Anna Forstenheim

Anna Goldmann Hirschler-Forstenheim (21 September 1836 in Agram – 19 October 1889 in Bad Vöslau) was an Austrian writer and poet.

Biography

She was born to Jewish parents Rosine (née Hirschler) and Moshe (Moritz) Goldmann in Agram, Croatia. She learned to read and write from her mother, and was later sent to a private secondary school for girls.

In 1867, she moved to Vienna and married banker and railway entrepreneur Samuel (later Georg) Hirschler, with whom she bore three children, Klara (1868), Dorothea (1869), and Otto Israel (1872). There she founded the Society of Women Writers and Artists (German: Vereins der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen), of which she was the treasurer. Soon after her sister Luise's marriage to German Hispanist Johannes Fastenrath in 1881, she and her family left the Jewish community, converted to Roman Catholicism, and changed their surname to Forstenheim.

Her son Otto died at the Łódź Ghetto in the Holocaust in December 1941.