Elisabeth Siewert

Elisabeth Siewert (1905)

Elisabeth Siewert (born November 20, 1867 in Budda , Prussian Stargard district , † June 28, 1930 in Berlin ) was a German writer. Her novels , stories and short stories revolve around her memories of childhood and the landscape in West Prussia and reflect contemporary reality .

The understanding of her literary work emerges from her biography - from her early artistic formation in her upper class parents and from her close relationship with two of her sisters, with whom she later lived in a shared apartment in Berlin . Often autobiographical in the center of ElisabethIn the factory there are figures, often sisters, who repeatedly investigate the question of how it could have happened that the blissful kingdom of heaven of childhood was lost. At the same time, she lets her characters suspect that their longing for the sunken children's world can only be the ground for further development. Like herself, her characters are looking for ways to break out of the blissful but also restrictive memory and to cope with life. Siewert's language is rather bitter and brittle, especially in the novels but also humorous.

Called “Protestant Droste ” during her lifetime , her novellas were mainly represented in magazines of the women's movement and in the socialist monthly journals until the end of the 1910s . In these media several times in detail rezipiert , her literary productivity then decreased significantly; It was only noticed in papers such as the East German monthly books or the West Prussia yearbook. She did not achieve the great literary breakthrough. Embittered by the failure, she died in mental confusion and was almost completely forgotten. It was not until 2008, when the work of her older sister, the painter Clara Siewert  , was rediscovered, that her work also came back into focus.

Life

Elisabeth Siewert was born on Gut Budda , around 56 kilometers south of Danzig , as the daughter of Iwan Siewert, a former captain of the Prussian army, and Helene Siewert, née von Baehr .

ancestors

According to the theater and art critic Paul Fechter , the family came from Saint Petersburg on his father's side . An ancestor, a very wealthy Russian-German , is said to have lived in the city on the Neva at the time of Paul I. He had the displeasure of Tsar excited when he one team grew that the widely admired dapple -Gespann the Tsar was like and thus on the Nevsky Prospekt walk went. Thereupon he was exiled to Siberia for some time . After his return he left Russia as a precaution, moved to Gdansk with his family and bought an estate near Ohra (now Orunia, a district of Gdansk) . To care for his sons, he bought several estates in Kashubia between the Tucheler Heide and the hill country in the western Vistula region . Elisabeth's father got one of the goods, the Budda estate.

The maternal ancestors were part of the central German birth and mental nobility . The mother, née von Baehr, was related to the Schlegel brothers, the grandmother, née Schlegel. The grandmother's cousin, Wilhelmine Marianne Niemeyer, went down in literary history through her relationship with the writer, poet and playwright Karl Immermann and her friendship with his former lover Elisa von Ahlefeldt . The grandfather Leopold von Baehr was friends with the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch , co-founder of the Berlin Sculpture School , and lived in the East Prussian Ragnit near Tilsit . During her childhood, Elisabeth Siewert spent a year with her grandfather, who was 104 years old, in the countryside in Ragnit.

Childhood and youth at Gut Budda

Budda with property and surroundings. Prussian land survey 1908, table sheet (1: 25,000).

On the remote Budda estate (from Bude , formerly the tar shack in the neighboring village of Grüneberg ), Elisabeth's parents farmed, raised cattle and produced a small amount of starch . The father was also head of the district of Liebichau (Lubichow) in the 1870s and 1880s . On the Budda estate, which is small according to Elisabeth Siewert , she grew up with several siblings.

Financial constraints and upper class education

However, the property in the barren area turned out to be "not very productive property". In the autobiographical novel Die Schöne Herbsttage (1903), Elisabeth Siewert described the Budda-like novel property Ruhla as “a small estate in the most sterile part of West Prussia”, which the owner, who is “not a real farmer, bought like a pig in a poke [ and "paid dearly". The "talented, delicate, elegant" residents are "overloaded with debts" and live in constant "worries about the bare minimum". In Drei Schwestern (1906) she also thematized an impoverished estate at Preussisch Stargard: "As long as the children could think, their parents had been in financial worries, and the way they lived was by all means manorial." The art historian and curator for classical modernism in the museum Wiesbaden Roman Zieglgänsberger described Budda 2008 as a bad buy and wrote about the childhood of sister Clara, which also applies to Elisabeth:

"In this multilingual population, with which religious diversity naturally goes hand in hand, Clara Siewert grew up somewhat sheltered and certainly also happy, but nevertheless in the dichotomy between a constantly felt poverty on the one hand and pretended wealth on the other, between reality and parental wishful thinking, so to speak."

- Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. 2008.

Despite the financial bottlenecks, the parents sent the girls to private riding lessons, later to the high school in Danzig and paid for Clara the expensive painting and drawing schools in Königsberg and later in Berlin; It is not known whether and to what extent Elisabeth received special literary training.

Early artistic imprint

Budda estate 1882, drawing by Helene Siewert, Elisabeth's mother

Her mother, in particular, was responsible for the artistic stamping of the sisters, who herself had studied painting until her marriage and kept a family book on Budda in which she wrote down everyday occurrences with poetry and illustrated them with drawings. Accordingly stimulated, the sisters let their imagination run wild from an early age, reenacting historical dramas, composing and drawing. According to Paul Fechter, they put entire novels together and read them to one another. A craftsman once refused to work in the room in which "the children played their wonderfully fantastic game"; with the “crazy little girls” he would not stay “in the same room”. In The Beautiful Autumn Days (1903) Elisabeth Siewert referred to the residents of the Roman estate in retrospect "all of them" as "dreamers" who even painted the walls of the cattle sheds. "Kitty painted the ' Ring des Polykrates ' on the wall of the servants' house towards the garden ." There is actually a drawing study for the mural' Ring des Polykrates' by Sister Clara . The poet and writer Herybert Menzel described the upbringing of the sisters in an obituary for Elisabeth Siewert in 1930 as follows:

“The residents of Budda were so rich in their seclusion that they became artists, sang, transformed themselves every day, drew and wrote poetry. Three of them then lived together in Berlin, two painters and the poet. Clara, Vicki and Elisabeth Siewert. And, like their furniture, they were still the forest with sunshine and stormy noise, they were still people of this forest, the three artists. "

- Herybert Menzel: On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930.

Although the sisters longed for life back to Budda from the reality of Berlin, in which they never felt at home , the writer also sighed in the memory of Die Heimat (1912): “That it was possible to ever get tired of such a country estate! It happened like this. ”After a long illness accompanied by brooding phases and after a carriage ride with her mother, she made the decision to leave the restrictive country life behind. During their time in Berlin, the sisters returned several times to West Prussia for longer visits - later, after their parents had sold the Budda estate, to the Luschkau / Luschkowo estate in the Schwetz district (today Luszkówko in the Pruszcz municipality ). The interpersonal skills, however, which were in demand in their life in the big city, were apparently not sufficiently conveyed by the parents to the sisters on the remote estate. The author complained: "The expensive Proteus Budda didn't exactly prepare me for dealing with people ."

