Clara Michelson Collection.

Abstract

The Clara Michelson Collection documents the life and work of the writer and graphologist Clara Michelson. The main subjects of the collection are her writings and her publications. The collection consists of manuscripts, a list of manuscripts, correspondence, publications and a photograph.

Series I contains correspondence with Sascha and Leo Rosenthal and Hedwig "Dudel" Klempner

The Clara Michelson Collection documents the life and work of the writer and graphologist Clara Michelson. The main subjects of the collection are her writings and her publications. The collection consists of manuscripts, a list of manuscripts, correspondence, publications and a photograph.

Clara Michelson was born in 1881 as the second daughter of a well-situated Jewish family in Riga. As opposed to Russia, her mother and father created a cultural alignment with Germany. Clara Michelson was fluent in German, Russian and French, as were her siblings. Sent to a German elementary and high school, she took courses in sociology and philosophy with Georg Simmel, a well-known professor at the University of Berlin. She also attended lectures by Sigmund Freud in Vienna, which might have deepened her interest in psychoanalysis and therefore made her increase her knowledge in Adlerian psychoanalytical theory. At the start of WW I Clara Michelson was in Germany. She returned to Russia, probably via Stockholm, in 1916. Her family fled Moscow. In early 1917 she went to the Caucasus with her mother. The start of the Russian Revolution trapped her in the South. It took her almost two years until she returned to Riga, to finally move to Berlin in 1921, while most of her family stayed in Latvia. From Berlin she moved to Paris in 1925 and worked as a fiction writer in addition to studying graphology and psychoanalysis. In the early 1930's Clara returned to Berlin, but with the Nazi seizure of power immigrated back to Paris. Clara failed to escape Paris when the Nazis occupied the city. In July 1942 she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed.