Louise Bresslau-Hoff

Caroline Dorothea Luise Bresslau-Hoff (born May 29, 1882 in Strasbourg , † 1966 in São Paulo ) was a German writer and poet .

Life

Until emigration (1882–1934)

Luise Hoff was born in Strasbourg as the daughter of the Strasbourg businessman Carl Ernst Friedrich Hoff and his wife Sophie Wilhelmine Hoff née Becker . In 1908 she married Ernst Bresslau, a private lecturer in zoology at the University of Strasbourg and later professor at the University of Cologne (1925) . At that time, she and Elly Heuss-Knapp , the wife of the politician and later German President Theodor Heuss, and Albert Schweitzer , who had married her husband's sister, belonged to a circle of friends that was later maintained through correspondence. The marriage had four children. Since her husband, a baptized Protestant Jew, was dismissed from civil service in 1933 due to racial legislation , the family emigrated to Brazil in 1934, where Ernst Bresslau was appointed by the founding commission of the newly established University of São Paulo in São Paulo . Bresslau knew Brazil from a research trip before the First World War.

Exile (1934-1966)

After the sudden death of her husband in May 1935, Bresslau-Hoff had to secure her livelihood "by selling her husband's extensive specialist library, by renting rooms and private lessons, and after the war by selling books that were first obtained from Germany", according to the professor for Lusitanian literature Ray-Güde Mertin reported. According to her daughter, Caroline Bresslau Aust, Louise Bresslau-Hoff maintained a reading group in her house, even after the German language was banned, in which poems and stories were read out in order to allow herself a kind of intellectual survival in a strange environment enable. The Bresslau family also maintained contacts with the only successful agricultural settlement in the entire Latin American exile , Rolândia , in the north of Parana , where there were around 80 emigrated families (of Catholic and Jewish faith), and that also as a kind of intellectual center in the otherwise inhospitable Brazilian interior acted.

Works

• Together with Carl Fried : Poems. Edited by BA Aust, São Paulo 1961 (= German poetry in Brazil, 1)
• The goat dês Francisco. Brazilian narration. Edited by BA Aust, São Paulo 1961 (= German poetry in Brazil, 5)

literature

• Izabela Maria Furtado Kestler : The exile literature and the exile of the German-speaking writers and publicists in Brazil Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1992, ISBN 3-631-45160-1
• Carl Ludwig Lang (Ed.): German Literature Lexicon: The 20th Century , KG Saur, Bern 2000, Volume 4, p. 197

Web links

• Literature by and about Louise Bresslau-Hoff in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth certificate 1561/1882 Strasbourg registry office