Anna Maria Jokl (1911–2001)

Anna Maria Jokl was the youngest of three daughters in an assimilated Austrian-Jewish family. She grew up in Vienna, where she was one of only five girls allowed to attend a boys' high school. Her father died in 1924, leaving the family in serious financial difficulties. Anna Maria got a job at age 15 in a kindergarten and discovered a talent for working with children —an experience that may have influenced her later decision to write works for children and to become a psychoanalyst. In 1928, Anna Maria moved to Berlin, where she studied theater and film, and worked as script writer and journalist. Her first short story, Der Fremde (The Stranger), was published in 1933. The rise of the Nazism put an to her career in Germany, and she left for Prague.
She later described the years of exile in Prague as a happy and a productive time. She found work as a journalist and published Die künstlerischen Grundlagen des Films (The Artistic Foundations of Movie Making, 1936). She also brought out her first children’s book in 1937. Her book Die Perlmutterfarbe, now her best-known work, could not be published when it was ready in 1939 due to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, and its author had to flee to the UK. In London, she became interested in psychoanalysis, and in 1948 passed the Senior Certificate examination, which enabled her to study at university.
After World War II, she moved to Zurich to study at the Jung Institute. However, she was rebuffed by anti-Semitism and never received the diploma she wanted. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, she was able to practice as a therapist at the Jewish Hospital in West Berlin, and she also worked again in radio. She translated Zvi Kolitz’s Jossel Rackower spricht zu Gott from Yiddish into German, and it was broadcast in 1955. Anna Maria became seriously interested in Jewish history and religion and started studying these subjects at the Free University of Berlin. Die Perlmutterfarbe was finally published in 1948 to critical acclaim. However, by 1965, Anna Maria was discouraged by the refusal of many Germans to remember the Holocaust, and she moved to Israel. There she continued to work as a psychoanalyst and also started writing again. In her eighties, she had a surprise literary comeback with her autobiographical works Essenzen (1993) and Die Reise nach London (1999).