Regina Ullmann
Regina Ullmann (1884–1961), Writer

Regina Ullmann was born on December 14, 1884 in St. Gallen and descended from a Hohenems family of doctors and rabbis. Her father, still born in Vorarlberg, after many years in the USA, where he fought as a soldier in the American Civil War, finally settled in St. Gallen as an embroidery merchant – and died soon after the birth of his daughter. In 1902 mother and daughter moved to Munich and Regina Ullmann made her first steps in literature. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of her patrons. In 1907 her first dramatic poem, “Die Feldpredigt”, was published. 1910 followed “Von der Erde des Lebens. Poems in Prose” followed. But her life did not turn out as she had longed for. Depression prevented her from writing. Two illegitimate children with the economist Hanns Dorn and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, Gerda and Camilla, she had to put in care. Also her conversion to Catholicism in 1911 brought no peace to her life. Persecuted by the Nazis as a Jew and excluded from the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller in 1936, she returned to St. Gallen in 1938 via several stations in Austria, Italy and Switzerland, where she finally lived in a Catholic nursing home until shortly before her death. In St. Gallen she finally found recognition as a writer – albeit late – and in 1954 she received the city’s cultural prize. The regained contact with her daughters meant a lot to her. On January 6, 1961 she died in the care of her daughter Camilla in Ebersberg.