Bettina von Arnim

Bettina von Arnim (born October 19, 1940 in Zernikow) is a German-born new realist painter, illustrator and graphic artist. Life Provenance and early childhood Bettina von Arnim was born in the Brandenburg flatlands north of Berlin at Zernikow (as it was known at that time) where Baron Friedmund von Arnim (1897-1946), her father, was the local lord of the (by this time seriously indebted) manor. As matters turned out he was the last lord of the manor. She was the fifth of her parents' six children: the other five were all boys. Through her father's family Bettina von Arnim is a great granddaughter of the romantic author Bettina von Arnim (1785-1859). The artist Bettina Encke von Arnim (1895-1971) was her father's older sister. Her mother, born Klara von Hagens (1909-2009) came originally from Kassel. Clara von Arnim (as Bettina's mother became known) was a lawyer who became pharmacist and in 1998, late in her life, achieved success as an author. For the first five years of the young Bettina's life the family home was the "Schloss Wiepersdorf" where they lived with various relatives and house-guests. Bettina later discovered that several of the house guests were in hiding from the authorities, including the communist Iwan Katz (1889-1956), the artist Fritz Kuhr (1899-1975) and the woman whom the children knew as "Aunt Irma", a clever and serious person who helped Bettina's older brothers with their school work and sometimes read the children stories. "Aunt Irma" was the cover name for a Jewish woman whose husband was already being detained in a concentration camp. Another of the house-guests combined the skills of a dress-maker with those of an alternative medicines practitioner. She produced clothes for the children's mother, and was allowed the singular privilege of regularly playing the treasured family Bechstein (piano).