Elisabeth Langgässer (February 23, 1899 in Alzey; † July 25, 1950 in Karlsruhe) was a German author and teacher. She is known for lyrical poetry and novels. Her short story 'Saisonbeginn,' for example, provides a graphically human portrayal of a 1930s German Alpine village erecting a sign forbidding the entry of Jews.
In the last free elections in March 1933 Langgässer voted for Adolf Hitler,[1] but then during the Third Reich she was considered a half-Jew and therefore expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer (writer's union) in 1936.
Langgässer's daughter with a married Jewish man Hermann Heller, Cordelia, spent the war years in Auschwitz after her mother's attempt to improve her racial status by marrying her to a Catholic army officer from Spain failed. Told that a confession would save her mother from prosecution, the 12-year-old Cordelia willingly went to live in a ghetto hospital. After surviving the Holocaust, she joined her mother in Sweden. Langgässer had been deemed "non-Aryan" (her father had converted from Judaism), but had subsequently upgraded her status to "German" by marrying a German with SS connections. Cordelia resisted the pressure from her mother to provide material for a death camp memoir, and married and had several children with a Swedish Protestant, becoming Cordelia Edvardson; quite unexpectedly, she emigrated to Israel at the height of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and wrote a searing autobiography, 'Burnt Child Seeks the Fire.'[2] Elisabeth Langgässer became a noted Catholic author. As such she was an influence on Pope Benedict XVI in his early years.