FOLIO III · ORT
Edinburgh, capital of Scotland and a university city of the Scottish Enlightenment, became from 1939 the place of exile and residence of Marianne von Herzfeld, one of the few women from Mises's private seminar in Vienna.
Edinburgh, capital of Scotland since the fourteenth century, shaped European intellectual and economic debate as the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment around David Hume and Adam Smith, and to this day bears the epithet Athens of the North. After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Marianne von Herzfeld was briefly imprisoned by the National Socialists in Vienna and was allowed to leave the country only after her mother's death. She followed her cousin, the well-known surgeon Gertrude Herzfeld, to Edinburgh and during the war ran a home for Jewish refugees there. After 1945 she worked closely at the University of Edinburgh with David Talbot Rice, holder of the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art, and translated standard works of art history from German, among them Konrad Onasch's book on icons. Her main work, Letters from Goethe (with C. Melvil Sym), published by Edinburgh University Press in 1957, brought together 595 letters from Goethe's correspondence in English and remains an important edition of primary sources. Edinburgh was thus, for almost four decades, the academic home of one of the few female voices in Mises's Viennese circle.
