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.

In the last free elections in March 1933 Langgässer voted for Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

, but then during the Third Reich she was considered a half-Jew

Mischling

Mischling was the German term used during the Third Reich to denote persons deemed to have only partial Aryan ancestry. The word has essentially the same origin as mestee in English, mestizo in Spanish and métis in French...

 and therefore expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer (writer's union) in 1936.

Langgässer's daughter with a married Jewish man Hermann Heller

Hermann Heller (legal scholar)

Hermann Heller was a German legal scholar and philosopher of Jewish descent. He was active in the non-Marxist wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany during the Weimar Republic. He attempted to formulate the theoretical foundations of the social-democratic relations to the state, and...

, 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

The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

, she joined her mother in Sweden. Langgässer had been deemed "non-Aryan" (her father had converted from Judaism), but had subsequently upgraded her status to "German" by marrying a German with SS connections. Cordelia resisted the pressure from her mother to provide material for a death camp memoir, and married and had several children with a Swedish Protestant, becoming Cordelia Edvardson; quite unexpectedly, she emigrated to Israel at the height of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and wrote a searing autobiography, 'Burnt Child Seeks the Fire.' Elisabeth Langgässer became a noted Catholic

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 author. As such she was an influence on Pope Benedict XVI

Pope Benedict XVI

Benedict XVI is the 265th and current Pope, by virtue of his office of Bishop of Rome, the Sovereign of the Vatican City State and the leader of the Catholic Church as well as the other 22 sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches in full communion with the Holy See...

in his early years.