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Lioness at Large https://themisathena.info Sat, 22 Jul 2023 20:27:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.9 https://themisathena.info/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cropped-lioness-6-1-32x32.jpg Lioness at Large https://themisathena.info 32 32 Adventures in Arda https://themisathena.info/adventures-in-arda https://themisathena.info/adventures-in-arda#comments Thu, 20 Jul 2023 20:23:37 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46135 Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from the place where I had posted it first.  My recent reads of Michael J. Sullivan’s Legends of the Empire and Riyria series reminded me that I have some catching up to do with regard to Tolkien’s legendarium.   So now, with almost a year’s delay …

You may remember that back in May 2022, the last time I posted here with any sort of regularity (ouch), I had embarked on a not-so-minor Tolkien binge.  At some point shortly thereafter, it occurred to me that I might as well create a project page for the whole venture, the way I do for some of my other reading projects and recurring reads … you know, like my Halloween Bingo and Festive Tasks master posts, and this sort of thing:

Around the World in 80 Books, Mostly by Female AuthorsFreedom and Future LibraryOngoing SeriesThe Detection Club221B Baker StreetAppointment With Agatha: The Agatha Christie Centenary CelebrationAs My Wimsey Takes MeNarrativium: Where the Falling Angel Meets the Rising ApeBy a LadyMeasure for MeasureBeyond the 100th Meridian … etc.

Well, I guess should have known better.  In the words of Sean Bean’s most frequently-memified line from the movie adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring:

… at least one does not if one is me.

So, what started fairly standard for the way I’m doing these things, with a project master page appropriately named Middle-earth, over the course of three months blossomed into a series of (to date) seven sub-project pages, each containing a detailed look at one particular aspect of the world created by J.R.R. Tolkien:

(For those who don’t know, Arda is the physical ensemble of the world to which Middle-earth belongs; notably including, during the First and Second Ages of its existence, Valinor — the Undying Lands to which the Elves, Gandalf, and the Ring-bearers return at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and where the Valar, the immortal Powers reigning over all of Arda, reside — as well as, during the Second Age, Númenor, Arda’s version of Atlantis, from which Aragorn’s ancestors, the Dúnedain, escaped just prior to its drowning.  According to Tolkien’s legendarium, at the end of the Second Age the creator god, Eru Illúvatar, caused Arda to bend, turning it into the ball we know today instead of the flat surface it had been before; in the process drowning Númenor as a punishment for the corruption of its rulers and most of its people at the hands of (you guessed it) Sauron, and removing Valinor from the physical confines of Arda, thus making it inaccessible to anybody who doesn’t know the “straight way” there — read: everybody but the Elven mariners ferrying their kin there at the end of the Third Age / after the end of the War of the Ring / after Sauron’s destruction.)

My return visit to Tolkien’s world included material both familiar and new to me; notably at last also this beauty:

As before, what bowled me over was not merely the richness of Tolkien’s creation in both imagination and detail but also its verisimilitude, down to the most minute element:  It’s mind-blowing to begin with (to me, anyway) for an entire universe, and one as complex, diverse and enchanting as this one, to have sprung from a series of experiments in the creation of languages and of proto-Saxon/Germanic/Nordic legends, first undertaken by way of distraction from the very real horrors of WWI.  But what really distinguishes Tolkien’s legendarium from every single other fantasy world is that it is the only one actually coming close to creating a canvas as vast as that of our real world.  (OK, at some point he purposely decided to go that route and create a fictional “prehistory” for our world, but it was an undertaking of immense proportions, and it’s one thing to set out that way and another thing entirely to actually make it happen.)

Whereas most fantasy worlds consist of a territory covering only a fraction of that of our Earth, and even to the extent that they include such a thing as an internal history or prehistory, they tend to account for the details of only a select few past events relevant to the books’ actual “present-day” narrative, the prehistory / “creation of the world” phase of Tolkien’s legendarium alone (referred to within the legendarium as “the Deeps of Time”) comes down to an unmeasured amount of time that just may have lasted several millions, or possibly even billions of years; and when Arda finally gets populated by creatures other than the Valar and their subordinate immortals, the Maiar (to which latter incidentally belong the guys we will meet as the Wizards in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as do — or once did — Sauron and the Balrog(s)), what we’re looking at are three Ages, each lasting several thousands of years* (plus the beginning of a Fourth Age), all of them bestowed with an amount of detailed information that, all told, does not fall dramatically short of the historic detail we know about our world’s real past; especially going much further back than, say, the past two or three millennia … which would account for only one of the three first / main Ages of Middle-earth.  (For pure flavor, just have a look at the timelines for the individual Ages, but especially the Third Age, as rendered on the Tolkien Gateway wiki.)

Similarly, while the territory called Middle-earth, where most of the action of Tolkien’s books is set, is “only” roughly equivalent in size to Western and Central Europe (without the Iberian Peninsula), Arda as a whole — at least in its incarnation throughout the majority of its three main Ages — approximates the size and continental outlay of Europe, Asia and Africa, i.e. the land mass constituting the pre-Age-of-Discovery “old world” part of our world:


From Middle-earth to Our World (sources: here and here)
(Note: Tolkien said that the Shire was to be found in the area of today’s Oxfordshire.)

… again, perhaps not coincidentally so, as Tolkien had decided to set out and create a fictional prehistory for our world as such, but again, too, in such mind-blowing detail as to enable cartographers such as Pauline Baynes, Karen Wynn Fonstad and the folks at The Encyclopedia of Arda, not to mention the creators of online roleplaying websites, to create minutely-detailed mapsto scale — of everything from the various parts (countries, regions, plains, mountains, and other lands) of Middle-earth to city maps, building floor plans and elevation sketches, maps showing troop movements in major battles, the movements of individual characters, etc. … all based straight on Tolkien’s own words.  In fact, in creating my Middle-earth project’s topical sub-pages, especially the page dealing with the various wars and battles fought in and for Arda and Middle-earth, I found that even for the First and Second Ages, notwithstanding the supernatural nature of most of the characters (essentially, everybody besides Men), you can write up the whole thing pretty much exactly the way you would write up events from, or a chronology of, the history of our own world.  Moreover, even taking account the legendarium’s occasionally shifting ground — resulting from shifts in Tolkien’s view and the continuing development of the legendarium — there is an inherent consistency and an inconceivably deep scholarly understanding to his universe, which after all was the creation of his entire lifetime, that in and of itself lifts it sky-high above every other fantasy world: it is not surprising that Tolkien’s work not only inspired readers by the millions all over the world but also his own fellow scholars of literature and linguistics, as well as countless gifted artists who have made the creation of illustrations of his works their main creative focus.

Tolkien originally wanted The Lord of the Rings to be published with a work giving the public access to the full panoply and history of Arda and Middle-earth, of which the War of the Rings, such as described in LOTR, consists merely the absolute tail end: When Bilbo, during the Council of Elrond, refers to Elrond’s father Eärendil (him of the light captured in Galadriel’s phial), this is no mere throwaway line hinting at a history yet to be developed if and when needed, nor is the Lay of Beren and Lúthien recounted in part by Aragorn such a fragmented creation; and similarly, Treebeard’s reference to the woods of Dorthonion in which he was able to wander long ago is a very specific reference of both time and place.  To me personally, the most dazzling glimpse into things beyond the surface of The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf’s apparently casual remark to Faramir that he used to be called Olórin “in the West”, “when he was young”, later repeated equally carelessely by Faramir when speaking to Frodo and Sam and giving me goosebumps every single time: because Olórin is Gandalf’s real name, the name by which he is known only in Valinor, in his true incarnation as a Maia / immortal — i.e., it’s a revelation of Gandalf’s true identity, the single most closely-guarded piece of information about him (while he has solely been known as Gandalf the Wizard — “Wizard” as in “wise old man”, not “sorcerer” — in Middle-earth for no less than two thousand years at this point); arguably as great a secret as the fact that he is also a bearer of one of the Elven Rings of Power, Narya, the Ring of Fire.  Yet, Gandalf trusts Faramir with this bit of knowledge to which, besides him, only Elrond, Galadriel and Celeborn, Saruman, and Círdan the Shipwright (Lord of the Grey Havens) are privy.  That is some showing of confidence … and Faramir himself doesn’t even realize what Gandalf has told him — after all, how could he possibly?!

Due to a misunderstanding with the publisher’s reader and editing team, a comprehensive publication such as envisioned by Tolkien never became a reality during his lifetime; as a result, it would later fall to his son Christopher to sift the vast amounts of material left by his father and determine which parts of these to make available to the reading public.  Even though, until copyright limitations are lifted, that reading public will not be able to make up their own minds about the incisiveness of his editorial work, I am immensely glad that he essentially dedicated his entire remaining life to this doubtlessly Gargantuan undertaking, without which at least our generation of readers would likely never have discovered the vast, luxurious tapestry — occasionally frayed edges and all — against which the events in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set.  So, my Tolkien project, while in no way, shape or form intended to mimic or even compete with the plethora of outstanding resources already out there, is by way of a bit of personal hommage to the creator of Arda and Middle-earth, as well as in gratitude to his son for removing at least a sizeable part of the veil from the material threatening to remain hidden from the public eye as a result of a sorely regrettable misunderstanding between the author and his publisher.

As yet, the project includes two cop-outs that must be obvious to anybody even remotely familiar with Tolkien’s works: For one thing, I just can’t bring myself to try and summarize the splendid opening chapters of The Lord of the Rings (“Concerning Hobbits” and “On Pipe-weed“), so I’m afraid for the moment the write-up is more detailed for pretty much everybody else than it is for Bilbo, Frodo, and their fellow Halflings.  Secondly, the one sub-project page conspiciously still absent from the ensemble is a page dedicated to the languages of Arda and Middle-earth.  That page is due to come (as it necessarily must, for a legendarium that began with the creation of its languages in the first place); I just didn’t want to start working on it before I had laid my hands on Jim Allen’s Introduction to Elvish — which is OOP, prohibitively rare and almost impossible to acquire for prices in ranges of less than triple-digit figures, and which I’ve therefore only acquired fairly recently.  (By way of a side note, the page on Wars and Battles of Middle-earth has not yet been proofread; it was the last one that I finished and I wanted to get it out there before moving on to other things, so forgive any obvious snafus on that page). — I might also, in due time, create a sub-page for the “in-legendarium” chronicles and chroniclers of Middle-earth: there were, after all, many more of them than Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and the Red Book of West-march (i.e., The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings); and just as without the Tolkiens we would never have learned about the alternative prehistory of our planet in the first place, later denizens of Middle-earth would never have learned about the history of the First Age without Rúmil of Valinor, Pengolodh of Gondolin, and Dírhaval of the Havens, either — to name just a few of them.

One final thought that kept cropping up in my mind as I was going back and forth between the worlds of Arda and my own daily work reality, and which I’d encapsulate in brief like this:

_____________________________________
* To the initiates: I know, I know — many timelines for the First Age begin with the Rising of the Moon and the Sun, which would seem to make the First Age last only a bit longer than half a millennium, but Tolkien expressly said that it began with the Awakening of the Elves, i.e. over four thousand solar years earlier, and he also expressly said that the First Age was the longest.


 

The Middle-earth Project
Book Reviews and Blog Posts

Book by J.R.R. Tolkien

Supplemental Material

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Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-riyria https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-riyria#comments Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:05:39 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46102

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost all of his series, Sullivan only proceeded to publish the first installment, The Crown Conspiracy (now part 1 of the first double-dip repackaging, Theft of Swords) after he had finished writing the entire series, as a result of which the series hangs together extremely well; in fact, despite some awkward bits here and there, the writing even in The Crown Conspiracy is accomplished enough that if I didn’t know this was the first book he ever published, I would never have guessed as much — and in terms of writing proficiency, it’s been all uphill from there, to the point that the final installment of the Riyria RevelationsHeir of Novron, comprising the books originally published as Wintertide and Percepliquis — is among the closest things to the gold standard set by J.R.R. Tolkien that I’ve seen in quite a while.  While it’s still a bit short of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, that’s certainly not so by a very wide margin; and in terms of its overall structure — despite one major digression in the original book 4, The Emerald Storm (now the second part of double-bill book 2, Rise of Empire) — it’s also quite a bit more successful than the Legends cycle, both taken by itself and as compared to the Tolkien “prehistory of Arda and Middle-earth” books, particularly so the Silmarillion … and yes, I’m saying that knowing full well that the Silmarillion started out as a collection of fractured material that J.R.R. Tolkien himself never got to edit in its final version and which, instead, was left to his son Christopher to sort out. (As I said in my review of the Legends cycle, the comparative shortfalls in the narrative structure of Sullivan’s Legends cycle chiefly pertain to the way in which the interaction between mortals and immortals is presented, and that — in Tolkien’s case — is a matter of J.R.R.’s actual writing, not of the organization of the Silmarillion material later provided by Christopher.)

Sullivan excels equally at plot construction, dialogue and, in particular, in the creation of fully-rounded, deeply flawed but engaging characters and in the rendition of emotions and human interactions, both on a grand scale (as in the workings of society, politics, government, and the pursuit of power and strategic goals) and on a person-to-person and individual level; in the latter respect, perhaps nowhere more impressively in his insightful and sensitive portrayal of a very young woman’s protracted PTSD after going through a truly harrowing experience.  And speaking of which, although Riyria itself is a partnership of two male characters, the Riyria books — like the Legends cycle — also feature a number of strong female characters, all of whom in their own ways overcome personal hardships and go through various forms of trial by fire to become unlikely leaders in a male-dominated society — and all of whom, therefore, are definitely among my favorite characters … and would easily qualify as main characters if the series were not specifically named for the (male-only) Riyria partnership.

When Sullivan was met with reader demands for more books featuring the two members of Riyria, Royce Melborn and Hadrian Blackwater, he decided to publish a series of prequels called the Riyria Chronicles, explaining that because of the way the Riyria Revelations are structured, there will be no sequels set after the ending of that series.  Instead, the Riyria Chronicles narrate some of the pair’s earlier adventures, including some that are referenced in the course of the Riyria Revelations series; most notably the mission that first brought them together and turned instant bitter enemies into reluctant friends and companions (The Crown Tower, book 1 of the Riyria Chronicles).

As Sullivan has since gone even further back in time and created a “prehistory” prequel series set in the distant past of the present-day world in which the Riyria cycle is set — Legends of the First Empire –, you now have the option to either approach all of his books and series chronologically or in publication order.  I frequently go for “publication order”, but in this instance I wanted to read the Legends cycle first; as indicated in my post on that cycle, in no small part because one of the major points that Sullivan makes both in the Riyria books and in Legends — and even more so, in the combination of the past and present-day narratives — is that the past is subject to misinterpretation and outright falsification, particularly if / to the extent that no reliable documents and records exist that are beyond such tampering and can set the historic record straight beyond the reach of cavil: I wanted to see how this plays out as both series are set side by side, knowing the “real” story (the Legends cycle’s “prehistory” narrative) while observing how that historic truth has since been changed and perverted.

And I’m really glad that I chose this approach: knowing the true events of the 3000-year-old past as narrated in the Legends cycle, the “big lie” at the heart of the Riyria cycle was evident almost from the very beginning.  Obviously this operated as a spoiler with regard to part of the ending of the Riyria Revelations (namely, the exposure of the falsification for what it is), but I didn’t mind, because (1) it was a spoiler that I had deliberately invited and taken into account, and (2) even more importantly, it in no way interfered with the suspense built into the “present-day” narrative; much to the contrary, it even heightened that narrative’s built-in tension, because it served to highlight the extent, poisonously pervasive nature and monumental, far-reaching consequences of the deliberate falsification — while still leaving enough of a surprise element for a key aspect of the final reveal.  All of that is true even if yet another part of the final reveal — the one foreshadowed on the very last pages of the final Legends book, Age of Empyre — also turned out to be exactly what I had suspected; but I probably would have clued into that particular aspect even if I hadn’t read the Legends cycle first: for one thing, it’s the kind of ending that is simply most consistent with the traditional structure of epic sword and sorcery fantasy series (so I’d have at least half expected it going in anyway), and in addition, there is yet another, almost blatant hint to this ending at the end of part 2 of Theft of Swords — originally book 2 of the Riyria Revelations –, Avempartha, which would almost certainly have made me sit up and take notice, especially taken together with several further hints sprinkled throughout the narrative.

I don’t know when I’ll be getting around to Sullivan’s remaining books set in various historic moments of the same fictional world (a place called Elan) — the remaining Riyria Chronicles, as well as a three-book series called The Rise and Fall, which is set in the time period between the Legends and Riyria cycles –; but I see a distinct possibility for at least one, and possibly even more of them to feature as part of my Halloween Bingo reads.

[As in the case of the Legends cycle, a detailed review of the Riyria books that I read, as well as the associated maps, will follow after the page break below; and blurbs, ratings, and “100 books of summer” prompt assignments are to follow on page 3 of this post. — NB: as a result of the prompt assignments for the Riyria books, I’ve also changed some of the original prompt assignments for the Legends books.]

]]> https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-riyria/feed 1 Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-legends-of-the-first-empire https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-legends-of-the-first-empire#comments Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:03:59 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46077

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth) he had created a cycle of books set 3,000 years prior to the Riyria narratives and providing a background to those in a similar way as Tolkien’s narratives of the prehistory / First, Second and early Third Ages of Arda and Middle-earth provide a background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  Even better, from an author’s note to Age of Myth (the first of these six books) I learned that, again much like Tolkien, Sullivan approached this cycle as a cohesive whole and was not ready to publish even book 1 before he had completed his drafts of all (initially five, ultimately six) books.  And while I knew that these books were only published after the two Riyria series (Riyria Revelations and Riyria Chronicles), I also knew that more than just providing the backstory and setting the scene for the Riyria worldbuilding, the six Legends books were set to reveal the true story behind “the big lie” at the heart of the Riyria tales, so I figured it made sense to start with these — and I certainly didn’t regret it; even though once again I found that J.R.R. Tolkien, to me, still remains the undisputed master of the genre that he himself created in the first place.

[Detailed review and maps after the page break.  Blurbs and ratings of the six individual books and “100 books of summer” prompt assignments to follow on page 3 of this post.]

]]> https://themisathena.info/michael-j-sullivan-legends-of-the-first-empire/feed 2 German Women Writers: Children’s and Young Adult Literature https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-childrens-and-young-adult-literature https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-childrens-and-young-adult-literature#respond Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:58:02 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46037

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

Children’s and young adult literature was an era where German women writers were represented even before there were such things as “children’s”, “middle grade”, and “young adult” genres.  In the early 20th century, there were the books of Else Ury, which are still hugely popular today, a century later; after WWII, there were the books by Marie-Louise Fischer (Germany’s answer to Enid Blyton, though she didn’t write children’s / middle grade / YA literature exclusively, therefore she’s included in the main run-down of Post-WWII authors) … and in addition, there are these ladies:

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German Women Writers: Mystery and Suspense https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-mystery-and-suspense https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-mystery-and-suspense#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:56 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46034

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

Crime fiction is arguably the most lively genre in the contemporary German literary scene; yet, only a fraction ever makes it to the translation into English (or, for that matter, French or any other languages).  This is true for both male and female authors, and it’s at least partly due to the fact that “regional crime” is the name of the game in Germany at the moment; i.e., books set in one particular region and explicitly using its geography and culture as the books’ setting: regardless how well-written, apparently, this is not considered worth anybody’s but German readers’ interest.  Add to that many German publishers’ reluctance to seek the international publication of anything but literary fiction, and it’s easy to see why not even most German mystery bestsellers ever make it to an audience outside their authors’ own country.

    • Ingrid Noll (* 1935): The grande dame of contemporary German crime fiction; she only published her first book at age 55, after having helped out in her husband’s medical practice and raised her children.  Many of her books feature female protagonists who rid themselves of bothersome husbands, boyfriends, or competitors by creatively despatching them to the hereafter before their time.  Three of her twenty books have been translated into English (and a few more into other languages, including French and Spanish):
      • Hell Hath no Fury (Der Hahn ist tot): Noll’s first novel, in which a frustrated 52-year old woman, realizing she may be about to miss the boat when it comes to romance, takes to murder in order to safeguard her one chance at romance literally at all costs.
      • The Pharmacist (Die Apothekerin): The sequel to the above, written three years later (Head Count / Die Häupter meiner Lieben, below, came in between); here the protagonist of Noll’s first book becomes the eponymous pharmacist’s hospitalized confidante in the tale of constant woe and unhappy quadrangles that is her love life … and decides to take a hand.
      • Head Count (Die Häupter meiner Lieben): Noll does The Talented Mr. Ripley (of sorts), only the setting is Florence and the protagonists are two young women who manipulate and murder their way towards independence and personal happiness.
  • Doris Gercke (* 1933): Also an author who put marriage and children first, before finally acquiring the high school graduation degree that her parents had not been able to afford when she was young, studying law — and becoming a writer instead of a practicing lawyer.  She is the creator of one of Germany’s most popular fictional detectives, Hamburg police inspector Bella Block, whose investigations in 1994 (seven years after the publication of the first Bella Block novel) were first made into a TV series that ended up running until 2018; albeit except for the very first episodes based on original screenplays, not on Gercke’s books, where Block eventually becomes a private investigator, whereas in the TV series she remained with the police.  The only book of Gercke’s that seems to have been translated into English is her and Bella Block’s debut, How Many Miles to Babylon (Weinschröter, du musst hängen).
  • Nele Neuhaus (* 1967): She published her first two novels on a self-publishing platform; their success drew a publisher’s attention.  Since then she’s made a name for herself as the author of a popular crime fiction series set in the Taunus mountain range near Frankfurt, named Bodenstein & Kirchhoff for its protagonists, as well as two middle grade / young adult series involving horses.  Four of her Bodenstein & Kirchhoff books, as well as her independently-published first book, have been translated into English; her crime series has also been adapted for TV.
    • Swimming with Sharks (Unter Haien): Neuhaus’s debut novel, about a rising Wall Street star trader who belatedly realizes that all is not well at her firm and a number of “accidental” deaths may be anything but.
    • From the Bodenstein & Kirchhoff (B&K) series:
  • Leonie Swann (* 1975): She probably doesn’t need an introduction, since the first book of her sheep series, Three Bags Full (Glennkill), was an instant bestseller.  She seems to be making unusual detectives a bit of a specialty; besides sheep, she’s also written a book featuring a parrot as the detective, and her most recent venture is a tap into the “senior citizen investigators” bracket with the novel The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp (Mord in Sunset Hall) — which incidentally also features a dog named Brexit and a tortoise named Hettie.
  • Andrea Maria Schenkel (* 1962): A former employee of Germany’s national postal service, whose first novel — against the publisher’s expectations — was an almost instant runaway bestseller.  Many of Schenkel’s books are based on real (often: historical) crimes and contain an investigation into the circumstances of those crimes and the towns and villages where they occurred.  Four of her novels have been translated into English:
    • The Murder Farm (Tannöd): Schenkel’s first book, based on the true story of the gruesome murder of an entire family on a farm in 1920s Bavaria (though Schenkel moves the story to the 1950s as part of its fictionalization).
    • Ice Cold (Kalteis): Based on the real case of a 1930s Munich serial rapist and murderer.
    • Bunker: The fictional story of a woman who is abducted and kept hostage by a man she may or may not have known in the past.
    • The Dark Meadow (Finsterau): Another book based on a real crime case; the murder of a single mother in a Bavarian village shortly after WWII (Schenkel changed the location of the crime as part of its fictionalization).
  • Mechtild Borrmann (* 1960): An author who, before turning to fiction writing, had a varied career that included everything from work as a social services educator to theatrical producer and restaurant owner.  Several of her books have been translated into French; two of them also into English:
    • To Clear the Air (Wenn das Herz im Kopf schlägt):Bormann’s debut novel, where the investigating police inspector has to overcome a village’s wall of silence to get to the bottom of the murder of an elderly man; and
    • Silence (Wer das Schweigen bricht): A group of friends is haunted by Nazi era and WWII secrets that cause a murder decades later, on the eve of the 21st century, when a dark secret is on the verge of being uncovered.
  • Petra Hammesfahr (* 1951): An author of psychological thrillers, frequently with women protagonists; two of her books have been translated into English:
    • The Sinner (Die Sünderin): An investigation into the reasons and motives that have driven a young woman to commit the murder in plain sight with which the book opens; the novel was an international bestseller and was eventually turned into a U.S. TV series starring Bill Pullman which, in turn, was successful enough to run for several instead of just the one season originally planned.
    • The Lie (Die Lüge): The story of two women who together concoct and embark on a ploy of deception that turns out more dangerous than it originally seems.
  • Brigitte Riebe (* 1953): An author of crime and historical fiction as well as romance novels; she publishes her crime fiction, which focuses on the investigations of a Munich attorney named Sina Teufel, under the pen name Lara Stern.  (Note: this is NOT the same Lara Stern as the author who publishes erotic thrillers.)  According to her Wikipedia bio, her books have been translated into a variety of languages … though English apparently is not one of them, and you also have to look for French and Spanish translations of her works with a fine tooth comb.
  • Sabine Klewe (* 1966): Similar story as with regard to Riebe (Stern), above — a prolific author with several crime series as well as several works of historical fiction to her credit (her crime fiction is partially written under the pen name Karen Sander), but while her fiction has been translated into several languages other than German, neither English nor, for the most part, French seem to be among them.  (There’s just one novel in French, Viens mourir avec moi / Schwesterlein, komm stirb mit mir, the first book of a series focusing on a pair of investigators named Liz Montario and Georg Stadler, which she publishes under the Karen Sander pen name.)
  • Inge Löhnig (aka Ellen Sandberg, * 1967): Again, similar story as with regard to Brigitte Riebe (aka Lara Stern) and Sabine Klewe (aka Karen Sander), above.  A prolific author with several crime series to her credit; some of them, published under the name Ellen Sandberg.  The first two books of her series focusing on a police inspector named Konstantin Dühnfort have been translated into English:
    • The Wages of Sin (Der Sünde Sold): Kidnapping, sadism, and religious  fanaticism as the background of a family drama and a murder (trigger warning: cruelty to animals); and
    • Dead Calm (In weißer Stille): Another family drama emerges from the depths of the investigation of an apparent robbery gone wrong and ending in murder.
  • Thea Dorn (* 1970): Again, a similar story as with regard to the above three writers: A prolific author of crime and general fiction, nonfiction, drama, and screenplays, as well as panel member and host of several literature-related TV shows (including, most recently, having been invited to host Germany’s arguably most influential literary talk show, Das literarische Quartett, the show hosted in its original incarnation by Germany’s “literature pope”, Marcel Reich-Ranicki) … yet, not one of her books seems to be available in either English or French.
  • Melanie Raabe (* 1981): The daughter of a German mother and a father from Benin, Raabe self-published her first stories, but quickly cornered recognition for her novel-length works, three of which to date have been published in English:
  • Anja Jantschik (* 1969): A representative of the “regional crime” genre, with a mystery series set in Southwestern Germany, in the area east of Stuttgart.  Since she has an English Wikipedia page I’m listing her here, as part of the main list … but as for English translations of her works — just nope.
  • Sabine Deitmer (1947-2020): Also a writer whose work, according to her Wikipedia bio, was translated into several languages, and who had several of her crime novels adapted for radio and TV … but even though she herself was a translator of English mysteries (including Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None), her own books never made it to English or, for that matter, French translation honors.

