Notebook / Manuscript and typescript, 1990s
Lisel Mueller was born as Elisabeth Annelore Neumann in Hamburg in 1924. Her father is the politically engaged reform educator Fritz C. Neumann, who was dismissed from his teaching position after the Nazis seized power. In 1937, he travels to the USA for a temporary position. At Evansville College in Indiana, he secures a permanent position in 1938 – Elisabeth Annelore Neumann, her mother Ilse, and her sister Ingeborg move there. Elisabeth begins to study sociology in the USA and meets her future husband, Paul E. Mueller, on campus. A few years later, she enrolls at Indiana University in Bloomington and studies Comparative Literature. Her engagement with narrative and fairy tale research later becomes apparent in her poetry. When her mother dies in 1953, she, along with her husband Paul, moves in with her widowed father. She often refers to her mother’s death as the starting point for her poetic work. Four years later, she publishes her first poem. In 1958 and 1962, her daughters Lucy and Jenny are born. She begins to work as a poetry reviewer and co-founds the Chicago Poetry Center. Her father also passes away in 1976. Lisel Mueller died on February 21, 2020, in Chicago. Throughout her life, she received many important awards for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1997 for her poetry collection Alive together: New and selected Poems. The Deutsches Auswandererhaus was able to approach the life and work of Mueller in two ways: on one hand through her migration biography, and on the other hand through her poetry, which addresses migration-specific themes such as experiences of alienation, language acquisition, wishes to return, or memories of the homeland.
Typescript
