German author, journalist and poet
Agnes Miegel
(9 March 1879 ? 26 October 1964) was a German author, journalist and
poet
. She is best known for her poems and short stories about East Prussia, but also for the support she gave to the
Nazi Party
.
Biography
[
edit
]
Agnes Miegel was born on 9 March 1879 in Konigsberg into a Protestant family. Her parents were the merchant Gustav Adolf Miegel and Helene Hofer.
Miegel attended the Girls' High School in Konigsberg and then lived between 1894 and 1896 in a guest house in
Weimar
, where she wrote her first poems. In 1898 she spent three months in
Paris
. In 1900 she trained as a nurse in a children's hospital in
Berlin
. Between 1902 and 1904 she worked as an assistant teacher in a girls' boarding school in
Bristol
, England. In 1904 she attended teacher training in Berlin, which she had to break off because of illness. She also did not complete a course at an agricultural college for girls near
Munich
. In 1906 she had to return to Konigsberg to care for her sick parents, especially her father, who had become blind. Her mother died in 1913, her father in 1917.
[1]
As early as 1900 her first publications had drawn the attention of the writer
Borries von Munchhausen
. Her first bundle of poems was published thanks to his financial support. In later years he was still an untiring promoter of her work.
She lived in Konigsberg until just before it was captured in 1945, and wrote poems, short stories and journalistic reports. She also made a few journeys. During the
Third Reich
she revealed herself as an ardent supporter of the regime. She signed the
Gelobnis treuester Gefolgschaft
, the 1933 declaration in which 88 German authors vowed faithful allegiance to
Adolf Hitler
. In the same year she joined the
NS-Frauenschaft
, the
women's wing
of the
Nazi Party
. In 1940 she joined the Nazi party itself.
[2]
In August 1944, in the final stages of World War II, she was named by
Adolf Hitler
as an "outstanding national asset" in the special list of the most important German artists who were freed from all war obligations.
[3]
In February 1945 she fled by ship from the approaching
Red Army
and reached
Denmark
. After Denmark's liberation on 5 May 1945 she stayed in the
Oksbøl Refugee Camp
until November 1946. In 1946 she returned to Germany, where she was under a
publication ban
until 1949. In that year a
denazification
committee issued a declaration of no objection.
At first she stayed in
Apelern
with relations of her former patron Borries von Munchhausen, who had committed suicide in 1945. In 1948, being a refugee, she was assigned a house in
Bad Nenndorf
, where she kept writing until her death.
Agnes Miegel now mainly wrote poems and short stories about
East Prussia
, the land of her youth. She was considered the voice of the
Heimatvertriebene
, the German-speaking people who had lived before the war in Czechoslovakia and Poland and in parts of Germany annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, who had to leave when Nazi Germany was defeated. Miegel received the honorary title
Mutter Ostpreußen
("Mother East Prussia") from her admirers.
[4]
[5]
She died on 26 October 1964 in a hospital in
Bad Salzuflen
.
Literary career
[
edit
]
Miegel's first bundle of poems appeared in 1901 and was called
Gedichte
. By 1945 she had published 33 books of poems, short stories and plays. She also regularly wrote for newspapers (especially the
Ostpreußische Zeitung
) and magazines. In her early career she mainly wrote about universal themes like man's course of life, nature, life in the countryside, the relationship with God and the past (especially the German past). A minority of these poems and stories were set in East Prussia, and these became her most popular works. Her most famous early poem was
Die Frauen von Nidden
("The Women of Nidden", 1907), in which the village of Nidden (present-day
Nida
in
Lithuania
) falls victim to a
bubonic plague
epidemic. The seven women who survive the plague let themselves be buried alive by the drifting sand dunes near the village.
[6]
During the Third Reich
National Socialist
themes appear in her work: complaints about the "heavy yoke" borne by cities like
Memel
and
Danzig
, which had been separated from Germany after the First World War;
[7]
glorification of the war;
[8]
glorification of the mothers who bear German children.
[9]
But as early as her 1920 poem "Uber der Weichsel druben" ("On the other side of the Vistula") (republished in
Ostland
)
[10]
she propagated fear of the Poles, who, she suggested, wanted to overrun East Prussia.
[11]
She wrote two odes to Adolf Hitler. The first of these,
Dem Fuhrer
, was published in 1936 and cited in
Werden und Werk
(1938), a study of Miegel's life and works.