The sisters' refuge in Berlin

Courtyard of the studio and residential building on Durlacher Strasse in 1893

Nothing is known about the living conditions and the address in Elisabeth Siewert's early days in Berlin, nor about the time of the move. There is evidence that she lived in Berlin or in one of the suburbs incorporated in 1920 by 1912 at the latest. In the same year, their Pomeranian homeland was incorporated into the re-established Polish state. Her sister Clara, who was five years older than her, finally moved to Berlin at the end of the 1890s, after commuting between Budda and Berlin every semester since around 1884. It is certain that the sisters Clara, Elisabeth and Victoria, the youngest of the three, set up a joint apartment at Durlacher Straße 14 in Wilmersdorf around 1915 and lived there increasingly withdrawn. Like Clara Siewert, Victoria Siewert was also a painter, but only three exhibitions of her can be proven.

Clara Siewert had already moved into Durlacher Strasse 14 in the at that time still independent community Deutsch-Wilmersdorf in 1904 and set up an artist workshop there. The house was built in 1893/94 by the architect Wilhelm Walther as "Atelierhaus Bieber" - named after the sculptor and builder Richard Bieber. The Bieberbau restaurant, which is still in the building and is a listed building, recalls the tradition of the building, which was largely destroyed in 1943 and in which the Brücke artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Pechstein, as well as the sculptors Gerhard Marcks and Richard Scheibe , among others, worked in the 1910s . Durlacher Strasse is built in the Wilhelminian style . From the apartments there was and still is an unobstructed view of the neighboring Volkspark Wilmersdorf . Herybert Menzel described the three sisters' later shared apartment in 1930 in an obituary for Elisabeth as a refuge that was supposed to preserve the atmosphere of their lost home in West Prussia:

“When you stepped into her room, you had stepped into the timeless from the throbbing present. Pictures of ancestors greeted us from the walls, old furniture took up weighty places. They creaked in the twilight like trees rubbing against each other in the wind. They were still completely forest and still smelled and so comforted [...]. "

- Herybert Menzel : On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930.

But even in this refuge, "life in the city" remained for the sisters "little more [...] than a fight against the collapse of all of their vital forces", as Elisabeth Siewert already wrote in 1912 in the novel Darum her, as so often autobiographically drawn, Attested sister characters; an ultimately futile fight for them.

Initial successes and support for the failing sister Clara

Ten years earlier, the writer seemed to have been gripped by a spirit of optimism when, for example, she allowed her character Marie in the novel Die Schöne Herbsttage (1903) to find Berlin “great and attractive for the first time” and continued: “So a thousand times more was played in it from, lots of little circles formed where at first only chaos seemed. And above all there was such a strong atmosphere. That was certainly the spiritual, the energy for progress [...]. ”Her professional successes in the early days of Berlin corresponded to this mood. Her first novella appeared in 1897, the first novel in 1903 and until around 1920 she was able to regularly publish her stories in magazines and find publishers for her novels.

Die Frau , front page January 1906, with Siewert's serialized novel Drei Schwestern . Siewert has publishedin this magazine of the Federation of German Women's Associations since 1897.

Although the writer Carl Lange spoke on the occasion of the obituary in 1930 of "decades of worry about daily bread", she was financially at least so well off in the 1910s that she could take care of her sister Clara. A decisive break occurred in the painter's career as early as 1912, which coincided with her resignation from the Berlin Secession . Clara Siewert, trained by Karl Stauffer-Bern among others , was one of the few women who were accepted into the progressive group of artists ; since 1900 she has been listed as a member. In the period from 1892 to 1912 she was successfully represented at around twenty art exhibitions with her expressive, passionate, psychologically torn painting , and museums and gallery owners bought her works. Why she left the Secession is unclear. After that she only took part in exhibitions sporadically. In 1916 , Käthe Kollwitz tried again in vain as a member of the jury to place Clara in a Secession exhibition. In her diary, Kollwitz noted: “Judges all day. Unsuccessful in bringing in Clara Siewert ”. Elisabeth Siewert, for whom the lack of a literary breakthrough was already becoming apparent and who herself had difficulties placing her stories in magazines after the First World War , is likely to have had some reserves from her novels published before the war and to pay for her sister, according to Zieglgänsberger be.

Self-doubt, lack of literary breakthrough and illness

Elisabeth Siewert's literary work was accompanied early on by self-doubt and by the search for self-discovery. Desperately, she searched for her “artistic term” and wondered whether her “undeveloped inner man”, arrested in childhood, was able to come out of the prison of memories to reality. “I only have one floor [in my head], on which inevitably resides the sense of the whole, the striving for unity.” The doubts and questions in the field of tension between longing and reality were at the same time the mainspring of her literary work.

Writing as a struggle

The story from a poor workshop illustrates their struggle, which was accompanied by illnesses as early as 1909:

“I lie here as the result of a complicated culture, the fodder for a hundred infamous complications. My lumbago is creeping, veiled, masked, three doctors say different things about it, a fourth prescribes powder from a distance. [...] Good heavens, I will not get up like newborn. Can someone turn off the thought mill for me? Can you make my past life a little less strange, abnormal, pour rose oil on it and move my afterlife to a mountain top? I also have to complain about my hearing [...]. And my feelings don't stop, like birds crashing their heads against the walls of the glass cage. The impatient heart pounds, pounds, as if it had finally deserved a different rhythm and was tired of solitary confinement and isolated existence; it would like to turn to where it - oh yes, where? [...] Something like that a female thinks that she definitely wants to deal with the outside and inside world in his own way, has sneaked into battle armed with a quill pen, is constantly being pushed back and gets up again and again and cannot allow anything say. Now the being has been hunted down because, in addition to a hundred spiritual temptations and sufferings of the mind and taste, a physical one has also been found. […] What are we, thinks the woman wrapped under many duvets. Fairy-tale characters who were chased out of their hiding spots to the fair. [...] to find rejection of the near, the spirit of the environment; that's not good. Where do you get the material from outside to expand and nourish the inside? "

- Elisabeth Siewert : From a poor workshop. 1909.

Then she describes that the sister, "the painter", does not go to her work in the gallery and stays to cheer her up. This gives her new strength:

“Yesterday I was stuck in the terrible prison of disaffection [...]. Today ... Ah, the air, a little undine is in it, I feel sisterly with the air today. What rejects and rejects falls from me, I turn to where I can love and nourish myself. For us poor chased fairy-tale characters come back to conditions, images that compensate. We are secretly rooted in our native forests, heights, and paradises, and that's why we suddenly receive gifts. ... I will now get up and write something, something is in mind. ... I'll get up in a moment. "

- Elisabeth Siewert : From a poor workshop. 1909.

