Grethe Auer

Grethe Auer, born Margarethe Emma Auer on June 25, 1871, in Vienna, was a Swiss-Austrian writer. She was the daughter of the architect Hans Wilhelm Auer and later lived in several places that would leave a strong mark on her writing, including Bern, Morocco, and Berlin.

Sources about her life describe her as both an educator and a novelist or storyteller. She spent years in Morocco in her brother’s household, and those experiences fed into books and stories centered on North African settings and encounters between cultures. Her published works include titles such as Marrakesch, Dschilali, and Gabrielens Spitzen.

She married Bruno Güterbock, and memoirs published after her lifetime show how closely her writing was tied to the places and upheavals she experienced. Grethe Auer died in Berlin on July 16, 1940. Though not widely known today, she remains an interesting figure for readers drawn to early 20th-century German-language literature shaped by travel, displacement, and observation.