Clara Nordström

Clara Nordström (birth name and stage name of Clara Elisabet von Vegesack ; born January 18, 1886 in Karlskrona , Sweden , † February 7, 1962 in Mindelheim ) was a Swedish-born writer and translator who mainly worked in Germany.

Life

Clara Elisabet Nordström's father was a doctor, her mother a farmer. She had a brother, Ludvig, who was six years her senior. She grew up in Växjö , where she was confined to bed until she was twelve due to illness. Only then did she attend various private schools in Växjö. In 1903 she came to Hildesheim and then to Braunschweig to learn the German language. In the house of her teacher Ludwig Reiche, she met his son Armin Reiche (* 1871). He was a senior teacher at the secondary school in the old town (Bremen) . After a brief engagement, Clara Nordström married the man 15 years older than her in 1905, moved to Bremen and had their son Gustav Adolf in 1906. In 1908, Armin Reiche received the offer to become headmaster of today's Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium in Varel, about 70 km away . The son Gustav Adolf graduated from this school. The marriage ended in divorce in 1909.

Clara Nordström returned to Växjö for a short time and moved to Germany in the same year , where she wanted to become a photographer in Berlin . After three years of training and internship, she had to give up the job for health reasons.

In 1912 she moved to Munich to become a writer. There she met Siegfried von Vegesack in 1914 , whom she married in Stockholm in 1915 . In 1916 she moved with her husband to Berlin, where their daughter Isabel was born in April 1917. Due to Siegfried von Vegesack's illness, the family moved to a farm near Dingolfing in 1917 and later to Großwalding near Deggendorf . In 1918 they bought an old grain box at the Weißenstein castle ruins near Regen , which they converted into a residential tower. In 1920 the second daughter, Karin, was born, who died a few days later. In 1923 their son Gotthard was born, who died in 1944 during the Second World War . In 1923, Nordström published her first novel Tomtelilla in both Germany and Sweden . All of the following books were only published in German.

After her mother died, an important source of money was lost. Nordström therefore opened accommodation for artists and writers in the tower. During these years the couple slowly drifted apart. In 1929 the family moved to Switzerland . Shortly afterwards, Clara Nordström moved with the children to Stuttgart and in 1935, at Vegesack's request, divorced. That year she began to give readings all over Germany. In 1936 she briefly returned to the residential tower in Weißenstein when it rained , and in 1938/39 she built a house in Baiersbronn in the Black Forest .

From Germany, Nordström published articles during the war in Den Svenske Folksocialisten , organ of the National Socialist Workers' Party Sven Olov Lindholms . In 1944 Nordström was called to Königsberg to read from her texts in the Swedish program of the German Reichsender Königsberg , but had to flee to Hamburg in 1945 .

Throughout her life she has struggled with serious illnesses and dealt with her beliefs a lot, as do the characters in her books. In 1948 she changed from the Protestant to the Catholic denomination. Around 1950 she moved to Stuttgart again and became an Oblate of St. Benedict in the monastery church of Neresheim . In 1952 she settled in Dießen am Ammersee in order to be able to give readings in Bavaria.

She died in 1962 at the age of 76 and was buried in Mindelheim.

Works

• Tomtelilla , 1923 (revised version 1953)
• Kajsa Lejondahl , 1933
• Mrs. Kajsa , 1934
• Roger Björn , 1935
• Lillemor , 1936
• The Call of Home , 1938
• Bengta, the peasant woman from Skane , 1941
• Sternenreiter , 1946 (from 1951 with another publisher under the name Engelbrecht Engelbrechtsson)
• The last of the Svenske , 1952
• Light between the clouds , 1952
• Kristof , 1955
• The path to the great glow , 1955
• My life , 1957
• The boulder from Sankt Erikshof , 1961
• The escape to Sweden , 1960
• The higher love , 1963 (published posthumously)

literature

• Marianne Wintersteiner: The highlight. Clara Nordström's novel of life. Salzer, Heilbronn 1988. ISBN 3-7936-0266-4

Web links

• Literature by and about Clara Nordström in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ School chronicle . Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium Varel. Retrieved February 11, 2019.
2. ↑ Rainer Urban: These were the first Varel high school graduates . Nordwest-Zeitung Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG. July 2, 2016. Retrieved February 11, 2019.