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Doris Ritter
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
There is also version.
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Minna Canth
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Sarah Gertrude Millin
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You can find the German version here.
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born on March 18, 1874 in Vienna, Austria
died on February 20, 1948 in Geneva, Switzerland
Austrian writer and journalist
150th birthday on March 18, 2024
Bertha Diener grew up comfortably cared for in a Viennese family of factory owners. She was to be prepared for her later role as a wife in the classical manner, and was thus not allowed to study. In the much older and wealthy private lecturer and bohemian Friedrich Eckstein, she met a man who introduced her to the wider world. As her parents were against this union, Bertha stopped speaking to her father and simply waited in silence for her coming of age. She married Eckstein in April 1898.
Karl Krauss, Adolf Loos and Peter Altenberg were guests in the couple’s home. But the "spiritual refuge" soon became a "spiritual prison." Her talents lay idle; the wider world was somewhere far away. In 1904, she left her husband and her five-year-old son Percy and began to travel. She traveled to Egypt, Greece and England. An amour fou with the Jewish doctor Theodor Beer almost brought her to the brink of madness. In 1910, her son Roger was born; he grew up in a foster family. Bertha…read more
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Bibiana Steinhaus
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Giulietta Masina
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Annedore Leber
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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Born on March 23, 1874 in Danzig, West Prussia (Gdansk)
Died on August 8, 1964 in Heidelberg
German politician, author, and pioneer of social work and welfare policy
In Marie Baum’s family, despite its relatively modest circumstances, the daughters as well as the sons were encouraged to study and enter a profession. Marie studied chemistry at the public research university ETH Zurich and – as a 22-year-old – soon supervised 60 men in the laboratory. She spent a happy time there in the company of other women students, meeting among others the author Ricarda Huch, with whom she would share a lifelong friendship.
After obtaining her doctorate, Baum worked in a chemical factory in Berlin; she soon shifted her focus, however, from scientific work to social work. Marie Baum: "My path to the social profession was clarified and broadened through contact with people who were engaged in lively debate on the issue of workers and women." Social work would become the center of her life and make her one of the most important shapers and champions of social welfare policy of the Weimar Republic.
In 1902 Baum became the first woman factory inspector…read more
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Alice Samter
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.
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born March 18, 1929 in Landsberg/Warthe (now in Poland)
died December 1, 2011 in Berlin
German writer
10th anniversary of death on December 1, 2021
Christa Wolf, besides Günter Grass Germany's best known author, was awarded the first German Book Prize in 2002 for her lifetime achievement. The jury lauded her for "courageously confronting the great debates of the GDR and reunified Germany." But Wolf's probing texts and courageous public stands had long since made her a unique and valued writer who spoke to the concerns of readers in both East and West. Her deeply reflective works cause the reader to become engaged with the moral and political questions of the time—from the reconstruction era of the early GDR to its end and beyond.
At first celebrated as a new talent of GDR literature, Wolf came to be viewed from the 1960s on as a "loyal dissident," critical of the regime but maintaining her belief in socialism as a better alternative to the capitalist west. Eventually she extended her critiques to the deforming effects of technology and patriarchy, always concerned to defend the human subject—in her works usually…read more
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Agnes Sapper
This biography is not yet available in English.
You can find the German version here.