And just to convey an impression of how lively the literary scene really is in Germany, unbeknownst to anybody who doesn’t happen to speak the language, I’m going to list some of the other female representatives of the crime fiction genre, even though I know that, alas, you won’t be able to read their books if you don’t speak German — and I’ll also note that (1) I could as easily have created the same sort of additional list for historical fiction and general / literary fiction, too, and (2) you can well and truly double or triple the number of writers mentioned if you add in the male German writers whose works you’ll never be able to read, either, if you don’t happen to speak German:

  • Monika Rielau (* 1945): regional crime fiction set in Frankfurt; one of her novels was co-written with Angela Neumann (further below)
  • Gisa Pauly (* 1947): a screenwriter, inter alia for the internationally syndicated telenovela Sturm der Liebe (“Storm of Love”), voice actor, and author of juvenile fiction and regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Sylt
  • Ursula Meyer (* 1947): regional crime fiction set in Münster, Westphalia
  • Gisela Garnschröder (* 1949), aka Gisela Stiens and Gisela Maria Stiens: romance novels and regional crime fiction set in Münster, Westphalia
  • Martha Bull (* 1949): historical fiction, children’s and YA literature, cozy crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Bremen
  • Angelika Griese (* 1949): regional crime fiction set in Bremen
  • Jutta Mehler (* 1949): general and popular fiction, as well as regional crime fiction set in Bavaria
  • Anita Wächtler (* 1950): regional crime fiction set in the Saxon town of Freiberg
  • Malin Blunk (* 1950s): regional crime fiction set in Kiel, the state capital of Schleswig-Holstein
  • Martina Kempff (* 1950): historical fiction (cf. also  my post on German women writers of historical fiction) and regional crime fiction set in the Eifel mountain range south of Bonn
  • Eva Markert (* 1951): general fiction, children’s and YA fiction, and regional crime fiction set in the Rhine Valley
  • Gabriella Wollenhaupt (* 1952): journalism and regional crime fiction set in the Ruhr Valley, in a fictional city modelled on Dortmund
  • Gesine Schulz (* 1952): juvenile and general crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set in the Ruhr Valley city of Essen
  • Gabi Bierhaus (* 1952): regional crime fiction set in Düsseldorf
  • Sibyl Quinke (* 1952): regional crime fiction set in Wuppertal
  • Nina Ohlandt (1952-2020): regional crime fiction set in and around Flensburg and the North Sea coast
  • Marion Scheer (* 1952): nonfiction, fantasy, and regional crime fiction set in Oldenburg (Lower Saxony) and on the Eastern Frisian coast
  • Christiane Baumann (* 1952): regional crime fiction set in Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
  • Angela Neumann (* 1953): regional crime fiction set in Frankfurt; one of her novels was co-written with Monika Rielau (further above)
  • Gabriele Korn-Steimetz (* 1953), aka Gabriele Keiser and Lea Wolf (joint pseudonym with Wolfgang Polifka): regional crime fiction set in and around Koblenz and in the Frankfurt area
  • Susanne Rüster (* 1954): regional crime fiction set in Berlin and Potsdam
  • Angelika Waitschies (* 1954), aka Angelika Svensson and Svea Jensen: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Angela Pajec (* 1954): regional crime fiction set in Münster, Westphalia
  • Franziska Franke (* 1955): “Sherlock Holmes in exile” pastiches and Roman era historical mysteries set in Worms, Cologne and Mainz
  • Claudia Rimkus (* 1956): a photographer and author of regional crime fiction set in Hanover
  • Clara-Martha Mai (* 1956): regional crime fiction set in Dresden
  • Marion Petznick (* 1956): regional crime fiction set in Rostock and on the Baltic coast
  • Birgit Lohmeyer (real name Birgit Hölscher, * 1958): general crime and suspense fiction and regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Susanne Kronenberg (* 1958): fiction and nonfiction on historical and regional subjects, children’s and YA books, and regional crime fiction set in Wiesbaden
  • Christine Lehmann (* 1958): a Stuttgart city council member for the Green Party and author of radio dramas, screenplays, nonfiction, and regional crime fiction set in Stuttgart and other locations in southwestern Germany
  • Ruth Edelmann-Amrhein (* 1958): regional crime fiction set in Stuttgart
  • Birgit Storm (* 1958): regional crime fiction set in Thuringia
  • Jacqueline Gillespie (* 1958): Scottish fairy tales, general fiction, nonfiction and regional crime fiction set in Vienna and in the mountainous region east of Dresden
  • Sabine Alt, aka Eva Ehley (* 1959): suspense fiction, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Sylt
  • Karin Büchel (* 1959): popular fiction and regional crime fiction set in Bonn
  • Astrid Fritz (* 1959): historical fiction and historical mysteries set in Freiburg
  • Manuela Kuck, aka Katharina Peters (* 1960): women’s lit and regional crime fiction with series set, inter alia, in Wolfsburg and various Baltic locations (Rügen, Wismar, and Bornholm)
  • Susanne Mischke, aka Antonia Riepp (* 1960): screenplays, radio plays, juvenile fiction, suspense fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Hanover.  Several of her books have been adapted as TV movies.
  • Sylvie Braesi (* 1960): historical crime fiction set in 1911 Manhattan, cozy crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Magdeburg
  • Ellys Meller (* 1960): regional crime fiction set in Quedlinburg and the Harz mountains
  • Monika Küble (* 1960): historical fiction and regional crime fiction set in the Upper Swabia region in southern Germany, between Augsburg and Lake Constance
  • Brenda Stumpf (* 1960), aka Lotte Minck, Stella Conrad, and Frau Keller (as part of a duo named  Auerbach & Keller with Fenna Williams, further below): romance novels, chicklit, nonfiction, cozy crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set on the North Sea Coast, in the Ruhr Valley, and in Berlin
  • Christiane Dieckerhoff (* 1960), aka Anne Breckenridge and Nelly Fehrenbach: historical fiction, romance novels, chicklit, and regional crime fiction set in the Spree Forest area in south-eastern Brandenburg
  • Birgid Windisch (* 1960): regional crime fiction set in the Odenwald mountains of south-eastern Hesse
  • Gabriele and Jürgen Jost (* 1960 and *1961), aka Danica Brückner: a husband-and-wife team publishing general fiction and regional crime fiction set in the Taunus mountain range north of Frankfurt
  • Andrea Revers (* 1961): regional crime fiction set in the Eifel range south of Bonn
  • Gitta Edelmann (* 1961) aka Felicitas Kind (joint pen name with Regine Kölpin, further below): historical fiction, alternative history, romance novels, fantasy, general crime fiction and regional crime fiction set in Scotland and on the Eastern Frisian coast
  • Heike Schroll (* 1961): scholarly nonfiction, dictionaries, and regional crime fiction set in northern Saxony Anhalt
  • Astrid Seehaus (* 1961): children’s and YA literature, YA fantasy, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set in Thuringia
  • Ute Wehrle (* 1961): regional crime fiction set in Freiburg
  • Nicola Förg (* 1962): travel literature, general fiction, and regional crime fiction set in varions Bavarian locations
  • Dietlind Kreber (* 1962): general crime fiction and regional crime fiction set on the Baltic coast
  • Franziska Steinhauer (* 1962): general and historical crime fiction; regional crime fiction set in Cottbus (south-eastern Brandenburg) and in Sweden
  • Andrea Ross, aka Marie Kastner (* 1962): general fiction, chicklit, thrillers and general crime fiction, horror, science fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Werningerode and the Harz mountains
  • Kerstin Rech (* 1962): Theatre, radio drama, nonfiction, and regional crime fiction set in the Saarland region south of Germany’s border with Luxemburg
  • Gina Greifenstein (* 1962): general fiction, romance novels, cookbooks, and regional crime fiction set in the Palatinate
  • Angelika Angermeier (* 1962): regional crime fiction set in Mainz and the area between Mainz and Frankfurt
  • Heike Rommel (* 1962): regional crime fiction set in and around Bielefeld, Westphalia
  • Susanne Reiche (* 1962): regional crime fiction set in Franconia
  • Moa Graven (* 1962): regional crime fiction set in Eastern Frisia
  • Manuela Sanne, aka Viola Sanden (* 1962): children’s / YA / new adult fiction, nonfiction, romance novels, and crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Uta-Marie Heim (* 1963): general fiction, poetry, radio dramas, essays, and regional crime fiction set in various locations in southwestern Germany
  • Roswitha Wildgans (* 1963): a trained classical singer and author of regional crime fiction set in the Munich area
  • Katrin McClean (* 1963): literary fiction and regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Nika Michaelis (* 1963): regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Christiane Franke (* 1963): regional crime fiction set in Wilhelmshaven (Lower Saxony) and Eastern Frisia
  • Sonja Kindler (* 1963): regional crime fiction set in the Black Forest
  • Claudia Puhlfürst, aka Eva Fürst (* 1963): a former editor who now writes thrillers, juvenile crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set in and near the Saxon town of Zwickau
  • Christina Auerswald (* 1963): general historical fiction and historical fiction set in and near Halle, Saxony-Anhalt
  • Petra A. Bauer (* 1964): juvenile fiction, nonfiction, and regional crime fiction set in Berlin
  • Elke Schwab (* 1964): regional crime fiction set in the Saarland and adjoining areas in southwestern Germany
  • Rita Falk (* 1964): regional crime fiction set in Bavaria
  • Hilde(gunde) Artmeier (* 1964): thrillers and regional crime fiction set in Regensburg
  • Irene Dorfner (* 1964): humorous fiction, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set in Upper Bavaria
  • Susanne Ptak (* 1964): regional crime fiction set in Eastern Frisia
  • Alida Leimbach (* 1964): regional crime fiction set in Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) and Eastern Frisia
  • Regine Kölpin (* 1964), aka Franka Michels and Felicitas Kind (joint pen name with Gitta Edelmann, further above): children’s and YA fiction, general fiction, and regional crime fiction set on the Eastern Frisian coast and elsewhere on the North Sea coast
  • Eva Almstädt (* 1965): regional crime fiction set on the North Sea and Baltic coasts
  • Corinna Kastner (* 1965): fantasy, time travel, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set on the Batic coast
  • Diana Salow (* 1965): regional crime fiction set in Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
  • Sylke Hörhold (* 1965): regional crime fiction set in the area east of Dresden, between Dresden and the borders of Brandenburg and Poland
  • Heidrun Grüttner (* 1965): chicklit and regional crime fiction set in Brandenburg
  • Nané Lénard (* 1965): regional crime fiction set in the Weser Uplands region in Lower Saxony
  • Michaela Küpper (* 1965): fiction set in the Rhine Valley post-WWII, children’s and YA literature, travel books, and regional crime fiction set in and near the Rhine Valley
  • Heike Köhler-Oswald (* 1966): regional crime fiction set in various locations in Thuringia (including Weimar and Jena)
  • Christiane Fux (* 1966): regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Beatrix Kietzmann, aka Eva Lirot (* 1966): general fiction, dystopias, children’s and YA literature, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set on the Baltic island of Fehmarn
  • Stefanie Schreiber (* 1966): regional crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Isabel Bernsmann (* 1967): regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Friederieke Schmöe (* 1967): literary scholarship, juvenile crime and fantasy fiction, and general and regional crime fiction set in Bamberg and Munich
  • Elke Bergsma (* 1968): romance novels, juvenile fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Eastern Frisia
  • Sabine Weiß (* 1968): historical fiction and regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Sylt and elsewhere on the North Sea coast
  • Britta Bendixen (* 1968): regional crime fiction set in and around Flensburg and on on the North Sea coast
  • Mona Frick (* 1968): romance novels, fairy tales, and regional crime fiction set in Stuttgart
  • Ilona Bulazel (* 1968): psychological thrillers, science fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Mannheim
  • Mirjam Müntefering (* 1969), aka Mirjam Munter: the daughter of former SPD (Social Democratic Party) chairman and former minister Franz Müntefering; a journalist, gay rights activist, and author of juvenile fantasy novels and regional crime fiction set in the Ruhr Valley
  • Sabine Schulze Gronover (* 1969), aka Sabine Gronover and Frida Gronover: nonfiction and regional crime fiction set in and near Münster, Westphalia
  • Katja Lukic (* 1969): autobiographical fiction, children’s and YA fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Warnemünde on the Baltic coast
  • Livia Pipes (* 1969): science fiction, thrillers, and regional crime fiction set in Stuttgart and in the Netherlands
  • Sybille Baecker (* 1970): regional crime fiction set in Karsruhe
  • Anette Hinrichs (* 1970): regional crime fiction set in and around Flensburg and on the North Sea coast
  • Kathrin Heinrichs (* 1970): regional crime fiction set in the mountainous Sauerland region between Cologne and Westphalia
  • Henrike Jütting (* 1970): regional crime fiction set in Münster, Westphalia
  • Evelyn Kühne (* 1970): romance novels and regional crime fiction set on the Baltic coast
  • Sandra Lüpkes (* 1971): a screenwriter, inter alia for the long-running TV crime series Wilsberg (named for its PI protagonist), and author of plays, general fiction, nonfiction, historical fiction, romance novels, and regional crime fiction set on the Eastern Frisian islands
  • Susanne Schieble (* 1971): a literary scholar, artist and author of regional crime fiction set in Hanover
  • J.M. Port (* 1972): regional crime fiction set in Trier and the Mosel valley
  • Marion Demme-Zech (* 1972): travel books and regional crime fiction set in the Saarland region south of Germany’s border with Luxemburg
  • Mia C. Brunner (* 1972): regional crime fiction set in the Allgäu region in southern Bavaria
  • Claudia Sagmeister (* 1972): regional crime fiction set in Lower Bavaria
  • Andrea Klier (prior to 1973 – 2017): general crime fiction, juvenile fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Eastern Frisia
  • Stefanie Rogge (* 1973): regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Föhr
  • Nicole Braun (* 1973): regional crime fiction set in and around Kassel in northern Hesse
  • Kathrin Ulbrich (* 1973): horror, romance, and thriller dime novels, as well as regional crime fiction set in Saxony and Thuringia
  • Romy Fölck (* 1974): regional crime fiction set in the Elbe Marshes outside of Hamburg
  • Silvia Stolzenburg (* 1974): see also my post on German women writers of historical fiction: general historical fiction, historical mysteries and contemporary thrillers set primarily in Ulm, Nürnberg and Esslingen (historical fiction also set in Venice and in Scotland)
  • Eva Adam (* 1975): regional crime fiction set in Bavaria
  • Julia Bruns (* 1975), aka Clara Bernardi: regional crime fiction set in Thuringia, on the Baltic island of Rügen, and in Northern Italy (Lake Como)
  • Sina Kongehl-Breddin (* 1975): children’s books and regional crime fiction set in northern Saxony Anhalt
  • Ulrike Schellhove (* 1975): regional crime fiction set in the Eifel range south of Bonn
  • Tanja Heinze (* 1975): regional crime fiction set in Wuppertal
  • Maria W. Peter (* 1976): historical fiction and historical mysteries set in Trier
  • Jessica Müller (* 1976): regional crime fiction set in the Munich area
  • Anett Steiner (* 1976): regional crime fiction set in the Saxon city of Chemnitz
  • Isabell Valentin (* 1978): regional crime fiction set in the Saarland
  • Katharina Schendel (* 1979): cozy crime fiction and regional crime fiction set in Thuringia
  • Sonja Silberhorn (* 1979): regional crime fiction set in Regensburg
  • Kerstin Pflieger (* 1980), aka Julia Corbin: urban fantasy and paranormal fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Mannheim
  • Andrea Reinhardt (* 1981): thrillers, horror, and regional crime fiction set in and near Koblenz
  • Britta Habekost (* 1982), aka Britta Hasler and Nora Schwarz: fiction and nonfiction books involving sado-masochism, historical thrillers, and regional crime fiction set in the Palatinate and in Mannheim
  • Melisa Schwermer (* 1983): regional crime fiction set in Frankfurt
  • Romina Angeli (* 1984): cozy crime fiction and regional crime fiction set in the Allgäu region in southern Bavaria
  • Marlen & Sven Rohde (both *1987), together aka Svarlen Edhor: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Eva Murges, aka Eva Link (* 1988): fantasy, children’s and YA fiction, tarot books, and regional crime fiction set in the Allgäu region in southern Bavaria
  • Saskia Louis (* 1993): romance novels, fantasy, and regional crime fiction set in Cologne
  • Birgit Rückert: the Administrative Director of Salem Monastery and Palace on Lake Constance; author of scholarly nonfiction works on archeology and historical fiction set in Salem
  • Andrea Illgen: regional crime fiction set in the Harz mountains
  • Heide Sommer: regional crime fiction set in the Harz mountains (note: this is not that other Heide Sommer)
  • Victoria Krebs: regional crime fiction set in Dresden and in Oldenburg
  • Thea Lehmann: regional crime fiction set in Dresden and in the Saxon Switzerland region southeast of Dresden
  • Annette Krupka: regional crime fiction set in the Saxon town of Plauen
  • Rosi Masuch: chicklit and regional crime fiction set in Jena and other locations in Thuringia
  • Ute Mügge-Lauterbach, aka Fenna Williams and Frau Auerbach (as part of the Auerbach & Keller duo with Brenda Stumpf, further above): chicklit, cozy crime fiction, and regional crime fiction set in Berlin
  • Caroline Parker: regional crime fiction set in Berlin
  • Bettina Kerwien: regional crime fiction set in Berlin
  • B.C. Schiller: the pen name of husband-and-wife team Barbara and Christian Schiller, who publish thrillers and regional crime fiction set on the island of Mallorca (Baleares), in Berlin and Vienna, and on the Baltic island of Rügen
  • Doreen Unkel: regional crime fiction set in Schwerin, the capital of the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
  • Jule Jacob: regional crime fiction set in Warnemünde and on the Baltic coast
  • Cathrin Moeller: general crime fiction and regional crime fiction set on the Baltic island of Rügen
  • Heike Meckelmann: regional crime fiction set on the Baltic island of Fehmarn
  • Mara Tamen: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Sylt
  • Ella & Tom Hansen: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea island of Föhr
  • Greta Henning: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Anne Amrum: regional crime fiction set on the North Sea coast
  • Elsa Dix: regional crime fiction set on the Eastern Frisian islands
  • Sina Jorritsma, aka Julia Brunjes: regional crime fiction set on the Eastern Frisian coast
  • Heidi Lubitz: local crime fiction set in Wilhelmshaven and on the Eastern Frisian coast
  • Dörte Jensen (image), Lena Karmann, and Ella Lorenz regional crime fiction set on the Eastern Frisian coast (note: they’re not a team, but I didn’t find front-facing author photos for any of them, so I’m lumping them together under the image that Jensen uses as her FB profile photo, since their books fall into the same genre and are set in the same part of Germany)
  • Angela Lautenschläger: regional crime fiction set in Hamburg
  • Klara Thoma: regional crime fiction set in Lower Bavaria
  • Denise Yoko Berndt: thrillers set in the music business and in London, and regional thrillers / crime fiction set in Tübingen and Munich
  • Andrea Pfrommer: regional crime fiction set in the northern Black Forest
  • Hanni Faller: regional crime fiction set in the Black Forest
  • Jana Fallert: regional crime fiction set in the Black Forest
  • Inge Zinßer: regional crime fiction set in the Swabian Jura mountains east of Stuttgart
  • Kirsten Nähle: general fiction and regional crime fiction set in Würzburg
  • Uta Seeburg: crime fiction set in late 19th century Munich and Bavaria
  • Elisa Lark: local crime fiction set in rural Bavaria
  • Franziska Franz: children’s adventure stories, thrillers and regional crime fiction set in Frankfurt
  • Cornelia Härtl, aka Carla Wolf: romance novels, comedy, cozy mysteries, and regional crime fiction set in the Frankfurt vicinity
  • Karin Joachim: regional crime fiction set in Cologne and other places in the Rhine Valley as well as in the Ahr valley south of Bonn
  • Leenders / Bay / Leenders: a trio of authors that, from 1993 to 2013, used to publish regional crime fiction set in the Lower Rhine Valley town of Kleve. — The married couple Hiltrud (* 1955) and Artur Leenders (* 1954) died in 2018 and 2020, respectively; Hiltrud Leenders was the main author, while her husband and their co-author Michael Bay, now a Green Party Kleve town council member, mainly contributed their knowledge as trained doctors and psychologists.  The books’ plot lines and characters were developed based on equal contributions from all three members of the trio.
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German Women Writers: Post-WWII / Contemporary https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-post-wwii-contemporary https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-post-wwii-contemporary#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:52 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46030

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

When Germany — divided into two unequally-sized halves — picked itself up after the catastrophe that had been the Nazi era and WWII, writers played an increasingly big role in the country’s search for its collective soul and its path to a better future; and finally, in the two states that had emerged from the ashes as well as after the German reunification almost half a century later, women writers had a huge part to play in the effort.  There’s a certain transition from the literature of the immediate postwar years (which is largely concerned with WWII and its effects) to books and authors chiefly interested in contemporary society and events; as, however, many of the authors who had been active in the earlier decades were still writing and publishing books at the time of the German reunification and the subsequent years — or are still doing so now — I’ve decided not to subdivide this page but to list them all here, even if that makes for a somewhat longer page.

