Clara Ratzka

Clara Ratzka (born September 4, 1872 in Hamm , † November 3, 1928 in Berlin ) was a German writer . She wrote novels , poems and travelogues , among other things , and was an important figure in Berlin's cultural scene at the beginning of the 20th century.

biography

Youth and first marriage

Clara Ratzka was born as the third of the five children of Joseph and Franziska Ernst. Her father was general director of the ironworks "Westphalian Union" in Hamm . When he was unable to work due to a severe nervous problem, the family first moved to Lippstadt , then in 1877 to Münster . Here Clara attended - according to her siblings, an intelligent, imaginative and daring girl - the cathedral school and the secondary school for girls. Her parents then sent her to the Marienthal Abbey, a Borromean boarding school in Groesbeek near Nijmegen in the Netherlands . There she completed a three-year teacher training course from 1886 .

After passing her exam in Koblenz , she returned to Münster in 1890. However, her parents did not allow her to practice her profession. Her plan to become a painter also failed due to resistance from her parents. Later, looking back at this time, she wrote: “There was an engine in me, I wanted to become something - an artist. And precisely that was completely frowned upon. Up to my thirtieth year I wasn't allowed to do anything on my own. ”So she ran the household for her mother and took part in the social and artistic life of Münster.

In 1894 she married the industrialist Clemens Linzen from Unna, probably at the instigation of her parents, with whom she had an unhappy marriage. For one thing, her husband turned out to be a notorious adulterer and showed little interest in her artistic ambitions. On the other hand, Ratzka felt uncomfortable in the world of business people and manufacturers and did not want to be satisfied with the traditional tasks of a wife. The birth of daughter Vera (1895) did not change anything. After eight years, she separated from her husband in 1900 and - against the will of her family - moved with her child to Berlin . In 1910 the marriage ended in divorce.

Emancipation and Second Marriage

In Berlin, the financially independent, single mother initially developed a keen interest in the emerging women's movement . She was involved in the "Association of progressive women's associations" and at times published the newspaper Korrespondenz Frauenfragen . At the same time, she began to continue her education and from 1906 studied economics , literature and philosophy . As one of the first women in Germany received his doctorate it in 1912 in Tübingen for Dr. rer. pole. in the subjects of politics and economics as well as public finance . In her doctoral thesis she dealt with the topic of world trade items and their prices .

In May 1911 Ratzka married the Hungarian artist Arthur Ludwig Ratzka , a well-known Berlin portrait painter , and moved with him to Berlin-Wilmersdorf . At his side she immersed herself in the cultural life of the seething imperial capital. The contacts to painters, musicians and writers opened up a new living environment for her, which she eventually brought to writing herself. The Ratzka couple often went on extensive trips, including to Switzerland , Italy , Lithuania and Finland ; later Ratzka traveled to the most distant corners of the world. From there she sent countless travel reports to Germany between 1910 and 1928, which were published in many daily newspapers .

Ratzka wrote her first novel, Blaue Adria , during the First World War following a trip to Italy. This marked the beginning of a phase of intensive literary activity: during the almost ten-year marriage to Ratzka, she completed two novels a year. Her husband did the editing and took care of the publication of her books. Clara Ratzka found her subjects in the social realities of her time as well as in the experiences of her own life. In the Brake Family (1919) - like Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks - she cast a critical and at the same time loving look at an upper-class family at the beginning of the 20th century.

Breakthrough and third marriage

With this novel at the latest, Ratzka achieved his literary breakthrough. She became one of the most widely read German authors of the 1920s. Renowned publishers such as Ullstein and the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt published their works, sometimes in tens of thousands of copies. Two of them were even made into a film for the cinema shortly after their release: The Green Manuela (1923) and The Confession (as a slide , 1928, with Heinrich George ). Because strong women play a central role, especially in Ratzka's novels, she became known as the “poet of women's fates”.

After the divorce from Arthur Ludwig Ratzka, Clara married a college friend in 1922, the lawyer and diplomat Dr. Ernst Wendler. From 1923 she lived with him for several years in London, in Paris and finally in Berlin-Zehlendorf. In 1927 she undertook a trip around the world on the steamship “Resolute” on behalf of the Berlin Scherl Verlag. In the course of this, she also visited her second husband, who now lived in New York and continued to oversee her manuscripts.

Death and rediscovery

At the age of only 56, Clara Ratzka committed suicide on November 3, 1928 in Berlin. She found her final resting place in an urn grave in the south-west cemetery Stahnsdorf in the Charlottenburg block, garden block II. The exact location of her grave was found in 2001 by Mrs. A. Brechmann on behalf of some members of the literary society based in Münster at the time, named Clara Ratzkas led, determined. Her works continued to be reprinted well into the 1950s. After that, it was increasingly forgotten. The Clara Ratzka Society, founded on the 70th anniversary of the writer's death in Münster, has only been involved in researching her estate and republishing her out-of-print books since 1998. In 2000 the first novel, the Brake Family, was published in a new edition by the Münster publishing house . In 2002 the WDR reworked the material into a two-hour radio play, with Marianne Rogée and Martin Böttcher , among others .

Novels and volumes of poetry (selection)

• Blue Adriatic. A symphony of youth. 1916.
• The last friend. 1917.
• Urte Kalwis. 1917.
• The alley. 1918.
• The green Manuela. 1919.
• Brake family. 1919.
• The Heritage. 1920.
• The seven and their way. 1921.
• Mrs. Doldersum and her daughters. 1921.
• You I don't know. Krause stories about the beautiful Yvonne. 1921.
• The riddles of Odry. 1922.
• The torchbearers. 1922.
• Renate in the maze. 1923.
• The Venus of Syracuse. 1924.
• The Confession , 1926
• The dark Ellerbroks. 1927.
• In the sign of the virgins. 1929.
• The game for Jolande. 1929.

• Clara Ratzka reading book. Compiled and with an afterword by Jutta Balster, Nylands Kleine Westfälische Bibliothek Volume 22, Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2011. ISBN 978-3-89528-809-8

Film adaptations

• 1923: The green Manuela (based on the novel of the same name)

literature

• Jutta Balster: Clara Ratzka. The life and work of a Münster writer. Aschendorff, Münster 2002.
• Liselotte Folkerts: My palette has many colors. The Westphalian writer Clara Ratzka. Münster 2008.

Web links

• Literature by and about Clara Ratzka in the catalog of the German National Library
• Clara Ratzka in the Lexicon of Westphalian Authors
• official homepage

Individual evidence

1. ^ According to official information from the personal files of the Hamm City Archives from April 10, 2016, born Clara Ernst on September 4, 1871 in Hamm .