In search of the "artistic term"

In Das Himmlisches Kind 1916, Siewert discussed her doubts as to whether she could and should go beyond her topic. She asked herself whether it was not enough if the “heavenly child” (that is, herself) “helped to create love”. She continued: "Writing a novel, for example making a name for yourself with it, really only comes second". She emphasized how much she draws her strength and wealth from happy memories. She glorified her childhood with the words “I cling to the little child, I adore it, I pull it out of the twilight and look at it with stunned delight.” And she wondered whether the child was forced to relinquish its clinging memories to connect with the outside world. She also hoped that if she held onto the child and just thought enough and tied strings, she would be able to connect her dream world with the outside world and only thus shape her "fluctuating artistic concept become strong ”. She wondered if she even wanted to. Doubt can only make me dusty, despair would be very stupid, very sick. It is more important for them to find themselves: “As if it is not a matter of indifference whether I drown once I have found myself. […] The new meaning that animated me is everything that belongs to me, its traces, which still accompany me now, are more important than anything else, and my only real task is to pursue and continue them. ”Had introduced your text with the words:

“I would like to say to a friend: You have no idea of ​​my narrow-mindedness and fearfulness. Listen: I think that I have to write novels, I torment myself with it, I cling to this obsession with pity and foolishness. When it surges and struggles in me, wants to create clarity in the chaotic, ponders the reason, wants to order and master the masses, then that counts for nothing or even as a time-consuming, incredibly presumptuous activity, almost pathological for my untrained mind. I mean, my situation is too uncertain for that. As if it were not about the essential, eternal in me that demands its right. As if writing a novel put me in a safe position. "

- Elisabeth Siewert. The heavenly child. 1916.

Failure, bitterness, and mental confusion

After 1917 only five short stories appeared in magazines and a few short stories in summarizing book editions. As Carl Lange announced, her circle of friends and admirers remained small and Elisabeth Siewert was unable to assert herself with her literature. Attempts by her friends to win a publisher for a complete edition of her work have failed. The unsuccessfulness and the accompanying material bottlenecks would have led to severe emotional shocks.

“Not so much material need, but also because she loved being able to waste. Rather, she perished because her works did not get the echo she had hoped for, that so many, alas, so many insignificant names entwined next to hers and hers did not blossom, took away all light from her. It made her bitter in the end. That ultimately took away all of her creative power. She found no consolation in the recognition and encouragement of her few friends. [...] So desperate, desperate, lay fallow. Until the very end, the friends hoped for a new success, for the smallest, visible success. That would have made her fresh and happy again. It should be denied her. And so her mind became confused in all hopelessness, and, without an echo, trapped in itself. So she collapsed. "

- Herybert Menzel: On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930.

Death and obituary

According to Carl Lange, Elisabeth Siewert fell asleep gently in a Berlin hospital on June 28, 1930 after months of suffering. Her sister Clara, just about to gain a foothold at art exhibitions, plunged the death of her lifeblood into another creative crisis and into a depression. Clara outlived her younger sister by 15 years and died in utter impoverishment in October 1945. Victoria died in December 1971. The three sisters remained unmarried and childless .

In the obituary, Herybert Menzel wrote in 1930: “She suffered hardship, Elisabeth Siewert, she, who will one day be said to be one of our greatest German poets.” Carl Lange, who is also friends with the writer, also regretted that Elisabeth Siewert The success that she “fully deserved” was not granted, but then summed up objectively and critically that Elisabeth Siewert lacked “deeper penetration” for great poetic successes.

Publications, magazines and publishers

Literature supplement of the magazine Neues Frauenleben with Siewert's novella Unnuütze Sünde , 1910

Title page of Unforgotten Menschen , 1911, Siewert's only novel to be published in two editions.

Between 1897 and 1928, Elisabeth Siewert published a total of around fifty novels and stories in magazines, several novella anthologies and six novels. Fifteen poems appeared posthumously in 1933.

Magazines of the women's movement, socialist monthly, S. Fischer Verlag and others

Her first novella, Maienfrost , appeared in 1897 in the magazine Die Frau , which was founded in 1893 by the educator and women's rights activist Helene Lange , a symbolic figure of the German women's movement , and published by the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine . In addition to its function as a mouthpiece for the women's movement, the magazine also wanted to address the broad mass of bourgeois women and win them over to the goals of the women's movement on the basis of family papers with fiction texts and everyday topics such as housekeeping and raising children. Until 1900 Siewert was one of the most productive authors of the magazine with up to four articles a year. Then the number decreased significantly, the last time it was represented in 1916 in Die Frau . Between 1910 and 1916 publications in the Viennese magazine Neues Frauenleben were added. The editors included the Austrian literary historian , writer and feminist Christine Touaillon . For the longest time Elisabeth Siewert stayed with the Socialist Monthly Issues - International Review of Socialism , which published 17 of her stories between 1908 and 1923.

The fact that Siewert's texts received a great response in women’s movements up to 1916 and in a socialist magazine until 1923 is due to the fact that the texts, at least up to this time, were extremely modern in the social context and the image of women of the time, despite their homeland. Again and again the stories were about crazy girls / sisters from the educated middle class, who set out for the big city in order to realize themselves artistically and to stand on their own two feet. The other female figures of Siewert were usually far removed from the traditional gender role or failed because of this role. Another reason was that Siewert let her characters emphasize again and again how little authority, preacher or belief in a higher being could give them. For example in the novella Van Braakel (1909), a cabin boy from a reading book, which for the little girls from the estate stood as a metaphor for everything "that was free, idiosyncratic, bold, despising of death and exhausting life"; to whom the Bible and the "black square devotional books" gave no answers and instead of "divine nature" demanded from adults "the very simplest [...], the observations of a single, simple day presented with sincerity"; who, even by force, wanted to break the “orderly, boring security, the civil equilibrium” and “searches for connections”.

The first novel, Bajowo , was published in 1903 by Richard Taendler , one of the most famous literary agents in Berlin. Two further novels were published in 1911 and 1913 by S. Fischer Verlag , which also published two novellas in its literary magazine Neue Rundschau in 1914 and 1915 . The writer and publishing editor Moritz Heimann , who worked for Fischer for almost thirty years, recognized Carl Lange Siewert's strong skills at an early stage. When it came time to find a publisher for an edition of Siewert's work in the late 1920s, Heimann had already left S. Fischer Verlag due to illness. Only the novel Unforgotten People from 1911 achieved a second edition in the following year . This second edition of the most extensive work by Siewert with 480 pages cost five marks stitched and six marks bound by Fischer .

