Marta Carst

Exlibris: Marta Carst geb. Pringsheim.

 

In 2023, one book and four loose bookplates from the library of Marta Carst could be returned.

Marta/Martha Eva Ernestine Pringsheim was born in Berlin on 17 February 1863. Her parents were Henriette Guradze (1830-1898) and the botanist Nathanael Pringsheim (1823-1894). In 1890 she married Eli (Elimar) Carst (also: Cohn), a landowner and banker from Pleschen, in Berlin. The couple had five children: Elisabeth (*1893), Irene (*1894), Agathe (*1896), Margot (*1898) and Günter (*1903).

Eli Carst dies in 1919. Marta Carst and her children were persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany from 1933. Marta Carst dies of natural causes in Berlin on 25 April 1935. Of her four children, three survive the Shoah.

Elisabeth Carst married the editor Henning von Koss in Berlin in 1915, and had two children with him: Ursula (*1916) and Henning (*1917). The marriage is divorced in 1930. Elisabeth survives in Germany.

Agathe Carst is married to Gerhard Hinrichsen, a native of Güstrow. She holds a doctorate in physics and works at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in the 1920s and later at BASF in Ludwigshafen until 1936. Dr. Agathe Carst is able to escape to the USA via South America. She dies in Brazil in 1975 and has no children.

The second oldest daughter Irene studies art history and philosophy in Berlin and Oxford. During the First World War, she works as an auxiliary nurse and subsequently studies state economics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She received her doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on medical care. Dr. Irene Carst is deported from Berlin to the Warsaw Ghetto on 2 April 1942 and murdered either there or in the Treblinka extermination camp. She was not married and had no children.

Margot Carst is married to Eugen Ranke, a native of Lodz. She obtained a degree in agriculture and a doctorate from the Berlin Agricultural College in 1930. The two have three children: Bodo (*1930), Klaus Maria (*1932) and Vera Martha (*1937). The Ranke family is able to flee to South America before 1937 and survives. Eugen Ranke dies in 1980, Margot follows him on December 24, 1989.

Günter Carst survives and dies in Poland in 1972, more detailed information about his life could not be gathered.

The route of access of the objects into the stock of the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin (ZLB) is not known and could not be traced. The book comes from unprocessed storage holdings of the Berlin City Library ("Berliner Stadtbibliothek", (BStB). An included securing stamp from the BStB can only be roughly narrowed down to the 1940s and 1950s, and may also have been in use later.

The bookplates originate from the ex-libris collection of the BStB, which had been created by a bookbinder since about the beginning of the 1980s and was handed over to the provenance research department of the ZLB in the 2010s. More detailed information on the route and date of accession is not yet available.

Additional Information

  • Röhn, Hartmut [Ed.]: Jüdische Schicksale : Ein Gedenkbuch für die Stadt Werder (Havel) und ihre Ortsteile. Berlin: Lukas Verl., 2016. p. 41 ff.