Wolf Von Eckardt


Wolf Von Eckardt was a German-American writer, art and architecture critic for the Washington Post.

Life

Wolf Von Eckardt was born in Berlin on March 6, 1918. His mother, Gertrude von Eckardt-Lederer, was Jewish, and his father Emil Lederer was a socialist professor of political economy. His parents divorced when he was a boy. Von Eckardt was excluded from school in Germany for being Jewish. He worked as a printer's apprentice before fleeing Germany in 1936 with a younger sister and their mother. On arrival in the United States, he found work as a printer's apprentice and took classes at the New School for Social Research. He later worked designing book covers for Alfred A. Knopf. In 1941 he married Karen Horney's daughter Marianne Horney, also a psychoanlyst. During World War II he served in Army intelligence, and after the war worked as an adviser to the West German government. in 1963 he started working at the Washington Post. His marriage to Marianne Horney ended in 1975. In 1981 he left The Post, but wrote about architecture for Time until 1985 and continued teaching and writing until his first stroke in 1989.
In 1987 Von Eckardt married again, to Nina ffrench-frazier. He died of complications after a stroke on August 27, 1997 at his home in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.

Works