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Anna Oehlke, 56 Jahre alt
Fotograf/in: Ev. Stiftung Alstersdorf, Archiv

Anna Oehlke (née Schmidt) * 1882

Kiebitzstraße 8–10 (Wandsbek, Eilbek)

HIER WOHNTE
ANNA OEHLKE
GEB. SCHMIDT
JG. 1882
EINGEWIESEN 4.7.1935
ALSTERDORFER ANSTALTEN
"VERLEGT" 16.8.1943
HEILANSTALT
AM STEINHOF WIEN
TOT AN DEN FOLGEN

Anna Oehlke, née Schmidt, born 31 Oct. 1882 in Zingst, Mecklenburg, died 21 July 1945 at the Wagner von Jauregg Mental and Nursing Home of the City of Vienna

Kiebitzstraße 8

Anna Oehlke became widowed shortly before her 32nd birthday after four years of marriage. Her husband perished right at the start of World War I. His death was a factor in triggering her illness which led to her death many years later in Vienna, far away from her home, shortly after the end of World War II.

Anna Oehlke, whose maiden name was Schmidt, came from the Zingst Peninsula on Mecklenburg’s Baltic Coast where her father Wilhelm Heinrich Schmidt worked as a ship carpenter. He had several children with his wife Elise, née Rätz. The family belonged to the Evangelical-Lutheran Church where Anna was christened on 7 Dec. 1882. Her brother Friedrich-Wilhelm was sent to an institution, probably as the result of an accident. He and Anna fell from a ladder. As a consequence of the accident, Anna lost her sense of smell.

Anna Schmidt graduated from the local elementary school and then went to work, eventually in Hamburg. Some of her siblings already lived there on Kiebitzstraße in Eilbek. On 23 Apr. 1910 she married the laborer Johann Oehlke, born on 12 Mar. 1881 in Hamburg, who lived at Kiebitzstraße, like she did. Her first child was born in 1911, a daughter followed by a son in 1914 and a second daughter.

After her birth, Anna Oehlke began to show the first signs of a mental disorder which roughly coincided with her husband’s death in the battle at Tannenberg on 28 Aug. 1914. A further blow was the death of her father-in-law who had escaped from the "Langenhorn mental asylum” at the beginning of Oct. 1914 and was found dead mid Nov. in the vicinity of Bad Segeberg.

Anna received a survivor’s pension, and her mother-in-law supported her as best she could. While the war was still on, Anna Oehlke was overcome by such anxiety that her sister suddenly had died, she wanted to take her own life. She was taken to St. Georg Hospital with a case of Lysoform poisoning where she stayed three weeks. It was there that she was overcome with the conviction that her husband was still alive. Despite her delusions, she was deemed well and discharged.

Anna Oehlke suffered from delusions of persecution and jealousy, became aggitated ever more frequently until she ultimately got into such a fight with neighbors that she was taken to the Friedrichsberg State Hospital on 23 Apr. 1935. Once there, she only spoke in disjointed sentences, was scatterbrained and at times beside herself. Although she was regarded as harmless, she was not discharged because her daughter was not able to take care of her. On 4 July 1935, she was admitted to the former Alsterdorfer Asylum.

An asset manager was brought in to administrate her survivor’s pension. In Sept. 1935, Anna Oehlke insisted that she be released. She became violent towards other patients and left the grounds of her own volition. As a result she was temporarily housed in the closed ward. After that she behaved and helped with household chores, darned laundry and spent a lot of time walking outdoors.

The question whether Anna Oehlke suffered from a congenital disorder was of particular importance to her nephew because to obtain a marriage loan he needed confirmation that his aunt did not have a heritable disease. Her nephew assumed that the cause of her suffering was her sorrow over losing her husband and worrying about raising her two daughters, whose health he emphasized. The asylum administration directed him to the district physician who was responsible for that kind of expert opinion. His opinion is not known.

Over the years, Anna Oehlke became more and more dissatisfied. She maintained her independence in caring for her body, kept her temporal and spacial orientation and went out for walks, but she suffered from recurring delusions and occasionally got into fights with other patients. From Jan. 1940 until she was removed from Alsterdorf, her weight dropped from 62 kg to 46 kg. On 12 Aug. 1943 she and 227 other women and girls were transported to the Wagner von Jauregg Mental and Nursing Home of the City of Vienna. One of her daughters who had been bombed out and evacuated to West Prussia in July maintained contact. During her admission to the Viennese asylum, Anna Oehlke’s doctor gained the impression that she was a nice, calm, oriented woman. When asked why she was moved to Vienna, she replied she needed rest because her nerves were so weak. A year after her arrival, she was moved to the nursing facility there where she continued to behave in a friendly, accessible manner. She was able to orient herself, correctly answer questions about the war and the government, took care of herself and helped in the laundry. The fact that she worked was communicated by the asylum management to her son and her guardian in autumn 1944. She only weighed 42 kg.

After her return from West Prussia to Hamburg, Anna Oehlke’s daughter received the news in Feb. 1945 that her mother’s condition was satisfactory and that her mental state had not changed recently. Towards the end of the war, a stop on mail was declared so Anna Oehlke’s relatives did not learn of her death on 21 July 1945 until a year later in May 1946. She died of "wasting with chronic mental illness and enterocolitis”. Anna Oehlke was buried at the Vienna Central Cemetery.


Translator: Suzanne von Engelhardt
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: January 2018
© Hildegard Thevs

Quellen: Ev. Stiftung Alsterdorf, Archiv, V 138; StaH 332-8 Meldewesen, K 6682; 332-5 Standesämter 6479-112/1910; Wunder, Exodus in: Wunder, Genkel, Jenner, Auf dieser schiefen Ebene.