Gabriele Reuter

Gabriele Reuter was born on 8 February 1859 in Alexandria (then part of the Egypt Eyalet), where her father was an international merchant in the textile trade sector.

Reuter attended finishing school for a year, but then the family lost its entire fortune, due to the general recession in the international trading system and fraud in the dissolution of her father's business, and they moved to a small apartment in Neuhaldensleben.

The responsibility for younger brothers and her increasingly depressive mother led to Gabriele Reuter becoming unusually independent at an early age.

Toward the end of the 1880s or early in the 1890s, she first travelled independently to Berlin, Vienna and Munich, to various writers conferences, and made acquaintance with other artists of the time, among them the anarchist and poet John Henry Mackay, with whom she had a long-standing friendship, and Henrik Ibsen.

There, she established in the following years a new circle of friends (including Hans Olden and his wife Grete, Rudolf Steiner and Eduard von der Hellen), and read the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Ernst Haeckel.

The father was Bruno Ruttenaüer, which was not open knowledge in Gabriele's life, but revealed in an article by Ulrich Hauer, 'Gabriele Reuter.

In the thirty years she lived there, she published numerous novels, short stories, children's books and essays that took up the theme of gender and generational conflict.

After the end of the First World War she worked as a columnist for the Neue Freie Presse and in her last years as a reviewer for the New York Times.

Reuter's successful novel From a Good Family is influenced by the innovative literary movements of the late 19th Century, such as Realism and naturalism.