Henriette Hardenberg

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German-British Jewish poet, one of the few women among German Expressionist writers and ranked among the best of the Expressionists. She published one book of poems, Neigungen (Tendencies) in 1918. A planned second collection, Südliches Herz (Southern Heart), was published posthumously in 1994. Her poems examine the relationship between people and their bodies, especially the skin as both an interface between self and world and a limiting factor. In a late interview, she said that her work expressed a desire to transcend the limits of the body. In the 1910s, she was part of the circle of writers around the magazine Die Aktion, which championed literary Expressionism. She thus got to know such writers as Else Lasker-Schüler and Ludwig Meidner. During World War I she served as a nurse at a hospital in Berlin. In 1916, she married the German poet, translator, and critic Alfred Wolfenstein, and the couple moved to Munich, where their son Frank was born. In Munich she built friendships with writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke (with whom she was especially close), Johannes R. Becher, Emmy Hennings, and Oskar Maria Graf. In 1924, she moved back to Berlin, where she worked as an actor and model. She separated from Wolfenstein in 1929 and divorced the following year. In 1937, Hardenberg took refuge in London from Nazi Germany. In 1938, she married the artist and designer Kurt Frankenschwerth, whom she had known since the early 1920s. During the war, she worked in a photography business. In 1948, she became a British citizen. She died on 26 October 1993 in London, aged 99. Link to Wikipedia biography