Gisela Elsner

Gisela Elsner (2 May 1937, Nuremberg, Middle Franconia - May 13, 1992, Munich) was a German writer. She won the Prix Formentor in 1964 for her novel Die Riesenzwerge (The Dwarf Giant, Rowohlt, (Gallimard), 1961).

From 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.

In her 1970 novel Berührungsverbot (The touch ban or The prohibition of contact), 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.

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

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

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