Lene Voigt (born Helene Wagner: 2 May 1891 - 16 June 1962) was a German writer and poet. Although some of her earlier work employed standard "Hochdeutsch" German, she is better remembered today for her poetry and prose texts written in the Upper Saxon dialect.
After 1945 her home city of Leipzig found itself in what became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). For various reasons Voigt's work disappeared from the shelves during the National Socialist years: her hopes that it would return to the magazines and bookshops after 1945 were dashed. It is widely thought that this was, at least in part, because her Upper Saxon dialect writing was seen in some quarters as disrespectful. Walter Ulbricht, the national leader between 1949 and 1971, also came from Leipzig, which meant that the dialect and accent of Saxony were the dialect and accent of the leader. In West Germany, across the internal border, her work was again published during the 1950s, and after Walter Ulbricht left the stage it also experienced a revival in East Germany, where a particularly effective cheer leader was (and post-reunification remains) the cabaret artiste and impresario Gisela Oechelhaeuser.
Life Provenance Helene "Lene" Alma Wagner was born at her grandmother's home in Leipzig. The circumstances of her birth may have contributed to subsequent confusion as to its precise date. Her mother had already given birth in 1887 and again in 1888, but the first son had been born dead and the second died after three hours. The understandable anxiety accompanying Helene's birth meant that she was subjected to an "emergency baptism" on the day she was born. Her godparents were her mother's sister and grandmother along with a theology student who may also have been a maternal relative. The doctors gave the parents little reason to hope that their baby daughter might survive, but survive she did.
Her parents had married in Leipzig in 1887. Her mother, born Alma Maria Pleißner (1860-1924), came from an academic family. She always spoke standard "Hochdeutsch" German and was uncompromising in her insistence that Lene should do the same. Lene inherited something of her mother's critical approach to life. While her husband was alive Alma Maria Wagner stayed at home and looked after the little family. Later she was employed as a housekeeper. By the time she died she was living in a "poor house" ("Armenstift"). Lene's father, Karl Bruno Wagner (1873-1917), worked as a typesetter. Lene later wrote that he came from a "family of mountain peasants" ("Gebirgsbauerngeschlecht"). From her father Lene inherited a talent for humour. He liked to use the local dialect. Sources indicate that Lene probably also inherited from her father a tendency to suffer with Depression and Psychoses. Karl Wagner drowned in 1917 when he was just 54.
Childhood She grew up in Leipzig. The family moved house several times while she was still small. Lene Wagner was a wild child and something of a prankster. For six years she attended school locally: she excelled academically, especially in lessons on Religion. Then, at her mother's wish, between 1905 and 1910 she attended a training establishment for Kindergarten work. Her interests lay in another direction, however. By the time she was 15 she had started to write poetry. In the end she undertook an apprenticeship for work in the book trade. Her childhood seems to have involved the omnipresence of relatives: aunts, in particular, were always in the background. The family was evidently a close-knit one. She loved to read, later naming the Viennese novelist-poet Ludwig Anzengruber as the favourite author of her childhood years. It was presumably from Anzengruber that she learned to identify social and political issues, and how to present them with humour. After she grew up Lene Voigt also recalled a period of her childhood when she was sent away to live with a church minister in a small mining village in the Erzgebirgischer mountain region, near the border with Bohemia and to the south of Leipzig. Precisely when, where and why she was sent to the mountains is unclear, but the arrangement was, in any case, temporary.
Employment As was usual in working-class families at the time, Lene's childhood was all too brief. According to several sources she left her parents' home as soon as she could. She was only 12 when she took work as a courier for a dolls' clinic, collecting dolls in need of attention and returning them to their homes following repair. This involved a very small girl walking the streets of Leipzig with an implausibly large basket. She was later able to recall the image and joke about it, but the work itself was perfectly serious. After she had been persuaded by her mother to enroll at an academy for Kindergarten work, between 1903 and approximately 1905 she worked as a nanny for a prosperous family. As part of the work, she used to create puppetry games to keep the children amused. It was the "background humour" incorporated in one of these puppetry games that led to her dismissal.
There followed a succession of jobs in Leipzig. At one stage she took an office job with the Teubner publishing business, and in 1912 she joined the Köhler Book wholesale traders (" Barsortiment Köhler").
Family tragedy After at least two "disappointing relationships with men", on 19 or 24 September Helene Wagner married Friedrich Otto Voigt. He was an orchestral musician who played in the Paul Lincke Orchestra, and the marriage took place in the St. Thomas Church. Unfortunately war had broken out at the end of July, and after the marriage ceremony Voigt was almost immediately conscripted into the army. He returned from the war alive but missing an arm, which put an end to his musical career. Between 1917 and the end of February 1919 Lene Voigt was employed as a sales representative by Insel Verlag (publishers): her departure was greatly regretted by Anton Kippenberg, the head of the business. The birth of her son, Alfred on 10 September 1919 provides a clue as to the reason for her resignation from Insel. The marriage ended in divorce in 1920. Nevertheless, Lene remained in touch with Voigt, and later on good terms with his second family, for the rest of her life.
