Lola Hoffmann

Lola Hoffmann (Helena Jacoby) (March 19, 1904 in Riga, Latvia – April 30, 1988 in Santiago, Chile) was a physiologist and psychiatrist.

Lola (Helena) was born into a well-to-do, German-speaking family of Jewish origin, which professed the Lutheran religion. The family environment, which was warm and intellectual, had a strong influence on her personal development. When she was 15, her family moved to Freiburg, in Breisgau (Germany) because her father, as a member of the movement led by Alexander Kerenski, was being persecuted by the Bolsheviks, who had occupied Latvia following the First World War.

Lola enrolled in the School of Medicine of Freiburg and remained there when her family decided to return to Riga. Her life changed dramatically, she joined a group of Baltic students, made new friends and devoted herself to her studies. At this time Freiburg was bristling with intellectual activity. Husserl and Heidegger were among the philosophers at University of Freiburg, as were Richard Wilhelm and Carl Gustav Jung. She went to their lectures without imagining that these same men would become so important in her life thirty years later.

Once she finished her thesis on the suprarenal glands of rats, she left Freiburg and moved to Berlin, where she became an assistant to Paul Trendelenburg, the main specialist in hormones. In Berlin she was exposed to the cultural upheaval of those years: she attended the premiere of The Rite of Spring of Stravinsky, The Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht, and was drawn to Dadaism, the Bauhaus movement and the painter Kurt Schwitters.

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