Annette Eick

Annette Eick (13 September 1909 – 25 February 2010) was a Jewish Lesbian author and poet.

Biography

Annette Eick was born 13 September 1909, in Berlin.

During the 1920s, a liberal time period in the Weimar republic, Eick wrote poems and short stories for lesbian magazines, including Garçonne.^[1] After the Nazis came to power in 1933, she had to give up on journalism and started working as a nanny. In 1938, she was granted a visum to live in the UK and fled to London after surviving an attack by Nazis on the farm she was staying at during the Reichskristallnacht.^[2] Her parents were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp.^[2]

In London, Eick worked as a nanny and housekeeper and met her partner Getrud Klingel. They moved to Devon, where they opened a nursery and Eick started writing again. Her collection of poems, Immortal Muse, was published in 1984 and turned into a short film called The Immortal Muse by Jules Hussey in 2005.^[3]

Eick became known to a wider audience after being featured, alongside five gay men, in the documentary ‘Paragraph 175’ from 2000, which told of their prosecutions under the paragraph 175 which criminalised homosexuality.^[4] Most of Eick's work, however, remains unpublished.^[5]

She died 25 February 2010, in Devon.