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Ilse Neumann (née Burmester) * 1898

Papenhuder Straße 15 (Hamburg-Nord, Hohenfelde)

HIER WOHNTE
ILSE NEUMANN
GEB. BURMESTER
JG. 1898
FLUCHT 1939
USA

further stumbling stones in Papenhuder Straße 15:
Dr. Fritz Neumann

Dr. Fritz Neumann, born 14.2.1897 in Hamburg, referred as Studienrat by the "Oberschule für Jungen und Mädchen im Alstertal" (High School for Boys and Girls), because of resistance, arrested March 1935 Gestapo headquarters Stadthaus, Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp, released 1937, fled 1937 USA, died 14.4.1976 in Libertyville, Illinois, USA

Ilse Neumann-Burmester, born 22.10.1898 in Hamburg, fled 1939 USA, died June 1953 in Evanston, USA

Papenhuder Straße 15 (Hamburg-Nord, Hohenfelde)

Fritz Carl Georg Neumann was born to Anne, née Pruns, and Gustav Neumann on February 14, 1897, in Hamburg, Lübeckerstraße 42.
He spent his childhood and youth in the Hanseatic city together with his brother Hans, born in 1891, who was six years older. His father ran a fashion store at Lübeckerstraße 139. He wanted to give both sons the best education and enabled them to attend a secondary school.

Hans graduated from the Johanneum scholars' school, which at that time was associated with high costs. He studied law in Marburg, was traditionally of a national mindset and belonged to a fraternity. Fritz attended the Oberrealschule on the Uhlenhorst. At an early age he was enthusiastic about German and French literature. In 1914 he obtained the Abitur, or the early "Notabitur", since he belonged to a group of students who had served voluntary military service at the beginning of World War 1.
Due to an eye problem, however, he was not called up as a soldier, which suited his inherently pacifist attitude.

At Easter 1915 he began his studies in Kiel with the subjects German, French and Philosophy, one year later he changed to Jena. At the end of 1916 there was another examination of his health. A health commission of the military now classified him as "fit for garrison service in the field". At the request of his brother Hans, a lieutenant in the artillery and an ardent supporter of the war, Fritz was ordered to join him and deployed in Flanders and France. The brothers were very different, but their war service brought them together and they became close in brotherly friendship. Shortly before Fritz returned to the front from home leave, his brother Hans was killed in action near Cambrai on the Somme on March 16, 1918. A day earlier, their father had suffered a stroke in Hamburg from which he would not recover. Fritz brought his killed brother back to the Hanseatic city in a coffin. Hans was buried in the family grave.

After World War I, Fritz Neumann continued his studies in the spring of 1919 at the newly founded Hamburg University, first with the recognized Jewish philosophy professor Ernst Cassirer, whom he greatly admired. Then, the following year, under Robert Petsch, professor of modern German literary history, he earned his doctorate in philosophy, summa cum laude, with a dissertation entitled "The Origin of Rosmersholm."

Henrik Ibsen, the author of the play "Rosmersholm", was one of his favorite writers. Fritz Neumann's essays on Ibsen were published in the leading scientific magazine on Scandinavian literature "Edda" in Oslo. Ibsen's ethical message "remain true to yourself", "self-respect" and the fight against "egoism" accompanied him and later helped him through the dark difficult years during the National Socialist era.

After receiving his doctorate, he officially became engaged to Ilse Emma Irena Martha Burmester, born in Hamburg on October 22, 1898. He had been on friendly terms with "Elisabeth," as he called her, and her family for some time. She was the sister of a schoolmate and taught as a teacher at a higher state school, since 1920 at the Passmann Foundation School for Boys at Michaelisstraße 11.

Fritz Neumann cultivated many friendships. Intensive exchanges of ideas and discussions about philosophy and political design played an important role. He belonged to the inner circle of Albert Malte Wagner, a young Jewish scholar and theater critic for the newspaper Hamburger Fremdenblatt. This also included the later writer Georg Meyer, Otto Alfred Palitsch, Hans Woydt and Irma Koopmann, who later had to go into exile as a persecuted Jew. He remained in contact with his philosophy professor Rudolf Eucken from Jena, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908, until the end of his life.

During these years Fritz Neumann wrote for a time as a literary critic for the "Hamburger Fremdenblatt". He passed his teacher's examination in German, French and history and was able to begin his teaching career in December 1921 as a student teacher at the Realschule in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort.

After his second pedagogical teacher's examination, he was appointed "candidate for higher education" by the Hamburg school authorities on April 1, 1922, and at his request came to the Lichtwark School, the reform and cultural school in Winterhude, Vossberg, where new forms of pedagogy could be practiced.

Ilse Burmester and Fritz Neumann were married in Hamburg on February 9, 1923. They had their shared apartment at Bismarckstraße 19 in Hamburg-Eimsbüttel. Two months later, Fritz Neumann was appointed a probationary civil servant on April 1, 1923.

