Liebe Leser,
eine sehr interessante Familiengeschichte,
es kommt fast alles vor, sowohl Kofessionen, wie Familiennamen und Orte
Namen: die hier erwähnt sind: Spi(e)ro, Gova
Sabine geboren außerhalb von Hamburg
Orte: Danzig, Hamburg, New York
wer weiß hierzu was, wer kann hier recherchieren, insbesondere wo diese Sabine geboren ist, muß
so 1902 gewesen sein
Danke + Grüsse
Reinhard donder
Als ich den Namen Spiero sah, musste ich an eine Sabine Spiero denken,
Tochter von Heinrich Spiero, die ich in den ‘60er Jahren gut kannte. Sie
war Professorin für Kunstgeschichte an einem kleinen College in der Nähe
von New York. Ich schliesse hier einige Zeilen an, die ich vor Jahren
über sie geschrieben habe (leider auf Englisch).. Eine äusserst
interessante Könisberger Familie! John Tagliabue
Sabine Gova, a petite, slender woman in her sixties, was the head of the
Art History Department at St. Peter’s College, today university, in New
Jersey. Born in 1906 outside Hamburg, Germany, her name at birth was Sabine
Spiero. Her father, Heinrich Spiero, was a distinguished writer and
literary scholar. He and her mother, Olga Jolowicz, were both of Jewish
families from Königsberg, though her father had converted to Protestantism
in his youth. Sabine, the eldest of their four daughters, had been
christened and raised a Christian. When the Nazis came to power, her father
led for a while an organization known as the Paulus-Bund, named for St.
Paul, one of the earliest converts from Judaism, that sought unsuccessfully
to secure the rights of Jews in Nazi Germany who had converted to
Christianity.
Dr. Gova had been a brilliant student of art history in pre-Nazi
Germany. In 1931, when she was 25, she married an up-and-coming German
artist named Hermann Gowa. With the arrival of the Nazis in 1933, she and
her husband, who was also Jewish, fled to France, where sometime after 1934
their marriage ended in divorce. Sabine stayed in Paris through the 1930s,
earning a living by giving guided tours, writing, and taking an active part
in German émigré activities, In 1938 she joined other exiled German artists
and art historians to found the Freier Künstlerbund, or Free Association of
Artists, opposed to Nazism.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, Sabine was arrested as a German
national and interned in the infamous camp at Gurs, in southern France.
With the help of French guards, she managed to escape and made her way to
Casablanca. In 1941, thanks to a sister who had settled in New York, she
obtained a visa for the United States. In New York, she earned a living
translating and doing various menial jobs, until in the mid-1950s she began
writing on art history for the Fordham University radio station. That was a
short step from a job lecturing on art history at Fordham, and from there,
in 1961, to becoming chair of a newly formed Art History Department at St.
Peter’s.
Dr. Gova, as I got to know her, was a remarkable woman, with an
extraordinary will to live and appreciate life. As students, we had heard
that in America she had used the name Gova, rather than Spiero, formed from
the English and French words to go, or to move on – ‘’go’’ and ‘’va.’’ That
certainly summed up her determined character. (I now think, however, though
I never asked her about it, that she simply resumed using her married name,
Gowa, anglicizing it by changing the w to a v.)
Despite her academic success in the United States, Dr, Gova never
felt at home there. As early as 1962, she told a German interviewer: ‘’I
will never be at home in America. I view my life in America as a marriage
of convenience, entered into late in life.’’ Not long after 1967, she left
the United States to return to France, a place she dearly loved, where she
died on March 23, 2000, at 98 years of age.