  • Nelly Sachs (1891-1970): A protegée of Stefan Zweig who published her first poems during the Weimar Republic, but was effectively silenced as a result of Nazi persecution.  Selma Lagerlöf, with whom she had been corresponding since age 15, intervened on behalf of Sachs and her mother with the Swedish royal family; eventually they were granted a visa and moved to Stockholm, where Nelly Sachs scraped by a living for both of them by German-Swedish translations.  It wasn’t until the final years of her life that Nelly Sachs found international recognition, but when it did come, it came in spades; topped off with the 1966 Literature Nobel Prize, shared with Shmuel Agnon.  Sachs commented on the award that while Agnon represented Israel, she herself represented the tragedy of the Jewish people, saying in the poem that she had composed for the awards ceremony that instead of a home, she held within her the transformations of the world.  Her poetry is available in English translation in a two-volume Collected Poems edition, comprising the years 1944-1969 and 1950-1969, respectively, as well as in several individual volumes; notably, Glowing Enigmas, The Seeker and Other Poems, Flight and Metamorphoses, and O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli.  Also available in English translation is an edition of her correspondence with her friend and “spiritual brother”, fellow Holocaust victim Paul Celan.
  • Hannah Arendt (1906–1975): Another one of the writers who hardly needs an introduction; one of the most important and influential post-WWII philosophers.  Since she was a naturalized U.S. citizen and published most of her works in English (and many of those originally written in German have been translated), there’s no difficulty to access her writings in English; her most important works include The Origins of Totalitarianism (with which BT, MarkK and I unexpectedly struggled somewhat in a buddy read a few years ago), her controversial trial report Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, On Violence, and her biography of Rahel Varnhagen (the lady with whom I started this post way back on page 1), which started out as her dissertation: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.  For those who’d rather start out by sampling some of Arendt’s work, The Portable Hannah Arendt contains a good cross section.
  • Marion Gräfin Dönhoff (1909-2002): Germany’s answer to Katharine Graham: the phenominally influential long-time editor and publisher of Germany’s premiere weekly newspaper Die Zeit (“The Time(s)”) — think The [London] Times or The New York Times on even more potent intellectual steroids, in weekly instead of daily editions.  In the Nazi era, Dönhoff was connected with the resistance group surrounding Count von Stauffenberg, which had planned the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.  One of her cousins was a member of that group and among those executed for the failed attempt; her brothers, on the other hand, were active supporters of the Nazi régime.  Dönhoff’s feature-length account of her post-WWII flight on horseback from Eastern Prussia, where she had grown up (and which today is part of Russia), to West Germany was one of her first published articles and contributed to her being hired by the newspaper which she would later come to head.  Of her books, two have been translated into English: her childhood memoir Before The Storm: Memories of My Youth in Old Prussia (Kindheit in Ostpreußen); and a portrait of several of West Germany’s political leaders, all of whom she knew personally, combined with reflections on postwar Germany’s political path, Foe into Friend: The Makers of the New Germany from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Schmidt (Von Gestern nach Übermorgen: Zur Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland).
  • Libussa Fritz-Krockow (1916-?) was the elder sister of renowned historian Christian von Krockow (1927-2002): She kept a diary during her flight from Pomerania (today part of Poland) to West Germany at the end of the war; her brother helped her transform that diary into book form and get it published.  (He is also frequently listed as the book’s sole author, which almost certainly was not his own doing.)  As the title indicates, the narrative, The Hour of the Women (Die Stunde der Frauen), recounts, from a woman’s point of view (toxic masculinity and all), the mass exodus of the German population from the territories handed over to Poland and Russia at the end of WWII.  It is considered one of the most important books on the subject, which in turn was one of those immediate consequences of the war that would come to impact Germany’s postwar history and politics for decades to come.
  • Christine Brückner (1921-1996): One of post-WWII West Germany’s, as well as the reunited country’s best-selling writers, her Quints Trilogy arguably is a companion piece to the “exodus” narratives of Gräfin Dönhoff and the Krockows (above), only in this instance, in the form of a trilogy of novels: Gillyflower Kid (Jauche und Levkojen) tells the story of a woman’s life as a child and young woman in Pomerania up to the moment when she joins the 1945 mass exodus from Pomerania to West Germany; Flight of Cranes (Nirgendwo ist Pönichen) continues the saga from the 1945 exodus to the 1960s’ and 1970s’ changes of German society as a result of those decades’ social upheavals; and Die Quints (“The Quints” — there doesn’t seem to be an English translation) continues the saga in the 1970s. — Another work by Brückner that is available in English translation is her series of imagined dialogues with famous women of the past, both fictional and real, Desdemona, If Only You Had Spoken (Wenn Du geredet hättest, Desdemona).
  • Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974): An author of poetry, essays, and prose narratives, whose work often placed women’s lives center stage and / or were told froma “lyrical subject” narrative perspective, increasingly questioning the perception of reality.  Among the works of hers that are available in English translation are the short story collections Long Shadows (Lange Schatten) and Circe’s Mountain, the poetry collections Whether or Not (Steht noch dahin) and Selected Later Poems, as well as Kaschnitz’s memoir, The House of Childhood (Das Haus der Kindheit).
  • Luise Rinser (1911-2002): A teacher-turned-writer who during her life was one of post-WWII West Germany’s best-known writers, but whose star increasingly waned towards the end of her life.  She had positioned herself strongly anti-Nazi after WWII, capitalizing on her imprisonment in Nazi Germany for “activities undermining the armed forces” (“Wehrkraftzersetzung”), a charge carrying the death penalty and frequently employed to silence those opposed to the Nazi regime.  Together with Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, she opposed the rearmement of Germany; in the 1960s and 1970s she also campaigned for abortion rights, for women’s right in the Catholic church, and in favor of Willy Brandt in his bid to become Chancellor of West Germany.  In 1984 she was nominated (but roundly defeated by the other parties’ favorite, Richard von Weizsäcker) as the Green Party’s candidate for the office of President of West Germany.  Yet, her reputation had been controversial since her 1968 criticism of the judgments handed down against the leaders of the “Red Army Faction” (“Rote Armee Fraction” / RAF) terrorist group, and it grew increasingly controversial in her later years: first on account of her glowing support of the North Korean regime under Kim Il Sung and of Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini; and finally when a posthumous biography revealed that in the early 1930s she had joined the Nazi women’s organization (albeit not the Nazi party itself).  In that book, her biographer — a close personal friend — also alleged that, several years before retiring from teaching in order to marry, she had denounced the Jewish  headmaster of her school to further her own career, and that she had also exaggerated her anti-Nazi role in the final years of the era and the interest that the regime had taken in her person and activities.
  • The works of Rinser’s that are available in English include her 1944 Prison Diary (Gefängnistagebuch), the novel Rings of Glass (Die gläsernen Ringe) — the only book that she had published during the Nazi era, and which was highly praised by Hermann Hesse –, Leave if You Can (Geh fort, wenn du kannst), a novella set in WWII Italy; as well as Abelard’s Love (Abaelards Liebe), a retelling of the story of Abelard and Heloise from the perspective of their son, and The Wounded Dragon (Der verwundete Drache), a dialogue between Rinser and Korean composer Isang Yun.  If you speak French, you’ll find the titles of additional works of hers that have been translated into French (but apparently not into English) on Rinser’s French Wikipedia page.
  • Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918-2002): The youngest daughter and second youngest child of Thomas and Katia Mann, Elisabeth was musically gifted and originally wanted to become a pianist.  In 1939, after she and her parents had moved to the U.S., she married Italian antifascist writer and scholar Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was 36 years her senior, and whose 1937 book Goliath: The March of Fascism had deeply impressed her even before she had met him in person.  With her husband she worked on the “Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution”, published in 1948 by a committee that also included (inter alia) Richard McKeon, Robert Hutchins, Mortimer J. Adler, and Harold Innis.  Dividing her time between homes in the U.S., Italy, and Malta, in the 1960s and 1970s she was a fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, CA.  At the same time, she increasingly began to focus on maritime law and ocean conservation and pushed for the creation of the International Ocean Institute; in the final decades of her life, the preservation of the world’s oceans was the major focus of her work.  She was a co-founder of the Club of Rome, the only woman in the group, and a leading advocate for the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. — While Mann Borgese was a well-known personality in the international environmentalist, scientific, legal, and scholarly community for decades, a wider German audience became aware of her as a person, and of the fact that a child of Thomas Mann was still alive at the dawn of the 21st century, through the series of interviews that she gave for the Emmy Award-winning 2001 TV series Die Manns: Ein Jahrhundertroman, (“The Mann Family: A Century’s Novel”), which traces the history of the Mann family from Wilhelminian Germany and the Weimar Republic to exile in the U.S. and the post-WWII years.
  • Mann Borgese published a large number of works on ocean conservation and maritime law, both scholarly and popular in nature, including The Oceanic Circle, The Drama of the Oceans, the Club of Rome report The Future of the Oceans, and Pacem in maribus (“Peace in the Oceans”, a report for the first international conference on the law of the sea, held on the island of Malta in 1970), in addition to an interdisciplinary study of gender roles (Ascent of Woman) and the science fiction collection To Whom It May Concern.
  • Carola Stern (1925-2006): Enrolled in the Hitler Youth by her fanatically pro-Nazi mother, the writer who at birth had been named Erika Assmus  graduated from high school on the island of Usedom immediately before the end of WWII; by then already critical of the Nazi régime and those mindlessly supporting it, including herself in her own childhood and early youth.  Having found work in a Soviet-administered missile research center in Thuringia during the first years after the war, she was approached by the CIC (U.S. Army counter-intelligence) and agreed to spy for them; becoming, at the CIC’s behest, a member of the newly-founded East German socialist party (SED) and its youth organization FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend / “Free German Youth”), as well as a lecturer at its party academy outside of Berlin.  She was unmasked by a friend in 1951 and fled to West Berlin, where she studied politics and subsequently embarked on a career as a journalist, editor at a large Cologne publishing house, and writer.  After the Stasi had twice attempted to kidnap her, her work was initially published anonymously, identified by a line of three askterisks; this later (probably) inspired her choice of her new name (“Stern” is “star” or “asterisk” in English).  A lifelong campaigner for human rights, together with (inter alia) noted author and broadcast journalist Gerd Ruge she founded the German branch of Amnesty International.  She also edited — together with Nobel laureates Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass — a journal that became a platform for Czech writers after the 1968 “Prague Spring”.  In 1971, she joined a highly public 1971 abortion rights campaign; and later in life, she headed the German section of PEN International.
  • The focus of Stern’s work as a writer was, on the one hand, the recent history and then-contemporary politics of Germany, especially communist East Germany — her biography of its first ruler, Walter Ulbricht, currently seems to be the only book of hers available in English translation, though she also wrote highly-acclaimed biographies of West German politicians, most notably Willy Brandt –; on the other hand, the lives and biographies of historical women (and occiasionally men) who had beaten the odds and overcome racial and / or sexual bias to make their mark: e.g., she authored biographies of three of the 19th century women writers listed on page 1 of this post (Rahel Varnhagen, Dorothea Schlegel, and Johanna Schopenhauer), as well as a biography of Fritzi Massary and dual biographies of, inter alia, Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht.  She published two autobiographies, In den Netzen der Erinnerung (“In Memory’s Webs”) and Doppelleben (“Double Life”).
  • Inge Jens (1927-2021): One of post-WWII Germany’s most significant literary editors and biographers and, together with her equally well-known but more controversial husband Walter Jens, among the foremost experts on the Mann family of writers.  She was the editor of Thomas Mann’s diaries, published a book about his life and world as a writer (Am Schreibtisch — “At His Desk”); and together with her husband, she authored biographies of Thomas Mann’s wife Katia and his mother in law, flamboyant actress Hedwig Pringsheim (Frau Thomas Mann and Katias Mutter, respectively).  Based on the experience of her husband’s dementia, she also published a memoir of Walter Jens’s final years and their marriage during those final years. — The only books in which she had a hand that seem to be available in English are the collection of the letters and diaries of Hans and Sophie Scholl, the founders of the White Rose resistance movement, which Inge Jens edited — At the Heart of the White Rose (Hans und Sophie Scholl: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen) –, as well as a tract jointly authored by her husband and theologian Hans Küng on voluntary euthanasia, Dying with Dignity (Menschenwürdig sterben), to which she contributed.
  • Brigitte Hamann (1940-2016): A noted historian who, German by birth, married an Austrian history scholar and spent the rest of her life in her husband’s native country, where she said, her German upbringing provided her with a healthy dose of detachment to the subjects of her writing.  Her focus was, on the one hand, the Habsburg dynasty — particularly Empresses Maria Theresia and Elizabeth, aka “Sissi”, as well as the latter’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf — on the other hand the history of Austria during the first half of the 20th century, including and in particular the origin and rise of Adolf Hitler.  Another notable work of hers is her biography of Nobel Peace laureate Bertha von Suttner (see page 1 of this post, 19th century writers).  Several of her books have been translated into English, including her biographies of Empress Elisabeth and Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria — The Reluctant Empress (Elisabth: Kaiserin wider Willen) and Rudolf: Crown Prince and Rebel (Rudolf: Kronprinz und Rebell) –, as well as, on Hitler’s early years and his entourage, Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators) and Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth (Winifred Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth); and last but not least, Bertha Von Suttner: A Life for Peace (Bertha von Suttner: Ein Leben für den Frieden).
  • Ingeborg Bachmann (1927-1973): She was Austrian, and far be it from me to appropriate her as a German national; but she was one of the most significant German speaking post-WWII writers, so she absolutely belongs on this list.  Bachmann has been compared to Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf — Sylvia Plath is more on the money than Woolf IMHO.  Her literary legacy comprises poetry, radio plays, literary criticism and other nonfiction, including and in particular five lectures on the role of the writer and on contemporary literature that she held at Frankfurt University, as well as several works of prose fiction.  She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but before the Swedish Academy had made up its mind, she died from the aftereffects of a fire caused when she fell asleep while smoking in bed; the severe prescription barbiturate dependency that she had developed in her final years almost certainly was a contributing factor both in the causation of the fire and in her death, as her condition had gone unrecognized in the hospital where she was treated.  A substantial amount of her work has been translated into English, including:
  • Christa Wolf (1929-2011): Arguably East Germany’s most important writer both in the RDA and in the first decades after reunification.  The Stasi recruited her as an informer in the early years of her career, but all three reports that she submitted were so positive in nature with regard to the person she’d been set to spy on that she was soon dropped and, in turn, incurred close Stasy scrutiny herself.  While a lifelong socialist, she grew increasingly critical of the RDA’s leadership, opposing, for example, the expulsion of poet, lyricist and singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann.  In the summer and fall of 1989, while calling for reform, she opposed reunification, which she saw as “selling out” East German society and values; not an attitude universally welcomed at the time.  Wolf’s most important works, all of which are available in English translation, include:
    • Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel, also translated as They Divided the Sky) — on the effects of the construction of the Berlin Wall;
    • The Quest for Christa T. (Nachdenken über Christa T.) — a critical retrospective of East German society during the first decades of the RDA and its effect on the individual; the novel’s protagonist is modelled on a friend of Wolf’s and the narrator an alter ego of Wolf herself;
    • Wolf’s feminist rewrites of the stories of two women from Greek mythology, the alleged arch-villain Medea (and implicitly, the myth of Jason and the Argonauts), as well as the unhappy seer Cassandra (and implicitly, the story of the Trojan War);
    • Accident: A Day’s News (Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages) — where Wolf contrasts the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster with personal tragedies such as death from cancer;
    • What Remains (Was bleibt) — a novella written in 1979 and topicalizing Wolf’s surveillance by the Stasi, which was however only published in 1990 and, not least due to the simultaneous revelation of her own early Stasi informer activities, caused a huge conflict concerning the role that writers — including, in particular, but not limited to Wolf herself — had played in communist East Germany and more generally, ought to play in society in general and in a dictatorial society in particular; spurred on by (West) Germany’s “Pope of Literature” (“Literaturpapst”), influential critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki; and
    • In the Flesh (Leibhaftig) — Wolf’s response to the aforementioned conflict, which had affected her profoundly, both psychologically and physically, and which had caused her to totally withdraw from the public eye for several years.
  • Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013): A close friend of Christa Wolf’s, and in her own right, considered one of the leading German-speaking poets of her generation.  Like Wolf, she protested the expulsion of Biermann; and as she was the first on the list of writers to sign the protest letter, she promptly was stripped of her RDA passport in turn.  In West Germany, she eventually settled in the northern region of Schleswig-Holstein.  Her poems have been published in English translation in (as far as I can see) three collections, Conjurations, Winter Music, and Ice Roses; and there is also at least one prose work of hers that has been translated: The Panther Woman (Die Pantherfrau), an interview-based record of five East German women’s lives.
  • Monika Maron (* 1941): The stepdaughter of Ulbricht-era RDA Minister of the Interior, Karl Maron, together with Stasi chief Erich Mielke and Ulbricht’s successor-to-be, Erich Honecker, one of the architects of the policy that culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall.  As Monika Maron’s criticism of East Germany’s political leadership grew, she made a point of stressing her last name on its second syllable (instead of the first one like in her stepfather’s case).  Her first novel, Flight of Ashes (Flugasche), was instantly banned in East Germany for its criticism of the massive chemical pollution in the Bitterfeld industrial area; it is considered the first East German novel to address environmental issues head-on.  She left the RDA after having grown irreconcilably estranged from its political system, but returned to Berlin, where she’d been living for most of her life, after the German reunification.  In recent years she has acquired a somewhat controversial reputation; she has openly avowed a fear of Islam, which some interpret as Islamophobia, and some contacts of hers that are considered right-wing have occasioned a change of publisher when her publisher of 40 years, S. Fischer Verlag — the company founded by Jewish publisher Samuel Fischer, which is perhaps best known for Thomas Mann’s works — dropped her on account those contacts (and, some say, also on account of certain public comments of hers that suggested a leaning towards the far right). — Besides Flight of Ashes, the works of Maron’s that are available in English translation include:
    • Pavel’s Letters (Pawels Briefe), a paen to her Jewish maternal grandfather, who had been deported to, and murdered in a Polish ghetto;
    • Animal Triste, a novella concerning a middle-aged woman’s reflections on her obsessive and initially exstatically happy, but increasingly desperate love affair with a married man;
    • The Defector (Die Überläuferin), where Maron takes the social claustrophobia engendered by the political system of the RDA all the way into her protagonist’s mind and makes it personal; and
    • Silent Close No. 6 (Stille Zeile Sechs), Maron’s final settling of scores with the RDA’s political system and with her stepfather’s generation of leadership.
  • Eva Strittmater (1930-2011): Another one of East Germany’s well-known writers; she published general fiction, poetry, and children’s literature, often — especially in her poetry — as an imagined dialogue with representatives of Eurasian culture and history.  She was well-connected in both the domestic and international literary scene, counting among her friends and acquaintances not only Christa Wolf but also Russian dissident writer Lev Kopelev and Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness.  As far as I can see, unfortunately none of her work has been translated into English; but her English Wikipedia bio (linked to her name at the beginning of this paragraph) includes a list of her published works, and according to her French Wiki bio at least two of her poetry collections have been translated into French. — As a side note, can you imagine first growing up in Nazi Germany and then having to spend years enrolled at an East German university, having been graced at birth with the name Eva Braun?  No wonder she married the first chance she got and kept her second husband’s name even after their divorce …
  • Renate Holland-Moritz (1935-2017): East Germany’s most prominent movie critic — also one of the world’s overall longest-serving movie critics, longer even than Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, and Richard Roeper –, whose movie reviews appeared in the satirical magazine Eulenspiegel (named for the famous medieval German prankster) from 1960 – 2015, two years before her death.  In addition, she was a highly popular author of satirical novels and short stories.  None of her books, unfortunately, seem to have been translated (into any other languages than German at all); but given her popularity, she just has to be included in this list.
  • Ines Veith (* 1955): A journalist and screenwriter chiefly known for her campaigns on behalf of East German parents who had lost their children when they were away by the authorities and given to other (typically “loyal”) parents to be adopted by them, without any notice to the birth parents as to their children’s new whereabouts.  Of the two cases she portrayed in book form — under the titles Wo ist Dirk? (“Where Is Dirk?”) and Die Frau am Checkpoint Charlie (“The Woman at Checkpoint Charlie”) –, the second one in particular gained an enormous amount of notoriety and directed public attention to this routine aspect of the RDA government’s policy; not least because the “stolen” children’s birth mother in that particular case had, once the West German government had negotiated her own (but not her daughters’) resettlement to West Germany — embarked on a highly publicized campaign of her own, with daily demonstrations at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing in central Berlin.  Veith eventually adapted her book into the screenplay for a TV movie of the same name.  Her books don’t seem to have been translated into English, but there is a French version of Die Frau am Checkpoint Charlie entitled Un mur entre nos vies. — Veith’s other writing includes various other TV screenplays and associated books, including on historical subjects, as well as a political thriller, a book on an East German women’s prison, and a book associated with a philosophy instruction project that she initiated.
  • Herta Müller (* 1953): The 2009 Literature Nobel laureate; a member of the German-speaking minority in the Banat and Transylvania regions of Romania, who frequently topicalizes violence and terror; particularly of the sort that she and those closest to her were subjected to by the brutal Ceaușescu regime and at the hands of its ruthless secret police, the Securitate.  After a prolongued campaign of persecution and censorship for her writing in Romania, she was permitted to emigrate to West Germany in 1987.  She is a highly vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, whom she has called “a KGB-indoctrinated dictator with a taste for a personality cult” („KGB-sozialisierter Diktator mit Personenkultallüren“) and whose politics, she says, “makes her phyiscally sick”.  When, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Alice Schwarzer (see below) and other public figures in Germany published an open letter calling for peace negotiations, Müller countered with an appeal of her own; urging the German government to firmly stand by the side of Ukraine and saying that “their cause is also our cause”. — A large part of Müller’s writing is available in English translation, including:
  • Elfriede Jelinek (* 1946): The winner of the 2004 Literature Nobel Prize; Austrian, but as in Ingeborg Bachmann’s case (above), this list just wouldn’t be complete without her.  A feminist with a Communist bent, she’s a vocal critic of Austrian society, which in her opinion has never entirely shed its Nazi heritage; a fact that she sees reflected in the sustained success of the right-wing party formed by Jörg Haider.  Her writing focuses on the absurdity of society’s clichés, the violence of human relationships and its causes, and women’s lives.  The works of Jelinek’s that have been translated into English include:
    • The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin): A novel about an emotionally repressed woman who eventually lives out her violent sexual fantasies in a relationship with a much younger man who also is a student of hers.
    • Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten): Violence again, this time in the shape of a group of teenagers’ gratuitous attack on a stranger, as well as a violent marriage (vicious domestic abuse and then some), all 1950s’ Austria and in response to the breakdown of Austrian society in WWII and its aftermath.
    • Lust and Women in Love (Die Liebhaberinnen): Two novels that both portray spousal abuse as a metaphor for capitalism (and, of course, as a symbol of society’s inherent misogyny).
    • Princess Plays (Der Tod und das Mädchen: Prinzessinnendramen): A collection of several plays where Jelinek not so much rewrites the source material of old but uses the example of several fairy tale princesses (e.g., Snow White and Sleeping Beauty), as well as an apparent modern-day real life princess — Jackie Kennedy — in order to show how the “princess” cliché pervades every aspect of their lives, culminating in a merger of death and sex for those who let men — their would-be rescuers — control their lives, whereas those who are essentially self-determined succeed evading death, even when on the brink of destruction.
