Lerner, Gerda (30 April 1920–2 January 2013), historian, playwright, and political activist, was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria, the oldest of two daughters in the well-off Jewish family of Robert Kronstein, a pharmacist, and Ilona Neumann Kronstein, an artist. Her bohemian mother did not get along well with her more conventional father, and the two went their own ways, without securing a divorce. Gerda, and her younger sister, Nora, fell under the influence of her paternal grandmother and a succession of nannies and were educated in the primary schools of Vienna....
