Karola Bloch

Karola Bloch (born Karola Piotrkowska; January 22, 1905, Łódź — July 31, 1994, Tübingen) was a Polish-German architect, socialist, and feminist. She was the third wife of the German philosopher Ernst Bloch.

Bloch was born into a Jewish-Polish textile manufacturing family that fled to Russia during the First World War. In Moscow she was an eyewitness to the October Revolution, an experience to which she attributes her lifelong devotion to socialism. In 1921 the family moved to Berlin, where she studied art with the Expressionist Ludwig Meidner. She met her future husband, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, in 1926. Karola began her architectural studies in Vienna then returned to study at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin as one of a small group of women. Karola was a devotee of the Neues Bauen; she was a student of Hans Poelzig and Bruno Taut, and through her friendship with she was able to spend time at the Bauhaus, though she was never officially enrolled. In Berlin she joined a leftist student club and devoted her energy to fighting fascism, joining the Communist Party of Germany in 1932. She also took courses at the “Masch” (Marxistische Arbeiterschule) where she met the architect Hannes Meyer and the critic György Lukács. Friends of the Blochs in Berlin included Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The Blochs lived in the left-wing in Wilmersdorf. When the Reichstag was burned in 1933 the colony was surrounded by Nazis; Karola was able to hide Ernst Bloch’s manuscripts and have them smuggled out. The Blochs fled to Switzerland where Karola finished her studies at the ETH Zurich. Due to the increasingly anti-Semitic atmosphere, they moved to Vienna, where they married in 1934.

In Vienna Karola worked for the architect , a student of Adolf Loos, and befriended Elias Canetti and Alma Mahler. In spite of the danger for Jews and Communists she also worked as an informant for the USSR, making risky trips to Poland. Her husband Ernst Bloch once said to her “You practice what I write in my philosophy.” After the Anschluss the couple fled to Paris, where Karola worked in the studio of Auguste Perret. In 1936 the couple moved to Prague, where Karola had a private design practice with the Bauhaus textile designer Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and was the architect of a single-family house in the Tatra mountains. Her son Jan-Robert was born in 1937. The couple emigrated to New York in 1938. Because Ernst Bloch did not speak English, Karola had to support the family alone by working as an architect. Karola worked as one of only two women in the office of Mayer & Whittlesey, where she worked on high-rises like 240 Central Park South. In the United States, the couple was reunited with other émigrés like Theodor Adorno and Hermann Broch. After moving to Cambridge, MA, Karola was commissioned to design a modern house for Harry Slochower in Andover, NJ. She also worked as a draftswoman for Stone and Webster, one of the largest engineering firms in the US, unaware that they were also working on the facilities for the Manhattan Project. She also worked for Leland and Larsen in Boston, and organized a group to help support Polish architects after the war. In 1943 Karola’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law were murdered in Treblinka after being forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto.

...
Wikipedia