Elisabeth Gerdts-Rupp

Elisabeth Gerdts-Rupp (born Elisabeth Rupp, 23 November 1888 – 18 March 1972) was a German jurist, lyric poet and a respected ethnologist.

Life Family Provenance and earlier years Elisabeth "Lisel" Rupp was born in Ravensburg, a mid-sized town which at that time had still not fully recovered its prosperity following the predations of the Thirty Years War more than two centuries earlier, located a short distance away from Lake Constance in the extreme south of Germany. She was the eldest of her parents' three recorded children. Erwin von Rupp (1855–1916), Lisel's father, was a senior judge. There are indications in her autobiography that Lisel Rupp was not hugely impressed by the city in which she spent the second half of her childhood. It was nevertheless important to the way that her career subsequently unfolded that in 1904 the school she attended had become only the second in the whole of Germany to start preparing girls for the Abitur. The Abitur was (and still is) the school leaving exam: passing it opened the way to a university-level education which had traditionally been a privilege reserved to men.

University She moved on to study Jurisprudence at Straßburg in 1909 or 1910, later progressing to Leipzig and Berlin. She was encouraged to attend university by her mother, even though her father (until persuaded otherwise by his wife and daughter) had foreseen for Elisabeth a future as a wife and mother rather than as an academic. Rupp and Hesse had a shared interest in Indian philosophies.

Argentina and marriage In 1922 the need to explore new horizons prevailed over her recurring tendency to home sickness, as Elisabeth Rupp went to Argentina for a year. She worked as a home-tutor for a prosperous German family there. There was time for reading and thinking and for close observation: she became very critical of the upper-class social mores she came across in the expatriate community, especially with respect to the subordination of women. Presumably that is not how it would have been perceived in 1937, however, and it seems to have assured her acceptance in academic quarters as a competent, if in some respects unconventional, ethnologist. During the later 1930s Gerdts-Rupp also undertook study trips in North Africa, South America and the Near East.

Ethnologist and scholar She worked for a couple of years at the Hamburg Ethnology Museum. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 put an end to her travels, as passenger ships were requisitioned for military use. That year she returned to Tübingen as an Ethnology teacher. The appointment was "honorary" (unpaid), and she continued to teach on an honorary basis till 1947 when she received from the university a more conventional teaching contract.

Following her husband's suicide she remained in Tübingen till her retirement in 1959, at one stage taking responsibility for both the Geography and Ethnology departments, and living with a "flock" of house-cats in some rooms at the "Tübinger Schloß" (castle). (The castle site also, by this time, accommodated the university Ethnology Faculty.) Among her more noteworthy students were Friedrich Kussmaul, Heinz Walter and Hermann Bausinger. In 1960 she returned to the region of her birth, settling on the shores of Lake Constance. She involved herself in nature conservation and continued to write poetry. Her poetry volume Tier und Landschaft. Gedichte aus fünf Jahrzehnten ("Animals and countryside. Poems from five decades") was published in 1958.

Elisabeth Gerdts-Rupp died at Radolfzell, a small town at the western end of the lake, on 18 March 1972.

Publications (selection)