Although some of her earlier work employed standard "Hochdeutsch" German, she is better remembered today for her poetry and prose texts written in the Upper Saxon dialect.

After she grew up Lene Voigt also recalled a period of her childhood when she was sent away to live with a church minister in a small mining village in the Erzgebirgischer mountain region, near the border with Bohemia and to the south of Leipzig.

Between 1917 and the end of February 1919 Lene Voigt was employed as a sales representative by Insel Verlag (publishers): her departure was greatly regretted by Anton Kippenberg, the head of the business.

[1] Living alone and without permanent work, Lene Voigt faced a compounding tragedy on 6 February 1924 when Alfed died from Tubercular Meningitis.

In Saxony Martin Mutschmann, the regional governor ("Gauleiter") established the "Heimatwerk Sachsen – Verein zur Förderung des sächsischen Volkstums e. V." (loosely, "...association for promoting Saxon popular culture and identity") in 1936.

The "Heimatwerk Sachsen" existed till 1945, intended to inspire the entire region of Saxony to identify with the National Socialist state.

There was no longer any place for "Saxon comedy, joke makers and jewifying literati" ,[a] which had simply led to "mutilation of the language in Saxony" ("Verschandelung der sächsischen Sprache").

The security services were only too well aware that she not only wrote texts using Upper Saxon dialect, but that before 1933 she had also worked with politically left-leaning publications and that she had openly asserted her atheism.

[1][3][4] It is not known why Lene Voigt relocated to Munich in 1937, but her reasons for leaving the city are apparent: the newspaper of the local Nazi paramilitaries (SA) launched a press campaign against her, ostensibly in connection with an Upper Saxon dialect card-game.

President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin had already agreed a postwar military settlement for the western two thirds of Germany which would divide the territory into four separate occupation zones.

[1] With the twelve year National Socialist period at an end, Lene Voigt might hope for better times ahead, and indeed her texts were included in "Die Rampe", Leipzig's first postwar cabaret show.

[3] Due to the shortage of capacity at the University Clinic Voigt was transferred, on 26 June 1946, to the Saxony-Altscherbitz District Hospital ("Landesheilanstalt Altscherbitz"): gradually her condition improved and she returned to her writing.

The Saxony-Altscherbitz District Hospital was a specialist establishment for psychiatric and nervous disorders which even by the standards of the time and place had a terrible record.

Coming across this work prompted Dietfried Müller-Hegemann (1910-1989), one of the hospital physicians who had overseen her treatment, to investigate Voigt's case further and to correct the "Schizophrenic episodes" diagnosis which had led to her hospitalisation the previous June.

It was now determined that in response to the exceptionally burdensome life events to which she had been subjected, she had become ill with repeating "Reactive Psychosis" (wiederholt "Reaktive Psychose").

In 1966, after he had retired from the hospital (and after Lene Voigt herself had died), Müller-Hegemann published a "Textbook for psychiatry and neurology" in which he wrote up the case in some detail.

As a result, among several generations of students and practitioners of Psychiatric Medicine Lene Voigt became as well known (or better known) as the subject of a celebrated case study as she was as a published author and poet of German-language and Upper Saxon dialect texts.

[b] By August 1949 the acute phase of her condition had subsided, but she expressed reluctance to leave the hospital because she thought she might be unable to manage with life's daily demands if she were to go back to living on her own.

Hospital administrators from that time would remember her as an exceptionally well read woman with an intense interest in current events and a strong willingness to engage in conversation.

It was only in 1985 that a gravestone was placed over her grave, and only in 2002 that her remains were disinterred and reburied with other distinguished citizens in the "Artists' Section" ("Künstlerabteilung") of the Leipzig Südfriedhof (South Cemetery).

Between 1923 and 1926 she was also writing for the "Proletarische Heimstunden",[14] a short-lived anti-militarist magazine, her work displaying a style of casual inconsequential humorous journalism that rapidly disappeared after 1933 and has never really returned.

[1] More recent studies of Lene Voigt tend to focus only on her better known works: Upper Saxon dialect variants of ballads and other literary classics.

Lauter gleenes Zeich zum Vortragen" (2 volumes, 1928), *In Sachsen gewachsen" (1932), "Die sächsische Odyssee" (1933) and "Leibzcher Lindenblieten" (1935).

Alongside these dialect works, she also published the autobiographical narrative "Mally der Familienschreck (1927)" and a travel novel, "Vom Pleißestrand nach Helgoland" (1934) in German before the publication ban came into effect.

[1][17] Except at the most acute phases of her illness Lene Voigt never stopped writing, even after 1949 when the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and she herself moved into the Psychiatric Clinic where she would spend her final thirteen years.

As East Germany approached its own time of decisive changes the focus of editors tended increasingly to concentrate on Voigt's more overtly political texts.

Since 1990 there has been an emergence of so-called Ostalgie, whereby people express nostaligia for what was good about the German Democratic Republic (1949-1989) without (in most cases) seeking to downplay the political repression and economic failings that led to its collapse.

Part of "Ostalgie" has been a booming interest in political cabaret which before totalitarianism was always more celebrated in the central industrial cities such as Berlin and Leipzig than further west.

Three stars and scholars from he world of cabaret in Leipzig who have shown particular commitment to reviving the poetry and lyrics written by Lene Voigt are Bernd-Lutz Lange, Tom Pauls and Gisela Oechelhaeuser.

The non-profit organisation has followed in her tracks and, in particular, worked to identify and draw attention to all the many Leipzig apartments and other homes and institutions in which she lived during a somewhat unsettled life.