Gerlinde Obermeier

Gerlinde Obermeier (1942-1984) was an extravagantly emotional writer with a powerful feminist perspective which extended into a critique of the mental health establishment as essentially oppressive.

She wrote "I Will Not" and "San Francisco, of Course" (or "Positively San Francisco" as she herself translated the title).

Obermeier has been credited by some critics with mystical insights in her writing. This perhaps makes too much of a visit to India. In 1976 she spent three weeks in India with Swami Paramananda Saraswati. This visit is detailed in Malachi O'Doherty's memoir, "I Was A Teenage Catholic". It seems more appropriate to read her explorations of madness as relating to a celebration of anarchic thinking than as grounded in Eastern religion.

She died by suicide in her early forties in Vienna in 1984.

See also: List of dramatists.