Kunstwart- und Ring-Verlag, East German monthly books, West Prussia yearbook

The two volumes of novels from 1925 and 1926, which were among the few works that she still published in the late 1910s and in the 1920s at all, were published by Kunstwart-Verlag GDW Callwey. Her last published story Die Geckin (1928) was included in the publishing house's literary and art magazine Der Kunstwart , which was subtitled German Service to the Spirit between 1925 and 1928 . The last book edition, the volume of short stories Der Sumbuddawald , was also published in 1928 by the Berlin Ring-Verlag. The publishing house primarily published the magazine Der Ring , the official organ of the German Men's Club . He was also close to the national conservative Motzstrasse district around Arthur Moeller van den Bruck , whose initiators were Paul Fechter , who was a friend of Elisabeth Siewert . Both the Motzstrasse district and the publishing house were located in the house of the nationalist, partly ethnically oriented German Protection Association for Border and German Abroad at Schöneberger Motzstrasse 22. Elisabeth Siewert now found attention almost exclusively in organs such as the West Prussia Yearbook , the Baltic Monthly Journal or the East German Monthly Hefts , which published an obituary in 1930 and poems in 1933.

The clearly declining publications are, as Carl Lange wrote, due to the fact that “the war and the post-war period pushed back everything artistic”, but they are also due to their increasing despair, bitterness and declining creativity. The now more popular and German affine publications indicate a departure from the initial, progressive attitude of the sisters, which could have already been announced with Clara's unresolved departure from the Berlin Secession. What is certain is that the few remaining friends of Elisabeth Siewert, such as Carl Lange as the founder and editor of the Ostdeutsche Monatshefte , who signed the pledge of loyal allegiance to Adolf Hitler in October 1933 together with 87 writers , or Herybert Menzel , who had joined the NSDAP and the SA joined, belonged to the right-wing political spectrum. Paul Fechter, who was very concerned about Elisabeth Siewert, also expressed himself in conformity with the system, at least in his literary history from 1941 and in it stylized Hitler's book Mein Kampf as a literary work of art. Elisabeth Siewert herself said in a conversation with Carl Lange in her final years:

"However, the fact remains: I serve the glorification of my lost province, whose resurrection I hope with deepest longing."

- Elisabeth Siewert in conversation with Carl Lange, 1920s.

How Elisabeth Siewert felt about the approaching National Socialism and whether she took a political point of view at all is unknown and cannot be conclusively read from her works. Sister Clara was a member of the Reich Chamber of Culture , but never of the NSDAP.

Reception of the literary work

Reception during lifetime

According to the poet , playwright and dramaturge Friedrich Bethge , Elisabeth Siewert was already referred to as a "Protestant Droste " during her lifetime . This characterization, which Paul Fechter later adopted in his History of German Literature , goes back to a brief review of the novel Unvergsame Menschen (1911) in the Bern daily newspaper Der Bund , in which it was stated: Elisabeth Siewert is a poet who was called a Protestant Droste-Hülshoff may soon be called. For the same novel, press reviews appeared in the Berlin BZ am Mittag , the Wiesbadener Zeitung and the Leipziger Neuesten Nachrichten . The BZ at midday “discovered” Siewert “with joy and amazement as one of the strongest individualities among German writers”. The Wiesbadener Zeitung saw in the author of the "modern, highly valued novel" a "poet, observer, designer of importance". Only three reviews are known that went into more detail on the writer's work. All three date from the first 1910s, when at most half of Siewert's short stories and novels had been published. However, these reviews contain general aspects of Siewert's work that are still evident in her 1928 novella The Adventures of Oijamitza .

→ Main article : The adventures of the Oijamitza

Gertrud Bäumer, 1911

Elisabeth Siewert, around 1900

The women's rights activist Gertrud Bäumer , co-editor of the magazine Die Frau , counted Elisabeth Siewert in 1911 as one of the “most remarkable types” of local artists she describes, “whose skills fail in some directions, but at least enrich the great vocal symphony of our modern literature with its own sound in order to create something special and new “with a certain harshness and idiosyncrasy in expression. The sketches collected in Kinder und Menschen (1906) led to an incessant struggle to break out of the barren and cramped country life, out of the ordinary, out of poverty and cold. “It is the problem of the noble man and at the same time the problem of the woman. The painful struggle of the single, noble, finely built individual with the everyday people who narrow it down, […] that is the material to which Elisabeth Siewert keeps returning […]. ”Even if Siewert's art is not a desireless, loving sinking into it Was home, she could be considered a native artist. In modern literature there are few in which one has the feeling as clearly as with Siewert that life is being taken in with new nerves and mirrored and new territory of the human soul is opened up.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, 1912

Lou Andreas-Salomé , who had recently started her psychoanalytic training with Sigmund Freud , saw Siewert's work in 1912 as having three roots that seldom come together : “one that is at the same time poetic-free, one that is somewhat morally bound, and one that is humorous. mediating position on life ". It is noticeable, she wrote in Das literäre Echo 1912, that whenever Siewert allows a character to step out of the confines of nature and poetry , she ascribes this role to a man. This is particularly evident in Hugo's novel Unforgotten People (1911), which expresses the type of someone who is determined to be creative. The same problem is encountered in the works in ever new interpretations: the beauty and impracticability of the poetic view of life. The oppressive toil of those who do moral work in the sweat of their brow runs through almost all the stories, while they prefer to think back to the paradise from which they have been driven since childhood. The reviewer repeatedly emphasizes Siewert's ability to use humor , with which she manages to mediate between the internally working opposites of want and ought, urge and compulsion, bravery and beauty in a reconciling way.

The writer succeeds best with pictures from the people, i.e. outside her personal sphere of life and education. In the descriptions of uneducated, natural people who are close to the earth, you can literally feel a sigh of relief and another reason why she is particularly suggestive here: “[...] you feel that her childhood was close to all of this, nature and poetry and everything Wealth of memories surrounded it, and so, in addition to the social distance, an infinite spiritual closeness continues to transfigure it (not to falsify it!). ”The interlocking of life poetry, life prose and humor is expressed above all in the novels, while it is in In the novellas and narratives, the moments that characterize the author's individuality often fall apart into mere poetic depictions of milieus, humorous depictions of people and even something like moral object lesson. As the highlight of Siewert's literature, Andreas-Salomé saw the (at that time) just published novel Unforgotten People (1911), which was no longer limited to a subject area, but comprised opposites with its more mature, reconciling understanding of one's own life . One of the main characters, Hugo, let them suspect that his being spellbound by the sunken wondrous world of childhood is only the premonition of having to lift from the depths what would become work, form, and design beyond him.

