[1][2][3] Cahner was born in Bad Godesberg, now a municipal district of Bonn, Germany, to a Jewish-Catalan father and a Catalan mother who had left during the Spanish Civil War.

The Cahner family moved to Galicia in 1937 to avoid persecution from the rise of National Socialism,[1] and then to Barcelona in 1939.

[2] Via Ramon Bastardes, Cahner was introduced to and began working on Serra d'Or, an influential Catalan magazine published by Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey.

[1] In 1980, Cahner was appointed the Minister of Culture in the Generalitat de Catalunya under Jordi Pujol, where he served for four years until 1984, when Joan Rigol took his place.

[1] He died, aged 76, in 2013, and was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of the Generalitat of Catalonia.