Hilde Spiel

Hilde Spiel (19 October 1911 – 30 November 1990) (pseudonyms: Grace Hanshaw and Jean Lenoir) was an Austrian writer and journalist who received numerous awards and honours.

Hilde Spiel was born in Vienna in October 1911, into an upper-class Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather lived in the 1st district of the capital, where he worked as a clerk. Her parents were Hugo F. Spiel, an engineering research chemist and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and Marie Spiel, née Gutfeld. For the first ten years of her life she lived in a garden apartment in Probusgasse in Heiligenstadt, in the 19th district, where her mother’s family had lived for generations, and then between Arenbergpark and Fasangasse in the 3rd district.

After passing her school-leaving examination at the famous Schwarzwald School, she studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, under Moritz Schlick among others. From 1933 to 1935 she worked at the Industrial Psychological Research Centre at the University of Vienna; in 1933 she joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (which was banned in 1934) and wrote her first two novels, Kati auf der Brücke and Verwirrung am Wolfgangsee. In 1936 she married the German writer Peter de Mendelssohn, who, like her, had emigrated to London that same year as a result of the rise of Nazism in their respective countries. The couple had met in Vienna and planned to marry in London, but Hilde Spiel delayed her departure until she had gained her doctorate in philosophy. Her final decision to leave her native city was reinforced by the politically motivated murder of Moritz Schlick by a former student.

On settling in London they had two children, Christine (later Shuttleworth), now a translator and indexer, and Felix de Mendelssohn, who became a psychoanalyst practising in Vienna and Berlin. In 1941, Hilde Spiel became a British subject, and from 1944 she contributed regularly to the New Statesman magazine.

On 30/31 January 1946, wearing British army uniform, she flew to Vienna in a military aircraft, as war correspondent for the New Statesman. Her declared intention was to 'compare my present life with my past, test my loyalty, and subject my powers of emotion to an experiment'. In Vienna she met, among others, the Czech painter Josef Dobrowsky, the Communist city councillor in charge of cultural affairs Viktor Matejka, and the young cultural critic Hans Weigel, who had returned from exile, and sought out the legendary intellectuals’ coffee house Café Herrenhof. She also visited refugee camps in Carinthia, and the Italian town of Udine, at that time also under British occupation.

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