Beate Susanne Rehfisch

Beate Susanne Rehfisch (Beata Duncan) was born in Berlin on the 3rd of August 1921 to Lilli Rehfisch née Stadthagen (1891-1941/42) and Hans Rehfisch (1891-1960) in their apartment at Württembergallee 26-27. The Rehfisch and Stadthagen families were distinguished Berlin families who contributed to German society as lawyers, medical doctors and engineers including Beate’s great-uncle Arthur Stadthagen (1857-1917), a Social Democratic (SPD) Member of the Reichstag, her grandfather Prof. Dr Eugen Rehfisch (1862-1937), the pioneering urologist and cardiologist and her uncle Paul Stadthagen (1893-1943), a decorated First World War pilot.

Beate attended the nearby 28. Gemeindeschule Westend (Reinhold-Otto Grundschule) and later briefly Westend Schule (Herder Gymnasium). Fürstenplatz in front of the apartment was a playground for both Beata and her older brother Thomas (1918-1991). Beata’s grandmother, Agnes Stadthagen née Jacobi (1864-1938) and her aunt Toni Salomon née Stadthagen (1887-1942) lived nearby on Hölderlinstraße and other family members and cousins lived in the Westend.

Her mother Lilli was a practising psychotherapist who saw her patients in her study in their apartment, while her father Hans, a successful playwright, wrote his plays in the adjoining study. Beate remembered a lively household with visits from both the worlds of psychoanalysis (Alfred Adler) and the theatre (Bertolt Brecht, Irwin Piscator) during the 1920’s and early 1930’s.

With the accession of Hitler in 1933 her father Hans, due to his dissident plays, was briefly arrested and left Germany for Austria and later the UK. With their Jewish origins their mother Lilli decided early in 1934 that Beate and her brother Thomas should also leave Germany and emigrate to the UK (with the assistance of Lady Erleigh of the Mond family, a distant relation). They attended the Bunce Court School in Kent, a progressive school that had been transferred to the UK from Herrlingen, Baden-Württemberg by the headmistress Anna Essinger after the Nazis came to power.

Beate subsequently attended the Manor House School in Surrey while her brother Thomas studied electrical engineering in London.  By 1939 Beate was living in north London in rented rooms and was employed as a secretary at the Refugees Committee in London (the reason she was not interned in 1940). During the Second World War she studied for a BA degree in History at Birkbeck College (University of London). To support herself as a student she had a range of part-time jobs, including as a nanny, teaching assistant and painter in a toy workshop, and was finally able to share a rented apartment with Thomas in Belsize Park, north London.

After the end of the war Beate was to learn that her mother Lilli, uncle Paul, aunt Toni and cousin Evamarie (1924-1942) had been murdered in concentration camps during the Holocaust, a traumatic loss leading to many years of distress.

Beate changed her first name from Beate to Beata, was naturalised as a British citizen in 1949 (having had her German citizenship revoked by the German Government in 1939) and settled permanently in London.

Beata had met Adrian, a fellow student, at Birkbeck College and they had a son Stephen. Adrian was appointed a lecturer in Psychology within the Philosophy Department of Sheffield University, but died young. As a single parent Beata brought up her son in north London, with employment as an editor in publishing and researcher for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a librarian in schools and colleges and a tutor in English literature and creative writing at adult education institutes.

Beata’s true passion was literature and she studied English Literature at University College London in the early 1950’s. Beata became a writer, principally as a poet, and was an accomplished and popular public performer of her poetry. She was widely published in many journals, magazines and anthologies (including the Arts Council of Great Britain ‘New Poetry’ Anthologies, the Hearing Eye Press and the website poetry p f ), was a prize winner in poetry competitions and pioneered creative writing workshops with many emerging poets. Much of her poetry describes the incidents of her life, including the care of her grandchildren, and was set to music as several song cycles by composers.

With retirement her career as a poet increased in vitality, recognised by many of her peers for her poetry’s clarity and elegance and her depiction of personal experience. The poet Julian Stannard has described her poetry as ‘magnificent and humane…her poetry is pitch perfect, gloriously exact’ while the poet Hugo Williams has said: ‘Her voice which bears traces of the best and worst of life’s experience, lend her work an authority we can trust’.

Beata led a long and active life and campaigned for the National Osteoporosis Society and for the future of her local library. She revisited her childhood home in Berlin with her family in her last decade and was in contact with historians in Germany researching her distinguished relatives. Her poetry collection Berlin Blues (Green Bottle Press) describes her first decade in Berlin, her parents and their lives during the Weimar period. Her poetry collection Breaking Glass (WriteSideLeft Press) describes her subsequent decade as a refugee in the UK and her experience of the London Blitz during the Second World War.

Beata’s son Stephen Duncan became a student at the Royal Academy in London and is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors. He is the executor and editor of her literary estate and her poetry is still featured in anthologies and posthumous publications.

Beata died in 2015 at the age of 93, leaving her son and three grandchildren who all live in the UK.

This biography has been written by Beata’s son Stephen Duncan with the assistance of her grandson Robert Duncan. London 2022.

Beata Duncan’s Stolperstein has been sponsored by her son.

© Stephen Duncan

Weblinks to be inserted:

Paul Stadthagen https://www.berlin.de/ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/ueber-den-bezirk/geschichte/stolpersteine/artikel.179349.php

Toni Salomon née Stadthagen https://www.berlin.de/ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/ueber-den-bezirk/geschichte/stolpersteine/artikel.1146363.php

Eva-Marie Salomon https://www.berlin.de/ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/ueber-den-bezirk/geschichte/stolpersteine/artikel.1146363.php