Nanny Lambrecht

Nanny Lambrecht (15 April 1868, Kirchberg, Rhein-Hunsrück as Anna Lambrecht – 1 June 1942, Schönenberg (Ruppichteroth)) was a German writer who authored about 25 novels, several volumes of published short stories, books for young people, and a nonfiction book. Many of her works play in the Hunsrück and the Eifel regions.

Her two older sisters were born in the United States, where the parents had emigrated in the year of their marriage in 1854. Her father learned shoe repair and business in Boston and Philadelphia, respectively, and her uncle was in the leather trade. The Lambrechts returned to Kirchberg, where Nanny was born on 15 April 1868. Her father died aged 52, leaving his family in poverty.

Nanny Lambrecht attended a workshop for teachers in Xanten on the Lower Rhine, and completed her training in Belgium in order to learn French. In 1889, she was hired at the bilingual school in Malmedy in the former Prussian Rhine province, where she practiced for 13 years. She began to write and published her stories. In Malmedy she met her Walloon partner Fanny Bierens. By some remarks in letters, which suggest a love relationship, folklorist Susanne Hose concludes that it "acted like more than a marriage of convenience of unmarried women." They left Malmedy and lived from 1904 in Aachen. Lambrecht established herself as a freelance writer on the growing Catholic book and magazine market.

After the First World War Lambrecht moved from occupied Aachen to Bad Honnef, where she founded a literary and musical society. She published many novels and short stories, the last, in 1936, a novel which contained some concessions to Nazi ideology. In the same year she retired, and died in 1942.

After the release of her collection of short stories "What Happened in the Fens ..." (1904) and the Eifel novel The House in the Moor (1906), literature reviews described Lambrecht as "Catholic Viebig", after German author Clara Viebig. Lambrecht considered this label as inappropriate and offensive. False rumors had claimed, that Clara Viebig's novel Das Weiberdorf, also situated in the Eifel region, had been indicted by the Catholic Church.

Lambrecht's novel The Statue Lady (1908) plays in Malmedy and the surrounding villages of the former Prussian Wallonia. In this work, she addressed the German government's actions to Germanize the Walloon minority. At the same time it deals with issues of women's emancipation.

The focus of Lambrecht's novel Armsünderin (1909), playing in the Hunsrück settlement Scheidbach, is a young woman from a family of tinkers who is pregnant by the son of a wealthy farmer and – rejected by all the villagers – brings her illegitimate child in a quarry to the world. The topic of single motherhood, as well as issues of birth control and abortion addressed in Notwehr, the Novel of the Unborn (1911), were continually discussed at the beginning of the 20th century.

Following the publication of Armsünderin the latent "Catholic literature dispute", part of a larger controversy surrounding the position of Catholics in the Protestant-dominated German Empire, flared up again. A reprint of the novel in the reform-oriented Catholic magazine Hochland by publisher Karl Muth angered the conservative Ultramontanes. As a result, Lambrecht remained excluded from the Catholic book market.

The themes of commitment for the socially weak and advocacy for the emancipation of women run through all of Lambrecht's works. With a strong regional focus and long dialect passages she was closely related to the literary folk art movement. During World War I, she published several novels about war. In the twenties she worked especially on historical novels and entertainment.