Ilse Rennefeld

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Ilse Rennefeld (* 1. November 1895 in Berlin as Ilse Bobreker ; † 1. January 1984 in Köngen ) was a German anthroposophic doctor , by the company Seven before the Holocaust was rescued. After the Second World War , she founded a doctor's practice in Köngen. There she lived as before the war with her blind husband, the poet Otto Rennefeld and a friend in a community. They lived in the Otto Rennefeld House , which developed into a house for cultural encounters.

Life

youth

Auguste Victoria School, today Fichtenberg Oberschule in Berlin

Ilse Bobreker was born on November 1, 1895 in Berlin, the second of three children to the grain dealer Ferdinand Bobreker and his wife Selma Jacobsohn. The Jewish family lived in Wilmersdorf at Rankestrasse 19, and from 1915 at Kurfürstenstrasse 102.

The wealthy and educated parents enabled their daughter to have a good education, which was not a matter of course for older daughters at the time. She attended grammar school Auguste-Victoria-Schule in Berlin-Charlottenburg , which in 1914 with the matriculation examination completed. At school in 1909 she met Kläre Meumann (1894–1980), who had moved from Cologne with her parents . A deep friendship developed between the two that lasted a lifetime.

Education

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Ilse Bobreker began studying medicine at the Berlin Friedrich Wilhelms University in the summer semester of 1914 together with her school friend Kläre Meumann . She remained enrolled until the winter semester 1916/17. In 1918 they both moved to the University of Tübingen to complete their degree and dissertation . In 1919 Ilse submitted her doctoral thesis in Tübingen, and on May 27, 1920 she received her license to practice medicine in Berlin. During her studies she worked in nursing and as an assistant doctor in Kiel and Berlin.

Weimar Republic

In 1913, during a poetry reading at her school, Ilse Bobreker met her future husband, the blind and destitute poet Otto Rennefeld , who had published his first two volumes of poetry a year earlier. They got engaged in Tübingen in 1919 and married a year later on Goethe's birthday on August 28, 1920 in Berlin. Before that, Otto Rennefeld had moved from Cologne to Berlin in 1918 with his mother Adele and sister Leni. The couple and Klare Meumann, the wife's friend, settled in Charlottenburg, first at Kantstrasse  130a, and from 1932 at Suarezstrasse 64. From then on they lived together in a community that was only interrupted for a few years during the Nazi era. Otto Rennefeld's mother Adele, his sister Leni and Ilse's sister Edith lived in the house.

Otto Rennefeld turned to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy at the suggestion of friends during his studies before the First World War . Under his influence, the two friends also became supporters of the anthroposophical movement and took part in Steiner's medical courses on holistic medicine in Dornach, Switzerland in 1921 and 1924 .

In their group practice, the doctors practiced medicine on an anthroposophical basis. Initially, they were mainly consulted by patients from the upper middle class in western Berlin. After Countess Eliza von Moltke, also a supporter of the anthroposophical movement, became Ilse Rennefeld's patient, members of the Berlin officer and aristocratic circles also sought medical assistance on her recommendation.

The “Dreierbund” of the two Rennefelds and their friend Kläre Meumann ran an open house in which concerts, literary readings and work evenings with anthroposophical doctors took place on a regular basis. The two friends bought a plot of land in Spandau near the Havel and had a country house built there for recreation and a biodynamic flower, fruit and vegetable garden, which they named "Orplid" after a fantasy land by Eduard Mörike . Otto Rennefeld went on many trips with his wife and girlfriend in Germany, Switzerland, Austria , Italy , Finland , France , England and the Soviet Union .

National Socialism

Berlin

Since Ilse Rennefeld was Jewish, the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933 began a period of harassment and humiliation that threatened her existence. Like all other so-called non- Aryan doctors, Ilse Rennefeld was withdrawn from health insurance in July 1933. In October 1933 her part-time job as a rescue doctor, which she had practiced since 1920, was terminated by the city of Berlin with reference to the Aryan paragraph , and she also lost her membership in the professional association of higher municipal officials in Germany. In 1934 her sister Edith emigrated to Palestine with her husband, the businessman Otto Husemeyer . Since Ilse Rennefeld had been a member of the Christian community close to anthroposophy since 1922 , she officially resigned from Judaism in 1934, but without being able to benefit from it. In the same year, like all Jewish doctors, she lost the right to issue medical certificates and to treat civil servants, officials and patients from private funds. According to the fourth ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Act , like all Jewish doctors, her license to practice medicine was revoked on September 30, 1938. With the approval of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, the doctors concerned were only allowed to provide medical care to Jews, their spouses and children.

