Friederike ("Friedl") Roth

Friederike (Friedl) was married to famous writer Joseph Roth. By the end of the 1920s she was permanently ill with schizophrenia. She was murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia program in Austria in 1940. She was a favorite cousin of Joseph Torczyner.

Married in Vienna in 1922, Friederike and Joseph moved to Berlin for the next several years. Historian and critic Sidney Rosenfeld notes that this period, living with Friederike, in a rented apartment (instead of Roth’s penchant for hotels) was the only rational, sane period in Joseph Roth’s life. After she became ill, when Friedl could no longer be left alone, Roth started taking her on journalistic trips, having to lock her in their hotel room when he was forced to go out. Then he started leaving her with friends, then putting her in hospitals. By 1928, she was complaining about ghosts in the central heating system, and had frequent catatonic episodes, and she was admitted to an asylum. Roth sought the counsel and intervention of rabbis for Friedl but to no avail.

When the Nazis took over Austria in March 1938, Friedl was in the Steinhof Sanatorium in Vienna. Among other Jews and psychiatric patients, she was murdered during eugenics experimentation two years later.

cf.: https://www.nzz.ch/kein_sanfter_tod_fuer_eine_schuechterne-1.9790498

&: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Roth