Eva Schmidt-Kolmer (25 June 1913 – 29 August 1991) was an Austrian-German physician, university teacher and social psychologist. After 1949 she became an influential researcher into early childhood in the German Democratic Republic, working at the interface between medicine and pedagogy.
Life Family provenance and early years Eva Kolmer was born in Vienna into a Protestant family of Jewish provenance. Her parents were both members of the Reformed church that traced its inauguration back to Huldrych Zwingli, and they both voted for the Social Democrats. Eva was the eldest of her parents' four children. Walther Kolmer (1879–1931), her father, held a position as "Imperial and Royal Adjunct Professor" in Human Medicine and Biology at the University of Vienna. Eva's father was his parents' only child. During her own childhood Eva spent a lot of time with her paternal grandparents, enjoying access to her grandfather's book collection and able to listen to the "grown-up conversations" when there were guests. Gustav Kolmer, her grandfather, worked as a parliamentary correspondent with the Neue Freie Presse, one of Vienna's leading daily newspapers. Eva's mother, born Lili Erika Pereles (1887–1942), came from a family which had risen to moderate prosperity, owning a series of shoe factories, but she had many cousins and three elder siblings: she appears herself to have grown up in modest circumstances. While her children were small she worked during the afternoons as her husband's secretary. Later, on 17 August 1942, Lili Erika Kolmer was deported to the Maly Trostenets extermination camp near Minsk, and murdered there on 21 August.
The family was a musical one and Eva took piano lessons till she was twelve, after which other interests came to the fore. She grew up and attended the gymnasium (secondary school) in the Döbling quarter of Vienna, on the north side of the city, a short walk beyond the university. She passed her school final exams ("Abitur") in 1930. She was already actively interested in issues of social justice while still at school, and involved with the Young Communists. She remained in Vienna, now as a medical student, between 1931 and 1938, although her student career was not uninterrupted. She had already, when aged just seventeen, joined the Communist Party in September 1930. There are indications that in 1930, it was in order to demonstrate solidarity with the working class that she took a job in a light bulb factory, but she soon moved on, to work as a research assistant at the bacteriological institute of the Vienna University Institute for Experimental Pathology. Her father's death, from a heart attack in 1931, left her widowed mother with four children to support on a small pension, and from 1931, in parallel with her university studies, Kolmer was earning money by undertaking cancer research on behalf of the "Pearson Research Foundation" She had already produced her first piece of published research, an article entitled "A specific detection of cadmium" ("Ein spezifischer Nachweis des Cadmiums"), jointly with F.Pavelka, in 1930.
Student years During her student years Kolmer, while still active as a Communist Party member, also participated in the activities of the Socialist Students Association ("Verband Sozialistischer StudentInnen Österreichs" / VSStÖ). The 1933 Nazi take-over in Germany had its counterpart in neighbouring Austria, where between 1932 and 1934 Chancellor Dolfuss systematically transformed the country into a one-party dictatorship. The Communist Party was outlawed in May 1933. Kolmer persisted with her political activism, however: she was arrested in August 1934 and held by the authorities for several months. Among her mother's wider family, the arrest drew attention to Eva's Communist activism, and she found herself marked out as something of a "black sheep". Her mother's elder sister, Marie, lived at this time in Berlin and was married to a director of "British Petrol". Relations between the sisters and their respective families were now severed. At the university she passed the exams for the first stage of her degree in 1935, but Prof. Freund, the head of the university institute at which she was studying, warned her not to persist with her political activities.
The Pearson foundation which was funding her research (and, indirectly, her university studies) sent Kolmer to work for a period in a Swiss cancer sanatorium. She was able to save some money from this work which funded further travel. However, after briefly backing away from her political activities she resumed "semi-legal work" on behalf of the party in Women's Associations and Consumer Co-operatives. She undertook her first trip to England at the end of 1935. In 1936 she began a clinical internship but also intensified her political activism. That led to a decline in her academic results. For the first time, she failed an exam, which led to another difficult conversation with Prof. Freund at the institute. It took place in the wake of a period working at the "London Hospital", which had been intended to create awareness for a cancer diagnosis method that Freund had developed: that exercise had not been a success. There was also conflict involving "Mr. Pearson" resulting from awareness of Kolmer's communist activities. The Pearson institute was the institute's principal funder. Prof. Freund told her that as an "incorrigible communist" she would have to abandon her course.
