Aline Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert
Aline Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert née de Saint-Hubert (22 August 1874 – 20 January 1947) was a Luxembourg women's rights campaigner, socialite, philanthropist. Mayrisch established many non-governmental organisations and was President of the Luxembourg Red Cross. She married Émile Mayrisch.
Life
Saint-Hubert was the daughter of Xavier de Saint-Hubert, and sister of Jeanne de Saint-Hubert, who had married
The first of many organisations that she set up was the '
The league's main purposes was to seek the establishment of public girls' schools, which gained momentum with the League's creation of the associated Association for the Creation of a School for Young Girls. This campaign achieved success in 1911 when the
She was active in work for charitable organisations such as the Luxembourgish League against Tuberculosis, and the Luxembourgish Red Cross, as well as advocating for the professionalisation of social work.[2]
On the outbreak of the
She and her husband moved to Colpach in 1920, and after the war they received many German and French intellectuals here under the name of Cercle de Colpach, such as Paul Claudel, Jean Guéhenno, Jacques Rivière, Karl Jaspers, Bernard Groethuysen, André Gide, Jean Schlumberger, Ernst Robert Curtius, Annette Kolb and Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. They turned their old house in Dudelange into a home for children, the Fondation Kreuzberg.
During World War II, she lived in Cabris in the south of France.[2]
Art and literature
Aline Mayrisch had a great interest in arts and literature and saw herself as a mediator between the German and French cultural worlds. From 1898, she published articles on German painters and literary criticisms, amongst others on
In 1914, she accompanied André Gide and Henri Ghéon to Turkey and in 1927, she travelled to the Gironde and the Limousin with Ernst Robert Curtius. In Colpach Castle, she arranged Franco-German encounters at which André Gide could meet Walther Rathenau and Ernst Robert Curtius. Aline Mayrisch also introduced André Gide to the texts of Rainer Maria Rilke, and in publishing an article on Rilke in the Nouvelle Revue Française, she helped find a French public for the German writer. It was in this same review that she published articles on the intellectual situation in Germany after the First World War, as well as her autobiographical travel account Paysages de la trentième année, which, starting in the island sceneries of Corsica and Iceland, evoked the confrontation with emptiness, absurdity and nothingness.[2]
Her unfinished novel Andrée Reimenkampf has not been preserved for posterity. In collaboration with Marie Delcourt and Bernhard Groethuysen, Aline Mayrisch also translated the sermons of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, L'enfant qui s'accuse by Jean Schlumberger and Le mythe de Sisyphe. Essai sur l'absurde by Albert Camus. In the 1930s, Aline Mayrisch financially supported the exile publication Maß und Wert, edited by Thomas Mann. The following works were dedicated to Aline Mayrisch: Das literarische Frankreich von Heute by Frantz Clément, Les Cahiers de la Petite Dame by Marie van Rysselberghe and La vie d'Euripide by Marie Delcourt.[2]
Legacy
The Lycée Aline Mayrisch, open in 2001 in Luxembourg City, the city in which she was born, is named after her.
Footnotes
References
- Mersch, Jules (1963). "Aline Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert". In Mersch, Jules (ed.). Biographie nationale du pays de Luxembourg (in French). Luxembourg City: Victor Buck. Retrieved 30 November 2008.