Martina Wied

Martina Wied (actually Alexandrine Martina Weisl ; born December 10, 1882 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary as Martina Schnabl ; † January 25, 1957 there ) was an Austrian writer.

Life

Alexandrine Martina Schnabl was the daughter of the lawyer Josef Schnabl and his wife Jenny Schnabl, who was also active as a writer. As a schoolgirl, her poems appeared in magazines such as “ Simplicissimus ” or “ Jugend ” under the pseudonym she preferred, Wied. She studied German philology, history, philosophy and art history in Vienna and went on study trips to Poland, France, England and Italy. In 1910 she married the chemist Sigmund Weisl , with whom she had the son Hanno. From 1912 Martina Weisl worked for the “ Brenner ”, in 1919 her first volume of poetry “Movement” was published, for which she received the first award from the City of Vienna in 1924, together with Robert Musil , Richard Billinger and Otto Stoessl . She was also acquainted with Paul Ernst . Her husband died in 1930, which is why she then had to rely on her profession as a writer. In 1936 “Rauch über St. Florian” was published as the first novel in book form. From 1939 to 1947 she lived in exile in Great Britain, where she worked as a middle school teacher and wrote four novels that were later published. In 1947 she returned to Vienna. In 1952 she was the first woman to receive the Great Austrian State Prize for Literature .

She was first a poet, then she went public as an essayist, literary critic and finally a narrator and playwright. In her works she criticized a. a. the crisis of civil society. Her main work is the extensive development novel “The Story of the Rich Young Man” from 1943 (published in 1952), in which, among other things, a literary portrait of Georg Lukács is drawn in the figure of the revolutionary Ivanov , with whom Wied was friends in Vienna.

Works

• Movement . Poems. 1919
• The restless heart . Amendment 1927
• Rauch on Sanct Florian or The World of Misunderstandings . Novel 1937
• The unicorn . From the diary of a Scottish painter in Italy. Historical story 1948
• Kellingrath . Novel. 1950
• The crow's nest . Events on different levels. Time - novel. 1951
• Bridges into the visible . Selected poems 1912–1952. 1952
• The story of the rich young man . Novel. 1952 (new edition Sisyphus, Klagenfurt, 2006)
• The wedding ring . Narrative. 1954
• The unfinished adventure . Novella. 1955

literature

• HF Prokop: The novels M. Wied . Dissertation, Vienna 1972
• B. Stepien-Janssen: Martina Wied. A monographic attempt . Dissertation, Vienna 2007
• Martina Wied , in: Hans Heinz Hahnl : Forgotten writers. Fifty Austrian life stories . Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984, ISBN 3-215-05461-2 , pp. 143-146

Web links

• Literature by and about Martina Wied in the catalog of the German National Library