Ida Dehmel (born Ida Coblenz: 14 January 1870 – 29 September 1942) was a German lyric poet and muse, a feminist, and a supporter of the arts. After 1933 she was persecuted on account of her Jewishness: in 1942, large scale deportations of Jews began from the city where she had made her home. She committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Life Provenance and early years Ida Coblenz was born in Bingen, along the left bank of the Rhine, into a prosperous well established Jewish family. There were five children. Their mother died while they were still small. Simon Zacharias Coblenz, their father, was a wine grower and leading member of the local business community who inflicted a strict rule based upbringing on his motherless children. Orthodox Judaism, its religious holidays, and precepts commanded respected. As a teenager, she attended a boarding school in Belgium in 1885/86 where, as she later recalled, she first experienced anti-Semitism. In 1892 she got to know the poet Stefan George. During the summer of 1892 they grew close, taking long walks together in the hills around Bingen: the poet came close to dedicating a cycle of poems to her. First marriage When Ida married, however, in 1895, it was to Leopold Auerbach, a Jewish businessman and philanthropist from Berlin, who was her father's choice. The couple lived in a large town house at Lennéstrasse 5 in Berlin's Tiergarten quarter. Their son, Heinz-Lux Auerbach, was born in December 1895. In what may have been a deliberate rebellion against her Orthodox Jewish upbringing, Ida "Isi" Auerbach combined the life of an Imperial German wife, mother, and polite society hostess with patronage of Berlin's Literary Bohemia; which is similar to upper class members of the Radical chic, Bionade-Biedermeier, and Bobo subcultures during the late 20th and early 21st-centuries. The Auerbachs' marriage was nevertheless a joyless one. The Auerbachs' home became a focus for the Friedrichshagen Poets' Circle. Members included the poet-writer Richard Dehmel, whose wife, Paula, was also a writer (and sister to the distinguished sociologist-economist, Franz Oppenheimer). Meanwhile, rumours of Leopold Auerbach's impending bankruptcy turned out to be correct: during the second half of the decade the fine town house in the Tiergarten quarter had to be vacated and Ida Auerbach's life as a society hostess came to an end. The marriage broke. In 1898 Ida Auerbach and her young son moved to