Dr Nini Herman

BORN BERLIN, APRIL 2, 1925. DIED LONDON, SEPTEMBER 25, 2015, AGED 90

ADOCTOR for 20 years, and a psychotherapist for a further 20, Nini Herman wrote and translated a dozen books. It was a life full of achievement if haunted by personal loss and tragedy. Nini Herman was born Eleonore Marie Ettlinger in Berlin in 1925. She was the daughter of Ellen Ettlinger (née Rathenau) and Lionel Ettlinger, a businessman, and spent her childhood on Fasanenstrasse in west Berlin. Her younger brother, George (192793), later became a distinguished neuropsychologist, described by The Times as “a major figure in the post-war development of neuropsychology”.

They grew up in an affluent, assimilated German-Jewish home. Their mother was well-read and highly cultured. Their uncle, Ernst, was a leading art publisher in Weimar Germany, who knew many of the leading German artists of the time. Walter Rathenau, the statesman and German foreign secretary, was a cousin. His assassination by right-wing extremists in 1922 shook the nation. He was one of the ghosts who haunted Nini’s childhood: her grandmother and an uncle had committed suicide. She later wrote about this in her book Letters to the Living and the Dead ( 1994).

Like many Jewish families in 1930s Germany the Ettlingers were unsure how to respond to the rise of the Nazis. They spent some months in Switzerland and then moved to rural Bavaria, only a few miles from Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden, to live in quiet seclu- sion, hoping the years of political terror would quickly pass. Nini and George were both sent to boarding school at Bedales, a progressive coeducational school in Hampshire. Nini regarded her years at Bedales as one of the happiest times in her childhood.

By now her parents had separated. Her father moved to America for the war, returning to live in Germany after 1945. Nini and her mother and brother found refuge in Oxford, where her mother spent the rest of her life until her death in 1994. Nini went to Oxford High School and then studied medicine in Edinburgh. Her brother read psychology and physiology at Oxford. Nini met and married a young refugee doctor, Peter Tarnesby. Living in west London, they had two daughters, Ruth and Sylvia, but the marriage did not last and Peter was awarded custody of the girls. This loss was a huge blow to both mother and daughters.

In the mid-1950s she met the Jewish refugee artist Josef Herman. Then at the height of his career, he was one of the leading figurative artists of the time. They lived together for the next 45 years, except for a brief separation in the early 1970s. They lived in west London then moved to the Suffolk countryside in 1963 with their two children, David, born in 1957 and Sara in 1961. It was a curious move: two Labour-voting Jewish refugees from central Europe living in the heart of Suffolk. Their daughter Sara died in 1966. Nini supported her husband through a serious breakdown and struggled to keep her family together. In 1967 they adopted Rebekah, a source of great joy.

Thanks to an NHS scheme which allowed women doctors to re-train after taking a break to raise a family,

Nini Herman: a life filled with literary and medical achievements