Susanne Faschon
Susanne Faschon, who would have celebrated her 100th birthday in 2025, spent the last years of her life in Jakobsweiler on the Donnersberg. She is remembered by many here in the district for her sensual and soulful dialect poems, her "Pälzer Sprich zum Sunndag" in the 'Sonntag aktuell' newspaper, and her numerous stories and radio plays. She was a member of the LVP and its advisory board.
The 2006 Donnersberg Yearbook, which can be obtained from the Donnersberg Tourist Association, was dedicated to Susanne Faschon. We are pleased to present here the contribution by her sister, Ingeborg Michno:
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Susanne Margarete Reuter was born on 3 May 1925, at 8 p.m., in Kaiserslautern. The fact that she was born on a Sunday is a pleasant detail for those familiar with her biography, perhaps allowing them to draw conclusions about her life, e.g. the gallows humour that never left her throughout her life, even under the most adverse circumstances, which, in her later, more mature years, coupled with iron self-discipline, her trust in God and her zest for life enabled her to pass on her strength both to her last two husbands (she outlived three in total) and to all those who sought comfort from her. She did this in personal conversations, in her poetry collections and, in the early 1990s, in the "Pälzer Sprisch zum Sunndag" published in "Sonntag aktuell", for which she had her own "fan community".
She was a very sensitive, thoughtful child, probably because
her childhood could not be described as happy.
Susanne Faschon as a child
Susanne Faschon, aged 18, with her younger sister
In 1944, she graduated with top marks from the Höhere Weibliche Bildungsanstalt (HWB) in Kaiserslautern, receiving the Scheffel Prize for outstanding linguistic achievements.
Susanne would have liked to become a teacher, but in 1947 she married the gravestone sculptor Rudolf Faschon. In 1948, her daughter Viola was born, who would later give her two granddaughters. Poor economic conditions meant that she had to support most of the family as a stenographer in Ramstein. She could only write poetry at night, in a corner of the kitchen table that she had cleared for herself.
In 1953, her first poetry collection, Das Blumenjahr (The Flower Year), was published. In 1956, she won first prize in the Bockenheim dialect competition, on whose jury she served from 1960 to 1995. Since 1958, she has been the local chairwoman of the re-established Literary Association (which had been "brought into line" during the Third Reich) and "ploughed the stony ground of artistic Kaiserslautern" (quote from S. F. 1978). "We – the poets – met in private gatherings in my much too small living room on Ebertstraße, but it was also nice and there were never enough coffee cups and we read to each other and sometimes got very heated" (from a letter to Marliese Fuhrmann in 1994).
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In 1959, Kein Spiel für Träumer (No Game for Dreamers) was published as the annual gift of the Literary Association of the Palatinate. The philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote of the poems Schachvariation (Chess Variation) and Der lange Tag (The Long Day) contained therein: "This is highly talented, in no way amateurish, full of linguistic and bold visual culture." In 1960, Susanne Faschon was elected second chairwoman of the Rhineland-Palatinate Writers' Association, whose board she served on until 1984 with a brief interruption.
Since the late 1950s, she has worked as executive secretary to Carl Maria Kiesel, director of the Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, who was persecuted during the Third Reich and returned home after emigrating. Through her encounters with numerous contemporary artists and her intensive engagement with modern art, her time at the Pfalzgalerie (until 1965) proved decisive for her further development, both artistically and personally.
In 1965, she left Kaiserslautern and moved to Mannheim, where she worked at the Scientific Book Society, the Reiß Museum and finally the Scientific City Library.
In 1968, she married C.M. Kiesel, who was 22 years her senior, and moved to Bischofsheim near Mainz. She became a librarian and clerk at Südwestfunk in Mainz and remained there until her retirement in 1984.
Kiesel's death in 1971 brought her poetic work to a halt until she met her third husband, Hans Stirn, in 1973. He became Susanne's "medium", as she called him, who, even in his capacity as professor of sociology and business administration at the University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, as an author of scientific books and articles, with his cheerful and positive attitude to life, gave impetus to her most fruitful and versatile creative period. They married in 1974 and lived in Hochheim am Main. In 1978, Susanne Faschon was awarded the Palatinate Prize for Literature. In the same year, the couple discovered their holiday home in Jakobsweiler am Donnersberg. Hans Stirn became the main character in "Traum von Jakobsweiler. Geschichten vom Glück mit Johannes" (Dream of Jakobsweiler. Stories of Happiness with Johannes), published in 1980.
In the early 1980s, Johannes fell ill with cancer. Susanne gave him strength and hope through her love poems. Love cannot cure illness, but it can alleviate fears and show your partner that they remain your beloved and are not reduced to being a patient.
The original High German version of these poems was not published until 1994 by the Frankfurt publishing house Brandes & Apsel.
The texts, which were transferred into the Palatinate dialect and mostly written at the same time, were published in 1988 by the Pfälzische Verlagsanstalt Landau, illustrated with drawings by Karl Unverzagt. This book, entitled "Mei Gedicht is mei Wohret" (My poem is my truth), uses gentle, sensual language to raise awareness of this tragic topic, which had hardly been addressed in dialect poetry before.
Johannes Stirn died in 1986. Now the line from one of Susanne's poems came true: "The power of goodness lives on." She reached into her bag of tricks and intensified her hobby of collecting dollhouses. Sorting through and restoring the rare items she had collected, together with her sister, who was also an avid collector, helped her cope with her grief. She organised a total of ten exhibitions, including the Christmas exhibition at the district office in Kirchheimbolanden in 1987.
In 1993, Susanne Faschon herself fell ill with bowel cancer. She was given a year to live. She ended up living for two years, which she used intensively to "bring in her most important harvest," as she called it. She was able to publish three more books: the above-mentioned poetry collection "Sommers Ende" (End of Summer) in 1994, "Altweiwersummer" (Indian Summer), dialect poems in 1994, and "Prinzessin Maultasch" (Princess Maultasch), with autobiographical stories. On her 70th birthday on 3 May 1995, she threw a big party for her large circle of friends and acquaintances in Jakobsweiler. She wanted to see her loved ones gathered around her during her lifetime, not just at her funeral.
At the beginning of October of the same year, she collapsed and succumbed to cancer on 25 October 1995 in a hospital in Wiesbaden. She was laid to rest next to her beloved Johannes in the idyllic cemetery in Jakobsweiler.
This text, which is mainly based on a special edition about Susanne Faschon's life, can be downloaded here:
Donnersberg Yearbook 2008, pp. 134–137
Christiane Stephani has reflected on Susanne Faschon's poem: Poor Snow White
An essay on the disappearance of a classmate
The quickest overview of the Donnersberg Literature Days and their connection to Susanne Faschon can be found on Wikipedia:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnersberger_Literaturtage
And, of course, there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to Susanne Fachon herself:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanne_Faschon