Search for books by: contact us home A B ... Join Our E-Mail Announcement List! Hertha Ernestine Pauli MOST OF THE BOOKS I HAVE WRITTEN IN THIS COUNTRY deal with people, things, and ideas that are at home in America but came from abroad, as I did. I was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909. My father was a scientist, my mother a journalist, and as soon as I could write, I became a dramatist: my plays based on children's classics from all over the world, were performed before mothers and aunts, with myself, of course, as producer, director, and star. At seventeen I ran away from college to become an actress, made my stage debut as Juliet, and later joined Max Reinhardt's famous theater in Berlin, remaining until Hitler came to power and Reinhardt left for America. Then I went home to Vienna, quit the stage, and began to write for a living. I wanted to create characters of my own, instead of acting out parts written by others, and from the beginning I wrote about people whose lives I would have liked to live. The hero of my first novel was Ferdinand Raimund, an actor who became a leading poet and playwright in the Vienna of Beethoven and Schubert (Toni: ein frauenleben fuer Raimond. Zsolnay, Wien, 1936). Publication of a second novel, about a great Austrian woman writer and fighter for peace, Baroness Bertha von Suttner, was halted by the Nazi seizure of Austria. My book (Nur eine Fran. Zeitbild, Wien, 1938) was banned, and I had to leave my homeland on the day of Hitler's entry. | |
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