Margarete Böhme (1867–1939)

Margarete Böhme was born Wilhelmina Margarete Feddersen in Husum, Germany, and began writing at an early age. She published her first story in a Hamburg newspaper at age 17. She then began to regularly contribute stories to weekly magazines, both under her own name and under the pseudonym Ormanos Sandor. While living in Hamburg and Vienna, she worked as a correspondent for North German and Austrian newspapers.

In 1894, she married Friedrich Theodor Böhme, a newspaper publisher 20 years her senior with whom she had a daughter; the marriage ended in divorce six years later. She moved to Berlin, where she wrote articles and essays as well as novels and short stories. She wrote prolifically and published six novels during the period 1903-1905, though few of them were successful. However, the next novel, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (The Diary of a Lost Girl), which appeared in 1905, was an overnight sensation, and made her internationally famous. It was adapted into a controversial stage play and two silent films. The book remained in print for more than 25 years before being stopped by the Nazi regime. Her later fiction, which contained strong social messages, included W.A.G.M.U.S. (English translation, The Department Store: A Novel of Today, 1911), which some critics consider her best work; Christine Immersen (1913); and Kriegsbriefe der Familie Wimmel (1915), among several dozen others. In 1911, she remarried to Theodor Schlüter, a businessman.