Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

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Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (born April 4, 1901 in Vienna , † March 11, 1991 in Visp ) was an Austrian writer . She was married to Carl Zuckmayer for the second time .

Family background

Alice Henriette Alberte Herdan was born on April 4, 1901 in Vienna as the daughter of the lawyer Dr. Maurice Herdan and the actress Claire Liesenberg was born at the Vienna Burgtheater . Her father came from a wealthy Jewish family in Bucharest, but converted to the Protestant faith in Vienna on September 23, 1897. Her parents' marriage on October 10, 1897 was divorced a few years later. The extended maiden name “Herdan-Harris of Valbonne and Belmont” often mentioned by Alice Herdan is not correct, because her father was adopted by the Hungarian Demeter Haris in Budapest in 1912 and has only been called “Herdan-Haris” since then.

Life

Alice Herdan attended the girls' high school run by the school reformer Eugenie Schwarzwald . In 1919 she met Karl Frank , whom she married, through the agency of the Black Forest . The couple moved to Berlin and soon afterwards to Munich , where the communist Frank had to serve a prison sentence. Their daughter Michaela was born there. Soon afterwards Alice Frank moved back to Berlin with the child and founded a shared apartment with two school friends, Elisabeth Neumann and Helene Weigel .

She worked as an actress and as an office worker. This is how she met Carl Zuckmayer, who hired her to copy (“type”) his manuscripts and whom she married in 1925. The following year the daughter Maria Winnetou was born, and after the great success of his play The Merry Vineyard , Zuckmayer was able to buy a house near Henndorf am Wallersee in Austria . The couple still lived mostly in Berlin until 1933, where Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer began studying medicine after completing her Abitur . After the Nazis came to power , the Zuckmayers had to leave Germany and settle in Henndorf.

The farm in the green mountains , Fischer paperback

After the “Anschluss” in 1938, the family also had to leave Austria, lived in Switzerland for a year and then emigrated to the USA . Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband spent most of the war and post-war years on a farm in Vermont . In 1949 her first book was published based on letters from that time. It is called The Farm in the Green Mountains and was a great success. With the time of exile and the dangers of emigration, she also dealt with the work Das Scheusal (1972), in which she erected a memorial to an ancient little dog that she was allowed to take with her to the USA. Its content and formulations coincide z. T. with Carl Zuckmayer's memoir As if it were a piece of me .

Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer moved with her husband to Saas-Fee in Switzerland in 1957 and died at the age of 89.

Works

Correspondence

  • Carl Zuckmayer / Gottfried Bermann Fischer: Correspondence 1935–1977. With the letters from Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and Brigitte Bermann Fischer. 2 volumes (edited by Irene Nawrocka). Wallstein, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-627-X

literature

  • Inge Aures: Come see the world with my eyes, married couples in exile. A comparison of the female with the male perspectives in exile autobiographies. UMI, Ann Arbor, MI 1997 DNB 956029213 (also university dissertation in Nashville, TN 1997)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://data.matricula-online.eu/de/oesterreich/wien-evang-dioezese-AB/wien-innere-stadt-lutherische-stadtkirche/TFB55/?pg=185
  2. ↑ See Anna L. Staudacher: Jewish-Protestant converts in Vienna 1782-1914 (Peter Lang Verlag 2004), Part 2, pp. 277-278 and footnote 160.
personal data
SURNAME Herdan-Zuckmayer, Alice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Herdan, Alice from; Herdan, Alice; Zuckmayer, Alice; Frank, Alice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1991
Place of death Visp