Leonore Niessen-Deiters

Leonore Niessen-Deiters (also: Leonore Deiters-Quesada ; born November 22, 1879 in Düsseldorf as Leonore Deiters ; † June 29, 1939 in Spiez / Canton of Bern ) was a German journalist and writer .

Life

Leonore Deiters was the daughter of the landscape painter Heinrich Deiters and his wife, née Preston, who came from England . Leonore Deiters grew up in Düsseldorf. Like her brother Hans , she received painting lessons from her father. She began to publish literary articles in Düsseldorf newspapers early on. In 1903 she married the lawyer J. Niessen and moved with him to Cologne . In the following years she worked for one of the most important national daily newspapers at the time, the Kölnische Zeitung , and published a number of narrative works. In the period immediately before the First World War , she was committed to the conservative - ethnic side for the interests of German women abroad and was one of the founders of the " Foreign Association of German Women ". In 1914 she traveled to South America on behalf of the Kölnische Zeitung . On this trip she met the lawyer and diplomat Ernesto Quesada . Although the couple had only sparse correspondence during the war years from 1914 to 1918, Leonore Niessen-Deiters divorced her husband J. Niessen in 1919 and moved to Argentina , where she married Ernesto Quesada.

L. Nießen-Deiter's travelogues about Central and South America, collected in a book for the Kölnische Zeitung, 1927

In Argentina, Leonore Deiters-Quesada, as she was now called, continued to work as a journalist, especially for the Kölnische Zeitung and the weekly Reclams Universum ; in addition, cultural-historical contributions were made for Argentine newspapers. Oswald Spengler stated in the Nekrolog on Eleonore Niessen that she had played a decisive role in the introduction of his work in Argentina. In 1921, Professor Quesada organized colleges on Spengler at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Catholic University of La Plata . In 1928 the Quesada couple returned to Europe and settled in Spiez , Switzerland , where Leonore Deiters-Quesada also spent the last years of her life after the death of her husband in 1934.

Leonore Niessen-Deiters' literary work includes novels , short stories and poems .

Text example from 1927

"L. Nießen-Deiters "'travel reports from America for the Cologne newspaper in the mid-1920s were known nationwide, so that the publisher, M. DuMont Schauberg , published its own book in 1927 with their" cultural-historical letters "from" Old America ". Here she proves to be a deep connoisseur of South American history, the Inca and Maya cultures, etc. She was a vehement critic of the colonial powers , their greed and brutality against the indigenous Indians. Her description of the power games around the Panama Canal and the massive US presence that followed was ahead of her time. When it comes to ethnic groups and not politics, as in her essay from Cuba , Nießen-Deiters remained stuck with the usual anti-racial thinking of the time:

“It has always struck me as a mystery why the Indian - like the Polynesian, by the way! - in contact with the white man perishes so much more easily than the negro. Are these two light brown races, which are so infinitely closer to us, so ancient? Was their time fulfilled and were we just the impetus for a long overdue catastrophe, the storm wind that brings down an already rotten tree? In any case, the imported black Africans were at first far worse off, in the toughest slavery, on foreign soil. And yet there is a burning ' Negro question ' in the southern US today with 14 million very agile, aggressive blacks, while the rest of the bold Indian peoples are dying on reservations; and yet there is a negro republic of Haiti and negroes on all the west Indian islands; and yet you see almost only Negroes on the whole coast of Brazil today, almost never Indians! While the Indian question even in the republics of Central and Northwestern South America, which are essentially still populated by Indian races, is really only the question: will they ever wake up again? If they are not kept in motion by forces outside their borders, as in Mexico, they seem to have sunk into a kind of lethargy that is otherwise a sign of fallow, of fatigue. It is true that the racially pure Indian of education and achievement and with a Spanish or Spanish name usually counts himself among the whites; that may reinforce the impression. In any case, the fact is that even in countries with a large Indian population, this real master of the soil has little or no say at all. The Indian has completely disappeared from Cuba. "

- L. Nießen-Deiters : Alt-Amerika, DuMont Cologne 1927, p. 11

Works

• People with and without tails . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1907.
• Fellow human beings . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1908.
• In love trap . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1911.
• The messy married family . Stuttgart [u. a.] 1912.
• The German woman abroad and in the protected areas . Fleischel, Berlin 1913.
• The faun . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart [u. a.] 1913.
• Women and world politics . Marcus & Weber, Bonn 1915.
• War, Germans abroad and the press . German publishing house, Stuttgart 1915.
• War letters from a woman . Marcus & Weber, Bonn 1915.
• My beautiful Germany! Hesse & Becker, Leipzig 1916.
• Country innocence and other nice stories . Cotta, Stuttgart [u. a.] 1916.
• The women and the socialization. Zeitfragen, Berlin 1919. Was placed on the list of literature to be sorted out in the German Democratic Republic .
• Eros in degrees of breadth . Cotta, Stuttgart [u. a.] 1920.
• Los Nibelungos . La Plata 1923.
• Ricardo Wagner y Matilde Wesendonk . Buenos Aires 1923.
• Verses . Luis Pares Vilasau, Buenos Aires 1925.
• Old America . DuMont-Schauberg, Cologne 1927.
• The islands of frozen rivers . DuMont-Schauberg, Cologne 1928.

Web links

Wikisource: Leonore Niessen-Deiters  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Leonore Niessen-Deiters in the catalog of the German National Library
• Leonore Niessen-Deiters in the Düsseldorf "Women's Culture Archive"
• Leonore Niessen-Deiters , biography and estate in the portal rheinische-literaturnachlaesse.de
• Article about the estate of Leonore Niessen-Deiters

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oswald Spengler: Urfragen . Beck, 1965-380 p. 361
2. ↑ http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1953-nslit-n.html