Lenka Reinerová

Lenka Reinerová

Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008) was born in Prague and is considered the last Czech writer in the German language. An essential voice of Prague's culture and literary scene, a friend of Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Werfel, she worked as a journalist for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung from 1936. When the Nazi troops invaded Czechoslovakia, Reinerová fled to France. After a brief stint in a Paris prison, she was interned in the Rieucros women's camp until 1941, when she was granted permission to leave the country. After passing through Marseille and Casablanca, she ended up in Mexico, where she lived for several years and made friends with, among others, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and some of the Spanish exiles there. After the war, she returned with her husband to Europe, first to Belgrade, and from 1948 to her native Prague. In the early 1950s he fell victim to Stalinist purges and spent fifteen months in pretrial detention, an experience he recounted more than half a century later in All the Colours of the Sun and the Night (2004). His books include Das Traumcafé einer Pragerin (1996), Mandelduft (1998) and Närrisches Prag (2005). In 1999 he received the Schillerring Prize from the Schiller Foundation and in 2003 he was awarded the Goethe Medal.