Ruth Margarete Roellig

Ruth Margarete Roellig (born December 14, 1878 in Schwiebus ; † July 31, 1969 in Berlin-Schöneberg ) was a German writer .

Life

Until 1933

Ruth Margarete Roellig was born in 1878 as the daughter of the innkeepers Anna and Otto Roehlig. In 1887 the parents moved to Berlin. Roellig attended a school for senior daughters and a boarding school . The records of her later career were probably lost when the apartment was closed after her death. Presumably she was already active as a writer before the First World War . After training as an editor , she found a job in a Berlin publishing house and wrote for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger and the women's magazine Bazar , as well as various literary magazines.

In 1913 she published her first book Whispers in the Dark , which describes the relationship between a poet and a muse. While traveling and during stays abroad in Finland, Bonn and Paris, she wrote novels and volumes of short stories, such as Lutetia Parisiorum and Traumfahrt: A Story from Finland , in which she processed her travel experiences.

In 1927 she returned to Berlin and achieved a high level of awareness , especially in the lesbian scene of the time . In Germany at that time female homosexuality was less criminally prosecuted than male homosexuality, but it was still socially outlawed. Roellig published various short stories and poems in relevant magazines such as the Frauenliebe . In 1928 her Führer Berlins Lesbische Frauen appeared , who described fourteen meeting places for lesbian circles. Magnus Hirschfeld wrote the foreword . A second edition was printed in 1930. In 1930 she took part in the educational book The vicious woman with a contribution to lesbianism and transvestism . Also in her story I Accuse , which deals with the loss of a partner, forced marriage and oppression, she tried enlightening prose.

time of the nationalsocialism

When the National Socialists came to power, the state's attitude towards homosexuality changed in a massive way. Homosexuality was seen as "degeneracy" and a crime. Although lesbians were not systematically persecuted and were not deported to concentration camps, National Socialism also outlawed this way of life. The lesbian scene at the time was smashed. In the course of the “ Gleichschaltung” , homosexual writers were also removed from the literary scene. However, Roellig withheld her lesbian writings and applied to the Reich Chamber of Literature in November 1936 . She closed her résumé with the words “I am a person who feels German through and through, and I have the deepest sympathy for the efforts of our esteemed leader. Heil Hitler . "

During the time of National Socialism, she probably published only two books: the crime novel The Other and the war novel Soldiers, Death, Dancer . The Other , published in 1936, is about Lloyd Warring, a writer who has a dark secret: he is a robbery. He finds his muse in 13-year-old Lydia Heinke. But this only uses it and accidentally reveals it. The protagonist commits suicide in the police cell. The novel contains allusions to the author's lesbian tendencies, so many characters are “hidden homosexuals”.

In 1937 Soldiers, Death, Dancer was published , based on an alleged incident during the First World War. The protagonist is the dancer Marion, who is suspected of being a spy in the turmoil of the war and is taken prisoner by the Romanians . She also witnessed the October Revolution . She gets back to Berlin via detours. The novel is full of anti-Semitic and anti-communist motifs and completely in line with National Socialism. The book was objected to by the Romanian traffic authority. This asked "in view of a better relationship between Romania and Germany" to withdraw the book from C. Bertelsmann Verlag . In March 1938, however, Joseph Goebbels ' deputy refused.

In the same year, her book Berlins lesbian women landed on the list of harmful and undesirable literature . Soldiers, Death, Dancer was to be her last monograph. There were plans to publish a novel about an “ Aryan ” child growing up with a Jewish adoptive father and another about her experiences in the air raid shelter , but these two novels never appeared. Whether it after the seizure of her book lesbians Berlin under prohibition was, is not known.

In November 1943, her apartment in Schöneberg was destroyed in an air raid and Roellig moved to her country house in Silesia.

After 1945

After the war, Roellig and her partner Erika moved in with her sister Käthe. She was no longer journalistic. She died of natural causes on July 31, 1969.

reception

In literary terms, Ruth Margarete Roellig is largely forgotten today. Your guide through the Berlin lesbian scene was considered to be one of the standard works of the lesbian and gay movement at the time and is now a much cited work as a historical source. The volume was reissued in 1981 and 1994 under the title Purple Nights: The Women's Clubs of the Twenties . Her later works were hardly read at that time, and a particular reception is not known.

Works (selection)

Advertisement for the book Berlins lesbian women in the magazine " Liebende Frauen "

Monographs

• Whispers in the Dark (1913)
• Liana (1919)
• Dream Voyage: A Story from Finland (1920)
• Lutetia Parisorum (1920)
• The Stranger Woman (1920)
• The Holy Announcements (1925)
• Berlin's Lesbian Women (1928)
• I accuse! (1931)
• The chain in your lap (1931)
• The Other (1935)
• Soldiers, Death and Dancer (1937)

Essays

• Lesbians and transvestites . In: The vicious woman . Edited by Agnes Countess Esterhazy (1930)

literature

• Sarah Colvin: Roellig, Ruth Margarete . In: Who's who in gay and lesbian history. From antiquity to World War II . Edited by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon . Routledge, New York NY et al. 2001, ISBN 0-415-15982-2 , p. 445.
• Claudia Schoppmann : The deepest sympathies for the Führer. Ruth Margarete Roellig in the “Third Reich” . In: Christiane Caemmerer et al. (Ed.): Poetry in the Third Reich? On literature in Germany 1933-1945 . Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1996, ISBN 3-531-12738-1 , pp. 169-176.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Ruth Margarete Roellig ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on Glbtq.com 
2. ↑ quoted from Schoppmann 1996. p. 169.
3. ↑ Schoppmann 1996. p. 172.
4. ↑ quoted from Schoppmann 1996. p. 175.