Who was Areal? Ima's mysterious suitor surfaces

        On January 1, 1908 Ima Hogg wrote in her Berlin diary, "who should appear but Areal?" Areal and others unnamed, she wrote, "stayed until late in the afternoon and we all drank eggnog together."

Hmmm.

What we know so far:
1. Ima had met Areal sometime during her travels the previous summer.
2. He came to see her again on January 4, when they had what may have been a lover's quarrel.
3. Areal was a probably a student at the University of Heidelberg. "He is off to Heidelberg in the morning," Ima wrote.
4. "Areal" is a Jewish name.
5. Ima was living with a German family at 22 Mommsenstrasse, a house in Charlottenberg, a suburb of Berlin that was a center of Jewish intellectual/artistic life in the early 1900s.

What do we think? More clues forthcoming!

Ima was very good at keeping secrets.

       When Ima Hogg did not want something known, she was very good at cover-ups. She idolized her father, James Stephen Hogg, and she wanted nothing to tarnish his reputation. She watched his biographer like a hawk, to be sure nothing got into it that she thought harmful to the legacy of J. S. Hogg. She didn't want anything about why she was named "Ima, " so the official biography omits that. Needless to say, she didn't want any stories about a sister named "Ura," either.
     
       In the bound volumes of J.S. Hogg's letters, there are missing pages.
     
       In the family letters, there are passages deleted.

       In Ima's diaries in 1907, 1908, 1910, and 1914 there are mysterious omissions.

       In the little notebook she kept on her summer vacation in 1918, pages have been removed.

       But in the voluminous files of the Hogg Collections in the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin,  there must be clues.

       Ima couldn't censor everything.

What was Ima's "secret"?

     When Ima Hogg wanted something hidden, she was very good at concealment. In the archives in Austin, the 1908 diary she began while she was studying music in Berlin starts with “January 1.”  She wrote in it nearly every day--until the end of February. 

     

     She wrote about her music studies, the piano pieces she was working on--and about a young man named “Areal” whom she had met the summer before. He came to see her January 4, but, she wrote, “He is off to Heidelberg in the morning.” That was the end of him--as far as we know. The diary ends abruptly on February 28. The rest of the little leather-bound book (with a lock) is blank. There was no more need to lock it. 

     If the “secret” that Ima mentioned in a letter to her brother Tom in April 1908 was something she wanted to keep to herself, she did: From February to October 1908 I have yet to find any record of her.  We have Tom's letter to her mentioning the "secret," but we don't have her letter to him. Did she destroy it? From Ima we have no letters, no diary, no nothing. We know that she was still in Germany, maybe still living in Berlin. 

        

         What was she doing?

Did Ima have a secret romance in Germany?

       Off to search archives for clues to Ima’s mysterious love life.  Rumors persist that the love of her life was someone she met in her 20s in Germany, and when he was killed in World War I she destroyed all his letters. Some say that is just romantic hearsay. But maybe, just maybe, there is something she forgot to hide, preserved in these files at the Briscoe Center for American History:

Ima Hogg Papers

Box

4Zg86 IH Travel diaries 1908, 1914

3B153 Diaries 1898, 1908, 1912, scrapbook of postcards from          European tour 1907

3B170 Notebooks and notes, 1908, 1912, 1926

4Zg78 Correspondence, “the girls,” 1902-1909, 1903-1936

4Zg81 Correspondence, Letters from old friends, 1906-1933

3B154 Social life, correspondence 1899-1918, dance cards, etc.

2.325 D5c another scrapbook? “oversize materials”

2.325/V26 “Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung” 1936, “Adolf Hitler: Ein Mann und Sein Volk” ??

Why did she save this newspaper and this book?

         When Ima went to Europe, she always visited Germany. Other rumors say that she kept up with her beloved’s family over the years. Or maybe it was just the family she stayed with when she studied music in Berlin. I’d like to think it was both.