Annemarie Balden-Wolff (neé Romahn) was born in Rüstringen (now Wilhelmshaven), Germany in 1911. She studied textiles and fashion drawing and after joining the German Communist Party (KPD), fled to Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) as a political refugee, following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, then immigrated to England in 1939. There, together with her husband, sculptor Theo Balden, she set up a cultural 'International Club' in Derby in 1943, also working as a practioner and teacher in the applied arts, prior to returning to East Berlin in 1947.
Artist Annemarie Balden-Wolff (neé Romahn) was born in Rüstringen (now Wilhelmshaven), Germany in 1911. She grew up in Berlin, where she attended textile college, studying fashion drawing and perfecting the appliqué sewing technique which influenced her later tapestries. She also created short fashion reports for the daily Berlin Morgen newspaper and studied stenography at the Marxist Workers’ School, where, in 1932, she joined a left-wing agitation group (dissolved in 1933) and, more importantly, the KPD (German Communist Party), which brought her into conflict with the burgeoning Nazi movement.
Following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, Balden-Wolff fled to Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), accompanied by a Jewish friend, who was wanted by the Gestapo; they were assisted by an aid organisation related to the KPD. There, she became the treasurer of the expatriate artists' group, the Oskar Kokoshka Bund (OKB), where she also met the sculptor Theo Balden. In the wake of the 1938 Munich agreement, which enabled Hitler’s annexation of Sudetenland (Western Czechoslovakia), she fled Prague as a political refugee with the help of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Refugee Trust Fund) and the Artists' Refugee Committee, travelling through Poland and Sweden and finally reaching England in 1939. She married Balden in Hampstead, north London, the same year and afterwards the couple moved to Great Bardfield, Essex, home to an artistic community associated with Edward Bawden, John Aldridge, Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood, among others, although there is no known contact between them. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, and the introduction of internment for so-called 'enemy aliens' in June 1940, Balden was interned and sent to Canada for ten months. Upon his release in 1941, the couple moved to Derby, where in 1943 they founded the ‘International Club’, a branch of the Free German League of Culture, with the aim of bringing together fellow émigrés who had settled in that city. Its members were Germans, Austrians, Czechs and Polish as well as British people, who joined in order to discuss political events and socio-political ideas including Marxism (Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image, Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain 1933-1945, 2006, p49). Balden, however, was also a member of ‘Club 1943’, a ‘venerable and much-loved forum for political discussion’, co-founded by Jewish refugees including the painter Fred Uhlman (Tony Grenville, Club 1943, AJR Journal 2011). Balden-Wolff's membership is not recorded but she is known to have practiced applied arts, creating soft toys and figures in traditional national costumes, as well as bags and painted glass, and also teaching adult arts and crafts courses organised by Derby council.
Aften seven years in England, Balden-Wolff returned, in 1947, to Communist East Berlin, then in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), where she continued to create work across a variety of media and practices, ranging from illustration to mixed media collage. She divorced Theo Balden in 1951, and a year later moved to Dresden, where she settled with the graphic artist Willy Wolff, whom she married in 1956. Annemarie Balden-Wolff died on 27 August 1970 in Dresden, Germany. Her work is in the collection of the Galerie Döbele Dresden.