- Lenka Reinerová
Lenka Reinerová (IPA2|ˈlɛŋka ˈrajnɛrovaː) (
May 17 ,1916 –June 27 2008 ) was an author from theCzech Republic who wrote exclusively in German. She was born inPrague .Life
Reinerová grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family, her mother a German-Bohemian from
Saaz (Žatec) and her father an ironware dealer from Prague. Prior toWorld War II , she worked as a translator, an interpreter and an editor for the "Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung". She fled toParis in 1938 and later travelled toMorocco . She was visiting Mexico with the journalist and writerEgon Erwin Kisch in March 1939 and was the only member of her family to survive theHolocaust . She returned to what was thenCzechoslovakia after 1948. In the 1950s, she was jailed by Czechoslovakia'sStalinist authorities and spent 15 months in prison; she recorded this experience in one of her novels, "Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nacht ". After her release she published sporadically. Beginning in 1968, she was not allowed to publish at all until the fall ofcommunism . Her works are mostly published at Aufbau Verlagsgruppe,Berlin .On January 25, 2008, a speech Reinerová wrote but could not longer deliver personally due to ill health was read in German parliament in the course of an hour of remembrance for the victims of the Nazi regime.
In 1999, she was awarded the
Schiller Prize . In 2003, she won the prestigiousGoethe Medal .Reinerova had been largely a recluse ever since a spell in hospital in 2007, with the cause of her death not immediately known. Lucie Cernhousova, head of Literaturhaus, the Prague publisher of German-language writers, disclosed her death.
Reinerova, the oldest living German-language writer in Prague, died
June 27 ,2008 , in Prague, in her apartment, at 92.fact|date=July 2007References
External links
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article4257119.ece The Times: Lenka Reinerova: the last survivor of the "Prague German" writers]
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