Deeply enmeshed in German cultural life as a writer, salon hostess, and women’s rights activist, Ida Coblenz Dehmel found herself squeezed out of the very communities she had helped shape when the Nazis came to power. Dehmel’s education at the Brussels Conservatoire was cut short when she returned home to help her grandmother run the household after the death of Dehmel’s mother. Nevertheless, in the 1890s she began writing articles and book reviews under pseudonyms. After a brief, unhappy marriage to businessman Leopold Auerbach in 1895, she moved to Berlin, where she met poet Richard Dehmel, whom she married in 1901. The couple settled in Hamburg, where Ida Dehmel ran salons and from 1912–1916, edited Frau und Staat, a monthly suffrage newsletter. In 1916 she co-founded the Women’s Society for the Advancement of German Art, and in the 1920s founded GEDOK, the Community of German and Austrian Women Artists’ Associations. However, with the rise of Nazism, she was stripped of her leadership roles and ostracized. After her husband’s death in 1920 she became his literary executor, and in 1940 also published an autobiographical novel, Daja. But, increasingly isolated and afraid of being rounded up by the Nazis, she took her own life in 1942.
How to cite this page
Jewish Women's Archive. "Ida Dehmel." (Viewed on December 16, 2017) <https://jwa.org/people/dehmel-ida>.