Partner Auguste Fickert
Ida Baumann (1845 – March 12, 1913), also known as Baumannchen, was Auguste Fickert's partner for decades. She was the daughter of a Jewish teacher who grew up in the principality of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen (present day Thuringen). She was a kindergarten teacher before moving to Vienna in 1872 to become a school teacher. She and Auguste Fickert met at the Lehrerinnen-Bildungsanstalt (teacher training institute) in 1881 and, after the death of Fickert's father, Baumann moved in with her. When, in 1887. Auguste Fickert got entangled in a complicated love affair with a man in Breslau, it was supposedly Ida Baumann—nicknamed "Hekuba" in Fickert's diary—who acted as her level-headed adviser. The two women jointly undertook their first steps into political territory, namely active participation in the organization of progressive women teachers, in the women's suffrage movement and in public debates on prostitution. Yet while Fickert grew into an increasingly prominent personality, Baumann remained a background figure. Regarded as a burden, suffering from her partner's coldness and impatience and with relations between Baumann and Fickert's colleagues growing tense, Ida Baumann drowned herself in the Danube near Greifenstein in Lower Austria, not quite three years after the death of Fickert.
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