Frida Kahlo and Her German Heritage: Lessons from Her Father

Although Frida Kahlo died in 1954, it was not until the mid-1970s that her art became widely known among the broader public. It had been known, of course, to scholars in the field of art history since the 1930s. Frida herself had a hand in creating her own posthumous legend, inasmuch as she managed and marketed details of her life for the consuming public.

Already the very beginning of Frida’s life is an example of her ability to package and promote her own persona. She was born in 1907, but consistently stated that 1910 was the year of her birth: she did this to link her life with the life of the Mexican nation-state. At birth, she was named “Frieda” but later changed it to “Frida” in solidarity with the German people who were being oppressed by the Nazi government.

Two of the most basic facts about any human being — one’s name and one’s date of birth — were recreated by Frida about herself.

She also sometimes took liberties in telling her family’s history: at times, she described them as Hungarian Jews, whereas they were in reality Lutherans from southwest Germany.

If Frida re-made her life’s story, it may have been because she was following a family tradition. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, reinvented himself when he emigrated from Germany and immigrated to Mexico in 1891. Born in the 1870s, he renamed himself Guillermo. Explaining Wilhelm’s life, historian Hayden Herrera writes that “he was a successful photographer who had just been commissioned by the Mexican government to record the nation’s architectural heritage.”

As a photographer, Wilhelm had an eye for things like form, shape, space, line, and texture — the elements of an image. He introduced Frieda to painting. The skill transfer from his photography to her painting was one dimension of their close parent-child relationship, as Hayden Herrera explains:

Guillermo Kahlo was a fastidious technician with a stubbornly objective approach to what he saw; in his photographs, as in his daughter’s paintings, there are no tricky effects, no romantic obfuscation.

For Wilhelm Kahlo — for business purposes using the name Guillermo — to receive a significant contract from the Mexican government “was a remarkable achievement for a man who had arrived in Mexico without great prospects, just thirteen years before.” He’d arrived in Mexico and worked in a variety of small businesses in the German emigre community there. His career didn’t seem to have a strong sense of direction until he got into photography. This was the world into which Frieda was born, as Hayden Herrera reports:

He arrived in Mexico City with almost no money and few possessions. Through his connections with other German immigrants, he found a job as a cashier in the Cristaleria Loeb, a glassware store. Later he became a salesman in a bookstore. Finally, he worked in a jewelry store called La Perla, which was owned by fellow countrymen with whom he had traveled from Germany to Mexico.

Wilhelm was able to nimbly shift from one business to another because he had a good education — although an education which was broken off before it was complete. He’d been a student at the university in Nünberg, but a head injury left him susceptible to epileptic seizures and unable to earn his diploma.

Frida sometimes helped her father when he was experiencing a seizure. Later in life, she faced her own physical health problems — first polio, then injuries from a bus accident — equipped with the example of her father, who dealt with a medical condition and yet excelled in his profession.

At home, Frida spoke German with her father. The Kahlo family sent at least some, if not all, of their children to the “Colegio Aleman Alexander von Humboldt,” a school which functioned in German.

Although professionally successful, Guillermo remained a foreigner:

He never really felt at ease in Mexico, and although he was anxious to be accepted as Mexican, he never lost his strong German accent.

In addition to photography and painting, Guillermo filled the family home with culture, giving his children exposure to literature and music.

As befitted a cultured European of that period in Mexico, he also had a small but carefully selected library — mainly German books, including works by Schiller and Goethe, as well as numerous volumes of philosophy.

His working rooms in the house contained his photographic equipment, including cameras and lenses imported from Germany. “Above his desk and dominating the room was a large portrait of a personal hero, Arthur Schopenhauer.”

Hayden Herrera records Guillermo’s daily routine:

Every evening Guillermo Kahlo returned home at the same hour. Solemn, courteous, a little severe, he greeted his family, then went directly into the room that housed his German piano and shut himself in for an hour. His passions were Beethoven first, then Johann Strauss.

Just as she had changed her name from “Frieda” to “Frida” as a protest to the brutalities which the Nazis inflicted on the Germans, so also Guillermo opposed Naziism.

Frida saw bravery, both in the way that Guillermo lived with his physical handicap, and in the way that he took a stand against Naziism. She wrote: “He suffered for sixty years with epilepsy, but he never stopped working, and he fought against Hitler.”

The mature works of Frida Kahlo manifest that she shared her father’s passion for the visual arts, his perseverance in the face of physical handicaps, and his thoughtful reflection on culture.

Trying to Get Your Dream Job? Let Potential Employers Know That You Are Proficient in German!

The state of the job market in 2024, despite wars, a pandemic, and political and economic upheavals, is in one way still as it was in 2019, when Ross Ibbetson wrote that German is “the most sought-after second language for employers.”

He went on to report that “vacancies for German speakers were up.” Companies are regularly posting openings for professionals who can read and write German — and in some cases speak it, as well. The high demand for German proficiency is accompanied by premium salaries, so not only can you get that dream job, but they’ll pay you more to be in it.

Because Germany is both an “inward investor” in various economies around the globe, and because exports to Germany are high and growing, German is “the most valued second-language for employers” and “job vacancies for German speakers rose.”

Alan Jones confirmed that German is “the language most sought-after by employers.” As a result of Germany’s steady economic policies and growth, “vacancies specifying German language skills increased by more than a tenth over the past three years, compared with only a slight rise in demand for French speakers.”

