Lilo Linke (1906–1963)

Lilo Linke was born in Berlin, Germany. As a teenager and university student, she experienced the hardships of the post-World War I era. She joined left-wing organizations such as the Berlin Young Democrats and the German Democratic Party or DDP, and wrote for the latter's publication Deutscher Volkswirt. In 1932, she joined the Social Democratic Party or SDP. On a trip to England, she visited a Labour Party Congress in Scarborough and met the English writer Storm Jameson (Margaret Chapman). Two years later, when the Nazi regime came to power in Germany, she fled to England at Jameson's invitation. Her autobiographical book Restless Flags: A German Girl's Story (USA title, Restless Days), published in 1934, established her as a writer and as a member of political and literary émigré society in London. All her books were written in English, which she learned to speak in the UK, except for the last one, Wo ist Fred?, published shortly after her death. In 1935, she traveled throughout Turkey and wrote about great social changes there. That same year, she translated into English Wolfgang Langhoff's memoir The Peat Bog Soldiers: 13 Months in Concentration Camps, one of the first internationally-known eyewitness accounts of Nazi concentration camps. In the 1940s, she went to Ecuador and traveled to remote areas of the country; in 1945, she acquired Ecuadorian citizenship. Much of her journalism and fiction deals with the subjects of fascism and exile.