PEEBLES PROFILES
EPISODE 193
Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff
Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff was born in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam on June 17, 1877. She was the daughter of Major General Heinrich Wilhelm Kurt von Knobelsdorff and Marie Elizabeth Fancis Gertrud Dyhrenfurth.
Young Elisabeth received an elite education: attending an English boarding school and studying Latin and mathematics before going on to a conservatory. She completed her Abitur at the Realgymnasium in Munich in 1906.
The next year, Elisabeth began studying architecture at the Königlich Technische Hochschule zu Berlin. Initially, she was a guest auditor, as it was not possible for women to enroll as students at that time. Elisabeth started working in the Charlottenburg office of Emilie Winkelmann, Germany’s first female architect.
However in 1909, a ministerial decree allowed the admission of women at universities within the Kingdom of Prussia. Elisabeth finished her studies in 1911, becoming “the first woman to achieve the title of Diplomingenieur as an architect”.
In 1912, Elisabeth became the first female member of the Association of Architects and Engineers (AIV) in Berlin. She took part in “The Woman in Home and Work”, an exhibition and showcase of the women’s movement. The organizers included her aunt Gertrud Dyrenfurth, who lived on the family estate in the Silesian village of Jakobsdorf near Breslau. In 1915, Elisabeth designed a community center in Jakobsdorf. It was the village’s social hub for the next thirty years…
During the Great War, Elisabeth was a military architect with the rank of lieutenant, She was in charge of the construction of the military infrastructure in Döberitz near Potsdam. Among the buildings she constructed were the “Knobelsdorff barracks”, which were laid out on a triangular groundplan. Later on, Elisabeth was employed by the German Army High Command to construct military buildings in occupied Belgium.
The period from 1914 to 1924 was not a good one for civil construction, as both the war and inflation reduced the role of the architect. Nevertheless, Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff succeeded in being the first architect for the provincial government in Potsdam. In 1921, she passed the state examination for the building authority. Again, Elisabeth was appointed as the first female master builder for the German government. She also designed monuments to those killed in action during the Great War.
In 1922, Elisabeth married Kurt Wilhelm Viktor von Tippelskirch, a legation manager in the German Foreign Office. She was now regarded officially as a ”provided for married woman”. As a result, Elisabeth was released from her civil service contract the following year.
Elisabeth then worked freelance as an architect in Berlin-Charlottenburg. In 1927, Kurt von Tippelskirch was named consul in Boston, Massachusetts… and Elisabeth accompanied her husband to the United States.
Three years later, Elisabeth took part in an exhibition entitled “Die Gestaltende Frau” (“The Creative Woman”), organized in Berlin by the German association of women citizens. Kurt von Tippelskirch was then recalled to Germany in 1938. The couple withdrew to the estate at Jakobsdorf in Silesia.
As the Second World War drew to a close in 1945, a tragic fate befell the couple. Kurt von Tippelskirch was deported to Siberia where he eventually died. The estate at Jakobsdorf was lost to the Soviets, and Elisabeth was expelled from Silesia. She passed her final years in a home for women in Bassum near Bremen.
Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff continued to dedicate herself to cultural projects. She died largely forgotten on April 20, 1959 at the age of eighty-one. Her grave remained in the Bassum cemetery for another thirty years.