Augusta von Zitzewitz

Augusta von Zitzewitz (26 December 1880 – 14 November 1960) was a German artist, based, for most of her working life, in Berlin. Early on in her career she was associated with the Berlin Secession movement. She is best known for her portraits.

Life Augusta von Zitzewitz was born in Berlin, a daughter of the Prussian Oberleutnant Coelestin Friedrich von Zitzewitz and his wife, born Elise Köbel. Because of her mother's English provenance she and her eight siblings grew up bilingual. According to family tradition she was christened "Augusta" after the empress Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1811-1890), the politically liberal wife of the old German emperor. Her father died in 1892, a few months after her eleventh birthday, and she was sent away to complete her education at the "Kaiserin-Augusta-Stift", a Potsdam boarding school which later formed the unsympathetic backdrop for Christa Winsloe's drama, Girls in Uniform.

In 1907, presumably with the backing of her widowed mother, in 1907, she embarked on an arts training with the Berlin Association of Women Artists ("Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen"). An arts training at one of the more mainstream Berlin academies would not have been accessible to her on account of her gender. One of her teachers during the next few years was the "Secessionist", George Mosson. She rented her own little studio

It was also in 1915 that she became a member of the recently formed Free Secession artists' association.

War ended in May 1945, and with it the Nazi régime. Berlin was divided into military occupation zones. Von Zitzewitz returned to her destroyed studio in Berlin-Charlottenburg (Reichstraßestraße 97) which she had left shortly before the war ended. Charlottenburg had ended up at the heart of what became West Berlin. The priority was on survival. She painted portraits using the light from a kerosene lamp and exchanged them for food. And as the rubble began to be cleared and the rebuilding got under way she re-established her place in the arts scene, once more painting leading figures from the literary and arts scenes. Another notable posthumous exhibition, arranged by the Pomerania Foundation ("Stiftung Pommern") at Kiel Castle (Rantzau building) in 1980/81, celebrated the centenary of her birth.