Mom's Biography
There are links at the top which will take you to some of Mom's art.
To the right, you see my mother the day after her 83rd birthday, when I interviewed her for some of the material on this site. She's standing in front of a picnic scene that her mother painted in Los Angeles in the 1960's.
Mom was born in Berlin in 1921. Both her parents were artists.
Her father Martin Ideler was the son of the Kaiser's fruitmonger, so he grew up with court gossip, all the fruit he could eat, and a sense of privilege. When he died in Los Angeles in relative poverty, he left a drawer full of silk shirts and ties.
Hearing about court scandals convinced him that royalty was just people. He became a bohemian, sort of like the hippies of the 1960's, studying art with Lowis Corinth and Mewes. They believed that the old feudal structure was decadent and sated with the blood of the people. The old feudal structure drafted the young artist, however, and he served in World War I in an emergency battalion. When battles went badly for the Germans, my grandfather's battalion was called in. Mom said, "He saw every hopeless battle; the Somme, Verdun. In Italy, of the 500 men with him, only he and one other survived. He was shell shocked and had cholera twice and couldn't keep food down or walk calmly past groups of trees for the rest of his life.
He had a saying, 'worse than Verdun it can never be,' that's what he said when he was trying to cheer himself up." Later, he painted pastorals from the sketches he made in France; the apple trees were blooming and that's what he wanted to bring home from battle.
After the war, through the equivalent of the GI bill, Martin studied to be a teacher. Eventually he became one of the co-ordinators of art education for the Berlin public schools, but he never got promotions because he refused to become a Nazi party member. After the war, he worked at an art college in Hamburg until he retired in Los Angeles.
You can see a few of his paintings here.
Mom's mother, Leonie von Wiese und Kaiserswaldau grew up as a Prussian aristocrat. Her father was some kind of baron with responsibilities for a chunk of land, but my grandmother was a late child and her father was retired in Berlin by the time she was a teenager. Her sister Rose wanted to become a social worker, a shocking career for a nicely bred girl. Rose and her daughter eventually were instrumental in forming kindergartens instead of the traditional draconian daycares that were available for the children of war widows in Berlin. Leonie, the spoiled younger one, studied art and married Martin.
Leonie was probably the more talented of the two. She had flair and passion. The watercolors which survive were done on the ridiculous yellowing crumbly paper available to her in a war-ridden country, but they fairly jump off the page.
However, she quickly became the mother of three. Mom says she suspects that her parents had no clue about birth control until their third.
The young couple had to move in with Grandmother von Wiese because of their many children and Martin's poorly paying job. It was a duplex, and Mom loved it. Her grandmother missed the old days, before the trillion percent inflation of the early 1920's, when they lost all their cash. But they still had the linens and chunky silverware and all the artifacts of old wealth. (These all burned during World War II, except for a small collection of photos which my grandmother took with her to the bomb shelter.)
Mom's mother was a kindly but scatterbrained woman, who left paintbrushes to harden and burned the soup. She suffered from SAD, and would weep in the closet in the dead of winter. She played Chopin on the piano, and one of Mom's memories of her is watching her hairpins gradually come loose from her bun as she played a passionate piece.
Mom's father, like any proper German professional, worked. He was seldom home, but when he was, he often wore suit and tie there, too. However, he was cuddly. Mom remembers the three of them draped around on his lap all the time when she was growing up, and I remember the two of them hugging affectionately when I was little. There's a story about him sitting in a cold bathtub with his two-year-old son Axel when he had diptheria. Axel's fever was dangerously high, and Martin sat with him in the tub, crooning to him until he either pulled through or died. He lived.
Germany was punished for its role in starting World War I, and so there was poverty and starvation everywhere. The milk cows had gone as reparations to France, so my grandmother and her mother kept a goat for the toddlers. Later, they tried to raise rabbits for meat but they cried when they tried to slaughter the animals. Starvation was preferable.
