Hedwig Fechheimer

Since 2015, two books from the library of Hedwig Fechheimer could be returned.

Hedwig Jenny Fechheimer is born on 1 June 1871 in Berlin as the daughter of the merchant Israel Isidor Brühl and his wife Bertha Brühl, née Norden. In addition to Hedwig and her parents, the family consists of her older sister Agnes and her two younger siblings Ernst Georg (born in Berlin in 1876) and Margarete (born in Leipzig in 1884). Agnes Brühl dies in 1874 at the age of just 9. In 1877, the Brühl family moves to Leipzig.

Israel Isidor Brühl dies in Leipzig in 1895, and the Brühl family moves back to Berlin in 1896. By this time, Hedwig has already passed a teacher's examination in Breslau, which enables her to enrol as a guest student at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin in October 1896. This is the only way she can attend the university. Women are not admitted to study at the university in Berlin until 1908. She consequently studies art history and philosophy, without any chance of gaining a recognised degree.

Whilst at university, Hedwig Brühl meets her fellow student Siegfried Fechheimer, whom she marries in Berlin in 1903. Just two months later, Siegfried Fechheimer dies of tuberculosis in Berlin. Her mother Bertha passes in 1905. Hedwig Fechheimer then devotes herself to Egyptology and establishes contacts with Egyptologists Ludwig Borchardt, Heinrich Schäfer and Carl Einstein, among others. In 1913, Fechheimer begins publishing her research, including numerous essays and the monograph ‘Die Plastik der Ägypter’, which was published by Cassirer in 1914. In 1917 she marries the medical doctor Richard Simon, who dies in 1920 at the age of 57. In 1921 she is appointed to the expert commission for the Egyptian Department of the Berlin State Museums (‘Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’, SMB). In 1930, Fechheimer campaigns for the exchange of the Nofretete in Berlin for a statue of the High Priest Ranefer from Cairo.

In 1933/34, Hedwig Fechheimer moves into a flat with her sister Margarete Brühl at Helmstädter Str. 10 in the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin-Schöneberg. Both sisters were persecuted as Jewish in Nazi Germany, and anti-Semitic legislation increasingly deprived them of their livelihoods. Margarete Brühl was dismissed from her job as a senior business teacher without a pension and Hedwig Fechheimer was excluded from the SMB's commission of experts. After the death of her brother Ernst Georg in 1938, Hedwig Fechheimer makes several unsuccessful attempts to escape from Germany.

On 18 January 1941, the sisters receive a letter demanding that they vacate their flat within three days. Within a very short time, they organise a move to the nearby Heilbronner Str. 8, where they find subletting accommodation with Charlotte Ochs. There, in view of their imminent deportation, the sisters Margarete Brühl and Hedwig Fechheimer commit suicide at the end of August 1942. They are buried at the Jewish cemetery in Berlin-Weißensee.

Hedwig Brühl née Wasser (born 1890), the widow of Ernst Georg Brühl, is deported from Berlin to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 and murdered. Her two children Rose Beate and Clemens Michael survive the Shoah. Rose Beate is sent to England on a Kindertransport, while Clemens Michael escapes to the Netherlands in 1939. There he is initially admitted to the Quaker school Eerde before going into hiding and surviving underground.

Files from the Chief Finance President of Berlin-Brandenburg show that the belongings of Hedwig Fechheimer and Margarete Brühl are confiscated and ‘utilised’ by the German Reich after their deaths. Fechheimer's library receives special attention in the files. The collection of around 1,500 volumes is purchased by the Reichstauschstelle (RTS) for 10,500 Reichsmarks in 1943 at the instigation of its managing director, Dr Adolf Jürgens. The library is valued by the bookseller and ‘authorised representative of the Reichsschrifttumskammer’ Max Niederlechner, who in turn charges 2% of the sales price for his services.

In 1944, following the destruction of its office buildings on Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, the RTS, which was based at the Prussian State Library, relocates the Fechheimer library, among others, to storage rooms at Baruth Castle in Saxony. The collection is still there in August 1945 according to a report on the storage conditions in Baruth written by Theophil Will, the head of the RTS office in Baruth and office manager of Adolf Jürgens. Of the approximately 100,000 volumes stored in Baruth after the end of the war, around 82,000 are taken away by the Soviet army, while the remaining books are sent back to Berlin.

However, the route and time of acquisition of the two books from the Fechheimer library, which have so far been identified in the ZLB's holdings, remains unclear, at least for the time being, due to a lack of reliable information. A book restituted in 2025 was accessioned as a gift in 1951; only the in-house storage room is listed as the supplier in the acquisition journal. A book of the same provenance that had already been restituted in 2015 was identified in the then still existing storage room, also without any indication of how it was obtained. The attribution of the autograph ‘Hedwig Brühl Leipzig-Eutritzsch. 1887' was at the time successful via a comparison of address book entries.