    • Her Not All Her (er nicht als er): A short play examining the fragmentation expressed in Robert Walser’s prose where, for example, pronouns such as “I” and “he” or “her” are divorced from the person to whom they seem to relate.
    • Charges (Die Schutzbefohlenen): Jelinek uses elements of Aischylos’s drama The Suppliant Women in order to challenge the response of Western societies to the plight of the masses of refugees fleeing to Europe and North America from their hunger- and war-ridden home countries elsewhere on the globe.
    • Three Plays: Rechnitz, The Merchant’s Contracts, Charges (Rechnitz: Der Würgeengel / Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns / Die Schutzbefohlenen): A collection of three plays, combining Charges (above) with a play about the — real, historical — massacre of 180 Jews in a town on the Austrian / Hungarian border, as well as a comedy of manners in which a small merchant, confused by the overwhelming babble surrounding him, ends up a loser on the stage of global economy.  (Rechnitz and The Merchant’s Contracts have also been published together in a two-play edition.)
    • Fury (Wut): Jelinek’s response, in the form of a play, to the violent antisemitism and hatred of Western society that drives Islamic terrorism, such as expressed in the 2015 attacks on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish supermarket.
    • Sports Play (Ein Sportstück): A play examining the objectification and commercialization of the individual by contemporary sports and beauty culture.
  • Alice Schwarzer (* 1942): The face of women’s lib in Germany; she’s Germany’s version of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French, and Susan Sontag rolled into one.  A friend of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, she founded Germany’s most influential feminist magazine, EMMA, in 1977, headed up Germany’s most highly visible abortion rights campaign (also in the 1970s), advocates the prohibition of pornography — but on the other hand also advocates for the legalization of brothels, as this would guarantee the sex workers employed there access to basic social services –. and in recent years, has taken a position highly critical of political islamism and in favor of women’s equality in Islamic societies.  She has published several books advocating women’s rights and position in society, as well as biographies of prominent women, including Marion Gräfin Dönhoff (further above) and actress Romy Schneider.  The only one of her books that seems to be available in English is her series of interviews with Simone de Beauvoir, After the Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir: Weggefährtinnen im Gespräch); though at least one of the most significant of her feminist works is available in French: La petite différence et ses conséquences (Der kleine Unterschied und seine großen Folgen), a collection of women’s life experiences from the 1970s compiled as part of Schwarzer’s campaign for abortion rights.
  • Brigitte Kronauer (1940-2019):  A multiple award-winning novelist and fiction writer active in the final two decades of the Cold War and the first two decades after the German reunification, whose effortlessly satirical prose style has sometimes been compared to that of Romantic writer Jean Paul.  As far as I can see, none of her novels is available in English, but there are two short story collections — Women and Clothes (Die Kleider der Frauen) — and Constructs of Desire, a cross section of her short fiction.
  • Elke Heidenreich (* 1943): One of contemporary Germany’s most influential representatives of the literary world.  She made her debut in the 1970s on the state-wide broadcast channel of North-Rhine Westphalia (WDR / Westdeutscher Rundfunk) — my local station; I practically grew up with her satirical radio commentary on current events and on society in the guise of a down-to-earth Ruhr Valley butcher’s wife named Else Stratmann.  She then became a columnist with one of Germany’s leading women’s magazines, Brigitte, where she did much the same as in the Else Stratmann sketches in a series of featured articles headed “Also …” (“Well …”).  More recently, she has been hosting literature-related shows on German and Swiss TV.  Book-form collections of her Else Stratmann and Brigitte features were first published in the 1980s; in 1992, she made her debut as a fiction author.  Unfortunately, only very little of her writing has been translated into English (or French, for that matter); the only books that seem to be available are her lovely cat story, Nero Corleone, and Some Folk Think the South Pole’s Hot: The Three Tenors Play the Antarctic (Am Südpol, denkt man, ist es heiß), a long satirical poem on climate change, the generational conflict, and the power of music, illustrated by Quint Buchholz.  French speakers can sample her writing in a collection of short stories named Dos au monde (Der Welt den Rücken).
  • Monika Held (* 1943): A journalist and writer whose focus includes working class lives and working conditions, as well as post-WWII Germany’s struggle to contend with the Nazi heritage, and, more recently, the ageing process.  The only one of her books that seems to be available in translation is This Place Holds No Fear (Der Schrecken verliert sich vor Ort), a novel about the meeting between a Holocaust survivor testifying at the 1964 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials and a woman working as a court translator, for whom the trials — and the conversations with the male protagonist (with whom she falls in love) are an “everyday German”‘s first confrontation with the horrors of the Holocaust and its traumatic after-effects.
  • Ursula Krechel (* 1947): An author of poetry and prose (novels, drama, essays, etc.), as well as lecturer and writer in residence at universities in Germany, the U.S., the UK, and Israel; her work focuses on women’s role in society, violence in war, marriage, and society, and Germany’s Nazi legacy.  The only work of hers that seems to be available in English is the poetry collection Voices from the Bitter Core (Stimmen aus dem harten Kern); French speakers will also be able to sample her awardwinning novel Terminus Allemagne (Landgericht), which deals with a couple’s struggle to rebuild their marriage, and the husband’s struggle to find a new start in Germany, after he — a Jew and former judge — has returned from exile in Havana after WWII, finding his wife (who, not Jewish herself, had stayed in Germany) to since have become a successful business woman, and their children shipped off to the UK as part of the “Kindertransport”.  The novel was adapted into a TV movie in 2017.
  • Eva Heller (1948-2008): A novelist, cartoonist, author of children’s books, and communications expert who is considered one of the pioneers of cheeky, ironic women’s fiction in postwar Germany (think Bridget Jones with a more pronounced satirical bite).  Her awardwinning novel With the Next Man Everything Will Be Different (Beim nächsten Mann wird alles anders) seems to be the only work of hers that was translated into English.
  • Sibylle Lewitscharoff (1954-2023): A renowned prose stylist, who initially wrote for broadcast media (including and in particular radio plays), published her first prose work in print in 1994, and, four years later, her first novel, Pong, which was an instant success (but which nevertheless to date has apparently not yet been translated into English).  She made headlines in 2014 by highly provocative comments she made in the context of an address on reproductive rights and artificial insemination, for the tone of which comments she later apologized, without, however, retracting their substantive contents. — As far as I can see, two novels of hers are available in English translation: Blumenberg — the story of a professor haunted by appearances of a lion — and the part-autobiographical Apostoloff, which deals with two sisters’ trip to Sofia to bury their Bulgarian-born father.  Two other books of hers have been translated into French, namely, Killmousky, her only venture into crime fiction, and a children’s book, the travel fantasy Der höfliche Harald (French title: Harald le courtois).
  • Doris Dörrie (* 1955): A writer, film director, producer and screenwriter who burst into West Germany’s collective national conscience in the 1980s with the movie Men … (Männer), a film that — like the fiction of Eva Heller (above) — satirizes male-female relationships from a female perspective (often with midlife crisis as part and parcel of the setup).  Some of her fiction has similar topics and a simiar perspective as well, though she is also interested in stories of cultural estrangement and enlightenment more generally, including and in particular characters moving between Asia and the West.  Many of her movies are available in English (or with English subtitles), including Naked (Nackt), Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten), Greetings from Fukushima (Grüße aus Fukushima), and Enlightenment Guaranteed (Erleuchtung garantiert). — Several of her works of fiction are available in translation as well, including the novel Where Do We Go From Here? (Was machen wir jetzt?), the short story collections What Do You Want From Me? (Was wollen Sie von mir?) and Love, Pain and The Whole Damn Thing (Liebe Schmerz und das ganze verdammte Zeug), and the children’s book Lottie’s Princess Dress (Lotte will Prinzessin sein), book 1 of a five-book series centering on a primary school-aged girl called Lott(i)e.
  • Utta Danella (1920-2015) and Marie Louise Fischer (1922-2005): Postwar Germany’s reigning queens of popular fiction and romance novels.  Together with their (de-facto) male counterparts  Johannes Mario Simmel and Heinz G. Konsalik, they revitalized and cornered the market for the popular fiction treatment of everything from romance and family to adventure and war (and in Simmel’s case, also contemporary politics); their novels’ protagonists were typically women — and in Fischer’s case, frequently also teenage girls — who successfully overcome an internal or external crisis to find a “happily ever after” ending; including (of course), in case of their grown-up protagonsists, love.  Both authors’ works have been adapted for the screen with great success. — Fischer, in the guise of an alleged male MD, for a few years also gave advice on sex and relationships in Germany’s most popular teenage magazine (Bravo) and published etiquette books for girls; like her fiction for teenagers, these guides reflected popular stereotypes and beliefs of the day, such as the notion that homosexuality is “curable” and the dictum that rebellion and independence in teenagers (particularly girls) is undesirable.
  • Neither author’s books seem to have been translated into English, though some (in Fischer’s case: many) of them are available in French.  In Danella’s case, these include her breakthrough success L’étoile du matin (Stella Termogen oder die Versuchungen der Jahre), as well as Adieu, Jean Claude (Niemandsland), L’ombre de l’aigle (Der Schatten des Adlers), Une vie de femme (Gestern oder die Stunde nach Mitternacht), Le lac de Constance (Jacobs Frauen), Carrière (Regina auf den Stufen), and Oublie si tu veux vivre (Vergiß, wenn du leben willst). — Marie Louise Fischer’s French Wikipedia page includes an exhaustive list of those of her books that are available in French translation.
  • Charlotte Link (* 1963): A writer of popular, historical, and crime fiction; arguably, Germany’s answer to Rosamunde Pilcher — including in terms of settings; many of her books, especially her mysteries, are set in the UK.  The two historical novels of hers that are available in French translation are listed in my post on German women writers of historical fiction; the standout among her works set in the 20th century is her Stormy Season (Sturmzeit) trilogy, which — similar to Christine Brückner’s Quints trilogy and the memoirs of Marion Gräfin Dönhoff and Libussa Fritz-Krockow (further above) — traces the life of an upper middle class woman from her childhood as an affluent manufactuer’s daughter in Wilhelminian and Weimar Era Eastern Prussia through the Nazi regime, the mass exodus from Eastern Prussia to West Germany after WWII, to postwar Germany and, finally, German reunification.  The trilogy was adapted for TV and a huge success both in book form and as a TV series.  I’m not sure whether it was ever translated into English; the French titles of the three books are Le temps des orages (Sturmzeit), Les Lupins sauvages (Wilde Lupinen), and L’heure de l’héritage (Die Stunde der Erben). — For that matter, Link’s other books don’t seem to be available in English, either: her English Wikipedia profile (see above link underlying her name) includes a list of title translations, but I think that’s really just what it is — a list of translations of the German titles –, not a list of actually translated books.  By contrast, the titles listed on Charlotte Link’s French Wikipedia page really are books that have been translated into French.
  • Hera Lind (* 1957): A trained musician and bestselling writer of chicklit and romance novels; in recent years she’s also published a number of novels reflecting dramatic real life events and destinies; e.g., the life stories of several women from East Germany and a victory over cancer.  I don’t think any of her novels have been translated into either English or French (though some of them seem to be available in other languages, e.g., Italian and Spanish); but she needs to be included in this list on account of her huge commercial success in Germany alone.
  • Inga Lindström (aka Christiane Sadlo, * 1954): A journaist, novelist, and screenwriter who has authored the screenplays for several of German TV’s highly successful adaptations of Rosamunde Pilcher’s novels, as well as for countless episodes of some of Germany’s most popular daytime soaps and also adaptations of a number of novels by Utta Danella (above).  Under the pen name Inga Lindström, she’s the author of romance novels set in Sweden, many of which have likewise been adapted for TV.  Similar story as with Hera Lind (above): I don’t think any of her works are available in translation, but she’s practically ubiquitous in Germany, so she obviously needs to be included in this list.
  • Karen Duve (* 1961): A self-taught, versatile novelist whose fiction ranges from feminist books and other books based on aspects of contemporary society and trends to dystopia, humor, children’s books, and nonfiction.  As far as I can see, three works of hers have been translated into English: her debut Rain (Regenroman), which is set shortly after the German reunification and features a young writer whose life breaks apart when he moves to an East German village, trying to retreat in order to fulfill a commission to write a mobster’s memoirs; as well as This Is Not a Love Song ( Dies ist kein Liebeslied), in which a middle-aged woman confronts society’s expectations of women and questions just what “normal” means as relating to them, and The Prepper Room (Macht), a dystopia combining eco-pessimism and feminism.
  • Elke Schmitter (* 1961): A journalist and novelist whose fiction follows the tradition of the great 19th century novelists, such as Flaubert and Fontane.  Her biggest international success is the marriage drama Mrs. Sartoris (Frau Sartoris), which has been called a contemporary update of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; it also seems to be the only book of hers available in English, though another novel of hers — a portrait of contemporary Berlin society — is at least available in French: Légers manquements (Leichte Verfehlungen).
  • Dörte Hansen (* 1964): A native of Frisia whose first language was not standard German but Low German (Low Saxon), Hansen is a journalist and writer whose fiction focuses on regional and geographical identification and on the meaning of the word “home”.  Her breakthrough novel This House Is Mine (Altes Land), which was adapted for TV, contrasts the perspective of a woman who, after WWII, has fled to Northern Germany from Eastern Prussia, and that of her niece, who has “fled” to the countryside from big city life in Hamburg.  Hansen has published several other novels in the interim, but none of them seem to be available in English translation.
  • Jenny Erpenbeck (* 1967): A native of (East) Berlin and a highly-regarded opera director in addition to her career as a writer, Erpenbeck’s fiction examines German society from past to present, from that of the Weimar and Nazi eras of her writer grandmother and father, to that East Germany in which she herself grew up, and finally to that of the reunified Germany in which she now finds herself.  Several of her books have been translated into English; almost all of them have won prestigious awards:
    • Visitation (Heimsuchung) — a kaleidoscope of German history focusing on a house once owned by Erpenbeck’s grandparents and its inhabitants;
    • The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend) — a novel similarly tracing German history through the stories of five interrelated protagonists;
    • The Book of Words (Wörterbuch) — a novella describing a girl’s coming of age in an unnamed dictatorial country (probably modelled on Argentina and Chile under Pinochet), where nothing is as it seems, memory is dangerous, and people live in constant fear;
    • Kairos — set during the collapse of the RDA and contrasting the societies of East and West Germany;
    • Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, ging, gegangen) — topicalizes the current refugee crisis in Western Europe; and
    • Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces (Kein Roman: Texte 1992 bis 2018) — a collection of essays and part-memoir of the first two decades after reunification.
  • Katharina Hagena (* 1967): A writer and literary scholar who has published three novels to date, all of them highly-regarded.  Her first novel The Taste of Apple Seeds (Der Geschmack von Apfelkernen), which deals with memory and forgetting, and the meaning of family, was an instant international success and was adapted for the big screen.  Her other two novels were not translated into English, but if you speak French, you can read them in that language: L’envol du héron (Vom Schlafen und Verschwinden) deals — as the German title (“Of Sleeping and Vanishing”) indicates — with sleep and its deprivation, and with the interconnection of human lives; and in Le bruit de la lumière (Das Geräusch des Lichts), a lady waiting for her appointment in a doctor’s waiting room invents fictional life stories and fictional worlds for the five people sitting there together with her and waiting for their own appointments in turn.
  • Annette Hess (* 1967): A screenwriter first and foremost, Hess authored the screenplays for several well-known movies and TV series, most notably the screen adaptation of Ines Veith’s Die Frau am Checkpoint Charlie (“The Woman at Checkpoint Charlie” — see further above), as well as Weißensee, a TV series set in East Berlin that Hess herself has described as “Dallas in the RDA”, and a multiple-episode adaptation of Christiane F.’s memoir Autobiography of a Girl of the Streets and Heroin Addict (below).  Her debut novel The German House (Deutsches Haus) focuses on a translator at the 1963-64 Auschwitz trial who finds herself confronted with her own family’s history as a result of what she learns during the trial.
  • Christiane F. (* 1962): Christiane Felscherinow became the symbol of 1970s/80s teenage drug culture when, based on interviews with two reporters, her autobiography up to age 13, Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (H. Autobiography of a Child Prostitute and Heroin Addict / Christiane F.: Autobiography of a Girl of the Streets and Heroin Addict / Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F.), was published, became an instant bestseller, and was shortly thereafter made into a movie with real appearances by David Bowie, whose music Christiane and her friends revered. — I remember being glued to both the book’s pages and to my seat at the cinema with a mix of fascination and horror: for one thing, Christiane was my generation, just a few years older than me, yet, her life couldn’t have been any more different than mine (in fact, I had no idea that her world even existed); and then, on the other hand, I knew the place that was the center of her world, Berlin’s Zoo Station, very well … yet, to me it had always been just a huge international train station. — Felscherinow was a one hit wonder for all the wrong reasons; she muddled through the rest of her life but never really managed (nor does she seem to have had the will power) to put her life back together.  A second memoir published 34 years later, apparently not translated into English but available in French, recounts her life “after the book”: Moi, Christiane F., la vie malgré tout (Christiane F.: Mein zweites Leben — “My Second Life”).
  • Julia Franck (* 1970): Born in East Berlin but having grown up in West Germany, Franck frequently draws on her own experience and that of her family in her novels; including in the three that were translated into English, all of which won or were nominated for important book prizes:
    • Based on the Slav legend of Lady Midday and on the early life of Franck’s father, The Blindness of the Heart (Die Mittagsfrau) traces the life of the protagonist and those of several characters interlocking with hers during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era, exploring in hindsight how the protagonist comes to abandon her young son at a train station at the beginning of the book.
    • Back to Back (Rücken an Rücken) explores the German post-WWII East-West dychotomy and broken dreams and a broken family in East Germany.
    • In West (Lagerfeuer), a young East German mother’s path crosses with those of other residents of the refugee processing center where (like all East Germans resettling in the West, including Franck’s own family) she has to spend the first several weeks of her stay.
  • Nina George (* 1973): Having gone from high school dropout to one of Germany’s internationally bestselling contemporary novelists, George’s novels all show the healing power of books, friends, and travel; be it physical or in dreams.  In Germany, she also writes books under several pen names (one of them, a mystery series she writes together with her husband under the name Jean Bagnol), but the for books that, to date, have been translated into English were all published under her own name: The Little Paris Bookshop (Das Lavendelzimmer) and its tie-in The Little Village of Book Lovers (Südlichter), as well as The Little French Bistro (Die Mondspielerin) and The Book of Dreams (Das Traumbuch).
  • Juli Zeh (* 1974): A lawyer with a PhD in international law and currently an honorary associate judge at the Constitutional Court of the State of Brandenburg, Zeh is one of Germany’s currently most politically vocal writers; most recently, she signed the open letter initiated by Alice Schwarzer (further above) advocating peace negotiations in lieu of armed support for Ukraine.  Oddly, while several of her novels have been translated into English, her arguably most important one, Unterleuten, to date is only available in French (and several other languages) … whereas its de-facto sequel was translated into English:
    • Unterleuten (Brandebourg in its French translation) is a sketch of German society after reunification, condensed to the level of an East German village and seen from and East German perspective, but as narrated by a writer born and raised in West Germany. Literally the book’s title translates as “Amongpeople” in English; it’s both a reference to the name of the fictional Brandenburg village that is the book’s setting and to its community, which includes POV characters from both parts of Germany.  The novel was adapted for TV; there is also a stage version.
    • About People (Über Menschen) is also set in a Brandenburg village; through the eyes of a big city girl who has fled there, defying COVID regulations, Zeh examines the motivations of the village’s overwhelmingly right-wing population. (The book’s German title is a play on words; “über” means both “about” and “superior”, and “Übermenschen” is Nazi terminology for the allegedly superior Aryan race.)
    • Eagles and Angels (Adler und Engel) was Zeh’s first novel; it’s a story of the destructive power of cocaine and of political corruption.
    • Dark Matter (Schilf), also published in English as In Free Fall) is a metaphysical thriller combining crime, temptation, and the laws of physics.
    • The Method (Corpus Delicti: Ein Prozess) is a dystopia set in a totalitarian health-crazy state that controls every aspect of its citizens’ lives.
    • Decompression (Nullzeit) is, in the words of its blurb, “a psychological thriller in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith about two couples caught in a web of conflicting passions while deep-sea diving off the beautiful Canary Islands” — judging by the reviews, readers’ responses are very much like those to Highsmith’s books, too (pretty much “love it or hate it”).
    • New Year (Neujahr) is also a psychological thriller, in which a panic attack in the middle of a bike ride during a family vacation on the island of Lanzarote (Canary Islands) suddenly brings back the protagonist’s cataclysmic memories of a traumatic event in his own childhood.
    • Empty Hearts (Leere Herzen) is a “near future” dystopian thriller set in a post-Trump, post-Brexit and post-Frexit (French exit from the EU) world in the grip of a global financial crisis, mass refugee migration, all-encompassing egotism, and ultra-populist movements, including the one that is governing Germany at the time when the book is set.
  • Judith Hermann (* 1970): A trained journalist who published her first short story collection, a highly-praised paen to the 1990s Berlin arts scene titled Summerhouse, Later, in 1998, and whose writing almost singlehandedly caused a renaissance of that particular form of writing in Germany.  To date, four short story collections and one novel of hers have been translated into English: Summerhouse, Later (Sommerhaus, später), Nothing But Ghosts (Nichts als Gespenster), Letti Park (Lettipark), Alice, and Where Love Begins (Aller Liebe Anfang = the novel).
  • Dunja Hayali (* 1974): a journalist who is one of Germany’s most outspoken LGBT+ and human rights activists. Her primary platform is public television, but she has also written numerous articles and features (including and in particular online) and published two books: one (Haymatland: Wie wollen wir zusammenleben?), a critical discussion of contemporary German society and an argument against racism and xenophobia (the title is a play on the word “Heimatland” — “homeland”), and the other one (Is’ was, Dog? — roughly, “What’s up, Dog?”) a paen to her beloved labrador retriever Emma.  Neither book has been translated into English to date, but given Hayali’s status and public recognition, this list just wouldn’t be complete without her.
  • Katja Hoyer (* 1985): A historian born in East Germany who today lives in England; she is a scholar at King’s College and Fellow of the Royal Society and, in addition, a Washington Post columnist.  She has published two books about Germany’s recent history, the titles of both of which are self-explanatory: Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire and Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990.
  • Emine Sevgi Özdamar (* 1946): A major representative of German immigrant literature and also a highly-regarded theatrical director, Özdamar was born in Turkey and traveled to Germany for the first time at 18, staying for several months (alone; unlike other immigrants without her family) and, after a temporary return to Turkey, moved here permanently after the 1971 military coup in the country of her birth.  Several of her works have been translated into English, including her very first book, the short story collection Mother Tongue (Mutterzunge) and the first two books of her Instanbul-Berlin Trilogy, Life Is a Caravanserai (Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei) and The Bridge of the Golden Horn (Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn).
  • Nino Haratischwili (* 1983): Born and raised in Georgia (not the U.S. state but the country in the Caucasus, south of Russia), Haratischwili first spent time in Germany as a refugee fleeing from the Georgian Civil War of the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.  She returned to Georgia alone at age 14 to complete high school and take up a course of theatre studies, then came back to Germany in 2003 and has been living here ever since.  Of her works (all originally published in German), four have to date been published in English:
    • The Eighth Life (Das achte Leben (für Brilka)), a novel tracing the history of Georgia (and implicitly, Russia), with the focus on one particular family, from the early 20th century to modern times;
    • Juja, Haratischwili’s first novel, about teenage girl suicides from the 1950s to our time;
    • My Soul Twin (Mein sanfter Zwilling), Haratischwili’s take on Wuthering Heights … beginning in the 1970s, and with Georgian history and war reporting thrown in for good measure; and
    • The Literature Express (Der Literaturexpress), a satirical helter-skelter train ride across Europe, symbolizing the state of international literary culture and of the European Union, with a minor Georgian writer in the midst of it all.
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German Women Writers: 1900 – 1945 https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-1900-1945 https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-1900-1945#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:47 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46028

