The Singular Life of Countess Ingeborg de Beausacq

By Lena Augris

A biography of the life of countess Ingeborg de Beausacq, American of German origin. In the 1930s she left Germany and fled to France. When the World War broke out she took a boat to Brazil where she became a portrait photographer. After the war she left for New York and became a fashion photographer. She left the U.S. in 1957 and lived 1,5 years with the natives in New Guinea collecting art objects. She came back to Europe and in 1965 she bought an old abandoned property in Provence which she restored where she invited friends from all over the world to stay. She died there in 2003.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781326191191

Book preview

The Singular Life of Countess Ingeborg de Beausacq

The Singular Life of

COUNTESS INGEBORG DE BEAUSACQ

Explorer and Photographer

A BIOGRAPHY

by Lena Augris

Source: Archives of the Ingeborg de Beausacq fund n° 467 FP kept at the Centre Historique of  la Fondation Arts & Métiers

Preface

Mechtild Rössler

I met Ingeborg de Beausacq through the Society of Woman Geographers (SWG) where we both were members and became friends. We travelled together to the Triennial in Washington DC in 1993 and subsequently I spent time at Ingeborg's property La Gaille and came to see her in New York in 1998.

In 2002 we met for the last time in the retirement home in St Didier in Provence where Ingeborg spent the last part of her life.

When Ingeborg died in 2003, I was asked to write the obituary for the Bulletin of the Society of Woman Geographers which was published in the Bulletin 2003. I previously tried to trace Ingeborg's archives and wrote to the Fondation des Arts et Métiers and to the retirement home, without success.

In 2006 Lena and Jean-Pierre Augris, a former student of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers, discovered the archives of Ingeborg at the Fondation des Arts et Métiers. They wrote an article about her in the journal Revue des Arts & Métiers on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the donation of La Gaille. They had met Ingeborg when they stayed at La Gaille in 2001 and were impressed by the story of her life that she told them. They also found the letter I had written on top of one of the boxes and contacted me.

The three of us met in Paris and the idea to document Ingeborg's photographic heritage and make a small exhibition was born. As I was able to make an exhibition space available in my house in the Luberon, not far away from La Gaille, it was decided to make an exhibition there and show the public the extraordinary life of Ingeborg de Beausacq.

The exhibition took place in August 2007  and was very successful. And a year later I was happy to unveil a plaque in her name at La Gaille, thanks to Eric and Tiphaine Heissat, the new owners of the property.

Ingeborg was not an easy character, she was a woman of conviction, strength, and full of  ideas. When she bought La Gaille in 1965, it was a ruin, and she brought  life to  the estate such as you can see it today. Her idea was to make a home for her many artist friends.

She told me many stories and I would like to tell you some of them: During the restoration of La Gaille she heard a discussion between two farmers from the country. One said to the other: It's a very nice property, but unfortunately there is no electricity. Of course, Ingeborg had put the electricity underground, which was not often the case in the 60s.

Ingeborg described her vision in her Christmas letter of 1970:

"On 3rd June I inaugurated the pool in splendid solitude – my pool... With the pool having become part of daily life at La Gaille – closes the file 'Miracles Performed' and settles down to routine. Les peuples heureux n'ont pas d'histoire... Before I get to my next project, I am looking forward to a lazy lazy summer. Come and join me. Drop your problems into the next waste paper basket. Let's live. We live only once after all."

When I was travelling with Ingeborg in the U.S., she told me about a discussion between herself and her housekeeper to know who would be the first in heaven. And finally her  housekeeper won, because she said: I will be first in heaven, as I have to brush the stardust from your wings.

Mechtild Rössler 

Introduction

When my husband and I met Ingeborg de Beausacq at her property La Gaille in May 2001 we did not imagine that we had got to know an extraordinary woman who would carry us away to discoveries of thrilling adventures.

The La Gaille property which she had created in the 60s  was owned by the Fondation Arts & Métiers since 1986. She had donated it to the Foundation, keeping part of it to live in until her death. The other apartments in the property were rented in summer to former students of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts & Métiers.

