Childhood and Adolescence
Ingeborg de Beausacq was born Holland on January 25, 1910, in Hattingen, Germany. Her parents were dentists. Her father, Ernst Holland, was one of nine children of a peasant family. He was the only one of the whole family, even of the whole village who had gone to school. His father had added a nailsmith shop to his farm and all the children worked in it. That's why he could buy books and also better clothes than the others in the village. There was only one street in all Steinbach Hallenberg and two family names for all its residents: Recknagel and Holland. They had been living there for centuries at the fringe of the Thuringer Wald, the deep endless forest of central Germany. They were small farmers and very poor.
Ingeborg's mother was Hella Mulsow, one of two girls of a dentist in a small town in Mecklenburg. She was also a dentist but gave up practising when she got married. After her second child, Günther, and before her divorce, she established herself again in Essen.
Ernst Holland, 18 years older than Hella, married her in 1908.They settled in Hattingen, a small town near Essen. Their first child was born in 1910, a dark haired black-eyed girl whom they named Ingeborg. In 1916 Ingeborg's mother enlisted her in a school in Essen.
The marriage ended in a divorce and the father sold their house for 1 M DM, an amount which was not enough to buy a stamp. The two children were taken to their father's home in Backnang, a small town near Stuttgart where he had established himself. Divorce procedures were still on, the fight was about the children. Ingeborg managed to contact her mother and went back to Essen in November 1918. Her father took jobs replacing colleagues on vacation. Her mother started working as a dentist again.
Hella Holland married again and the children got a brother, Gernot, from their half English stepfather. He was a civil engineer and had worked for the firm Holzmann at the Bagdad train project in Palestine. But due to some tropical illness from way back he began to get into fits of violence, of rage. He lost his job at the city administration and the whole burden of the household fell on his wife's shoulders. A divorce was the only solution. Ingeborg's mother had taken replacement jobs and after one year and a half she was on her feet again. She had enough capital to take over her father's dental cabinet in Recklinghausen, a small town in Westfalia.
Ingeborg made her "Abitur" in 1929 and was ready for University at the age of 19. She decided for literature, psychology and history of art with the aim of a career as a journalist. She spent her first semester at the University of Hamburg. Then her father objected to journalism and insisted on her studying medicine. For the winter semester she went to Berlin. She was good at anatomy and dissecting but half hearted about becoming a doctor. She also worried about the financial burden to her parents, the length of medical studies, the political situation.
Nazism and anti-semitism continued to grow in Germany. Ingeborg did not want to stay and in 1935 she took the night train to Paris and joined a group of immigrants who had managed to leave with a few personal things: lawyers, doctors, businessmen... She did not go back to Germany until 1958.
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