Zoe Droysen

Zoe Droysen

Zoe Droysen (born December 4, 1884 in Berlin , † September 20, 1975 in Ramsau near Berchtesgaden ) was a German poet and writer.

Life

Zoe (actually Eva Helene) Droysen came from an old family of scholars and artists in Berlin on his father's side. She was a granddaughter of the history professor Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and his wife Emma Michaelis (1829-1881). Their son Hans Droysen (1851-1918) and his wife Margarete nee Lührß (1856-1907) were Zoe Droysen's parents. She was the middle daughter. Her older sister Emma Droysen (1881–1945) was married to the cousin Otto Droysen, the younger sister Anna (* 1886) to the doctor Dr. med. Karl Veit in Lehrte.

Zoe Droysen's great-grandfather on her mother's side, Fedor von Rüdiger, was post director in Lüben / Lower Silesia. The family bought a piece of land near the former post office. There in the garden house, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren had a wonderful summer vacation. Zoe Droysen was associated with Lüben from childhood.

When the Droysen's apartment in Berlin was bombed in 1943, Zoe Droysen moved to Lüben with her widowed older sister Emma. Little was known about her life. Nevertheless, she maintained a cordial relationship with the Lüben people. Before she had to leave Lüben with her sister on January 29, 1945, she hiked through the park again, which was covered in snow. She dealt with the farewell to the old garden house in Lüben in the novella The old garden .

Many of her touching descriptions, stories and poems were published in the Liegnitzer / Lübener Heimatblatt .

Two handwritten diaries by Zoe Droysen are kept at the Stiftung Kulturwerk Schlesien. As a 20-year-old she wrote one thing about her stay in Italy, from October 4, 1904 to February 1, 1905. It is less interesting, since it is exhausted in a list of the museums, buildings and landscapes she visited. It seems as if her father, who had recorded his impressions of Italy in the same exercise book in 1875/76, requested these notes from Zoe and her sister Emma - as evidence of their educational trips.

On the other hand, she began her Lüben diary at Easter 1944 in Lüben. It was not foreseeable at the beginning that Christmas 1948 would end in Erlangen and makes the diary a moving document of the war. In the beginning she describes her deep feelings towards nature, her contacts with the locals and shows in a shocking way how the war breaks into the idyll of the contemplative small town. She meticulously records the escape of the two women over sixty in the freezing cold, overcrowded trains and the fear of the Russians and later the Americans. Her sister dies of exhaustion and heartache a few days after arriving at an acquaintance in Erlangen. Zoe Droysen suffers lifelong from the loss of her home in Lüben.

Her works are not of high literary rank. But they are evidence of a bygone era and a sensitive personality.

Works

Published in book form:

• Swallow . Franz Schneider Verlag, Berlin / Leipzig 1942.
• Jo from Webergasse . Vier Tannen Verlag, Berlin 1943.
• Novellas . Verlag Volk und Zeit, Karlsruhe, 1948 (contains among other things: Renate Cornelius and The old garden ).
• Sidonie's cellar gang . Vier Tannen Verlag, Berlin 1949.
• The Cantor of St. Nikolai . Rufer-Verlag, Gütersloh 1952.
• Wang in the Giant Mountains . Publishing house “Our Way”, Ulm / Donau 1956.
• Driving is fun! Verlag Josef Scholz-Mainz, Wiesbaden 1959.

literature

• Entry in: German Literature Lexicon. Biographisch-Bibliographisches Handbuch , Vol. 3, Bern; Munich 1971, p. 590.

Web links

• Literature by and about Zoe Droysen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Zoe Droysen