Hanna Elisabeth Bergmann Weston, a teacher, lawyer and human rights activist, passed away Jan. 21, 2021, in Denver. She was 83. The family held a private service Jan. 24 at Golden Hill Cemetery. Feldman Mortuary made the arrangements.
Her family said that Hanna approached “nearly everything with a deep sense of egalitarian empathy and curiosity. She believed that society and its institutions were both remarkable and fragile.”
Hanna Bergmann was born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria. Her mother Anna Katherina Golwig Bergmann took her to England after the Anschluss in 1938 and then to New York City in 1939.
Her father Gustav Bergmann fled Vienna for the US in 1939 and brought his daughter to Iowa City, Iowa in 1944. She attended high school in Iowa City, earned a BA at Oberlin College in 1958 and an MA in history at Columbia University in 1963.
She married Burns H. Weston and they had two children.
Mrs. Weston taught history and economics at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids.
After her marriage to Charles H. Nadler, Mrs. Weston taught in Kirkwood’s school’s paralegal program, which she reorganized as the Legal Assistant Program.
Upon earning her law degree at the University of Iowa in 1983, she and Mr. Nadler open a law firm in Cedar Rapids. She was a mediator, arbitrator, and helped found the Iowa Mediation Service.
Mrs. Weston, a fixture at local Democratic functions, coordinated get-out-the-vote campaigns. She was active in the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, which championed gender discrimination cases led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1972-1988.
Mrs. Weston won a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant, 1972-1973; and was named Civil Libertarian of the Year in 2003.
The couple moved to Denver in 2005. She taught business law at Everest College and economics at the Community College of Denver until 2012.
Post-retirement, she supported, among other causes, a clean needle initiative to reduce the incidence of Hepatitis-C.
“She led a life of conviction and we miss her enormously,” the family said.
Hanna Elizabeth Bergmann Weston is survived by her husband Charles H. Nadler; children Timothy Bergmann Weston and Rebecca Burns Weston; and grandchildren Leah Yonemoto-Weston, Emma Yonemoto-Weston, Elijah Weston-Capulong and Isabella Weston-Capulong.
Donations may be made in her name to the ACLU.
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