“Cheerful” is a word that writer Barbara Noack liked to say. However, the term is always frowned upon in Germany, she once told the German Press Agency.
And yet Noack inspired millions of readers and television viewers with cheerful stories, and two episodes of “Traumschiff” also bore her signature. There were book titles like “Holidays are nicer” or “It’s easier to guard against fleas”. Noack died on Tuesday in Munich at the age of 98, as the publisher Langen Müller announced to the dpa on Wednesday.
“The Zurich Engagement” was her first success
Her light literature was not well received at the beginning of her career, Noack recalled. The first manuscript she sent to a publisher came back “like a boomerang”. Her characters and stories were probably not serious and tragic enough. In 1955, however, she achieved a bestseller success with “The Zurich Engagement”, which was made into a prominent film in 1957. From then on things went uphill. The ZDF series “Der Bastian” – here she first wrote the screenplay, then the novel – became a huge success on TV.
She developed her sense for light, loose stories as a young girl, precisely 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”.
Horst Janson was “Der Bastian”
After the war, Noack went to the Berlin art school, worked as an illustrator and journalist. Since the 1950s she has been extremely successful with entertainment literature and also provided material for TV hits. “Der Bastian” (1973) with Horst Janson as the good-natured dream dancer as well as Lina Carstens and Karin Anselm are most memorable. The ZDF series reflected the lifestyle of the 1970s, as did Noack’s screenplay for the love series “Three are one too many”.
In the 1990s, Noack largely stopped writing. “I retired myself. I suspected that my typewriters would break down at some point and that I would be at odds with computers. I also smoked too much. I always needed a stimulant. I didn’t always feel like it to the desk, I had to.” 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. Publisher Michael Fleissner paid tribute to her: “She was an author of special kindness and friendship. Barbara Noack will not be forgotten.”
