Ida Hoff

Ida Hoff (8 January 1880 - 5 August 1952) was a medical doctor and feminist activist in Switzerland. She was the first woman to be employed as a school doctor in Bern. In a traditionalist city in a conservative area of Switzerland, Ida Hoff was one of Bern's first regular female motorists.

Life Family provenance and early years Adelaide "Ida" Hoff was born in Moscow. Her father, Siegfried Hoff (ca.1845-1896), had been born into a prosperous German Jewish family, and had emigrated to the United States, taking US citizenship. According to one source, Siegfried Hoff was regarded by family members as the "black sheep" of the family. At some stage he had trained as a dentist. However, he had left the United States and, from the perspective of his respectable brother Leopold who lived near Hamburg and ran the family manufacturing business, Siegfried had "disappeared" into czarist Russia where he supported himself as a businessman. The family business had been established by Ida's grandfather, Johann Hoff, and involved manufacturing a Malt Extract health tonic which sold well in the German speaking world. It also sold well in Russia, where "Hoff's Elixir" even got a mention in the 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). As a child Ida Hoff grew up in circumstances of some material comfort, possibly reflecting her father's success as a health tonic salesman. in the guest house "Villa Clara" where she was staying. Ida was greatly affected by her mother's death, and it is clear that the mother:daughter bond between them had been exceptionally close. Landlocked Switzerland was unusual in western Europe with regard to the vanishingly low levels of naturally occurring iodine in the national diet, a deficiency that has subsequently been addressed by adding iodine to salt sold in the shops. Later, in a medical dissertation, Ida Hoff addressed issues involved in kidney disease in a piece of work entitled "On the question of salt retention in kidney disease" ("Über die Frage der Kochsalzretention bei Nephritis [...]").

Student years and activism Hoff enrolled as a medical student at the University of Bern in 1899. She would flourish at university where, again, she was something of a pioneer. There were indeed plenty of Russian female students studying at western universities. That reflected the all-male nature of universities in Russia. But most of the Russians stayed Russian, spending their spare time with fellow Russians. Ida Hoff was evidently keen from the outset to become assimilated in Swiss society. In order to avoid becoming isolated, she was one of a group of Bern students who founded the "Bern Female Students' Association" ("Berner Studentinnenverein"). The female students conducted themselves with some confidence, participating as a group in the opening ceremony in 1903 of a new college building in the city's Grosse Schanze quarter which they made memorable by turning up carrying the slogan "Equal rights - Equal obligations" ("gleiche Rechte – gleiche Pflichten"). Subsequently, they defended themselves against sexist attacks.

The cultural highlight of Hoff's and Tumarkin's shared travel experiences took them beyond the surrounding cantons, however, and involved a visit to Greece in the spring of 1927 which they undertook with a travel company called, appropriately, the "Hellasgesellschaft". Tumarkin recorded her impressions in a "travel book" and contributed a lengthy reportage to "Der kleine Bund".

Sharing the suffering: family Hoff and Tumarkin were both Jewish, with relatives in parts of Europe that were badly affected by the Shoah. In 1925 and 1937, the friends made two lengthy visits to Tumarkin's relatives in Chișinău, then a part of Greater Romania, today in Moldova. The city had been the scene of ferocious antisemitic pogroms at the start of the twentieth century, and the coming to power in Germany of the Hitler government paved the way for race-based persecution and slaughter in the 1940s as the German and Soviet armies fought for control over the Bessarabia region. Many of Tumarkin's family were horribly persecuted, deported, and in some cases killed.

Cousin Clara and her daughter survived the Hitler years. Other relatives, friends and acquaintances were killed. Hoff and Tumarkin were badly affected by the gruesome fate of relatives. As their friend and confidant Georgine Gerhard recalled after Hoff's death, "that such horrors could be inflicted on the Jews without a storm of indignation bursting out across the entire world weighed on them heavily. Ida was also deeply unsettled by the less than laudable reactions of the Swiss authorities in dealing with holocaust refugees, and some of the manifestations of antisemitism within Switzerland."

Final years Hoff's final years were not entirely untroubled. She suffered problems with her ears which made it necessary for her to undergo periodic surgical interventions which were very painful. She also developed heart problems. More painful, however, was the illness and suffering of her friend Anna Tumarkin. Despite the care Hoff was able to lavish on her dying friend, eventually Tumarkin, now aged 75, had to be transferred to the "Siloah Diakonissenhaus" in Gümligen, on the south side of the city in the direction of Thun. Anna Tumarkin now faded away rapidly, dying six weeks later on 7 August 1951.

Hoff's own will to live never entirely returned. She tried to channel her energies into work as much as possible. She also formulated new travel plans. An invitation to visit her cousin Clara - now living in Sweden - provided an element of light at the end of her tunnel of grieving. But her failing heart left her short of energy. She was forced to rest during the morning hours, only able to emerge towards the end of the afternoon to attend to a few long time patients. On the afternoon of 4 August 1952, by now aged 72, her heart began to fail more completely, and she died early the next morning, a couple of days before the first anniversary of Anna's death.

Her body was cremated: the ashes were placed in an urn in Anna Tumarkin's grave in Bern's Bremgarten Cemetery.