her undergraduate studies, Schild went with some classmates for a year to Munich, attracted by the large urban student population and the desire to be independent from their parents.

In the Bavarian metropolis, Schild took active interest in the social bustle of students, but was occasionally confronted there with narrowing gender role models, such as when neighbors took offence when she received a male visitor in her room.