Irena Veisaitė

Irena Veisaitė (9 January 1928 – 11 December 2020) was a Lithuanian theatre scholar, intellectual and human rights activist.

Irena Veisaitė, June 2009

Career

Veisaitė was a Lithuanian Jew. She was born in Kaunas and survived the Holocaust. She earned a doctorate in Leningrad in 1963 with a dissertation on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and was a lecturer at the teacher's college in Vilnius from 1953 to 1997. She has also been head of the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre in Nida, Lithuania. She was awarded the Goethe Medal in 2012 for her contribution to the cultural exchange between Germany and Lithuania.[1]

She was the long-term President of the Open Society in Lithuania Foundation.

She was also known for addressing communism in her work, and has said in an interview with Deutsche Welle that "the Soviets were very, very bad. Different from the Nazis, but not better."[2]

Veisaite died in Vilnius in December 2020 from coronavirus.[3]

References
  1. "Goethe-Medaille - Goethe-Institut". www.goethe.de. Retrieved Dec 11, 2020.
  2. "Überleben, um zu erzählen: Irena Veisaite | DW | 24.08.2012". DW.COM. Retrieved Dec 11, 2020.
  3. "Mirė koronavirusu sirgusi teatrologė, literatūrologė Irena Veisaitė". DELFI. Retrieved Dec 11, 2020.
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