Ida Friederike Görres

Who was Ida Friederike Görres?

Ida Friederike Görres, born Elisabeth Friederike, Reichsgräfin Coudenhove-Kalergi, was an Austrian writer. From the Coudenhove-Kalergi family, she was the daughter, one of seven children, of Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Japanese wife Mitsuko Aoyama.

After her father's early death, she was brought up in his Bohemian home, Schloss Ronsperg, in accordance with the Anglophile ideas of the time, and so, in view of the fact that her mother was an invalid, doubly in the hands of nurses and governesses. A convent education led to the Mary Ward Institute in St. Pölten, near Vienna, and Countess Ida entered a novitiate in 1923. Doubting her vocation, she took up lay work and was soon deeply involved in the German Youth Movement. She graduated from the Social Women's School in Freiburg where she studied church history. In 1928, she went as a youth ministry secretary for girls to Dresden and worked in Catholic education. In 1935, she married the German engineer Carl-Josef Görres in Leipzig. She continued with her Youth Movement activities until the Second World War strangled most of these activities.