Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt

[1] Karg-Gasterstädt was the daughter of Karl Gasterstädt, a factory director from Swabia, and his wife, Sophie, née Schönleber.

Klara attended a teachers' college in Stuttgart from 1909 to 1912, and after graduation she was allowed to teach middle and higher grades.

[1] In 1918, Karg-Gasterstädt was employed as a librarian at the German Institute of the University of Leipzig and received her Ph.D. there in 1920 with a dissertation titled, On the History of the Origins of Parzival, which proposes "four different sound types" in the ancient Middle High German text written by knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach.

[2] She started work on her habilitation thesis for a postdoctoral degree but she abandoned that effort for reasons of time and health.

[1][5] On the occasion of her 75th birthday, the apolitical scholar was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the German Democratic Republic in silver.