ed a part of her youth
in eastern Germany, in Posen, the birthplace of her parents. After her
father's death she came to Berlin to study music; here she became a
writer, and now she is living as the wife of her publisher in the
suburb of Zehlendorf. Her spiritual experiences are perhaps most
clearly set forth in the novel _Long Live Art_ (1899). The passionate
struggles of a young authoress for literary success lead after many
disappointed hopes and many disillusionments to the attainment of
genuine good fortune in art and in domestic life as well. On her native
heath the despairing woman is cured of her despair--this typifies all
the work of Clara Viebig, which reveals itself as pure _Heimatkunst_ in
advance of the time when this label gained currency. To be sure, it is
a triple home that Clara Viebig can call her own, the Rhine country,
eastern Germany, and Berlin. As might be expected, the memories of
childhood left the most lasting effect upon her. The Eifel, that bleak
plateau between the Moselle and the Rhine, with its broad melancholy
heaths and bald craters of extinct volcanoes, with its dark lakes and
lonely forests, is the district with which she is most familiar. The
hard-headed, moody, quick-tempered peasants, whose stubbornness befits
the volcanic origin of their mountains, appear in her first collection
of short stories, _Children of the Eifel_ (1897). In the Eifel is
situated the _Women's Village_ (1900), all the men of which seek their
livelihood overseas, so that all the women swarm about the only man
left at home, a cripple. The novel _John Miller_ (1903) treats the
tragedy of a rich man of the Eifel who goes to ruin in pride and blind
presumption; _The Cross in the Venn_ (1908) deals with the religious
life of this district. The scene of the novel _The Watch on the Rhine_
(1902) is Duesseldorf, where the difficult process of amalgamation
between Prussians and Rhinelanders, first accomplished in 1870, is
illustrated in the wedded life of a Prussian sergeant and the daughter
of a Duesseldorf innkeeper. The struggle of racial incompatibilities
which is here depicted with the most matter-of-fact objectivity, and
which in a series of merry _genre_ pictures is brought to a happy
conclusion, is carried in another work to a frightfully serious tragic
ending. _The Sleeping Host_ (1904) takes us to the Prussian province of
Posen and shows the effect of strife between German and Slavic
elements, in the fate of Rh