[12]
The second poem,
An den Fuhrer
, is, in Tauber's words, an "hysterical adulation" of Hitler,
[13]
published as a kind of preface in
Ostland
. In the
Soviet occupation zone
in Germany after the Second World War both
Werden und Werk
and
Ostland
were forbidden books. To her credit it may be said that her works were free from
antisemitism
, although by no means free from the Nazis'
Blut und Boden
ideology.
[14]
After her publication ban had been lifted in 1949, she mainly wrote about East Prussia as she remembered it. The title of her first bundle of poems after the war is characteristic:
Du aber bleibst in mir
("You however stay within me"). Her best known stories and poems are melancholic reflections on her
Heimat
(homeland) that had been destroyed and was now forever out of reach. This is certainly true of her most famous poem,
Es war ein Land
("That was a country", 1949). Blackbourn shows that this was "exactly the idealized image that the expellee organisations cultivated ? as if all had been pastoral harmony until the Red Army marched west, as if the mass flight of Germans had fallen out of a clear blue sky."
[15]
She was not vindictive towards the Russians and Poles who had taken possession of East Prussia.
[16]
In a poem from 1951 she urged her readers
nichts als den Haß zu hassen
("to hate nothing but hate").
[17]
She refused to account for her doings during the Nazi era. The only thing she was willing to say was:
Dies habe ich mit meinem Gott alleine abzumachen und mit niemand sonst
("I have to settle this with my God and with no one else").
Publications of her works in Germany after 1945 usually omit her works between 1933 and 1945, propagating the myth of an apolitical author.
[18]
Miegel's poems usually consist of lines of unequal length, some rhyming and some not.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
included three of her poems (
Die Schwester
,
Die Nibelungen
and
Die Frauen von Nidden
) in his anthology of exemplary German literature
Kanon lesenswerter deutschsprachiger Werke
(Part
Gedichte
, 2005).
[
citation needed
]
Reputation
[
edit
]
The Agnes-Miegel-Haus in
Bad Nenndorf
During her lifetime Agnes Miegel received several marks of honour. In 1916 she received the
Kleist Prize
for lyrics and in 1924 was awarded an honorary doctorate by the
University of Konigsberg
.
During the Nazi era she was overloaded with marks of honour. In 1933 she joined the writers' section of the
Akademie der Kunste
in Berlin, together with prominent Nazis such as
Hanns Johst
. They filled the vacancies that had arisen because some members, amongst them
Alfred Doblin
and
Thomas Mann
, had to give up their seats for not being loyal to the Nazi regime. In 1935 she received the "honorary ring" of the
Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein
and in 1936 the Johann-Gottfried-von-Herder-Preis (the predecessor of the
Herder Prize
). In 1939 she was made an honorary citizen of Konigsberg; in the same year she received the Golden Decoration of the
Hitlerjugend
(Hitler Youth). In 1940 she received the
Goethe Prize
of the city of
Frankfurt
. In 1944 Adolf Hitler and
Joseph Goebbels
put together a "
Gottbegnadeten-Liste
" of the most important artists of the Third Reich. A separate list, the
Sonderliste der Unersetzlichen Kunstler
("special list of irreplaceable artists"), put together by Hitler himself, mentioned those 25 people whom the Nazi leaders considered as the Third Reich's greatest artists. Agnes Miegel was (with
Gerhart Hauptmann
and Hanns Johst, among others) ranked as one of the six greatest German writers. The artists on the special list were freed from all war obligations.
After the Second World War she received,
inter alia
, the
Westfalischer Kulturpreis
(1952), the
Großer Literaturpreis
of the
Bayerische Akademie der Schonen Kunste
(Bavarian academy of fine arts) (1959) and the
Kulturpreis der Landsmannschaft Westpreußen
(1962). In 1954 she became an honorary citizen of
Bad Nenndorf
, her place of residence.
After her death her house in Bad Nenndorf was rechristened the Agnes-Miegel-Haus. It is now a museum, dedicated to her life and works, and situated in the Agnes-Miegel-Platz ("Agnes Miegel Square").
[19]
In several places in Germany, streets received the name Agnes-Miegel-Straße. A few schools were named Agnes-Miegel-Schule. In 1979 the
Deutsche Bundespost
issued a postage stamp in honour of her 100th birthday.
Commemorative plaque at Agnes Miegel's former dwelling house in Konigsberg/Kaliningrad
There is a monument dedicated to Agnes Miegel in
Wunstorf
. A monument in Bad Nenndorf has been removed in 2015. In
Filzmoos
near
Salzburg
there is a plaque dedicated to the Hofers, Miegel's mother's family, who had their roots there. On 26 October 1992 a plaque was put on her former dwelling house in Konigsberg, now
Kaliningrad
, with texts in German and Russian.
