Herta Susi Anneliese Stein

Charlottenburg, 1923

Herta Susi Anneliese Stein was born on August 10, 1923, in Charlottenburg, a prosperous residential district in western Berlin. Her father, Leo Stein (formerly Kaminski), was 38 years old at the time of her birth. Her mother was Frieda Ottilie Erna Kaden.

Charlottenburg in the 1920s was the cultural heart of Weimar Berlin, home to the Deutsche Oper, the Technische Hochschule, and the grand Kurfürstendamm boulevard. Growing up in this district during the Weimar Republic meant witnessing both the artistic flowering and the political convulsions of interwar Germany firsthand: the hyperinflation of 1923, the brief golden age of the late '20s, the street violence of the early '30s, and Hitler's rise to the Chancellorship in 1933.

The 1936 Olympics

Herta was a talented young athlete, and family lore recalls that "Grandma Susi" participated in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games as a teenager.

The 1936 Berlin Olympics opened on August 1, 1936, at the Reichssportfeld before 110,000 spectators. That evening, the regime staged an elaborate production called the "Festspiel Olympische Jugend" (Festival Olympic Youth), a theatrical spectacle involving thousands of young German athletes. The program included 2,500 girls aged 11-12 in the first act and 2,300 girls aged 14-18 in the second act, performing choreographed athletic demonstrations with balls, hoops, and clubs. Music was composed by Carl Orff and Werner Egk. The 500 boys in a later act formed the five Olympic rings in a living tableau.

Herta would have been twelve years old that summer, fitting precisely into the age cohort recruited for the opening festival. Her family remembers her running hurdles as part of the choreographed athletic displays, one of thousands of young Berliners performing for the cameras of Leni Riefenstahl.

Marriage and Wartime

On March 7, 1942, in the middle of the war, Herta married Austrian psychologist Dr. Peter R. Hofstätter in Hamburg, Germany. Peter was 28; Herta was 18. At the time of their marriage, Peter was serving in the Wehrmacht as a military psychologist, a role he had entered after emigrating from Austria to the United States in the late 1930s and then returning to Europe.

The couple lived through some of the most devastating years of the 20th century together. Hamburg, where they married, was subjected to Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, a week-long firebombing campaign by the Allied forces that killed over 37,000 civilians and left much of the city in ruins. Whether the young couple was still in Hamburg at the time is unclear, but the destruction of the city where they began their married life would have been deeply personal.

Raising Nadina

In 1947, Herta gave birth to her daughter, Herta Ingeborg Nadina Hofstätter, in Austria. Herta raised Nadina through the difficult years of post-war reconstruction, as Peter rebuilt his academic career. He emigrated to the United States in 1949 on a Rockefeller Fellowship to Clark University, then moved through several American university positions before accepting the prestigious Chair of Psychology at the University of Hamburg in 1959.

The marriage eventually ended in divorce. Peter married Hertha Anna Theresia Rott during his tenure at the University of Hamburg, where he became one of the most prominent (and controversial) psychologists in post-war Germany. The separation left Herta to chart her own path in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Later Years in Dortmund

Herta lived the later decades of her life in North Rhine-Westphalia, far from the academic spotlight that followed her former husband. She passed away on August 21, 2002, in Dortmund, Germany, at the age of seventy-nine. She is buried in Hagen.

Through her daughter Nadina, who married Dr. Clifford James Goodman Jr. in Hamburg in 1966, Herta's lineage became part of the Goodman medical dynasty centered in Chandler, Arizona. The girl who ran hurdles in the 1936 Berlin Olympics became the grandmother of Arizonans.