Gertrud Elisabeth Mertens-Körber was born in Wrocław (Prussia) on June 28, 1883, the eldest child of Elisabeth Broackhaus and Willibald Körber (27/05/1854 - 1/06/1920). The son of the lichenologist Wilhelm Körber (1818-1885), Willibald Körber was a high school professor in Wrocław and a scholar of classical philology. Elisabeth Broackhaus’ family was involved in the world of publishing (her father was the manager of the W.G. Korn bookstore in Wrocław). On May 26, 1888 their second child, Rudolf, was born; following in the footsteps of his paternal grandfather, Rudolf dedicated himself to botanical studies. He lost his life in March 1915 as a soldier in the Deutsches Heer during World War I.

Right from an early age, Gertrud Körber revealed a remarkable aptitude for music, which became the focus of her education and future professional life. She began studying piano with Max Auerbach (1872-1965) when she was six; in 1893, she became a student at the prestigious “Santa Maria Magdalena” lower secondary school in Wrocław. She continued her musical studies in Berlin, where, between 1900 and 1903, she attended courses in singing, piano, and composition at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts). One of her professors was the Austrian singer Anna Schultzen von Asten (1848-1903), a further confirmation of the high level of her musical education. 

After receiving her degree, Gertrud Körber returned to Wrocław, where she began to frequent the city’s artistic and musical milieu. She met her future husband, Viktor Emmanuel Mertens (09/03/1875 - 12/07/1974), through her friend Johann Freiherr von Mikulicz-Radecki (1850-1905), an Austrian doctor and musicologist. Mertens, who was from Riga, was a surgeon; after completing his studies in Germany (Königsberg and Berlin), he moved to Wrocław in 1901 to work at the university hospital, where Mikulicz-Radecki was the chief physician of the surgical ward. Viktor and Gertrud married in 1907 and moved to Hindenburg (today, Zabrze, near Katowice), where Gertrud taught music and Viktor was the chief physician of the hospital. Then, in 1918, they moved to Munich; their apartment was located at Schönfeldstraße 10, in one of the most central neighborhoods of the city. 

During the 1920s and ‘30s, the two consolidated their respective careers, establishing themselves as key exponents of Munich’s upper middle class and its intellectual circles, in particular the one that revolved around the Catholic magazine Hochland (founded in Munich in 1903 by Carl Muth). Viktor became the editor of the Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift (“Munich Medical Weekly Magazine”) and, thanks to his groundbreaking research, he became a world-class leader in cancer studies. Gertrud was a protagonist in the artistic-musical world, in Bavaria and Europe. She forged professional ties and became friends with people such as the musician Anna Barbara Speckner (1902-1995), the Greek philosopher and musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades (1907-1977), the German actor and translator Sigismund von Radecki (1891-1970), the composer Carl Orff (1895-1982), the previously-mentioned author and editor Carl Muth (1867-1944), the author Theodor Haecker (1879-1945), and the scholar Katharina Kippenberg (1876-1947). Her name appeared in the local news both as a performer and in musicological literature, where she stood out as an expert in medieval and Renaissance music. This specialized interest – which reveals her father’s cultural legacy – also took her to Italy. In 1927, she edited Das Schöne: Schopenhauers Ästhetik(“Beauty: Schopenhauer’s aesthetics,” Vieweg und Teubner Verlag), a collection of essays by the German philosopher – who was one of her grandfather Gustav’s favorite authors – and wrote the book’s introduction. During the 1930s, she became an assistant of the renowned music theoretician Hans Kayser (1891-1964), with whom she planned to found the Thimus-Institut, a music institute based in Basel and named for Albert von Thimus (1806-1878). Mertens was to become the head of the ancient music department but the project was never completed.

The Mertens had no children. Nonetheless, during the 1920s they became the guardians of the violinist Beatrice Dohme (1908-1986 ca.), the daughter of an important American pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Alfred Robert Louis Dohme (1867-1952). Beatrice was a rebellious spirit and her parents enrolled her in a strict private school run by nuns in Munich, but the girl soon escaped without a trace. Her music teacher Gertrud Mertens – whom she affectionately called “Frau Mimi” – took Beatrice under her wing and brought about a reconciliation between the girl and her family. The Mertens considered Beatrice a daughter and raised her as such; she lived with them in their apartment and dedicated herself to musical studies.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Beatrice Dohme emerged as a violinist of growing international reputation. With the Fiedel Trio – a group that also included Franz Sidersbeck, her future husband – she undertook long tours throughout the continent (including Italy), performing medieval and Renaissance music. The trio’s growing fame eventually attracted the attention of the Ministry of Culture of the Third Reich, which sponsored its activities for propaganda purposes during the war years.

From 1943 until the end of the war, Beatrice Dohme and her husband participated in various conspiratorial activities, hiding information for the Allies in the form of coded messages in the musical scores of the Fiedel Trio. Their collaboration with the Ministry of Culture not only provided an effective cover, it also let them extend their activities in the Resistance to the occupied territories – activity which consisted primarily in tracking down and hiding American pilots who had been shot down.

After the end of the war, Beatrice Dohme returned to the United States and continued her career as a violinist.

I met Scholl at the home of Dr. Mertens, at a soirée to which she had personally invited me. There were various young doctors and students present, as well as a number of older people who belonged to her circle. She read a short piece about religious renewal [religiöse Erneuerung] which sparked the dissent of the young people because it was, to a certain extent, unilateral and rather distant from reality. During the course of the discussion, heated disputes arose between the “North and South” factions, whose main representatives were Scholl (South) and a certain Dr. Ellermann [Heinrich Ellermann (1905-1991), author and editor]; I tried to build a bridge between the two positions. Both of them struck me as highly intelligent and we agreed to meet again.

This is what Professor Kurt Huber wrote in his reply brief dated April 19, 1943, the day of the trial that would end with an accusation of subversion against him for having written and published anti-Nazi pamphlets for the Weiße Rose ("White Rose”). On July 13, he was executed by guillotine. The student and former Wehrmacht soldier Alexander Schmorell (1917-1943) was on the executioner’s block alongside him. A few months earlier, on February 22, three other young members of the group, Hans Scholl (1918-1943), Sophie Scholl (1921-1943), and Christoph Probst (1919-1943) were executed the same way.

In his reply brief, Huber referred to the literary soirée that was held on Wednesday, June 17, 1942 at the Mertens’ apartment at Schönfeldstraße 10. That is where the professor of philosophy and musicology at Munich’s “Ludwig Maximilian” University first encountered the medical student Hans Scholl, who, together with Schmorell, was the driving force behind the “White Rose.” It was a decisive moment in the history of the famous Resistance group that printed and distributed six anti-Nazi pamphlets in Munich between the summer of 1942 and February 1943. 

During that period, the Mertens home, along with the studio of the architect Manfred Eickemeyer, was one of the main gathering places of Munich’s intellectual middle class. Artists, intellectuals, doctors, and scholars regularly met at Schönfeldstraße 10 to attend the cultural events that Gertrud Mertens organized, confirmation of her influence and renown in an intellectual circle that was extensive and, as we will see, politically inclined.

The get-together on June 17 was not the first. A literary evening at the Mertens home with the “White Rose” activists had already been held on the previous June 3 (also a Wednesday), at the behest of Gertrud and the medical student and musician Otmar Hammerstein (1917-2003), a friend of Beatrice Dohme. In fact, it was on that “Wednesday” that Scholl and Schmorell entered the apartment for the first time; the occasion was a reading by the eclectic Sigismund von Radecki. Guests included long-standing friends, such as Anna Barbara Speckner and her husband Thrasybulos Georgiades, as well as a close-knit group of young people, for the most part medical students who were not members of the Mertens’ usual circle but had been invited that evening by Hammerstein. The next day, one of them, Alexander Schmorell, reconstructed the events in detail in a letter to his friend Angelika Knopp:

IYesterday evening Radecki read out loud. Hans [Scholl] had asked him to. Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly go as we expected, at least on a formal level, I mean. We didn’t have a suitable space so Hammerstein offered us the apartment of Professor Mertens. Hans gladly accepted the invitation. But instead of limiting herself to putting her home at our disposal and maybe joining us to listen, Mrs. Mertens immediately felt she was the mother of the evening, and more: the primordial mother no less, the creator of a new philosophical-literary “circle” …

A program was immediately announced … And guess who else had been invited! (She invited some acquaintances on her own initiative! Demonstrating very little tact). Naturally, Mr. Amann [the sculptor Helmut Ammann (1907-2001)] with his entourage (his wife and Wolfgang Jakob [medical student]), from whose direction we constantly heard giggles and comments such as “marvelous, marvelous!” etc. Miss Speckner [Anna Barbara Speckner] sat next to them and spent the whole evening knitting (something that is very appropriate for her, a bit less so for a reading and Radecki)… Plus, on that side there were also Hammerstein, a Greek [Thrasybulos G. Georgiades], a certain Mr. Jäger [Herr Jäger, medical student]; on our side there were Christel [Christoph Probst], Furtwängler [Hubert Furtwängler, medical student, soldier, and a friend of Scholl and Schmorell’s], Sammiller [Raimund Sammüller, a friend of Scholl and Schmorell’s], Traute [Traute Lafrenz, a doctor and friend of Scholl’s], and Hans’ sister [Sophie Scholl]; Hans, too, of course. I was sitting in a corner, behind Furtwängler’s big armchair, so I was almost completely hidden

But let’s get to the actual reading.

First, he read two reflections, two sketches: The Child[Radecki, Ein Kind der Großstadt, 1929] and one that was a bit lighter, The Street [Radecki, Die Stimme der Straße, 1937]. In The Child he showed how deeply he can delve into a topic – in this case, children – and his ability to grasp and recognize so many essential facets. The Street reveals his splendid sense of observation and his descriptions cast a beautiful and profound light on what he observes.

Then he read the episode of Captain Kopejkin from Dead Souls[chapter 10 of the novel published in 1842 by Nikolai Gogol]. You are familiar with it and his reading was magnificent: in this, he is an extraordinary maestro. After a brief pause, during which we smoked abundantly in the living room – where smoking is normally prohibited – during the second part he read poetry, translations from Old French, and in particular many from Russian. I found the translations very good, excellent. One of the poems was his.

As soon as it was over, he disappeared almost on the run, followed by half of us. Hans came back home with us and we chatted and drank wine until midnight. He told us a lot of things about his life: he has been an actor, he has met many people who interested us, too, important men… When we parted ways, he thanked us for the pleasant evening; he sincerely liked everything. Originally, we wanted to have the get-together at my place but various things didn’t work out. For a while now, Hammerstein has been talking about a circle he would like to found. But if it’s going to be like yesterday, he has lost us. Either he comes here and abides by our program (which consists solely in a total absence of any program) or he’ll have to find himself some other people, other Amanns.  

Schmorell’s description gives us an outline of the personality of Gertrud Mertens, who at the time was fifty-eight years old. Not only an enthusiastic and hospitable hostess – “a tiny woman, extremely vivacious and inquisitive” – but also a scrupulous weaver of the intellectual relations that were taking form in her apartment. On the evening of June 3, Mertens agreed to host the Radecki conference devised by Hans Scholl and Otmar Hammerstein, but – and this is what irritated Schmorell – she made sure to invite her own circle, too, which was closer to her in age and, as mentioned above, culturally anchored to the so-called Hochlandkreis. The descriptions of that evening – today, a crucial passage in the historiographical literature about the White Rose – report the rift that was created among the guests. Although they shared the same Christian and cultural heritage (for the most part Catholic and Protestant, with the exception of Schmorell, who was Orthodox) and an aversion to Hitler’s regime that was typical of certain associations (such as Guardini’s Quickborn), in Schmorell and his friends’ opinion, Mertens’ group – and this explains her attempt to steer the debate – seemed unwilling to transform the evening’s rigid literary and philosophical “program” into an occasion for a freer and more productive political discussion. In fact, this latter aspect was the true objective of the “Scholls’ circle,” as Mertens would come to call them. Primarily as a result of the military experience of a number of them on the eastern front, for a while they had been contemplating the idea of dissident activity that was much more incisive than the cautious, wait-and-see spiritual resistance promoted by the “Hochland circle.”

