Elisabeth Langgässer was a German author and teacher. Her posthumously published novel The Quest (1950) is regarded by many critics as one of the finest German works dealing with the moral burden of Nazi inhumanity.
Background
Ethnicity:
Langgaesser’s late father was a Jew, and the Nazis persecuted the author for being “half-Jewish.”
Elisabeth Langgässer was born on 23 February 1899, in Alzey, Germany. She was the daughter of Eduard, an architect and government surveyor, and Eugenie (Dienst) Langgaesser.
Education
Elisabeth Langgässer attended a teacher’s college.
Career
After attending school, Elisabeth worked as a schoolteacher. It was during this time that she first began to publish her work in newspapers and magazines. Langgaesser’s poetry collection Der Wendekreis des Lammes: Ein Hymnus der Erloesung was published in 1924. Depicting feasts of the Roman Catholic Church calendar, the expressionist poems in this work display Langgaesser’s religious inclinations. Langgaesser moved to Berlin with her daughter Cordelia in 1929. While in the cosmopolitan German city, she joined a group of like-minded writers called Die Kolonne (The Column). Langgaesser’s first novel, Prosperina: Welt eines Kindes was published in 1933. This novel contains autobiographical elements of the author’s own life.
Langgaesser’s involvement in Berlin’s literary circles introduced her to several writers, including Wilhelm Lehmann, Ina Seidel, and Gottfried Benn. Langgaesser and Seidel wrote the preface and edited an anthology of poetry by German women, the 1933 volume Herz zum Hafen: Frauengedichte der Gegenwart. Langgaesser’s short story collection Triptychon des Teufels: Ein Buch von dem Hass, dem Boersenspiel und der Un- zucht was also published in the 1930s.
In 1935, another poetry collection by Langgaesser, Die Tierkreis- gedichte, was published. A novel, Der Gang durch das Ried: Roman, was released the following year. During the 1930s, the Nazi Party was becoming increasingly powerful in Germany. After Der Gang durch das Ried was published, Germany’s Reich Chamber of Literature prevented her from publishing in Germany. She continued to write, collecting her works so that they could be published in different countries or at a later date. An Austrian publisher released her 1938 collection of short stories Rettung am Rhein: Drei Schicksals- laeufe.
Following the war in 1946, Langgaesser’s novel Das unausloeschliche Siegel: Roman was published. Other post-war works by Langgaesser include the books of poetry Der Laubmann und die Rose: Ein Jahreskreis and Koelnische Elegie and the short story collections Der Torso and Das Labyrinth: Fuenf Erzaehlungen. By this point, the Nazi government had dissolved, so Lang- gaeser’s work was published in West Germany.
Langgaesser’s novel that incorporates her daughter’s Holocaust experiences, Maerkische Argonautenfahrt: Roman, was published after the author’s death. Set in postwar Germany, it depicts how Holocaust and wartime survivors face life after their ordeals. Jane Bannard Greene translated the work into English as The Quest, and this edition was published in 1953.
Elisabeth Langgaesser has often been grouped with traditional German Christian writers of the 1930s and 1940s because of her Roman Catholic background. Yet Langgaesser strove to reach a more general audience, hoping to connect with the secular world as well.
Quotations:
“Christianity is in opposition to this world of the arts, the aesthetic, or literature; it opposes them and transcends them.”
Membership
Langgässer was a member of Die Kolonne, literary group, and Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, Germany.
Personality
World War II took a heavy toll on Langgaesser. Her daughter Cordelia was interned in a concentration camp by the Nazis. The strain of both her daughter’s situation and other worries made Langgaesser physically ill a number of times during the war, a period she called “eintoenige Hungerjahre,” the monotonous hunger years.
Connections
Langgässer married Wilhelm Hoffmann, a philosopher and theologian, in 1935. They had four children: Cordelia, Annette, Barbara and Franziska.