Erna "Annette" Eick (13 September 1909 – 25 February 2010) was a Jewish Lesbian author and poet.
Partner Gertrude Klingel
Queer Places:
Sybelstraße 5, 10629 Berlin, Germany
Angeli, 41 Northfields Lane
South, Brixham, Devon
Erna "Annette" Eick (13 September 1909 – 25 February 2010) was a Jewish Lesbian author and poet.
Annette Eick was born 13 September 1909, in Berlin, the daughter of Louis Eick (1877-1943) and Minna Seelig (1888-1943). During the 1920s, a liberal time period in the Weimar republic, Eick wrote poems and short stories for lesbian magazines, including Garçonne.[1] After the Nazis came to power in 1933, she had to give up on journalism and started working as a nanny. In 1938, she was granted a visum to live in the UK and fled to London after surviving an attack by Nazis on the farm she was staying at during the Reichkristallnacht.[2] She escaped, as did her younger brother Horst, who had been sent overseas on the Kindertransport. Their parents were killed in Auschwitz – a subject which Annette would not discuss, or write about. In London, Eick worked as a nanny and housekeeper. In the 1950s she mixed in literary and artistic circles in Hampstead, where she met her partner, Gertrude Klingel. When Trude retired in the 1960s they moved to Brixham in Devon where Annette opened the area's first nursery, which she ran for over 11 years. Eick started writing again. Her collection of poems, Immortal Muse, was published in 1984 and turned into a short film called The Immortal Muse by Jules Hussey in 2005.[3] Eick became known to a wider audience after being featured, alongside five gay men, in the documentary ‘Paragraph 175’ from 2000, which told of their prosecutions under the paragraph 175 which criminalised homosexuality.[4] Most of Eick's work, however, remains unpublished.[5] Trude died in 1989. She died 25 February 2010, in Devon.
My published books:
