Lydia Adelheid Hellenbrecht

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Memorial stone in the women's garden

Lydia Adelheid Hellenbrecht , née Lydia Adelheid Köbner (born December 13, 1844 in Hamburg ; † January 30, 1920 ibid) was a Hamburg original known as Vogeljette .

Life

Lydia Hellenbrecht was the daughter of a helmsman and lost her father as a child. At the age of 30 she married Johann Hellenbrecht, a clerk and messenger, who was 20 years her senior. This marriage lasted only nine years, then her husband died of cholera in 1883. From then on, she wore mourning clothes until her own death.

This consisted of a long black dress with a white crocheted shawl over it. She wore a cap on her head, her face was almost completely covered by a white veil. But it wasn't just clothing that aroused incomprehension among those around them. With a basket full of bread cubes in one hand and a small enamel bucket in the other, Lydia Hellenbrecht wandered the streets of Hamburg's St. Georg district to feed the moistened pieces of bread to the birds, especially sparrows.

This behavior led to her being declared insane without further ado, even though she was completely normal mentally and physically healthy. It was rumored that Vogeljette believed that her late husband had been reborn as a sparrow, and according to other accounts she was of the opinion that a magician had turned him into a sparrow.

Ultimately, feeding was only down to their love for animals, especially birds. Possibly it was also her kind of mourning work, because her husband had also been an animal lover all his life, so Lydia Hellenbrecht probably considered the feedings as a souvenir of him. Although she knew how people thought and talked about her, she, who sublet lived in modest circumstances at Rostocker Straße 9, carried out her job, which was ridiculed by the environment, for many decades.

In the women's garden at Hamburg's Ohlsdorf cemetery , Lydia Hellenbrecht and Henriette Müller have dedicated a stone of memory to the lemon jette.

Adolf Woderich dedicated the play Vogeljette, which premiered in 1961 in the Ohnsorg Theater , to her .

literature

  • Vogeljette (Lydia Adelheid Hellenbrecht, née Köbner) , in: Rita Bake , Brita Reimers: City of Dead Women. Portraits of women and life pictures from Hamburg Ohlsdorf Cemetery , Dölling and Galitz, Hamburg 1997, ISBN 978-3-930802-56-2 , pp. 202–203

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A bad address also has its charms DER SPIEGEL 46/1978
  2. ↑ Rita Bake: Vogeljette. In: Women's biographies. Hamburg.de, accessed on July 11, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Memories of the Vogeljette
  4. ↑ Stones of Memory
  5. ↑ Kürschner's German Literature Calendar. 54th year limited preview in the Google book search
personal data
SURNAME Hellenbrecht, Lydia Adelheid
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Köbner, Lydia Adelheid (maiden name); Vogeljette
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hamburg original
DATE OF BIRTH December 13, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1920
Place of death Hamburg