The Many Lives of Jella Lepman

On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Jella Lepman’s death, the International Youth Library in October 2020 published a new German edition of Die Kinderbuchbrücke (A Bridge of Children’s Books) with several photographs and notes. This article is an abbreviated version of a text by Anna Becchi with the same title, which was first published in this book. In her Bridge of Children’s Books memoir, Jella Lepman remembers her 1945 return to Germany from her exile in Britain and writes about why and how she founded the International Youth Library in Munich. Apart from this seminal accomplishment, readers don’t know much about Lepman’s life before or after. The following pages provide more information about the multifaceted life of this extraordinary woman who founded the International Youth Library, IBBY, and Bookbird.

Cover of the new edition of Die Kinderbuchbrücke

Her First Life

Jella Lepman was born on May 15, 1891, in Stuttgart. She was the eldest daughter of Joseph Lehmann, owner of a men’s clothing company, and of Flora Lauchheimer, whose sister was the mother of the famous philosopher Max Horkheimer. Lepman grew up in a liberal, largely assimilated middle-class Jewish family, which sympathized probably more with the open-minded congregation (Synagogengemeinde) than with the orthodox, Israelite religious community (Religionsgemeinschaft). She went to school at the Königin-Katharina-Stift, where Eduard Mörike, the popular German author, had taught literature.

Young Jella Lehmann showed her social commitment quite early. At seventeen, she founded an “International Reading Room” for the children of foreign workers at the cigarette factory Waldorf-Astoria, where the first Waldorf school, based on Rudolf Steiner’s principles, was established in 1919. During this period, she also made her first ventures into journalism.

Her father, with whom she had a very close relationship, died in 1911. Two years later, she married Gustav Horace Lepman, partner in the featherbed manufacture of Lewis Lepman in Stuttgart-Feuerbach. The couple, however, only enjoyed a short common happiness, because Gustav was drafted into the army when the First World War broke out. During the war years, Jella Lepman initially worked as an infant nurse at the Katharinenhospital. In 1918, she gave birth to their first child, Anne-Marie. When her husband returned from the war, he was marked both mentally and physically. In 1922, at the age of only forty-five, he collapsed on the street and died. He was survived by the thirty-one-year-old Jella Lepman, mother of two children, because eight months earlier a second child had been born, their son Günther. Her husband’s sudden cardiac arrest marked the end of her first life. She never remarried or developed another romantic relationship.

Her Second Life

The 100.000 Reichsmarks that Jella Lepman received from her husband’s life insurance, which would normally have guaranteed the small family economic security before the inflation, weren’t even enough to buy a rose bush for his grave at the time, due to the rapid currency depreciation. Lepman shared this and other details about her early life in the essay “Women in Nazi Germany,” published under the pseudonym Katherine Thomas. The young widow was forced to enter the professional world. She soon found a job as the first female editor at the Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt. From the beginning, she was primarily interested in women’s issues, and so in 1927 she launched a supplement: “Die Frau in Haus, Beruf und Gesellschaft“ (“Women at Home, in the Workplace and in Society”). Under the pen name Marianne Konrad, she also wrote articles on culture, society, and politics, as well as book and film reviews for other newspapers and magazines. During this time, Lepman also wrote her first children’s book, Der verschlafene Sonntag (Sleepy Sunday; 1927), with illustrations by Hermann Gradl. She also wrote a play for children, Der singende Pfennig (The Singing Pfennig; 1928), which was performed at the Kleines Haus of the Stadttheater in Stuttgart and in Basle.