Lady Charlotte Blennerhassett (1843--1917)

When Lady Charlotte Blennerhassett died in the middle of the First World War in 1917, she was mourned by contemporaries on both sides of the front as the "last European". In fact, her life was shaped by the great religious-cultural and political-social lines of conflict between the founding of the Reich and World War II - and this from a genuinely European transnational perspective: the Bavarian noblewoman and Anglo-Irish woman by marriage led a life between Munich, Paris and London, that should make her an "enemy alien" in her own hometown during the World War. Her constant struggle for self-assertion as an author and scientist was not only intellectually motivated, but also an economic imperative given the family's economic and social decline. Last but not least, the student of the controversial church historian Ignaz von Döllinger was committed for life as a combative liberal Catholic for freedom of science and conscience.