Ingrid Warburg Spinelli

Ingrid Warburg Spinelli (born October 1, 1910 in Hamburg ; † October 24, 2000 in Rome ) was a German philanthropist , anti-fascist and socialist .

Live and act

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Ingrid Warburg Spinelli was the eldest daughter of Anna Warburg and her husband Fritz. Her mother was a trained pedagogue, her father, as a banker, was a partner in Bank MMWarburg & CO . Ingrid Warburg had two younger sisters named Eva and Charlotte Esther, called Noni , with whom she grew up in a Jewish family. The family lived at Fontenay 5 and owned a house on the Kösterberg in Blankenese , which they used as a summer residence. The family lived in Stockholm from 1915 , as Fritz Warburg worked there until 1920 as a commercial agent for a German company. Ingrid Warburg first attended a school in Stockholm. After the family returned to Hamburg, they attended a girls' school from 1924, which was directed by Mary Henkel. From 1927 she attended the Schloss Salem boarding school , where she passed the Abitur examination in 1930. One of her schoolmates in Salem was William Hilsley , who later, through her sister Eva, became a music teacher at the Quaker School Eerde , which her younger sister Noni also attended and where her cousin Dr. Max A. Warburg taught.

In 1931 she went to Heidelberg to attend the local university to study literature and philosophy. Here she heard from Karl Jaspers and Friedrich Gundolf and thus dealt with left-wing political issues for the first time. In the same year she moved to the University of Hamburg , where Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky were among her professors. After spending some time in Oxford in 1932 to improve her language skills, she continued her studies in Hamburg in 1933. She took the subjects of German, English and philosophy. In December 1935 she received her doctorate under Emil Wolff and Bruno Snell . The English translator Lucy Hutchinson dealt with her doctoral thesis .

Ingrid Warburg was involved in Hamburg in Hechaluz and dealt with works by Martin Buber and Schalom Asch . During her studies, she took a closer look at Judaism and increasingly realized that she felt a part of German culture despite repression by the National Socialists . The reason for this was the close friendship with Adam von Trott zu Solz , whom she had met in Oxford. Since her stay in England, she was also known to the future President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann , to Isaiah Berlin and the economist Ernst Friedrich Schumacher , who was a nephew of Fritz Schumacher .

In 1936 Ingrid Warburg traveled to her uncle Felix Warburg in New York . You had originally planned to stay there for six weeks and then return to Germany permanently. However, because of the persecution of the Jews , this did not happen. In 1937 Ingrid Warburg visited Hamburg again briefly and then traveled on to Zurich , where she took part in the Zionist Congress. In the years that followed, she campaigned intensively for Jewish aid organizations that took care of people who were politically persecuted.

Her uncle Felix, who also worked in many such organizations, advised her to go on a lecture tour that took her to over 220 cities in the United States by 1939. The donations collected were to go to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee . She then went briefly to Stockholm, where her parents had fled, and a few weeks before the start of the Second World War she traveled through Poland for the Committee . Warburg was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt , the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt , who was helpful to Warburg. In 1939, however, she did not succeed in establishing contact between Adam von Trott zu Solz, the German resistance and the American government.

Since she was financially independent and had many contacts, she was able to go to New York in the same year. At Harvard , she set up the National Committee to Help Refuge Students and, together with Karl Borromäus Frank and Anna Caples, she was involved in the American Friends of German Freedom . In 1940 she was a founding member of the Emergency Rescue Committee and until 1942 personal assistant to the organization president . Of the more than 2000 people who were able to flee France thanks to the organization, many owe their lives to Ingrid Warburg's commitment. In 1941 Warburg also worked for the Emergency Relief Committee of the Children in Italy . In the same year she married Altiero Spinelli's brother Veniero Spinelli, an Italian anti-fascist and whose political commitment Ingrid Warburg promoted unreservedly. In 1942 the Emergency Rescue Committee and the International Relief Association merged to form the International Rescue Committee . Warburg Spinelli took over the office of Vice President.

After the Second World War, the couple went to Rome in 1946, where Warburg Spinelli gave birth to five children. Together with her husband, who, like her, pursued the ideal of a humane and socialist society, she launched the magazine L'Italia europea . In 1948 she attended the international trade union conference that took place in London as their correspondent . Since she had to look after her family, Warburg Spinelli was less politically active in the years that followed. In the 1950s she traveled to Sweden and southern Germany, in the 19060s and 1970s to Israel and the USA. From 1980 she visited Hamburg several times and in 1990 put her autobiography The urgency of pity and loneliness to say no there. Memoirs before that in publishing Dölling and Galitz appeared. Three years later she attended the Brückenschlag series of events that took place at the Hamburger Kammerspiele .

Ingrid Warburg Spinelli died a few days after her 90th birthday in the Italian capital.

Works

• Ingrid Warburg Spinelli: Memories. The urgency of compassion and the loneliness to say no. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Hamburg and Zurich, 1991, ISBN 978-3-630-71013-6 .

literature

• Dirk Brietzke : Warburg Spinelli, Ingrid . In: Franklin Kopitzsch, Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . tape 3 . Wallstein, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-8353-0081-4 , p. 401-403 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ingrid Warburg Spinelli: Memories , p. 125 ff.
2. ↑ http://ejas.revues.org/11920 European Journal of American Studies vol 12 : "Veniero Spinelli, brother to the more famous Altiero, one of the founding fathers of European federalism."