Status: 12/21/2022 2:32 p.m
Barbara Noack was one of the most successful authors of light literature in Germany. Many of her books have been made into films. She has now passed away at the age of 98.
The bestselling author Barbara Noack (“Der Bastian”) is dead. Her publisher Langen Müller told the dpa news agency. Accordingly, she died yesterday in Munich at the age of 98.
Noack was very successful with entertainment literature from the 1950s onwards and also provided 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. Her second novel, Die Zürcher Verlobung, was filmed in 1957 by Helmut Käutner with Liselotte Pulver, Paul Hubschmid and Bernhard Wicki. Two “Traumschiff” episodes also bore her signature.
Her entertainment literature was not well received at the beginning of her career, Noack once recalled in a conversation with the dpa news agency. The first manuscript she sent to a publisher came back “like a boomerang”. Her characters and stories were probably not serious and tragic enough.
One success after the other
“Heiter is always frowned upon in Germany,” Noack once said self-deprecatingly in a dpa interview. That didn’t stop her from having success after success with light-hearted novels.
She developed her sense for light, loose stories as a young girl – during her most difficult time during the Second World War in her hometown of Berlin. She wrote her first story when she was eleven, also to get away from the terrible experiences around her.
Noack processed her memories of this time in the early 1980s in “A handful of happiness” and “A piece of life”.
In the 1990s, Noack largely stopped writing:
I have retired myself. I suspected that my typewriters would eventually break down and that I would be at odds with computers. I also smoked too much. I always needed a stimulant. I didn’t feel like always being at my desk, I had to.
Lived at Lake Starnberg for a long time
She no longer wanted this “torture”. Noack, mother of a son, lived for many years at Lake Starnberg in Upper Bavaria. However, she spent her last years in a home in Munich, said a publisher’s spokesman.
“She was an author of special kindness and friendship. Barbara Noack will not be forgotten,” said her publisher Michael Fleissner.