Claire Goll (née Klara Liliane Aischmann, married name Studer)
29 October 1890 | Nuremberg – 30 May 1977 | Paris
Writer & journalist
Claire Goll was born into a wealthy Jewish family. The suicide of her brother Alfred, who was five years her senior, had a profound effect on her. After the family moved to Munich, she attended a girls’ school there. Partly so that she could leave her parents’ home – and, above all, her strict mother – she married Heinrich Studer in 1911. The couple moved to Leipzig, where their daughter Doralies was born in May 1912.
Claire Studer began studying philosophy at the University of Leipzig and wrote her first poems, the manuscript of which was recently discovered by Inselverlag. The Studers moved in literary circles, particularly amongst the Expressionists associated with Kurt Wolff. Two of Wolff’s colleagues later reported: Kurt Wolff played the cello and Claire Studer accompanied him on the piano. Heinrich Studer soon proved to be extremely violent and abusive towards his wife. As a pacifist, she left Germany, Leipzig and her husband in 1916 during the war, emigrating to Switzerland. At the divorce in 1917, her daughter was awarded to her father on the grounds of her relationship with Kurt Wolff, which he admitted in court. His acts of violence, which Claire was unable to prove, did nothing to alter this outcome.
In 1917, she studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Geneva. In 1918, she moved to Ascona and made her debut as a writer with the poetry collection Mitwelt and the collection of novellas Die Frauen erwachen. In Switzerland, she became involved in pacifist circles around Romain Rolland and in the women’s movement. In 1918, she met Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she had a creatively fruitful relationship. The two remained close friends until his death.
Together with the Jewish poet Yvan Goll – with whom Claire fell deeply in love and who, like her, lived in Switzerland as a pacifist – the couple moved to Paris in 1919. It was there that her love poems, amongst other works, were published. They married in 1921. Fleeing the Nazis, the couple moved to New York in 1939 – and returned to Paris in 1947.
Yvan Goll died in 1950. Claire Goll remained a feisty woman throughout her life and died at a very advanced age in Paris in 1977. The graves of Yvan and Claire Goll are located in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The gravestone features a drawing by Marc Chagall.
NOTE: *) Due to the exhibition format, the biographical details above have necessarily been abridged. Visitors to the exhibition can read a more detailed version of the biographical information in the exhibition folders provided. The entire, very extensive project includes further biographies, additional content and research … is in progress – also online…