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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Tetzner, Lisa
Legal name: Tetzner, Lisa
Birthdate: 1894-11-10
Date of death: 1963-07-02
Gender: female
Nationality: Deutschland (Geburt)
Deutschland (Ausbürgerung, 1938)
Schweiz (Einbürgerung, 1948)
Country (for map): Germany
Switzerland
Birthplace: Zittau, Germany
Place of death: Carona, Switzerland
Places of residence: Carona, Switzerland
Occupations: children's book author
radio producer
teacher
fairy tale writer
Relationships: Held, Kurt (pen name husband)
Short biography: Lisa Tetzner was born to a middle-class German family in in Zittau (Lausitz), the daughter of a doctor. She had a special interest in collecting and writing fairy tales. In 1924, she married Kurt Kläber, a writer who used the pseudonym Kurt Held. She began writing books for children after World War I. She also worked as a teacher and produced a radio program called "Children's Hour" for the Berlin Broadcast Service during the late 1920s. With her husband, she co-authored the nine-volume series Children from No. 67 (1933-1949). In 1933, to escape persecution from the Nazi regime in Germany, Tetzner and Held, who was Jewish and a Communist, fled to exile in Switzerland; they lived there the rest of their lives. Among their other joint works was the classic Black Brothers: A Novel in Pictures (1941), translated into English in 2004.

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Reviews

The Black Brothers by Lisa Tetzner

Very interesting story but this printing/translation was rough. Worth the effort though.

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ColleenLVE | 4 other reviews | Apr 13, 2022 |

The Black Brothers by Lisa Tetzner

When the man with the scar comes to the small mountain village, thirteen-year-old Giorgio does not know that this is the end of his childhood. Poverty-stricken, his father has no choice: he sells Giorgio to the man with the scar, who takes the boy to work as a chimneysweep in the city. It's a hard life: the dark, narrow chimneys are full of dangers, Giorgio faces cruel treatment at his master's house, and gang fights in the street. But Giorgio still has his friend Alfredo and their secret society, The Black Brothers.

The Black brothers takes you back to the middle of the 19th century, to a time when poor farmers from Ticino sold their children across the Swiss-Italian border to work as "living broomsticks" in the chimneys of Milan. Not everyone survived.

This book has amazing pictures and I really liked this book. Giorgio has his ups and downs and lives a hard life as a chimneysweep, being teased by children because he's a chimneysweep and having to live with a cruel master, getting into fights with gangs but finding friendship in the master's daughter and a local doctor. 4 stars. Recommended.

Published in 1941, Lisa and her husband chose her name to write under because he was Jewish and not allowed to publish. Sad times… (more)