Agnes Miegel

Agnes Miegel
Agnes-Miegel-Denkmal in Bad Nenndorf
Born	(1879-03-09)9 March 1879 Königsberg, Germany
Died	26 October 1964(1964-10-26) (aged 85) Bad Salzuflen, Germany
Nationality	German

Agnes Miegel (9 March 1879 in Königsberg, East Prussia – 26 October 1964 in Bad Salzuflen, Germany) was a German author, journalist, and poet. She is best known for her poems and short stories about East Prussia, but also for the support she gave to the Nazi Party.

Agnes Miegel was born on 9 March 1879 in Königsberg into a Protestant family. Her parents were the merchant Gustav Adolf Miegel and Helene Hofer.

Miegel attended the Girls' High School in Königsberg and then lived between 1894 and 1896 in a guest house in Weimar, where she wrote her first poems. In 1898 she spent three months in Paris. In 1900 she trained as a nurse in a children's hospital in Berlin. Between 1902 and 1904 she worked as an assistant teacher in a girls' boarding school in Bristol, England. In 1904 she attended teacher training in Berlin, which she had to break off because of illness. She also did not complete a course at an agricultural college for girls near Munich. In 1906 she had to return to Königsberg to care for her sick parents, especially her father, who had become blind. Her mother died in 1913, her father in 1917.

As early as 1900 her first publications had drawn the attention of the writer Börries von Münchhausen. Her first bundle of poems was published thanks to his financial support. In later years he was still an untiring promoter of her work.

She lived in Königsberg until just before it was captured in 1945, and wrote poems, short stories and journalistic reports. She also made a few journeys. During the Third Reich she revealed herself as an ardent supporter of the regime. She signed the Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft, the 1933 declaration in which 88 German authors vowed faithful allegiance to Adolf Hitler. In the same year she joined the NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the Nazi Party. In 1940 she joined the Nazi party itself. In August 1944, in the final stages of World War II, she was named by Adolf Hitler as an "outstanding national asset" in the special list of the most important German artists who were freed from all war obligations.