Rega Ullmann

Diagnoses

Vocation

Family

Swiss poet and writer. Following her father's death in 1887, she and her mother moved to Munich, beginning a correspondence with Rilke, who became a major supporter and mentor; the two met for the first time in 1912. In January 1906, Ullmann gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Gerta, in Vienna. The father was the economist Hanns Dorn. A second child, Camilla, followed in 1908 following a relationship with psychoanalyst Otto Gross. Ullmann left both children to grow up with foster parents, though she visited them regularly and oversaw their education. Ullmann converted to Catholicism in 1911. Unmarried and without work, she suffered from severe depression, exacerbated by her mother's suicide by hanging. With her first collection of short stories, however – Die Landstraße – she gradually became better known. With Rilke's help, she acquired some financial support for her writing, first from her publisher and later from Swiss patrons and Catholic aid agencies. The Nazis expelled her from the German Writers Association in 1935 because of her Jewish ancestry, and the following year she left Germany, moving to Austria where her mother died in 1938. She later returned to St. Gallen, Switzerland, where she remained and worked for some twenty years, until shortly before her death. In the final months of her life, she returned to Germany and stayed in a nursing home under the care of her daughter Camilla. She died on 6 January 1961 in Ebersberg. Link to Wikipedia biography