German author, artist and theater director
Barbara Honigmann (born 12 February 1949) is a German author, artist and theater director.
Life and career
Honigmann is the daughter of Jewish emigrant parents, who returned to East Berlin in 1947 after a period of exile in Great Britain. Her parents were Litzi Friedmann (1910–1991; née Alice Kohlmann), an Austrian Communist who was the first wife of Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge Five,[1][2][3][4] and Georg Honigmann, PhD (1903–1984).[5] Her mother was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, and worked in film dubbing in her later years. Her father was born in Wiesbaden, Germany and was the chief editor of the Berliner Zeitung while also being a filmmaker. The couple divorced in 1954.[5]
From 1967 to 1972, Honigmann studied theater at Humboldt University in East Berlin. In the following years she worked as a dramatist and director in Brandenburg and Berlin. She has been a freelance writer since 1975. In 1981, she married Peter Obermann who later took her surname; the two went on to have two children together, Johannes (b. 1976) and Ruben (b. 1983). In 1984, she and Peter left the GDR to move to a German Jewish community in Strasbourg, France. Honigmann began finally to explore her German roots in the end of the 20th century [6]
According to Emily Jeremiah from The Institute of Modern Languages Research, "Honigmann’s texts are also paradigmatic of post-exile writings by German-Jewish authors. In addition, they offer examples of literary reactions to the demise of the GDR by its decamped intellectuals, and represent the articulations of a new generation of women writers" [7]
Life in the theater
Honigmann worked for many years in theater as a playwright and dramatist. In addition to working in Brandenburg, she also worked in the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Some of the plays she wrote were later changed into radio plays.[8]
Both of her plays and radio plays have elements of fairy tales or historical lives weaved into them. One of Honigmann's radio plays was awarded with "radio play of the month" by the South German Radio Station.[citation needed]
