Marie Luise Kaschnitz
Marie Luise Kaschnitz was a prominent German writer born on January 31, 1901, in Karlsruhe, Germany. Coming from an affluent family with a conservative upbringing, she initially trained as a book dealer and worked in publishing before marrying archeologist Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg. Their travels across Europe and North Africa greatly influenced her literary work. Kaschnitz's writing career began in 1933, focusing on themes related to the female experience, with her early novels often exploring the roles of women in a patriarchal society, though they gained little recognition until decades later.
Her poetry, however, earned her significant acclaim, particularly her 1947 collection, Gedichte, which includes vivid reflections of her childhood. Over time, her work evolved, becoming more experimental and expressive, particularly during her husband's illness and her own reflections on World War II. Kaschnitz received the Buechner Prize in 1955 and continued to explore themes of guilt, hope, and personal growth in her later poetry. She passed away on October 10, 1974, in Rome, leaving a legacy as one of Germany’s influential contemporary women writers, whose work mirrored the complexities of her era and the individual’s struggle within it.
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Marie Luise Kaschnitz
- Born: January 31, 1901
- Birthplace: Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- Died: October 10, 1974
- Place of death: Rome, Italy
Biography
Marie Luise Kaschnitz was born on January 31, 1901, in Karlesruhe, Germany, to Max Freiherr von Holzing-Berstett and Elsa (von Seldenek) von Holzing-Berstett. Her father was a Prussian general and the family was affluent. She was raised in a very conservative environment, and because she was a girl she did not attend a university. She was trained in Weimar as a book dealer and worked for the O. C. Recht publishing house in Munich when she was sixteen. She did not seek employment again until 1924, when she worked for an antiquarian bookstore in Rome, Italy, but she left that job in 1925 when she married Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg. Her husband was an archeologist and the couple traveled to Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, and North Africa. These trips benefitted her husband’s research and provided Kaschnitz with stories and impressions for her future as a writer. The couple had one child, Iris Costanza.
Kaschnitz’s career as a writer began in 1933with the publication of her first novel Liebe beginnt. Both this novel and her second, Elissa, published four years later, are traditional in form and focus on the condition of women. Their protagonists are submissive females who are dominated by the men in their lives. Neither novel was noticed by the critics until they were reprinted nearly fifty years later.
It was her poetry that earned Kaschnitz acclamation as one of Germany’s most influential contemporary women writers. Her collection Gedichte (1947) includes highly structured and graphically detailed accounts of her own childhood, a theme that Kaschnitz also examined in her first volume of short fiction, Das dicke Kind und andere Erzehlungen (1952). Her depiction of a fat and unattractive child is based upon her own experiences, and her poems and stories reflect her narrator’s attempt to understand herself and her importance in the world. These powerful literary creations earned Kaschnitz the prestigious Buechner Prize in 1955.
Encouraged by her success, Kaschnitz developed a more experimental and expressive form of poetry in her collection Neue Gedichte (1957), which was written when her husband was dying. Although she was still writing about difficult subjects, the narrator in this collection is less detached, and Kaschnitz noted this shift in style almost a decade later when she collected poems from her entire career in Ueberallnie. Published in 1965, Ueberallnie was her attempt to trace her own development as a writer and a woman. She noted particularly her sense of guilt over her silence during World War II and reflected that her poetry in the years following was her attempt to exorcize that guilt.
During the last decade of her life, Kaschnitz continued to write poetry about the troubled world, but she also began to emphasize the hope and promise that comes with progress. Particularly, the poems in Ein Lesebuch, 1964-1974 (1975) show her ability to break from traditional forms and emerge as a writer in the modern age. The literary achievements of her career reflect the changing times in which she lived, focusing on an individual’s struggle to exist in an alienating world. Kaschnitz died on October 10, 1974, in Rome, Italy, at the age of seventy-three.