Karin Wagner
* Karlsruhe, 1941
Lives in: Ettlingen, Germany
Educational counciller (retired)
Karin Wagner’s ancestors come from very different regiones: her mother’s family has members from Tilsit, Königsberg, Breslau, Berlin and Karlsruhe, and her father’s family is composed by people proceeding from Lucca, Bern, Freiburg und Freudenstadt. Wagner studied subjects of Romanistic, History, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology Romanistik, Geschichte, Politik, Philosophie, Psychology and Pedagogy and worked more than 40 years at different preparatory high schools. She also directed during 5 years a private school for social pedagogy and worked as a education counciller in the public service in Karlsruhe. Her penchant for French language and culture, together with many stays in French universities and exchange initiatives have led her to be nearly more knowledgeable about France than about Germany.
After meeting by chance a lady Baron von Gemmingen from Königsbach (Pforzheim, Germany), whose ancestors include a certain Daniel Rollin de Saint-André-Montbrun de Rochefort, Wagner started to work on a critical reconstruction of an aristocratic family tree. For this purpose, she traveled during nearly 30 years to different places in Germany and abroad, interviewing researches and digging up documents in archives in France, Italy, the Vatican, Malta and Sweden, tracing contacts between Huguenots,French kings, wars and weddings.
It was also by chance that Wagner ran into the History Meetings of Eugen Gabowitsch in Karlsruhe, although as a learned Historian she knew of course about the many fakes in ancient chronicles and diplomas. Nowadays she is working on her dissertation centered on the biography of the little known psychologist and therapist Paul Diel (Vienna, 1893 – Paris, 1972) and his theories.