Ruth von Mayenburg (1907–1993)

Ruth von Mayenburg was born in Srbice, then in Bohemia, in the Sudetenland (now the Czech Republic). She grew up in a cosmopolitan, aristocratic family in the small town of Teplitz-Schönau. At age 13, she became secretly engaged to Hansi von Herder, a young man who later became a Nazi Party member and died in the Night of Long Knives.
Ruth studied architecture at the Technischen Hochschule Dresden (Technical University of Dresden). In 1930, she moved to Vienna, Austria, to live with a friend of her mother, Baroness Netka Latscher-Lauendorf, who was the companion of Theodor Körner, later president of Austria. Through this couple, Ruth was introduced to a circle of young socialists and intellectuals such as the writer Elias Canetti and Ernst Fischer, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, who influenced her political views. She and Fischer were married in 1932.

In 1934, Ruth and her husband took an active role in the February Uprising against Engelbert Dollfuss, the fascist chancellor of Austria, forcing them to flee the country. They first went to Czechoslovakia, where her husband got a job working for the press office of the Comintern. While in exile, Ruth became a member of the Communist Party of Austria (Kommunistische Partei sterreichs, or KPÖ), which was then outlawed. She then reportedly served as a spy for the Soviet secret service, traveling around Nazi Germany. In 1938, she and her husband escaped the Nazis to the Soviet Union and lived until 1945 in Moscow's Hotel Lux, which was then filled with international political émigrés.

During World War II, she served in the propaganda division of the Red Army. After the war, Ruth returned to Austria and became general secretary of the Austrian-Soviet Society. She worked as a screenwriter at Vienna Film. She and Fischer divorced in 1954.

In 1966, she resigned from the KPÖ and worked as a translator, while continuing her own writing. Her autobiographical novel Blaues Blut und Rote Fahnen (Blue Blood and Red Flags), was published in 1969. Her most famous work, Hotel Lux (1978), focused on life at the hotel, with details of the terror and betrayal experienced by the exile community during most of the 1930s and 1940s.