On February 8, 1924, their first daughter Lisel Annelore was born - as she later described in one of her poems - in a year when banknotes were shredded into confetti and a loaf of bread cost 1 million marks. It was the time of hyperinflation in Germany, the Great Depression. Three years later their second daughter Ingeborg Victoria was born on June 12, 1927. The following year, on October 1, 1928, Fritz Neumann was appointed to the position of a Studienrat.

For eight years he remained at the Lichtwarkschule, teaching social sciences as well as English and French. In the fall of 1930 he was transferred with the so-called "communist teachers" Rudolf Kappe and Ernst Lewalter and came separately from them first to the Oberrealschule am Kaiser Friedrich Ufer, then, in 1932, to the Oberschule für Jungen in Alstertal. In the meantime, his former colleague from the Lichtwark School, Margarethe Cohen, had also been transferred there.

Fritz Neumann was intensively occupied with the teachings of Marxism and, as head of the "Marxist Workers' School," took over a course on imperialism at the beginning of December 1932, but under a different name in order to avoid political persecution. Nevertheless, during a break in the seminar, the police intervened. He was forced to close the course and to identify himself. He was led home by a policeman and his library was searched. Fritz Neumann was able to stay in his apartment; the next morning, while he was teaching at the school, two policemen searched his apartment and confiscated some books they considered politically suspicious, including Engels and Lenin. An interview with the school authorities and "disciplinary proceedings" followed.

A few days later, he was shocked by the official notification from the attorney general that an action was being brought against him in the highest court for high treason.
Then, when Kurt von Schleicher became Reich Chancellor for a short time and the National Socialists, Social Democrats and Communists decided on a political amnesty by mutual agreement, his case fortunately fell under it. The case was not pursued further.

After the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, actions against Jews and political opponents increasingly took place. On April 1, 1933, calls were made for boycotts of Jewish stores. The book burning of Jewish and politically dissident writers on May 10, 1933, on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ufer by the National Socialist Student Body will also have severely affected and upset the free spirit and literature lover Fritz Neumann. As his daughter Lisel Mueller later described in one of her poems, she had grown up "in a free city, in a house where the bookshelves connected heaven and earth."

On May 22, 1933, Fritz Neumann was dismissed from the teaching profession in accordance with § 2 of the Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums (Reich Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service) on April 7, 1933.

This law had been created by the National Socialists to eliminate political opponents and exclude Jews. Fritz Neumann's dismissal from the teaching profession was for political reasons. After the war he stated in this regard: "For years before 1933, I had made myself known in the pedagogical world of Hamburg as one of the most resolute and outspoken opponents of National Socialism. Only a few days before January 30, 1933, I had spoken to this effect in a mass meeting of Hamburg teachers at the Curio Haus. Hence the action of the National Socialist State on May 22, 1933."

The state continued to pay his salary for three months, then he was, in his own words - "completely cut off, and outside and alone in a cold, cold world...".
That same year, Fritz Neumann emigrated to France. He was able to teach at the École Normale in Nancy from the fall of 1933 until June 1934 as an assistant to the German professor. For this he received board, lodging and a small allowance from the League of Nations in Geneva. During this time he also tried to get a job as a French teacher at the very progressive boarding school "Dartington Hall" in Devonshire. In July 1934 he crossed over to England for a job interview; the trip was reimbursed to him. Back in Hamburg, news reached him that he had been selected for the teaching position, and he looked forward to a good living and a life there with his family.

It was not to come to that. When he entered England to begin his work, he waited in vain for a permanent residence permit. Finally, he received a refusal without giving any reason. He still made personal representations in London, but to no avail. Deeply affected, he returned to Hamburg in December 1934.

In the time that followed, he received helpful support from the widow Lucie Borchardt, the Jewish owner of a large fleet of tugboats in the port of Hamburg. She had already given him the suspended salary after his disciplinary proceedings, out of gratitude for his intensive support of her two daughters, whom he had taught at the Lichtwark School. Now she arranged for him to work in the office of the accountant and tax expert Frenzel on Jungfernstieg. For Fritz Neumann it seemed as if this was an employer of the "Notgemeinschaft bedrohter Existenzen" (mergency community of endangers people).

In March 1935, Fritz Neumann was arrested by the Gestapo and held for four days in Fuhlsbüttel Prison. The arrest took place in connection with an exchange of letters he had conducted with Alice Jacobi, a German teacher of Jewish faith who had emigrated to Italy, and his establishment of contact with the Hamburg Jewess Hilde Schottlaender, née Stern, daughter of the former psychology professor and co-founder of the University of Hamburg William Stern. After her dismissal, she worked as a career counselor at the Hamburg Employment Office for the Jewish Career Counseling Center in Hamburg and became involved in the underground resistance against the Nazis. Anyone who contacted her was arrested, even Fritz Neumann's wife and mother, who came looking for him the day after his arrest there. In 1935, the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court sentenced Hilde Schottlaender to two years' imprisonment for "preparation for a highly treasonous enterprise," which she served in the Lübeck-Lauerhof women's prison. She then fled to the USA via Holland.

