Berlin-Pankow on the north side of town. She was now living close to Richard and Paula Dehmel who had become close friends. Fairly quickly the relationship between the three of them mutated into what amounted to an informal three way marriage. That arrangement proved brittle, but according to one source the three of them lived virtually together till April 1899, occupying two adjacent houses in what later became Parkstraße (Park Street). Second marriage Between the summer of 1899 and the end of 1900 Richard Dehmal and Ida travelled together. They went first to Munich and then undertook an extensive tour of Greece and Italy. On the way back they stopped off at Sirmione at the Italian end of Lake Garda. They would have stayed there longer, but Ida fell ill with Typhus and the local doctor recommended that she return to Germany to convalesce. They moved north to Heidelberg where their friend Alfred Mombert lived. Other neighbours were Peter and Lily Behrens. Ida's elder sister, Alice Bensheimer, lived in the Mannheim conurbation nearby. Heidelberg was also within easy reach by train of the Mathildenhöhe Artists' Colony at Darmstadt. There was never any shortage of friends, but Ida Dehmel's Orthodox Jewish kinsfolk were nevertheless underwhelmed by her divorce from Auerbach and her cohabitation with the non-Jewish Dehmel, which may explain why, when in October 1901 they finally got round to marrying each other, they went to Bloomsbury, London in England to do so. A few years later the couple's friend, the Berlin artist Julie Wolfthorn, prepared two oil-paint portraits of the Dehmels, which were exhibited in 1906 at the third exhibition of the German Artists' Association, held in 1906 at the Grand Ducal Museum, Weimar. After they married they settled not in Heidelberg but, further away from the disapproval of both their families, in Hamburg. Unable to know the nightmarish horrors that the new century would bring to Europe and indeed to her own family, Ida wrote of this time that she had wanted to create a new heaven and a new earth. ("Ich möchte einen neuen Himmel kreieren und eine neue Erde."). Together the Dehmels traveled frequently to lectures and readings. Favourite destinations included Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Leipzig and Dresden. It is indeed not immediately clear from sources that during the first few years of the twentieth century they saw Hamburg as their permanent home. One place where they spent