Alice Rühle-Gerstel

Who is Alice Rühle-Gerstel?

Alice Rühle-Gerstel was a German-Jewish writer, feminist, and psychologist.

Alice Gerstel attended a girls' boarding school in Dresden, then the lyceum and the German-language teacher-training college in Prague.

She was a nurse in the First World War. From 1917 to 1921 she studied literature and philosophy in Prague and Munich. In 1921 she completed a doctorate on Friedrich Schlegel. In the same year she married Otto Rühle, a Left-communist student of Alfred Adler, and together with Grete Fantl founded the Marxist Individual-psychological Study Association of Dresden.

In 1924 she co-founded the publisher "Am Ufer ändern - Dresden-Buchholz-Friedewald" and produced monthly articles defending socialist education.

Alice Rühle-Gerstel struck up a great friendship with Milena Jesenská. As a socialist, she was no longer safe at the beginning of Nazi rule in Germany, so in 1932 she returned to her native city of Prague. From 1933 she worked on the children's supplement of the Prager Tagblatt. Her search for identity here is described in the autobiographical novel "Der Umbruch oder die Freiheit und Hanna". But she left Prague after a few years and 1936 was followed her husband to Mexico, who had family there. In Mexico, she worked as a translator in a government office and as a trade journalist. Despite friendships with Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico, she never felt comfortable there, and ended up committing suicide on the day of the death of her husband in June 1943.