Angelika Schrobsdorff

Angelika Schrobsdorff (born December 24, 1927 in Freiburg im Breisgau) is a German writer and actress.

Her mother Else, whose first marriage was to the author Fritz Schwiefert, was an assimilated Jew; her father was a member of the wealthy Berlin bourgeoisie. She grew up in Berlin and in 1938 fled, with her mother and sister, to Sofia, Bulgaria, where she remained until the end of the war. Her grandmother was murdered in Theresienstadt. In 1947, Schrobsdorff returned to Germany. In 1971 she married the French film-maker Claude Lanzmann, with whom she subsequently lived in Paris. Later she lived in Munich for a few years before emigrating to Israel. She lived in Jerusalem until early 2006, in a house on the Green Line near the Old City. Today, Angelika Schrobsdorff lives in Berlin (and died there July 30, 2016).

Schrobsdorff's first novel, "Die Herren" ("The Gentlemen," 1961) caused a scandal and made her famous. She has published a dozen additional books, several of them about Bulgaria. Her memoir of her mother, "Du bist nicht so wie andre Mütter" (1992, 2nd ed.1994) was a best-seller and was also made into a movie for television (1999). It appeared in English under the title "You are not Like Other Mothers" (trans. Steven Rendall, New York: Europa Editions, 2012).

Schrobsdorff is also an actress; she has appeared in "Der Ruf" ("The Last Illusion," 1949) and in several films and television programs about her own life. One of the most famous ones is the German documentary of Bulgarian film-maker Christo Bakalski named "Bulgaria of all Places" ("Ausgerechnet Bulgarien" in German).