‘My Dark Brothers’: A Graphic Artist among Coal Miners

Prussian Countess Tisa von der Schulenburg linked arms with striking workers in Durham, England.

‘TISA’ VON DER SCHULENBERG experienced the first half of the 20th century as a student, social worker, teacher and artist, working among laborers in several coal-mining communities, both in England and Germany. She died in 2001, an Ursuline nun who taught art at a religious school in Germany, in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Born in 1903, her full name, in German, was Elisabeth Karoline Mary Margarete Veronika Gräfin (Countess) von der Schulenburg. She’d had the luck of being born as a daughter of Prussian nobility. (Before rising through the ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s army, her father had been an officer for a duke of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — where my own German family stretches back to the mid-20th century.)

Von der Schulenberg’s life as an antifascist artist began in 1933, when she fled Berlin and Germany, seeing the clear danger to Jews and the Left being posed by the new Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler….