Kathe Spiegel

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Käthe Spiegel (born November 19, 1898 in Prague , Austria-Hungary ; died between 1941 and 1945 in the Litzmannstadt ghetto or in the Auschwitz concentration camp ) was an Austrian-Czechoslovak historian.

Life

Käthe Spiegel was the only child of Clara Spiegel (1874–1940) and the lawyer Ludwig Spiegel (1864–1926). She attended the girls' college in Prague and, after completing her secondary school leaving examination at the kk Deutsches Staats-Realgymnasium, began studying medieval history and new history at the German Karl Ferdinand University in Prague in the winter semester of 1917/18 . She received her doctorate in 1921 with Samuel Steinherz with the dissertation The Prague University Union (1618-1654) .

She worked as his father's secretary until her father's death in 1926. She took part in the international university courses in Vienna in 1924 and in the summer courses of the Cooperation Intellectuelle in Geneva in 1926. From October 1927 to October 1929 she was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in the USA and did research on the American Revolution , among other things .

In 1931/32 and again in 1936/37 she submitted a habilitation application to the German University of Prague, which was apparently not accepted for anti-feminist and anti-Semitic reasons.

Spiegel got involved in the German association "Frauenfortstieg" in Prague and published articles in the magazine Die Sudetendeutsche Frau . In April 1935 she was a delegate at the 12th International Women's Congress in Istanbul .

From October 1935 she had a position as a research assistant at the University Library in Prague . After the German occupation of the Czech Republic, she was dismissed for anti-Semitic reasons in early 1940. She tried to emigrate to Cuba with the help of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) , but did not succeed. She wrote another request for help to the rector of the German University, SS leader Wilhelm Saure . On October 21, 1941, one of the five deportation trains transported her from Prague to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in occupied Poland. After that, their track is lost. According to Gerhard Oberkofler , there is no doubt that she was murdered by Germans.

Fonts (selection)

  • The Prague University Union (1618–1654) . In: Communications from the Association for the History of Germans in Bohemia, 1924
  • The Prague Jews at the time of the Thirty Years' War . Self-published, 1927
  • American history problems . Prague: German association for the dissemination of non-profit knowledge in Prague, 1930
  • The legal life of the American colonial era . Prague: German association for the dissemination of non-profit knowledge in Prague, 1930
  • Cultural-historical foundations of the American Revolution . Munich: Oldenbourg, 1931
  • Characteristics of American History , in: Historische Vierteljahrsschrift , 28, 1934
  • Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg's imprisonment and its significance for the peace question 1674–1679 . Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1936

literature

  • Gerhard Oberkofler:  Spiegel, Käthe. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 13, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 2007–2010, ISBN 978-3-7001-6963-5 , p. 19.
  • Gerhard Oberkofler : Käthe Spiegel. From the life of an old Austrian historian and women's rights activist in Prague . Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2005
  • Guido Kisch : Necrologue Kaethe Spiegel 1898–1942 , in: ders. Selected writings. 2. Research on the legal, economic and social history of the Jews: with a directory of Guido Kisch's writings on the legal and social history of the Jews . Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1979 ISBN 3-7995-6017-3 , pp. 444f. First in: Historia iudaica; a journal of studies in Jewish history, especially in legal and economic history of Jews , 1948, pp. 193f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerhard Oberkofler in ÖBL
  2. ↑ Käthe Spiegel has no entry at holocaust.cz and is not mentioned in the chronicle of the Lodz / Litzmannstadt ghetto .
  3. ↑ Gerhard Oberkofler 2012
personal data
SURNAME Spiegel, Kathe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spiegel, Kaethe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian-Czechoslovak historian
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH after 1941
Place of death Litzmannstadt ghetto or Auschwitz concentration camp