Irena Veisaitė

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.