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.

Biography Youth in Vienna Hilde Spiel was born in Vienna in October 1911, into a prosperous assimilated and apostatized Jewish family. Her paternal grandfather had attained a level of prominence in Vienna as a salesman, living in the 1st district of the capital. were Hugo F. Spiel, an engineering research chemist and an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I, and Marie (née Gutfeld). For the first ten years of her life she lived in a garden apartment in Probusgasse in the prestigious Heiligenstadt, in the 19th district, where her mother's family had lived for generations, and then between Arenbergpark and Fasangasse in the 3rd district. In the same year she emigrated to London, where she married the writer and journalist Peter de Mendelssohn.

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.

After her separation from Peter de Mendelssohn in 1963 and her divorce in 1970, she was married, from 1972 until his death in 1981, to the writer and retired BBC employee Hans Flesch von Brunningen. In the 1980s she spent another year in London as FAZ correspondent.

Hilde Spiel was a member of the Austrian PEN Centre, and its general secretary from 1966 to 1971. In 1971 she took on the post of vice-president, and after the resignation of Alexander Lernet-Holenia in 1972, and at his suggestion, stood for election as president. However, her election was blocked by an initiative mainly conducted by Friedrich Torberg, who tried to persuade some of his friends to publish attacks on Hilde Spiel. After resigning from the Austrian PEN Centre in protest, she joined the German centre and remained active in International PEN, in particular, together with Heinrich Böll, in its Writers in Prison Committee. In addition she joined the Grazer Autorenversammlung, today the largest writers' association in Austria, where she became a defender and mentor of controversial younger writers, such as Wolfgang Bauer and Peter Turrini. She also became an active member of the German Academy for Language and Literature in Darmstadt.

Hilde Spiel died in Vienna in 1990. Like her parents and her second husband, Hans Flesch von Brunningen, she was buried in the cemetery at Bad Ischl. Her tombstone records her name as Hilde Maria Flesch-Brunningen.