Hildegart Rodríguez Carballeira facts for kids
..... She spoke four languages when she was eight years old, finished law school as a teenager, and was a leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) which she abandoned in favor of extreme republicanism, joining the Federal Democratic Republican Party (PRDF).
When she was 18 years old and had become internationally known, her mother shot her to death.
Contents
Childhood
Conception
Hildegart was conceived in Ferrol, Spain, by her mother Aurora Rodríguez Carballeira and an undisclosed biological father. Aurora chose the father with eugenic intentions; she wanted to create the perfect child to further her feminist and socialist ideology. She had previously taken care of her sister's son, giving him musical courses until he became a prodigy, but his mother took him to raise him herself.
When Carballeira was certain that she was pregnant, she moved to Madrid, where Hildegart was born. During her pregnancy, Aurora had set a clock to wake herself up every hour, allowing her to change sleep position so blood could flow to the fetus uniformly.
Her father was a brilliant military chaplain, Alberto Pallás.
Name
Hildegart's birth certificate and baptism act give her name as Hildegart Leocadia Georgina Hermenegilda Maria del Pilar Rodriguez Carballeira but she only used her first name. In spite of Aurora's atheism and opposition to birth registration, she had her daughter baptized, somewhat late, on 23 March 1915 and then registered on 29 April 1915. Her mother said that Hildegart meant "Garden of Wisdom" in German, but there is no basis for that and the name was either an invention or an alternative spelling of the Nordic/German name Hildegard.
Education
She knew how to read at 2 and typed before 4. ..... Her mother had a total control on Hildegart, forbidding her to do anything which could distract her from "her work."
In June 1928, at the age of 13½, Hildegart enrolled in the School of Law of the Complutense University of Madrid. She later gave lessons at its School of Philosophy during the Second Spanish Republic.
Activism
Politics
At 14, she joined the PSOE, like her mother. She was also a member of the Unión General de Trabajadores.
In 1932, she was expelled from the PSOE after publishing an article in La Libertad criticizing the PSOE for supporting a reactionary candidate; she then joined the Federal Party and started attacking those she termed socialenchufistas.
Death
Murder
Aurora shot her daughter several times while she slept in her bed.
There were several hypotheses about the motive for the murder. Hildegart may have fallen in love. ..... Aurora's explanation was, "El escultor, tras descubrir la más mínima imperfección en su obra, la destruye," "the sculptor, after discovering the most minimal imperfection in his work, destroys it."
Aftermath
Aurora was tried in Madrid. At her trial, she claimed that a Catalan lawyer, Antonio Villena, H. G. Wells, and Havelock Ellis were the agents of an international conspiracy to have her daughter leave Spain and make her serve the Intelligence Service and that, furthermore, Antonio Villena and Hildegart were lovers. She was sentenced to imprisonment for 26 years, 8 months and 10 days, to which she said she won 26 years to live, expressing joy she will not be locked away in an asylum.
She was later transferred to a mental institution in Ciempozuelos, Madrid, on grounds of paranoia and schizophrenia. ..... In 1948, in a letter to the superior mother of the nuns working in the mental institution, she said she spent a long time in prison and that she deserved to be pardoned.
After she died in 1955 of cancer, she was subsequently buried in a mass grave.
Selected works
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