Gisela Elsner

Gisela Elsner (2 May 1937 – 13 May 1992) was a German writer. She won the Prix Formentor in 1964 for her novel Die Riesenzwerge (The Giant Dwarfs).

Early life
Elsner was born in Nuremberg, Middle Franconia. She was born to a well-to-do family, and grew up with her sister, Heidi, and brother, Richard. Her father was a Director at Siemens. She graduated from a Gymnasium in Nuremberg in 1957. In 1959, she went to Vienna to study philosophy, Germanic letters and drama.

Career
Elsner then lived as a freelance writer in various places: Lake Starnberg, Frankfurt, in Rome from 1963 to 1964, in London from 1964 to 1970, 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 banned, 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. She was an ardent supporter of the government of East Germany, and left the German Communist Party in June 1989 due to their pro-Gorbachev tendancies. She returned to the party in October 1989 as a highly critical and "uncomfortable" member, as a display of her strong communist convictions.

Her political position was in lifelong conflict with her bourgeois upbringing.

Personal life
Elsner married author Klaus Roehler in Planegg in 1958. They had a son together, Oskar Roehler, who was born in Starnberg in 1959. They later divorced, after Elsner left her husband and lost custody of her son.

She then remarried to Hans Platchek in 1976, who worked as a painter, art critic and author.

Death and legacy
Elsner's mental health began to decline due to a mix of economic problems, lack of literary success, and loss of political perspective after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She became increasingly isolated. In 1992, Elster was taken to a private medical clinic in Munich after collapsing on a public street. Elsner committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-story window at the same clinic, on May 13, 1992.

A dramatized film about her life, No Place to Go, was made by her son Oskar Roehler.

Elsner's literary work is stored in the literary archives of the Monacensia, the literary archives of the city of Munich.

A literary prize, the "Gisela-Elsner-Literaturpreis" was established in her honor in 2021.