Alice Rühle-Gerstel

Alice Rühle-Gerstel (24 March 1894 – 24 June 1943) 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 in 1936, 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. Freud und Adler. Elementare Einführung in Psychoanalyse und Individualpsychologie. Dresden 1924 Der Weg zum Wir. Versuch einer Verbindung von Marxismus und Individualpsychologie. Dresden 1927, Nachdruck München 1980 Das Frauenproblem der Gegenwart – Eine psychologische Bilanz. Leipzig 1932, Nachdruck unter dem Titel Die Frau und der Kapitalismus. Frankfurt/Main 1973 (darin das Zitat: "Die ganze Welt, wie sie heute ist, ist Männerwelt") Der Umbruch oder Hanna und die Freiheit, 1984 (posthumous). Das proletarische Kind.