Christiane Singer

Her father was of Hungarian origin and her mother was half Russian and half Czech. Because of the persecution of the Jews, her parents fled Hungary, then Austria, and settled in Paris, France, in 1935.[1] She was born eight years later, in 1943, in Marseille.

She is a high school student and a pupil of the Conservatory of Diction and Dramatic Art in Marseille and then studies literature at Aix-en-Provence, where she obtained a Doctorate of Modern Letters.[2]

In 1968, she met Count Georg von Thurn-Valsassina,[2] an architect, who would become her husband, and settled in 1973[1] in his medieval castle of Rastenberg (Austria), not far from Vienna, and will raise their two sons there. This castle inspired the romantic work of the same name in 1996 "Rastenberg". She also organized personal development seminars in her home, which she designed, and which her architect husband built.[2]

In the late 1970s she founded the Dianus-Trikont-Verlag in Munich with the editor Victor Trimondi.

She followed the teachings of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim (a disciple of C.G. Jung).

In Switzerland, she was a lecturer at the University of Basel, then a lecturer at the University of Friburg.

Her work and her personal reflection were entirely centered on the necessary taking into account of the spiritual which broods in everyone's heart. She was a relatively prolific writer, of Christian sensitivity imbued with Oriental wisdom, who refrained from giving lessons in morals and excludeed all dogmatism. She won several literary prizes, including the Prix des libraires for La Mort viennoise in 1979, le Prix Albert Camus for Histoire d'âme in 1989, and le prix de la langue française en 2006 for the whole of her work.

She once said in a radio-interview:

I wrote a book on Les Âges de la vie. I tried to show these metamorphoses of being in the course of life. It is obvious that all this is only valid if one has learned to die in the course of existence. And these occasions are given us so often; All crises, separations, and diseases, and all forms, everything, everything, everything, all invites us to learn and leave behind. Death will take away only what we wanted to possess. The rest, it has no hold on the rest. And it is in this progressive deprivation that an immense freedom is created, and an enlarged space, exactly what was not suspected. I have an immense confidence in aging, because I owe to this acceptance to age an opening that is unsuspected when one has not the audacity to return.[3]

In September 2006, when her doctor announced that she had six months left to live[4] as a result of cancer, she wrote a diary in her last months, which will be published under the title Derniers fragments d'un long voyage. Christiane Singer died in April 2007, at age sixty-four.

• 1979: prix des libraires for La Mort viennoise
• 1982: prix Alice-Louis Barthou de l'Académie française for La Guerre des filles.[5]
• 1989: prix Albert Camus for Histoire d'âme
• 1993: prix Écritures & Spiritualités for Une passion. Entre ciel et terre.
• 2000: prix Anna de Noailles of the Académie française for Éloge du mariage, de l'engagement et autres folies.[5]
• 2006: prix de la langue française pour l'ensemble de son œuvre
• 2007: prix ALEF for Seul ce qui brûle.[6]

• Passion - Hommage à Christiane Singer, de la cinéaste autrichienne Carola Mair,[7] documentaire, 45 min.

• Articles and documents à propos Christiane Singer
• Christiane Singer on YouTube
• Christiane Singer on Les insoumis
• Christiane Singer on Babelio
• Le dernier message de Christiane Singer on Psychologie