Elisabeth Langgässer
Elisabeth Langgässer · Arts & Literature
Catholic poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent, silenced by the Nazis and author of The Indelible Seal, whose daughter survived Auschwitz
23 février 1899, Alzey, Hesse rhénane, Allemagne — 25 juillet 1950, Karlsruhe, Allemagne
Alzey, Berlin, Rheinzabern
Elisabeth Langgässer is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Catholic poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent, silenced by the Nazis and author of The Indelible Seal, whose daughter survived Auschwitz
Origins and early life
Elisabeth Langgässer was born in Alzey, in Rhenish Hesse, on 23 February 1899; her father, the architect Eduard Langgässer, had been born a Jew and converted to Catholicism at his marriage to her mother, a Catholic, and she was raised and remained a devout Catholic — which did not prevent the Nuremberg laws from classifying her as a 'Mischling of the first degree', a half-Jew, and this fiche states her Jewish ancestry exactly as the persecution defined it.
Work and career
A schoolteacher in Hesse, she published her first poems in 1924 and in 1929 gave birth to a daughter, Cordelia, whose father was the Jewish constitutional jurist Hermann Heller; her novels Proserpina and Der Gang durch das Ried made her a leading Catholic writer of the early thirties. In 1936 the Reich Chamber of Literature expelled her and forbade her to publish; in 1944 she was sent to forced labour in a munitions factory, and her daughter, a 'full Jew' under the law, was deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz.
Cordelia survived and was brought to Sweden by the Red Cross; as Cordelia Edvardson she became a journalist and wrote of it in Burned Child Seeks the Fire. Langgässer's great novel Das unauslöschliche Siegel, The Indelible Seal, the story of a baptized Jew's struggle for grace, appeared in 1946 and made her, briefly, the most discussed writer of post-war Germany; Märkische Argonautenfahrt followed in 1950. Ill with multiple sclerosis, she died on 25 July 1950 at Karlsruhe, and the Georg Büchner Prize of that year was awarded to her posthumously.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/langgasser-elisabeth-1899-1950
This page is published in seven languages from an English source. The translations are reviewed, but a mistake can still slip through. If you spot one on this profile — a wrong word, a lost date, a sentence that says something the English does not — please tell us.
Catholic poet and novelist of Jewish paternal descent, silenced by the Nazis and author of The Indelible Seal, whose daughter survived Auschwitz
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/langgasser-elisabeth-1899-1950
Similar Contributors
Paul von Heyse
Aviva Cantor
Boris Pasternak
Jane Yolen
Jo Sinclair
