Clara Viebig


Clara Emma Amalia Viebig was a German author.

Life

Viebig was born in the German city of Trier, the daughter of a Prussian civil servant. She was related to Hermann Göring. At the age of eight, her father was transferred, and the family moved to Düsseldorf, where Clara attended school. She frequently returned to the Moselle scenery at Trier and vicinity, and took many walks there. When her father died, she was sent to live on the estate of some relatives in Posen, where she frequented the local Luisenschule. At the age of twenty, Clara moved to Berlin with her mother. She went to Berlin to study music, but instead of doing it, found that the stimulus of the great city, in addition to the landscapes she had already seen, was beginning to steer her toward a literary career.
She was married to the Jewish publisher Fritz Theodor Cohn in 1896. The following year, Clara began a successful career as a writer and her works became much admired. After her marriage, she lived most of the time in Berlin and its suburbs.

''Das Schlafende Heer''

In her novel Das Schlafende Heer, published in 1903, Viebig praised conquest of Polish territories by German settlers and warned of "dangers" posed by Polish minority in Germany, which she characterised as "disloyal" and "uncultured". Left unchecked, she warned, Poles would overwhelm Germany and thus need to be controlled, repressed and assimilated. Viebig's viewpoint was characteristic of German attitudes at the time, and her work formed part of the German Heimatkunst literary movement during this period. This novel became a bestseller in German Empire in 1904 and 1905, and, besides Die Wacht am Rhein, was her most read novel.
In Das Schlafende Heer she depicted the alleged racial division between Poles and Germans, focusing on character of Polish women, obsessing with the distinction between blonde and black, white and dark and portraying them as plotting the demise of German men, who needed to be warned in advance. The Poles were living according to Viebig in a state of "animalistic and barbaric state", from which only German "civilizing mission" could save them, the solution to this "Polish problem" was exclusive colonization, Viebig warned that "Polish degeneracy" was "contagious". Kristin Kopp from University of Missouri writes that Viebig's novel represents a "prominent example" of narrative strategy that presents Polish characters whose external "whiteness", conceals hidden "blackness", which allows them to infiltrate German culture and undermine German colonial projects.

Later career

As her fame faded, in 1933 she published Insel der Hoffnung, which condemned the Weimar Republic and praised the colonization of the border with Poland.
However, in 1936 her publications became forbidden by the Third Reich because her husband was Jewish. As Viebig was related to Hermann Göring she herself was not 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, on her 80th birthday in 1940, she was celebrated by the press and Nazis for her work, with Das Schlafende Heer being praised by Nazi critics as the first "Volksdeutsche novel" and important document of "national fight". While her works differ from racist Blut und Boden literature and her correspondence shows a distance from Nazism, they are filled with nationalist spirit and show some similarities to volkisch thinking.

Works

Novels

Wildfeuer, 1896Dilettanten des Lebens, 1897 Rheinlandstöchter, 1897Vor Tau und Tag, 1898Dilettanten des Lebens, 1899 Es lebe die Kunst, 1899Das Weiberdorf, 1899 Das tägliche Brod, 1900
  • * English edition: Our Daily Bread, 1909 Die Wacht am Rhein, 1902 Vom Müller Hannes, 1903Das schlafende Heer, 1904
  • *English edition: The Sleeping Army, 1929Einer Mutter Sohn, 1906
  • *English edition: The Son of his Mother, 1913 Absolvo te!, 1907
  • *English edition: Absolution, 1908 Das Kreuz im Venn, 1908 Die vor den Toren, 1910Das Eisen im Feuer, 1913Eine Handvoll Erde, 1915 Töchter der Hekuba, 1917
  • *English edition: Daughters of Hecuba, 1922Das rote Meer, 1920Unter dem Freiheitsbaum, 1922 Menschen und Straßen, 1923Die Passion, 1925Die goldenen Berge, 1928
  • *English edition: The Golden Hills, 1928Charlotte von Weiß, 1929Die mit den tausend Kindern, 1929
  • *English edition: The woman with a thousand children, 1930Prinzen, Prälaten und Sansculotten, 1931Menschen unter Zwang, 1932Insel der Hoffnung, 1933Der Vielgeliebte und die Vielgehaßte, 1935

Short stories & novellas

Kinder der Eifel, 1897
  • Vor Tau und Tag, 1898Die Rosenkranzjungfer, 1900
  • Die heilige Einfalt, 1910
  • Heimat, 1914
  • West und Ost, 1920 Franzosenzeit, 1925

Plays

  • Barbara Holzer, 1896
  • Die Pharisäer, 1899
  • Kampf um den Mann, 1903
  • Das letzte Glück, 1909
  • Pittchen, 1909