Demand for professionals in various fields also includes those proficient in Italian, Chinese, and French. German is, however, more central in the global economy and more desired by potential employers.

Frida Kahlo’s Social Life: German Friends, German Family

The reader might be forgiven for thinking it odd to speak of a “social life” in connection with Frida Kahlo. The reader could well have gained the impression that she was a stern and always-serious person. This impression might arise from the oh-so-grim interpretations which some art historians make of her work, and from the often somber subjects in her work.

But Frida was a person who enjoyed the company of friends and family, and who had a lively sense of humor. Despite the fact that she lived in physical and emotional pain, despite the fact that she grieved the death of her child, she made jokes and laughed at the jokes of others.

One of Frida’s friends was Lucienne Bloch. Frida and Lucienne had a number of things in common. Both of them had fathers born in the German-speaking areas of Europe, and both fathers had emigrated from Europe and immigrated to the Americas. Both fathers were photographers. Both Frida and Lucienne learned the methods of imagery from their fathers: lighting, framing, composition, subjects, etc. Both Frida and Lucienne used German when speaking with their fathers.

As a trusted friend, Lucienne was present for some of the pivotal moments in Frida’s life, as historian Elizabeth Carpenter writes:

Perhaps more than any other photographer who came before or after her, Lucienne Bloch had unprecedented access to Kahlo throughout the 1930s, during which time they were very close friends and traveling companions. The daughter of Swiss photographer and composer Ernest Bloch, Lucienne first came to be acquainted with Rivera soon after he and Kahlo arrived in New York City in 1931. A multitalented artist herself, Bloch was invited by Rivera to join the crew of assistants poised to begin work on his Rockefeller Center mural commission. In addition to her artistic labor on the murals, she also faithfully documented Rivera at work and Kahlo’s frequent visits to the site. After Nelson Rockefeller’s controversial declaration that work on the mural must be stopped due to the prominent position held by the portrait of Lenin in the composition, it was Bloch who clandestinely took the only photographs documenting the development of the work, which was ultimately destroyed. It was also Bloch who traveled from New York to Detroit in June of 1932 to keep Kahlo company during the early stages of her pregnancy and to see her through a subsequent miscarriage. Bloch was there for her friend again three months later, when Kahlo received a telephone call that her mother was dying of breast cancer. They boarded a train for Mexico the next day, and their trip was sensitively recorded by Bloch with her Kodak Brownie snapshot camera.

Not only were the 1930s a traumatic time for Frida’s personal life, but world events were also turbulent. Well into adulthood — Frida was around thirty years old at the time — she changed her from “Frieda” to “Frida” to protest the harsh and genocidal dictatorship which Hitler’s National Socialism inflicted on the German people. Appropriately, “Frieda” is a German forename which means peace.

Frida was willing to change more than her first name. She played fast-and-loose with her personal story, changing details for symbolic reasons. Although she was born in 1907, she often gave her birthdate as 1910, a significant year in Mexican history. She also occasionally alluded to ancestors who were Hungarian or Jewish — or both — although she was acquainted with her family’s history which had deep roots in western Germany.

Frida embraced Mexico, the land into which her father had immigrated. Yet she could also see Mexican culture from a distance, given her German roots. She celebrated Mexican culture, and yet could view Mexico analytically, as Elizabeth Carpenter explains:

Kahlo’s interrogation and testing of Catholic, patriarchal, and bourgeois mores was a primary motivation throughout her life, ultimately helping her to define her identity as an artist and informing the art that she produced.

Frida’s heritage included both the Mexican version of Roman Catholicism that she inherited from her mother and a long tradition of German Lutheranism on her father’s side. Her world included Mexican patriarchy, but also a European sensibility which saw women as capable of creating worthy and significant works of art. She lived among the rooted Mexican middle class, but also among her father’s German emigre community in Mexico. Her life’s structure prevented her from being totally shaped by one single culture.

Not only her father, but also both of her grandfathers were involved in photography on a professional level. Images were the family stock-in-trade. It would have been surprising if Frida had not worked in the visual arts.

Not only Frida, but at least one of her siblings, spoke German fluently enough to attend a school in which German was the language of instruction. Later in life, Frida maintained her ability to speak German, but was not comfortable writing it. The letter which she wrote to her distant relatives in Germany after the end of WW2 is in English. She writes enthusiastically about details of the family history, having retained in her memory the stories of previous generations of Kahlo women and men, and is able to furnish details in her letter.

To be multilingual is to be able to think from different perspectives. About Frida, historian Victor Zamudio-Taylor writes:

She spoke German and English but also adored the colloquial forms of her native Spanish spoken in central Mexico.

From the cards and letters she wrote and received, and from casual photographs taken with friends and family, the viewer sees both the serious and even austere Mexican traditionalism, but also a fun-loving personality who grins and laughs.

A solid, middle-class Mexican version of social standards and Roman Catholicism were Frida’s inheritance from her mother. A German Lutheranism, a love of classical music on the piano, and a curiosity about Schopenhauer’s speculative philosophy were her inheritance from her father. Frida could not have been who she was without her father’s German artistic sensibilities. It is for good reason that more than one biographer records that he addressed his daughter habitually as Liebe Frieda.