Fritz Neumann was interrogated and harassed daily at the Gestapo headquarters "Stadthaus". With his hands up, he was forced to stand in a room with other prisoners facing the wall for hours; they were showered with curses and threatened to be shot on the spot.

After his release, Fritz Neumann left Germany. At first, together with a cousin of Alice Jacobi, he was able to accompany a group of German-Jewish children from Berlin, Hanover and Hamburg on a five-week vacation to Italy; they were to recover from the oppressive atmosphere in Germany. They were accommodated in Alice Jacobi's boarding house on Lake Garda. He was allowed to take his daughter Liesel with him.
Back in Hamburg, the Jewish families decided that Fritz Neumann should give their children lessons. A group of about eight Jewish children was found, to whom he taught the entire curriculum for secondary schools.

With the best recommendation of one of these parents, he got a job in June 1936 in the Jewish "Landerziehungsheim Florenz", a very recognized and important school, founded in 1933 by Werner Peiser and Moritz Goldstein for German-Jewish refugee children. At that time there was no visa requirement for Germans to go to Italy, and Jewish parents could transfer money, about 200 RM per month, to Italy to provide for their children. Fritz Neumann had to get by on a meager salary. In the fall of 1936 he moved back to Gardone-Riviera to Alice Jacobi's boarding school. He stayed there for almost a year.

In the meantime, a contact had come up in the USA, and he decided to emigrate there. The Graduated Teachers College in Winneteka, Illinois, had assured him a scholarship to study American pedagogy.
Fritz Neumann went to Hamburg and said goodbye to his family with a heavy heart. At the end of September 1937 he boarded a sailing ship of the Bernstein Line in Antwerp and reached the port of Hoboken in New York.

After completing his studies at Winneteka, he was accepted at Evansville College, Illinois, in 1938 as assistant professor of French and German. This set the stage for his wife and their two daughters to join him. In June 1939, they left Hamburg and arrived in New York Harbor. The family was reunited in time for the start of World War 2.

In 1944, Fritz Neumann acquired American citizenship. Ilse Neumann was also able to work as a teacher again.

After the war, both visited their hometown for the first time in 1948 and were able to see his mother again. Ilse's mother was now living in the Russian-occupied zone, and they were not allowed to meet her. A second time the Neumann couple traveled to Hamburg in 1952. Shortly thereafter, Ilse became very ill, suffering from diabetes and her heart was weakened. In June 1953, just as she seemed to be recovering, she died unexpectedly in the hospital in Evanston. Ilse Neumann, née Burmester, was 54 years old.

The early death of his wife caused a deep break in the life of Fritz Neumann. Together with his daughters he suffered greatly, according to his granddaughter Jenny it broke his heart. Since then he lived for some time in Hamburg and some time in Lake Forest, Illinois. At the Roosevelt University of Chicago he was a Lecturer from 1950 to 1965. He then married a second time in Hamburg; the marriage was unhappy. During the time of his serious illness he stayed with his daughters in the USA and lived with his daughter Lisel.

Fritz Neumann died on April 14, 1976 in Libertyville, Illinois. He lived to the age of 79.
His daughter Lisel Mueller, née Neumann, who had begun writing poetry after her mother's death to deal with this great loss, is now a well-known poet in the U.S., winner of the 1981 U.S. National Book Award and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.

Stand: April 2024
© Margot Löhr

Quellen: StaH 351-11 Amt für Wiedergutmachung, 19807, Fritz Neumann; StaH 332-5 Geburtsregister, 6359 u. 468 / 1897, 2468 u. 2075 / 1898; StaH 332-5 Heiratsregister, 6622 u. 50 / 1923; Hamburger Adressbücher 1897-1943; Fritz C. Neumann’s typescript: "Memoirs of a contemporary”, German Historical Institute Libary: German Americans-Biography, Location: Stacks, shelf mark: E 184 G3 N4, freundlicherweise zur Verfügung gestellt von Evi Hartmann, Head Librarian German Historical Institute Washington – Library 1607 New Hampshire Ave NW, Washington DC 20009, U.S.A.; Lisel Mueller, Alive together, New and selected Poems, 2006, Brief vom Ende der Welt, Ausgewählte Gedichte, September 2006; Gedicht "curriculum vitae", 1992; https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/curriculum-vitae, eingesehen 25.07.2014; http://media.offenes-archiv.de/Rathausausstellung_2010_Widerstand_21.pdf, eingesehen 24.04.2015; Herzlichen Dank für hilfreiche Informationen und Fotos an Jenny Mueller Illinois/USA, Enkelin von Dr. Fritz Neumann.