Clara Ratzka (1871–1928)

Clara Ratzka, née Ernst, was born in Hamm, Germany, the third of five children of Joseph and Franziska Ernst. Her father was the general director of a large ironworks. When he was incapacitated by a severe nervous disorder, the family moved to Lippstadt and then to Münster, where Clara attended the Cathedral School. She later went to boarding school in the Netherlands. She qualified as a teacher but her parents did not allow her to practice the profession. She lived at home until 1894, when she married Clemens Linzen, an industrialist, with whom she had a daughter. The union was unhappy and after eight years, she separated from her husband and moved to Berlin, against the wishes of her family. In Berlin, she developed a keen interest in the newly emerging women's movement. She worked briefly as a newspaper correspondent on women's issues. From 1906, she studied politics, economics, literature and philosophy. In 1912, she became one of the first women in Germany to receive a doctoral degree, graduating from the University of Tübingen. In 1911, she married Arthur Ludwig Ratzka, a Hungarian-born artist, and with him became involved in artistic and literary circles. The couple traveled extensively, and she began to write travelogues from her trips to Italy, Lithuania, Finland, and other countries. Some of them were printed in German newspapers. She wrote her first novel, Blaue Adria (1916) following a trip to the Adriatic, and went on to write 16 more, becoming one of the most widely-read authors of the 1920s. Two of her books were adapted into films shortly after their publication. After a divorce from Arthur Ratzka, in 1922 she married Ernst Wendler, a jurist and diplomat. They lived in London, Paris and finally in Berlin-Zehlendorf. She died in 1929 at age 57; after her death, her works fell into oblivion. In 1998, the Clara-Ratzka Society began arranging the re-issuing of her out-of-print books.