Ernst Heinrich Schoenfeld was born in Nordhausen on March 10, 1882 to Fritz Schoenfeld and Adele nee Bon. His father died when he was 3 years old and his mother remarried Adolf Collin. Ernst grew up in Berlin and attended a private boys school. His older brother, Paul, to whom he was very close, died of diphtheria when Ernst was 13. In high school Ernst fell in love with one of his fellow (male) students and wrote of this in his diary and a series of poems. Some of these poems were published when he was 19 years old by the Axel Juncker publishing house under the title Lieder eines Knaben [ Songs of a boy ] and were well received. He began his university studies in Berlin, then moved to Munich where he quickly became attached to a circle of artists, writers, and other intellectuals. Here he became close friends with the painters Rudolf Levy and Hans Purrmann; he had become close to Julius Bab already in Berlin. He worked as a language teacher in London and Turkey, but returned to Germany to enlist at the start of WWI. He survived the war and married the widow of the painter Albert Weisgerber. He returned to Berlin and worked as a tutor and then as an archivist for the company Dreyfus & Co., until its Aryanization. He moved to Great Britain in the late 1930s and died there on March 19, 1953.
From the guide to the Ernst Collin Collection, 1899-1966, (Leo Baeck Institute Archives)
