Elisabeth Freundlich (1906–2001)

Elisabeth Freundlich was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. Her father Jacques Freundlich was a lawyer for the rising social-democratic movement and co-founder and president of the Arbeiterbank-AG (Labor Central Bank). While she was studying German and Romance languages, art history, and theater at the University of Vienna, she worked as a playwright at the Neues Wiener Schauspielhaus (New Vienna Playhouse).
In 1931, she was awarded a doctorate with her dissertation "Clemens Brentano and the Stage."
She also contributed articles to the magazine Die Wiener Weltbühne and drafted her first novel. She traveled frequently to Paris, where she attended courses at the Sorbonne and later became involved in aid committees for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. In 1938, Elisabeth and her family fled Austria after her father was banned from practicing law and put under house arrest by the Nazis. Eventually, they arrived in Paris, where Elisabeth founded the Fédération des Emigrés provenant d'Autriche (Federation of Austrian Emigrants) and worked as a journalist for magazines and radio.
In 1940, she managed to reach New York City via southern France and Spain; there she worked as a lecturer at colleges and universities and completed her training as a librarian at Columbia University. In 1943, she got a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she oversaw Austro-American exhibits. She married the philosopher Günther Anders, a German-Austrian Jewish émigré, in 1945. The couple returned to Vienna in 1950, where Elisabeth translated American literature and was a cultural correspondent for the daily Mannheimer Morgen and other German-language publications. For the Morgen, she covered the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials from 1963 to 1965. She had a breakthrough as a fiction writer late in life when her novel Der Seelenvogel (The Soul Bird), written in exile but rejected by Austrian publishers on her return, was published in 1986, when she was 80 years old. It was well received by the media and the public. Her novel Finstere Zeiten (Dark Times) and nonfiction work Die Ermordung einer Stadt namens Stanislau (The Murder of a City Named Stanislau) were published in the same year. She published other novels and collections of poetry and stories. In 1992, she published her memoirs under the title Die fahrenden Jahre (The Traveling Years). Elisabeth Freundlich Way in Vienna was named after her in 2009.