The professional ban meant the economic end for the Rennefeld couple, as Otto Rennefeld had hardly any income. Ilse Rennefeld therefore decided to leave Germany following the example of her sister. Despite the support of numerous personalities and institutions, she was unable to find a ready-to-host country at short notice. The November pogroms of 1938 , in which the rioting Nazi troops in Charlottenburg had penetrated into Ilse Rennefeld's neighborhood, brought her once again to a drastic view of the dangers to which Jewish citizens were exposed.

Netherlands

In January 1939 Ilse Rennefeld went on an "information trip" to the Netherlands (she had already obtained the passport as a precaution in 1936). For the time being she was able to live and work in Bosch en Duin near Zeist near Utrecht in a home for handicapped children of the anthroposophical doctor Bernard Lievegoed . Her husband and her friend stayed in Berlin because as non-Jews they were not at risk.

After the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, all plans for a secure existence in the Netherlands came to nothing. During her three and a half years of emigration, her husband was able to visit her several times, sometimes together with her friend, under the pretext of an eye operation. As in Germany, Ilse Rennefeld was banned from working in the Netherlands after the attack, and Jews were barred from participating in public life. In 1942, as a stateless person , she was threatened with deportation to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . As part of Operation Seven , she managed to flee to Basel with her husband via Berlin at the end of September 1942 under adventurous circumstances.

Switzerland

The Swiss exile of the Rennefeld couple from 1942 to 1946 was a difficult time. They repeatedly had to worry about the extension of the officially set departure deadlines and were not allowed to take up any gainful employment in Switzerland. Ilse Rennefeld's father Ferdinand Bobreker died shortly before the deportation to Theresienstadt in October 1942 in his house at Kurfürstenstrasse 102. His wife Selma Bobreker was deported to Theresienstadt in September 1943 on the 96th “Alterstransport”, where she was 77 years old was murdered in May 1944. In June 1945 Otto Rennefeld received permission from the Swiss authorities to publish his collection of poems "Ein Homatlos Mensch".

post war period

After the end of the war, the Rennefelds only received permission to enter Germany in August 1946 after lengthy efforts. Kläre Meumann had been "conscripted" as a company doctor for the Behr company in 1944 after her bombing in Berlin with the help of her anthroposophical friend Emil Kühn, partner in the Behr furniture factory in Wendlingen , and had settled in the house at Nürtinger Strasse 6 in the Swabian town of Köngen . She welcomed the couple with great joy. The two doctors continued their Berlin group practice in Köngen from September 1946. In 1953 they bought the house at Wilhelmstraße 13 in Köngen, which was later named Otto-Rennefeld-Haus . As in Berlin, the house of the "Dreierbund" developed into a cultural meeting place in Köngen.

Retirement

In 1957 Otto Rennefeld died in Koengen after almost 37 years of marriage at the age of 70. In 1958 Ilse Rennefeld brought her husband's sister, Leni Lamparter, back from Moscow. She emigrated to Tbilisi with her husband in 1923 and was deported to Siberia during the war , where she was imprisoned in a camp for ten years. In 1958 the two friends brought out a three-volume complete edition of Otto Rennefeld's poems together with Albert Steffen . Klare Meumann died in 1970 at the age of 86 after ten years of illness and care from her friend, with whom she had been a close friend for 72 years. Ilse Rennefeld held office hours until she was 87 years old. In Köngen she also looked after many guest workers from Italy, Spain , Yugoslavia and Turkey , from whom she enjoyed great respect. She died at the age of 88 on January 1, 1984 in Koengen.

Otto Rennefeld House

The Otto-Rennefeld-Haus is a house for cultural encounters at Wilhelmstrasse 13 in Köngen, which, like the house at Wilhelmstrasse 15, is run by the "Cultural Promotion Association on an anthroposophical basis, Köngen-Wendlingen". It houses meeting rooms and the “Köngener Bücherstube” bookstore.

In 1953 the house was bought by the two doctors and friends Ilse Rennefeld and Kläre Meumann together with the house at Wilhelmstrasse 15. The previous owner of the Otto Rennefeld house was the lawyer Alfred Koebel. He had received his doctorate in Tübingen in 1927 and was, among other things, a member of the management of the Behr furniture factory in Wendlingen and managing director of the Salamander Association. The house was built in 1927 by the Köngener authorized signatory Arthur Zimmermann according to the plans of the Nürtingen architect and government master builder Alfred Pirling as a two-story single-family dwelling with a floor area of ​​125 square meters.

