Johanne Buchardt was a writer from Salling, known at the time as “the poor seamstress from Rødding”. Buchardt published 6 novels, five of them with a contemporary and social realist aim.
Life
Buchardt was born at Skive Fattiggård, but when her mother was unable to care for her, Buchardt became the foster daughter of tailor Anton Godsk in Vejby. With the Godsk family, Buchardt lived a relatively ordinary life and formed a strong bond with the family’s daughter Mariane Godsk. Yet the role of foster child haunted Buchardt throughout her life. She was educated at Vejby School, but she was responsible for her own education by reading history, art history and modern Danish writers.
After her youth in Vejby, Buchhardt wandered around and worked in various Jutlandic towns, but settled down as a seamstress in Rødding with her sister Mariane Godsk.
In Rødding, Buchardt began to write herself and published her first short story “En pige gaar forbi” in Skive Folkeblad on November 16, 1936. She subsequently published more of these short stories, but it was with the publication of her first novel in 1941 that she would put herself on the map. After her debut novel was well received, Buchardt and her sister moved to Skive, where Buchardt then lived as a writer.
In the time after the first novel, Buchardt wrote one novel after another at a very fast pace. Buchardt had a lot on her mind and was hospitalized a few months before her death for bad nerves, but died by her own hand in 1948.
Buchardt’s novels
Buchardt’s novels are social realist, based on herself and the world that surrounded her. Buchardt herself expressed this as a desire to depict the people she saw, and not with a desire to criticize the conditions that existed.
Especially in the later novels, there was a focus on the new reality of the city and how women coped with the new reality. Buchardt describes how Denmark has become more uniform and the unique hometown is in retreat.
Bibliography
- Born to Graad – 1941
- Fields of God and Men – 1942
- There is no turning back – 1944
- The Road to the North – 1945 (written in 1943 but banned by Nazi German censors)
- The House Under the Stars – 1946
- The Wind and the Cherry Tree – 1948
Sources
- Mortensen, Karen Elna “Johanne Buchardt – en forfatterstemme fra provinsen” Skivebogen 1992, Skive offset 1992
- Skive Folkeblad, 16/6-1948