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Lola Töpke
© Privatsammlung Seckel

Edith Lola Töpke (née Simon) * 1891

Lübecker Straße 78 a (Hamburg-Nord, Hohenfelde)

1941 Riga
HIER WOHNTE
EDITH LOLA TÖPKE
GEB. SIMON
JG. 1891
DEPORTIERT 1941
RIGA
1944 STUFFHOF
ERMORDET 3.1.1945

• www.garten-der-frauen.de
  (Im Garten der Frauen auf dem Ohlsdorfer Friedhof in Hamburg befinden sich einige Grabsteine von und Erinnerungssteine für weibliche(n) Opfer(n) des Nationalsozialismus, für die in Hamburg Stolpersteine verlegt wurden.)

Edith Leonore "Lola" Caroline Töpke, née Simon, born on 4.7.1891 in Leopoldshall, deported to the Riga Ghetto in 1941, from there to the Stutthof concentration camp in 1944, perished there on 3.1.1945.

Lübecker Straße 78a (Lübecker Straße 82)

Edith Leonore Caroline Simon was the eldest daughter of the lawyer Georg Simon and his wife Anna Marie, née Seckel. Georg Simon had been born on March 7, 1853 in Crossen/Thuringia, Anna Seckel on June 25, 1864 in Walsrode in the region Lüneburger Heide (Lüneburger Heath). They had married in 1889; at that time Georg Simon was working as a district judge. Together they undertook several major trips, including to Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, as well as Scandinavia. Due to their father's profession, the family had to move several times.

Lola, as she was called, spent her childhood and youth first in Staßfurt near Magdeburg, then from 1893 in Nordhausen near Erfurt, where her father had in the meantime become a district court judge, and from 1900 in Halle at river Saale. Her sister Helene Henriette Cäcilie Minna, called Ellen, who was four years younger, was born in Nordhausen on July 16, 1895. Also there, on April 4, 1897, another boy was born. Heinrich Charles Theodor Robert Simon, however, died at only four months old on August 19.

At the end of 1897, Anna Simon published her first novel, "Vergebens und andere Geschichten" ("In Vain and Other Stories"), under the pseudonym Mania Korff in an Erfurt publishing house. In it, she dealt with the death of her son, among other things. The novel was a sales success. In the years that followed, she wrote other books, which initially, like her first work, revolved around the themes of love, suffering, illness and death, and later also around social issues such as the lives of working-class women.

While both sets of children's grandparents actively lived their Judaism, this was no longer the case for their parents. In 1897, Anna and Georg Simon converted to the Protestant faith and also had their children baptized.

As a child, Lola had an exuberant imagination and was very playful. This brought her into conflict with the strict, authority-oriented Prussian school system. Eventually, she was excluded from school as "too inattentive." When she was eleven years old, her parents placed her in the boarding school for developmentally disabled and disturbed children founded by the pedagogue Johannes Trüper in Jena in 1890.

At the time, it was the first curative education home in Germany. There, the educators noticed Lola's great artistic talent, which they subsequently fostered through a targeted musical education. Her talent is said to have been discovered on the occasion of an argument with a family member, during which she excitedly kneaded a piece of clay back and forth in her hand and in the end realized that it had become a figure. After completing her secondary education at a school in Neuchatel, Switzerland, where she was encouraged to take part in sports and familiarized herself with the French language and poetry, she returned to her family in Halle at river Saale in 1907, at the age of 16. Her father had already died there on December 1, 1903, at the age of only 48. He had made it professionally to the rank of district court judge. After his death, Lola's mother stopped her work as a writer and only wrote a few small articles for literary magazines.

Lola Simon decided to continue pursuing her artistic inclinations in Halle. At the university, with the help of her mother, who had begun studying art history there after her husband's death, she obtained admission as a guest student with the art historians. She subsequently attended the School of Arts and Crafts in Halle, where she learned sculpture. German arts and crafts schools had been slow to open up to women since the beginning of the 20th century. Art was not supposed to serve as a means of finding a profession, but rather to educate the tastes of higher-ranking daughters. For this reason, the full-time teachers were all men, who made sure that the number of women to be taught remained limited in order to be able to provide enough study places for male fellow students. But the spirited Lola apparently succeeded in asserting herself in the field of art.

