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Daughter of
Sister of
Mother of
Wife of Hermann Calmsohn [*1817]
Hermann Calmsohn family (1860s-1880s)
Siegmund Behrens family (1897-1898)
Große Bäckerstraße 31 (= Am Markt)
Lüneburg
Friederike Calmsohn, milliner (1860s)
Hermann Calmsohn, private tutor (1860s)
Große Bäckerstraße 17
Lüneburg
Hermann Calmsohn family
Große Bäckerstraße 17
Lüneburg
Friederike Calmsohn, Widow (1890s)
Leopold Less (1901-1902)
Friederike Behrens was the first child of Philipp Behrens, a paper and furniture merchant from Lüneburg, and his wife Adele, née Bramson. She grew up with her three younger siblings in the family"s large house on Market Square (corner of Bäckerstraße).
In 1843, she married Hermann Calmsohn in Lüneburg, who had come to Lüneburg a few years earlier as a teacher for the Jewish community. The couple lived on Große Bäckerstraße. Their son Carl August was born in 1844 and their daughter Charlotte Auguste in 1851. Both children later left the town and moved to larger cities.
Together with her husband, Friederike Calmsohn ran a small boarding house for Jewish students who attended secondary schools in Lüneburg. In the 1850s, she started her own business as a milliner with her own shop, where her husband later also worked.
A study on the diversity of the fashion market in the rural area around Lüneburg highlights the importance of Friederike Calmsohn"s business during those years: "In 1854, Friederike Calmsohn"s fashion shop in Lüneburg advertised in the ‘Jeetzel-Zeitung’, boasting with direct connections to Paris and Brussels and with the employment of a French "Directrisse". Calmsohn sold fabric and straw hats, bonnets, hairstyles, flowers, ribbons, and straw trimmings.“
In his study on Harry Bresslau"s youth in Lüneburg in the 1850s, Peter Rück also mentions Friederike Calmsohn"s connections to the world of fashion and her lasting impact: “Calmsohn"s wife was the mistress of many milliner apprentices in Lüneburg, who repeatedly praised the latest hat styles from Paris and London to the ladies of Lüneburg in the local press.”
Hermann Calmsohn died in 1888. His wife continued to live in Lüneburg as a widow. She died there in 1900 and was buried, like her husband, in the town"s Jewish cemetery.
Sources and info (in German):
Autobiographical preface, chapter "Harry Bresslaus Jugend bis zum Wechsel nach Berlin", in: Peter Rück/Erika Eisenlohr/Peter Worm (Hrsg.), Abraham Bresslau (1813-1884): Briefe aus Dannenberg 1835-1839. Mit einer Einleitung zur Familiengeschichte des Historikers Harry Bresslau (1848-1926) und zur Geschichte der Juden in Dannenberg, Marburg an der Lahn 2007, p. 158
Karen Ellwanger/Andrea Hauser/Jochen Meiners (Hrsg.), Trachten in der Lüneburger Heide und im Wendland, Münster/New York 2025, p. 105, available online
Name variants: Calmansohn