Böhme, Margarete, 1869-1939

Margarete Böhme (8 May 1867 – 23 May 1939) was, arguably, one of the most widely read German writers of the early 20th century. Böhme authored 40 novels – as well as short stories, autobiographical sketches, and articles. The Diary of a Lost Girl, first published in 1905 as Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, is her best known and bestselling book. By the end of the 1920s, it had sold more than a million copies, ranking it among the bestselling books of its time. One contemporary scholar has called it “Perhaps the most notorious and certainly the commercially most successful autobiographical narrative of the early twentieth century.”