Mechtilde Lichnowsky

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Princess Lichnowsky (1912)
Memorial plaque for the German and Austrian refugees in Sanary-sur-Mer , among them Mechthilde Lichnowski [sic!]

Mechtilde Christiane Marie Countess von und zu Arco-Zinneberg , better known as Mechtilde Lichnowsky (born March 8, 1879 at Schönburg Palace ; † June 4, 1958 in London ; second marriage to Mechtilde Peto ) was a German writer .

Life

Mechtilde Lichnowsky came from the Count's family of Arco-Zinneberg and was a great-great-great-granddaughter of Maria Theresa . Her parents were Count Maximilian von und zu Arco-Zinneberg and his wife, Freifrau Olga von Werther. She was raised in the Sacré-Coeur monastery school in Riedenburg . She became engaged to the military attaché of the English legation in Munich, Ralph Harding Peto, but had to separate from him out of consideration for the family.

In 1904 Arco-Zinneberg married the landowner and diplomat Karl Max Fürst Lichnowsky . The couple lived with their three children, including a daughter, in the castles of Grätz and Kuchelna . In 1911 they traveled to Egypt. Between 1912 and 1914, her husband was appointed German ambassador to London , where he tried in vain to find a compromise with Great Britain . There she met George Bernard Shaw and Rudyard Kipling . After the First World War, the family had alternating stays in Berlin, Munich and what was then Czechoslovakia . Prince Lichnowsky died in 1928 and she moved to Cap-d'Ail in southern France.

Even in Munich, Lichnowsky maintained close contacts with writers such as Carl Sternheim and Frank Wedekind . She had a special friendship with the Viennese writer and publisher of the literary magazine Die Fackel , Karl Kraus , with whom she had known since 1915, maintained a long-term correspondence and composed the music for his Nestroy lectures. The theater director Max Reinhardt and the publisher Kurt Wolff were also among her circle of friends. Wolffs Verlag published her first works, which were clearly influenced by Expressionism, and later published them, among others, at S. Fischer Verlag , which was unpopular with those in power during the Nazi era .

During the Nazi era, Lichnowsky refused to join the Reichsschrifttumskammer , and her works were then banned. Also because of the expropriation of her last publisher before the war, the Fischer family, in 1936, she initially refrained from new publications. In 1937 Lichnowsky married her childhood friend, the British Major Harding Peto. When she made a visit to Germany in 1939, the English citizen was interned and placed under police supervision, separated from her second husband, whom she was no longer to see since he died on September 3, 1945.

She used the time of house arrest to write the language and style-critical book Words upon Words , in which she a. Made statements of Adolf Hitler ridiculous. For Lichnowsky, the barbarism of the National Socialists was already evident in language. However, publisher Peter Suhrkamp was unable to publish her book in 1939. This only took place in 1949 in the Bergland Verlag in Vienna. Also talks in Sybaris , published in 1946, translated at the Nazi state from.

Expelled from their holdings in Silesia, Lichnowsky settled in London in the summer of 1946. In 1953, the Society for the Promotion of German Literature awarded her the Prize for Poetry . In 1954 she received the literature award of the city of Munich , she was also a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the German Academy for Language and Poetry .

Lichnowsky died in London on June 4, 1958 and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery , Surrey.

relationship

Mechtilde Lichnowsky had two sisters; Helene married the sculptor Hans Albrecht von Harrach in 1899 and Anna married the colonel and resistance fighter Rudolf von Marogna-Redwitz , who was sentenced to death by the People's Court on October 12, 1944 and executed in Plötzensee .

Name in different phases of life

  • 1879–1904 Mechtilde Christiane Marie Countess von und zu Arco-Zinneberg
  • 1904–1937 Mechtilde Christiane Marie Fürstin Lichnowsky
  • 1937–1958 Mechtilde Christiane Marie Peto

Works

  • Gods, kings and animals in Egypt , Leipzig: Rowohlt 1913, 255 pp.
  • A game of death , Leipzig 1915.
  • God prays , Leipzig 1918.
  • The child friend , Berlin 1919.
  • Birth. Love, madness, solitary confinement , Berlin: Riess 1921, 533 pp.
  • The fight with the specialist , Vienna / Leipzig: Jahoda & Siegel 1924, 308 pp.
  • Half & Half , Vienna 1927.
  • The rendezvous in the zoo (Querelles d'amoureux) , Vienna / Leipzig: Jahoda & Siegel 1928, 71 pp.
  • On a leash. Roman , Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag 1930, 320 pp.
  • Childhood , Berlin 1934.
  • Deläide , Berlin 1935.
  • The pink house , Hamburg 1936.
  • The course of the Asdur , Vienna 1936.
  • Conversations in Sybaris. Tragedy of a City in 21 Dialogues , Vienna 1946.
  • Words about words , Vienna: Bergland 1949, 320 pp.
  • Ordered to look , Esslingen 1953.
  • Today and the day before yesterday , Vienna 1958.

Letters

  • Mechtilde Lichnowsky and Karl Kraus: Dear Princess! Letters and documents. 1916-1958 , ed. by F. Pfäfflin, E. Dambacher u. a., Göttingen 2005

literature

Web links

Commons : Mechtilde Lichnowsky  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ralph Harding Peto, b. February 11, 1877, d. September 3, 1945 ( The Peerage ).
  2. ^ Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Karola Ludwig, Angela Wöffen: Lexicon of German-speaking women writers 1800–1945. dtv Munich, 1986. ISBN 3-423-03282-0 . Pp. 201-203.
  3. ↑ According to NDB.
personal data
SURNAME Lichnowsky, Mechtilde
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Arco-Zinneberg, Mechthilde Christiane Maria von und zu (birth name); Lichnowsky, Mechtilde Christiane Maria Fürstin (in 1st marriage); Peto, Mechtilde (in 2nd marriage)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH March 8, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Schönburg Castle
DATE OF DEATH June 4th 1958
Place of death London