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

Women writers had made great strides in the 19th century, but it still had taken them almost a millennium to really claim a place of their own in public awareness.  A fair number of the works of early 20th century German women writers exist in English language incarnations, too; particularly those dealing with the Nazi era and WWII.  The cruel undercurrent to this fact, however, is that women writers were (alas and of course) not exempted from the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, intellectuals, and otherwise undesirables: a common denominator of these women’s lives is that many of them were either murdered in a concentration camp or subjected to another one of the Nazis’ manifold ways of eradicating anyone not fitting into their notion of an “Aryan” nation — or they escaped Nazi persecution, often by the skin of their teeth, and became naturalized citizens of other countries.  (Note: Some of the writers listed below only published their books in the second half of the 20th century, but topically those belong into the context of the early decades of the century, so for purposes of consistency I’m listing them here.)

  • Elizabeth von Arnim (1866-1941): She obviously doesn’t need any introduction, and I’m not going to claim her as a bona fide German writer; but she lived in Germany (well, what was Germany then — Pomerania, now part of Poland) long enough to be able to describe its incarnation in her era faithfully and, no matter how unhappy and stressful her personal situation, with a lot of wit and charm; particularly in
  • Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945): A child prodigy who was able to read fluenty at age four, before she had even started school, Lasker-Schüler was one of the preeminent representatives of early 20th century Germany’s avantgarde movement in both literature and the visual arts.  She published poetry, novels and shorter prose narratives, letters, essays, and drawings, and was a friend of many of the leading intellectuals and artists of pre- and post-WWI Germany, including Gottfried Benn (whom she revered), Karl Kraus, Alfred Döblin, the composer Arnold Schönberg, and the expressionistic painters Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Emil Nolde, and Franz Marc, one of the founders of the Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) group of artists.  As a Jew, Lasker-Schüler was subjected to racial harrassment and persecution after the Nazis’ seizure of power.  She first fled to Switzerland, but was unable to settle permanently there.  Having been stripped of her German citizenship, traveling and unable to return to Europe when WWII broke out, she at last found herself permanently stranded in Palestine.  Though supported financially by a Jewish organization and by the publisher Salman Schocken, as well as by a group of friends who likewise found themselves exiled to Palestine, including the philosopher Martin Buber, she spent the last years of her life increasingly isolated and unhappy.  Several of her final tragedies topicalize the Nazi rule; e.g., Arthur Aronymus und seine Väter (“Arthur Aronymus and His Fathers / Ancestors”, 1933) anticipates the Holocaust, and her final drama ichundich (“”I-and-I”, left unfinished at her death), Goethe and Faust together watch Hitler conquering the world. — A fair number of her works have been translated into English, including:
  • Else Ury (1877–1943): One of Germany’s most popular author of children’s books to this day: I used to love her books as a kid, and while it never occurred to me then, in hindsight I find it kind of cool that I used to love some of the same books as my grandma, who at approximately the same age as me when I read them would have been part of the original audience for whom Ury’s books were written, and whose own childhood home was not so terribly different from those of Else Ury’s child protagonists; particularly “Nesthäkchen” (an affectionate word for the youngest child of a family, literally implying that child to be “hooked to her nest”, i.e., clinging to, or being sheltered at home).  And even almost two decades later, when the first three Nesthäkchen books were made into a TV series, I was happily glued to the TV screen all over again.
  • Unfortunately, Ury’s own life was not nearly as happy as that of her child heroine.  A Jew whose life, like those of many in her situation, vaccillated between an educated German middle class lifestyle and her religious affiliation (which is not reflected in her books at all), after the Nazis’ rise to power Ury tried but failed to build an economical basis for emigration to the UK or US; her efforts were curtailed once and for all by the onset of WWII.  In 1943, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed on arrival.
  • Ricarda Huch (1864-1947): The woman whose picture should by rights have appeared next to the words “quintessential intellectual” in every late 19th century / first half of the 20th century dictionary.  A trained historian with a PhD from Zürich University, obtained in Switzerland as women were still barred from studying for a degree at German universities, her magnum opus is her three-volume German History (Deutsche Geschichte), which traces the history of the Holy Roman Empire from its predecessor, the empire of Charlemagne, to the abdication of the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, in 1806.  The first two volumes — published in 1934 (“Middle Ages”) and 1937 (“Reformation”), respectively — took a deliberate stance against Nazi doctrine and beliefs in everything from the meaning of government and the administration of justice to the role of religion in general and the Jews in particular in German society and, ultimately, the Nazis’ insistence on the alleged superiority of the German people as such. The oeuvre’s third volume was published posthumously after the end of WWII, in 1949.
  • Huch’s great knack, which at the time revolutionized the approach to nonfiction history writing, was to make historical events, lives, and circumstances come alive by wrapping and integrating the rendition of historical facts and dates into vividly descriptive passages of social, philosophical and psychological context, and by putting ordinary people center stage alongside princes and other great historic leaders; all of which made history palpable rather than merely a matter of “great men, great deeds and great wars” to be studied as part of a school curriculum (and promptly forgotten again).  Before publishing her three-part German History, she had already published other works of great note, inter alia a two-part study of the 19th century Romantics, a history of the Thirty Years’ War, and biographies of that war’s great military leader, general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and of early 19th century Prussian minister and political reformer Freiherr vom Stein.  After WWII, she began to collect materials on a book on the resistance against the Nazis, which was ultimately edited on the basis of her research and published after her 1947 death. — Her fiction writing included everything from historical novels to literary and crime fiction; among the works of hers that are available in English translation are the courtroom drama The Deruga Case and the epistolary novella The Last Summer, which is set during the years leading up to the Russian Revolution.
  • Annette Kolb (1870-1967): The daughter of a German father and a French mother, Kolb was a lifelong francophile who worked tirelessly for the friendship and reconciliation between her two parents’ countries.  She spoke out against WWI from the beginning, which caused her books to be banned in her native Bavaria; as a result, she emigrated to Switzerland.  After the Nazis had banned her books in all of Germany, she learned how to drive (in 1932, at age 62) and moved to Paris a year later, then fled to the U.S. in 1941, when Nazi Germany occupied almost all of France, but returned to Europe after the end of WWII, making her home in both Munich and Paris.  She published featured articles, novels, short stories, and biographies.  The only work of hers translated into English that currently still seems to be available is her biography of Mozart (Mozart: His Life); if you speak French, you’ll also be able to access her sketch of the relationship between King Louis II of Bavaria and Richard Wagner (Le roi Louis II de Bavière et Richard Wagner (König Ludwig II. von Bayern und Richard Wagner), as well as those works of hers that, probably, speak most to her own personality:
    • L’Ame aux deux patries (“A Soul with Two Homelands”: a series of feature articles);
    • Lettres d’une franco-allemande (“Letters of a Franco-German”; German title: Briefe einer Deutsch-Französin); and
    • La vraie patrie, c’est la lumière! (“The True Homeland is the Light”): Kolb’s correspondence with her friend, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland.
  • Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919): The Marxist philosopher who, together with Clara Zetkin and Karl Liebknecht (the son of Social Democratic Party (SPD) co-founder Wilhelm Liebknecht), in 1914 founded the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), which four years later became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).  They seceded from their former party in protest against the SPD’s support of WWI; two years later, the Spartacus leader’s anti-war activism and calls for a general strike caused them to be arrested, and they remained in prison until the end of WWI.  After the end of the war and the abdication of Emperor William II, Liebknecht tried but failed to proclaim a Marxist republic; instead, it was the SPD under Friedrich Ebert (first President of the Weimar Republic-to-be) that, allied with the political representatives of the middle class and the conservatives, carried the day, and Ebert’s colleague Philipp Scheidemann (who would become Chancellor) proclaimed the formation of the republic from a balcony of the Berlin parliament building on November 9, 1918.  Liebknecht, however, believed — wrongly, as it turned out — that chances were still in their favor, and he continued to organize and agitate for a Soviet-backed revolution (the so-called Spartacus Uprising (Spartakus-Putsch)); Luxemburg was skeptical but outwardly stood by his side.  Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were arrested and killed by ex-army “Freikorps” paramilitaries in January 1919.  The radically antisemitic leader of that paramilitary group later claimed that he had obtained covert government permission for what he termed the “execution” of the two socialists, but there is no proof for this claim.  Rather, the time and manner of Luxemburg’s and Liebknecht’s death greatly contributed to their idolization among communists and other representatives of the far left; even though in life, Luxemburg’s critical attitude towards Soviet Russia and its Leninist, increasingly totalitarian brand of socialism on the one hand, but also towards moderate, more social-democratic schools of thoughts on the other hand, had caused her to be seen with a certain amount of ambivalence among her political allies.
  • Rosa Luxemburg is known for the statement that “freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter”, which is contained in a posthumously-published essay critical of the outcome of the Russian Revolution; however, on the eve of the Spartacus Uprising, the party newspaper founded and edited by her, The Red Flag (Die rote Fahne), explicitly called for the KPD to violently occupy the editorial offices of the anti-Spartacist press and all positions of power. — Her writings on socialism, revolutions, and political economy are considered important contributions to socialist theory in Germany; one of the core driving elements of her writings is their international rather than national or parochial perspective.  Her chief book on the economical underpinnings of communism is The Accumulation of Capital (Die Akkumulation des Kapitals); other important texts on socialist doctrine are Social Reform or Revolution? (Sozialreform oder Revolution?), The Crisis of German Social Democracy (Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie, aka “The Junius Pamphlet”, for the pen name she used to smuggle this 1916 text out of prison), The Russian Revolution (Die russische Revolution), and The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften).
  • Clara Zetkin (1857-1933): A communist women’s rights and peace activist; initially, one of Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s chief political allies and, after their death, one of the leading representatives of the Communist Party in the parliament of the Weimar Republic.  Unlike Rosa Luxemburg, she supported Lenin’s political course and even participated, in the role of prosecutor, in the 1922 show trial of the Russian socialist / social democratic dissidents whose faction had been ousted by Lenin; in her argument to the court, she called for the accused to be sentenced to death “as a matter of course” for their “intellectual crime” of having deviated from the Leninist interpretation of the party line.  Zetkin was, however, one of the last communists of note to overtly oppose Stalinism, even after having moved to Russia in the late 1920s.  She died near Moscow in 1933; her ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall necropolis.  After WWII, the combination of her women’s rights and peace activism and her pro-Russia communist leanings made her an ideal poster girl for the newly-founded German Democratic Republic. — A representative selection of her writings on women’s equality, labor, peace, and socialism is available in English translation in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings.
  • Hermynia Zur Mühlen (1883-1951): The daughter of an Austrian family of high nobility, Zur Mühlen turned her back on her aristocratic upbringing after having increasingly come to endorse leftist ideology and eventually become a member of the German Communist Party once she had moved to Berlin.  “The Red Countess,” as she came to be known, was a prolific translator of works originally published in English, Russian and French — inter alia by Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, Harold Nicolson, Max Eastman, and Edna Ferber –, as well as an author of featured articles, essays, feuilletons, novels of both general and crime fiction (one of the latter, because of its criticism of the police, earned her a prosecution for high treason, which however was eventually dropped), self-described “revolutionary” fairy tales, as well as several narratives with an autobiographical background; the best-known being The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life (Ende und Anfang), which looks back on the early years of her life before her conversion to communism.  When the Nazis came to power, she first fled back to Vienna, then to Bratislava, and finally, via a huge detour through various south-eastern, southern, central and south-western European countries, to England, where however she fell into obscurity and died in poverty twelve years later. — Her 1934 novel Unsere Töchter, die Nazinen (“Our Daughters, the She-Nazis”), first serialized in a periodical in the autonomous Sarre Territory and promptly banned, is a piercing satire of Nazi ideology and an examination of the reasons why that ideologies was so particularly attractive to middle class Germans.  English translations of a selection of her writings have been published as The Red Countess: Select Autobiographical and Fictional Writing of Hermynia Zur Mühlen.
  • Vicki Baum (1888-1960): An Austrian-born newspaper editor and prolific writer of general and popular fiction, often with a proto-feminist bent (or at any rate, focusing on women’s lives and women protagonists). Baum’s Jewish birth, which had caused her to be increasingly discriminated in Germany in the early 1930s, eventually decided her to seize upon the star-studded 1932 Hollywood adaptation of her 1929 novel Grand Hotel (Menschen im Hotel) — featuring a cast that included Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Joan Crawford — to move to the U.S. and make a new home there, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.  While she has over 50 works of fiction to her credit, several of which were  likewise adapted for stage and / or screen (the movie Grand Hotel was based on a stage adaptation of the novel authored by Baum herself, too), Grand Hotel remains her best-known work in all three formats.
  • Irmgard Keun (1905-1982): Trained but unsuccessful as an actress, Keun found literary success in the final years of the Weimar Republic thanks to her witty, spunky style of writing; she also secured the patronage of notable writers such as Alfred Döblin, Kurt Tucholsky (with whom she later quarrelled over a charge of plagiarism that was belately retracted by the other writer involved after Tucholsky’s death and towards the end of Keun’s life), Egon Erwin Kisch, Stefan Zweig, Heinrich Mann, and Joseph Roth (with whom she also had a two year long love affair).  Her novels’ heroines are typically young women determined to make their way in the world without being shoehorned into stereotypical gender roles; in recent years, several of them have been translated into English, including her breakthrough success Gilgi, as well as its instantly bestselling successor, The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen), and two of the novels that she published while in exile in the Netherlands, After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht) and Child of All Nations (Kind aller Länder), both of which portray the change of German society brought on by the Nazis’ ascent to power. — Keun, who was ostracized in Nazi Germany due to her criticism of the fascist regime and society, nevertheless secretly returned to Germany using a false passport and spent the years of WWII in hiding in her parents’ Cologne home.  After the war, she was unable to return to publishing successfully; her final novel Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart (Ferdinand, der Mann mit dem freundlichen Herzen) portrays life in West Germany immediately after the war.  Having sunk into poverty and alcoholism, Keun came to spend several years practically living on the streets and was eventually committed to a Bonn psychiatric hospital, from where she was released to spend her final years in modest circumstances in Cologne.  Her books were only rediscovered towards the very end of her life; they have since been come to be assessed as important contributions to pre-WWII and feminist German literature.
  • Lili Grün (1904-1942): Largely unrecognized during her own life, Lili Grün’s scant amount of fiction was rediscovered and comprehensively republished in the 2010s.  The daughter of a Jewish family from Vienna, Grün moved to Berlin in the 1920s in search of career opportunities as an actress, which however didn’t materialize.  A cabaret venture with a number of friends (several of whom, including Ernst Busch, Hanns Eisler, and Erik Ode, would later find fame and fortune after all) failed to find a stable audience and had to close again.  Although Grün’s short prose and poetry met with a positive response, whatever money they earned her was not enough to feed her.  Suffering from tuberculosis, she returned to Vienna probably in or about 1932, but her conditions did not improve.  In 1942, she was deported to Belarus and killed in the Maly Trostenets concentration camp. — Grün’s autobiographical novel Alles ist Jazz (“All Is Jazz”; originally published as Herz über Bord (“Heart Overboard”) — poverty forced Grün to sell the rights in that title to a publisher who wanted to use the same title for an operetta) is closely modelled on her own life and circumstances in 1920s Berlin.
  • Anne Frank (1929-1945): No introduction necessary; obviously this list wouldn’t be complete without her — and without her justly world-famous diary, which speaks to Anne’s extraordinary personality as eloquently as it does to Nazi barbarism.  If you’re ever in Amsterdam or in Anne’s native Frankfurt, do make a point of visiting the Anne Frank House or the Frank Family Center at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt.
  • Silvia Tennenbaum (1928-2016): The daughter of an art-loving Jewish upper middle class / merchant family from Frankfurt — via her maternal grandfather, she was related to Otto and Anne Frank –, Tennenbaum emigrated first to Switzerland and ultimately to the U.S. with her mother and her stepfather in the 1930s.  She became an arts critic and in her fifties published two novels, The Rabbi’s Wife and Yesterday’s Streets (with a third, uncompleted and unpublished one apparently existing in manuscript), recreating from afar the Weimar Era Frankfurt she had known as a child and its changes under Nazi rule.  In the last decades of her life, Tennenbaum frequently returned to the city of her birth and became an important figure in its cultural life.
  • Anna Seghers (1900-1983): A communist of Jewish origin and in later life, one of the most significant authors of the German Democratic Republic (also the president of its writers’ association until 1978), Seghers’s arguably most important books date from the years immediately prior to and during WWII, when she fled from her native Mainz to Paris and, via Marseille, to Mexico:
    • The Seventh Cross (Das siebte Kreuz) (1942) is an early warning about the horrors of the concentration camp system (even before the implementation of the “final solution”: the novel was begun in 1938), based on Osthofen concentration camp near Worms, not far from Seghers’s native city.  The book concerns the flight of seven prisoners from the camp, for each of whom a cross is erected inside the camp, in front of which the recaptured men have to stand until they fall, which in turn is then used as an excuse to “punish” (i.e., further torture and kill) them.  The book was made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy in 1944.
    • Transit (1944) is based on Seghers’s own experience and chronicles the experience of a number of refugees from Nazi Germany whose paths cross in Marseille, from where they hope to escape to the New World.
    • The Dead Girls’ Class Trip (Der Ausflug der toten Mädchen) is a 1943 short story recounting, from a hindsight perspective, the fates of the narrator’s high school classmates, whom she first remembers as they had been during a class trip on the Rhine and whose lives she follows from there, through two world wars, Nazi rule, persecution, love, betrayal, cruelty, and death; in the process portraying various aspects of German society in the first half of the 20th century.
  • Erika Mann (1905-1969): Thomas Mann’s formidable, outspoken eldest daughter.  Having inherited her father’s gift as a writer, the political chutzpah passed down from her maternal great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm (see page 1 of this post, 19th century writers), and the acting talents of her glamorous maternal grandmother Hedwig Pringsheim, it was probably a given that she would appear on stage for the first time before she had even graduated from high school and, within a few years, attract the attention of one of the era’s biggest stars of stage and screen, Gustav Gründgens.  Her marriage to Gründgens was short-lived, however, and he would soon become the thinly-veiled model for the protagonist of her brother Klaus’s denunciation of the Nazi assimilation of Germany’s performing arts scene, Mephisto.  A few years later, Erika Mann married W.H. Auden; and while this was a marriage of convenience intended to provide her with a British passport in the increasingly likely event of her losing her German citizenship (which did in fact happen), Mann and Auden remained friends (and formally married) throughout their entire lives. — In the 1930s, Erika Mann become the writer, producer and star turn of a political cabaret founded by herself, her brother Klaus, and a group of friends and named Die Pfeffermühle (“The Peppermill”), which, banned in Munich within a scant two weeks, relocated first to Zürich and then to New York City, where, respectively, it became a focus of German exile intellectuals.
  • Over the course of her life, in addition to her own political writings, war reports from the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Britain (for the BBC), travel narratives, and children’s books — in part, published together with Klaus Mann, with whom she was particularly close during their entire lives –, Erika Mann was also a close confidante of her father’s and, after his 1955 death, his literary executor, as well as that of her brother Klaus, who committed suicide in 1949.  A fair number of her works are available in English (either originally written in that language or translated from German); these include:
  • Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942): Born and raised in Switzerland, Schwarzenbach met Erika and Klaus Mann in Berlin, where her androgynous appearance (encouraged from childhood by her bisexual mother) and gender stereotype-defying lifestyle well matched the bohemian culture of the late 1920s and early 1930s, but made her an instant target of discrimination upon the Nazis’ seizure of power.  A skilled photographer, Schwarzenbach acutely documented the rise of fascism in Europe — much to her pro-Nazi family’s displeasure –; but she also wrote several novels and spent much of her life traveling to various parts of Europe, as well as Persia, Russia, Afghanistan (with fellow writer Ella Maillart), the Congo, and the U.S., and publishing reports on her travels, with both the text and photos provided by herself.  She continued to stay in contact and spend time — traveling and visiting — with the Manns, who remained close friends, despite a brief initial involvement with Erika Mann that had ended unhappily for Schwarzenbach.  Klaus Mann would base characters in several of his novels on Schwarzenbach’s personality.  Carson McCullers, who had met her during her stay in the U.S., dedicated the novel Reflections in a Golden Eye to her.  To date, three of her numerous works have been translated to English:
  • Inge Scholl (1917-1998): The eldest sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, co-founders (together with a group of friends and one of their professors) of the Munich student resistance group against the Nazi regime that came to be known as The White Rose.  Inge Scholl’s book about her siblings, their motivation and movement, and their show trial and execution — based both on her and other witnesses’ observations and on key documents –, The White Rose (Die weiße Rose), tells their story in plain, straightforward terms and has (rightly) become an international bestseller since its 1952 publication.  Inge Scholl herself was a member of the German peace movement from the 1960s until her death.
  • Lise Meitner (1878-1968): The woman who should have been awarded the Nobel Prize (in either chemistry or physics) for the discovery of nuclear fission and the coining of that term, regardless whether instead of or in addition to her friend and former colleague Otto Hahn.  The daughter of Jewish parents from Vienna, Meitner overcame every bias in the book — sexual, religious, academic, you name it — to obtain a habilitation in physics from Berlin University (the first woman in Prussia and the second woman in Germany to achieve this) and to obtain, four years later, an appointment as professor of physics, the first German woman to attain that academic position.  Together with Otto Hahn, she had been working on radioactive processes since the early 1900s; by the time she was forced — and despite significant obstacles, finally managed — to flee from Germany on account of her Jewish birth, they had made significant process.  From exile in Sweden, Meitner and her nephew, nuclear physicist Otto Frisch (who had, in turn, emigrated to the UK), remained actively involved in Hahn’s research; it was Meitner and Frisch who first described, correctly interpreted, named, and in February 1939 published a scientific paper on the process that Hahn had observed but initially not understood.  Meitner was nominated for the Nobel Prize in either chemistry or physics a total of 49 times, including by Nobel laureates such as Max Planck, Max Born, Niels Bohr, and also Otto Hahn himself.  Most later observers agree that she was deliberately sidelined out of a mixture of disciplinary bias, jealousy, political obtuseness, ignorance, and haste; not least driven by the fact that the president of the physics Nobel committee considered Meitner (who at the time was living in Sweden) a professional rival, and the chemistry Nobel committee plain missed the fact that the only reason why she was no longer in Berlin and was reduced to corresponding with Hahn from afar was that she had been forced to flee from Germany to save her life.  She was subsequently awarded virtually every physics and chemistry award under the sun and also invited to the 1962 incarnation of the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting as a deliberate message on the part of the community of Nobel laureates that she had every right to be included.
  • Besides publishing a plethora of scientific papers, Meitner authored (in German) a book of memoirs of Otto Hahn (Erinnerungen an Otto Hahn); excerpts from her correspondence have been published in English translation under the title Yours, Lise.  The book considered to be her definitive biography is Ruth Lewin Sime’s Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics.
  • Judith Kerr (1923-2019): The daughter of renowned Weimar Era literature critic and essayist Alfred Kerr (nicknamed “the culture pope”), Judith Kerr was transplanted to the UK in childhood when her family had to flee from Germany because of her father’s Jewish descent.  She became a naturalized British citizen when she was in her twenties.  Although she had been dreaming of becoming a writer as a child, and although she was both the daughter and wife of writers, Kerr herself only took to the pen when she had children, creating for them the books that would make her popular when they were eventually published, such as The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series; all of which Kerr both wrote and illustrated.  Also inspired by her own children, in addition she wrote a trilogy of books fictionalizing her own refugee experience, Out of the Hitler Time; the first and IMHO most important book of which — When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit — describes what she witnessed as a child in Germany and tells the story of her family’s flight, the material and psychological deprivations it entailed, and the life lessons she learned.  Book 2 of the trilogy (Bombs on Aunt Dainty, aka The Other Way Round) describes her family’s WWII experience; book 3 (A Small Person Far Away) is set in 1956 and deals with the Hungarian Revolution and the Cold War, with the heroine temporarily returning to Berlin and experiencing life in the divided city a few years before the construction of the Berlin Wall.
  • Elisabeth Langgässer (1899-1950): An author whose reputation has undergone several metamorphoses pre- and post-WWII.  Originally a teacher, Langgässer lost her job in 1929 when she gave birth to a daughter out of wedlock.  Afterwards she first supported herself by publishing poetry and reviews; then she began to publish novels in an avantgarde style known as “natural magic”.  The daughter of a Catholic father of Jewish origin, she was a devout Catholic herself, which is reflected in her writing, the overall theme of which is the conflict between man’s satanic impulses and divine salvation.  However, her father’s origin still caused her to be qualified as a “half Jew” by the Nazis and to be excluded from the state organization of authors (Reichsschrifttumskammer), which made it impossible for her to continue publishing in Germany.  Her daughter, whose father was Jewish, was deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz in 1944; she survived and was able to join a Red Cross rescue convoy to Sweden at the end of WWII.  Langgässer herself was saved because, in the interim, she had married a man  considered “Aryan”; though she was not spared being subjected to forced labor in an ammunition factory.  After the war, Langgässer chastized those writers who, like her, had remained in Germany without speaking out against the Nazis (she deliberately included herself in that criticism); and some of the works she published at that time, like the short story Saisonbeginn (“Season’s Beginning”), depict the systematic and all-encompassing persecution of Jews in Germany under the Nazis.  Her critics, however, later pointed to correspondence of hers in the early years of the Nazi era that showed her as initially an enthusiastic supporter. — The major novel she published after the war, Das unauslöschliche Siegel (“The Inextinguishable Seal”), topicalizes the salvation of inherently guilty man by divine grace, as promised in the baptismal ceremony.  Her final novel, Märkische Argonautenfahrt, was left uncompleted but in a near-finished state that was considered good enough for publication at her 1950 death from multiple sclerosis.
  • Ruth Klüger (1931-2020): The daughter of a Jewish doctor from Vienna, Klüger was a Holocaust victim who survived the Nazi terror to make a new life for herself in the U.S.  Other members of her immediate family were not as fortunate: her half brother was deported to Riga and massacred in 1941, her father (who had tried but failed to flee abroad) was murdered in Auschwitz — and in 1942, eleven year-old Ruth herself and her mother were deported first to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, and finally to Groß-Rosen.  From that camp’s death march, Klüger, her mother and her adopted sister succeeded, against all odds, to flee.  Ruth and her mother briefly returned American-occupied Bavaria after the war, but after Ruth had gained an emergency high school graduation degree, they emigrated to the U.S., where Klüger obtained a PhD in literature, and became a highly-regarded professor of German literature, first at several colleges in the Midwest and finally at the universities of Virginia, Princeton, and UC Irvine.  In later years, she was also a tenured professor at the University of Göttingen and divided her time between the U.S. and Germany.  Her memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered recounts the Nazi barbarism she experienced first hand as a child; its sequel Unterwegs verloren (“Lost Along the Way”) — which doesn’t seem to have been published in English (yet?) — recounts her experience in the U.S.  In addition to numerous books on German literature and on literature generally, she also co-authored a book on a clandestine WWII rescue mission seeking to ferry Jews to Palestine, The Last Escape, which was later adapted into two books for young readers, The Secret Ship and Last Road to Safety.
  • Ilse Koehn (1929-1991): The daughter of Social Democratic, anti-Nazi parents, Koehn was raised as an “Aryan” and even enrolled with the Hitler Youth girls’ organization, Bund Deutscher Mädel, in order to secure her higher education (from which Jews and children of Jewish descendance were excluded) and to protect her from the persecution she would have suffered if it had become known that she had a Jewish grandmother, who, at age 80, was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp.  Having survived, with a considerable amount of luck, WWII, bombs, hunger, deprivation, evacuation, and the postwar years, Koehn emigrated to the U.S., where she married, worked as a graphic designer and, in 1977 published her memoirs of her Berlin childhood, Mischling, Second Degree; as well as, some years later, a partly autobiographically-based novel named Tilla, describing the meeting of two teenagers in bombed-out Germany during the final months of WWII and their re-encounter in the divided and occupied city of Berlin after the war.
  • Marta Hillers (1911-2001): After having traveled widely in her youth, Hillers spent the early 1930s in Russia and in France, working as a photo journalist and studying history and art history, respectively; as a result, she also became fluent in both languages.  She then returned to Berlin, where historians believe she joined the Nazi propaganda effort in a minor role.  She came to prominence when, in the 1950s, a diary recounting a Berlin woman’s experience during the final eight weeks of WWII was published anonymously under the title A Woman in Berlin and, some time later, Hillers was suggested as its probable author.  The diary describes the mass rape of German women by marauding Russian soldiers, which caused many women to deliberately seek Russian officiers’ protection (guess how they payed for that) to be spared outright rape at the hands of their subordinates.  Although a bestseller when first published in several other countries (including the U.S.), the diary was ill-received when it was first published in Germany in 1959, and Hillers — then not yet officially revealed as its author — prohibited a republication for the rest of her lifetime.  That same year, she retired from journalism and spent the rest of her life with her husband in Switzerland.  Her diary was finally republished two years after her death, and Hillers’s identity as its author was leaked by a journalist.  It is likely that the diary’s contents was in part edited prior to publication, but historians familiar with the original document argue that the essence of that text is consistent with the published version.  The book was adapted into a movie in 2008.
  • Anna Wimschneider (1919-1993): A farmer from Bavaria who gained national prominence towards the end of her life with the publication of her autobiography, which describes how, from age eight onwards, she had to manage her family’s farming household(s), first on her father’s farm — with nine people to take care of — and then on that of her husband, who, like Anna herself opposed to the Nazis, but was drafted into the military a few days after their wedding and returned from the war severely impaired.  On her husband’s farm she was subject to severe abuse on the part of her husband’s family, especially his mother, who had hated her from the start; a treatment that only ended at her husband’s return. — Entitled Herbstmilch (“Autumn Milk”), for the name given to milk no longer salable because it had gone sour and which, therefore, had to be consumed by the farmers themselves and to them constituted a major source of nutrition, Wimschneider’s memoir was adapted into an awardwinning movie in 1989, a few years after its publication.
  • Ursula Hegi (* 1946): Born in Düsseldorf, Hegi grew up in post-WWII Germany at a time when the Holocaust was a conversational taboo; a fact that profoundly impacted Hegi’s perception of her own German nationality and of Germany’s recent past.  She emigrated to the U.S. in 1964, at age 18, and married and became a naturalized U.S. citizen a few years later.  Several of her books, including her bestseller Stones From the River, are set in or connected with a city named Burgdorf, a fictionalized version of her German birth place, and topicalize its mid-20th century history and the experience of German immigrants to the U.S.  Hegi’s “Burgdorf Cycle” comprises:
    • Stones from the River – Burgdorf in the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era through the end of WWII, as experienced by a “dwarf”, i.e., a woman suffering from dwarfism, a condition that makes her a quintessential outsider;
    • Floating in My Mother’s Palm – Burgdorf in the 1950s, finding its bearings in a world changed forever after a devastating war and American occupation;
    • The Vision of Emma Blau – Burgdorf as the origin and background of a late 19th century German emigrant to the U.S. and the subsequent generations of his family; and
    • Children and Fire – Burgdorf on a single, pivotal day in 1934; one year after the burning of the Reichstag.
  • Sabine Dramm: A late 20th / early 21st century political and theological scholar specializing in the recent history of the Protestant Church generally and in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Resistance theologian of the Nazi era, in particular: in light of her scholarly focus I’m listing her works on this page of the post rather than on the next one (concerning post-WWII German women writers).  Two of her works have been translated into English, a third one was published in French (possibly also originally written in French; Dramm is German but lives in the South of France):
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German Women Writers: Historical Fiction https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-historical-fiction https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-historical-fiction#respond Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:42 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46025