In 1913 she became a master student of Richard Engelmann at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. Engelmann, one of the leading German sculptors and etchers before World War I, worked there as a professor of sculpture from 1913 to 1933. In 1935, the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts banned him from practicing because he was Jewish. However, his marriage to a non-Jewish woman was considered a mixed marriage according to the categories of the National Socialists, so that he was deferred from the deportations from 1941 and was able to survive the Nazi regime near Freiburg im Breisgau.

Right at the beginning of World War I in the summer of 1914, Lola volunteered as an auxiliary nurse for the Red Cross, which sent her to East Prussia. After the war ended, she returned to Weimar in 1919. In April of that year, architect Walter Gropius had merged the art academy with the school of arts and crafts there and founded the State Bauhaus. Here she continued her studies. Between 1916 and 1919 she also stayed in Hamburg several times. Then she always lived with her aunt Agnes, née Seckel, married Pels, at Heilwigstraße 37 in Eppendorf. Agnes Pels was one of the three younger sisters of Lola's mother Anna. All four Seckel sisters lived in Hamburg: in addition to Anna and Agnes, Clara (married Oettinger) and Eugenie (married Brückmann).

On October 1, 1919, Lola Simon married the merchant Heinrich "Heinz" Carl Töpke in Hamburg. He had been born on December 9, 1894, to Hermann Töpke and Fulvia Maria, née Carrascoza (Carrascosa), in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. His father had emigrated from Braunschweig to Guatemala around 1890 and had founded a hardware store in Quetzaltenango - the second largest city in the country. Heinrich, who was called Enrique in Guatemala, still had five siblings, among them Hermann and Alice (Alicia Fulvia). He had come to Hamburg in February 1919; before that he had stayed in Bad Sachsa. It was in this spa town in the Harz mountains that his mother died in 1919, probably having come there from Guatemala because of a serious illness in the hope of being cured, but which proved to be in vain.

Soon after his marriage to Lola Simon, Heinrich returned to Quetzaltenango, while Lola remained in Germany. In March 1922, the two divorced. "Malicious abandonment on his part" was the reason for the divorce. Lola, however, kept her husband's name. Since the spouses separated both spatially and legally after such a short time, family members suspect that it was a marriage of convenience, with which Lola Töpke wanted to discard her Jewish-sounding birth name.

When the Bauhaus was moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Lola Töpke did not go with it. Instead, she now also moved to Hamburg, where her mother and her sister Ellen had already been living for several years. Both lived in a spacious apartment at Uhlenhorster Weg 30. After graduating from high school, Ellen had studied law and political science in Jena, Halle an der Saale, Hamburg and Marburg and had received her double doctorate (Dr. jur. et rer. pol.). She now worked as a department head at the Hamburg Youth Welfare Office and State Youth Welfare Office.

Lola attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (from 1928 Landeskunstschule, today Hochschule für bildende Künste) in Hamburg and took lessons with the Swiss sculptor and illustrator Johann Michael Bossard. He served as professor of sculpture at the Kunstgewerbeschule. She also set up her own studio in the then still independent Prussian town of Wandsbek. She also worked as a freelance artist in Holland for two years, accepting portrait commissions. To do this, she lived with various families in Germany, observed their children at free play, and then made a bust of them. In 1927 she rented a studio in the middle house at Breite Straße 14 in the then still independent Prussian city of Altona, but continued to live with her mother and sister in Uhlenhorst.

The tall Lola Töpke wore her dark hair cut fashionably short at the time as a bob - an attribute of the "new", emancipated woman of the time. She was considered warm-hearted, spirited and generous, occasionally even lavish. She was completely absorbed in her profession and enjoyed the freedoms of an artist's life, which were offered to her in Hamburg in the 1920s. She certainly took part in the boisterous and free-spirited Hamburg artists' festivals that were held annually at the Curio-House on Rothenbaumchaussee - organized by professors, students of the School of Arts and Crafts or Landeskunstschule, as well as by members of the Hamburg Secession, the city's most important artists' association at the time. Probably to reassure the many Hamburg citizens who found the festivities too permissive, the Hamburger Anzeiger once wrote, "that even at the fourth hour of the morning everything danced most diligently, joked most merrily, and yet the limits of inner respectability, so easily drowned in champagne, always remained palpable."

