Clara Viebig

Vocation

German author. Clara Viebig was highly musical and endowed with a fine voice, she spent some time at the Conservatoire in Berlin. In 1896 she married a publisher (F. T. Cohn), and her first book, appeared in 1897. Throughout her life she used her maiden name in publication. Her first considerable success was Das Weiberdorf (1900), a powerful novel about a village in the Eifel from which all the able-bodied men are absent working for the greater part of the year. She was a prolific writer, wrote numerous novels as well as collections of stories and plays, but even those that were performed did not reach a wider public. Clara Viebig's novels and stories are noteworthy for the integrity of her vision and the imaginative realism of her nature descriptions. Although they show a keen insight into suffering female characters, they also deal sympathetically with the problems and situations of men. In 1936 her publications became forbidden by the Third Reich because her husband was Jewish. As Viebig was related to Hermann Göring she herself wasn't persecuted. She moved in 1937 to Brazil for a year, but returned a year later and tried to accommodate herself in Nazi Germany. Her work continued to be published, albeit with less regularity; eventually in 1940 she was celebrated by the press and Nazis for her work on her eightieth birthday, with the "Dormant Army" being praised by Nazi critics as the first "Volksdeutsche novel" and important document of "national fight". She died 31 July 1952 in Berlin-Zehlendorf. Link to Wikipedia biography