Ingeborg de Beausacq was 91 years old at the time but still drove her car. The guardians had told us to be very careful: she didn't see very well and you had to get out of her way. She parked her little red car on the parking lot not far from the apartment we had rented. And that's where we met her when she came back from shopping in town. We invited her to dinner that night. She was lovely in a long blue-green dress matching her white short-cut hair. Lively, she told us about her life in New Guinea where she stayed with the natives, buying art objects from them. We were totally under the spell.

Next day, Mrs de Beausacq invited us for a drink with her in her house. We sat down in a room filled with primitive art objects, engraved poles, statues, wild animal skins on the chairs and the leather couch. After the drink she showed us around, her office and the mezzanine where she had assembled objects from all over the world.

I was captivated and suggested that she write a book about her life. She then proudly showed me three tapes on which was recorded an interview with an American journalist. I offered to write down the interview which could be the start of a book. She happily agreed.

Later she wrote to us that she had to go to Zurich for a few weeks to see her lawyer, but we would get in touch when she came back. But time went on and we had no news. We forgot all about it.

In 2006 a friend of my husband's, Georges Gutman, an amateur photographer, asked my husband to help him with some archives of a woman photographer. What was her name, my husband asked. Ingeborg de Beausacq, he answered. And so we learned that she had died in 2003 and left archives with a great number of photographs.

In the archives we found a letter to the Foundation, by one of Ingeborg's friends, Mechtild Rössler, asking for information about her to write an obituary in the bulletin of the American association SWG (Society  of Woman Geographers)  where both were members. We called Mechtild and decided to meet to see what we could do to honour Ingeborg's memory.

We also found the three tapes which I transcribed as I had promised her. This text and her notes, her stories, and her voluminous correspondence allowed me to write her biography.

In 2007 we organized an exhibition of a selection of Ingeborg's photos in Mechtild's house in Goult, Provence. Two press-books with articles on Ingeborg and her reports published in the 40's and 50's, were also displayed. A year later, a plaque in her name was inaugurated at La Gaille by Mechtild Rössler, the President of the Fondation Arts & Métiers, the Mayor of Saumane and the new owners of La Gaille, Tiphaine and Eric Heissat.

Lena Augris

The Singular Life of

INGEBORG DE BEAUSACQ

Photographer and Explorer

Ingeborg de Beausacq, born Holland in 1910, photographer and explorer, was an American citizen of German origin. In the 1930s, she left Nazi Germany and fled to France. When World War II started, she went to Brazil where she became a portrait photographer. But she was attracted by the United States and in 1948 she settled in New York and became a fashion photographer. But life in New York was exhausting and Ingeborg left in 1957 to live with the natives in New Guinea until 1959.  In 1965 she wanted to go back to her European origin and bought la Gaille, an old abandoned property in southern France which she restored, while travelling around the world. She died there July 12th, 2003.

Childhood

Ingeborg de Beausacq was born Holland on January 25th, 1910 in Hattingen, Germany. Her parents were dentists. I was a wanted child and my parents loved me. Her father, Ernst Holland, was one of nine children of a peasant family. His father had added a nail smith shop to his farm and all the children worked in it. That’s why he could buy books and also better clothes than the others in the village.

Ingeborg's mother was Hella Mülsow, one of two girls of a dentist in a small town in Mecklenburg.

The Hollands

Ingeborg relates her childhood:

There was only one street in all Steinbach Hallenberg and two family names for all its residents: Recknagel and Holland. They had been living there for centuries at the fringe of the Thuringer Wald, the deep endless dark forest of central Germany. They must have been intermarrying, bickering and fighting with each other all their long lives. They were small farmers and very poor, except for uncle Karl who had a store and was considered rich and therefore absolutely despicable. A shopkeeper! The land was also poor and there was very little of it per family.

When Ingeborg was little she liked going there in the summer and playing harvesting and bringing in hay. When she was allowed to handle one of the big wooden forks and gather hay and then sit high on top on the wagon going home, she shrieked and jumped with pleasure and uncle Gustaf, aunt Karline’s husband, had to hold her tight, otherwise she would have fallen down.

