Groth, KLAUS

Groth, KLAUS, a modern writer of Low German, was born at Heide in Holstein, 24th April 1819. After teaching for some time in his native village, he spent six years (1847-53) of literary activity in the island of Femern. It was at this time that he composed his masterpiece, Quickborn (1852, 15th ed. 1885), a collection of poems written in the Ditmarsh dialect, and dealing with life and nature in Ditmarsh, poems as fresh and simple as the subjects that inspired them. A continuation was published in 1871. Both in Quickborn and in the prose village tales Vertelln (1855-59) Groth used Low German with great skill and ease, and with a fine feeling for its artistic capabilities. His other works in the same dialect are Rohtgeter, Meister Lamp un sin Dochder (1862), an idyll; Voer de Goern (1858), children's rhymes; Ut min Jungsparadies (1876), three stories; and Drei Plattdeutsche Erzählungen (1881). He has also written poems in High German, Hundert Blätter (1854), which are not adjudged so successful as his Low German efforts. A warm lover of his native tongue, he claims for it a co-ordinate place with High German in the polity of languages, and has urged his views in Briefe über Hochdeutsch und Plattdeutsch (1858) and in Mundarten und Mundartige Dichtung (1873). After five years' wandering in Germany and Switzerland, Groth began to teach German language and literature at Kiel in 1858, and in 1866 was nominated professor of the same subjects at the university there. See Eggers, Klaus Groth und die plattdeutsche Dichtung (1885).