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

Historical fiction is obviously an important way to visit the past; alas, while I’m happy to report that the genre is alive and extremely well in Germany, only a tiny fraction of the books published — and an even tinier fraction of those written by women — have been translated into English … and this is true even for the unofficial doyennes of the current generation of historical fiction writing hereabouts, Rebecca Gablé and Tanja Kinkel.  The latter doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia page; and the same also applies to many of the other successful German representatives of the genre, even those whose works have at least partially been translated.  Rather than not being able to provide any information at all, I decided to link their German Wikipedia pages anyway; just be aware that you’re going to have to resort to your online translation service of choice to learn more about them. — In recent years, some of Germany’s historical fiction writers have taken to programs such as Amazon Crossing and ebook publishing to be able to bring their books to an international / English-speaking audience, translated by bona fide, native-speaker translators, or they have even found English language publishers.

  • Sandra Paretti: One of the best-known German writers of historical fiction of the generation preceding that of today; also one of the few with more than a single book to have been translated into English.  These include:
    • The Drums of Winter (Der Winter, der ein Sommer war), a novel set among the German — chiefly: Hessian — soldiers fighting on the British side in the American War of Independence.
    • Tenants of the Earth (Pächter der Erde), the story of two rivaling railway companies and of the families owning them in Civil War America.
    • The Rose and the Sword (Rose und Schwert), Paretti’s first novel and the first installment of a trilogy chronicling the life and love affairs of a young adventuress in Napoleonic France.
    • The Wishing Tree (Der Wunschbaum), a historical romance involving a young woman from a German upper middle class merchant family in the late 19th / early 20th century, whose life is shattered by her family’s bankruptcy, and who has to forge a path in life she hasn’t been prepared for.
    • The Magic Ship (Das Zauberschiff): A novel based on the true story of the German ocean liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie, which had just set out on a voyage from New York to Germany when WWI broke out; rather than have his ship and passengers fall into the hands of the British or French, the captain turned around and sought (and was granted) safe harbor in the port of Bar Harbor, ME (Frenchman Bay).
  • Rebecca Gablé: Considered the queen of historical fiction writing in present-day Germany … however, chiefly on the basis of books set in medieval and early modern England, not in Germany.  Those series — The Waringham Chronicles, set during the Hundred Years’ War, and The Scarlet City, a series of prequels to the Waringham Cycle — seem to be among the few books of hers that have been translated to date; including her breakthrough novel, book 1 of the Waringham Chronicles, Fortune’s Wheel (Das Lächeln der Fortuna).  Another book of hers that is available in English is The Settlers of Catan (Die Siedler von Catan), which follows a Viking community setting out to discover a mythical island; the book is based on a popular board game and inspired the creation of two further spinoff board games in turn.  As far as I can see, no other books of hers have been translated, though, including and in particular not the two set in the realm of 10th century German Emperor Otto I “the Great”.  (Just in case these ever are, the German titles are Das Haupt der Welt and Die fremde Königin, which translates as “The Head of the World” and “The Strange / Foreign Queen”, respectively.)
  • Tanja Kinkel: Her novels are bestsellers in Germany, but would you believe even a single one has been translated into English to date?  Well, at least those of you who speak French or Spanish are able to sample some of them if you’re interested:
    • Die Puppenspieler (“The Puppeteers”; French title: Le montreur de marionnettes) is set during the late 15th century witch hunts and features, inter alia, the super-rich and powerful merchant dynasties of the era, the German Fuggers (bankers to the Holy Roman Emperor) and the Medici.
    • Die Schatten von La Rochelle (“The Shadows of La Rochelle”; French title: Les ombres de La Rochelle; Spanish title: La sobrina del cardenal) showcases the cruelty of the religious conflicts of the 17th century as set against life at the court of Louis XIII, and involves a conspiracy against Cardinal Richelieu.  (Three Musketeers, anyone?)
    • Die Löwin von Aquitanien (“The Lioness of Aquitaine”; Spanish title: Reina de trovadores) is Kinkel’s take on Eleanor of Aquitaine.  If translations of the works of female German-speaking historical novelists weren’t so g’damned rare to begin with, the fact that this book apprently was neither translated into English nor into French would make me wonder whether her publishers thought she wouldn’t be able to hold her own against Sharon K. Penman, Elizabeth Chadwick, and their French equivalents; but given the general state of affairs, this is probably just par for the course.  Hats off to whoever made sure there is a Spanish translation at least!
    • Mondlaub (“Moon Foliage”; French title: La princesse de Grenade; Spanish title: El maleficio de la Alhambra) is set, as indicated by the book’s French and Spanish titles, in late 15th century Granada and deals with the end of Moorish rule in Spain.
    • And lest anyone think she doesn’t also write about German history, she does; e.g., Das Spiel der Nachtigall (“The Nightingale’s Recital”) deals with the life of Germany’s most famous medieval poet and minstrel, Walther von der Vogelweide.
  • Charlotte Link: A highly prolific author whose name alone practically guarantees her books bestseller status, not least because a fair number of them have been adapted for the screen — looking just at those adaptations, you just might get the impression that she is Germany’s answer to Rosamunde Pilcher.  As most of her fiction is either contemporary or, in any event, set in the 20th century, I’m going to include her other translated books in my post on contemporary German women writers; however, two of her comparatively few excursions into historical fiction that have at least been translated into French — though as per usual, not also into English:
    • Wenn die Liebe nicht endet (“If / When Love Doesn’t End”; French title: Les trois vies de Margareta), a love story set during the Thirty Years’ War, featuring a Catholic, convent-raised woman from Bavaria and a Protestant gentleman from Bohemia; and
    • Cromwells Traum oder die schöne Helena (“Cromwell’s Dream, or Beautiful Helena”; French title: La belle Hélène) — as the title indicates, the life story of a woman in Cromwellian and Restoration England.
  • Eveline Hasler: Arguably the queen of Swiss historical fiction and also a prolific author of children’s books; she has to be included here not only because she’s a successful German-speaking writer but also because, unlike the vast majority of her German colleagues’ books, several of hers actually do have foreign language, including English, incarnations (hooray) — both her historical novels and her children’s books –, even if in her case, too, there’s vastly more untranslated than translated material.  Among the books of hers available in English are the two on which her reputation as a writer of historical fiction is chiefly built:
    • Anna Goeldin: The Last Witch (Anna Göldin: Letzte Hexe), a fact- and historical document-based novel about the last witch tried and excuted in Switzerland; and
    • Flying With Wings of Wax (Die Wachsflügelfrau), the story of Johanna Spyri’s niece Emily Kempin-Spyri, the first woman to graduate and earn a PhD from a Swiss law school, who — barred from practicing in Switzerland on account of her sex — emigrated to the U.S., where she founded a law school for women that was eventually integrated into NYU.
  • Martina Kempff: An author of historical fiction and contemporary mysteries; as far as I can see, only one of her numerous historical novels has been translated … not into English, of course: Die Königsmacherin (“The King Maker”; French title: Berthe au grand pied), a novel about the mother of  Charlemagne.
  • Iny Lorentz: A husband and wife writing team (Iny is the wife’s first name), several of whose historical novels have been adapted for TV.  Probably their best-known series is The Wandering Harlot (Die Wanderhure — and yes, there actually is a bona fide English translation, too); a cycle of novels dealing with a 15th century woman who goes from riches to rags in a split second at the hands of her villainous fiancé and, from a life on the streets, plots her revenge.
  • Martina André: Speaking of “Germany’s answer to …”, André (who incidentally has a second home in Scotland) is Germany’s answer to Diana Gabaldon; only replace 18th century Scotland by the Middle Ages, Germany, and the Knights Templar, and reverse the direction of the time travel (i.e., forward to modern times, not backwards from there).  I think only one of her plethora of books has been translated to date (even into English): Mystery of the Templars (Das Rätsel der Templer), the first volume of her Templars time travel series, though hopefully eventually there will be more.
  • Asta Scheib: A novelist who has made a name for herself for her contemporary fiction as well as for her biographical novels fictionalizing the lives of historical personalities; in addition, she is also a screenwriter (particularly on TV).  Her only translated historical novel seems to be Children of Disobedience: The Love Story of Martin Luther and Katharina Von Bora (Kinder des Ungehorsams: Die Liebesgeschichte des Martin Luther und der Katharina von Bora) — though those who are looking for a more in-depth portrait might be better served with Margaret Skea’s two-part novelized treatment of Katharina von Bora’s life, Katharina: Deliverance and Katharina: Fortitude (see the Reformation Age section of this post).
  • Petra Durst-Benning: Via Amazon Crossing, she has become the poster child for the fact that, contrary to what most traditional German publishers seem to believe, historical novels written by German women writers do sell abroad, including and in particular in English.  (Now all she needs is an English Wikipedia page.)  She’s the author of several historical series featuring women protagonists, typically set in the later part of the 19th (and the early 20th) century in different parts of Germany, as well as a number of stand-alone novels that do not yet seem to have been translated.  Not yet having read any of her books, I can’t vouch for their historical accuracy, which some reviewers seem to question (at least for her earliest books); I’ll note, though, that — like virtually every other woman writer mentioned on this page, incidentally — she’s won historical fiction awards, so you’d think her stuff can’t be all that terrible. Anyway, here’s what is available in English to date:
    • The Glassblower Trilogy — as the title indicates, focuses on the world of glass blowing, one of the showpiece crafts of Thuringia, in the small town of Lauscha, one of that craft’s big centers, at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century:
    • The Seed Traders’ Saga (Samenhändlerin-Saga) — a duology of romances set against the background of the trade in flower seeds and a flower shop in various parts of 19th century southwestern Germany:
    • The Photographer’s Saga (5 books, of which to date 2 have been translated into English) — the late 19th /early 20th century story of a woman who takes over her uncle’s photo studio in a small town south of Stuttgart:
    • The Century Trilogy (Jahrhundertwind-Trilogie) — focuses on three friends who all forge their path towards personal and financial independence at the turn of the (19th/20th) centuries:
      • 1. While The World Is Asleep (Solang die Welt noch schläft) — Josephine’s story: cycling (Berlin and Black Forest)
        2. The Champagne Queen (Die Champagnerkönigin) — Isabelle’s story: wine / champagne growing (Champagne region, France)
        3. The Queen of Beauty (Bella Clara) — Clara’s story: beauty products (Berlin and Lake Constance).
  • Petra Mattfeldt: An author, editor and publisher who writes under her own name as well as two pen names, and who has recently begun to take a page out of Petra Durst-Benning’s book to publish English translations of the first books of several of her series of historical novels (with a fair dose of romance and / or family drama) published under the name Ellin Carsta:
    • The Secret Healer (Die heimliche Heilerin), a series focusing on a 14th century woman in southwestern Germany who is a trained midwife, but has to leave town after a birth that goes wrong, as a result of which she is accused of witchcraft (books 1 and 2 of 5):
    • The Draper’s Daughter (Die Händlerstochter), book 1 of a duology about a — you guessed it — draper’s daughter in 14th century Cologne who, defying the social norms of the day, takes over her father’s business in the cloth trade.
    • A Distant Hope (Die ferne Hoffnung), book 1 of an 8-book series about a series of late 19th century / early 20th century Hamburg coffee merchants who move their buiness to Cameroon to escape from bankruptcy at home after their father’s death.
  • Ines Thorn: Also a heretofore traditionally-published author of historical novels (including historical mysteries and romances) who seems to have taken a page out of Petra Durst-Benning’s book, using Amazon Crossing to publish English versions of the first two books (to date) of a trilogy of historical novels set on the island of Sylt in Northern Frisia, on the Danish border, during the 18th century: The Whaler (Die Walfängerin) and The Beachcomber (Die Strandräuberin).
  • Marion Kummerow had a personal motivation to turn to writing historical fiction, as her grandparents Hansheinrich Kummerow and Ingeborg Kummerow were members of the Red Orchestra anti-Nazi resistance group who were killed by the Nazis when their group was discovered and its members arrested.  Unsurprisingly, their story became the subject of her first trilogy, which is available in English (as are several other books of hers), as she went the whole hog and found an English language publisher in addition to a German one — I suspect she was able to do so because her German books are not published by one of the industry’s behemoths but a smaller publisher:
  • Silvia Stolzenburg: A very prolific, awardwinning author of historical fiction and historical biographies, who has published an English Kindle edition of one of her books, Daughters of Venice (Töchter der Lagune), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello in the form of a historical romance set in the 16th century.
  • Henrike Engel: Another traditionally-published novelist who seems to be making use of AmazonCrossing; except that in her instance we’re back to French translations, for the first book of her trilogy of historical novels (as far as I can see, a blend of historical mystery, romance, and women’s lib) focusing on a female doctor working with women in peril among the would-be-emigrants and the poor in the port area of early 20th century Hamburg: Die Hafenärztin (“The Harbor Doctor”; French title: Les femmes du dispensaire).
  • Lena Falkenhagen: An author of historical novels and computer games — and another major case in point for the underrepresentation of German women writers’ works in translation, as none of her novels seem to be available in any other language than German to date; never mind that she won awards for them … in addition to currently being the CEO of the German Writers’ Association (VS).
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German Women Writers: The 19th Century https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-the-19th-century https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-the-19th-century#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:38 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46023

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

The below collection of 19th century writers incorporates the initial response to the question about women writing in German that inspired this series of blog posts; beginning with my personal late 18th / early 19th century heroine and with the ladies most closely associated with the circle of writers portrayed in Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels, then moving on to others in more or less but not strictly chronological order, though it seems fair to say that almost all of these ladies and their families and friends were interconnected to some extent or other.

The ladies mentioned below are only a few representatives of the community of 19th century women writers: what looks like a fairly exhaustive list of the lot can be found on Wikipedia.

  • Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), the wife of prominent Prussian diplomat and writer Karl August Varnhagen von Ense.  She ran a literary salon in Berlin that was part and parcel of the literary movement that Andrea Wulf’s book deals with (the von Humboldts, Schlegel, Schelling and others were regular attendees of Varnhagen’s salon). Varnhagen didn’t publish any novels, but she had a huge correspondence and published essays on, inter alia, political, social and other current affairs of her time. Hannah Arendt wrote a biography about her — Rahel Varnhagen: Life of a Jewess — which you might find interesting; to the German speakers I’ll also recommend Carola Stern’s biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Der Text meines Herzens, which I actually prefer to Arendt’s, but which unfortunately wasn’t translated into English. (Re: the title of Arendt’s book: Rahel was born Jewish but, probably due to social pressure, converted to Christianity later in life.)  Rahel Varnhagen was a remarkable woman in many respects; as a matter of fact, she’s a bit of a personal heroine of mine because she rose to a position of intellectual and social prominence against overwhelming odds.
  • Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano, 1785-1859), a poet and novelist, also loosely a member of the circle that Wulf’s book deals with (she was the sister and wife of two prominent poets, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano — and yes, that is the same von Arnim family into which not quite a century later the writer Elizabeth von Arnim married).  Her best-known works include her epistolary quasi-novelizations of her (real) correspondence with Goethe and with her friend Karoline von Günderrode (below), published in English as Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child and Miss Günderode (or the same title as in German, Die Günderode), respectively.
  • Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806), a passionate but emotionally fragile poet and tomboy at heart, who was ultimately broken by society’s refusal to grant her, a woman, the same recognition and status as men, as well as by the rejection of the two men whom she loved passionately and who, though fostering her literary talent and (in one case) entering into a serious, long-lasting relationship with her, both ended up favoring marriage with other women.
  • Amalie von Imhoff (later: von Helvig) (1776-1831), a hugely prolific and highly regarded poet and novelist who, like Rahel Varnhagen, ran a literary salon, and who was a particularly close associate of Goethe, Schiller, and their circle.  She was the niece of Goethe’s muse Charlotte von Stein (below).
  • Caroline Schlegel (later Schelling) (1763-1809), the wife of no less than two of the main proponents of 19th century German Romanticism, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: she (probably) didn’t publish any poems or works of fiction of her own, but she wrote literary criticism and reviews and was instrumental in both of her husbands’ works (inter alia, she worked with August Wilhelm Schlegel on his translations of several of Shakespeare’s plays), and in shaping the Romantic movement.  Notably, for a while Caroline and August Wilhelm Schlegel and the latter’s brother Friedrich, as well as Friedrich’s lover and wife-to-be Dorothea (below), shared rooms in Jena and maintained a literary salon that was frequented by Novalis, Ludwig Thieck, and, well … Schelling.  Caroline’s enmity with Schiller’s wife Charlotte may also have been one of the reasons why Schiller was increasingly excluded from the circle of the Jena Romantics.
  • Dorothea Schlegel (1764-1839), born Brendel Mendelssohn, the daughter of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (in turn, the closest friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who based the eponymous protagonist of his play Nathan the Wise on Mendelssohn), and aunt of composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.  She met poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel — the younger brother of Caroline Schelling’s then-still-husband August Wilhelm Schlegel — in the literary salon of her friend Henriette Herz (which eventually merged with that of Rahel Varnhagen, above) and, having already changed her first name to Dorothea at this point, several years later converted to Protestantism to be able to marry Friedrich Schlegel, who also edited her first novel, Florentin, which was modelled on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister and was published anonymously.  Having moved to Paris, Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel became members of Madame de Staël’s salon, and Dorothea translated de Staël’s novel Corinne into German, as well as the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois (“Queen Margot”, she of the “blood wedding” and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre); and she wrote a second novel, Geschichte des Zauberers Merlin (“The History of Merlin the Magician”).  Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel eventually converted once more, this time to Catholicism, and upon her return to Germany after her husband’s death, Dorothea reconnected with her friends from her Berlin days, Rahel Varnhagen, the Humboldt brothers, and poet Joseph von Eichendorff. — Note to the German speakers: Carola Stern published a biography of Dorothea Schlegel entitled “Ich möchte mir Flügel wünschen”.
  • Friedrich Schiller’s sister in law and biographer Caroline von Wolzogen (1763-1847), who in addition to writing Schiller’s first biography is also noted for her novels Agnes von Lilien and Cordelia, both of which explore women’s role in 19th century society.  Caroline also wrote a play, Der Leukadische Fels (“The Leucadian Rock”), a collection of short stories, and a further novel entitled Walther und Nanny (“Walther and Nanny”); her correspondence from the time that she and her first husband had spent in Switzerland was published under the title Briefe aus der Schweiz (“Letters from Switzerland”).
  • Charlotte von Stein (1742-1827), Goethe’s muse, whose marriage to the Ducal Equerry of Sachse-Weimar-Eisenach, Baron Gottlob Ernst Josias Friedrich von Stein, was a loveless (albeit dutifully fruitful) union entered into exclusively for political reasons; and whose husband, other than making his mark on her life by their children, was more noticeable by his absence than by his presence.  Goethe’s and Charlotte von Stein’s deep mutual affection — which suffered a severe reversal as a result of his unannounced 1786 departure on his Italian Journey — is documented in the roughly 1700 letters exchanged by them, but Charlotte also authored several works of her own.  One of these — Die zwey Emilien (“The Two Emilies”) — was definitely published during her lifetime (with Schiller’s name on the cover, as a result of which he was initially mistaken as the author); another, now lost play published during her lifetime and which may have been authored by her was called Die Probe (“The Trial” or “The Rehearsal”).  Three more works that can be ascribed to her with certainty are called Rino, Dido, and Neues Freiheitssystem oder die Verschwörungen gegen die Liebe (“New System of Freedom or the Conspiracy Against Love”); Dido in part expresses Charlotte’s increasing sense of loneliness and social isolation after the death of her husband and Goethe’s preference of the much younger and much less well-educated Christiane Vulpius, which Charlotte found hard to tolerate.  She also wrote two further, untitled and now lost works; one a comedy and the other one a piece of prose narrative, possibly based on a French original.
  • Caroline de La Motte Fouqué (1773-1831), the wife of Romantic writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué: I haven’t read any of Caroline dLMF’s works, but I get the sense that she may have risen to prominence on account of quantity rather than quality, as well as through her much more highly-regarded husband.
  • Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848), also an associate of the Schlegels, the Brentanos, Johanna and Adele Schopenhauer (below) and (inter alia) the Brothers Grimm; like Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (also below), one of the few 19th century women writers whose reputation has survived until the present day: her novel Die Judenbuche (The Jews’ Beech Tree) — which tells the story of a murderer and which, together with the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann, paved the way for crime, horror, supernatural and “sensation” fiction as a literary genre in Germany — is still on the curriculum of German high schools today.
  • The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s mother, Johanna Schopenhauer (1766-1838), a noted diarist, correspondent, and writer of travelogues, and her daughter, Arthur’s sister Adele Schopenhauer (1797-1849), who even in her youth already wrote fairy tales, poems, and novels and was also a skilled papercuts artist.  They lived in Weimar and were close associates of Goethe when Adele was a child (she reportedly called him “father”), but a tragic loss of wealth through the failure of the bank holding all of their money forced them to move away (to Bonn, as it happened). — German speakers may be aware that Carola Stern also published a biography of Johanna Schopenhauer, named Alles, was ich in der Welt verlange.
  • Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916), a well-known and highly prolific Austrian dramatist and novelist chiefly active in the second half of the 19th century.  One of her major works is the novel Child of the Neighborhood (Das Gemeindekind), which criticizes society’s attitude towards the children of criminals and other outcasts of society, who were wrongly believed to have inherited their parents’ reprehensible traits and thus ostracized in turn.
  • Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819), a highly prolific writer who, though largely forgotten today (probably at least in part due to the fact that, being a woman, she chose to publish most of her works anonymously), is nevertheless considered the mother of historical fiction in Germany.  Her works, which were highly regarded during her own time and believed to be written by a man, range across all of  European (not merely German) history, and, like many writers of her day, she also dabbled in supernatural fiction.  An anthology of short works by Naubert, Caroline de La Motte Fouqué (above), Caroline Pichler and Karoline von Woltmann (below) was published a few years ago under the title The White Lady: Supernatural Tales by German Women Writers of the Romantic Era.
  • Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), the ex-fiancée of Goethe’s friend and fellow representative of Weimar Classicism, Christoph Martin Wieland (whom she ditched in favor of the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a dancer … who did, however, enjoy his father’s patronage). Considered the first financially independent German woman writer, her most important work is the epistolary novel The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim (Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim), nobly published by none other than Wieland, which tells the life story of a young woman of part-German, part-English descendance and her adventures and loves among the English nobility.
  • The Universitätsmamsellen (“University Demoiselles”), Caroline Schelling (above) and her four friends Philippine Engelhard, Therese Huber, Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, and Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer (1770-1825), all of them daughters of scholars and professors at the University of Göttingen, who — though not being able to formally attend lectures and graduate — were pioneers of women’s education and academic exchange, who moved in the company of the leading lights of the era’s intelligentsia, and who remained friends during their entire lives:
    • Philippine Engelhard (1756-1831) was the dauther of a professor of history and diplomacy at Göttingen University; her brother Christoph Wilhelm would likewise choose an academic career, albeit in natural science and forestry.  Through her father, his colleagues (including, for example, physicist and satirist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg) and the fathers and husbands of her friends, she was closely connected to literary and scholarly circles from early youth on; besides the other “University Demoiselles”, her friends included the Brothers Grimm, Achim and Bettina von Arnim (above), as well as Charlotte von Einem, the literary muse of the so-called Hainbund, a group of nature-loving Göttingen writers and poets that is considered part of the Sturm und Drang Romantic movement.  Philippine Engelhard’s poetry was widely-known during her life and set to music by highly-reputed composers of the day; her mentors included several members of the Hainbund and leading representatives of Sturm und Drang, including Gottfried August Bürger. — Philippine Engelhard was the great-grandmother of Gabriele Reuter (further below).
    • Therese Huber (1764-1829), the eldest and preferred daughter of Göttingen University’s most influential teacher, classical scholar and archeologist Christian Gottlob Heyne, the long-time director of the university’s library.  Her education — albeit unsystematic — included classic literature, archeology, natural history, anatomy and medicine, politics and history.  After an unhappy marriage to geographer and naturalist Georg Forster, who in his youth had travelled around the world with James Cook and is considered Germany’s first travel writer, Therese married another writer, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, who also lent his name to her own first works.  Therese Huber eventually became one of the first and most influential editors of a new literary magazine published by leading Stuttgart publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta (Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände — “Morning Paper for the Educated Classes”); in addition to working as a translator and being a prolific author of novels, novellas, travel reports, essays, and featured articles in her own right.
    • Meta Forkel-Liebeskind (1765-1853) née Wedekind, a scion of the same family to which also belonged, a century later, the playwright Frank Wedekind, author of the controversial play Spring Awakening, as well as (inter alia) Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.  Margarethe “Meta” was the daughter of a Göttingen University teacher of Protestant theology and sister of Georg von Wedekind, together with Georg Forster (the first husband of Therese Huber, above) one of the founders of the Jacobite club of Mainz.  Like the other “University Demoiselles,” Meta enjoyed an exceptional education.  Her first marriage to musicologist Johann Nikolaus Forkel soon ended in a separation and, eventually, divorce; when later marrying lawyer and author Johann Heinrich Liebeskind, she nevertheless kept her first husband’s last name in addition to that of her second husband.  Her first literary claim to fame (or rather, infamy) was as that of Gottfried August Bürger’s much-maligned “Furciferana”, a satirical epithet he bestowed on her after the end of their one-year-long affair.  (He apparently couldn’t abide the fact that he wasn’t the only man with whom she betrayed her first husband, Forkel.)  In her own right, she authored a roman à clef named Maria and a brief epistolary narrative from the point of view of a young woman who has recently given birth; moreover and in particular, she was a highly sought-after translator, especially of works from English and friends, including several novels by Ann Radcliffe, parts of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.
    • Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer (1770-1825), who, thanks to a bet between her father (a reform pedagogist and professor of history and constitutional law) and another reform pedagogist, was the only one of the five “University Demoiselles” who was even awarded a formal degree, on the iniative of Caroline Schelling’s father.  Fluent in nine languages by age 16 (French, English, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Hebrew, and Greek), as well as instructed in botany, zoology, mathematics, optics, religion, architecture, mining, and mineralogy — in addition to all the skills considered female, such as cooking, handicrafts, singing and playing the piano –, at age 17 she was subjected to a 3 1/2 hour examination, administered by eight professors, in subjects as diverse as classical literature, mining, architecture, and mathematics.  Having passed the examination, she was formally awarded a PhD; the second woman in Germany after Christiane Erxleben (see page “Age of Enlightement” of this post) to attain a formal university degree. — She married a well-to-do Lübeck merchant named Rodde, who at the time was also the city’s mayor, and after her marriage signed her name Schlözer-Rodde; the first German woman of record to use a double name in order to preserve her maiden name in addition to that of her husband.  Before her marriage, she had already authored a history of the Russian monetary and mining sector together with her father; after her marriage, she hosted a well-known literary salon. — She later began a long-lasting relationship with French philosopher Charles de Villiers; and during a stay in Paris, she also gained the friendship and patronage of the a number of other French scholars and scientists, as well as Empress Joséphine Bonaparte and her aunt, writer Fanny de Beauharnais.  Her final years were marred by her husband’s bankruptcy and senility and her own decreasing health.
  • Rosa Maria Assing (1783-1840) and her daughters Ottilie Assing (1819-1884) and Ludmilla Assing (1821-1880), the sister in law and nices of the lady topping this list, Rahel Varnhagen; Rosa Maria was the sister of Rahel’s husband Karl August Varnhagen von Ense.
  • Raised by progressive parents who supported the French Revolution, in her youth, Rosa Maria was given the same extensive education as her brother; she was musically-gifted and wrote her first epistolary novel, lyrical poems, and novellas at age fifteen, and she was also a gifted silhouette artist.  After having met her husband through a friend of her brother’s, she established a literary salon which was frequented, inter alia, by Friedrich Hebbel and Heinrich Heine.
  • Rosa Maria Assing’s eldest daughter Ottilie (above left) emigrated to the U.S., where she settled in Schenectady, NY, worked as a literary correspondent, and became a member of the abolitionist movement and an important contributor to its key magazine, The Liberator.  In that latter capacity, she made the acquaintance of Frederick Douglass and eventually became one of his most fiercely committed collaborators and supporters (and some also believe, his lover) during an almost three-decades-long period, also translating his works into German and seeking a German publisher for his autiobiography.  Suffering from depression, she at last committed suicide during a stay in Paris, having learned of Douglass’s marriage to suffragist Helen Pitts and aware that she herself was suffering from incurable breast cancer.
  • Ludmilla Assing published journalistic articles and kept house for her uncle Karl August Varnhagen von Ense during the last sixteen years of his life (Rahel had predeceased him ten years earlier); together, they witnessed and reported on the 1848 March Revolution in Berlin.  Their friends included Alexander von Humboldt (who had already been a member of Rahel Varnhagen’s literary salon, see further above) Gottfried Keller, Social Democratic Party co-founder Ferdinand Lassalle, landscape gardener and travel writer Prince Hermann von Pückler, and the suffragette and grandmother of Thomas Mann’s wife Katia, Hedwig Dohm (see further below).  Ludmilla moved to Florence in 1862, after the publication of Varnhagen von Ense’s diaries, as well as the scandal-prone correspondence of Alexander von Humboldt, had caused the Prussian government to initiate criminal proceedings for lèse majesté and issue a warrant for her arrest.  In Italy — where she remained for the rest of her life — she published the majority of her aunt Rahel Varnhagen’s correspondence, as well as a biography and the literary legacy of the Prince von Pückler, and a history of the Risorgimento (the 19th century movement for the merger of the Italian principalities into a unified state).
  • Johanna Kinkel (1810-1858), a prolific writer and composer even as a child and friend of Bettina von Arnim (above), who, after a disastrously repressive first marriage — which ended in a divorce — married fellow Bonn resident, theologian, poet, teacher and journalist Gottfried Kinkel; thus causing a scandal in the Catholic Rhineland not only due to her recent divorce but also because, though raised a Catholic, she converted to Protestantism to be able to marry her new husband (which as a Catholic she wouldn’t have been able to do).  Gottfried Kinkel would some years later become one of the leaders of the 1848-49 national revolutionary movement.  After the failure of that movement, the Kinkels were forced to emigrate to London, where Johanna died a decade later.  (Personal note: the Kinkels’ Bonn home was in the same street as my church, which is named Kinkelstraße in their memory.)
  • Mathilde Wesendonck (1828-1902), the poet, author of fairy tales, dramatist and wife of a Rhineland industrialist who became Wagner’s muse and for whom he wrote his (duh) Wesendonck Lieder, setting aside the Ring Cycle not to touch it again for another 10 years, and embarking on Tristan and Isolde instead, which is considered his memento to their unfullfilled relationship.  (And if you listen closely enough, you can indeed hear the Wesendonck theme in the main theme running through Tristan, the so-called Tristan chord, too.) Other than having written the lyrics that Wagner set to music in the Wesendonck Lieder, Mathilde Wesendonck wrote children’s stories and fairy tales, several plays, and a collection of further poetry.
  • Sophie Mereau (1770-1806), a protegé of Schiller’s, friend of many members of the Romantic circle (including Herder, Tieck, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and Dorothea Schlegel (further above)),  and, in her second marriage, the wife of poet Clemens Brentano.  She was a proponent of women’s equality and their right to choose her husband based on love, rather than financial motives.  As such, the plots of both of her novels were taken from her own experience, including — in the novel Amanda und Eduard — her own battle to obtain the divorce of her marriage of convenience (from her first husband, Jena professor Friedrich Ernst Carl Mereau); at the time, possibly the first divorce proceedings initiated by a woman in the duchy of Sachsen-Weimar, although not the duchy’s first divorce proceedings overall.  She also published short stories and poetry, edited a short-lived literary magazine, and translated works by Boccaccio (Fiammetta), Montesquieu (Lettres persanes), Madame de La Fayette (The Princess of Clèves), and Corneille (Le Cid).
  • Caroline Pichler (1769-1843), an Austrian historical novelist and host of a highly-regarded literary and musical salon in Vienna that was frequented by the likes of Beethoven, Schubert, Friedrich Schlegel, Franz Grillparzer, and other leading artistic and intellectual lights of the day.
  • Helmina von Chézy (1783-1856), the grandddaughter of 18th century poet Anna Louisa Karsch (see post on German women writers from the Age of Enlightenment); a friend of Dorothea Schlegel (further above), translator — together with Adalbert von Chamisso — of several of Friedrich Schlegel’s works into German, author of the libretto of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe, as well as of several novels, novellas and plays (for one of which, Rosamunde, Franz Schubert composed incidental music), as well as Romantic poems, several of which were likewise set to music by Schubert, and featured articles.  She was a close friend of Beethoven’s during the final years of his life; her own memoirs were revised by Rahel Varnhagen’s husband Karl August Varnhagen von Ense.
  • Caroline Auguste Fischer (1764-1842), a twice-divorced, vocal proponent of women’s rights and equality who had started writing early on and, after her second divorce, used her pen to support herself and to promote her proto-feminist agenda, as well as to speak out against slavery and argue in favor of universal human rights.  (Note: the image to the left is shown as her profile picture here and is used as the cover of a modern edition of one of her novels.  Due to the fashion style it represents, I’m not wholly convinced it really is a portrait of hers, but it’s the only one I could find at all.)
  • Karoline von Woltmann (1782-1847), a historical novelist, as well as secretary and editor of her second husband, historian Karl Ludwig von Woltmann’s works, and moreover, noted translator of works by Maria Edgeworth.  (She is, alas, the only writer for whom I couldn’t find a portrait, not even a dubious one, so a cover image of her first and best-known novel will have to do.)
  • Amalie Schoppe (1791-1858), a prolific author of historical and juvenile fiction, as well as editor of a magazine named Pariser Modeblätter (“Paris Fashion Sheets”), which also included literary contributions, as well as co-editor of several other journals and magazines, and editor of a magazine for boys and girls named Iduna.  She was a friend of Rosa Maria Assing (Rahel Varnhagen’s sister in law, further above), as well as poets Adalbert von Chamisso and Friedrich Hebbel, and for a while co-headed a Hamburg girl’s school together with another well-known female writer of the period named Fanny Tarnow.
  • Dorothea Tieck (1799-1841), the eldest daughter of Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck and true author of several translations of William Shakespeare’s works (e.g., Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus, and A Winter’s Tale) published under her father’s name, after Ludwig Tieck had taken over Friedrich Schlegel’s project of producing translations of all of Shakespeare’s collected works.  Fluent in several languages that also included Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and Ancient Greek, and although unquestionably literarily gifted in her own right, Dorothea restricted herself to the position of a translator, which she considered as more in keeping with a woman’s role than authorship.  Her translations also included works by Robert Greene, Cervantes, and Jared Sparks’s Life and Correspondence of George Washington.
  • Ida Hahn-Hahn (1805-1880), an admirer of George Sand and indefatigable proponent of women’s equality, whose books frequently featured several strong women characters.  Like Luise Mühlbach, Fanny Lewald, Marie Nathusius, Ottilie Wildermuth, and E. Marlitt (all below), she was one of the 19th century’s women writers who were most popular and widely-read during their own lifetimes.  Several of her books display an openness towards Judaism and Islam, which however is counterbalanced by open racism in other respects, e.g. in the depiction of black slave girls.  Her frequently mannered style and elitist attitude was mocked by her competitor and contemporary Fanny Lewald.
  • Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), the daughter of a Jewish merchant; she converted to Protestantism in order to be able to marry a young theologian, but he died before the marriage had taken place.  Educated above and beyond the standard then usual for girls, Lewald first published a number of articles in a magazine published by her cousin and subsequently proceeded to fiction writing.  Moving from early works based on her personal experience, such as the novel Jenny, to fiction unrelated to her own life, her books were both popular and, already during her own lifetime, noted as significant pieces of advocacy for the emancipation of both women and Jews; equally calling out mysoginist and racist stereotypes.
  • Luise Mühlbach (née Clara Mundt, 1814-1873), a prolific and, during her lifetime, extremely populer author, chiefly of historical and adventure novels characterized by the high drama of their plots; her body of work comprises some 250 novels.  Several of her works were transated into English and popular especially in the U.S.; besides books fictionalizing the life stories of royalty, her writing frequently focused on marriages of convenience, divorce issues, and social inequality.
  • Marie Nathusius (1817-1857), a highly prolific and widely-read author of popular fiction and composer of songs; together with her husband, a publisher and industrialist, she also ran charities for the care of women and children in need in a number of cities; these later gave rise to a charitable organization still in existence today.  Most of Nathusius’s novels were first serialized in a magazine that her husband acquired and began to edit in 1849.  The couple were friends with August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, one of whose poems eventually yielded — in its third stanza — Germany’s current national anthem.  He wrote a also number of children’s verses that Marie Nathusius set to music; several of these are still popular today.
  • Ottilie Wildermuth (1817-1877), a prolific author of popular and juvenile fiction.  Having autodidactically taught herself English and French, in addition to the education she had received in a state school, as well as a school for household management, she later joined her husband — a professor at Tübingen University — in teaching English.  She also formed a literary salon that consisted of her husband’s colleagues and their wives, as well as several other local intellectuals, and poet Ludwig Uhland and his wife.  Similar to the books of Marie Nathusius (above), her writings greatly benefited and were popularized by first being published serially in a number of widely-read magazines, including Die Gartenlaube (see E. Marlitt, below).
  • E. Marlitt (née Eugenie John, 1825-1887), next to Harriett Beecher Stowe, is considered one of the world’s first bestseller authors.  She was a trained singer and pianist, but after some initial stage successes was unable to pursue her original career due to a hearing disability and then spent a decade as a companion and reader to Princess Mathilde of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, an important patron of the arts.  Two years after having left the princess’s service she published her first novel, which was serialized in the widely-read monthly mass circulation magazine Die Gartenlaube and proved an instant blockbuster success both for Marlitt and for the magazine.  The sales from her third novel alone allowed her to buy a lavish villa; and Marlitt’s novels were also one of the main reasons why subscription to Die Gartenlaube quadrupled over the course of the next decade.  Many of Marlitt’s heroines were independent young women, rebelling against the limitations imposed on women’s lives by society.
  • Gabriele Reuter (1859-1941), a great-granddaughter of Philippine Engelhard, one of the “Universitätsmamsellen” (above).  Economic dire straits forced her to earn money capitalizing on her gifts as a writer from early on; in Weimar she rubbed shoulders with, inter alia, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, the publisher Samuel Fischer, and one of the progenitors of German cabaret, Ernst von Wolzogen (a distant indirect in-law descendant of Schiller’s sister in law and biographer Caroline von Wolzogen, further above, through the brother of Caroline’s husband).  Gabriele Reuter caused huge scandals with both of her best-known novels, From a Good Family, (Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens) — which examines a young woman’s life in the Wilhelminian era and has been compared to Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther — and The House of Tears (Das Tränenhaus), which deals with the conditions at a home of unwed mothers.
  • Helene Böhlau (1859-1940), during her life, also considered one of the leading writers of her time.  She traveled widely as a young woman and, in Istanbul, met architect and scholar Friedrich Arnd, who was already married and who, in order to be able to take her as his second wife, converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar al Rashid Bey.  After the death of her husband’s first wife, the couple returned to Germany and (Helene having been banned from her father’s house for the “goings-on” in Istanbul) settled in Munich, where she proceeded to publish a large number of novels running the gamut from literary to popular fiction.
  • Johanna Spyri (1827-1901), who canonized rural Switzerland in Heidi.  Not exactly a personal favorite — my earliest objections, at age six or thereabouts, were on the grounds of the book’s idolization of Swiss cheese (which I hated as a child), its demonization of city life (I’m born in a big city and have always been a city girl at heart), and its rosy portrayal of the friendship of Heidi and the peasant boy Peter (which I mistrusted); and somehow, those objections are still more present in my mind than the book’s actual contents.  But I can’t deny that Spyri’s book is a classic of world literature, so obviously she has to be included here.
  • Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867-1950), Barbara Cartland’s ancestor-in-spirit … there’s a reason why the folks at Wikipedia use the term “formula fiction” in describing her romance novels.  Still, given that her books are still widely-read, there’s no denying that she has successfully claimed a corner of the writing industry and is still holding onto it decades after her death, so there we are.
  • Bertha von Suttner (1843-1914), a peace activist who in 1905 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first German-speaking female Nobel laureate, and the second female Nobel laureate overall (after Marie Curie).  Though of noble birth, she had to take to the pen to support herself — she also briefly worked as Alfred Nobel’s housekeeper in Paris — and she used her writing skills to author both novels and nonfiction.  She moved to Austria and became a leader in that country’s peace movement in the 1880s; her pacifist novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) was a major building block, in addition to her activism and her support for an International Court of Justice, of her Nobel prize.  She stayed in contact with Alfred Nobel until his 1896 death and her advocacy is believed to have been instrumental in the inclusion of a peace prize in the Nobel award categories.
  • Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919), a feminist novelist who, through her husband, the actor and writer Ernst Dohm, came into contact with the progressive and women’s rights movements of Berlin; their salon enjoyed the regular attendance of the likes of Alexander von Humboldt, workers’ rights activist and Social Democratic Party co-founder Ferdinand Lassalle, and musicians such as Franz Liszt and Hans and Cosima von Bülow (the director of the Bayreuth Festival). Hedwig Dohm was the grandmother of Thomas Mann’s wife Katia (née Pringsheim) and the mother of the actress Hedwig Pringsheim, in her own turn after her marriage the center of Munich society; Thomas Mann’s son Golo would come to describe his grandmother Hedwig as “the femme du monde (women of the world) of the capital of Bavaria.”
  • Auguste Schmidt (1833-1902) and Louise Otto-Peters (1819-1895), the founders of the General German Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein, ADF), Germany’s oldest women’s rights organization (1865).  Both women were among the leading progressive journalists of their time; Louise Otto-Peters was the founder of Germany’s first women’s newspaper and, after that paper was banned, the co-founder and, until her death, editor-in-chief of the leading feminist journal, Neue Bahnen (“New Tracks” or “New Ways”).  In addition to her activism, Louise Otto-Peters published (and had been writing since childhood) everything from novels and poetry to libretti and essays. — Auguste Schmidt had come to her feminist activity from her work as a teacher and in addition to ADF also founded Germany’s first women teachers’ organization.  When in 1894 the four leading women’s rights organizations that had formed by then merged into the League of German Women’s Associations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), Auguste Schmidt became its first president.


Contemporary depictions of the leaders of Germany’s suffragette movement:

Left image (1883): Marie Calm, Henriette Goldschmidt, Louise Otto-Peters, Lina Morgenstern, Auguste Schmidt, Jenny Hirsch and Anna Schepeler-Lette;
Right image (1894): Louise Otto-Peters, Mathilde Weber, Henriette Goldschmidt, Lina Morgenstern, Marie Loeper-Housselle, Auguste Schmidt, Helene Lange, Luise Büchner, Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow, and Marie Calm.

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German Women Writers: The Age of Enlightenment https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-the-age-of-enlightenment https://themisathena.info/german-women-writers-the-age-of-enlightenment#comments Wed, 19 Jul 2023 16:57:34 +0000 https://themisathena.info/?p=46016

General introduction to this series of blog posts HERE.

The Age of Enlightenment introduced new schools of philosophical and political thought and brought huge advances in scholarship and scientific knowledge — what it still didn’t bring, however, was universal education, including and in particular for women.  So writing (and reading) still remained a pursuit of those whose families had the means to provide their daughters with private schooling; essentially, the aristocracy and the well-to-do middle class and merchant families.  Accordingly, the number of women writers from the 17th and 18th centuries — generally, and even more so, women writers of note — is still extremely limited.  All the more remarkably, however, several of the female authors from the period were highly distinguished, significant scientists and scholars, some of whom went to enormous lengths in the pursuit of their course of study.  The writings of others shed a light on the effects of the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648; the territorial and religious conflict that ended up radically redrawing the map not only of Germany / The Holy Roman Empire, but also that of Continental Europe as a whole and cemented the effects of the Reformation in Germany once and for all.  Even after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, religion continued to control many aspects of life in Germany; not least the lives of women, who (if they were commoners) were routinely prohibited from marrying men of a different faith of their own, while noblewomen, however piously rains in one particular faith, were as routinely required to convert to another faith in order to facilitate politically desirable marriages. — While all of the below women writers stand out for their contributions to Germany’s literary and intellectual history, the first three are far and away the most important representatives of the group.

  • Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717): A descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss patrician Merian family; an entomologist, naturalist and scientific illustrator who was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly.  Schooled in painting and drawing by her stepfather, a botanist painter and student of the still life artist Georg Flegel, Merian had been collecting and studying insects, particularly silkworms, since her adolescence; in adulthood, she published several volumes on caterpillars, moths and butterflies, as well as two “flower books”, all illustrated by plates created by herself.
  • Making a living by giving art lessons and selling her own paintings, in 1685 Merian moved (accompanied by her mother and her daughters from her unhappy marriage to her stepfather’s apprentice) to a Pietist Protestant community in Friesland and in 1690 on to Amsterdam, where her daughter Johanna married a merchant in the Suriname trade.  In 1699, at 52 years of age, Merian and her younger daughter Dorothea Maria traveled to Dutch Guiana (Suriname) to study and record the tropical insects native to the region.  This journey was followed by the publication of another book on insects. Her pioneering observations radically altered the perception and knowledge of insect life; Merian was able to document the various stages of an insect’s development, from egg to larva to pupa and finally to adult, thus dispelling the notion of insects’ spontaneous generation “from mud”, and establishing the idea that insects undergo distinct and predictable life cycles.  She also made significant observations on the struggle among organisms for survival and evolution that predate those of Charles Darwin by over a century.
  • Maria Sybilla Merian’s life is the subject of the biography Chrysalis by American writer Kim Todd; a selection of her art work has been published under the title Maria Sibylla Merian: Artist And Naturalist (edited by Kurt Wettengl).
  • Elizabeth Charlotte, Madame Palatine (1652-1722): Known in Germany as Liselotte von der Pfalz (“Liselotte of the Palatinate”; the first name is a contraction of her two actual first names and is still used as a first name in its own right today); a member of the House of Wittelsbach (the rulers of, inter alia, Bavaria and the Palatinate), the second wife of Philippe I, Duke of Orléans (the younger brother of Louis XIV), and the mother of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, France’s ruler during the 1715-1723 Regency, while Louis XV was a minor.  Although she had only two surviving children, Liselotte not only became the ancestress of the House of Orléans, which ascended the French throne with the so-called “Citizen King”, Louis Philippe I (1830 to 1848), but she was also the ancestress of numerous European royal families; as a result, she came to be called the “Grandmother of Europe”.  Through her daughter, she was the grandmother of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (the husband of Empress Maria Theresa) and the great-grandmother of their children, Holy Roman Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II and Queen Marie Antoinette of France.
  • Raised a Protestant and taught religious tolerance early in her life, Liselotte had to convert to Catholicism for dynastic reasons on the occasion of her marriage, but remained sceptical towards Catholic dogma.  She was excessively well-read and gained literary and historical importance in her own right primarily through the preservation of her correspondence, which is of great cultural and historical value due to her lively, detailed, and sometimes very blunt descriptions of French court life and intrigues under Louis XIV and during the Regency, and which is one of the best-known German-language texts of the Baroque period.
  • A collection of Liselotte’s letters has been published in English under the title A Woman’s Life in the Court of the Sun King.
  • Maria Cunitz (1610-1664): An accomplished Silesian astronomer and the most notable female astronomer of the Early Modern Era. Maria was the daughter of a physician; even as a little child, she showed no interest in dolls and insisted on being comprehensively educated.  As a result, before her girlhood was over she was already fluent in Latin and other languages and had an excellent understanding of arithmetics and history.  After a short-lived teenage marriage that ended with her much older husband’s death, she married her father’s assistant, the physician and astronomer Elias von Löwen, who tutored her in astronomy.  During the Thirty Years’ War, Maria and Elias, both Protestants, found refuge in a Cistercian monastery in Poland, where Maria employed her time by arranging a set of astronomical tables based on Johannes Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables.  Once having returned to their Silesian home, in 1650 she published her findings in a book entitled Urania propitia, in which she provided new tables, new ephemera, and a simpler solution to Kepler’s second law of planetary motion. The Cunitz crater on Venus is named in Maria Cunitz’s honor, as is the minor planet 12624 Mariacunitia.
  • Anna Maria van Schurman (1607-1678): A painter, engraver, poet, classical scholar, philosopher, and feminist writer who is best known for her exceptional learning and her defence of female education. She was a highly educated woman who excelled in art, music, and literature, and became a polyglot proficient in fourteen languages, including Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Aramaic, and Ethiopic, as well as various contemporary European languages.  She was the first woman to unofficially study at a Dutch university and, in her writings — particularly in a tract entitled The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar –, defended the equality of men and women and argued that women should be given the same access to education as men and should be free to exercise their domestic duties on their own responsibility, without any male oversight or interference.  Her extensive correspondence, conducted in a multiplicity of languages, included many of the leading women of her age, including Queens Christina of Sweden (to whom she wrote in Latin) and Elizabeth of Bohemia (to whom she wrote in Latin and French), as well as other proponents of womens’s education, such as Dorothea Moore and Marie de Gourneay (to both of whom she wrote in Latin and Hebrew).  During the last years of her life, she was a prominent member of the same Pietist community that would, some years later, also provide both a spiritual and a physical home to Maria Sibylla Merian and her mother and daughters.
  • Elisabeth Sophie of Mecklenburg (1613-1676): Having received a thorough lingustic and musical education at her own father’s court, in 1635 she married the learned Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, one of the most literate princes of the age (and also, at the time of their marriage, more than twice her own age). — Once having been introduced to Heinrich Schütz, arguably the leading German Baroque composer prior to Johann Sebastian Bach, she took charge of organizing the court orchestra and large entertainments such as masquerades, plays and ballets at her husband’s court, appointing Schütz the court orchestra’s conductor in chief.  Several of the pieces performed under her directorship were contributed by Elisabeth Sophie herself, who wrote both librettos and music, though most of her musical compositions were hymns or devotional arias, including one published in a collection named Vinetum evangelicum (Protestant Vineyard / Evangelischer Weinberg) that is among the first pieces of music published by women in Germany.  She selected one distinct narrative strand from French writer Honoré d’Urfé’s successful novel L’Astrée to adapt it into a novel of her own called Die histori der Dorinde (The Story of Dorinde) that would come to have a refining impact on court etiquette; her musical play Neuerfundenes Freudenspiel, genannt Friedenssieg (“The Newly-Invented Rejoycement, Known as the Victory of Peace”) is considered one of the first pieces of musical theatre published in Germany (by an author of either sex); and another play of hers, Ein Frewdenspiell von dem itzigen betrieglichen Zustande in der Welt (“An Entertainment About the Present State of the World”) openy comments on the political issues of the day.
  • Sibylle Ursula of Brunswick-Luneburg (1629-1671): A daughter of Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg from his second marriage, Sibylle Ursula became the stepdaughter of Elisabeth Sophie of Mecklenburg (above)  upon the latter’s marriage to her father.  Having received the same comprehensive education as her brothers, Sibylle Ursula entered into a prolongued correspondence with French writer Madeleine de Scudéry (the heroine of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 19th century novella Mademoiselle de Scudéry) and proceeded to write what would become the best-known courtly novel of German Baroque literature, Die Durchlauchtige Syrerin Aramena (Aramena, the Noble Syrian Lady; the book was completed by one of her brothers after she had fallen too ill to finish it herself).  She also wrote a five-act play and two series of spiritual meditations published under the titles Him[m]lisches Kleeblat (Heavenly Shamrock) and Seuffzer (Sighs), as well as translating two novels by French writer La Calrenède (Cassandre and Cléopâtre), parts of Madeleine de Scudéry’s novel Clélie (which introduces the idea of the carte de tendre; i.e., a map of Arcadia whose geography is based on the theme of love), and Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives’s Latin tract Introductio ad sapientiam (Introduction to True Wisdom).
  • Sibylla Schwarz (1621-1638): Known in the 17th century as “the Pomeranian Sappho”, Sibylla was the daughter of the mayor of the city of Greifswald in Western Pomerania.  She began to write poetry at the age of seven; her verse reflects the difficult times in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, which reached her city when Protestant Greifswald, and Pomerania as a whole, was occupied first by Imperial Catholic troops under the Holy Roman Empire’s supreme commander Albrecht von Wallenstein and then by the Swedish army under that country’s Protestant King Gustav II Adolf, one of the Holy Roman Empire’s chief opponents in the Thirty Years’ War. — Other important themes in Sibylla’s work besides war and death include friendship and love.  She died of a sudden illness in 1638, only 17 years of age.  After her work had fallen into oblivion in the 18th century, as from the 19th century onwards she came to be considered one of the foremost notable female German Baroque writers.
  • Justine Siegemund (1636-1705): A Silesian midwife whose obstetrical book The Court Midwife (1690) was the first German medical text written by a woman: it would be reprinted several times over the course of the subsequent decades and would remain highly influential throughout a large part of the 18th century.
  • The daughter of a Lutheran minister, Justine married an accountant and, as a result of a misdiagnosis of the gynecological condition that made her and her husband choose to remain childless, she sought to become educated in obstetrics herself.  Soon proving to be a skilled midwife who provided free services to the poor women of her area, she also saw her paying client base grow rapidly, including among the nobility; until she caught the eye first of the city fathers of the nearby town of Liegnitz (today: Legnica), where she was appointed City Midwife, and ultimately of Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, who appointed her his court’s midwife.  She also delivered the children of Frederick William’s daughter Marie-Amalie and of Eberhardine, the wife of Augustus the Strong, the powerful Prince-Elector of Saxony.  On two occasions, Justine was accused of unsafe practices, but both of those claims soon folded in the face of her demonstrable skills (and probably also in light of the protection she enjoyed at several of Germany’s most influential courts of the time).  Based on careful notes made during her deliveries, after having been in practice for several decades, she published her authoritative obstetrical book The Court Midwife (Die Kgl. Preußische und Chur-Brandenburgische Hof-Wehemutter), which was written in the form of a dialogue between herself and a pupil, and which contained a systematic and evidence-based discussion of possibly lethal childbirth complications such as poor presentations (where the baby lies in a position that makes a lateral body part such as an arm or shoulder instead of the head or feet the “leading” body part during birth), umbilical cord problems, and placenta previa (placenta attachment near or over the cervical opening), as well as the management of these conditions during the birthing process.
  • Anna Sophia II, Abbess of Quedlinburg (1638-1683): A member of the German high nobility who, at age 17, entered Quedlinburg Abbey north of the Hartz mountains in today’s Saxony-Anhalt: an imperial estate (i.e., a dominion subject to the rule of none but the Holy Roman Emperor himself) founded by the mother of 10th century Emperor Otto I (“the Great”) as a house of secular canonesses.  Raised in the Lutheran faith, Anna Sophia was well-educated, including in oriental languages and in poetry, and strictly religious.  Some years after her entry into Quedlinburg Abbey, she published a religious songbook and book of spiritual meditations, which was initially criticized by theologians for ostensibly equalizing men and women, but was eventually approved nonetheless.  Having suffered a spiritual crisis after her sister converted to Catholicism to facilitate her marriage, Anna Sophia ultimately chose to remain at Quedlinburg and was elected the abbey’s princess-abbess two years prior to her death.
  • Elisabeth Dorothea of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1640-1709): A noblewoman originating from Thuringia, Elisabeth Dorothea became regent of Hesse-Darmstadt (specifically, Landgravine, a title roughly equivalent to that of a Duchess, indicating direct subjection to none but the Holy Roman Emperor himself) upon the death of first her husband, Landgrave Louis VI and, only 18 weeks later, also the death of his eldest son from his first marriage, Louis VII.  Both her husband and her stepson had designated Elisabeth Dorothea as regent in the event of their deaths while her eldest son Ernest Louis was still a minor.  The Imperial Court nevertheless imposed the condition that she was to rule together with a group of councillors, but she possessed the political savvy to prevent the men in question from taking their oaths as co-governors, which essentially relegated them to a position of mere advisors whose counsel she was free to ignore if she so chose.  Her wisdom as a regent and a politician quickly also showed in the way in which her principality florished unter her rule.  She maintained a diary for a period of 52 years which, as from 1667, is still completely extant, and which thus constitutes one of the most extensive and detailed diaries of a member of high nobility, chronicling the politics of the time and life at court and allowing detailed historical insights.
  • Susanna Eger (1640-1713): Forced to turn to her culinary skills due to the premature death of her husband, Susanna eventually became a sought-after cook in the household of Leipzig middle class families, creating and serving meals ranging from simple and straightforward dishes to elaborate concoctions which, however, still allowed for kitchen economy.  She published the first edition of her “Leipzig Cookbook” (Leipziger Kochbuch, see frontispice and first page to the left) in 1706, and the book would see several further editions through 1745, as well as multiple reprints of its 1745 edition.  From its second (1712) edition onwards, it included easily comprehensible explanations on nutrition and diet, as well as a dictionary of food items and spices, a measurement conversion table, and a suggested inventory of indispensable and useful kitchen utensils; along with the — unusual for the time  — specifications of the quantities of each recipe’s individual ingredients, all of these features greatly contributed to the lasting popularity of Susanna Eger’s cookbook.
  • Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644-1724): A theological writer and one of the leading figures of Radical Pietism.  Of noble birth, Johanna Eleonora’s family had fallen into poverty as a result of the Thirty Years’ War; the premature death of her mother moreover obliged her to assume household duties and prevented her from receiving any kind of formal education.  Like many other impoverished noblewomen, she eventually entered into service at the regional court, where she would spend her entire youth and formative years.  After a brief return to her father’s household, she ultimately moved to Frankfurt, where (deeply religious since childhood) she founded a Pietist community together with a friend, after having been introduced to the influential local leaders of the Pietist movement some years earlier.  In that community, she met and married a likeminded theologian named Johann Wilhelm Petersen, with whom she moved first to Lüneburg, then to the vicinity of Magdeburg and eventually to a country estate near today’s border of Saxe-Anhalt and Brandenburg; and together with whom she published a large number of Pietist theological writings containing meditations, Bible readings and commentaries, as well as an autobiography which would come to greatly influence the style of Pietist autobiographical writing.
  • Glikl bas Judah Leib (aka Glückel von Hameln, 1646(?) – 1724): The daughter and, from age fourteen, successively the wife of two affluent Jewish merchants from Hamburg, who began to write a diary in her mid-forties to comfort herself over the loss of her first husband and continued the diary until a few years before her death.  Glikl (whose Yiddish name translates as “little luck”) was born two years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War; she witnessed and, in her diaries, commented on several other significant historical events, including but by far not limited to the wars that further transformed the landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, particularly the 1701-1715 War of the Spanish Succession.  The only early modern diary written by a woman in Yiddish, Glickl’s journal provides eloquent testimony to the effect of those wars, as well as the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Early Modern Europe and their precarious situation even in times of peace and stability.  At the same time, the diary also provides important historical insight into the daily life of Jewish families and businesses of the period, marriage, business and travel arrangements and customs; as well as painting an in-depth portrait of Glickl herself as a person and an astute business woman. — The image to the left is taken from the cover of a 20th century republication of the diaries.
  • Maria Sophia Schellhammer (1647-1719): A writer and cook, best remembered for her cookbook Die wol unterwiesene Köchinn (“The Well-Instructed Cook”; see copperplate cover image to the left), also known as the Brandenburgisches Kochbuch (“Brandenburg Cookbook”), published in 1692.  In 1700, she also wrote a book about confectionary named Der wohl-unterwiesenen Köchinn Zufälliger Confect-Tisch (“The Well-Instructed Cook’s Occasional Confectionary Table”) and translated works by Giovanni Boccaccio and possibly by Jean Racine into German.
  • The daughter of the Royal Physician of Queen Christina of Sweden, Maria Sophia was given a wide-ranging education, inter alia in foreign languages, poetry, and geography.  Her husband Günther Christoph Schelhammer, like her father, was a medical scholar and court physician, employed at the court of Frederick IV, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf (Gottorp), a descendant of Christine of Hesse (see post on German women writers from the Reformation Age); Frederick IV’s son Carl Friedrich would, in 1725, marry Peter the Great’s daughter Anna Petrovna and with her found the last Imperial Russian dynasty, the house of Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. — Among her contemporaries, Maria Sophia Schellhammer was renowned for her wide knowledge and linguistic prowess as well as for her culinary skill and expert household management; praise offered to her husband for his scholarship was extended to her on her own merits, not merely in her capacity as the court physician’s wife.  Her cookbook, whose publication was overseen by her husband, and which was reprinted several times until the end of the 18th century, incorporated her knowledge of dietetics and chemistry; it was not intended for the households of the nobility but expressly addressed to the middle class and upper middle class, where the display of culinary arts had, by that time, become a way to demonstrate wealth and an elevated social status.  The recipes included range from simple everyday dishes to elaborate feasts influenced by the French cuisine and involving a plethora of exotic ingredients; and the cookbook also gives advice on household management, stock keeping, and the conservation of food.
  • Henrietta Catharina von Gersdorff (1648-1726): A Baroque religious poet and advocate of Pietism; the sister of Otto Heinrich von Friesen, chancellor to Saxon Elector Friedrich August I (“Augustus the Strong”).  Comprehensively-educated, Henrietta Catharina was praised, in her youth already, for her German and Latin verse; and she maintained a correspondence with the leading theologians, scholars, and scientists of the day; most notably with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.  As the wife of a high-ranking administrative officer (roughly equivalent to the position of a regional governor), she used her influence to foster the Pietist movement as well as the schooling of girls, and she also encouraged the translation of the Bible into the local Sorbian language (Lusatian Slavic).  She wrote and composed a series of religious songs which, though vanished from today’s Protestant hymnals, were considered to be among the best of her time.
  • Magdalena Sibylla of Hesse-Darmstadt (1652-1712) and Auguste Magdalene of Hesse-Darmstadt (1657-1674): Stepdaughters of Elisabeth Dorothea of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (further above) through the latter’s marriage to their father Louis VI of Hesse-Darmstadt; and through their own mother, Marie Elisabeth of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, also descendants of Christine of Hesse (see post on German women writers from the Reformation Age) as well as relatives of Frederick IV, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf, the patron of Maria Sophia Schellhammer and her husband Günther Christoph Schellhammer (above).
  • In 1673, Magdalena Sibylla, the elder of the two sisters (see image above left), married the crown prince of the Duchy of Württemberg, who ascended to that principality’s throne upon his father’s death six months after their marriage, but who only ruled for four years before dying in turn.  Thus, at age 25, Magdalena Sibylla (like her stepmother) suddenly found herself having become regent; she would rule the duchy until her son Eberhard Louis had reached his majority a decade and a half later.  Also like her stepmother, Magdalena Sibylla proved a successful ruler, on account of her prudence as much as on account of her piety.
  • Both Magdalena Sibylla and her younger sister Auguste Magdalene (who died at only 17 years of age) took to the pen: Duchess Magdalena Sibylla authored numerous hymns, some of which are contained in Protestant songbooks to this day; she also employed the noted Baroque composer Johann Pachelbel, and she kept a large library that speaks to her wide-ranging interests and education. — Auguste Magdalene translated the Psalms of David into German verse and composed a volume of poems entitled Die Thür zur deutschen Poesie (The Door to German Poetry).
  • Susanna Elisabeth Zeidler (1657-1706): A self-taught poet, Zeidler was one of Germany’s most important female poets of the Baroque era.  She initially opposed the publication of her works, but eventually gave her brother permission to go ahead, because she was frustrated by the poor acceptance of women’s poetry.  Her works, which were eventually published in a compilation entitled Jungferlicher Zeitvertreiber (“Virginal Pastime(r)” — see modern-day facsimile cover to the left) expressly advocate women’s right of authorship and their right to participate in the literary debate.
  • Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (1695-1760): The daughter of the (at the time) mayor of the city of Leipzig, Christiana Mariana probably began to compose poetry and lyrics after the premature death of her second husband as well as her daughters, probably during a pandemic.  At that time, she moved back to her parental home, where she created Germany’s first literary and arts salon, which inter alia was attended by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johann Christoph Gottsched, who encouraged her literary activities.  Bach set nine of her cantata lyrics to music, and Gottsched made von Ziegler the only female member of his illustrious literary society, the “Deutsche Gesellschaft”.  In 1733, she was named Poeta laureata by Wittenberg University; a title endowed with imperial honors privileges. Both her membership in Gottsched’s society and her poet laureate honors — the first to be awarded to a woman in Germany — were met with fierce opposition and harshly sarcastic pamphlets on the grounds of her sex.  Her literary activity ceased after she married for the third time in 1741.
  • Friederike Caroline Neuber (1697-1760): One of the most famous actresses and actor-managers in the history of German theatre, Neuber stands out for her achievements in elevating the status and professionalism of German theatre in an age when most theatre directors — like the representatives of every other profession — were men.  Caroline had been taught reading, writing, and French by her mother; but after her tyrannical father had beaten her mother to a premature death, Caroline strove to run away from home; a desire in which she finally succeeded, together with her husband-to-be, her father’s clerk Johann Neuber, with whom she joined a well-known theatrical company.  The Neubers eventually formed a highly-reputed theatrical company of their own and worked with leading playwrights and critics such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Christoph Gottsched to reform German theatrical standards along the lines of the French theatre, professionalizing performances and expressly banning and abolishing the crude, impromptu harlequinades that were popular at the time.  While most of the plays performed by the Neubers’ company were written by Gottsched, Caroline Neuber authored a number of pieces as well, particularly after having quarrelled with Gottsched and terminated their cooperation.  She died in poverty after having fallen out of favor at the courts that had until then sponsored her (especially that of Saxony) and after having had to disband her company several times during the last two decades of her life.
  • Sidonia Hedwig Zäunemann (1711-1740): a lawyer’s daughter from Thuringia, Zäunemann was noticeably and “unwomanly” independent even as a child, when, inter alia, she autodidactically taught herself French and Latin.  Taking Christiana Mariana von Ziegler (further above) as her example, she began to write poetry and openly challenged society’s treatment of women as inferior; at age 24, she was named the poet laureate of the newely-founded University of Göttingen.  As traveling without a male escort was impossible for women at the time, she frequently disguised as a man and, that way, even traveled considerably long distances.  She was also one of the first women ever to visit a mine (namely, the one in Ilmenau, the city in which lived her sister) and later wrote a poem describing that experience.  Her literary career and unconventional life came to a vastly premature end due to a fatal riding accident at age 29.
  • Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715-1762): The daughter of a medical doctor from Quedlinburg near the Harz mountains, as a child Dorothea was given the same in-depth education in Latin, maths and the sciences as her brother.  When she showed the same aptitude in the sciences as her father and brother, her father — who opined that gifted women’s talents were wasted in the kitchen — petitioned for royal permission for her to attend university, which she did receive.  Her studies were hampered by her marriage to a wdiower with several children from his first marriage; nevertheless, she completed them and, in order to contribute to her family’s income, began practicing medicine, quickly making a reputation for herself, even before she had obtained a degree.  When she was sued for quackery, King Frederick II of Prussia ruled that she had to pass an examination and submit a dissertation with her university, which she did, becoming the first woman to be granted a university degree and the first woman M.D. in German history.  Thereafter, she was able to continue to practice without any further trouble. — Besides her dissertation, she published a tract arguing for women’s admission to education and study, pointing out the inherently inequal treatment expressed in women’s prohibition from higher learning.
  • Anna Louisa Karsch (1722-1791): An autodidact who became a celebrated poet nicknamed “The German Sappho”, Karsch was born the daughter of an innkeepter and severely punished for her “book mania” when her stepfather (her father having died a few years after her birth) became aware of her “unseemly” love of reading and writing, the basics of which she had been taught by a great uncle who had had her custody for a while in early childhood.  Her gifts as a poet, which were discovered after she had began to write poems commissioned for special occasions such as weddings, eventually brought her to the attention of intellectuals such as philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, as well as, particularly on the basis of her patriotic Prussian poetry, the Prussian nobility.  Eventually, the Prussian King himself, Frederick II (“the Great”), promised her a pension and a house; after he had failed to make good on the promise she approached his successor, Frederick William II, who fulfilled his predecessor’s self-imposed obligation.  Besides Sophie von La Roche (see page 1 of this post, 19th century writers) Karsch is considered one of the earliest women authors to have attained financial independence on the basis of her literary gifts.
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