Anna Ritter (February 23, 1865 – October 31, 1921) was a German poet and writer.

Biography

Ritter was born Anna Nuhn in

Coburg Coburg () is a town located on the Itz river in the Upper Franconia region of Bavaria, Germany. Long part of one of the Thuringian states of the Wettin line, it joined Bavaria by popular vote only in 1920. Until the revolution of 1918, it ...

Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total l ...

, (then part of the duchy of

Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (german: Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha), or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (german: Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, links=no ), was an Ernestine, Thuringian duchy ruled by a branch of the House of Wettin, consisting of territories in the present ...

) on February 23, 1865, but she was only a young child when her father, an export trader, moved the family to New York City. The young Anna returned to Europe in 1869 to attend boarding schools in

Kassel Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...

and at a Moravian boarding school in the hamlet of Montmirail in the French-speaking canton of

Neuchâtel , neighboring_municipalities= Auvernier, Boudry, Chabrey (VD), Colombier, Cressier, Cudrefin (VD), Delley-Portalban (FR), Enges, Fenin-Vilars-Saules, Hauterive, Saint-Blaise, Savagnier , twintowns = Aarau (Switzerland), Besançon (Fra ...

, Switzerland. She completed her education in Kassel where she married a future civil servant, Rudolf Ritter in 1884. The couple moved first to

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

and later to Berlin and

Münster Münster (; nds, Mönster) is an independent city (''Kreisfreie Stadt'') in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is in the northern part of the state and is considered to be the cultural centre of the Westphalia region. It is also a state di ...

. Her husband died in 1893, and the widow moved to the spa town of

Bad Frankenhausen Bad Frankenhausen (officially: Bad Frankenhausen/Kyffhäuser) is a spa town in the German state of Thuringia. It is located at the southern slope of the Kyffhäuser mountain range, on an artificial arm of the Wipper river, a tributary of the Uns ...

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and lar ...

. She published her first collection of poetry in 1898 and a second collection followed in 1900. In that same year she found employment with the weekly journal,

Die Gartenlaube ''Die Gartenlaube – Illustriertes Familienblatt'' (; ) was the first successful mass-circulation German newspaper and a forerunner of all modern magazines.Sylvia Palatschek: ''Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries'' (Oxford: ...

, which had previously published her poetry. She published a novel, ''Margharita'' in 1902 followed by a travel diary. Her most famous poem is "Denkt euch, ich habe das Christkind geseh'n" (I think I saw the Christ Child). She belonged to a group of writers commissioned by Cologne-based Ludwig Stollwerck chocolate producers to produce literature for a series of collectable print albums and scrapbooks. Other authors included the poet "T. Resa," (Gröhe Theresa), zoologist Paul Matschie, Hans Eschelbach, journalist Julius Rodenburg, writer Joseph von Lauff, poet

Carl Hermann Busse Carl (Hermann) Busse (12 November 1872 – 3 December 1918) was a German lyric poet. He worked as a literary critic and published his own poetry and prose, occasionally under the pseudonym ''Fritz Döring''. Life Busse was born in Lindenstadt n ...

, and the novelist

Gustav Falke Gustav Falke (11 January 1853 – 8 February 1916) was a German writer. Life Falke was born in Lübeck to merchant Johann Friedrich Christian Falke and his wife Elisabeth Franziska Hoyer. The historians Johannes and were his uncles, and the ...

, among others. Ritter died on October 31, 1921, in

Marburg Marburg ( or ) is a university town in the German federal state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of the Marburg-Biedenkopf district (''Landkreis''). The town area spreads along the valley of the river Lahn and has a population of approximat ...

. Ritters style is lyric, and it aligns with lyric styles of several turn of the century German poets – saturated with symbolism and influenced by folklore and a New Romanticism. Composers to set her poems to music include

Max Reger Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger (19 March 187311 May 1916) was a German composer, pianist, organist, conductor, and academic teacher. He worked as a concert pianist, as a musical director at the Leipzig University Church, as a professor a ...

Jean Sibelius Jean Sibelius ( ; ; born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius; 8 December 186520 September 1957) was a Finnish composer of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely regarded as his country's greatest composer, and his music is often ...

, and

Kurt Weill Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900April 3, 1950) was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fru ...

, among others.

Selected works

* ''Gedichte'', Stuttgart (1898), Berlin: Cotta (27-29 printing) 1911. * ''Befreiung: Neue Gedichte'', Stuttgart: Cotta (fourth printing) 1900.

External links

*
Anna Ritter at Wortblume.de (German)

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ritter, Anna 1865 births 1921 deaths German poets German women writers