English exile In March 1938 Austria was incorporated into Germany, creating a "Greater Germany", albeit under circumstances that those who had advocated the arrangement when German unification had risen up the agenda during the previous century could not have foreseen. On account both of her Jewish provenance and of her record of left-wing political activism, Kolmer could not expect an easy life in a state controlled by the Nazis. The Pearson foundation which had sponsored her research earlier in the decade was based in England, and her own travels had enabled her to establish further contacts in London. By now she had also mastered the English language. Following the advice of party comrades she emigrated, leaving Vienna on 16 March 1938 with a train ticket that took her to Zürich, from where she went on via Paris (where she encountered "passport problems"), arriving in London on 24 March 1938. She arrived, one of the first of a wave of political exiles from Austria, with a British pound in her handbag and, as she later wrote, no idea that she was not to set foot in her native land for another seven years. An "invitation letter" from an English friend had persuaded the authorities to let her into the country, and supported a three-month visitor's permit, but she had no long term visa and no permission to obtain work. The invitation letter had been provided by Wilson Harris, a prominent journalist and the editor of The Spectator whom she had met the previous year while visiting London on a journalistic assignment of her own, on behalf of the "Wiener Wirtschaftswoche". The Spectators traditionalist conservatism reflected its editor's background, and it is hard to have seen that there can have been much meeting of minds between Kolmer and Harris on political matters. Harris was, as it turned out, one of several contacts in the English establishment whom she had been able to cultivate during her visits to London during the 1930s. Others included the Liberal politician, Geoffrey Mander who, like Wilson, took a particular interest in Austria, along with the formidable feminist campaigner Margery Corbett Ashby and the Duchess of Atholl, whom Kolmer later described as "highly prominent but completely mad".
In due course the administrative issues began to be resolved and she obtained laboratory work with her former sponsors at the Pearson Organisation. Fairly soon she was dropped by Pearson "on political grounds", however. She was able to stay with Margery Corbett Ashby for her first month in England. During this time she found time to produce a short report, describing the dramatic events of March 1938 in Austria. Wilson Harris provided an introduction to the London publisher, Michael Joseph: she published her account under the title "Austria Still Lives" in London in May 1938 under the pseudonym "Mitzi Hartmann". The fifty pounds she received for the little book enabled her to repay a debt and live on the balance for a short time. She also found casual secretarial and journalistic work. She was particularly appreciative of the learning opportunities provided by a stint working at "The Peckham Pioneer Healther Centre".
In September 1938 Kolmer was a co-founder, with Ruth Zerner, of the non-party-political "Council of Austrians in Great Britain" In March 1939 she was appointed general secretary of the "Austrian Centre" in London, an appointment which required her to obtain permission from the British Interior Ministry ("Home Office"), and for which she received a payment of two pounds per week. By this time, as more victims of race-based or political persecution attempted to gain admittance from central Europe to England she had, in the words of one source, "become well established in Austrian refugee relief work". In September 1939 the British government declared war on Germany, following the simultaneous invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. It would take several more months before the war had a serious impact on most people's daily lives in London, and in the meantime, during the nervous months of uncertainty at the end of 1939, Eva Kolmer married Jakob Wolloch, a childhood friend who was now, like her an Austrian refugee from political persecution, living in London.
One practical step the government could take on the home front, as it waited to find out what war would involve, was to dust down a regulation providing for the arrest and detention of enemy aliens. While the armies of Germany and the Soviet Union concentrated on the carve up of Poland, the significance of this remained unclear, but once France was invaded, in May 1940, the British government decided that thousands of people who had fled from the Nazis during the previous few years because they were persecuted on account of their Jewishness and/or their political activities, represented a threat. Mass arrests took place. Eva Kolmer, well connected with the British establishment, found herself classified as "an official of a refugee organisation", and so she was not interned. She was indeed permitted to visit Austrian internees in the camps to which they had been consigned by the British authorities. Jakob Wolloch, her new husband, was not so lucky and she was obliged to lobby extensively to try and hasten his release, at the same time using all her contacts to lobby more widely against the policy of arresting political refugees. Sources are silent about the effectiveness of her campaigning on her husband's behalf. Within a year or two the British government had changed its mind about the problem of the enemy aliens, and most were quietly released, The Wolloch marriage quickly broke apart, ending in divorce. The British security services were aware of Eva Wolloch's political sympathies and aware of concerns within the political establishment that known communists among the German and Austrian refugees might make common cause with Britain's home-grown communists, to the detriment of British interests. They certainly took a close interest in her activities while she was in England, although the practical impact on her of British security services' attentions is not clear.