Fonts

  • Ilse Bobreker: Hysterical twilight states with the character of pseudodementia along with two cases that follow the image of puerilism. Dissertation, University of Tübingen, 1919.

Web links

literature

  • Friedrich Behrmann: From the life and work of the poet Otto Rennefeld. In: The Goetheanum. Weekly for Anthroposophy , Volume 66, 1987, Number 22.
  • Olaf Daecke: Culture - Art - Economy. Portraits of the Baden-Württemberg region of Köngen and Wendlingen. Schneider Editions, Stuttgart 2016, pp. 50–52, 278–299, 317–319.
  • Klara Meumann: The prognostic significance of the intracutaneous reaction with the partial antigens according to Deycke-Much in external tuberculosis. Dissertation, Berlin, 1920.
  • Winfried Meyer: Company Seven. A rescue operation for those threatened by the Holocaust from the Foreign Office / Defense in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Hain, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 82-98, 283-316, 330-335.
  • Peter Selg (Ed.): Anthroposophic Doctors. Ways of life and work in the 20th century; with a sketch on the history of anthroposophic medicine up to the death of Rudolf Steiner (1925). Verlag am Goetheanum, Dornach 2000, p. 200.
  • Peter Selg: Ilse Rennefeld. An anthroposophical doctor of Jewish origin in exile in the Netherlands (1939–1942). Ita Wegman Institute, Arlesheim 2017.
  • Peter Selg: Ilse Rennefeld (1895–1984). Career, escape and rescue of an anthroposophical doctor of Jewish origin. To evaluate an extensive estate. In: Annual Report of the Ita Wegman Institute , 2017, pp. 9–25 ( PDF ( Memento from December 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), 3.42 MB).

Footnotes

  1. ↑ After the death of Bobreker's father Gustav Bobreker in 1902/1903 Ferdinand Bobreker became the owner of the "Grain Agency Gustav Bobrecker & Co.". His mother Emma Brobeker geb. Zernik died in 1926/1927. Ferdinand Brobeker died in 1942, his wife Selma was murdered at the age of 77 in May 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp . Ilse's older brother was seriously wounded shortly before the end of World War I in 1918 and declared dead as a missing person. Her younger sister Edith Husemeyer emigrated to Palestine with her husband in 1934 .
  2. ↑ #Meyer 1993 , pp. 87, 90, #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 12-13, Berlin address books, victim database .
  3. ^ Matriculation of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin . - From the winter semester 1917/18, information about the students is missing in the matriculations.
  4. ^ The Tübingen students 1818-1918 in alphabetical order .
  5. ↑ #Bobreker 1919 .
  6. ↑ Kläre Meumann received his doctorate in Berlin in 1920 ( #Meumann 1920 ) and, like Ilse Rennefeld, was approved there on May 27, 1920.
  7. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 12-13, #Meyer 1993 , p. 90.
  8. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 10–11, #Meyer 1993 , p. 90.
  9. ↑ #Meyer 1993 , p. 90. - Countess Eliza von Moltke (1859-1932) was the widow of the former Chief of Staff of the Imperial Army Helmuth von Moltke ("Moltke the Younger"). He was the nephew of the famous General Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke ("Moltke the Elder") and personal adjutant of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
  10. ↑ The country house was on the Weinmeisterhöhe in Spandau, address: Zur Haveldüne 4, location .
  11. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 17-18.
  12. ↑ #Meyer 1993 , pp. 90–91, #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 18–20.
  13. ↑ # Meyer 1993 , pp. 283-317. - The resistance fighters, among them the head of the military defense Wilhelm Canaris , who organized the escape of 14 people at risk of the Holocaust through Operation Seven, were murdered after the Nazis uncovered the conspiracy.
  14. ↑ #Selg 2017.2 , pp. 25, 10, #Daecke 2016 , pp. 284–286, 290.
  15. ↑ #Daecke 2016 , p. 80.
  16. ↑ SABU Schuh & Marketing GmbH .
  17. ^ Building application from April 2, 1927.
personal data
SURNAME Rennefeld, Ilse
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bobreker, Ilse (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German anthroposophic doctor
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 1, 1984
Place of death Kings