The Hollands had an intricate system of hating and loving each other. Ingeborg’s father hated some of his brothers and sisters so much that one could not even mention them. Aunt Marie was shifted by Ingeborg’s father from one category to the other. When the family visited the Hollands they stayed with aunt Karline. She was on good terms with her brother Karl, but not with her sister Marie. Aunt Karline’s daughter Minna was not on speaking terms with her cousin, uncle Karl’s daughter Eve. Eve’s mother was not a native of the village and barely cared about getting out of the house and talking to people. She only watched them through a window. She was accused of being proud. And Ingeborg was warned that should she ever go to aunt Marie, she could not come back to aunt Karline’s or uncle Karl’s. When she was four and five years old, she spent two summers in Steinbach Hallenberg without even seeing her.

The mother

All children think their mothers are beautiful and so did I, said Ingeborg. She liked to dress, to sing and dance around the house with her little dog. She had and wore beautiful things. It was forbidden, but Ingeborg opened her drawers and discovered rouge and powder and perfumes, postiche braids and corsets with puzzling hooks and strings. When Ingeborg was allowed to get into her bed on Sunday mornings her mother was dressed in silky gowns with lace through which she felt the softness and the warmth of her body.  She adored her mother, who represented for her all things beautiful and gentle.

When her parents went out in the evening she kept herself awake to hear them coming home. She waited for her mother's last goodnight kiss.

Her mother was a dentist like her father. She gave up practising when she got married. After her second child, Günther, and before her divorce, she established herself again in Essen, which was in commuter distance from Hattingen where they lived, so that she could come home for lunch.

The father

Ingeborg’s father, Ernst Holland, 18 years older than Hella,  married her in 1908. What a dark medieval narrow-minded man my father was, said Ingeborg. He hated nearly everybody". He was distant, not affectionate like the mother.

Ernst was the only one of the whole family, even of the whole village who had gone to school. He had to walk two and a half hours to get there and two and a half hours back home. There was no school in Steinbach Hallenberg. He was also the only one to rise above village life and poverty, went to University, became a dentist. Politically he was extreme right, a fanatic anti semite who worshipped Ludendorff.

The couple  settled in Hattingen, a small town near Essen. Their first child was born in 1910, a dark haired black eyed girl whom they named Ingeborg. Her mother abandoned her profession in order to look after the children, the large house, the staff, the extensive gardens, vegetables, fruit trees, lilacs, roses, dogs and cats and even chickens. The scene seemed to be set for the typical happy bourgeois life in a typical small town in prosperous Germany before World War I.

When Ingeborg was seven and her parents went through a tricky phase of their divorce, she was sent to stay alone with aunt Marie. It was then that she met her for the first time.

Aunt Marie was very badly off. She was not only a widow, but what was really terrible was that her husband had hanged himself right in her house from a beam. And her son was not right in his head and did not work. He only ate. Like all the other women in Steinbach Hallenberg aunt Marie looked awfully severe. She wore the traditional peasant costumes of the Thuringer Wald. A heavy black woollen turban covered all her hair; her face, like all the other women’s faces, was weathered and full of wrinkles. She wore a tight fitting black woollen long sleeved blouse with a high collar and many woollen skirts one on top of the other. The top one was black, the underskirts were red and blue. She always wore the same outfit, she did not even change on Sundays. Every evening after dinner and before going to bed she said: Thank God, one more day nearer to the grave. That was about all she ever said the whole day long.

Ingeborg was punished by the other Hollands for staying with aunt Marie. Cousin Eve turned her head away when she saw her in the street.

The Mülsows

After Ingeborg had become sick in Steinbach Hallenberg, she was not sent there any more and was allowed to visit her mother’s parents more often. Her father was not on speaking terms with them; he never went with them to see the Mülsows. They were the grandmother, the grandfather and the grandfather’s mother who lived to be over hundred. She called them the young oma, opa and the old oma. Opa was a dentist like her father.

Ingeborg knew very well that the Mülsows did not really love each other either. The old oma never ate with them at the table but remained in her room. The young oma did not visit her, only opa, her son, would go with them to see her. She sat in a dark velvet armchair and looked very tiny in her tight fitting black corsage with high collar and long narrow sleeves. Her wide skirt touched the ground, and a lack lace bonnet covered her white hair. Ingeborg’s mother said that the young oma was terrible and wished the old oma’s death. One day, said her mother, she would take the old oma to live with them. But the old oma died before her mother had a chance to move her.

