Gisela Elsner


Gisela Elsner was a German writer. She won the Prix Formentor in 1964 for her novel Die Riesenzwerge.

Life

Elsner was born in Nuremberg, Middle Franconia. In 1959 she went to Vienna to study philosophy, Germanic letters and drama. Then she lived as a freelance writer in various places: Lake Starnberg, Frankfurt, from 1963 to 1964 in Rome, from 1964 to 1970 in London, then in Paris, Hamburg, New York and finally in Munich.
She was among the members of Group 47, which also included Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll.

The touch ban

In her 1970 novel Berührungsverbot, several couples try to transcend the limits of the bourgeois sexual mores of their middle-class background by engaging in group sex orgies. In Switzerland a journal that published excerpts from the novel was seized, and in Austria it was attacked as harmful to children.

Politics

Elsner described herself as a Leninist. She was a long lasting member of the German Communist Party.

Death

Elsner committed suicide by jumping out of a window, in Munich, in May 13, 1992.

Film

A dramatized film about her life, No Place to Go, was made by her son Oskar Roehler.