Lenk, Margarete b.August29, 1841; Leipzig, Saxony d. 1917 (Exact date unknown); Grun (Vogtland),Thuringia
German author who wrote novels about her experiences in the United States. She was the daughter of Julius Ludwig Klee, who taught at the Leipzig Gymnasium, the high school for the university-bound elite.
The family moved to Dresden when Margarete was eight years old, as her father took the prestigious position of director of the city Gymnasium. She received a humanist education based on the classics. Her father’s involvement with education only furthered his daughter’s interests and opportunities. Margarete began tutoring and teaching out of her home and in 1863 passed the teacher examination and received certification. She founded and directed her own school. For her endeavors, she needed a teacher of religion, a required class in German schools, and a candidate in theology, Emil O. Lenk, took the job. Margarete married Pastor Lenk in 1868 when he was called to serve a congregation in Siebenlehn, Saxony. After five years in that community, both embarked to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1873, where Pastor Lenk became the minister of one of the largest Lutheran churches, Bethlehem. He served in that capacity from 1874—1883. At the end of his service to this congregation, he and his wife moved to Millstadt, Illinois, about ten miles east of St. Louis, where they served a much smaller church. The Lenks remained in America for fifteen years and returned to Germany because Pastor Lenk received a request from the Jo- hannis congregation in Niederplanitz near Zwickau, Saxony, to establish an independent congregation in Vogtland. Margarete Lenk and her husband remained in Grun near Lengenfeld, Vogtland, for the rest of their lives.Margarete Lenk became a writer only upon her return to Germany. At the age of forty-eight, she had the idea to put to paper some memories of her stay in America. She was particularly interested in the life of youths and many of her stories and novels are about young people or written for a young audience.
Her first work, the memories of her stay in America, was sent to the publisher von Steinkopf in Stuttgart in 1896 by her brother Gotthold Klee, a teacher and writer himself. The publishing house Johann Herrmann in Zwickau, Saxony, accepted her work, and it was first published in a pamphlet addressed to young readers entitled Im Fernen Westen, deutsche Ansielder in Nordamerika: Eine wahre Erzahlung (In the Far West: German Settlers in North America: A True Story) and later at Christmas time as a volume of a youth library. Encouraged by her success, Lenk published many more stories and novels for youths, many of which appeared in second and third editions. Although she wrote in German, many of her youth novels were translated into Swedish and Norwegian, as well as English.Lenk’s fictional account of German immigrants’ lives, Im Fernen Westen, and her autobiographical novel, Funfzehn Jahre in Amerika (Fifteen Years in America), published in 1896 and 1911, respectively, received relatively large success in that each had several editions. Her novel Im Fernen Westen follows the lives of several German immigrant families in western Missouri in the mid-nineteenth century. Interestingly, Lenk addresses the issue of veracity in her subtitle “eine wahre Erzahlung, (a true story). She attempts to make it clear from the outset that hers—unlike Gottfried Duden’s—is a real story based on fact. The immigrant’s dream, according to Lenk, is a community based on German culture with a church and a school, not the rugged life one might eke out of the wilderness as an immigrant. While she details the lives of the German immigrants, Lenk conveys the message that Christian values and German culture are important and need to be protected at all costs in the New World. Her experiences that led her across the Atlantic and back find expression in her literary work and emphasize the importance German immigrants and their culture had on the formation of the American cultural landscape until World War I. With the outbreak of that war, the cherished values Lenk emphasized and upheld, as well as the German inhabitants themselves, came under attack.
Anabel Aliaga-Buchenau
See also Duden, Gottfried; Travel Literature, German-U.S.
References and Further Reading
Shlebitzki Pickle, Linda. “Women of the Saxon Immigration and Their Church.” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly 57 (1984): 146-151.