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Elizabeth 
von der Schulenburg
1903 - 2001


Elizabeth 
von der Schulenburg
, sp"Tisa Hess", and "Sister Paula". Obit: The Telegraph Countess Elisabeth von der Schulenburg (Filed: 20/02/2001) Prussian aristocrat, nun and artist in 1920s Berlin who supported her brother in the plot to assassinate Hitler COUNTESS Elisabeth Von Der Schulenburg, who has died in Germany aged 97, was an artist, an Ursuline nun and a lifelong admirer of England and the English way of life; she was the sister of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, hanged by the Nazis for his part in the July Plot against Hitler in 1944. "Tisa" Schulenburg's life was by any standard remarkable. Having grown up among the Prussian nobility and witnessed the trauma of Germany's defeat in the Great War, she frequented the salons of Weimar Berlin, shocked her family by marrying a Jewish divorce in the 1930s, fled Nazi Germany for England, worked as an artist with the Durham coal miners, and spent her later years in a convent in the Ruhr. Her experience of the darker moments of the 20th century was reflected in her sculpture and drawing, in which the subject of human suffering and hardship was a constant theme - whether in the form of Nazi terror or the back-breaking grind of manual labour at the coal face. Some of her most powerful work concerned the Holocaust, the horrors of which she addressed in a series of harrowing prints and bronze reliefs. Her character was one of marked contradictions. On the one hand, she exhibited the rigid discipline, and sometimes the uncompromising manner, of her Prussian background; on the other, she displayed a passionate artistic temperament and a taste for rebellion. Countess Elisabeth von der Schulenburg was born on December 7 1903 at Tressow, her family's estate in Mecklenburg, northern Germany. Her father, Count Friedrich von der Schulenburg, was a regular Army officer; her mother Freda-Marie, nee von Arnim, came from another of Prussia's old families. Elisabeth was the fifth child and the only daughter. Following her birth, Count Friedrich called his four sons together to solicit suggestions for a name. Their suggestion of "Rosebush" was rejected in favour of Elisabeth; but before long the child was known to all as Tisa - apparently a corruption of "Teaser", a nickname bestowed by the governess, Miss Bull, the stern daughter of a nonconformist minister from the north of England. The family's close ties to England were in part a result of Count Friedrich's posting to London as military attache from 1902 to 1906. As her father's career progressed, so Tisa and her brothers - a fifth son was born in 1914 - moved from one posting to the next. At the outbreak of the Great War - which her father predicted Germany would lose - the family was in Potsdam, where Count Friedrich was commander of the elite Garde-du-Corps regiment. Two years later he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Crown Prince. The war left a profound mark on the family. Tisa's elder brothers saw action while still teenagers, and returned physically and emotionally scarred. As defeat loomed, Count Friedrich had counselled the Kaiser against abdication, and was then embittered by the latter's flight to Holland. The Count put his army past behind him and retired to his estate - only to return to public life as a nationalist member of the Reichstag under the Nazis. Further disillusionment set in when brother officers were among those opponents of Hitler eliminated in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. By then, Tisa was already living in exile in London, where she had fled with Fritz Hess, the Jewish businessman whom she had married in 1928. The marriage had caused an uproar within the family - not only on account of Hess's faith and occupation, but also because he was almost 20 years Tisa's senior and a divorced man. But then even before her meeting with Hess, Tisa Schulenburg had started to break loose from the confines of her conventional upbringing. After boarding school on the Baltic coast, she spent a miserable year at home attempting to learn household management before her parents relented and allowed her to pursue her ambition to be an artist. While studying sculpture under Fritz Klimsch, she immersed herself in the whirligig of artistic, intellectual and social life of 1920s Berlin - a world dominated by such people as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Oskar Kokoschka. When that world came to an end with Hitler's attainment of power in 1933, Tisa and Fritz Hess, along with many of their friends, left Germany. For Tisa, who went to London, the move represented a further split with her family, as her father and four of her five brothers supported the Nazis. The Hesses lived in Highgate, moving in an emigre circle that included the architect Ernst Freud, the father of Lucian and Clement. Tisa also struck up a friendship with Henry Moore, and she joined the anti-fascist Artists' International Association. Her connection with the mining world came about through a chance weekend encounter at Walberswick, the Suffolk coastal town where she and her husband would stay in a cottage built for them by Ernst Freud. A woman visitor from Durham suggested that Tisa go to a mining community to give talks and to teach wood-carving to unemployed miners. The idea appealed to her and sparked off a lifelong interest; well into her seventies, she would still be paying visits to the coal face. Towards the end of the 1930s her marriage to Fritz Hess broke down and the couple were divorced in 1938. The next year Tisa went back to Germany on her father's death. On her return to Britain, the authorities at Croydon Airport, having been alerted to newspaper pictures of Hitler at Count Friedrich's funeral, promptly sent Tisa back to Germany. She returned to Mecklenburg where in August 1939 she married a neighbour and former flame, Carl Ulrich von Barner. The war years were increasingly dominated by the knowledge that her favourite brother, Fritz-Dietlof, had turned his back on Nazism and was among the group of plotters intent on assassinating Hitler. The plot failed when on July 20 1944 a bomb planted by Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenburg - who had met with Fritz-Dietlof at Tisa's home - failed to kill Hitler. Fritz-Dietlof was among the first to be rounded up, and was later hanged. The immediate post-war period was bleak and traumatic for Tisa Schulenburg. Her favourite brother had been executed, her other siblings were also all dead. The Schulenburg and Barner estates were in the Soviet zone of Germany and were soon expropriated. Her marriage to Barner ended in divorce in 1946. After a turbulent few years - which included spells working as a journalist and for the British Army - Tisa found spiritual contentment as a convert to Roman Catholicism. In 1950 she entered the Ursuline convent at Dorsten, in the Ruhr, and took the name Sister Paula. She struck up close ties with the local mining community, and over the decades became something of a local personality. She was made an honorary citizen of Dorsten and received the Federal Award of Merit. So far as her religious life allowed, she also returned often to England, staying with a niece in north Wales. Towards the end of her life, when she was no longer physically able to make heavy sculpture, a colourful vibrancy appeared in her drawings. In her seventies, she also turned to writing, publishing several books of memoirs. Neither of her marriages produced children, but to several generations of nieces and nephews, Tisa von der Schulenburg was an inspiring and much-loved aunt who never lost her keen sense for the ridiculous. Ã Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002. Terms & Conditions of reading..Commercial information. Privacy Policy.

Born: Tressow, , , 7th Dec 1903 Baptised:
Died: Germany 8th Feb 2001 Buried:
Family:
von der Schulenburg

Ancestors
[ Patrilineage | Matrilineage | Earliest Ancestors | Force | Force2 | Set Relationship | Relationship | Options ]

1.
Elizabeth 
von der Schulenburg
1903 - 2001
2.
Friedrich B.K.G.U.E. 
von der Schulenburg
1865 - 1939
4.
 
   
 

Siblings


1.
Fritz-Dietlof 
von der Schulenburg
1902 - 1944

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Timeline


7th Dec 1903Born (birth) Tressow
8th Feb 2001Died (death) Germany
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