Ingeborg Engelhardt

Ingeborg Maria Engelhardt (born October 10, 1904 in Posen , † 1990 in Lübeck ) was a German author and writer for young people .

Ingeborg Engelhardt was born in Posen in 1904. From the age of ten, Engelhardt lived in Upper Silesia . In 1924 she and her family first moved to Berlin and later to Schleswig-Holstein , which she has regarded as her home from then on. She trained as a garden architect . With a few interruptions, she practiced the corresponding profession for about 25 years from 1950 onwards; first in Essen , then in Altmölln .

The manuscripts of Engelhardt's first literary works - fairy tales , fairy tale games, poems and individual stories - were also lost as a result of the war. In the post-war years she began to intensify her writing activity. In 1950 her children's book The Three Silver Buttons was published for the first time. In the 50s, 60s and 70s Engelhardt published the stories A Ship to Greenland (1959), In the Shadow of the Staufer (1962), Dark Glass and Fish in the Lamp (1963), Five against Christian Budde (1963), ... because I was in danger (1966), The Call of the Minstrel (1977) and Storm Bells over the Occident (1978). An edition of the story Witches in the City (1971) - their greatest commercial success - appeared once in 1979 under the title Torches Before Day . Like several of her books, the latter work also made it onto the shortlist for the German Youth Book Prize (now the German Youth Literature Prize ) and the list of honor for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize . And as early as 1963, A Ship to Greenland was awarded the special prize »History in Children's and Youth Books« at the awarding of the German Youth Book Prize. Quite a few of Engelhardt's books had a large number of editions up until the 1990s , mostly through the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag .

In 1980 Engelhardt was awarded the Culture Prize of the Duchy of Lauenburg Foundation for her complete works and her membership of the first generation of children's and young people's authors after the Second World War .

Ingeborg Engelhardt died in Lübeck in September 1990.

With her historical novels , she pursued the literary-pedagogical aim of depicting historical fates and people in certain conflict situations. One of their methods was to make it easier for children and young people to access the traditional, real history, also through invented forms and processes. The author liked to create fictional characters who were more in the shadow of the famous, already often treated historical personalities. In order to be able to make her novels authentic and vivid, a critical examination of the source situation and the exploration of the respective home history was obligatory for Engelhardt; in addition, she has traveled to quite a few locations of her stories. So it happens that in her books, with all the richly developed imagination, in addition to the general historiographical facts, the cultural and social details of everyday historical life are often quite consistent. In this sense, Ingeborg Engelhardt's preferred topics were the medieval settlement of Greenland by Norwegian-Icelandic Vikings , the decline of the Hohenstaufen dynasty , the witch hunts during the upheaval from the Middle Ages to the early modern period and the history of East Prussia .

It was not until the 1990s, with the dwindling social interest in traditional historical content and the incipient crisis in book culture for young people, that the sales figures for Engelhardt's written material also fell. For witches in the city , however, in the course of increasing attention to historical witch hunts and metaphysical material in general, an increase in popularity was recorded (28 editions up to 2006), but now more so among adults. Engelhardt had once researched the Würzburg archives for this novel - Würzburg and the surrounding area had been the scene of one of the largest waves of lawsuits against alleged witches and magic criminals between 1616 and 1630 . For the figure of Frederick the historic Hexenbeichtvaters was Jesuit and baroque - poet Friedrich Spee of Langenfeld Godfather of 1631, the Cautio Criminalis , one of the most important writings against the merciless Hexereitribunale, had published anonymously.

Works

• The three silver buttons , 1950
• A ship to Greenland , 1959
• In the shadow of the Staufer , 1962
• The strangers in the hunting lodge , 1963
• Dark glass and fish in the lamp , 1963
• five against Christian Budde , 1963
• ... because I was in danger , 1966
• Witches in the City , 1971
• The Minstrel's Call , 1977
• Storm bells over the West , 1978

literature

• Georg H. Schlatter Binswanger: Engelhardt, Ingeborg Maria . In: German Literature Lexicon. The 20th century. Biographical-Bibliographical Handbook. Founded by Wilhelm Kosch. 7th volume. Zurich & Munich: Saur 2005, Sp. 491f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ingeborg Engelhardt in the catalog of the German National Library