Critics accused her of eating too lightly. But the success simply proved Barbara Noack right. Her stories like “Der Bastian” or “Die Zürcher Verlobung” hit the mark with the audience. The writer, who was born in 1924, has now died.
Bestselling author Barbara Noack is dead. This was announced by her publisher Langen Müller. Accordingly, she died on Tuesday in Munich at the age of 98.
Noack was extremely successful with entertainment literature from the 1950s onwards and also wrote material for TV hits such as “Der Bastian” (1973) with Horst Janson, Lina Carstens and Karin Anselm. The ZDF series met the lifestyle of the 1970s. Noack first provided her with the screenplay, which she later adapted into a novel.
Her second novel, Die Zürcher Verlobung, was filmed in 1957 by Helmut Käutner with Liselotte Pulver, Paul Hubschmid and Bernhard Wicki. “Heiter is always something frowned upon in Germany,” said Noack in 2009 self-deprecatingly in an interview that the German Press Agency conducted with her at the time on the occasion of her 85th birthday. That didn’t stop her from having success after success with light-hearted novels.
However, the way there was rocky, Noack explained in the interview from 2009. “I actually fought for years with my books against resistance from the publishers and the people responsible,” she said at the time and added: “The first book that I sent in came back like a boomerang every time. I wasn’t serious enough for everyone, I didn’t dig deep, and my characters didn’t have tragic fates.”
Noack revealed that she developed her passion for light stories in the worst time of her life – as a girl in Berlin during the Second World War. “Then the war came and you couldn’t get away from the terrible things. I wrote myself nice stories about young people who were allowed to live in peace without a care in order to forget the horrors around me”, Noack looked back, who started writing when she was eleven.
The author looked at her many years of work extremely soberly. “Writing was actually my job. I was never a writer with a crown of laurels. It was my profession,” she said. She often had to force herself to write. That ended in the 1990s.
“I retired myself. I had a suspicion that my typewriters would break down at some point and that I would be at odds with computers,” Noack blurted out. And further: “I also smoked too much. I always needed a stimulant. I didn’t feel like working at my desk all the time, I had to. And I don’t want this torture anymore. I think it’s wonderful when I’m in this morning Have breakfast in peace and read the newspaper and nobody will rush me.”
Noack was married twice and had a son. Her publisher Michael Fleissner now paid tribute to her after her death: “She was an author of exceptional kindness and friendship. Barbara Noack will not be forgotten.”
