Christa Reinig was a German poet, fiction and non-fiction writer, and dramatist.
15 Facts About Christa Reinig
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2.
Christa Reinig began her career in the Soviet occupation zone which became East Berlin, was banned there, after publishing in West Germany, and moved to the West in 1964, settling in Munich.
3.
Christa Reinig's works are marked by black humor, and irony.
4.
Christa Reinig sold flowers on the Alexanderplatz in the 1940s.
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Christa Reinig made her literary debut in the late 1940s in the satirical magazine Ulenspiegel, at the urging of Bertolt Brecht; she had been working there as an editor.
6.
Christa Reinig was already involved in the West Berlin Gruppe Zukunftsachlicher Dichter, and continued to publish both poetry and stories with West German publishers.
7.
In 1964, after her mother's death, Christa Reinig travelled to West Germany to receive the Bremen Literature Prize and stayed there, settling in Munich.
8.
Christa Reinig had ankylosing spondylitis; she left her desk at the museum empty, except for an X-ray of her crooked spine.
9.
Christa Reinig died on 30 September 2008 in the Catholic care home, where she had moved at the start of that year.
10.
Christa Reinig left her papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar.
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Christa Reinig began as a lyric poet, and her voice is frequently allegorical and metaphysical, as well as characterised by black humor, irony, brash, life-affirming sarcasm, and an "extremely refined simplicity".
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Christa Reinig was known as a rebel, who went her own way.
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Christa Reinig felt like an outsider both in East Germany, despite her proletarian background, and in the feminist movement.
14.
Christa Reinig's first published short story came in 1946, "Ein Fischerdorf"; and between 1949 and 1951, she wrote stories about women living without men; however, for 25 years after that, until the autobiographical Die himmlische und die irdische Geometrie, a "pre-feminist" work in female voice, men were at the centre of her work.
15.
Christa Reinig's last publication, in 2006, was a volume of philosophical thoughts titled, Das Gelbe vom Himmel.