Meet Ilse Burroughs
- Richard Byrne
- Aug 2
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 4
Ilse Burroughs – the first wife of author William S. Burroughs – cuts a mysterious figure in literary history. Until now, for instance, there have been no widely-available photographs of her from the 1930s or the 1940s, during the decade after she married William in Athens, Greece in 1937.
Archival documents are opening new windows into Ilse Burroughs’ life in this period, however. Her visa and immigration documents, as well as records relating to her marriages and divorces (and naturalization) in the late 1930s and 1940s trace the path of her relationship with William Burroughs from 1937 to 1946.
These documents also have yielded two new photos of an elusive figure in the the larger Beat narrative from the era when she was married to one of its greatest writers.
A Highly-Coveted Visa
William Burroughs rarely spoke about his first marriage, but Ilse is not absent from the Beat Generation narrative. She lurks between the lines of Jack Kerouac’s celebrated depiction of Burroughs as “Old Bull Lee” in his 1957 novel, On the Road.
The published version of the novel casts Ilse as a “White Russian countess” whom Lee had married. But Kerouac’s first draft, published in 2007 as On the Road: The Original Scroll, makes a more direct connection:
It would take all night to tell about Bill Burroughs … He dragged his long thin body around the entire US and most of Europe and No. Africa in his time only to see what was going on; he married a German countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the Thirties … He never saw the German countess again.
Ilse was no countess. She was born into a German Jewish family in Hanover in 1900. And while much about her life before she met William Burroughs in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik remains obscure, Ilse snaps into tighter focus after she marries him and escapes from Yugoslavia in 1939.
William and Ilse wed in Athens on August 2, 1937. William was 23 years old. Ilse was 37. The union eventually allowed her to obtain a much-coveted “non-quota visa” — issued to her by the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb in December 1938.
Ilse’s need to flee was urgent. Antisemitism was spiking in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where she had fled after the Nazis took power in 1933. Germany’s Nuremberg Laws barred her from receiving a new passport.
Receiving a “non-quota” visa as the wife of a U.S. citizen was vital. Without it, Ilse likely could not have entered the United States in 1939. The quota for visas issued to German nationals that year was 27,370. The waiting list had 309,782 names.
Ilse’s visa – obtained via a request from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – shows the level of scrutiny required to receive permission to come to the United States. She had to produce a birth certificate, as well as reports from both German and Croatian police that she had no criminal record. She also was given a medical.
The visa also has one of the only photos of Ilse Burroughs taken in the 1930s. It is the portrait of a woman who has escaped catastrophe. Her face has an open and expectant air. She is smiling.
A First Marriage – and a First Divorce
Ilse Burroughs was married to another man when she met William Burroughs: Heinrich Klapper. They were wed in Berlin on January 18, 1930 — and fled Germany within weeks of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. When the couple separated is unknown. But they did not divorce immediately.
Ilse lived in Dubrovnik when she met William. Klapper resided in Zaton Mali – a small village nearby.
As her situation grew more perilous, Ilse’s thoughts turned to escape. Enter William Burroughs. Her plans accelerated when William visited Dubrovnik again to convalesce after surgery in May 1937.
In the absence of any official record of divorce, there has been speculation that Ilse never did untie her marital knot with Klapper. But a notation on the original 1930 marriage certificate in Berlin confirms their divorce. It was concluded on July 5, 1937 – a month before Ilse’s second wedding in Athens.
A Life in the United States
It took 16 months for Ilse to obtain her non-quota visa. She sailed from Dubrovnik on January 5, 1939 on the MS Vulcania. She arrived in New York on January 19, 1939.
A mere four months after her arrival, Ilse was swept up briefly into notoriety. She found work as a secretary with one of the most prominent exiles from Nazi Germany: antifascist writer and activist Ernst Toller.
In 1939, Toller was entangled in crises both professional and personal. Ilse was the one who discovered him dead in his bathroom on May 22, 1939. Toller had hung himself.
As the evening editions hit New York pavements that night, Ilse’s name, age and address were featured in many of the city’s newspapers. As a recent emigrant who had just escaped the horrors of Europe, this brief but bright spotlight must have seemed terrifying.
Ilse Burroughs eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen on January 18, 1944. It was one day shy of five years since she arrived in New York. That document – also obtained from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – boasts another rare photo of Ilse in this era, only a few years before she would divorce William Burroughs.
In this photo, the open and expectant gaze of 1938 has vanished. Ilse is now icily composed. Sharp angles. A perceptible hardening.
A Divorce on Home Turf
Biographies of William Burroughs agree that he divorced Ilse in 1946. But documents to confirm it have been elusive until now.
The Burroughs family was prominent in St. Louis, and a number of the city’s newspapers, including The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ran short items on William Burroughs’ filing for divorce in St. Louis County. “He charged desertion,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 22, 1946, “asserting that his wife, who is now in New York, left him more than a year ago.”
In the archives of St. Louis’ County’s Circuit Court, a document confirms that the divorce sought by William Burroughs was granted. Dated October 16, 1946, an official order uncovered recently by circuit court officials notes that “the plaintiff is the innocent and injured party and is justly entitled to the relief prayed for in his petition.”
The document also sketches out the courtroom scenario. William Burroughs and his lawyer were present, while Ilse was represented only by her lawyer. The plaintiff was stated to have paid “the costs herein incurred.”
The date of this proceeding also aligns with a letter sent to Allen Ginsberg on October 19, 1946 – and included in The Letters of William S. Burroughs (Penguin) – in which Burroughs writes that “I am leaving here in a few days for St. Louis to divorce my wife and extort some financial backing from my family.”
Ilse remained in New York City, and worked there before moving to Lucerne, Switzerland in 1970. She passed away in 1982.
(Images: The two images of Ilse Burroughs that accompany this story have been digitally enhanced for greater clarity by Stage Write. The original images are U.S. government records obtained via a request to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.Image of the marriage certificate of William Burroughs and Ile Klapper is from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
Image of the marriage certificate of Heinrich Klapper and Ilse Herzfeld is from the Landesarchiv Berlin.
Image of the official order confirming the divorce of Ilse Burroughs and William S. Burroughs is from the St. Louis County Circuit Court. The authors wish to thank John O’Sullivan, Communications Director of the St. Louis County Circuit Court, for his assistance in locating this document.)
(This article first appeared on the Stage Write Substack on September 12, 2023 under the joint byline of Richard Byrne and Thomas Antonic.)
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