Irina Liebmann

Irina Liebmann is a German journalist-author and sinologist of Russo-German provenance. She has won a number of important literary prizes: the most significant of these, probably, was the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair non-fiction Prize, awarded for "Wäre es schön? Es wäre schön!", a biography of her father, a noted anti-Nazi activist and political exile in Warsaw and Moscow who, after 1945, returned to what became, in 1949, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and in 1953, despite his longstanding record of communist activism, emerged as an uncompromising critic of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht: he was expelled from the party and suffered various other government mandated public indignities. She grew up and lived the first part of her adult life in the German Democratic Republic, but succeeded in moving to West Berlin during 1988, thereby anticipating reunification by more than a year. Irina Herrnstadt was born at the height of the Second World War in Moscow, to where her German-born Jewish father, the lawyer turned journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt (1903–1966) had fled from Warsaw following the twin-pronged invasion of Poland in September 1939. Moscow was at war when Irina was born. Life was a struggle for survival and there were only soldiers and military vehicles on the streets. The city had been evacuated in response to the German invasion. Only people deemed essential for the war effort had stayed on the city. Her father was editor-in-chief of a German language newspaper produced for prisoners of war. That was important for the war, so the Herrnstadts had stayed behind when the city was evacuated. It was in Moscow that Rudolf Herrnstadt had met Valentina Veloyants (Валентина Велоянца), Irina's mother: she wanted to take her new friend dancing but he "could not [dance]". The child was always told, later, that when her parents met her mother was a scholar of Germanistics, originally from Siberia.