Every Thursday afternoon, a small group of artists met to work together, alternating in the respective studios. In addition to Lola Töpke, this included Lou Amerding, Jürgen Block, Gert Grube and Emma Gold Blau. Lola's role models were the sculptors Auguste Rodin, an important representative of modernism, and Ernst Barlach as an important representative of realism. As a member of the Hamburg Artists' Association and as a guest of the Hamburg Secession, she exhibited her figurative clay and plaster sculptures at the Kunsthalle and the Kunstverein between 1928 and 1932. Today, most of her few works, predominantly small-format ceramics, are privately owned. Exceptions are the bust of the art critic Harry Reuss-Löwenstein from 1928, which is kept in the Hamburg State Archives in his estate, and the fine ceramics "Dancer" from 1928/29 in the holdings of the Kiel City Museum - Warleberger Hof.

In addition to her sculptural work, Lola Töpke was also active as an educator. One of her students was Hertha Borchert, the mother of Wolfgang Borchert (Draußen vor der Tür/"Outside the Door"). She lived in Hamburg-Eppendorf with her husband, the elementary school teacher Fritz Borchert. Lola tried to introduce her to a plastic understanding with clay works. Hertha Borchert acquired a sculptor's and potter's trestle and worked late into the night in her kitchen on sculptures. In the long run, however, this seemed too laborious for her. She turned to writing and became an important author in Low German. At the time when Lola Töpke taught Hertha Borchert, Wolfgang Borchert was still a child.

In 1930, Lola and her sister Ellen moved with their mother Anna from Uhlenhorster Weg to a somewhat smaller apartment on the third floor of the house Beim Andreasbrunnen8 in Eppendorf. A short time later, Lola gave up her studio in Altona. On April 14, 1931, Anna Simon died at the age of 76. She was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery.

Shortly after the handover of power to the National Socialists in January 1933, the Hamburg Artists' Association carried out its Gleichschaltung (i.e. they align with NS_organizations) on April 25, 1933. It expelled its Jewish members, including Lola Töpke. The Hamburg Secession, on the other hand, dissolved itself because it did not want to exclude Jewish artists. The fact that Lola was baptized Protestant did not matter to the Nazi regime. Since she had at least three Jewish grandparents, she was also considered Jewish (according to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935).

In 1937, she was also forced to leave the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts. This had been founded on November 1, 1933 as a department of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer/RKK), to which all German artists had to belong. It saw itself as the professional representation of its members and was supposed to promote all those who designed their works in the spirit of the National Socialists. Conversely, those who were politically unpopular and Jews were excluded. From 1937, Lola Töpke was effectively banned from her profession, because membership in the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts was a prerequisite for being allowed to work artistically and exhibit publicly in National Socialist Germany. In protest against the racism of the Nazi rulers, Lola made a bust of a black sailor whom she had met in the port of Hamburg and who served as a model for her in her studio. Because of this, a neighbor who belonged to the SS denounced her.

Lola's sister Ellen was a member of the SPD and was persecuted for this reason immediately after the beginning of the Nazi regime. She emigrated to Switzerland as early as the beginning of September 1933.

After her denunciation, Lola looked for a new apartment and lived on the fifth floor of the house at Lübecker Straße 82 (today Lübecker Straße 78a) from 1934 at the latest.
After her expulsion from the Chamber of Culture, Lola Töpke was still able to earn her living for a while with a stonemason. In addition, many friends and acquaintances supported her by buying sculptures from her or inviting her to do handicrafts and pottery with their children in the pre-Christmas season. Her sister also helped her as much as she could by sending her a small amount of money each month from abroad. In 1938, Ellen had moved to France from Switzerland, where she had worked at a clinic and a nursing school, and on to England that same year. In London, she worked for the Presbyterians, a Reformed church derived from Calvinism.

Ellen also offered her sister to join her in England. But Lola, who believed in the good in people and completely underestimated the National Socialists, did not want that. Perhaps she was also afraid of a new start in an unfamiliar environment, especially since it would have been difficult for her, now over forty, to get a job abroad. So she stayed in Germany, where, however, the increasing number of anti-Jewish decrees pushed her more and more out of public life. Her financial situation also deteriorated increasingly. In the early 1940s, she also suffered from health problems. Despite everything, she tried to maintain contact with her old acquaintances and to participate in big-city life.

