Auguste Lechner

Auguste Lechner (January 2, 1905, Innsbruck, Austria - February 25, 2000, Innsbruck, Austria) was an Austrian writer famous for her books aimed at a teenage readership.

Life

Born Auguste Neuner, she studied languages at the University of Innsbruck, and in 1927 she married the managing director of the Tyrolia publishing company, Hermann Lechner. Their son was born in 1930.

During the 1930s she published folk stories in various magazines, and after the Second World War she began to write books for teenage readers, concentrating predominantly on retelling classical and medieval legends and myths. Her extremely wide range of adaptations drew from Ancient Greek and Roman myths (Hercules, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Golden Fleece and the Aeneid) as well as (King Arthur, the Norse epic, The Song of the Nibelungs, Roland and Parzival).

With estimated total sales of over a million she was one of the most successful authors writing in German, and her books have been translated into Dutch, Bulgarian and Korean. Among the well-known artists who provided illustrations for her works were Hans Vonmetz, Maria Rehm, Josef Widmoser and Alfred Kunzenmann.

Critical Reception

At the time Lechner was writing she won considerable praise for her blend of entertainment and education, her mastery of language, her sensitivity to the historical material and the suspense which characterized her works. There was admiration for her ability to make the myths and legends which form an important part of Western civilization accessible to young readers.

Some of the more recent criticism has claimed that she does not explore in sufficient depth the values, customs and perspectives of the period she describes, and that her main characters are stylized and simplified. Defenders of her work have pointed out that such criticism is unfair in that the myths and legends that she draws upon could also be criticised in this way.

Awards

1956 Austrian State Prize for Young Literature 1978 Listed in the VII Premio Europeo di Letteratura Giovanile, Provincia di Trento 1983 Order of Merit of the State of Tyrol 1985 Honorary professorship 2005 The Song of the Nibelungs named as one of the Top Ten Books for Young People on International Children’s Book Day

Works (selected)

The Song of the Nibelungs, Told for Our Times, 1951 The Adventures of Dietrich von Bern, 1953 The Dolomite Sagas, 1955 The Adventure of Parzifal, 1956 The Brothers from the Cave – A Prehistoric Adventure, 1959 The Tales of Odysseus, 1961 The Story of Wild Hagen, Beautiful Hilde and Gudrun, 1963 Aeneas, Son of the Goddess, 1967 The Adventures of Don Quixote, 1970 The Saga of Roland, 1972 The Iliad: The Downfall of Troy, 1973 The Finest Fables of La Fontaine, 1976 Hercules: his Adventures for Young People, 1977 The Saga of the Golden Fleece, 1980 The History of King Arthur, 1985 Alexander the Great, 1995