LENE VOIGT (1891-1962)

The most famous Saxon writer is her, Lene Voigt (Hélène Wagner by her maiden name), born on May 2, 1891 in Leipzig. She began writing her first poems at the age of 15, secretly thwarting her mother's plans to work in a kindergarten instead. She studied childcare, which she followed until 1910, before embarking on an apprenticeship as a bookseller and then finding a position with the Teubner publishing house. In 1914, she married the musician Friedrich Otto Voigt, with whom she had a son, Alfred, who died very young. In the 1920s, she became a full-fledged writer, published texts in the Neuen Leipziger Zeitung, in the Rote Fahne, as well as in the satirical newspaper Der Drache. Lene Voigt became truly popular from 1925 onwards, with her works Säk'sche Balladen and Säk'sche Glassigern, in which she humorously reinterpreted classic German literature in a typically Saxon dialect. In 1933, she published the poetry collection L'Odyssée saxonne, then a year later the novel Vom PleiBen Strand nach Helgoland. A very difficult period followed, during which she was persecuted by the Nazis and forced to write... In 1940, she returned to Leipzig after having lived between Bremen, Berlin and Munich. Still prevented from publishing, she was admitted several times to psychiatric institutions to treat depression and then schizophrenia, which gnawed at her. An internment that would ultimately last until her death in 1962, and on which the woman of letters would nevertheless try to be positive by looking at the management of psychiatric illnesses.