Isabel Hamer
Isabel Dorothy Hamer (born March 15, 1912 in Berlin ; † April 4, 2004 in Überlingen ) was a German writer and translator.
Life
Isabel Hamer is the daughter of the British officer Aston Hamer and the writer Gertrud von Sanden (1881-1940), who was one of the successful authors at Wunderlich Verlag under the pseudonym Mervyn Brian Kennicott . Isabel Hamer spent her childhood in England; after her parents divorced, she moved to Germany with her mother in 1927. In the 1930s she worked temporarily as a secretary to the writer and women's rights activist Gertrud Bäumer , with whom Gertrud von Sanden had lived since 1930.
Through her mother, Isabel Hamer became acquainted with Hermann Leins , the owner of Wunderlich Verlag, whom she married in 1939. The daughters Dorothee and Editha Leins come from this marriage. The couple lived in Reutlingen .
Her greatest success was the novel Perdita , published in 1938 , of which 130,000 copies appeared in the Third Reich. Relaunched shortly after the end of the war, it finally reached a circulation of millions with paperback and book club editions by 1981. The novel is strongly colored autobiographically. He describes the life of a girl who became an orphan at an early age, comes to live with relatives in London after the death of her Bavarian foster aunt, grows up there, but ends up in a cultural conflict in which she has to choose between England and Germany. National Socialist reviewers criticized the fact that this conflict was not resolved on the basis of a “struggle ... over the last questions of the blood”, but rather on the basis of externalities, “in complete disregard for fateful ties”.
She also worked as a translator for English fiction for Wunderlich Verlag and re- edited her mother's works ( Die Geschichte der Tilmansöhne ).
Today Isabel Hamer's work is completely forgotten.
Works
- Perdita (novel, Berlin 1938)
- So many summers ago (Roman, Tübingen 1952)
- Trees in my life (essays, Tübingen 1954)
literature
- Christian Adam: Reading under Hitler: authors, bestsellers, readers in the Third Reich. Galliani, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86971-027-3 , pp. 220ff
- Metelmann, Ernst: Leins, Hermann. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 147 f. ( Digitized version ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Isabel Hamer in the catalog of the German National Library
- Reutlingen authors of the 20th century and the present: prose and poetry
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.dla-marbach.de/index.php?id=448&ADISDB=PE&WEB=JA&ADISOI=00204316
- ↑ Angelika Schaser: Gertrud Bäumer and Helene Lange. A political community . 2. through Ed., Böhlau: Cologne et al. 2010. ISBN 978-3-412-09100-2 , passim.
- ↑ Review by Sebastian Losch in Großdeutsches Leihbüchereiblatt 1 (1939), issue 5, p. 172
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hamer, Isabel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Hamer, Isabel Dorothy (full name); Leins, JD |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German author and translator |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 15, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 4, 2004 |
| Place of death | Überlingen |