When the deportations of Reich German Jews from Hamburg began at the end of October 1941, Lola Töpke was among those who received a deportation order. On December 6, 1941, she was to be "resettled" in the East for labor duty and therefore had to bring winter clothing and a spade. Lola Töpke did not give it much thought and continued to believe in nothing bad. She said goodbye to her remaining friends, and is said to have discussed with an acquaintance whether it would be advisable to pack Christmas tree decorations because Christmas was approaching.

The letter from the Gestapo also contained the order to report to the lodge house on Moorweidenstraße on the day before the "resettlement". Her friend Alexandra Burchardi accompanied her there. On December 6, 1941, 753 Hamburg Jews were taken by truck from the lodge house to Sternschanze station, from where the transport left for the "East," which in this case meant Riga. How steadfast Lola Töpke was is shown by a postcard she wrote and threw from the train to Riga. On it was the sentence, "The novel Lola goes on!" From today's perspective, such behavior seems quite naive. But did the first deportees really know what fate awaited them or could they imagine what barbarity the Nazis were capable of?

In order to "make room" for the new arrivals in the Riga ghetto, who arrived with 20 transports between November 1941 and February 1942, the Latvian SS, under the supervision of the German SS, murdered 27500 mostly Latvian ghetto inhabitants in two shooting campaigns. When the Hamburg transport, to which Lola Töpke belonged, had almost reached Riga on December 8, 1941, the second killing operation was still in progress. The Hamburg Jews were therefore taken to the nearby Jungfernhof estate. Lola Töpke escaped the shootings there as part of "Aktion Dünamünde" in March 1942 because she was still strong enough to be able to work.

In the spring of 1943, she was sent from camp Jungfernhof to the Riga ghetto with other survivors. Beginning in the summer of 1944, as the Red Army continued to advance westward, the ghetto prisoners were taken to the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, where they also had to perform forced labor. Among them was Lola Töpke, now 53 years old. She survived the appalling hygienic conditions, the typhus and typhus fever epidemics, the completely inadequate nutrition and the mistreatment for another three months. On January 3, 1945, Lola Töpke died completely exhausted in the Stutthof concentration camp.

Her sister Ellen returned to Germany from England three years after the end of the war, in June 1948. In Frankfurt am Main, she initially worked as a social welfare officer at the German Association for Public and Private Welfare. From 1955 until her retirement in 1963, she managed the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus in Berlin, where female educators had been trained since 1874 and which had thus played an important role in the emergence of women's social professions. She also looked after her uncle Ernst Seckel, her mother's younger brother, who was disabled, and his second wife Erna in Berlin. Both had survived the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Ellen Simon died in Berlin on July 13, 1982, at the age of 86.

Lola Töpke's gravestone, which also bears the names of her mother Anna Marie Simon, her sister Ellen Simon and her cousin Lena Brückmann, is located in the "Garden of Women" in Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery. In this place of remembrance, initiated, financed and supported by the Garden of Women association, the association has gravestones of important Hamburg women moved after their gravesites have been dissolved, thus saving them from destruction. In addition, today the female members of the association can be buried in this area of the cemetery. Thus, as patrons, these women contribute to the preservation of the historic gravestones.

The name of Lola's and Ellen's cousin Lena Brückmann is also inscribed on the historic gravestone for Anna Simon and her daughters. Their mother Eugenie Brückmann was one of Anna Simon's sisters. She had killed herself in Hamburg on July 14, 1942, one day before her deportation to Theresienstadt. There is a Stolperstein for her at Goernestraße 8 in Eppendorf (see www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Anna Simon's sister Clara was killed in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on March 13, 1945. There is a Stolperstein for her at Isestraße 113 (see "Stolpersteine in der Hamburger Isestraße" and www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de).

Agnes Pels survived Theresienstadt and died in 1966 in Amsterdam at a ripe old age.

Translation by Beate Meyer
Stand: January 2022
© Dr. Stephan Heinemann aus dem Band "Rita Bake: Der Garten der Frauen. Ein Ort der Erinnerung mit historischen Grabsteinen von Gräbern bedeutender Frauen und eine letzte Ruhestätte für Frauen. Hamburg 2013" mit Ergänzungen von Frauke Steinhäuser

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