Miegel's reputation was badly damaged when her poems to Hitler were rediscovered and published on the internet in the 1990s. Much discussion arose about her Nazi past. As a result, all the schools and many streets that had been named after her have been renamed. For instance, Agnes-Miegel-Schule in
Willich
was renamed Astrid-Lindgren-Schule in 2008
[20]
and the Agnes-Miegel-Straße in St. Arnold in the
Steinfurt district
was renamed Anne-Frank-Straße in 2010.
[21]
After a lengthy dispute about whether the Miegel monument in Bad Nenndorf should be kept or removed, it was removed in February 2015.
[22]
Works
[
edit
]
Poems, short stories, plays
[
edit
]
- 1901:
Gedichte
, Cotta, Stuttgart.
- 1907:
Balladen und Lieder
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1920:
Gedichte und Spiele
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1925:
Heimat: Lieder und Balladen
, Eichblatt, Leipzig.
- 1926:
Geschichten aus Alt-Preußen
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
[23]
- 1926:
Die schone Malone: Erzahlungen
, Eichblatt, Leipzig.
- 1927:
Spiele
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1928:
Die Auferstehung des Cyriakus: Erzahlungen
, Eichblatt, Leipzig.
- 1930:
Kinderland: Erzahlungen
, Eichblatt, Leipzig.
- 1931:
Dorothee: Erzahlungen
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1932:
Der Vater: Erzahlungen
, Eckhart, Berlin.
- 1932:
Herbstgesang: Gedichte
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1933:
Weihnachtsspiel
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1933:
Kirchen im Ordensland: Gedichte
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1934:
Gang in die Dammerung: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1935:
Das alte und das neue Konigsberg
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1935:
Deutsche Balladen
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1936:
Unter hellem Himmel: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1936:
Kathrinchen kommt nach Hause: Erzahlungen
, Eichblatt, Leipzig.
- 1936:
Noras Schicksal: Erzahlungen
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1937:
Das Bernsteinherz: Erzahlungen
, Reclam, Leipzig.
- 1937:
Audhumla: Erzahlungen
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1937:
Herden der Heimat: Erzahlungen mit Zeichnungen von Hans Peters
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1938:
Und die geduldige Demut der treuesten Freunde: Versdichtung
, Bucher der Rose, Langewiesche-Brandt, Schaftlarn.
- 1938:
Viktoria: Gedicht und Erzahlung
, Gesellschaft der Freunde der deutschen Bucherei, Ebenhausen.
- 1939:
Fruhe Gedichte
(reissue of the 1901 collection), Cotta, Stuttgart.
- 1939:
Herbstgesang
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1939:
Die Schlacht von Rudau: Spiel
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1939:
Herbstabend: Erzahlung
, published by herself in Eisenach.
- 1940:
Ostland: Gedichte
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1940:
Im Ostwind: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1940:
Wunderliches Weben: Erzahlungen
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1940:
Ordensdome
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1944:
Mein Bernsteinland und meine Stadt
, Grafe und Unzer, Konigsberg in Preußen.
- 1949:
Du aber bleibst in mir: Gedichte
, Seifert, Hameln.
- 1949:
Die Blume der Gotter: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
- 1951:
Der Federball: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
- 1951:
Die Meinen: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
- 1958:
Truso: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
- 1959:
Mein Weihnachtsbuch: Gedichte und Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln (a new, extended edition appeared in 1984).
- 1962:
Heimkehr: Erzahlungen
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
Selections and collected works
[
edit
]
- 1927:
Gesammelte Gedichte
, Eugen Diederichs, Jena.
- 1952:
Ausgewahlte Gedichte
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln.
- 1952-1955:
Gesammelte Werke
, Eugen Diederichs, Koln (six volumes).
- 1983:
Es war ein Land: Gedichte und Geschichten aus Ostpreußen
, Eugen Diederichs, Munchen (reprinted by Rautenberg, Leer in 2002).
- 1994:
Spaziergange einer Ostpreußin
, Rautenberg, Leer (journalism 1923?1924).
- 2000:
Wie ich zu meiner Heimat stehe
, Verlag S. Bublies, Schnellbach (journalism 1926?1932).
- 2002:
Die Frauen von Nidden: Gesammelte Gedichte von unserer ‘Mutter Ostpreußen’
, Rautenberg, Leer.
- 2002:
Wie Bernstein leuchtend auf der Lebenswaage: Gesammelte Balladen
, Rautenberg, Leer.