Her grandfather’s parents had emigrated from Hamburg to Brazil where her grandfather was born. They came back to Hamburg when they had trouble with their slaves. Her great-grandfather had some strange illness in Brazil and died young, therefore her great grand-mother, the old oma, lived with her son. They told her stories about their life in Brazil: no Christmas tree in Brazil, the old oma said, a coffee tree instead.

Ingeborg’s grandparents had furniture from Brazil, coins, and jewels and semi precious stones. Everything in the apartment had a story. The young oma was very gay, wore beautiful clothes and waltzed around humming Wiener lieder and swung a tiny little pinscher dog in he arms. Every night Ingeborg watched her setting her hair in curls and was fascinated by the elaborate braids she made the next morning.

But the highlight of Ingeborg’s visits was always opa taking her to bed. He would let her ride high on his shoulders through all the rooms including the kitchen so she could say goodnight to the maid too. Then he would tuck her in and kiss and tickle her with his moustache until she was red in the face from screaming. Then he would leave the bedroom open and go to the salon. She would hear him adjust the piano chair, open the lid, play and sing: "Guten Abend, gute Nacht, mit Rosen bedacht…" and he would sing until she was asleep.

Conflicts arise

Ingeborg’s father complained about everything: the house they lived in, the chickens, his patients, all pigs, and then turned to his pet subject: the Jews. Department stores were tools in the hands of Jews who conjured Germany’s downfall. Juda and Rome were selling Germany to an international crime gang. The inflation also had something to do with it. Where did all the money go, her father was losing every day? To the Jews, of course. And that they lost the war was of their making. What irony that Ingeborg’s father’s hate should drive her straight into the camp of those whom he considered the arch enemy! And isn’t it of supreme logic and justice that I, my father’s only daughter, should live and most probably also die as lonely as he did? He for hating and I for loving the world too much. Neither he nor I have been able to find the middle road.

Conflicts came soon. The father was extremely thrifty, a workaholic, an austere no-nonsense man. The mother had tasted independence, leaned towards the arts, liked decorating the house, entertaining, theatre in nearby Essen, pretty clothes, beautiful things. Ingeborg was three years old when her mother took an important step: she established herself in Essen and commuted twice a day with Hattingen in order to have her meals with the family. But sometimes the child saw tears in her mother’s eyes. Noticed the stern face of her father and felt the silence of Fräulein Albrecht, the governess whom she did not like.

In 1914 the war broke out and in 1915 the first wounded soldiers arrived in Hattingen. At a reception for the soldiers, Ingeborg, dressed in a white lace dress, with an enormous ribbon in her black hair, recited patriotic poems for them.

In 1916 Ingeborg’s mother enlisted her in a school in Essen, schools in Hattingen being not good enough. Mother and daughter took the train to Essen every morning and back to Hattingen for lunch. A very close relationship was established based on love, fun, fantasies, story telling. All this was very stimulating for the child who adored her mother. Father was always working, never had time and never played.

Because Ingeborg had to meet her mother at the station to catch the train she had to leave classes earlier. She not only had a silver wrist watch but knew how to read the time. Already then it dawned on her that she must be somebody special. She did not live those playful moments of children getting together after school. She had no contact with children in Hattingen. She had her toys, her picture books, the gardens, the servants, rare glimpses of her father. And there was the little brother, but above all, the walks and train rides with mother.

The divorce

The marriage ended in a divorce and the father sold their house for one million DM, an amount which was not enough to buy a stamp. In those times women did not usually divorce. Ingeborg soon found out that the daughter of a divorced and working woman was somebody to stay away from. Often she had nobody to play with and locked herself in the toilets. Her brother had the same experience. One day he came home with a hernia and had to wear a truss.

