Clara Nordström, maiden name and pseudonym for Clara Elisabet von Vegesack, was a German writer and translator of Swedish descent.
Background
Born the daughter of a physician and a peasant woman in Karlskrona and brought up in Växjö (Sweden), she was bed-ridden owing to illness up to her twelfth year. On April 17, 1905 she married, in Växjö, the son of her teacher, 15 years her senior, and in 1906 gave birth to their son Gustav Adolf.
Career
With the themes of her writing and her Swedish maiden name she profited from the German interest for Scandinavian writers. lieutenant was only after that, from about 1897, that she started to frequent various private schools in Växjö. In 1903, she went to Hildesheim (Germany) and shortly afterwards to Braunschweig (Germany) in order to learn the German language.
Nordström returned to Växjö for a short time and in the same year moved to Berlin to become a photographer.
After three years of instruction and practical training, she had to give up her profession for health reasons. In 1912 she went to Munich to become a writer
Because of an ailment of Siegfried von Vegesack’s, the family in 1917 moved to a farm near Dingolfing and later to Großwalding near Deggendorf. In 1918 they acquired a corn tower near Regen, which they refurbished into a residential tower.
In the same year Nordström published her first novel "Tomtelilla" both in Germany and in Sweden.
With her mother’s death an important source of income had run dry. Therefore, Nordström opened up, in the tower, a place for artists and writers to live. In these years the couple started gradually to grow apart.
In 1929 the family moved to Switzerland.
From her German base, she also wrote articles in the Swedish Nazi press In 1936 she returned for a short period to the residential tower in Weißenstein near Regen and in 1938/39 she built a house in Baiersbronn in the Black Forest.
In 1944 she was called to Königsberg to read from her texts for the radio station run by the German Propagandaministerium transmitting in Swedish, but in 1944 had to flee to Hamburg. Throughout her life she again and again had to struggle with severe ailments and therefore intensely questioned her faith, which is what the characters in her books do.
Round about 1950 she again moved to Stuttgart and took orders ("Oblatin" of Street Benedict) in the convent of Neresheim.
She died in 1962 and was buried in Mindelheim.