Clara Hepner (December 9, 1860 – August 11, 1939) also known by the pseudonym Klara Hepner, or Clara Muschner, Klara Muschner, sometimes Clara Hepner-Muschner, born Clara Freund in Görlitz, in Lower Silesia, Germany. She is best known as a poet and author of children's stories.

Personal life and family

She was the eldest of the six children of Dorothea (Sarah, known as Doris) Freund (1832–1915) and Rabbi Dr. Siegfried Freund (1829–1915), who was the main rabbi of the Jewish community in Görlitz, Germany^[1] from 1853 to 1909 - over 50 years.^[2]

In 1881 she married Salo (Salomon) Hepner, with whom she lived in Görlitz for a number of years before they moved to Berlin. Shortly before their divorce in October, 1903,^[3] she moved to Munich, where she struggled to create an existence as a writer.

Around that time she began a relationship with Georg Muschner (1875–1915), who was also living in the Nymphenburg area of Munich. He was simultaneously an Austrian playwright, poet, editor, and an Austrian Army lieutenant. He died in September 1915 while fighting at Jaroszowice on the Eastern Front during the First World War. They had not married, but she added his name to her own for a few years after his death (several sources wrongly give Hepner as being her maiden name) before returning to using only her own (married) name.^[4] Both her parents died at the end of that same year.^[5]

Career as a writer

Clara Hepner discovered a talent for writing late in life, publishing her first book in 1906 (Sonnenscheinchens Erste Reise, The Little Sunbeam's First Journey) at age 46, still under the German Empire. Her manuscript translation of Gaspard de la Nuit from French to German had been rejected for publication by the Insel-Verlag in Leipzig the year before, in 1905.^[6] She wrote some poems that were set to music around 1910, but primarily she earned a reputation for herself as a German author of children's stories during the Weimar Republic. Her stories were illustrated by famous artists of the day, like József Divéky, Lore Friedrich-Gronau, Josef Mauder, Ernst Liebermann, Ernst Kutzer, Anna Löffler-Winkler, Else Wenz-Viëtor, Fritz Lang, Otto Ubbelohde, Willy Planck, Hugo Wilkens among others.^[7]

After the Nazis rose to power in January 1933, her main publishing house (Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung in Stuttgart) at first was allowed to continue printing her books but came under increasing pressure to fire Jewish and "politically suspect" authors.^[8] Forced to abandon her apartment in Munich under the anti-Jewish laws of the Nazi government, she committed suicide in Munich on August 11, 1939, at age 78, and was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery there.

Writings

References