Then the father kidnapped his daughter from school and parked her with his sisters in Thuringen village. The two children were taken to their father’s home in Backnang, a small town near Stuttgart where he had established himself again. After life in Essen, Ingeborg was miserable in that small town. Divorce procedures were still on, the fight was about the children. Ingeborg managed to contact her mother and had herself kidnapped back to Essen in November 1918. Confusion reigned, the defeated troops were on trains and everywhere. It took them days to get to Essen. But Ingeborg was back at mother’s, to a lovely house, to pretty clothes and far away from the regional costumes of her Thuringen aunts, from their cows, their unheated houses with manure heaps in front.

Ingeborg got postcards from her father from Italy and other far away places. He took jobs replacing colleagues on vacation. Sometimes he settled down for a while until they would get a long letter telling them that the mayor, the pharmacist, the doctor and the rest were crooks and that he could not be expected to keep living in a town with such people.

The years of inflation were hard on them. It was a problem to buy food. Several times it looked as if they had to leave the house in Essen. It was only rented. They never got a house of their own again.

Ingeborg’s mother worked all day long, the waiting room was always packed with patients. Ingeborg could not remember ever having heard her mother complain or say that she was tired though she was on her feet all the time. She was always good humoured, laughed, and was never sick. During school vacations at the sea she played in the sand with her children and swam faster and further than they. When she was young she once won a medal for good swimming. She spent all her free time with the children and very seldom went out alone. They took all that for granted. She belonged to them. How terrible of us, because as soon as we grew up, we only wanted to belong to ourselves and in spite of all her love for us, she, like my father, also had to die alone, said Ingeborg.

Hella Holland married again and the children received a blond and blue-eyed brother, Gernot, from their half English stepfather. His father had been an explorer and journalist in Africa, married to a Miss Wilkinson. The son became a civil engineer and worked for the firm Holzmann on the Bagdad train project, in Palestine, joined the Turkish army during the war and had the most fascinating stories to tell. There was the Sahara, the Bedouins, the Arabs, the Armenians, the Turks, glittering galas in Istanbul, beautiful women, bazaars. He was a great playmate to the children. He took a special interest in Ingeborg and taught her geometry years before it was taught in school. There was a man around the house who had time!

But due to some tropical illness from way back he began to get into fits of violence, of rage. He lost his job at the city administration and the whole burden of the household fell on his wife’s shoulders. It seems that he abused Ingeborg. Hella took her daughter on walks around the block because sometimes they were not safe in the house. A divorce was the only solution. Ingeborg was 14 then.

What inflation had not taken was taken by the catastrophic divorce. One day, Hella found herself alone with her three children and furniture in storage, Günther parked at his father’s, Gernot at his parents and Ingeborg in a boarding school run by a protestant sect, the Herrenhuter Brüdergemeine in Neuwied/Rhein. She loved the discipline, the orderly life and felt secure.

Ingeborg’s mother had taken replacement jobs and after one year and a half she was on her feet again. She had enough capital to take over her father’s dental practice in Recklinghausen, a small town in Westfalia. She took her children back. Now they lived in a small apartment without any glamour.

Ingeborg was fiercely independent. I have decided never to marry, never to depend on anybody, earn my own living, be alone, LIVE! she declared. In fact she was to marry, but she always remained independent and free.

Berlin

The children went to school, Ingeborg obtained her Abitur in 1929 and was ready for University at the age of 19. She decided on literature, psychology and history of art with the aim of a career as a journalist. She spent her first semester at the University of Hamburg. Then her father objected to journalism and insisted on her studying medicine. For the winter semester she went to Berlin. She was good at anatomy and dissecting but half hearted about becoming a doctor. She also worried about the financial burden to her parents, the length of medical studies, about the very bad economic times in Germany, the bleak outlook for jobs.

Berlin meant the discovery of other new joys. Ingeborg belonged to the lost generation but did not feel like giving anything up for lost. She had a voracious appetite for life and gobbled down all the firsts which presented themselves to her in rapid succession.

The city itself: her first big city. The grand epoch of the German theatre. The glitter of Kurfürstendamm. The political cabarets. First nightclubs with and without table telephones. First oysters. First caviar. First glamour. First flirts with dancing close under dim lights. Artist balls and weekends at the Baltic sea. A bit of Dancing on the Volcano and a bit of "Après moi le déluge."

