Lily Pringsheim

Lily Pringsheim (born Lily Chun: 7 February 1887 – 28 September 1954) was a German politician (SPD). She served between 1931 and 1933 as an active member of the Hesse Landtag (parliament), after which, for reasons of race and politics, she was forced into exile. Pringsheim also worked as a journalist/writer and theatre critic.

Life Lily Chun was born in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, where she spent her early childhood. The family relocated to Breslau in 1895 and to Leipzig in 1899. Her father, Carl Chun (1852–1914), was a zoologist and deep sea researcher who was employed as a university professor at Königsberg, Breslau and then Leipzig. Her mother, Lily Vogt, was the daughter of the zoologist-geologist-politician Carl Vogt (1817–1895). When she was 16, she was excluded from her school, where the staff found her "exceptionally headstrong" (... wegen "ausgeprägter Eigenwilligkeit"). A particular admirer of her political abilities was the interior minister, Wilhelm Leuschner. Two of her sons had to break off their law studies. In July 1933, believing that she was scheduled for imminent arrest by the Gestapo, As a result of this connection she was for several months during the first part of 1937, despite living in a very small apartment, the rather improbable landlady of Jean Genet, Later, when Genet's literary archive was opened up to scholars, several rather stiff and literary love letters were found that he had written to Pringsheim, but he was more than twenty years her junior, and Genet's more serious "love interest" at the time was almost certainly Anna Bloch, the wife of an industrialist who had imprudently recruited Genet to teach his young wife French.

During 1938 the German army incrementally invaded Czechoslovakia. Pringsheim, now using a Czechoslovak name, became a political refugee again, fleeing to London. By 1940 she had moved on again, this time to Peru where she joined up with her eldest daughter, Marianne, who had already settled there. In 1941 she undertook what was intended to be a brief visit to the United States of America. She was caught out in December when the United States unexpectedly (to her) joined in the European war as a response to the Pearl Harbor attack. It became impossible to travel to Peru. Her visit to the country lasted seven years during which she engaged in teaching and social work with a Quäker Organisation. At one stage she was employed as a radio presenter. She also became a much sought after speaker on behalf of the Socialist Party. Lily Pringsheim returned to Peru in 1947.

While she was in the US her son Johannes was killed. Unlike his older brother, Karl Peter, who had followed his mother to London, Johannes had stayed in Czechoslovakia after the German invasion and become a resistance activist. In 1943 he was summoned to London by the Czechoslovak government in exile. It is believed that he crossed Switzerland on foot, but in France he was caught by the Gestapo and placed on a train destined for Buchenwald. Little more is known of his fate, although there is a report that he was killed in the Strasbourg area while jumping off the train.

Lily Pringsheim came home to Darmstadt in 1950, making her home at a top floor apartment alongside the Luisenplatz. She taught conversational English and French at the local school for the rest of her life. There was talk of a return to politics, but she found she was unable to gain any sort of a foothold in the Darmstadt branch of the post-war SPD. She died at Darmstadt in 1954 having never got over the death of her son, Johannes.