Our friend Ursula Mahlendorf passed away on October 31, 2018. Mentor, scholar, professor, sculptor, psychoanalyst, author, philanthropist, refugee … to say she was many things to many people is almost a truism. Born on the day of the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929, her life spanned immense historical changes, from the twilight of the Weimar Republic through the advent of our post-truth era.
Ursula was born in a part of Germany that is no longer Germany, in lower Silesia, which is now part of Poland. Her extended family of merchants and farmers, hurt by Weimar hyperinflation in the 1920s, was further impoverished by the worldwide economic downturn. Her father died when she was 5 years old. When she was 10, like all non-Jewish children in her town, she was inducted into the Hitler Youth. As the Russians closed in near the end of the war, Ursula, then 15, worked as a nurse at a military hospital while her brother, one year older, was drafted into the army. When the war ended, her family were refugees, ending up in a camp near Bremen.
Ursula quickly made up for the disruption of her education, graduated high school, and was admitted to the University of Tubingen on a refugee scholarship. To support herself, she worked as a weaver in a jute factory and as a waitress. After three semesters, she applied for a Fulbright grant to study in the United States and was one of two students, out of 300 applicants, to receive one. She studied for a year at Brown. Returning to Germany, she completed her undergraduate study in comparative literature and philosophy at Bonn University, but Ursula found herself deeply disillusioned with the conservative postwar political climate and the inadequacy of “denazification.” She returned to Brown, earned her PhD, and became an American. Ursula’s acclaimed memoir, The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), provides much more detail about her early life.