Lenka Reinerova enjoyed the proud but melancholy distinction of being fêted as the last survivor of the “Prague German” writers.

They had been a group active in the Bohemian capital in the early decades of the 20th century, linking German, Czech and Jewish culture and writing mostly in a distinctive local form of the German language. In its time the group had embraced such leading literary figures as Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank Kafka and Max Brod, and Reinerova witnessed the last years of its flowering.

She could never claim to be a writer in the same rank as the great novelists, poets or journalists. But through her stories and reminiscences she became in recent years a powerful advocate of that great literary inheritance which had seemed not only extinct but often forgotten in its own homeland.

Reinerova knew through bitter experience how devastating the Nazi and then Communist assaults on that inheritance had been. She was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust; she had to live in exile in France and Mexico and, after her return to Czechoslovakia in 1948, she was imprisoned as part of the Stalinist purges, and banned as a writer. Yet in her final decades, after the revolution against communism in 1989 and the final liberation of Prague from totalitarian rule, she was able to offer a symbolic personal link with a time of creativity and cultural co-existence which had begun to receive more of the recognition that was its due.

Reinerova was born in 1916 into a middle-class family that immediately established her multicultural identity: her father was Czech, her mother German, and both parents were Jewish. She grew up speaking both her parents’ languages — “for me German and Czech were always of equal status,” she said — but spoke more German in the end “as my mother set the tone for our family”.

She attended in the 1920s one of the best of the grammar schools that the long-established German-speaking minority in Prague had set up. It was a time of uncertainty for that minority, as Czechoslovakia had been created in 1918 from what had previously been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Czech culture became more assertive as Czech elites now held much more political power. Economic insecurity also affected every community, and Reinerova had to leave school early in the 1930s to try to augment the family’s income. The poverty she witnessed shaped her increasingly left-wing political beliefs, and she joined the Communist Party as a teenager.

Although tensions between Czechs and Germans and general anti-Semitism were ever present, there were spheres in which mixing across the various cultures continued. Reinerova entered the café-based society where coffee and cultural conversation were the common currency, and intermingling was much easier. To that society were added political exiles from Germany who arrived after Hitler came to power. Reinerova found a job working with an exiled left-wing German newspaper and began to cover issues such as the rise of pro-Nazi feeling in the Sudetenland areas of Czechoslovakia with their ethnic German majorities.

After the Sudetenland had been handed to Hitler at the Munich conference in 1938 the Nazi threat towards the rest of Czechoslovakia intensified. And Reinerova narrowly escaped falling victim. She was visiting Romania when the Nazis invaded Prague in March 1939. She rang home, and her sister warned her, in coded speech, not to return as the Gestapo were already on her trail.

“That conversation saved my life,” she recalled. But it was the last contact she had with her mother and two sisters, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. Only after the war did she learn of their fate, when she met a family friend who had been with her mother in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

“The only time I saw your mother beaming,” said the friend, “was when she told me that there was one of my daughters the Nazis didn’t get.”

Reinerova had escaped the Nazis’ clutches by heading first for France (where she was imprisoned for six months in Paris) and then eventually to Mexico, where she found an exiled German-speaking community which included the writers Anna Seghers and Egon Erwin Kisch, who had been a neighbour in Prague.

After a spell in postwar Yugoslavia (the birthplace of her husband, the doctor and writer Theodor Balk) she returned in 1948 to Czechoslovakia, just as the Communists took full control after a coup. Prague had changed little physically, as it was spared much wartime destruction, but culturally the change was huge, with the city’s German-speakers all but eradicated by the murderous persecution of the Jews and then the expulsion of ethnic Germans after the end of Nazi occupation in 1945.