Name Hermynia Muhlen | Role Writer | |
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Died 1951, Radlett, United Kingdom Books Fairy tales for workers' children, The End and the Beginning: The Book of My Life | ||
The Servant
Hermynia Zur Muhlen, or Hermynia zur Muhlen, born as Hermine Isabelle Maria Grafin Folliot de Crenneville, also Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet (December 12, 1883 – March 20, 1951) was an Austrian writer and translator. She translated over seventy books into German from English, Russian and French, including work by Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, Harold Nicolson, Max Eastman and Edna Ferber. She has been characterised as "one of the best known women writers of the Weimar Republic.". A committed socialist from a Viennese aristocratic Catholic family, she was sometimes called the Red Countess.
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Life
The Countess Folliot de Crenneville, born in Vienna, was the great granddaughter of Louis Charles Folliot de Crenneville, a French-born general who fought for Habsburg Austria in the Napoleonic Wars. Her maternal grandfather was the diplomat Ferdinand, Count von Wydenbruck, who had married a politically liberal woman from the Anglo-Irish gentry. Growing up in the Governorate of Estonia, where her father was a diplomat, she was sent aged 13 to a sanatorium in Davos. Here she began a career of translation into German, translating an anti-war novel by Leonid Andreyev, and in 1918 King Coal by Upton Sinclair. An unhappy marriage to Viktor von zur Muhlen, a conservative German landowner, was officially ended in 1923. By this time she had met Stefan Klein, a German Jew and fellow translator who would be her partner for the rest of her life.
Zur Muhlen wrote six detective novels under the name Lawrence H. Desberry, and collections of fairy tales interpreted from a radical perspective. She also wrote anecdotes, sketches and feuilletons for periodical publication. She published an autobiographical memoir, End und Anfang, in 1929, in which the new beginning is that of the Russian Revolution. Though she quietly left the Communist Party around 1931 or 1932, she remained committed to socialism.
Zur Muhlen and Klein left Germany for Vienna in 1933. Zur Muhlen refused to agree to S. Fischer Verlag's appeal that she follow Thomas Mann, Alfred Doblin, Rene Schickele and Stefan Klein in undertaking not to write in emigre magazines:
To this 'best of company; I prefer solidarity with those who, in the Third Reich, are persecuted because of their convictions, shut up in concentration camps, or 'shot while attempting to escape.' One cannot serve Germany and the German people better than by joining in the struggle against the horror tale become reality that is the Third Reich.
Unsere Tochter die Nazinen was a directly anti-Nazi satire: serialized in a leftwing local newspaper in 1934, it was banned after eventually finding a publisher in 1936. With the Anschluss of 1938, Zur Muhlen and Klein left for Bratislava, where they married; after the German occupation of Bohemia in 1939, they left to live in England, where Zur Muhlen scraped a precarious living from journalism. The two novels she wrote in England - Ewiges Schattenspiel and Als der Fremde kam - seem to have been part of an intended trilogy. She died in obscurity in Radlett, Hertfordshire.