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Maya Lasker-Wallfisch (born 1958 in London) is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, author and educator, specialising in transgenerational trauma. [1]
Maya Jacobs Lasker-Wallfisch was born as Marianne Lasker-Wallfisch in London into a family of musicians. Her parents, pianist Peter Wallfisch and cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch OBE, were both originally from Breslau and had emigrated to Great Britain after the Second World War. Her mother is of Jewish-German descent and had survived the Holocaust as a cellist in the girls' orchestra at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After arriving in England, Anita became a co-founder of the English Chamber Orchestra. Maya Lasker-Wallfisch was married to David Jacobs, the son of London's Rabbi Louis Jacobs, with whom she has a son. [2]
Lasker-Wallfisch's older brother is the cellist Raphael Wallfisch, her nephews are film composer and Academy member Benjamin and baritone Simon Wallfisch.[ citation needed ]
After initially working with children at the Tavistock Centre in London, Lasker-Wallfisch trained as an addiction's specialist and later became a psychoanalytic psychotherapist for adults, couples, and families. Her focus is on the treatment of transgenerational trauma. Lasker-Wallfisch lectures on the psychological and political consequences of the Nazi dictatorship. She has published scientific articles. [3] She was a speaker at the 2017 international conference on transgenerational trauma in Amman, Jordan [4] and at the "Celebrate Life festival" near Oldenburg, Germany. [5] Together with her mother Anita, Lasker-Wallfisch campaigns at numerous memorial events against anti-Semitism and in favor of a living culture of remembrance.
In 2020, German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag published Lasker-Wallfisch's memoirs, entitled "Letter to Breslau". [6] In the memoirs, Lasker-Wallfisch explores her family's history and the transgenerational transmission of trauma. In an interview with The Jewish Chronicle , she describes her motivation as follows: "I longed to have three generations of Laskers in the same place, because my grandparents could never be in a room together with us. Now they have a home in my book. Though there is no cemetery to visit, I hope I’ve given them back, the Laskers of Breslau, a place to be." [2]
Lasker-Wallfisch's biography was well received by German reviewers, with Marta Kijowska in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calling it "an impressive book. It contains an unusually open and comprehensible description of a transgenerational trauma that is still rarely addressed." [7] Die Welt's Manuel Brug points out "with 'Letter to Breslau' Maya Lasker-Wallfisch has written a gripping family history – as well as a modern theory of memory." [8] Deutschlandfunk’s Peter Sawicki calls it a "... touching book. Maya Lasker-Wallfisch writes with empathy and succeeds in portraying a sensitive topic in a lively manner." [9] [10] German public broadcasting radio Deutschlandfunk Kultur remarks "The author finds a clear and touching language to break out of the devastating silence. To tell her grandparents everything that she did not hear from her mother for so many decades." [11] Alexandra Senfft (Der Freitag) calls it a powerful book that has "greatly enriched the understanding of transgenerational transmission, the perspective on multiple generations in historical contexts. It reminds us of the dangerous psychological and political legacies of the Nazi dictatorship and proves that the destructive spell of the past can be broken." [12] In April 2021 Lasker-Wallfisch's biography was chosen 'Book of the Month' by 'Haus der Heimat des Landes Baden-Württemberg' (education and research center of the Ministry of Interior of Baden-Württemberg). [13]
On the topic of her family history Lasker-Wallfisch also curated an original stage performance, The Laskers From Breslau which she produced from the archive of family correspondence as a stage performance with live musical performances by composers such as Ernst Bloch, Max Bruch, and Maurice Ravel. This was presented at the Jewish Museum Berlin and later in Hamburg by invitation of the Shoah Foundation UCLA [14] In July 2020 she was invited to a talk about her book by Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism. [15]
Lasker-Wallfisch lives and works in London and Berlin. In 2020 she received German citizenship. [16]
The German translation of her second book "Ich schreib euch aus Berlin" (I write to you from Berlin) was published by Suhrkamp/Insel in October 2022. [17]
Together with the director Daniela Volker, Lasker-Wallfisch created the documentary "The Commandant's Shadow" which premiered in May / June 2024. Also, she has completed her first stage play, for which she received international interest. It is scheduled to premiere in London and Vienna in 2025. She is currently working on her second play.[ citation needed ]
Edward Lasker was a German-American chess and Go player. He was awarded the title of International Master of chess by FIDE. Lasker was an engineer by profession, and an author of books on Go, chess and checkers. Born in Prussia, he emigrated to the United States in 1914. He was distantly related to World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker with whom he is sometimes confused.
