Anita Augspurg (22.9.1857 Verden/Aller – 20.12.1943 Zurich)

Anita Augspurg grew up not far from Bremen in a family that was interested in politics and granted her great personal freedom. She moved to Berlin shortly after she came of age in 1878. A legacy enabled her to lead a financially independent life untrammeled by a middle-class marriage of convenience. After training as an actress, she undertook various engagements in Germany and abroad.

In 1886, Augspurg moved to Munich with Sophia Goudstikker and trained as a photographer, in 1887 opening a photography studio, ‘Fotoatelier Elvira’, at Von-der-Tann-Straße 15. The two women from outside Munich drew attention not only because of their photographic work but also because of their unconventional appearance, cutting their hair short and wearing reform clothing. Augspurg drove a bicycle, rode astride through the English Garden, smoked in public, and maintained close contact with artists and literati in Schwabing. In 1893, Augspurg decided to study law in Zürich.

In 1897, she returned to Munich as the first woman to gain a doctorate in law; as a militant, radical, middle-class women’s rights activist, she became an icon of the women’s movement. Unconventional as ever, she fought for the equality of women, female suffrage, and the women’s peace movement. During the 1920s, she analyzed the political defects of the Weimar Republic in the monthly magazine ‘Die Frau im Staat’ (Women in Government), published in Munich in collaboration with her partner Lida Gustava Heymann.

Augspurg warned against the antisemitic terror spread by the Nazis as early as 1921, as a result of which she too became a target of ethnic-chauvinist agitation. At the beginning of 1923, Augspurg, Heymann, and Ellen Ammann called in vain for the expulsion of Adolf Hitler from Bavaria. When Hitler became Reich Chancellor on January 20, 1933, Anita Augspurg was in Mallorca with Lida G. Heymann. In fear of their lives, the couple decided not to return to Germany. Augspurg emigrated to Zürich aged 76. The Nazis confiscated her property. Anita Augspurg died in Zürich in 1943.