Mathilde Friederike Karoline Ludendorff (born Mathilde Spieß; 4 October 1877 – 24 June 1966) was a German psychiatrist and author on several subjects such as philosophy, politics, and religion. She was a leading figure in the Völkisch movement known for her unorthodox (esoteric) and conspiratorial ideas. Her third husband was General Erich Ludendorff. Together with Ludendorff, she founded the Bund für Gotteserkenntnis (Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society of theists, which was banned from 1961 to 1977.
Early life and education Mathilde Spieß was born in Wiesbaden, Hesse in central Germany, the daughter of Prof. Dr. phil. Bernhard Spieß, from 1876 until 1906 teacher at the Wiesbaden Gymnasium. She attended a private and a public school for girls. Despite their modest means, the parents were able to give their daughters a practical professional education, which was unusual at the time. From 1893 until 1895 she trained to be a school teacher for girls, and in 1896 began to teach, initially at a boarding school for girls in Biebrich. She saved enough money to attend evening classes at the Gymnasium for Girls in Karlsruhe from 1900 until 1901, to gain her Abitur. During the winter semester of 1901/1902, she began to study medicine at the Albert Ludwigs University in Freiburg, where she attended the lectures of August Weismann on common descent (Vorlesungen über Deszendenztheorie) amongst others. In 1904, she married her lecturer, anatomist Gustav Adolf von Kemnitz, and moved to Munich in 1905, where she had a daughter, Ingeborg von Kemnitz (1906–1970) and the twins Asko (1909–1992) and Hanno (1909–1990). Two years later in 1911, she picked up her interrupted medical studies in Munich until 1912, followed by the Medizinalpraktikum (practical year) part-time in the gynecology department of the Universitätsklinik Bonn, followed by approbation in 1913. She also graduated in 1913 with a PhD degree in neurology with a thesis examining the hereditary nature of mental differences between genders.
Career From 1913 to 1914 she volunteered with the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and for a short time had her own office. She developed tuberculosis of the lung in 1915. As she recovered in 1915, she took over as medical director of a "Offiziersgenesungsheim" (place of recuperation/rehabilitation for military officers) in Partenkirchen and Garmisch and opened her own neurology office. In parallel to her intensifying preoccupation with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer in 1916 she founded a private spa in 1917. Her husband died in 1917 during an accident in the mountains. In 1919, she married Edmund Georg Kleine, a retired major, and divorced two years later. She made her living with an office in Munich. Through Gottfried Feder, she got to know General Erich Ludendorff, who had been the leader of German military activities during the second half of WWI. His wife became her psychiatric patient but after they divorced, she married Ludendorff on 14 September 1926 in Tutzing. She became a strong critic of the religions existing in the Germany of her time and officially left Lutheranism in 1913.
Philosophy and science Her 1921 work Triumph des Unsterblichkeitwillens (Triumph of the Will for Immortality) examined the desire in humans for immortality and in doing so attempted a synthesis of philosophy and science which would underpin much of her later work. This was the case in her The Origin and Nature of the Soul, a book in three volumes: History of Creation (1923), which traces the soul from its beginnings and the emergence of the universe; Soul of Man (1925), which explains the soul as a will and a consciousness; and Self Creation (1927), which suggests ways of remodelling the soul. A later work, Der Seele Wirken und Gestalten (The Action of the Soul and its Effect), dealt with similar themes and was also split up into three books: The Soul of the Child and the Parent's Duty (1930), a study in pedagogy; The Soul of the Nation and the Molders of its Power (1933), which argued that the Volk was an indivisible unit and was shaped by its leaders so that bad leadership could kill off a group; The God-Story of the Nations, (1935) which claimed that culture was more important to any people than civilisation and that it was tied into their will to creation itself. She also advocated women's rights and equality of the sexes, although these issues did not form a central part of the wider political platform with which she would become associated.
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