Hilde Spiel was the grande dame of 20th century Austrian literature. She was born in Vienna and studied philosophy at the city’s university. She left Vienna for England in 1936 amid rising anti-Semitism and because of her opposition to the clerico-fascist Austrian regime, but returned after World War Two and had a distinguished and prolific career as the cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Guardian and The New Statesman. Spiel wrote novels, works of cultural history, volumes of essays and literary criticism and translated the works of modern British writers including W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard.
Christine Shuttleworth grew up in London, the daughter of the German-language writers Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, who emigrated there in 1936. A graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, she has served as executive editor of the international journal The Indexer. She has translated several books by Hilde Spiel: Fanny von Arnstein, Daughter of the Enlightenment; The Dark and the Bright, Memoirs 1911-1989; and Return to Vienna. Among her other translations are Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship by Erdmut Wizisla and Human Space by O. F. Bollnow.
Michael Z. Wise spent five years as a Vienna-based correspondent for Reuters and The Washington Post. He is author of Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy.
