Erica Lillegg

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Erica Lillegg (born January 18, 1907 in Graz , † December 12, 1988 in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire , France) was an Austrian children's author .

Life

Maria Erika Paula Lillegg was born in 1907 as the second youngest of seven children. In 1909 the father died before the birth of the youngest daughter. After primary school and attending grammar school in Vienna-Döbling, Lillegg began training as a chemical laboratory assistant. She then studied German at the University of Vienna and worked as a freelance journalist. In 1935 she met the German - French surrealist painter and graphic artist Edgar Jené , who had emigrated to Vienna , with whom she soon shared an apartment in Belvederegasse and whom she married in 1939. She met important surrealists like André Breton know, translated surrealist texts from French into German and ran a kind of artistic salon with her husband in Vienna.

During the Second World War she worked as a secretary in the Vienna City Hall , while her husband, whose art had been called " degenerate " since 1935 , worked as a translator in the Gneixendorf prison camp near Krems from 1940 onwards. After the war, Lillegg and Jené tried from 1945 to 1950 to establish a new surrealist movement in Vienna. Jené is regarded as a model for the artistic movement that Johann Muschik called the Viennese School of Fantastic Realism . At the end of 1947, the poet Paul Celan also briefly joined the surrealist circle in Vienna. Until 1960, Lillegg and Celan were in professional and friendly correspondence.

In 1948, the first children's book in Lillegg appeared with Jakob was a cobbler . She continued to write articles and features for German-language newspapers. In 1953, Lillegg moved to Paris . In 1955 the novel Vevi was published by Heinrich Ellermann Verlag in Hamburg. It is about a little girl named Vevi who is given a magic root that turns into a doppelganger in her absence. In the course of history, however, the so-called root girl developed an unexpected life of its own. The novel has been translated into five languages. In 1955 Vevi was named one of the fifty most beautiful books of the year by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels , and in 1956 was placed on the shortlist for the German Youth Book Prize . In 1958, Feuerfreund , her second novel, was awarded the German Youth Book Prize, and Vevi was placed on the list of honor for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize . In the following years more novels for children appeared and were translated into different languages.

reception

During her lifetime, Erica Lillegg was highly valued as a children's book author, especially in Germany, but for a long time hardly noticed in Austria. She herself writes: "Austria ignores me with astonishing consistency, especially for Austria. And it has always been." Today Lillegg is considered to be the pioneer of fantastic children's literature, her novel Vevi as "the first genuinely German-language fantastic children's story". The Lillegg estate has been stored in the literary archive of the Austrian National Library since 2008 . In 2009 a symposium on the author's life and work took place in the children's literature house in Vienna.

In autumn 2019, Roman Vevi was performed for the first time in a theatrical version in the Vorarlberger Landestheater .

Works

  • Jakob Was A Shoemaker Boy And Other Stories For Children (1948)
  • Vevi (1955), translations into Dutch (1956), Swedish (1959), Italian (1959), Danish (1961) and Japanese (n.d.); Broadcast as a radio play in 1956
  • Feuerfreund (1957), translations into Dutch (1959), Italian (1959 as Zolfanello ) and Japanese (1973)
  • Michel und das Milchpferd (1957), published in 1959 as Michiel en het melkpaard in the Netherlands
  • Scarlet and Jealousy (1958)
  • Scarlet. Your way to the theater (1961), translation into Polish (1967)
  • Peps (1964), translations into Japanese (1964) and Italian (1971)
  • The Music Box (1968)
  • Namely ... these are the stories of Mr. Namely (1973), published in 1975 as a radio play on MC and LP
  • Erika and Erik (1988)

literature

  • Ernst Seibert and Vera Nowak (eds.): Erica Lillegg-Jené (1907–1988) - Children's literature on the way to modernity. Praesens Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0645-6 .
  • Clemens Ottawa: Austria's forgotten writers - A search for traces. Verlag Kremayr & Scheriau GmbH & Co. KG, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-218-00882-2 , pp. 130-133.
  • Anna Krüger: Children's and young people's books as class reading. Beltz Verlag, Weinheim and Basel 1970, ISBN 3-407-10805-2 , pp. 161–177.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://webarchiv.onb.ac.at/web/20160203201106/http://www.onb.ac.at/sammlungen/litarchiv/bestaende_det.php?id=lillegg Austrian literature archive - holdings
  2. ↑ a b c Ernst Seibert and Vera Nowak (eds.): Erica Lillegg-Jené (1907–1988) - Children's literature on the way to modernity . Prasens Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0645-6 , pp. 21-23 .
  3. ↑ a b c Teresa Engländer: The children's and youth literary work by Erica Lillegg (1907–1988) . Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 6th f . ( d-nb.info ).
  4. ↑ Ernst Seibert and Vera Nowak (eds.): Erica Lillegg-Jené (1907–1988) - Children's literature on the way to modernity . Prasens Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0645-6 , pp. 57-62 .
  5. ↑ The Most Beautiful Books 1955. Retrieved July 3, 2019 .
  6. ^ Book: Vevi | Working group for youth literature. Accessed on June 13, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Book: Feuerfreund | Working group for youth literature. Accessed on June 13, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Ernst Seibert and Vera Nowak (eds.): Erica Lillegg-Jené (1907–1988) - Children's literature on the way to modernity . Praesens Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0645-6 , p. 235 .
  9. ^ Clemens Ottawa: Austria's forgotten writers - A search for traces . Kremayr & Scheriau GmbH & Co. KG, Vienna 2013, ISBN 978-3-218-00882-2 , p. 131 .
  10. ^ Teresa Engländer: The children's and youth literary work by Erica Lillegg (1907–1988) . Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 6 ( d-nb.info ).
  11. ^ Teresa Engländer: The children's and youth literary work by Erica Lillegg (1907–1988) . Frankfurt am Main 2009, p. 111 ( d-nb.info ).
  12. ↑ Lillegg, Erica (1907–2007) - Austrian National Library. Retrieved June 13, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Vera Bandion: The fantastic story of the 1950s and 1960s . Vienna 2016, p. 53 .
  14. ^ Pippi's forgotten Austrian sister. November 13, 2007, accessed June 12, 2019 .
  15. ↑ Lillegg, Erica (1907–2007) - Austrian National Library. Retrieved June 13, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Ernst Seibert and Vera Nowak (eds.): Erica Lillegg-Jené (1907–1988) - Children's literature on the way to modernity . Praesens Verlag, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-7069-0645-6 , p. 9 .
  17. ↑ Vera Nowak: Erica Lillegg-Jené and the fantastic realism in children's books - report on the exhibition, the symposium and the readings . In: libri liberorum - communications from the Austrian Society for Children's and Young People's Literature Research . Volume 10, Issue 33/34, 2009, ISSN  1607-6745 , p. 46-48 .
  18. ↑ VEVI. Accessed June 12, 2019 (German).
  19. ↑ ARD audio game database. Retrieved September 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Lillegg, Erica
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lillegg, Maria Erika Paula
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz
DATE OF DEATH December 12, 1988
Place of death Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire , France