Angelika Schrobsdorff (1927–2016)

Angelika Schrobsdorff was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Freiburg, Germany and grew up in Berlin. Her parents were Else Kirschner and Erich Schrobsdorff. In 1939, after her parents divorced, Angelika, her sister Bettina, and their mother fled the Nazis to Sofia, Bulgaria, where she remained until the end of World War II. Her maternal grandmother Minna Kirschner was murdered at the Nazi concentration camp at Terezín (Theresienstadt). In 1947, Schrobsdorff returned to Germany with her first husband, Edward S. Psurny, an American officer. In 1971, she remarried to French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and lived in Paris. Later they lived in Munich for a few years before emigrating to Israel. She returned to Germany again in 2006. Her debut novel, Die Herren (The Gentlemen), published in 1961, was considered scandalous and made her famous. She published another 10 novels and two collections of short stories, several of them about Bulgaria. Her memoir of her mother, Du bist nicht so wie andre Mütter (1992) was a bestseller and was adapted into a film for television in 1999. It was published in English in 2012 under the title You Are Not Like Other Mothers. Schrobsdorff acted in the German film Der Ruf (1949) and appeared in several films and television programs about her life, most notably in the German documentary Ausgerechnet Bulgarien (Bulgaria of all Places) by Christo Bakalski. Her half-brother Peter Schwiefert, who also fled Germany and was killed serving with the Free French forces in World War II, wrote letters to their mother published in book form as L'oiseau n'a plus d'ailes (The Bird Has No Wings, 1974), edited by Lanzmann.