In the west she had found herself under attack from Turkish leftwing intellectuals because she had dared to translate Nâzım Hikmet's Bedreddin Epic.
[4] It was unusual for West Germans to emigrate permanently to East Germany at this time: in a posthumously published memoir entitled "Mein Land, ein anderes" (loosely "My country, a different way") Kraft would recall in comic detail the difficulty the East German frontier official checking her papers had in accepting that she had no plans to "return home" to the west.
She refused conventional medical treatment and suffered a long decline, dying in the arms of her favourite sister, Reinhild, at a clinic in Bad Berka, near her Weimar home.
[9] In her poetry and in her prose works Gisela Kraft treated her impression of her travels in the Near East and her scholarly research of Turkish culture.
In 2009 she was awarded the Christoph Martin Wieland Translator Prize for her epilogue to Nâzım Hikmet's "Die Namen der Sehnsucht" ("The Names of Yearning").