Paula Dehmel

Paula Dehmel (born Paula Oppenheimer: 31 December 1862 – 9 July 1918) was a German writer. She wrote tales and poems for children. Between 1889 and 1900 she was married, under increasingly unconventional circumstances, to Richard Dehmel, who was among the country's best known and most popular poets during the first part of the twentieth century. She was also a sister of the polymath-sociologist Franz Oppenheimer (1864–1943).

Familial provenance

Paula Oppenheimer was born in Berlin. She was 8 when unification was proclaimed. Her parents were Antonia Oppenheimer, (born Davidsohn: 1837–1910) and Dr. Julius Oppenheimer (1827–1909), an exceptionally scholarly man who served for many years as a rabbi and teacher at the temple of the Berlin Reformed Jewish Community. Her mother was also a teacher. Her elder brother, Georg Oppenheimer, died of cholera in 1872. Several of her younger siblings survived to adulthood and achieved a measure of professional eminence. These included the physician Dr. Phil. Carl Nathan Oppenheimer who died in 1941 at Zeist (Utrecht) and Prof. Dr. Franz Oppenheimer who died in 1943 at Los Angeles. Her younger sister Lise married the noted Egyptologist Georg Steindorff: Lise lived to the age of 97. Paula herself would die following a long festering illness when she was only 55, sparing her from the nightmare of the Hitler Holocaust which drove at least two of her siblings to relocate to California.

Although relatively little information is available concerning Paula's own childhood, it is known that she was a pupil at the "Luisenschule", the first secondary school for girls in Berlin (which had been initially founded on a different site as far back as 1838).