Elise Unger

Elise Unger was born in Berlin on 19 November 1904, the daughter of lawyer Leopold Unger and his wife Paula (née Goldschmidt). In 1924, she graduated from the Auguste Victoria School and then attended the teacher training seminar at the State Augusta School in Berlin (now the Sophie Scholl Secondary School). After graduating in 1925, Elise Unger went to study in Freiburg and from 1928 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, where she studied German, French, philosophy and education. Like many students of her generation, she spent a semester abroad (Paris).

In 1932, she submitted her dissertation on "Die Stellung der Frau bei Stifter" (The Position of Women in Stifter) in Berlin, an unusual topic for German studies with a historical-philological focus. Her supervisor Julius Petersen rated the thesis as "sufficient" because "[...] the sources are not exhausted and the cultural-historical and sociological background [...] is thin and flimsy", as he wrote in his assessment. After Elise Unger had passed her oral examination on 9 February 1933, the printing of her dissertation delayed the award of her doctorate. Her study was published as a partial print in 1934, so that the doctoral certificate was finally issued on 14 December 1934^.1 It is possible that Petersen supported his Jewish doctoral student in completing the doctoral procedure despite the anti-Semitic (university) policy.

Elise Unger's study is still consulted today when it comes to analysing Adalbert Stifter's works. As Kerstin Cornils writes in her dissertation published in 2007:

'In her dissertation on "Die Stellung der Frau bei Stifter", published in 1934, Elise Unger rightly emphasised the exceptional nature of Angela, which becomes visible against the backdrop of Stifter's oeuvre as a whole. In her opinion, the Austrian author "[did] not use the comparison with a romantic Shakespearean figure [...] again"^.2

According to Kerstin Cornils, Elise Unger wrote her study "with feminist verve"^.3

The literary scholar Sabine Schmidt shares this view:

Unger critically notes, for example, that the woman is merely a quasi-accidental object of the love that ennobles the man, on a par with the enjoyment of art or fulfilment through work; moreover, Stifter places more emphasis on the depiction of men's conflicts and stages of development, as "he sees the woman as a simpler being from the outset"^.4

As far as is known, Elise Unger worked as a teacher after her studies^.5 She lived with her parents in Berlin-Sch?neberg at Geisbergstra?e 11 until at least 1940. At the age of 39, Elise Unger was deported from Berlin to Auschwitz on 12 March 1943 with another 940 people on the 36th transport from the Moabit goods station in Putlitzstra?e and killed there^.6 She was one of nine women who graduated from Friedrichs-Wilhelms-Universit?t between 1900 and 1936 and were murdered in the Holocaust^.7