User:Virtualiter/Mariedi Anders

Mariedi Anders (26 January 1915 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary – 26 December 2009 in San Francisco) was a music agent.

Born as Maria Elbogen, she was the only child of Franz Elbogen and Lilli Agathe Elbogen (1891–1919), a daughter of Eduard Elbogen.

Despite her parents' non-denominationalism, she was baptized as a Protestant - a religion she abandoned at the age of fourteen. After her mother's death, her father married the pianist Julia (Mady) Goldner two years later. She grew up in a house in Vienna's third district that was dominated by music. In 1922, her stepsister Anna (Hanni) Elbogen was born. Her aunts, Stefanie (∞ Eugene Ormandy) and Gertrude Goldner, were, like her stepmother, excellent musicians. Her father wrote couplets that he performed in coffee houses, and played the lute and violin as an amateur.

She completed her humanistic education at the Federal High School in Vienna III in 1934 with a high school diploma. She had already been released from her father's authority on May 6th at the age of 18 with a declaration of adulthood. Shortly afterwards, she married the employee Ernst Otto Aufricht, who was seven years older than her and a son of Heinrich Aufricht (1871–1942) from Zablocie and Rosa (– 1931), née Gans. Maria began studying at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. In 1936, their first son, Thomas, was born.

After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, both the Elbogens and the Aufrichts were considered Jews according to the Nuremberg Race Laws, despite their non-denominational affiliation; in addition, the family's publicly known social democratic orientation was a factor. Her father, who often appeared at 1. May celebrations of the workers' movement, was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for six months in 1938/1939, but was released thanks to the efforts of his brother-in-law Ormandy and the US authorities and was able to emigrate to the USA.

An Affidavit by Ormandy also enabled the Aufricht family to enter the USA. In the early summer of 1938 they reached New York (NY) on board the S.S. Volendam and in the same year changed her name Aufricht, which was difficult to pronounce in English, to "Anders". Maria, now initially Mary, later Mariedi Anders, initially worked briefly as a cigarette seller in a nightclub before her husband's product development in the field of fluorescent tubes brought the family a secure income and later great prosperity (from 1940 in Milwaukee). In 1944 the family moved to San Francisco, where two more children were born, Peter in 1945 and James Henry "Jim" in 1946.

Her stepsister also managed to emigrate to the USA in the summer of 1938, where she married Charles F. Forester in 1941.

From 1952 to 1954 Anders studied Dramatic Arts at San Francisco State University, but did not work in this field after graduating. She founded an artist agency that operated successfully throughout the US for over fifty years.

Weblinks

 * https://web.archive.org/web/20090224142359/http://andersmanagement.com/ (Homepage of 2009 with Artist List)
 * https://www.andersmanagement.com (Homepage)
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20240626091110/https://www.sfcv.org/articles/feature/memoriam-mariedi-anders1915-2009 (Obituary by Robert P. Commanday, founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice)
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20220529084003/http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/ead/detail.html?id=EAD_upenn_rbml_PUSpMsColl1051 (Film archive 1932–1947)