Books about Agnes Miegel
[
edit
]
- Walther Hubatsch,
Ostpreussens Geschichte und Landschaft im dichterischen Werk von Agnes Miegel
, Agnes-Miegel-Gesellschaft, Minden, 1978.
- Harold Jensen,
Agnes Miegel und die bildende Kunst
, Rautenberg, Leer, 1982.
- Marianne Kopp,
Agnes Miegel: Leben und Werk
, Husum Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Husum 2004.
- Agnes Miegel,
Werden und Werk, mit Beitragen von Professor Dr. Karl Plenzat
, Hermann Eichblatt Verlag, Leipzig, 1938. (This is what the title page says. In fact this is a study by Plenzat about Miegel's work, with a foreword by Miegel herself and many citations from her work.)
- Anni Piorreck:
Agnes Miegel. Ihr Leben und ihre Dichtung
. Eugen Diederichs, Munchen, 1967 (a corrected edition appeared in 1990).
- Alfred Podlech (editor),
Agnes-Miegel-Bibliographie
, Agnes-Miegel-Gesellschaft, Minden, 1973.
- Annelise Raub,
Nahezu wie Schwestern: Agnes Miegel und Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Grundzuge eines Vergleichs
, Agnes-Miegel-Gesellschaft, Bad Nenndorf, 1991.
- Ursula Starbatty,
Begegnungen mit Agnes Miegel
, Agnes-Miegel-Gesellschaft, Bad Nenndorf, 1989.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
Werden und Werk
, page 209.
- ^
Ernst Klee:
Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945
, Edition Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2009, pages 369-370.
- ^
Oliver Rathkolb:
Fuhrertreu und gottbegnadet. Kunstlereliten im Dritten Reich
, Osterreichischer Bundesverlag, Wien 1991,
ISBN
3-215-07490-7
, page 176.
- ^
The Agnes Miegel Gesellschaft about the honorary title Mutter Ostpreußen
.
- ^
Mutter Ostpreußen now controversial
Archived
December 19, 2013, at the
Wayback Machine
.
- ^
About Miegel and "Die Frauen von Nidden"
.
- ^
In her poems
Nachtgesprach
("Night talk", 1935) and
Sonnenwendreigen
("Solstice dance", 1939), both published in her book
Ostland
(1940).
- ^
In her poem
An Deutschlands Jugend
("To Germany's youth", 1939), also published in
Ostland
.
- ^
In her poem
An die Reichsfrauenfuhrerin Scholtz-Klink
(1939).
- ^
Pages 22-24.
- ^
Uber der Weichsel druben
has been analysed by Frank Bodesohn in
Ostexpansion und deutsche Literatur: Verbreitung der Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie aus Hitlers "Mein Kampf" in der NS-Literatur
, GRIN Verlag, Munich, 2012, pages 46-48.
- ^
Pages 79/80.
Dem Fuhrer
was reprinted under the title
Dem Schirmer des Volkes
in
Dem Fuhrer: Gedichte fur Adolf Hitler
, a bundle of poems by several authors on the occasion of Hitler's 50th birthday on 20 April 1939.
- ^
Kurt P. Tauber,
Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism Since 1945
, Volume 2, 1967, Page 1255: 'For Agnes Miegel's hysterical adulation of Hitler, see her poem, "To the Fuhrer", on Hitler's birthday, April 20, 1940.'
- ^
Horst Matzerath about Agnes Miegel's role in Nazi Germany
.
- ^
David Blackbourn,
The Conquest Of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2007, pages 302-303.
- ^
Miegel's thoughts about the reconstruction of the Kaliningrad region
.
- ^
She wrote this poem,
Spruch
, on the occasion of the opening of the
Gedenkstatte des Deutschen Ostens und der Vertreibung
(Memorial for Deportation and the Memorial of the German Eastern Provinces) in
Burg Castle
in
Solingen
.
- ^
Peter Davies:
Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture 1860?1945
, Walter de Gruyter, 2010, page 364.
- ^
The Agnes-Miegel-Haus on the website of the city of Bad Nenndorf
Archived
December 13, 2013, at the
Wayback Machine
.
- ^
‘Lindgren statt Miegel?’, January 2008
.
- ^
‘Schilderwechsel in St. Arnold: Anne Frank statt Agnes Miegel’, December 2010
Archived
December 13, 2013, at the
Wayback Machine
.
- ^
‘Miegel-Tage im Zeichen des Abschieds’, March 2015
Archived
2015-09-24 at the
Wayback Machine
.
- ^
One of the four short stories in this collection,
Die Fahrt der sieben Ordensbruder
, has been published as a separate book in 1933 and reprinted many times, most recently in 2002.
External links (all in German)
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]
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