Lenka Reinerova, the oldest German-language writer in Prague, died Friday June 27, 2008 in Prague, in her apartment at the age of 92

Lenka Reinerová (b. May 17, 1916, Prague) was the author living in the Czech Republic who wrote exclusively in German.

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 to World War II, she worked as a translator, an interpreter and an editor for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. She fled to Paris in 1938 and later travelled to Morocco. She was visiting Mexico with the journalist and writer Egon Erwin Kisch in March of 1939, and was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. She returned to what was then Czechoslovakia after 1948. In the 1950's, she was jailed by Czechoslovakia's Stalinist authorities and spent 15 months in prison, experiences recorded in one of her novels, Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nachtand. After her release she published sporadically. After 1968, she was not allowed to publish at all until the fall of Communism. Her works are mostly published at Aufbau Verlagsgruppe, Berlin.

On January 25, 2008, Lenka Reinerová delivered a speech in the German Bundestag, which was part of an hour of remembrance for the victims of the NS-Regime.

In 1999, she was awarded the Schiller Prize. In 2003, she won the prestigious Goethe 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.

This post was last modified: 06-28-2008 06:29 AM by admin.