Nanny Lambrecht

Nanny Lambrecht (15 April 1868 – 1 June 1942) was a German writer who wrote some 25 novels, several volumes of published short stories, books for young people, and a nonfiction book. Many of her works play in the Hunsrück and the Eifel regions.

Biography

Her two older sisters were born in the United States, while the parents were still emigrated in the year of their marriage in 1854. Her father studied shoe repair and business in Boston and Philadelphia, respectively, and her uncle was in the leather trade. The Lambrechts returned to Kirchberg, where her father died at 52, leaving his family in poverty.

Nanny Lambrecht attended a workshop for teachers in Xanten on the Lower Rhine, and completed her training in Belgium in order to learn French. In 1889, she was hired at the bilingual school in Malmedy in the former Prussian Rhine province, where she practiced for 13 years. She began to write and publish their stories. She met her partner in Malmedy, Wallonin Fanny Bierens. By some remarks in letters, which suggest a love relationship, Susanne concludes that it "acted [like] more than a marriage of convenience [of] unmarried women." They left Malmedy and lived from 1904 in Aachen. Lambrecht established herself as a freelance writer on the growing Catholic book and magazine market.

After the First World War Lambrecht moved from occupied Aachen to Bad Honnef, where they founded a literary and musical society. She published many novels and short stories, the last, in 1936, a novel which contained some concessions to Nazi ideology. In the same year she retired, and died in 1942.

After the release of their collection of short stories "What Happened in the Fens ..." (1904) and the Eifel novel "The House in the Moor" (1906), Lambrecht was missed by the literature review, the label "Catholic Viebig" they felt was inappropriate and offensive. Due to Clara Viebig's gambling in the Eifel novel, the Weiberndorf was rumored that he had been indicted by the Catholic Church, but this is not true.

Lambrecht's "Roman Statue Lady" (1908) plays in Malmedy and the surrounding villages of the former Prussian Wallonia. In this work, they addressed the Germanisierungsmaßnahmen, the German government against the Walloon minority. At the same time it deals with issues of women's emancipation.

In "Hunsrück-Roman Armsünderin" (1909), the latent "Catholic literature dispute" flared up again. The literary dispute was only a portion of a larger controversy surrounding the position of Catholics in the Protestant-dominated German Empire. The impression of the novel in the reform-oriented Catholic magazine highlights the publisher Karl Muth who was angered by the conservative Ultramontanes. As a result, Nanny Lambrecht remained excluded from the Catholic book market.

The focus of the novel "Armsünderin", playing in the Hunsrück settlement Scheidbach, is a young woman from a family of tinkers who is pregnant by the son of a wealthy farmer and – rejected by all the villagers – brings her illegitimate child in a quarry to the world. This issue of single mother as well as issues of birth control and abortion addressed in "Notwehr, the Novel of the Unborn" (1911) were at the beginning of the 20th century continually discussed.

Commitment to help the most vulnerable and the advocacy of the emancipation of women run through all the Lambrecht's works. She had been close to their strong regional focus and long dialect passages of the literary folk art movement. During World War I, she published several novels about war. In the twenties she worked especially on historical novels and entertainment.

Bibliography

• What Happened in the Fens ... Stories from the Eifel Region and the Walloon Region (1904)
• Hausiererkinder – Narrative (1905)
• The House on the Moor – Eifel Roman (1906)
• The Land of Night (1908)
• The Statue Lady! Novel of a Marriage and of a People (1908)
• Allsünderdorf – New Short Stories and Sketches (1908)
• Armsünderin – Novel from the Hunsrück (1909)
• The New Mother – A Woman Book (1909)
• The Girls – A School Tragedy in Four Acts (1910)
• The Seekers – Roman (1911)
• Brother Man – Tales from the Ship of Fools (1912)
• Self-Defense – The Novel of the Unborn (1912)
• The Marriage Village – Novel from the Belgian Countryside (1913)
• The Great Duchess – Roman (1913)
• The Iron Joy – Roman (1915)
• The Flat of the Walloons – Roman (1915)
• The Prisoner of Belle – Jeanette (1916)
• The Hell Experiences – Roman (1916)
• The Hollaprinzeß (1917)
• From Klappergasse – Stories (1917)
• The Smile of Susanna – Novel from the Hunsrück (1918)
• Before Awakening – Roman (1920)
• The Secret Guest – Roman (1920)
• The Blonde, the Brown, the Black – A Travel Novel From Better Days (1922)
• The Children of Cain – Roman (1922)
• Stories from History (1922)
• In the Twelfth Hour (1924)
• The Rape of the King's Castle (1926)
• Overstolz – A Rhenish Novel from the Present (1927)
• The Lady in Black – An Event on Lake Lugano (1929)
• Anne-Brigitte – Time Roman (1936)

References

• Christina Niem: Nanny Lambrecht – (1868–1942). An unadjusted writer. Social commitment and literary renewal in the Catholic controversy (= Studies on Folk Culture in Rhineland -Palatinate 16). Folklore Society in Rhineland -Palatinate, Mainz 1993, ISBN 3-926052-15-5 (at the same time . Mainz, Univ, Diss, 1993).
• Joseph Schreier: Nanny Lambrecht and the female dominated Fiction in the border region. In: Elisabeth Fischer-Wood (ed.): call and response – Significant women from the area of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine. Life images in three volumes. Volume 3: women born in the years 1855–1900 – Einhard-Verlag, Aachen, 1991, ISBN 3-920284-57-7, pp.17–43.
• Adalbert Wichert: Lambrecht, Nanny. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X, pp.442f (digitized).

Links

• Literature by and about Nanny Lambrecht in the German National Library catalogue
• Rheinland-Pfälzische Personendatenbank