But not only that.

Ingeborg used to sit up with fellow students all night, discussing politics, the future of Germany. Unemployment had risen to anguishing proportions.  In order to get some money, students had to open doors of taxis in front of Berlin nightclubs, a beautiful young female student sold razor blades on Kurfürstendamm. And who was that Hitler? Nazism and anti semitism continued to grow in Germany. One evening Ingeborg had been out with two Jewish friends for a beer at some brasserie. Coming home alone she felt her way through the dark hallway towards the staircase leading to her furnished room when a man jumped at her. If you don’t stop going out with Jews, he threatened her, we will cut your hair. I am an S.A. Man, you don’t know what that is? You better watch out, or else…" She was shocked.

When Ingeborg came back from Berlin, she was not a child any more.  One evening, walking the dog, her mother asked: What do you think about the Nazis? They say that they will get Germany back on its feet. Did she think that killing the Jews would solve the problem?  Ingeborg asked. There was no question of killing them, she said. They would live like under the Kaiser: They would not be admitted to higher posts in the army. After all, we could not have traitors in the Nation’s defence! Also no more Jewish lawyers. Foreigners were not qualified to interpret German law. And doctors?  Also no Jewish doctors any more. There were too many doctors anyway and once the Jews were eliminated, German doctors such as she would become one would have a better chance.

But besides that, their lives would not change at all.  They still could...Could what, Ingeborg asked. Oh well, she said, they had always found ways to make money!

How was it possible that her mother talked that way! Her mother! She had risen her voice in excitement, trying to make her mother see that she betrayed everything she had ever stood for.

Hush, Hella said, you can’t talk like that in public. They say they are preparing concentration camps for people who are against them. You talk like a communist. You worry me.

Ingeborg’s mother had been swept away by the general enthusiasm for the rebirth of the Reich, the New Germany, and joined the party. She moved to Berlin and did well. Ingeborg lost contact with her father and did not know when and where he died. The Nazis tried to put pressure on Ingeborg via her mother who wanted to convince her to join the German counter-espionage.

Some of Ingeborg’s colleagues were Jews. Her father had become more and more militant and fanatic with his anti-Semitism and her mother counterbalanced that fanaticism by inviting Jewish neighbours’ children together with others. Therefore Ingeborg had been exposed to the existence and problems of anti-Semitism when nobody in Germany had ever heard of Hitler.

Monte Carlo

Ingeborg felt more and more uncomfortable with her medical studies and looked for a chance to break out.

One day she saw an advert in a Berlin newspaper: a job was offered to a private secretary, who must speak French and be able to travel. She applied and got the job. The man was a Jew, 35 years old, a bachelor living and travelling with his mother. He had important real estate holdings in Berlin and three apartments in Monte Carlo: one for himself, one for his mother and one for his secretary. All three in the same building.

Ingeborg spoke French, would love to travel, bought a travel typewriter and in no time could type to dictation. She did not even consult her mother, took the job, payed her mother a goodbye visit and left for Monte Carlo in a chauffeur driven Cadillac with A.D. and his mother.

Monte Carlo in 1930 was a gambler’s paradise out of a picture book. During the summer months, all big hotels, the Hotel de Paris, the Metropole, were closed. The SEASON was in the winter. The first attempts for a summer season had been made by the Société des Bains de Mer: A small Beach Hotel with a sea water swimming pool and many tennis courts had been installed at a small bay. Ingeborg’s life: tennis and swimming with A.D. Every morning. A.D. lunched with his mother every day except Sundays when they all had lunch together at his mother’s or at the Beach Hotel.

Afternoon work: answering letters, learning what it is all about having hundreds of tenants, an office in Berlin with a permanent lawyer, mortgages, contracting for renovations, transforming large apartments at Kurfürstendamm n° 34 into a hotel. Accounting, controlling. Commuting between Berlin and Monte Carlo. A new world for her, fascinating, glamorous, carefree, secure. A.D. was a perfect father figure and Ingeborg tried to be the perfect child, the perfect pupil who grew into a loyal friend who even risked her life for him when the S.A. men drove in open trucks along Kurfürstendamm singing their Horst Wessel Lied: "…und wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritzt…"

Commuting between Berlin and Monte Carlo, A.D. was a big gambler, every evening they spent at the Privés. She became fascinated by the lois du hasard and there was not a book, not a system she did not study and sometimes try out. But she did not become a gambler herself.

