German Professor's Work Speaks for Many

by Paula Orth

In the cadence of Northern Ireland where she was born, Ruth Schwertfeger gives voice to two groups of people who can't speak for themselves – her Northern Irish ancestors and Holocaust victims. In her book, " Wee Wild One: Stories of Belfast and Beyond" (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), the professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics/German, begins her stories in Northern Ireland and ends them in a small Jewish cemetery in Harburg, Germany.

It illustrates Schwertfeger's quest to connect the scars of her native Ireland with her understanding of the Holocaust.

Schwertfeger points out that this connection is, contrary to first thought, quite natural. "My dissertation at Oxford University was on German Expressionism. Anyone involved in studying 20th century German literature will become involved in studying German Jewish writers and the Holocaust," she says. "re is no way around it."

Researching and teaching German and German literature, Schwertfeger has been part of the UWM campus since the 1980s. Born in Ballycoan, she holds a double honors degree in French and German from Trinity College, Dublin, and her graduate degrees are in German Literature from the University of Alberta, Canada, and Sommerville College, Oxford University.

Her life has been one of research and teaching – both have taken her around the world, but especially to Europe. Now a permanent U.S. resident, she says, "I've settled down in this country, but I still have deep ties to Ireland, so I go back for visits."

But where the research takes her is secondary to the extraordinary experiences she's had, often when she least expects it.

Through her Holocaust studies, she became interested in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the former Czechoslovakia. Her book, " Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp," presents descriptions of the camp, interwoven with the writing and testimonies of its women inmates. It was the first book written in English about this camp.

While writing the book, if she had any doubts about continuing with her Holocaust research, she said they vanished when "various threads came together. I saw Claude Lanzmann's film, ‘Shoah,' in which, with an eye that didn't blink, he reclaimed the suffering of a group of people." Then, she visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. It reaffirmed her belief in "the power that research and archives hold."

But Schwertfeger will tell you that these stories, whether about the Holocaust or Northern Ireland, are simply in the Irish storytelling tradition. "Reading is encouraged so much more in Ireland," she explains, "and through our oral tradition we absorb the very cadence of storytelling."

This storytelling tradition permeates her latest work. In the book's last story, she relates an encounter with a journalist who was making rubbings of the headstones in a small Jewish cemetery. "It's one of the most moving experiences I've had," she recalls. "He is coaxing the names into life."