Source Documents
Record | Events | Title | Source Website | Type | Created | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Forces War Records | Image | 13 Aug 2017 | ||||
| Birth, Custom, Death, People | US, Social Security Death Index |  Forces War Records | Index Record | 3 Sept 2008 |
Source URLs
URL | Events | Description | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enter a title | Margarethe Rie Nunberg was born in Vienna on March 25th in 1899 and died on July 15th, 1986 in New York City. She was the second child and first daughter of Melanie Bondy Rie, an artist of works on paper, and Oscar Rie, a pediatrician whose patients included the children of Sigmund and Martha Bernays Freud. Her older brother was Norbert, and her younger sister was Marianne Rie Kris. Other family members included the industrialist and art collector Oscar Bondy and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. A number of her other relatives had their portraits painted by Gustav Klimt, a close family friend; and she was particularly overjoyed the day the portrait of her cousin Serena Pulitzer Lederer was re-hung in the galleries of the Metropolitan in 1985. Prior to attending the University of Vienna, Margarethe was educated at home by private tutors and was fully tri-lingual in German, French and English. After completing her university studies in linguistics, she became a well-received actress based in Berlin while touring throughout Germany. She shared an acting coach with Marlene Dietrich. She left her first career when she married Hermann Nunberg in the late 1920s. He was a psychoanalyst in Freud’s circle, serving as secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute. When the trustees of what was then known as the Mental Hygiene Institute in Philadelphia, now part of the University of Pennsylvania medical school, summoned Freud in 1930 to introduce psychoanalysis to American medicine, he referred Nunberg to them instead. The appointment lasted two years; and rather than return to Europe and what they knew to be the deeply entrenched anti-Semitism of Vienna–“Ah, that silver soul of Vienna,” Margarethe recalled–the couple settled in New York City in 1933. Over the course of the next four decades, Margarethe raised two children, a daughter Mena and son Henry, while she became a leading editor and translator of psychoanalytic works. Among them were three volumes of the Proceedings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and numerous scholarly papers. She attended Hunter College during the 1950s, earning her second degree in linguistics. Her transcript contained nothing but A’s and A+’s. Following the death of her husband in 1970, she began a third career, instructing opera singers in the nuances of German, often working in collaboration with the voice coach Marinka Gurewich. Among her better-known students were Kathleen Battle, Martina Arroyo and Grace Bumbry, but there were many others, all deeply devoted to her. Margarethe, though, claimed that her greatest achievement and most abiding joy was a circle of new friends, all at least a half century younger than she, whom she began accruing several years after her husband’s death. She was a greatly beloved friend and mentor to them all. She traveled extensively with one of them, and spent her last three Februarys and two Augusts in San Francisco at his home. In fact, she was to have departed on July 17th, two days after her death, for six weeks there. | ||
| A Brief Summary of Her Life |
Other Sources
Source | Events | |
|---|---|---|
David Kusin | Death, People |