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Keywords

literature, female authors, Danish

Abstract

Consider the following question: Which Danish author was not only one of the most famous European authors in the early part of the twentieth century, but also one of the most widely read female ones; had all of her books translated into German and some of them into as many as 30 other languages; wrote the most notorious bestseller of that period; celebrated her 60th birthday at a banquet hosted by Austrian PEN in Vienna where she was awarded both an Austrian and a Czechoslovakian medal and honored by the German language papers as Europe's Conscience; had her books banned by Hitler because of her outspoken criticism of him and her aid to German refugees, among them Bertolt Brecht and his family; was forced to spend the second World War as a refugee in the United States, suffering economic hardship and a devastating heart ailment, but was made an honorary member of the German-American Writers Association and had her 70th birthday celebrated with a banquet in New York City, sponsored by the community of German expatriots; came back to Denmark in 1946 and was awarded King Christian X's "Frihedsmedalje" [Medal of Freedom]; but died, virtually forgotten, at a boarding house in Copenhagen in 1950, after having had to sell her Thuro properties, a victim of the postwar housing shortage.

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