Opening of the Sporting d’Eté near the Beach Hotel, of the Palais de la Mediterranée in Nice, skiing in St Moritz, every evening driving out in Berlin, theatres, Dreigroschen Oper, der Blaue Engel. 

And one day, All quiet on the western front. Mice and rats were let loose in the movie, the police came late if at all. The Nazi terror began in the open.

In one of her biographical notes, Ingeborg confesses that she had become A.D.'s mistress. But A.D.'s Jewish orthodox mother who hated her opposed  their marriage.

1933. A.D. did not return to Germany. He moved to Paris, again the three apartment set-up. Ingeborg travelled between Paris and Berlin to help him save what could be saved. Her mother also helped in illegally transferring part of his large fortune. Consequently, she was arrested, a friend imprisoned and found hanged in his cell after having signed a confession in which he accused her too.

A.D.’s mother died, he went on to New York where he had some well established cousins. Ingeborg followed him to the ship in Le Havre and said goodbye. She was 26 years old and had no profession. A.D. left her enough money to live 12 months. She never heard from him again until 1948 when she came to New York. An old friend from those Berlin times told her that A.D. had married a spinster cousin and died a few years later.

Ingeborg’s mother asked her what her plans were for the next semester. She said she had none.

What was she going to do then?

I am going to Paris, she said.

Oh my God, to Paris? Why to Paris? It’s full of emigrants! What will you do in Paris?

Dish washing, I suppose, she said and knew that she would hurt her mother. She wanted to hurt her, she could not help it.

They sat on her bed that night.

Why are you such a rebel, Inge! Can’t you be like everybody else? Had she brought Ingeborg up to be like everybody else? Besides, she was not that four year old child any more who took orders about whom to hate and whom to love. She was old enough to know where she stood. Her mother was simply hooked by the Nazis and if she expected Ingeborg to join them she could have left her with her father and saved herself a lot of trouble!

They both cried. Ingeborg wiped their tears with a corner of her bed sheet and pressed her mother against her. How much she loved her, she thought! Didn’t she know it? Didn’t her mother see that she had to go, that she would perish in the midst of all that hatred, that they would take her to a camp, that she had to save her life as well as her soul.

And so she went to Paris.

In 1935 she took the night train to Paris and joined a group of immigrants who had managed to leave with a few personal things: lawyers, doctors, businessmen. She did not go back to Germany until 1958.

Paris

1935 in Paris, a woman alone. Ingeborg had learned a lot and had also seen much cruelty, selfishness, greed and ruthless exploitation.

She rented a studio apartment near the Trocadero. She wanted to be part of the life around her. She heard people say We are going to Spain, We are waiting for our visas to America... The only certitude was the coming of a war.

Love in Paris was spelled "amour. On fait l’amour, from five to seven, after dinner, in a movie or a theatre. Wasn’t there more to love than faire l’amour? she asked.  Mais c’est ce que l’on raconte aux petits enfants, Mademoiselle!" In what century did she live? How romantic German girls were! She learned and played the game of which one important rule was to reject before one was rejected.

For a short while, the emigration from Nazi Germany was received with open arms in Paris. "A bas la peste brune" - down with the brown plague – was painted in large letters on many walls. The emigrants believed they were living for a cause. Soon the novelty wore off and they became yesterday. All enthusiasm died and buried itself in the narrow grooves of everyday living.

Few of the German Jewish emigrants ever received the French Carte d’Identité.  Many had to move on to Spain, a few lucky ones got visas for America.

The exotic birds

Now Ingeborg had to earn her living.

One of her Jewish friends in Paris was Dr Proskauer, who had been a general practitioner in Berlin. He and his non Jewish wife made a living in Paris by importing tropical fish and exotic birds and sold them within an exclusive arrangement with the