Mom's brother Axel was a scientist. He raised and trained field mice from the empty lot across the street, built a mixer out of a phonograph turntable, and generally got things done. Eventually, he went through medical school and became a surgeon. In World War II, his job was to certify that men were fit for battle again, even if they weren't. He refused to do that, and was put in the signal corps. Two weeks before the end of the war he was killed. My mother wondered if grief would kill her mother, but it didn't; she lived to follow her husband to retirement in Los Angeles.
Mom's sister Suzanne had a heart condition, and so didn't get all the formal education that Mom did. She was a superb artist, and she and Mom were inseperable. Mom says she took on the protector role. After the war as refugees, they roomed together, and now they are still the best of friends.
There were only a few subjects that one was allowed to study during the war years; otherwise one had to work for the war effort. As a pacifist, Mom didn't want to do that, so she just kept going to school. Her first love was art, which she was able to pursue by studying to become a teacher.
She started in Berlin, but going to school was hazardous because of the bombing. To go to class, you had to participate in bucket brigades that helped put out fires in the University. She also volunteered as a Red Cross aide, and still gets nightmares because of the horrors she saw doing that.
Eventually, she was allowed to transfer to the University of Freiburg, where she was instantly recognizable as a Berliner because of her jaundice from breathing burning asphalt all the time. There, the students daringly spoke French to indicate their anti-Nazi sentiments. After a semester there, the town was bombed, the University was closed, and she transfered to the University of Wurzburg.
Wurzburg was a beautiful town and she loved it. One day, a dentist who was in the same apartment building where Mom and her sister Suzanne were living told them that he was leaving town. One of his patients, a high-up Nazi, had told him that all the Nazi bigwigs were leaving. He didn't know why, but he told the sisters that he was leaving and they probably should too.
It was near Easter vacation, so they packed some clothes and books and bicycled out of town to visit an acquaintance in Bad Mergentheim, a medieval village several miles away. Then Wurzburg was firebombed and it rained ashes for three days. "Some of those ashes were my friends," said Mom. "I understand battles, that's where men do their rooster thing off by themselves. But I don't understand burning civilians to death, students and babies and everyone."
Everyone was required to put a certain amount of refugees up, and their acquaintance was glad that at least she knew Mom and my aunt. They stayed there during the aftermath of the war.
Both sisters got jobs with the American Occupation Army, and moonlighted as portrait painters. Photographic equipment was not available yet, and so officers could send portraits that Mom or Suzanne painted of them. Mom ran an arts-and-crafts school for local children, and made stunning pen-and-ink illustrations of poems and local folk tales.
Eventually, Suzanne married Jim, whom you see on the right, and moved to Los Angeles with him. Mom wanted a normal life as well. One of the American soldiers said, "Under the khaki, we are civilians." She wanted to live in a country where that was possible.
She was sponsered by Arnold Haase, a Jewish refugee who had been a student of her father's and a close family friend. Arnold showed her New York City, and if it weren't for her sister in Los Angeles, Mom would have settled there.
But, she moved to LA. There, she got a job working at Disney on (I think) Snow White. She lied to them; told them that she had far less art education than she really did, so that she could land the job. Later, she worked for an independent agency, Betty something.
At a Latin American dance, Mom met my dad. He was Czech, but as a Mischling, had to spend the war in Bolivia. Once he got over the fact that Mom was German, they hit it off. Mom wrote to her father that she was a bit dubious about Dad because he was a businessman instead of an artist. Martin wrote back, "If you love him, marry him. With a businessman, you'll never starve."
My parents settled in Los Angeles and had three children, on purpose, almost at once. Mom settled into the perfect life; a dachshund (I later visited Prague and found that dachshunds are de rigeur for middle-class Czechs), a cat, three girls, a mortgage, PTA duties, and a used pink station wagon. Pictures of her from that time show her beaming with happiness.
The latter half of Mom's life was and is a rich one, but she concentrated her artistic energies on family rather than canvas.