Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Hermynia Zur Mühlen (12 December 1883 – 20 March 1951), or Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet, was an Austrian writer and translator. She translated over seventy books into German from English, Russian and French, including work by Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, Harold Nicolson, Max Eastman and Edna Ferber. She has been characterised as "one of the best known women writers of the Weimar Republic." A committed socialist from a Viennese aristocratic Catholic family, she was sometimes called the Red Countess.

Life

The Countess Folliot de Crenneville, born as Hermine Isabelle Maria Gräfin Folliot de Crenneville in Vienna, was the great-granddaughter of Louis Charles Folliot de Crenneville, a French-born general who fought for the Habsburg monarchy in the Napoleonic Wars. Her paternal grandfather was Franz Folliot de Crenneville, Knight in the Order of the Golden Fleece. She was also a great-great-granddaughter of Victoire de Folliot de Crenneville, the royal governess of Marie Louise, Empress of the French. Her maternal grandfather was the diplomat Ferdinand, Count von Wydenbruck, who had married a politically liberal woman from the Anglo-Irish gentry. Growing up in the Governorate of Estonia, where her father was a diplomat, she was sent aged 30 to a pulmonary sanatorium in Davos. Here she began a career of translation into German, translating an anti-war novel by Leonid Andreyev, and in 1918 King Coal by Upton Sinclair. An unhappy marriage to Viktor von zur Mühlen, a conservative German landowner, was officially ended in 1923. By this time, she had met Stefan Klein, a German Jew and fellow translator who would be her partner for the rest of her life.