Career
From 1959 she went to Vienna to study philosophy, Germanic letters and drama. Then she lived as a freelance writer in various places: Lake Starnberg, Frankfurt, from 1963 to 1964 in Rome, from 1964 to 1970 in London, then in Paris, Hamburg, New York and finally in Munich. In her 1970 novel Berührungsverbot (or The prohibition of contact), several couples try to transcend the limits of the bourgeois sexual mores of their middle-class background by engaging in group sex orgies.
In Switzerland a journal that published excerpts from the novel was seized, and in Austria it was attacked as harmful to children.
Elsner described herself as a leninist. Gisela Elsner committed suicide by jumping out of a window in May 13, 1992.
