Despite this explicit profession by Karl Christ, then employed with Munich cavalry captain Rittmeister Ewald Hornig, and his commitment to alimony, later contemporaries and biographers doubted his paternity.

This speculation was fed through Lena Christ's statement that her mother claimed her father went missing and lost his life in the sinking of the Cimbria on 19 January 1883 on route to America at the high seas.

Glonn's local chronicler Hans Obermair also noted that Karl Christ did emigrate to America, but only later, and he did arrive safely.

To avoid the hard labour and the outbursts of the mother, she decided in 1898 to enter the Premonstratensian abbey in Ursberg as candidate and teaching student, but left again after one-and-a-half years and returned to her parents' house.

She was found with slit wrists in the wine cellar of the parental inn and saved by her step-father, who did not mistreat her but neither protected her from her mother.

Notes and documents from the royal police department suggest that Lena Christ occasionally prostituted herself at this time, to secure the livelihood for herself and the children.

In March 1911 she was sentenced of procuration and in June 1911 of professional fornication by Munich's court of lay assessors to four weeks of arrest each.

In September 1912 her debut book Erinnerungen einer Überflüssigen (remembrances of an unnecessary one) came out at the publisher Albert Langen under the name of Lena Christ, which she used for all other publications.

In it she portrayed in unusually drastic words her life, the shattered relationship to her mother and the human and sexual tragedies of her marriage.

The book was not initially successful, but was praised by literary criticism and an amicable contact with Ludwig Thoma, Wilhelm Langewiesche and Korfiz Holm began.

In it she describes the unscrupulous attempts of Johanna Rumpl, cook from Öd (close to Schönau near Bad Aibling), to achieve social advancement and independence.

Through Benedix, at readings in the military hospital in 1918, she made the acquaintance of the young singer and war invalid Ludwig Schmidt, née Lodovico Fabri as son of German parents in Italy, and fell in love with him.

Fallen into economic hardship, she signed valueless pictures with the names of well-known painters, sold them and thus got into conflict with the law for forgery.

Among other things it is impressive how she assimilated her own observations and experiences into her books, which give a deep insight into the poor life of the working class, domestics and rural population at the beginning of the 20th century.

Another contemporary representative of this type of regional literature critical of society, Emerenz Meier, has passed into obscurity in comparison.

Regional historian Maria Sedlmaier wrote about Lena Christ: Her books are full of love of her country, the material she drew from her homeland, she was a very demotic writer, knew masterly how to romance, concise in diaglogue gripping, exciting, full of humour and wit, but at times somewhat profane.

Münchner Neueste Nachrichten wrote eleven years after Lena Christ's death: if she had not left the racing track ahead of time, she would today probably be the most famous poet of Bavaria, would stand in one front with the best names of the new German narrative.

[2]: 55  Literary critic Werner Mahrholz named her as purely poetically perhaps next to Annette Droste the greatest, strongest, most sensual talent of all our literature.

[2] Biographer Marita Panzer stated that Lena Christ had produced a considerable opus in the short time span of eight years, which gains recognition until today.

That many reviewers assigned her to the Heimatkunst (de) movement due to her peasant parentage and use of Bavarian idiom, Panzer saw as incorrect, however.

The home, the village, the peasantry Lena Christ in no way portrayed as an idyll, but described a hard, hierarchical reality, violence and bigotry.

Gunna Wendt describes in her biography that for Lena Christ writing was a "line of escape", which allowed her to not just suffer her live passively, but to shape it actively.

As representative of the conservative-traditionalistic Heimatkunst movement he declared Lena Christ to a "primitive-childlike woman", whose art of storytelling was "instinctive".

[1]: 58  Dominik Baur points out that Benedix, despite to his credit having recognized Lena Christ's talent, and also having disadviced her against typical heimat literature in the vein of Thoma und Ganghofer, but rather having pointed her to representatives of realism like Jeremias Gotthelf and Gottfried Keller, was an "unpleasant type", an ambivalent if not shady character.