Clara Emma Amalia Viebig (17 July 1860 – 31 July 1952) was a German author.
Life
Viebig was born in the German city of Trier, the daughter of a Prussian civil servant. She was related to Hermann Göring. At the age of eight, her father was transferred, and the family moved to Düsseldorf, where Clara attended school. She frequently returned to the Moselle scenery at Trier and vicinity, and took many walks there. When her father died, she was sent to live on the estate of some relatives in Posen, where she frequented the local Luisenschule. At the age of twenty, Clara moved to Berlin with her mother. She went to Berlin to study music, but instead of doing it, found that the stimulus of the great city, in addition to the landscapes she had already seen, was beginning to steer her toward a literary career.
She was married to the Jewish publisher Fritz Theodor Cohn (a partner in the firm of Fontane and Company, later of Egon Fleischel and Company) in 1896. The following year, Clara began a successful career as a writer and her works became much admired. After her marriage, she lived most of the time in Berlin and its suburbs (Schöneberg, Zehlendorf). Her son Ernst adopted communist positions and fled from Nazi regime pressure to Brazil; he became father to Reinhart and Susanne, mother of—among further children—the TV producer Pedro Bial.
Das Schlafende Heer
In her novel Das Schlafende Heer ("The Dormant Army" or "The Sleeping Army"), published in 1903, Viebig praised conquest of Polish territories by German settlers and warned of "dangers" posed by Polish minority in Germany, which she characterised as "disloyal" and "uncultured". Left unchecked, she warned, Poles would overwhelm Germany and thus need to be controlled, repressed and assimilated. Viebig's viewpoint was characteristic of German attitudes at the time, and her work formed part of the German Heimatkunst (regionalism) literary movement during this period. This novel became a bestseller in German Empire in 1904 and 1905, and, besides Die Wacht am Rhein, was her most read novel.
