She served between 1931 and 1933 as an active member of the Hesse Landtag (parliament), after which, for reasons of race and politics, she was forced into exile.
Her father, Carl Chun (1852–1914), was a zoologist and deep sea researcher who was employed as a university professor at Königsberg, Breslau and then Leipzig.
[1] As a young woman Lily Chun supported herself by writing, publishing short stories and (subsequently forgotten) novels.
[6] She was also the first in Hesse to put her signature to a call for a "reduction of the penal provisions in §218 of the constitution", which concerned the country's longstanding anti-abortion laws.
In July 1933, believing that she was scheduled for imminent arrest by the Gestapo,[1] she fled with three of her children via Dresden to Prague in Czechoslovakia which at this stage was still independent.
[8] As a result of this connection she was for several months during the first part of 1937, despite living in a very small apartment,[9] the rather improbable landlady of Jean Genet,[8] on the run from France where he had acquired a string of convictions for petty crime and, more recently, gained the status of an army deserter.
As a 27 year old asylum seeker in Brno, Pringsheim found him a "highly literate and memorable autodidact [with an] uncontrollable thirst for knowledge".
She was caught out in December when the United States unexpectedly (to her) joined in the European war as a response to the Pearl Harbor attack.
Unlike his older brother, Karl Peter, who had followed his mother to London, Johannes had stayed in Czechoslovakia after the German invasion and become a resistance activist.
[4] There was talk of a return to politics, but she found she was unable to gain any sort of a foothold in the Darmstadt branch of the post-war SPD.