Margarete Böhme

Born Wilhelmina Margarete Susanna Feddersen in Husum, she grew up in northern Germany and began publishing young, with an early story appearing in a Hamburg newspaper while she was still a teenager. She went on to work as a journalist and became a remarkably productive author of novels, stories, sketches, and articles.

Her biggest success was The Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen), published in 1905. Presented in a way that made many readers think it was a real diary, the book became an international bestseller and helped make her one of the most widely read German writers of her time.

Böhme wrote more than 40 novels, and her work often showed a strong interest in social questions, especially the pressures placed on women. She died in Hamburg in 1939, but her fiction still stands out for its mix of readability, controversy, and sympathy for people pushed to the edges of society.