Elisabeth Langgässer

Elisabeth Langgässer (23 February 1899 – 25 July 1950) was a German author, journalist and teacher. She is known for lyrical poetry and novels.

Her short story Saisonbeginn, for example, provides a graphically human portrayal of a 1930s German Alpine village erecting a sign forbidding the entry of Jews.

Early life

In 1899 Langgässer was born in Alzey into a middle-class Roman-Catholic family. Her father was building inspector, architect Eduard Langässer (1846–1909), son of the commercial broker Coloman from Mainz and Barbara Lebrecht. Her mother was Eugenie Maria Pauline Dienst (1859–1942), daughter of the Senior Court Secretary Paul Dienst from Mainz and Maria Anna Rauch. She had a younger brother, Heinrich (1901–1946).

In 1909, after her father's death, the family moved to Darmstadt, where Langgässer attended school and graduated from all-girl Viktoriaschule high school. After a year of teacher training, she taught at Hessian grade schools in Seligenstadt and Griesheim from 1920 until 1928.

Following a brief affair with the married legal scholar Hermann Heller, she gave birth to her illegitimate daughter Cordelia in January 1929. As a consequence she was sacked from her teaching position.

Publications during the Weimar Republic

From 1924 onwards Langgässer published poetry and reviews. After losing her employment as a teacher she devoted herself to a literary career. From 1929 to 1930 she was a lecturer at the Social Women's School in Berlin, where she remained permanently after retiring as a freelance writer.

Her writings were regarded as Naturmagie (nature magic), where a magic sense unfolded within the realm of an ambivalent nature. This movement was connected with writers who published in the journal Die Kolonne between 1929 and 1932. Other members of the Naturmagie literary movement were Günter Eich, Horst Lange, Peter Huchel, Wilhelm Lehmann and Oskar Loerke and the married couple Oda Schaefer and Horst Lange.

Persecution in the Third Reich

Langgässer became a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature). In June 1935 Langgässer married Wilhelm Hoffman and together they had three daughters. Langgässer was classified as a "half-Jew" due to Jewish relations on her father's side of the family. She was banned from any writing or publishing activity by the Reich Chamber of Literature in 1936 on racial grounds. She appealed to Hans Hinkel in August 1937 and then to Joseph Goebbels in April 1938. In the appeal letters she makes reference to the pure Aryan line on her mother's side and points to the criticism of her literary work by the Jewish author Alfred Döblin. After her death the letters were used as evidence for Langgässer's willingness to compromise, accusations that she had prostituted herself politically, or were interpreted as interventions by a Catholic German citizen who had not yet seen where fascist Germany was heading.

Ultimately the marriage in 1935 to Wilhelm Hoffman (1899–1967), Dr. phil., lecturer at the Germersheim Institute of the University of Mainz; which she had met in Berlin while working as a radio editor in 1933; saved Langgässer from deportation. They had three daughters; Annette (b. 1938), Barbara (b. 1940) and Franziska (b. 1942).

However, her eldest daughter, Cordelia, whose father was a prominent Jew, was considered fully Jewish according to the Nuremberg Laws; made to wear the yellow star of David in 1941 and not allowed to live with her family. Cordelia was deported aged 15 to Theresienstadt concentration camp and then to Auschwitz in 1944. Cordelia survived following an exchange of camp inmates with German prisoners in Sweden and came back in 1946.

Literary work

Langgässer's poetry thrives on the tension between diverse forces that accrued to the poet from her Rhenish-Hessian origins, her Jewish family heritage, and a lifelong commitment to the Roman-Catholic faith. The dominant theme of her poetic work, which drew inspiration from the artists of the "Renouveau Catholique," especially Paul Claudel and Georges Bernanos, was the transforming power of grace, which frees humanity from the eternal cycle of the natural cosmos to existence under the Christian telos. Langgässer found her genuine poetic expression in poetry. In a letter dated September 7, 1947, to Wilhelm Lehmann, who remained her lifelong role model, she even confessed that her great novels were "not written in prose at all, but rather a suspended rhythm." Her first creative period was therefore entirely devoted to poetry. The focus is the cycle "The Tropic of the Lamb: A Hymn to Redemption," published in 1924. In it, she counters the paradoxical contradiction of creation, with its threat to humanity from cthtonic-telluric powers, with a commitment to the Christian message and attempts to resolve the incompatibility of nature and faith within the "church year," whose Sundays and festivals she accompanies with hymns of celebration.