Margarete Susman (1872–1966)

Margarete Susman was born to a Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany. Her parents were Jenni and Adolph Susman, a successful businessman. She had an older sister, Paula. When Margarete was 10 years old, her family moved to Zurich, Switzerland. There she attended a high school for girls. Her father would not consent to her attending university, but after his death, she studied painting in Düsseldorf and Paris, and philosophy in Munich. In Munich, she met Gertrud Kantorowicz, who became a close friend (and later died at Terezín). At the beginning of the 1900s, Susman published her first volume of poetry and moved to Berlin. There she studied philosophy and participated in the seminars of Georg Simmel, who became a friend and mentor. She also befriended other members of his circle, including Martin Buber and Bernhard Groethuysen. In 1906, Susman married painter and art historian Eduard von Bendemann, with whom she had a son. During World War I, the family lived in Switzerland and afterward returned to Germany. Susman and her husband divorced in 1928. From 1907 to 1932, she was a regular contributor to the Frankfurter Zeitung. She also contributed to the German-Jewish periodical Der Morgen. Her pioneering essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Franz Kafka helped establish Susman as a leading intellectual of modern Jewish thought. In 1929, she published Women of the Romantic Period. Following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, Susman moved to Zurich permanently. She met the Protestant socialist Leonhard Ragaz and became a regular contributor to his journal Neue Wege (New Paths). In 1946, she published The Book of Job and the Destiny of the Jewish People. Her next book was Interpretation of a Great Love: Goethe and Charlotte von Stein (1951). Interpretation of Biblical Figures, a collection of her essays from the 1930s and 1940s, was published in 1955. In 1966, Susman published her autobiography, I Have Lived Many Lives.