It is "strange that Mechtilde Lichnowsky has not yet taken the place in the consciousness of our literary world that a Virginia Woolf has in the English world.

Strange, in the sense of questionable – not questionable for the poet”, summarized Joachim Moras in 1951 in “Merkur”.

In the meantime there have been two attempts to remedy this.

At the beginning of the 1950s, Hanns Arens, editor at Bechtle-Verlag, tried to launch the author with new editions of the books she had published in the 1920s and 1930s, and later Friedhelm Kemp at Kösel-Verlag as well.

Vain.

Moras' finding is still valid today, none of Lichnowsky's eighteen books was available until recently.

The fact that she published at all in her exposed social position – member of the high nobility, wife of a diplomat, mother of three children – was improper enough that she was associated with Berlin artist and intellectual circles, all the more so.

She took her liberties, including privately, which cost her dearly.

After the death of her husband, Prince Carlmax Lichnowsky, who was nineteen years her senior, in 1928, she lived on a small footing in Cap d'Ail in southern France.

Ostracized by the Nazi regime, she left Germany in 1946 to live in London from then on, where she died in 1958.

Contrary to the image of women at the time

She published in renowned publishers such as Kurt Wolff or S. Fischer, most of her books went through several editions, she was courted by the capital newspapers: the multiple talents of making music, drawing and writing were present - and a singular appearance: just as cosmopolitan as down-to-earth, just as graceful as down-to-earth, as charming as astute.

Lady, of course, but in trousers - and smoking a cigar and a pipe.

She didn't make it easy for her readers with sophisticated essayistic prose and advanced narrative techniques.

Kurt Tucholsky seemed irritated by her first work, Gods, Kings and Animals in Egypt, which was published in 1913: “Besides, she can write.

And think.

And see.

In short: not a woman.” And they didn't make it easy for her.

"Poetic diplomat's wife!" was gleefully rubbed under her nose in 1916 on the occasion of the Berlin premiere of her drama "The Game of Death".

Anyone who associated her “civil relationship” (Lichnowsky) with her writing drew her ire.

She was a writer, period!

It only wanted to be judged as such.

In the last third of her life she no longer cared about the so-called business, she withdrew to writing, to the language, to which she libidinally worshiped.

That's one reason for her disappearance, but not a sufficient one.

Her oeuvre, which is as stubborn as it is disparate, can hardly be classified.

It was also extremely unsuitable as a rediscovery under the sign of making amends for someone who had been marginalized during her lifetime in the male-dominated literary scene.

She was always sovereign, allergic to any kind of paternalism, despised women who acquiesced, what she called the "little woman".

To be born as a girl, "that's the most horrible thing that can happen to a person," says "Childhood," and she suffered all her life from being "in the wrong suit": "Men, women?

– Kocolores!

Artist!"