Elisabeth Castonier

Elisabeth Castonier (6 March 1894 – 24 September 1975) was a German writer. Her books were written with humor and warm-heartedness, judges the encyclopedia FemBio. This kind of upscale entertainment was rather rare in German literature and not very well regarded by literary critics. Nevertheless, Castonier's stories from Mill Farm and her memoirs Stormy to serene, published in 1964, achieved high circulations.

Biography

Castonier was born in Dresden, the daughter of the painter Felix Borchardt and spent her early there until her family moved to Paris. Her grandfather was Jewish. In 1912 the family moved to Berlin. During the World War I she left her parental home because she did not get along with a new stepmother and went to Munich, where she worked in a publishing house and also began to write herself.

In 1923 married the Danish singer Paul Castonier, from whom she later divorced. She wrote satires in the weekly paper Die Ente, but during the National Socialist period she went in exile to Vienna and after the Anschluss in 1938 through Italy and Denmark to London. Here she wrote children's books and also a book about Christian opposition to the Third Reich.

In London she was also a correspondent for the News Chronicle and the New Statesman and also for emigrant newspapers like the Pariser Tageszeitung and the Wiener Tageblatt. In 1944 she worked as a farmhand in Hampshire. From 1950, she also corresponded regularly with Mary Tucholsky, the widow of writer Kurt Tucholsky.

Works

• Der schwarze Schatten (1928; novel)
• Frau, Knecht, Magd (1932)
• Angèle Dufour (Die Sardinenfischer) (1932; play)
• The Eternal Front (1942; on religious resistance to the Third Empire)
• Drei taube Tanten (1957)
• Das vergessene Haus (1959; novel)
• Mill Farm (1959)
• Die Herzogin Nana. Neue Geschichten von Mill Farm (1960)
• Noella (1962; novel)
• Stürmisch bis heiter. Memoiren einer Außenseiterin (1964)
• Etwas laute Nacht, Erzählung (1966)
• Seltsames Muster: Begegnungen, Schicksale (1971)
• Dreimal Liebe, Erzählungen (1975)
• Unwahrscheinliche Wahrheiten. Erlebnisse, Kuriositäten, Erinnerungen (1975)
• Das Gesicht am Fenster (1976; novel)

References

• Budke, Petra & Jutta Schulze. 1995. Schriftstellerinnen in Berlin 1871 bis 1945: Ein Lexikon zu Leben und Werk. Berlin. Orlanda.
• Frings Dagmar; Jörg Kuhn (2011). Die Borchardts. Auf den Spuren einer Berliner Familie. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich.

External links

• Works by Elisabeth Castonier at German National Library