Nelly Neppach

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Nelly Neppach (born September 16, 1898 in Frankfurt am Main as Nelly Bamberger , † May 7, 1933 in Berlin ) was a German tennis player . Her greatest sporting success was the German championship in women's singles in 1925.

Life

Stumbling block at the house, Nachodstrasse 22, in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

Neppach was born in 1898 as Nelly Bamberger into a Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main. She started doing sports at a young age. Neppach won her first tournament victory as a tennis player in 1910 at the age of twelve.

After the First World War she married the film architect and producer Robert Neppach , moved to Berlin and became a member of the Tennis Borussia club . Neppach reached the peak of her sporting career in the 1920s. Her greatest success was the victory at the German Championship in 1925, in which she prevailed in the final against the otherwise outstanding Ilse Friedleben .

In 1926 Neppach caused a public sensation when she traveled to France against the will of the German Tennis Federation (DTB) to take part in international tournaments at the invitation of the French champion Suzanne Lenglen as the first German female athlete after the First World War in the field of “ hereditary enemy ”. Arrived on the Côte d'Azur , they received several ultimatums from the DTB by telegram, threatening them with permanent exclusion from the tournament. Although Neppach finally bowed to the pressure and started the return journey from Nice at the beginning of March , the DTB issued a press release on March 11 in which he declared their immediate exclusion. The announcement was pervaded by such undisguised nationalism and also contained anti-Semitic undertones - its championship title in 1925 was even described as a "lucky win" - that a few days later the respected sports journalist Wilhelm Meisl was compelled to comment in the Vossische Zeitung and sharply attacked the DTB : "With a real cheer" the criminal court rushed to Neppach, the letter was an "outrageousness par excellence".

From 1927 Neppach took part in tournaments again. This year she appeared for the first and only time at the French Championships , where she lost to Eileen Bennett in the round of 16 . In 1932 she was still in ninth place in the national German rankings. A few months after the National Socialists came to power, Neppach resigned from her tennis club in April 1933. Nothing is known about the exact circumstances, but the Tennis Borussia Berlin club, which had a high proportion of Jewish members in the Weimar Republic, declared itself “free of Jews” in mid-April 1933. It is highly doubtful that it was a matter of “voluntary self-resignations”, as it was externally presented at the time. The DTB board had also decided in April 1933 to block “non-Aryan” members for international tournaments.

On the night of May 7th, 1933, Neppach committed suicide in her Berlin apartment by poisoning herself with veronal and gas. It is considered likely that the exclusion from the sport, which was the center of her life, caused her to fall into depression. According to your club, Neppach was “probably the first real female sports star with an international reputation in Germany”.

literature

  • Christian Eichler : A fate. In: Deutscher Tennis Bund (Ed.): Tennis in Germany. From the beginning until 2002. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-428-10846-9 .
  • Henry Wahlig : Suicides of Jewish athletes under National Socialism: The examples of Fritz Rosenfelder and Nelly Neppach , in: Diethelm Blecking , Lorenz Peiffer (ed.) Athletes in the "Century of the Camps". Profiteers, resistors and victims. Göttingen: Die Werkstatt, 2012, pp. 241–247

Web links

Commons : Nelly Neppach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • A brave woman. Tennis Borussia Berlin eV, May 2, 2010, accessed on September 28, 2013 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dr. Willy Meisl: Right becomes wrong . In: Vossische Zeitung , No. 131, March 18, 1926, evening edition.
  2. ↑ Christoph Kopke , Werner Treß (ed.): The day of Potsdam. De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2013, ISBN 978-3-11-030549-4 , p. 203.
personal data
SURNAME Neppach, Nelly
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bamberger, Nelly (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German tennis player
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1933
Place of death Berlin