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An Australian musician and pianist, Ethel Cooper (1871-1961), spent the duration of World War I (WW1) in Leipzig, Germany. At the outbreak of the War in 1914, she had opted not to leave Germany when that was possible. After that leaving was not possible. In her weekly letters (n=228) written to her sister Emmie in Adelaide, Ethel Cooper has gifted us a contemporaneous account of life in wartime Germany. The letters were smuggled out of Germany. She gives an account of a Rudolf Steiner lecture and a Theosophist visitor. Civilian life was difficult during the war. The British blockaded Germany, from the outset, with the objective of denying supplies to the enemy (Bell, 1937). Ethel Cooper wrote of her frustration that: “The whole day goes in the search for what is necessary to live on just for that day” (letter of 19 August 1917). She took the pragmatic view: “where everything is forbidden, you simply have to break the law” (Cooper, letter of 4 August 1918).

Australian woman spends WWI in Germany. She is suspected of spying.