By 1923 Lene Voigt was working for the foreign trade subsidiary of "Barsortiment Köhler", which collapsed in August of that year. This turned out to have been her last experience of full-time employment. She now became a "Geistesarbeiterin" which was a contemporary euphemism for self-employment.
Bereavements Living alone and without permanent work, Lene Voigt faced a compounding tragedy on 6 February 1924 when Alfed died from Tubercular Meningitis. He was not quite five. She tried to work through her grief by writing.
Happiness of a kind returned at some point between 1926 1928 when she teamed up with Karl Geil, an unemployed anarchist and opera singer. He described Voigt as the one great love of his life. Geil was married to someone else, but lived apart from his wife. He was a member of a progressive movement known as the "Vagabond Brotherhood" which involved a rather itinerant lifestyle. For a year or so from 1928 the meetings between Geil and Vogt became progressively less frequent, although they maintained an intensely passionate relationship by letter. In January 1929 Voigt's worst fears were confirmed: Karl Geil was more seriously sick than he could admit to himself. He collapsed unexpectedly on a street in Dresden and was taken to hospital where on 19 January 1929 he died as the result of a stroke. It took considerable effort for Voigt to have his ashes returned from Dresden to Leipzig. The deaths within a few years first of her child and then of her lover plunged her into severe depression which would haunt her for the rest of her life.
Friends advised a new start. Later in 1929 Voigt moved to the northern port city of Bremen, an industrial hub with a seething political and cultural energy. She arrived with little more than a typewriter and a small suitcase. The next few years were some of her most productive. Some of her best known books date from this period. She also benefited from frequent visits from Robert Meier, an admirer twelve years her junior who became a lifelong friend. Many of her texts, including some that never found a publisher, have survived only because she sent copies to Meier, and Meier took good care of them.
Success followed by dictatorship Until the Hitler government took power Lene Voigt now enjoyed a hitherto unfamiliar level of financial security. The rapid transition to one-party dictatorship during 1933 changed that. Even after 1933 her books failed to follow the official orthodoxies. Her humour was not to the liking of the authorities. She became an object of government suspicion and a target for Gestapo surveillance. She herself became increasingly unsettled, relocating to Lübeck in 1934 and to Flensburg in 1935. For a long time she lived only in rented furnished apartments.
"Nicht sächsisch, sondern jiddisch" One respect in which the Hitler government was keen for Germany to catch up with Britain and France involved centralsing state power. Government strategy extended well beyond replacing Germany's former administrative structure. In Saxony Martin Mutschmann, the regional governor ("Gauleiter") established the "Heimatwerk Sachsen – Verein zur Förderung des sächsischen Volkstums e. V." (loosely, "...association for promoting Saxon popular culture and identity") in 1936. The idea was to take control of all regional cultural aspirations and redirect them in support of party goals. The "Heimatwerk Sachsen" existed till 1945, intended to inspire the entire region of Saxony to identify with the National Socialist state. As part of this mission, the "Heimatwerk Sachsen" banned the Upper Saxon dialect. There was no longer any place for "Saxon comedy, joke makers and jewifying literati" , which had simply led to "mutilation of the language in Saxony" ("Verschandelung der sächsischen Sprache"). Lene Voigt was expressly identified as part of the problem. Upper Saxon dialect literature was "unheroic": it was almost all pulped.
The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda placed a nationwide ban on further publication of Voigt's books. The security services were only too well aware that she not only wrote texts using Upper Saxon dialect, but that before 1933 she had also worked with politically left-leaning publications and that she had openly asserted her atheism. Voigt did not react robustly to the increasingly threatening situation in which she now found herself. Intensified surveillance, proscription, the publishing ban and the resulting economic hardship led her to a form of psychosis. Between 18 May and 15 June 1936 she was placed in a mental hospital in Schleswig for the treatment of mental instability and hallucinations. When she was released it was "without mental disorder". She herself diagnosed her illness as stemming from delusions of persecution. That may have been necessary to secure her release, but at least one commentator has questioned her use of the word "delusion" in this context.
It is not known why Lene Voigt relocated to Munich in 1937, but her reasons for leaving the city are apparent: the newspaper of the local Nazi paramilitaries (SA) launched a press campaign against her, ostensibly in connection with an Upper Saxon dialect card-game. In or before 1938 she relocated to Hamburg and then to Berlin where she lived till 1940.