Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Hermynia Zur Mühlen (12 December 1883 – 20 March 1951), or Folliot de Crenneville-Poutet, was an Austrian writer and translator. She translated over seventy books into German from English, Russian and French, including work by Upton Sinclair, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, Harold Nicolson, Max Eastman and Edna Ferber. She has been characterised as "one of the best known women writers of the Weimar Republic." A committed socialist from a Viennese aristocratic Catholic family, she was sometimes called the Red Countess.

Life The Countess Folliot de Crenneville, born as Hermine Isabelle Maria Gräfin Folliot de Crenneville in Vienna, was the great-granddaughter of Louis Charles Folliot de Crenneville, a French-born general who fought for the Habsburg monarchy in the Napoleonic Wars. Her paternal grandfather was Franz Folliot de Crenneville, Knight in the Order of the Golden Fleece. She was also a great-great-granddaughter of Victoire de Folliot de Crenneville, the royal governess of Marie Louise, Empress of the French. Her maternal grandfather was the diplomat Ferdinand, Count von Wydenbruck, who had married a politically liberal woman from the Anglo-Irish gentry. Growing up in the Governorate of Estonia, where her father was a diplomat, she was sent aged 30 to a pulmonary sanatorium in Davos. Here she began a career of translation into German, translating an anti-war novel by Leonid Andreyev, and in 1918 King Coal by Upton Sinclair. An unhappy marriage to Viktor von zur Mühlen, a conservative German landowner, was officially ended in 1923. By this time, she had met Stefan Klein, a German Jew and fellow translator who would be her partner for the rest of her life. It was banned after eventually finding a publisher in 1936. With the Anschluss of 1938, Zur Mühlen and Klein left for Bratislava, where they married. After the German occupation of Bohemia in March 1939, they had to escape again; via Budapest, Yugoslavia, Italy, Switzerland, and France, they reached London on 19 June 1939. In London, Zur Mühlen scraped a precarious living from journalism. The two novels she wrote in England - Ewiges Schattenspiel and Als der Fremde kam - seem to have been part of an intended trilogy. She died in obscurity in Radlett, Hertfordshire.

Works Schupomann Karl Müller (1924) Fairy tales for workers' children Chicago, Ill., Daily Worker Pub. Co. 1925 Unsere Töchter, die Nazinnen Our Daughters, the Nazis (1935). "Unsere Töchter die Nazinen." A Synopsis in English, With an Introduction. By Lionel Gossman, Princeton University. We Poor Shadows (1943) Came the Stranger (1946) The Castle of Truth and Other Revolutionary Tales (Princeton, 2020), ed. and trans. by Jack Zipes