Lotte Hattemer

Ida Hofmann-Oedenkoven, Lotte Hattemer, Henri Oedenkoven in the winter of 1902/03

Lotte Hattemer (actually Pauline Charlotte Babette Hattemer ; born November 24, 1876 in Berlin , † April 19, 1906 in Ascona ) was a German teacher and co-founder of Monte Verità in Ascona.

Life

Lotte Hattemer, the daughter of the Catholic telegraph inspector, railway director, Prussian council and Berlin mayor Heinrich Hermann Hattemer and Marie Hermine Josephine, née Kaiser, enjoyed training as a teacher in Berlin. In order to escape the Wilhelminist conditions in her parents 'house, she left Berlin and stayed with several jobs, including as a waitress in a Hamburg sailors' bar.

Together with Henri Oedenkoven (1875–1935; son of the Antwerp industrialist Louis Oedenkoven ), Ida Hofmann-Oedenkoven (1864–1926), her sister, the concert singer Jenny Gräser (née Hofmann) and her future husband, who was previously in Przemyśl ( Galicia ) stationed Lieutenant Karl Gräser (1875–1920) and Gusto Gräser , she belonged to the founding group of the Vegetable Cooperative of Monte Verità.

In the autumn of 1900 the group moved on foot from Munich through the Tyrolean countryside to the Bellagio peninsula on the western shore of Lake Como , southwest of the municipality of Bellagio , where they initially settled. But soon they were looking for a nicer area. At the northern end of Lake Maggiore , in Ascona, they bought the Monte Monescia vineyard and renamed it Monte Verità , in English the mountain of truth . While Henri Oedenkoven and his partner Ida stayed on the mountain and built a sanatorium , Lotte Hattemer, Karl and Jenny Gräser settled in the neighborhood. Hattemer settled in a ramshackle stable with no doors or windows on the high path towards Ronco sopra Ascona . On Monte Verità she was called Babette , Saint Babette , Santa Lotta di Ascona , wild Lotte or Sonnenlotte . She appeared charitable, she passed money transfers from her father on to the needy and gave her surplus of grapes to children. She regularly made pilgrimages to Locarno to follow the teachings of the theosophists Alfredo Pioda and Franz Hartmann . She suffered famine voluntarily and only ate raw root vegetables and fruits on an occasional basis .

Lotte Hattemer died in 1906 under mysterious circumstances. From autumn 1905 she was found confused with suicidal intentions on Monte Verità. When she met her father in Domodossola , he tried in vain to take her to a north German sanatorium. Two days later she died of poisoning . The final police report published in 1909 mentioned a suicide as the cause of death, and rumor has it that poisoning with a cocktail of cocaine and opium was the reason psychopathologist Otto Gross , theology student Johannes Nohl and the writer Erich Mühsam were involved.

literature

• Adolf A. Grohmann: The vegetarian settlement in Ascona and the so-called natural people in Ticino. Papers and sketches . Marhold, Halle 1904, p. 54 f .
• Erich Mühsam : Ascona . 2nd Edition. Guhl, Berlin 1905, p. 36-40 .
• Curt Riess : Ascona. History of the strangest village in the world . 3. Edition. Europa, Zurich 1977, ISBN 3-85665-506-9 , p. 21-24 .
• otto big. Lotte Hattemer. Raimund Dehmlow, June 19, 2015, accessed November 17, 2017 . 
• Paulette Charlotte Hattemer. ticinARTE, accessed on November 17, 2017 . 
• Berlin birth register 1874–1899. 1876 ​​first register . Certificate no. 5668 , November 25, 1876.