Stefanie Kiesler

Stefanie Kiesler , born as Stephanie Frischer, (born July 18, 1897 in the Austro-Hungarian Skotschau , present-day Poland ; † September 3, 1963 in New York City ) was an Austrian-American author, editor and librarian. She was married to the artist-architect Friedrich Kiesler .

Live and act

Kiesler studied philology at the University of Vienna and married Friedrich Kiesler on August 19, 1920 in the Vienna synagogue . In 1925 the two went to Paris, where, under the influence of Theo van Doesburg and the De Stijl movement, they worked on their “writing pictures” and “typoplastics”. These were published under the pseudonym Pietro de Saga. In 1926 the couple moved to New York and never returned to Europe.

She began to work in the New York Public Library in 1927 as a "Foreign Language Specialist" and stayed there until her retirement in 1959. She was responsible for German and French-language literature. On the side she wrote short stories, translations and worked on an anthology on the subject of dreams in literature. Much of her literary texts remained unfinished and unpublished. From the 1930s onwards, Stefanie Kiesler kept a joint calendar that documented the Kiesler couple's artistic career and their role in the center of the New York avant-garde.

After her retirement she worked as a freelance editor and writer of film, theater and book reviews for the German-Jewish exile magazine Aufbau . Stefanie Kiesler died of lung cancer on September 3, 1963 in New York.

literature

• Evert van Straaten: "Wie is Pietro Saga?", In: Jong Holland, Vol. 2, No. I, March 1986, pp. 23-28
• Barbara Lesák: “Who was Pietro Saga?”, In: The backdrop explodes. Friedrich Kiesler's theater experiments and architecture projects 1923-1925, Vienna: Löcker, 1988. pp. 187–193

Web links

Austrian Friedrich and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna