Clever, charming, utterly devoted to her students but also tough, intense, even "a holy terror." Those who knew and loved her use these words to describe Hilde Cohn, who taught German language and literature at Swarthmore for more than 25 years.

Cohn was born in Görlitz, a town on the German-Polish border. Her childhood visits to the opera in nearby Dresden instilled a lifelong love of the art, and after studying literature and fine arts, she earned a doctorate magna cum laude from the University of Heidelberg in 1933.

As a young woman, Cohn wrote essays for Jewish youth organizations and cultural articles for Berlin’s Vossische Zeitung. She also published a study on the Jewish woman in medieval Germany, taught German Jewish children in a Florentine boarding school, and worked as a librarian at the American Academy in Rome.

But life as she knew it did not last. Cohn was living with her family when her father was first arrested around 1935 (when her sister and brother-in-law left Germany for Italy, later settling in the United States) and taken into "protective custody." In a 1994 interview, she said: "To us, that is not a good term." He was released soon after, but it was a sign of the worst still to come.

In 1937, Cohn became the first in her family to come to America. She did so on the advice of Hertha Kraus, a member of Bryn Mawr College’s social work faculty and also a Jewish refugee. By Cohn’s count, Kraus helped "hundreds of people like me." In her case, Kraus encouraged her to teach German, saying she would not know much about her language until she did. When a position to teach introductory German opened at Bryn Mawr, she took it. More than 50 years later, she still had the pay stub (for $300) for her first American job.

But Cohn’s parents had remained in Germany. Soon after arriving in the United States, she received word that her father had died—or was killed (she never learned the details)—in Buchenwald. Cohn’s mother managed to escape on the last boat to Italy and followed Cohn to the United States. The Nazis later used her family’s home, which her father had built, for offices.

Cohn taught at Bryn Mawr for 10 years before joining Swarthmore’s German Department in 1948. At Swarthmore, Cohn mentored the German club and developed a strong following among her students. "She wanted her students to succeed and would give them as much time as was needed," says Betty-Barbara Smart, a longtime friend. "She loved her subject and wanted them to love it, too."

Cohn could also be serious, almost to a fault. "She saw no reason why I—an American who came to German at 20—didn’t read [Thomas] Mann in the original German," Smart laughs.

After she retired in 1975, Cohn maintained a steady presence in Swarthmore by attending lectures and classes on campus and volunteering in the town’s library. "She thought of her life as a continuing intellectual journey," says Thompson Bradley, professor emeritus of Russian. "That kept her intellectually young."

Cohn is remembered for her tremendous passion for art and music, her well-cut suits, and her love of the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, an Austrian poet, dramatist, and essayist. Her friends could expect a poem in English and German on their birthdays. For this woman who never married and lived alone much of her adult life, these relationships meant the world.

 

Additional source: Nancy Hope Wilson's [’69] 1994 audio interview with Dr. Cohn. Wilson is the author of Flapjack Waltzes (1998), based, in part, on their friendship.

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