author
M. Gontard-Schuck
1861–1950
Best known for the 1914 autobiographical novel Seelenverkäufer, this German writer published under several pen names and turned personal experience into dramatic, readable fiction. Her breakthrough book was successful enough to be adapted for film just a few years later.
1 Audiobook
Seelenverkäufer: Das Schicksal einer Deutsch-Amerikanerin
by M. Gontard-Schuck
About the author
Margarete Schuck, who also wrote as M. Gontard-Schuck, Lutz von Bollanden, and Emil Peterhans, was born on March 22, 1861, in Gumpelstadt, Thuringia, and died in 1950 in Dortmund. Reference sources identify her as a German prose writer, and note that she lived in Wesermünde before later settling in Dortmund.
She published a small but notable group of narrative works between 1914 and 1924. Her best-known book is Seelenverkäufer: Das Schicksal einer Deutsch-Amerikanerin, an autobiographical novel first published in 1914 under the name M. Gontard-Schuck. That debut became her biggest success and was adapted into a film in 1919.
Other works attributed to her include Schiffbruch im Hafen, Daphne, Scheidung?, and Die Vogelfreien. The surviving biographical notes are brief, but they suggest a writer who drew on lived experience and used fiction to explore hardship, relationships, and social pressure in direct, story-driven prose.