Christine Touaillon, 1914

Two years later, Christine Touaillon published an article about Elisabeth Siewert in the magazine Neues Frauenleben , which she edited , in which she looked more closely at the novels Unforgotten People (1911) and Lipspki's Son (1913), as well as the novella The Hit (1914), published in After their contribution was printed, received. Siewert's art is without external stimulus, sparse, bitter and brittle . For her, it is always about the question of how man can come to terms with life and cope with it. The heroes of their stories did not feel comfortable in their existence. They lived in a narrow, sometimes self-made, pressure was on them. They feel an unclear longing for a distant life. Often they cannot say what they want themselves, but they have to get out of this captivity or they perish because of it. The action of these poems is unconventional, tension is infinitely far removed from their art. Instead of a dramatic escalation, the events slipped into one another as in reality. That the whole poetry does not fall apart with such a technique is the most convincing evidence of the great creative power and the impressionist art of the poet.

1920s

In addition, there was a brief review of Lu Moeller van den Bruck in the Ostdeutsche Monatshefte in 1924, who was very likely the second wife and collaborator of the völkisch - nationalist journalist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck . The childlike and ingenious, the dreamlike and visionary, the natural and mystical of our nationality made up Siewert's importance for Van den Bruck. You have found the new, modern synthesis of Expressionism and Romanticism . In 1928, the Baltic Monthly Papers published a short review of the volume of short novels Der Sumbuddawald , published in the same year . It said we may no longer grasp all the mysticism that haunts the 'Sumbuddawald'. To do this, one must be closer to Slavic than our embraced Germanness ever wanted and was able to do in defense. After pointing out that it would be pointless to reproduce the content of the novels, the contribution was essentially limited to the statement that the novellas came from an East German poet who unites Eastern humanity, Germanness and poetry to an astonishing degree.

Later representations

First page of Siewert's manuscript The Apple . The story was very likely never published.

After Siewert's death in 1930, the above-cited obituaries appeared in the Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, which - in addition to some general comments on the work - were essentially limited to biographical information. The introduction by the National Socialist lyricist Friedrich Bethge (1933) to the fifteen poems published by Siewert from the estate also posed only the brief rhetorical question of why Siewert's lyrical work had remained unnoticed until then. The answer was exhausted in the statement that such baroque, idiosyncratic, uncouth, unpolished primeval and wild poems [...] must be the horror of all Beckmesser and a readership who [only] consider smoothly pleasing verses to be poetry. Bethge took the title of his contribution The Sorrowful Preussin from the penultimate line of the poem Fromme Abendstunde . In his contribution to the West Prussia yearbook, Carl Lange summed up in 1959:

“When we think of her poetry, we often think of Novalis , Kleist , Jean Paul and Klopstock, and the young Goethe . Their language is elementary, musical, full of baroque verbosity and self-determined expressions. [...] The poet has made a name for herself in the professional circles of literature with mythically-romantically written descriptions of the country and people of her homeland, but the deeper penetration into great poetic successes was lacking [...]. "

- Carl Lange : Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert. 1959.

The last detailed article in the 20th century was also in the West Prussia yearbook in 1964. The editor Carl Lange published here posthumously the unfinished biography Die Siewerts by Paul Fechter, which breaks off after the presentation of the ancestors and first references to the Budda estate. The biography was very important to Fechter. But he put it on hold in order to complete his European drama and could not resume it before his death. However, in his revised History of German Literature , which appeared until the end of the 1950s , Fechter had previously gone into comparatively in detail individual novels and short stories by Siewert - such as Jean Paul , Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and other much better-known writers he dedicated in his Compendium also Siewert three pages. Fechter summed up: The art world is something like the longed-for realm of unreality, better still of the superreal, and if you take a closer look, all of their stories ultimately started out from the confrontation between these two worlds.

In the following decades, Elisabeth Siewert was only represented with short entries in lexical works. The German Literature Lexicon (1997 edition), for example, contains the personal data with the additional information [...] mostly lived with her sisters in Berlin; Narrator and lists ten novels and two references. The Lexicon Autobiographies of Women names some of Siewert's most important autobiographical short stories. In a study of the fiction literature in the first years of the magazine "Die Frau" Xenia Boe Elisabeth Siewert was one of the most important prose writers of the early years of this magazine. She also said that Siewert had preferred to deal with topics that humorously reflected contemporary reality.

Rediscovery in 2008

Only with the rediscovery of the work of her sister Clara in 2008 did the life and work of Elisabeth Siewert come back into focus. In 2008 the exhibition Clara Siewert - Between Dream and Reality , conceived and realized by Roman Zieglgänsberger, took place at the Art Forum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg . The exhibition offered the first comprehensive retrospective on the life and work of the artist. In the monograph of the same name on Clara Siewert accompanying the exhibition , Zieglgänsberger tried to reconstruct the artist's life. Since the data was only very fragmentary, he made use of what he writes, "unfair" means "by filtering out" from the prose of Sister Elisabeth Siewert [...] biographical information ". In addition, the biographical chapter A Missing Artist is accompanied by detailed, in-depth quotations from Elisabeth's works in a side column. Zieglgänsberger saw the procedure legitimized, among other things, by the fact that Elisabeth was Clara's closest confidante all her life. In the appendix, the monograph documented for the first time a chronological overview of Elisabeth Siewert's works, which, however, does not contain her novellas in the Socialist Monthly Issues and the Neue Rundschau . In 2012 the exhibition Käthe Kollwitz and her colleagues in the Berlin Secession followed in the Wertheimer Schlösschen Hofgarten and in the Berlin Liebermann Villa , where numerous works by Clara were presented. Here, too, the accompanying volume in the section on Clara contains numerous elements from Elisabeth's literary work.

According to Paul Fechter, his brother Alexander left a three-volume story of the family on his death in 1961, the whereabouts of which are unclear. In addition, Elisabeth and Clara Siewert wrote diaries which, according to Zieglgänsberger, were later likely to be found in the archive of the East German monthly journals, where their trace is lost. A review of the complete works and the legacy of Elisabeth Siewert has not yet taken place; Nor has it been the subject of literary research so far .

Parallels and contrasts in the literary and artistic work of the sisters

The parallels and contrasts in the works of Elisabeth and Clara, which Roman Zieglgänsberger worked out in 2008, provide further information about Elisabeth Siewert's thinking. Like Elisabeth's texts, the visual work of her sister Clara was determined by the artistic influences they shared in their parents' home, the ideas they developed together and the longing for childhood and home in West Prussia.

