Irena Veisaitė

Biography

Irena Veisaitė (January 9, 1928 – December 11, 2020) was a Lithuanian theatre scholar, intellectual and human rights activist. She was awarded the Goethe Medal in 2012 for her contribution to cultural exchange between Germany and Lithuania. Veisaitė was a Lithuanian Jew. She was born in Kaunas and survived the Holocaust. She earned a doctorate in Leningrad in 1963 with a dissertation on the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and was a lecturer at the teacher's college in Vilnius from 1953 to 1997. She was also head of the Thomas Mann Cultural Centre in Nida, Lithuania. She was the president of the O…