Ida Hoff (8 January 1880 - 5 August 1952) was a pioneering medical doctor in Switzerland. As a woman in a man's world she achieved a number of "firsts". She was the first woman to be employed as a school doctor in Bern. She was a feminist activist, although it was as much her lifestyle choices as her conscious activism that are remembered. In a traditionalist city in the conservative heart of Switzerland, Ida Hoff was one of Bern's first regular female motorists.
Life
Family provenance and early years
Adelaide "Ida" Hoff was born in Moscow. Her father, Siegfried Hoff (ca.1845-1896), had been born into a prosperous German Jewish family, and had emigrated to the United States, taking US citizenship. According to one source, Siegfried Hoff was regarded by family members as the "black sheep" of the family. At some stage he had trained as a dentist. However, he had left the United States and, from the perspective of his respectable brother Leopold who lived near Hamburg and ran the family manufacturing business, Siegfried had "disappeared" into czarist Russia where he supported himself as a businessman. The family business had been established by Ida's grandfather, Johann Hoff, and involved manufacturing a Malt Extract health tonic which sold well in the German speaking world. It also sold well in Russia, where "Hoff's Elixir" even got a mention in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). As a child Ida Hoff grew up in circumstances of some material comfort, possibly reflecting her father's success as a health tonic salesman.
Anna Naschatir (1861–1901) was the "impoverished cousin" of Siegfried Hoff's landlord. She had been born in Daugavpils which today is in Latvia but at that time would have been regarded as a prosperous city to the south of St. Petersburg in the western part of the Russian empire. Anna was at least sixteen years younger than Siegfried. It is not clear whether they married out of love or from dynastic calculations. The marriage ceremony, conducted towards the end of 1878 in St. Petersburg, was a lavish affair. The couple's only child, Adelaide "Ida" Hoff, was born a little over a year later. However, the marriage was a joyless one. Anna and Siegfried separated in the mid 1880s, although they were formally divorced only in 1890. It was possibly a reflection of the stigma surrounding divorce that later Ida would explain that she had grown up in a one-parent family in the context of her father's early death, which was not completely untrue. (Her father died in 1896.) Despite being a one parent family, it appears that the divorce settlement left Anna and her daughter well provided for financially.
Escape to Switzerland
Before Ida reached school age, in 1886 Anna, still not quite 25, moved with her daughter to Switzerland. Hundreds of other young Russian women were making the same journey at this time, especially those from an intellectual milieu or with a record of political awareness. The czarist regime in Russia was becoming increasingly despotic and paranoid, persecuting opponents where it identified them, placing Jews under pressure and blocking the way to higher education for women. Many of the young women fleeing Russia settled in the Zürich districts Fluntern and Hottingen, on the city's eastern side. Anna Hoff was one of these, although unlike most of them she had very little interest in politics or in fermenting revolution in Russia: the focus of her life was more on her own personal development and on looking after her little daughter. The woman running the guest house in which they lived described her – with evident approval – as an educated, quiet and reliable person ("[eine] gebildete, stille und solide Person").
Despite the landlady's evaluation, Anna's school education had been relatively basic, and not sufficient as a basis for enrolling as a university student. She was able to listen to lectures as an "Auskultantin". She attended philosophy lectures given by Ludwig Stein. Anna was determined that her daughter's path to serious study should not be blocked in the way hers had been.