Parallels

Title page of the novel Lipski's Son , 1913

Thus, the 25 verifiable self-portraits of Clara based on Zieglgänsberger's portrayals testify to the knowledge that she is at the mercy and to a general defenselessness . Elisabeth expressed similar feelings when she wrote in The Adventures of Oijamitza (1928): The terrible fell on her like death . In general, it can be assumed that the basis of this text - as with Geckin (1928) - was jointly developed. The picture Mother at the Bed of Her Sick Child (1902) shows a worried mother who looks helplessly and with a sadly understanding look down at her child, who is curled up on the sofa, limp and anxious. In The Adventures of Oijamitza (p. 20) Elisabeth described a scene similarly: 16-year-old Luise “lay again, her little head in the confused mass of her ash-blonde hair as if on an extra pillow on the white pillow. […] She was almost now […] an honestly stupid cradle, without any responsibility, without abnormal conditions and terrible experiences ”. In addition, Clara's black ink and pen drawing with the very similar title The Adventure of Oljamizza (around 1900/1910) indicates a topic that had already been developed jointly in their youth, even if Elisabeth published her Oijamitza in the Sumbuddawald in 1928 . As shown in the ink drawing, Elisabeth describes in her story (pp. 12–15) a scene in which the main character is mocked and driven away by vulgar girls “shaken with laughter”. Clara made a drawing for the novel Geckin .

According to Zieglgänsberger, Clara's picture rest (1902) can be interpreted as “redemption from earthly existence” according to various texts by Elisabeth, when, for example, in Lipski's son (1913, p. 54) she wrote: “ During the night she lay straight and motionless with folded hands in her bed, the idea dominated them that if they would lie in the position of a corpse, perhaps would do something about it to be deposited them. "the pencil drawing Greek Sphinx takes the dead witch on central from Clara's witches cycle recall a situation that Elisabeth described in Lipskis Sohn (1913, p. 228): "They went to bed and found that they were resting on the wings of a mythical creature that moved". The drypoint etching The Saleswoman (1903) has a counterpart in Elisabeth's novel Die Schöne Herbsttage (1903, p. 526f): “Kitty stayed in a small pastry shop [...] with a view of the baked goods counter, behind it, in front of mirrored panes, glass ports with sweets and chocolates. […] Three young men stepped out of the next door one after the other, all of whom looked strangely well-fed and brutal. The most handsome of them gave Kitty a long sideways glance , her hands in her palette pockets , and stood with her legs apart in front of the cash register, behind which a young girl was sitting. "

opposites

However, the works of the sisters also showed clear contrasts. Describe Elisabeth's childhood rather 'as the only happy and carefree time in a person's life and in her texts I repeatedly pursue the question [...] how it happened that this heavenly kingdom of childhood was lost ", Clara's pictures of children and Adolescents' childhood mostly “as a threatening 'children's prison'” and conveyed the children's longing for death ; The mystery of death is also expressed as a central Clara's theme in the pictures on the subject of literary material, fairy tales and mysticism . Clara's nudes - almost exclusively female - showed “introverted, sometimes emotionally wounded and internally cornered people. […] They don't laugh, show no emotion and stare straight ahead […], are exhausted and seem fatalistically to accept what is to come. ”While Clara clearly outweighed the negative side of existence, Elisabeth Siewert was said to be heavy with happiness and suffering side by side.

Catalog raisonné

→ Main article : Elisabeth Siewert / catalog raisonné

The following selection is largely limited to the works mentioned in this article.

Novels and short stories

• May frost . In: The woman. Monthly magazine for the entire women's life of our time. Ed .: Helene Lange . 4th year 1897. W. Moeser Buchhandlung, Berlin, pp. 423-427.
• Bayowo . Novel. Verlag R. Taendler , Berlin 1903, 128 pp.
• The beautiful autumn days . Novel. In: Deutsche Roman-Bibliothek (regular supplement to the illustrated entertainment paper Über Land und Meer ), 31st year 1903, 52 issues in 2 volumes, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Stuttgart a. Leipzig 1903 (pp. 440-448, 459-468, 480-488, 497-508, 520-528, 542-548, 556-568).
• Children and people . Novellas. Karl Reissner, Dresden 1906, 271 pp.
• Three sisters (novel). In: The woman . 13th year 1906. In continuation distributed over several issues.
• Van Braakel . In: Socialist monthly books - International revue of socialism. Ed .: Joseph Bloch . Issue 15 1909. Verlag der Sozialistische Monatshefte, Berlin., Pp. 236–241 ( full text in the online edition of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung library ).
• From a poor workshop . In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , Heft 15 1909, S. 1568–1573 ( full text in the online edition of the library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung ).
• Useless sin , novella. In: New women's life: Organ of the liberal women in Austria. Ed .: until 1910 Auguste Fickert , then among others Christine Touaillon . 22nd year 1910. Goldschmiedt Verlag, Vienna (Part 1 in: No. 6, Part 2 in: No. 8, End in: No. 9, each in the literary supplement , available online ).
• Unforgettable people. A novel from the crinoline era . S. Fischer Verlag , Berlin 1911, 480 pp.
• The home (memory). In: The woman . 19th year 1912, pp. 406-410.
• That's why (Novellette). In: Neues Frauenleben, 24. Jg. 1912, No. 7/8 (beginning) and 9 (continuation and ending) ( e-book at ngiyaw eBooks ).
• Lipski's son . Novel. S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1913, 247 pp.
• The victim . In: Neues Frauenleben, 16th year 1914, No. 1/2, pp. 47–55 ( e-book at ngiyaw eBooks ).
• Comrades (novella). In: Neue Rundschau , Heft 5, 1914, S. Fischer Verlag , (at this time) Berlin, from p. 645. ( Also available in Braille at the Bundes-Blindenerziehungsinstitut (BBI) Vienna .)
• The chosen one (novella). In: Neue Rundschau, Heft 6, 1915, S. Fischer Verlag, (at this time) Berlin, from p. 737.
• The heavenly child . In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , Issue 22 1916, pp. 43–46 ( full text in the online edition of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung library).
• The Indian god in the country . Kunstwart-Verlag GDW Callwey, Munich 1925, 85 pp.
• Rescues. Old fashioned narrative. Kunstwart-Verlag GDW Callwey, Munich 1926, 82 pp.
• The Sumbuddawald . Novellas. Ring-Verlag, Berlin 1928. 239 p. (Contains the stories: The adventures of Oijamitza , The Sumbuddawald and The sevenfold life of the shepherd Mathias. )
• The Geckin (novella). In: The art warden . Verlag Kunstwart, Dresden and Callwey, Munich, September 1928. (According to Zieglgänsberger, there was a drawing by Clara Siewert 'Die Geckin' for the story […], mentioned in: Ausst.Kat. Gurlitt 1936, no. 131. )

Poetry

The Poetry Elisabeth Siewert remained largely unpublished. All that is known is the compilation of a few poems from her estate in the East German Monthly Issues 1933, which the National Socialist poet , playwright and dramaturge Friedrich Bethge reproduced with a brief introduction. The titles were:

• Compensation; Embassy; The blind child speaks; An old person speaks; Rapture; Pious evening hour; Gods and demons; In adversity; Cosmic grace; Last intoxication; Girl's evening supplication; Medea; Deer with the heart shot (subtitle: in the hospital - shortly before death ) ; Unhappy love ; Intent I and Intent II .

literature

• Lou Andreas-Salomé : Elisabeth Siewert . In: The literary echo . Edited by Ernst Heilborn . 14th year 1911/12, September 15, 1912, Berlin, pp. 1690–1695.
• Gertrud Bäumer : The woman and the spiritual life . CF Amelangs Verlag, Leipzig 1911 (on Elisabeth Siewert see pp. 138–141).
• Friedrich Bethge : The sad Prussian (Elisabeth Siewert) . In: Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 13th year, 1933, pp. 221–227 (with poems from the estate).
• Xenia Boe: The fiction literature in the first years of the magazine "Die Frau" . In: Dirk Hempel : Literature and the bourgeois women's movement in the Kaiserreich and in the Weimar Republic: Research reports and studies. Publications of the University of Frankfurt , Institute for German Studies II, Hamburg 2010, pp. 139–158. Virtual specialist library for German studies: short version of Xenia Boe's contribution and link to the full text.
• German Literature Lexicon . Carl Ludwig Lang (ed.). Volume 17, KG Saur Verlag , Bern and Munich 1997, ISBN 3-907820-20-7 , entry Elisabeth Siewert , p. 674f.
• Paul Fechter : The Siewerts. In: Westpreußen-Jahrbuch , Landsmannschaft Westpreußen (ed.), Volume 14, 1964, pp. 63-68.
• Paul Fechter: History of German Literature. C. Bertelsmann Verlag , Gütersloh 1952. (Originally: Knaur , Berlin 1941.) Here cited from the Bertelsmann edition 1957, for Siewert see pp. 723–725.
• Carl Lange : Elisabeth Siewert . In: Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 11. Jg., 1930, p. 505. (Brief introduction to the following article: Herybert Menzel: Zum Tode Elisabeth Siewerts. )
• Carl Lange: Meeting the West Prussian poet Elisabeth Siewert. In: Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 23rd vol., 1957, pp. 59–61.
• Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert. In: Westpreußen-Jahrbuch , Landsmannschaft Westpreußen (ed.), Volume 9, 1959, pp. 48–53.
• Herybert Menzel : On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. In: Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 11th year, 1930, pp. 506–508.
• Lu Moeller van den Bruck: Elisabeth Siewert. In: Ostdeutsche Monatshefte, 4th vol. 11, 1924, pp. 554–556. (Note: Lu Möller van den Bruck was very likely the second (?) Wife and colleague of the völkisch - nationalist journalist Arthur Moeller van den Bruck .)
• Christine Touaillon : Elisabeth Siewert . In: Neues Frauenleben, 16th year, No. 1/2, Vienna 1914, pp. 41–46. ( Full text at ALO = Austrian Literature Online .)
• Roman Zieglgänsberger (editor): Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. With contributions by Renate Berger, Michael Kotterer and Roman Zieglgänsberger. Ed .: Kunstforum Ostdeutsche Galerie Regensburg, Regensburg 2008; ISBN 978-3-89188-116-3 Note: All sources in this book refer to contributions by Roman Zieglgänsberger.
• Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). In: Ulrike Wolff-Thomsen, Jörg Paczkowski (eds.): Käthe Kollwitz and her colleagues in the Berlin Secession (1898–1913) . Boyens Buchverlag, Heide 2012, ISBN 978-3-8042-1374-6 , pp. 104–125.