Eduard Lasker was a German politician and jurist. Inspired by the French Revolution, he became a spokesman for liberalism and the leader of the left wing of the National Liberal party, which represented middle-class professionals and intellectuals. He promoted the unification of Germany during the 1860s and played a major role in codification of the German legal code. Lasker at first compromised with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who later strenuously opposed Lasker regarding freedom of the press. In 1881, Lasker left the National Liberal party and helped form the new German Free Thought Party.
Else Lasker-Schüler was a German poet and playwright famous for her bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and her poetry. She was one of the few women affiliated with the Expressionist movement. Lasker-Schüler, who was Jewish, fled Nazi Germany and lived out the rest of her life in Jerusalem.
Esther Béjarano was one of the last survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. She survived because she was a player in the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. She was active in various ways, including speeches and in music, in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive. She was a regular speaker at the International Youth Meeting organised yearly at the Max Mannheimer Study Center in Dachau.
The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz was formed by order of the SS in 1943, during the Holocaust, in the Auschwitz II-Birkenau extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Active for 19 months—from April 1943 until October 1944—the orchestra consisted of mostly young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners, of varying nationalities, who would rehearse for up to ten hours a day to play music regarded as helpful in the daily running of the camp. They also held a concert every Sunday for the SS.
Dörte von Westernhagen is a German writer who wrote a book about her father, Heinz von Westernhagen, an SS functionary and Waffen-SS commander of the Nazi era.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is a German-British cellist, and a surviving member of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz.
Necla Kelek is a Turkish-born German feminist and social scientist, holding a doctorate in this field, originally from Turkey. She gave lectures on migration sociology at the Evangelische Fachhochschule für Sozialpädagogik in Hamburg from 1999 until 2004.
Friederike Mayröcker was an Austrian writer of poetry and prose, radio plays, children's books and dramatic texts. She experimented with language, and was regarded as an avantgarde poet, and as one of the leading authors in German. Her work, inspired by art, music, literature and everyday life, appeared as "novel and also dense text formations, often described as 'magical'." According to The New York Times, her work was "formally inventive, much of it exploiting the imaginative potential of language to capture the minutiae of daily life, the natural world, love and grief".
Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf is a German composer, editor and author.
Iris Hanika is a German writer. She was born in Würzburg, grew up in Bad Königshofen and has lived in Berlin since 1979, where she studied Universal and Comparative Literature at the FU Berlin. She was a regular contributor to German periodicals like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Merkur. Hanika won the LiteraTour Nord prize and the EU Prize for Literature for her novel Das Eigentliche. In 2020, she was awarded the Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis for her novel Echos Kammern. In 2021, she won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Hanika wrote previously mainly short non-fictional texts, later novels, including two books on psychoanalysis.
Benjamin Mark Lasker Wallfisch is a British composer, conductor and producer, known for his work on film scores. He has contributed to over 50 feature films since the mid-2000s, including notable works like Blade Runner 2049, Shazam!, It, It Chapter Two, The Invisible Man, Hidden Figures, A Cure for Wellness, The Flash, Twisters, Alien: Romulus, and Kraven the Hunter.
Simon Wallfisch is a British-German classical singer and cellist.
Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a German playwright, essayist, theatre curator and novelist. She is writer in residence at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin where she was artistic director of the studio theatre, Studio Я, from 2013 to 2015.
Hans Peter Wallfisch was a concert pianist and teacher, resident in Britain from 1951.
Gunda Trepp is a German author and journalist.
Anna Katharina Hahn is a German author.
Renate Lasker-Harpprecht was a German author and journalist. She survived the Holocaust, having been imprisoned at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Johanna Walser is a German writer and translator.
Kerstin Preiwuß is a German writer and arts journalist.
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