Gertrud Simmel

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Gertrud Simmel on a photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf .

Gertrud Simmel (born March 7, 1864 in Potsdam ; † July 23, 1938 ; born Kinel, pseudonym: Marie Luise Enckendorff) was a music teacher, painter, writer and philosopher.

Life

Gertrud Kinel was born in Potsdam on March 7, 1864. She came from a middle-class family, her father was Albert Kinel (1825-1911), her mother was Laura Kinel, she had an older sister Helene (1862-1945) and was baptized Catholic. However, she was raised by her Protestant mother according to her denomination. After attending school, she completed an apprenticeship as a drawing teacher and deepened this talent through further drawing lessons with the painter Karl Stauffer-Bern (1587–1891). From 1889 to 1890 she studied at the renowned "Académie Julian" art school in Paris. Until around 1900 she took part in various Berlin art exhibitions with her work.

In 1890 she married Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who was a private lecturer at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin . After their marriage, she moved to her husband in Berlin and lived with him in Berlin-Westend . Her house was a place of encounter and intellectual exchange with various intellectual contemporaries such as Max and Marianne Weber , Rainer Maria Rilke , Heinrich Rickert , Reinhold Lepsius , Sabine Lepsius , Stefan George , Edmund Husserl and others. Their son Hans Eugen (1891–1943) was born in 1891.

Around the turn of the century she gave up painting and dealt more with philosophical topics. Gertrud Simmel published several philosophical works under the pseudonym Marie Luise Enckendorff, who impressed many with her intellect and personality. In 1906 her work “On Being and Having the Soul” came out. In 1910 she published the text "Reality and Law in Sexual Life". It is primarily about the relationship between man and woman in marriage. She supported the women's movement of her time with the idea that women should develop independently and not in opposition to men. Her friend Marianne Weber praised Gertrud as a “Delphic Sibyl” and as the “summit” of what a woman could become. In 1914 the family moved to Strasbourg to as Georg Simmel, a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm University of Strasbourg had received. Her work “About the Religious” was published here in 1919. Their philosophical views were strongly influenced by religion and grew out of a metaphysical mindset that assumed the unity of man and the world in the belief in an all-embracing God.

Georg Simmel died of liver cancer on September 26, 1918. After the death of her husband, Gertrud Simmel moved in 1920 to live with her son in Jena, who works there at the university as a medical professor and director of the hospital. At first she lived here in very modest circumstances, as it was a long time before her financial security was confirmed after her husband's death. In 1927 she published another work “Kindschaft zur Welt” and then in 1929 moved to Gera with her son . Among other things, she was in close contact with the philosopher Martin Buber , who lived with her during his stay in Jena, and also published in the journal Die Kreatur, which he co-edited . After Hans Simmel had lost his post as chief physician in 1933 due to “racially justified persecution”, the family moved to Stuttgart. Her son Hans finally emigrated to the USA in 1943, where he died in Colorado in the same year.

Gertrud Simmel died on July 23, 1938 in Stuttgart.

Works

  • About being and having the soul. From a diary (1906)
  • Reality and Legality in Sexual Life (1910)
  • About the Religious (1919)
  • Childhood to the World (1927)

Web links

  • Portrait in women's names for Jena's streets , catalog for the exhibition of the Towanda Jena eV women's center, Jena 2015, page 5; accessed on February 21, 2017
  • Angela Rammstedt, Paul Ernst Friendship with Georg and Gertrud Simmel in: Paul Ernst, outsider and contemporary, Königshausen & Neumann Verlag

Remarks

  1. ↑ See http://www.simmel-gesellschaft.de/00_simmel/biostud.htm and http://www.horst-helle.de/simmeld.html .
  2. ↑ quoted in: Joachim Radkau: Max Weber. The passion of thinking, Munich 2005, p. 463.
  3. ↑ Martha Friedenthal-Haase, Ralf Koerrenz (ed.): Martin Buber: Bildung, Menschenbild und Hebräischer Humanismus, Paderborn 2005, p. 25, notes 19 and 20.
personal data
SURNAME Simmel, Gertrud
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kinel, Gertrud (maiden name); Enckendorff, Marie Luise (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter, writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH July 23, 1938