This is the context underlying the soirée on June 17, which was attended by the same guests – except for Schmorell, who refused to participate, and with the addition of Katharina Schüddekopf (1916-1992), one of Kurt Huber’s PhD students. Organized once again by the Mertens-Hammerstein duo, the program included a talk by Professor Huber. Once again, Mertens attempted to dictate the line of the debate, reading a political and spiritual text she had written on the topic of “religious renewal.” Nonetheless, the discussion inevitably took a political turn: “What is to be done?” was the question that soon dominated the discussion. The editor Ellermann (in his reply brief in 1943, Huber placed him among the exponents of the “North” front, or rather the supporters of strictly internal resistance), took a position against the idea of active resistance, encouraging the younger guests to take advantage of their studies to expand and strengthen their conscience. Hans Scholl (the “South” front, i.e., the young people eager to take action), rebutted sarcastically: “Shall we rent an island in the Aegean sea and take ideological courses?” That is when he found himself in agreement with Huber, who did not hesitate to support the student’s enthusiasm: “We must act, and right away, already today.”

The understanding that developed between Hans Scholl and Kurt Huber on June 17 at the Mertens home marked the beginning of the events that initiated with the writing and printing of the six White Rose pamphlets during the summer-fall of 1942 and culminated with the arrest of the Scholl brothers in the entrance hall of the University of Munich the following year in February. The “bridge” Huber built between the two positions, North-internal resistance and South-external resistance, took form in the non-violent and ethical character of the White Rose’s actions. Many of the people present at these two encounters, including the hosts, were interrogated by the Gestapo. Katharina Schüddekopf and Traute Lafrenz (1919-2023) were sentenced to one year in prison for having been “aware of anti-Nazi propaganda but not reporting it” (Propagandaabsichten gewußt, das aber nicht angezeigt). Thanks to Viktor’s renown, the Mertens were able to avoid the accusation of conspiracy.

As the war and the bombing raids intensified, the Mertens, with the help of their daughter Beatrice Dohme, left Munich and rented a house on the banks of Lake Starnberg at Assenbuch 5-1/2 (today, Assenbucherstraße 77, Berg). In 1945, the Mertens purchased a house on the Way of the Cross (Kreuzweg) on Lake Starnberg, at Maxhöhe 11-1/2 (since 1965, known as Himbselweg 14, Berg). It was there that in December 1961, at 78 years of age, Gertrud Mertens read and was struck by Ist das ein Mensch? (published in November), and wrote to Primo Levi.

Over the course of the next twenty years, Gertrud Mertens continued to cultivate her philosophical-musical interests, organize cultural soirées, and foster relations with important intellectuals of the time. For example, during this period she corresponded with the Catholic author Gertrud von Le Fort (1876-1971) and frequented the Jesuit theologist Eric Przywara (1889-1972). Reminiscences by Alberto Pescetto, an expert in Slavic studies who was a regular guest at Hause Mertens, have provided us with a rare portrait of Gertrud – whom he affectionately called Madame “la Grande Gnosis” or the Mystic of the North – during the final years of her life:

The Mystic of the North is almost blind [...], ah how can I describe the person! Elderly, stately, and yet small in stature, with large gold and silver pectoral crosses like the Patriarch Jeremiah, stupendous, adorable, and with an inexhaustible discourse [...]. After twelve operations, she only reads Origen and, at 82 years of age, is writing a treatise on "Metaphysics in History".

Gertrud Mertens morirà nel 1973.