Elisabeth Langgässer

Who was Elisabeth Langgässer?

Elisabeth Langgässer was a German author and teacher. She is known for lyrical poetry and novels. Her short story 'Saisonbeginn,' for example, provides a graphically human portrayal of a 1930s German Alpine village erecting a sign forbidding the entry of Jews.

Langgässer was born in Alzey. In the last free elections in March 1933 Langgässer voted for Adolf Hitler, but then during the Third Reich she was considered a "half-Jew" and therefore expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1936.

Langgässer's daughter with a married Jewish man Hermann Heller, Cordelia, spent the war years in Auschwitz after her mother's attempt to improve her racial status by marrying her to a Catholic army officer from Spain failed. Told that a confession would save her mother from prosecution, the 12-year-old Cordelia willingly went to live in a ghetto hospital. After surviving the Holocaust, she joined her mother in Sweden. Langgässer had been deemed "non-Aryan", but had subsequently upgraded her status to "German" by marrying a German with SS connections.