Obert, Klara

Klara Obert was born 14 January 1896 in Brabander. She was the 7th of 9 children born to Johann Obert, a school teacher.

From early childhood, Klara was interested in the life, manners, and customs of peasants through their language, folk poetry. After graduating from the Saratov women's high school in 1914, she worked as a teacher in German schools in the Volga region.

While studying at the university under the guidance of Professors Georg Dinges and Andreas Dulzon,  she became inspired by Professor A. A. Heraclitov and began reserach into the folklore of the Volga Germans. In 1927, during the summer holidays, she collected 205 folk songs and 102 quatrains. The result of her work was the publication in 1928 in the magazine Wolgadeutschen Schulblatt of an article about a folk song in the village of Brabander "Das Volkslied im Dorfe Brabander".

In 1930, she graduated from the Department of German Philology at Saratov University. After graduation, she taught in the village of Mariental.

Along with her professional activities, she continued to collect quatrains, nursery rhymes, folk songs, and especially proverbs and sayings. By 1940, she had collected more than 1,000 proverbs and sayings (more than 500 in Russian). She compared the Russian sayings with the German ones and documented the origin of many Soviet German proverbs and sayings.

In 1940, she moved with her family to Saratov, where she taught German at the Planning Institute. During this period, she passed her candidate exams and wrote the dissertation “Die Wolgadeutschen Sprichwörter und Redensarten im Lichte der marxistischen Weltanschauung” (German-Volga Proverbs and Sayings in the Light of the Marxist Worldview). Her academic advisor was Prof. Dulzon.

Following deportation in 1941, she worked in agriculture and as a cleaner and embroiderer. From 1949 to 1956, she was able to work as a teacher. For a long time she lived and worked in Gorno-Uralsk, and then moved to Novosibirsk to live with her children.

At the age of 60, she left teaching and again took up folklore research. She collected about 2,000 proverbs and sayings recorded in a card index, a significant number of folk songs, quatrains, jokes, anecdotes, children's games with songs, a significant number of dialectisms and Russisms common among Russian Germans.

She was married to Peter Schmall. They had one son: Reinhold.

She died 2 September 1971 in Novosibirsk and was buried in the city cemetery of Novosibirsk on Sunday, 5 September 1971.

[Original research on Klara Obert authored by Alexander Spack.]