Web links

Commons : Elisabeth Siewert  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Elisabeth Siewert in the catalog of the German National Library
• West Prussian poets and writers, part 8. Short biography of Elisabeth Siewert and excerpt from the volume of short stories Children and People from 1906.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert . 1959, p. 51.
2. ^ Paul Fechter: Die Siewerts , 1964, p. 64f.
3. ^ ^{A b} Paul Fechter: Die Siewerts , 1964, p. 65.
4. ↑ Christian Feldmann: The demons live in the soul. A look into the abyss: the rediscovery of the artist Clara Siewert. ( Memento of the original from April 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Sonntagsblatt , issue 35/2008, August 31, 2008.  
5. ^ ^{A b} Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert . 1959, p. 50.
6. ^ Bernhard Stadié : The district of Stargard in West Prussia in historical terms from the oldest times up to now. Part II: Historical notes about the individual villages in the district . In: Prussian provincial sheets . Volume 72, Königsberg 1869, pp. 294, 303
7. ^ Rolf Jehke: Territorial changes in Germany and German administered areas 1874–1945 : Liebichau district.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Elisabeth Siewert: The home . In: The woman . 1912, p. 406. See also: Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , P. 20.
9. ↑ In the autobiographical novel Die Schöne Herbsttage (p. 464), Elisabeth Siewert (p. 464) mentions seven children for the Budda-like fictional novel property Ruhla : two sons (mathematician and engineer) and five sisters (two married, the three others are artists ).
10. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: The beautiful autumn days , 1903, p. 450ff.
11. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: Three sisters . In: The woman . 1906, p. 16.
12. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. P. 20.
13. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , Pp. 20f, 23.
14. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). P. 106.
15. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , Pp. 17f, 20f.
16. ↑ ^{a b} Herybert Menzel: On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930, p. 506f.
17. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: The beautiful autumn days , 1903, p. 459.
18. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Fig. 69, p. 167.
19. ^ Herybert Menzel: To the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930, p. 506.
20. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: The home . In: Die Frau , 1912, pp. 407ff.
21. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: The home . In: Die Frau , 1912, p. 410.
22. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). P. 25.
23. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , P. 29.
24. ↑ Victoria Siewert participates in exhibitions: 1914 Haus der Frau, world exhibition for book trade and graphics Leipzig; 1915 House of the Woman, Leipzig; 1936 art exhibition German city images , Berlin. Source: Documentation: Victoria Siewert . In: Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. P. 185.
25. ↑ Durlacher Strasse . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1904, Part 5, Vororte, p. 350 (first registered at Durlacher Strasse 14 (today no. 15a)). (Later as Siewert, J., retired captain ) For details on the movements of the sisters into this apartment with the corresponding address book entries, see the chapter Relocation to Berlin in the article on Sister Clara Siewert.
26. ↑ Entry in the Berlin State Monument List
27. ↑ I want to paint inside very beautiful but very difficult. The black acrobat Sam inspires Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gerhard Marcks and Richard Scheibe . (PDF; 33 kB) Georg-Kolbe-Museum , Section 5 of the exhibition Magic of the nude model ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2012/2013.  
28. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , Pp. 22, 25, 35 (note 48).
29. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: Darum , 1912. In: Neues Frauenleben . ( E-book ) at ngiyaw eBooks
30. ↑ Elisabeth Siewert: The beautiful autumn days , 1903, p. 408.
31. ^ ^{A b c} Carl Lange: Elisabeth Siewert , 1930, p. 505.
32. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). Pp. 106f, 114f.
33. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , Pp. 22f, 26–30, 34 (note 35), 183ff. Quotation on Kollwitz from: Käthe Kollwitz. The diaries 1908–1943. Edited by Jutta Bohnke-Kollwitz. Siedler, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-88680-251-5 , p. 232, entry on 30./31. March 1916. (Here quoted from Zieglgänsberger, p. 30.)
34. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). P. 106f.
35. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: The home . In: Die Frau , 1912, p. 409.
36. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: From a poor workshop , In: Socialist monthly books , 1909, pp. 1568-1570 ( fes.de ).
37. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: From a poor workshop , In: Socialist monthly books , 1909, p. 1572 ( fes.de ).
38. ↑ Elisabeth Siewert: Das Himmlisches Kind , In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , 1916, pp. 43–46 ( fes.de ).
39. ↑ Elisabeth Siewert: Das Himmlisches Kind , In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , 1916, p. 43 ( fes.de ).
40. ^ Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert , 1959, p. 49f.
41. ↑ ^{a b} Herybert Menzel: On the death of Elisabeth Siewert. 1930, p. 508.
42. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. , P. 30f.
43. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert (Gut Budda / West Prussia 1862–1945 Berlin ). P. 125, note 26.
44. ↑ Paul Fechter: Die Siewerts , 1964, p. 66. Regarding Elisabeth and Clara, it is certain from the entire literature that they were never married and had no children. In a letter reproduced by Fechter, Victoria is also referred to as "Fräulein".
45. ^ ^{A b} Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert , 1959, p. 52.
46. ↑ Xenia Boe: The fictional literature in the first years […] , pp. 139, 142, 144.
47. ^ Elisabeth Siewert: Van Braakel . In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , Issue 15 1909, pp. 236–241 ( fes.de ). See also, for example, The Heavenly Child . In: Sozialistische Monatshefte , 1916, p. 44 ( fes.de ) or Christine Touaillon's reception of the novel Lipski's son (1913). Touaillon writes about the figure of the imaginative widow Felsken: She is not much different from a pagan. Her father's Catholicism and mother's Protestantism put her in a skeptical position about everything that means religion. Source: Christine Touaillon: Elisabeth Siewert , 1914, p. 44.
48. ↑ ^{a b c} Elisabeth Siewert: Lipskis Sohn , 1913. Advertisement from S. Fischer Verlag: The same publisher has published: Elisabeth Siewert: Unvergsame Menschen. Novel. Second edition. Go 5 Mark, born 6 marks . This is followed by excerpts from reviews of Unforgotten People in the newspapers on three pages : BZ am Mittag , Berlin; Der Bund , Bern; Wiesbaden newspaper and Leipziger latest news .
49. ↑ Motzstrasse 22 . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1928, part 4, p. 692. The weekly Das Gewissen , mentioned here, was the forerunner of Der Ring . The Berliner Ring-Verlag is not to be confused with the Großdeutschen-Ring-Verlag , founded by Walter Stang , which was located at Kaulbachstrasse 60a in Munich at the same time.
50. ^ Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert , 1959, p. 49.
51. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 351.
52. ^ Ernst Klee: The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 147.
53. ↑ Quoted from Carl Lange: Encounters with the poet Elisabeth Siewert , 1959, p. 50. Lange does not give a more precise time for the conversation with Siewert.
54. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. P. 31.
55. ↑ Friedrich Bethge: Die grübte Preußin (Elisabeth Siewert) , 1933, p. 221. Bethge did not name the author of the ascription "Protestant Droste".
56. ^ Paul Fechter: History of German Literature , 1957, p. 724.
57. ↑ Gertrud Bäumer: Die Frau und das Geistige Leben , 1911, p. 138ff (see also the introduction to the section on local artists before the chapter on Elisabeth Siewert).
58. ^ Lou Andreas-Salomé: Elisabeth Siewert , 1912, pp. 1691f.
59. ^ Lou Andreas-Salomé: Elisabeth Siewert , 1912, pp. 1693ff.
60. ↑ Christine Touaillon: Elisabeth Siewert , 1914, p. 41 ff., 46.
61. ↑ ^{a b} See: Baltic Monthly . Edited by Woldemar Wulffius, Werner Hasselblatt, Max Hildebert Boehm. 60th year (1929), Verlag der Buchhandlung G. Loeffler, Riga 1929, p. 166.
62. ^ Lu Moeller van den Bruck: Elisabeth Siewert. P. 556.
63. ↑ ^{a b} H.WB: Elisabeth Siewert, Der Sumbuddawald. In: Baltic Monthly . Edited by Woldemar Wulffius, Werner Hasselblatt , Max Hildebert Boehm . 59th year (1928), Verlag der Buchhandlung G. Loeffler, Riga 1928, p. 248.
64. ↑ Friedrich Bethge: Die sadden Preußin (Elisabeth Siewert) , 1933, pp. 221f, 227.
65. ↑ Follow-up remarks by Carl Lange on: Paul Fechter: Die Siewerts , 1964, p. 65f.
66. ^ Paul Fechter: History of German Literature. P. 723.
67. ↑ German Literature Lexicon, pp. 674f.
68. ↑ Autobiographies of Women: A Lexicon . Gudrun Wedel (Ed.). Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20585-0 , p. 795.
69. ↑ Xenia Boe: The fictional literature in the first years […] , pp. 141f, 144.
70. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 7, 12, 186.
71. ^ Paul Fechter: Die Siewerts , 1964, p. 66.
72. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 18, 33 (note 9).
73. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 12, 75, 91, 117.
74. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 73, 75, 91, 155 (fig. 3), 167 (fig. 73).
75. ↑ ^{a b c} Documentation: novels, stories and poetry by Elisabeth Siewert. In: Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. P. 186.
76. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 155 (Fig. 4), 170 (Fig. 102), 177 (Fig. 150).
77. ^ Roman Zieglgänsberger: Clara Siewert. Between dream and reality. Pp. 91, 117f, 138f.
78. ↑ Deutsche Blindenstudienanstalt e. V. Catalog. Detail view Elisabeth Siewert: Comrades .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
79. ↑ Friedrich Bethge: Die grübte Preußin (Elisabeth Siewert) , 1933, pp. 222–227.

This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on May 16, 2013 in this version .