Augusta Bender

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Augusta Bender (born March 20, 1846 in Oberschefflenz , † September 16, 1924 in Mosbach ) was a German writer , local poet, teacher and women's rights activist . She wrote poems, calendar stories, short stories, novels, cultural images and novels and collected historical texts, folk songs, peasant rules, nursery rhymes and proverbs.

Life

Augusta Bender was born on March 20, 1846 in Oberschefflenz in North Baden as the sixth child of her parents and grew up on the family's farm. She described her childhood as meager. At school she was an outsider who became increasingly concerned with literature. As a peasant girl, she published her first poems in the Mosbacher Zeitung in 1855 . A first attempt as a seventeen-year-old to include his own poems in a Mannheim newspaper failed. She fled the narrowness of her home village to Mannheim to become an actress. This project failed - after three months she gave up. She broke off training as a white seamstress after six weeks. She then graduated from high school in Mosbach in 1864, with which she began to work in Karlsruhe as one of the first women at the telegraph office.

She made the decision, unusual for a girl at the time, not to get married and to earn a living on her own. From 1865 to 1867 she worked as a telegraph operator at the post office in Karlsruhe. From 1867 to 1868, she trained as a teacher for secondary schools for girls . She went to England as a private tutor and governess , but fell ill and returned disappointed. From 1868 she lived in the simplest of circumstances in Heidelberg , gave private lessons, published poems, was an educator and companion for traveling foreigners. In the years 1868 and 1869, she went to Paris , Nice , Genoa and Rome as the governess of a US diplomatic family .

In 1871 she traveled to the USA in order to gain prestige and money as a teacher, lecturing and writing. A first collection of poems appeared in New York in 1880. Due to her contacts with the women's movement and despite her poor health, she traveled nine times across the Atlantic. Around 1873 she gave lectures at the women's congress in Stuttgart and at women's days in Mannheim and Karlsruhe. She fought against discrimination and condemned the slavery of women. From 1873 to 1874 she lived in Adelsheim . In 1874 she went back to the USA, where she lived until 1897 - interrupted by trips to Germany. In New York she passed the American teacher examination. A job as a teacher was canceled due to illness. She worked as a private tutor in Philadelphia and New York. From 1880 she turned more to writing. The failed attempt to set up a foreign language school for adults in Heidelberg in 1880/1881 left her penniless.

From 1890 to 1891 a spa stay in Heddernheim near Frankfurt / Main followed. Her historical novel Die Reiterkäthe was published by dva in Stuttgart. In 1891 she took up a professorship at Smith College in Northampton / Massachusetts for one year . In 1893/1894 she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner , and from 1895 to 1897 further lectures and seminars on German literature followed in New York.

From 1900 she lived in the Badischer teacher's residence in Lichtental / Baden-Baden . She received support from the Grand Duchess of Baden for her collection of Oberschefflenz folk songs . In between, she lived in Eberbach for two years from 1910 . In 1905 her animal welfare novel The Power of Compassion was published, and in 1910 essays on local history.

Impoverished, she moved to her home village of Oberschefflenz in 1922 and after six months in Siegburg she lived in a retirement home in Mosbach (today's Pfalzgrafenstift), where she died on September 16, 1924. She was buried in the Mosbach cemetery.

Her written estate, including a large number of manuscripts and letters, is now in the Badische Landesbibliothek in Karlsruhe .

Works

The main works by Augusta Bender are:

  • Quick decisions. Novella 1868
  • A picture from reality. Amendment 1869/70
  • A dark doom. Amendment 1869/70
  • German love in America. Amendment to the letter 1882
  • The question of women in Germany. 1883
  • My brother. Amendment 1883
  • Heather flowers. Volume of poetry 1887
  • The Reiterkäthe. Homeland novel from the Thirty Years' War 1893
  • A German girl in America. Novella 1893 in English / 1901 in German
  • House friend 1, 2, 3. 1900–1903
  • Sorle, the rag woman. Amendment 1901
  • Oberschefflenz folk songs. 1902
  • The spinning wheel. Amendment 1902
  • The struggle for a higher existence. 1907
  • Cultural images. 1910
  • The power of compassion. Animal Welfare Novel 1905
  • On the dark side of life. Autobiography 1913/14

Others

literature

  • Ilona Scheidle: From the Odenwald to the USA. The writer Augusta Bender (1846–1924) . In: Heidelberg women who made history. Munich 2006, pp. 85-91. ISBN 3-7205-2850-2
  • Georg Fischer: The local writer Augusta Bender . In: Unser Land , Heidelberg 1994, pp. 79–82.
  • Augusta Bender: Collected Works. With an afterword by Georg Fischer. Book: Odenwälder, 1996 ISBN 3-929295-21-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Augusta Bender School in Mosbach especially trains women for various professions.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bender, Augusta
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bender, Gustl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German suffragette, writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Schefflenz
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1924
Place of death Mosbach