Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff

Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff (born June 17, 1877 in Potsdam , † April 20, 1959 in Bassum ) was a German architect . She was the first woman to obtain a degree in engineering from a technical university in the German Reich .

origin

Her parents were Major General Heinrich Wilhelm Kurt von Knobelsdorff (born April 13, 1850) and his wife Marie Elisabeth Francis Gertrud Dyhrenfurth (born September 17, 1856). Her father was a commandant in Gaudenz.

Life and accomplishments

Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff visited the daughter of a major general schools in different cities in Germany, a boarding school in Oxford and the Conservatory in Berlin before 1906 at Munich , the grammar school High School took off. In 1907 she began to study architecture at the TH Charlottenburg (today: Technical University Berlin) , first as a guest student , after the admission of women to the universities in Prussia in 1909 as a properly enrolled .
She finished her studies in 1911 as the first woman in Germany to take an engineering degree.

In 1912 she became the first female member of the Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin (AIV) and took part in the exhibition “Women in Home and Work”, a performance exhibition of the bourgeois women's movement . One of the organizers of this exhibition was her aunt Gertrud Dyrenfurth (1862–1946), who lived on the family's estate in Jakobsdorf near Breslau . Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff designed a community hall for the Silesian village , which was built in 1915. It remained the social center of Jakobsdorf until 1946.

During the First World War , she worked as a "field architect in the rank of lieutenant" at the military building administration in Döberitz near Potsdam and at the Supreme Army Command (OHL) in occupied Belgium . After the First World War she worked as an architect for the provincial government in Potsdam. In 1921 she passed the state examination for the building construction department and was again appointed as the first woman in Germany to be a government master builder.

In 1922 she married Kurt Wilhelm Viktor von Tippelskirch , Legation Counselor in the Foreign Office , and was then dismissed from civil service in 1923 (as a married and cared for wife) . She then worked as a freelance architect in Berlin-Charlottenburg until she accompanied her husband to the USA in 1927 .

After returning in 1938, the couple lived in Jakobsdorf, from where they were expelled at the end of the Second World War . Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff lived in Bassum near Bremen from 1946 until her death .

Works

• Jakobsdorf parish hall, Neumarkt near Breslau, 1915
• Villa in Potsdam, 1924/25

literature

• Kerstin Dörhöfer: pioneers in architecture. A building history of the modern age . Wasmuth Verlag, Tübingen 2004, ISBN 3-8030-0639-2
• Gothaisches genealogical pocket book of noble houses , 1905, p.377 ancestors

Web links

• Archive of the press office of the TU Berlin: The first student: Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff (1877–1959) , accessed on March 25, 2013
• Archive of the press office of the TU Berlin: "Fräulein Dipl.-Ing." And the masculine error , accessed on March 25, 2013