Sibylla Schwarz was the daughter of a distinguished family from Greifswald. In another source it is claimed that she was  the mayor‘s daughter of Greifswald. Her early childhood was relatively carefree till in 1627 the effects from the Thirty Years´ War reached her home Greifswald. 

When in 1630 her mother unexpectedly died, her father tried to keep their household going with three other children to care for: Sibylla`s  two older sisters Regina and Emerentia and her brother Christian. Her private education gave her comprehensive knowledge. Because of being very bored with having to stay at home all the time,  she translated poems from Dutch into German and so she came into connection with baroque poems. 

Already at the age of ten, she began to write poems about the war and her longing to go back to Fretow (Fretow was the paternal country estate near Greifswald where Sibylla spent a very happy childhood but which she had to leave because of the war). In addition,  she wrote poems for all sorts of occasions for different family festivities like christenings, weddings and the like. But the most important topics of her poems were the appreciation of friendship , love and death. The subtle love poem “Is love a fire?“ belongs to the latter category. Also, she often wrote about the people who disapproved of such a young girl writing poetry. 

In many of her poems her idol Martin Opitz, the author of the most famous German work of poetic theory of the 17th century, can be detected . On July 23 th, 1638, Sibylla fell ill with dysentery and died of the consequences one week later at the age of only 17. After 1650, her  works were published in two parts by her teacher Samuel Garlach (1609-1683) under the title “German Poems“. Today the name Sibylla Schwarz remains forgotten . In literary criticism she is considered a writer who still has to be detected. 

Katharina Schöffel and Kathrin Höck