Three German Women: Personal Histories of the Twentieth Century

Three German Women: Personal Histories of the Twentieth Century by Erika Esau, Ph.D. ’85, is a memoir/history of three German women whose stories illuminate their responses to the turmoil of Central Europe in the past century. The lives of each of these three women inspired Esau directly— mathematician Maria Weber Steinberg (1919-2013); journalist Irmgard Rexroth-Kern (1907-1983); and Viennese art historian Fr. Dr. Anna von Spitzmüller (1903-2001). Their stories describe the hardships, struggles, and victories of intellectual European women in this era. Placing them in the cultural context of the times in Germany and Austria, the book highlights the traumatic choices imposed on ordinary people by political and social circumstances over which they had no control. (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020)