Anne Dorn

Anne Dorn

Anne Dorn was the nom de plume of Anna Christa Schlegel, born in Wachau near Dresden in 1925.

Having worked at a news desk in Dresden while the media were being ideologically streamlined (Gleichschaltung) in Nazi Germany, she fled to Austria at the end of World War II.

Dorn eventually lived in the British-governed Rhineland and worked in Cologne, where she died on February 8, 2017. She pursued an outstanding career in radio broadcasting and screenwriting, all the while raising six children as a single mom in West Germany. Her novel Hüben und Drüben (1991) dramatizes her personal family history and offers insight into the postwar experience of displaced persons and life in early Cold War Germany.

At age 86, she burst onto the poetry scene with her debut Wetterleuchten (2011), which was followed by her final poetry collection Jakobsleiter in 2015.

 

Winter 2020 (Issue 15), To My Angel