Women and War

Tapes, files, stories

I have been working hard on a book. The last book I wrote was a light-hearted look at love and infused with music.

This one is about war, structured around a series of interviews with German and English women that I recorded in the late 1970s. I wrote the work up at the time but then I got into university in Germany and this project landed in the bottom drawer.

I thought brushing it up would fairly quick, but I was wrong.

 First I reviewed the historical background (women's place in society at the time) that I wrote based on material I collected in the library in Wiesbaden just after I recorded the interviews. I was a bit doubtful about this part of the book because my German was just-learned and I was unsure about the credentials of the people who wrote the books I was quoting. I discover however that I kept excellent notes and collected enough material to enable me to back-check everything. The Internet now makes it easy to check credentials and my doubts about the material have been allayed.  The review is interesting and I have now included more of the material I collected at the time.

When I looked at the interviews themselves I discovered that instead of  translating the interviews verbatim I had summarised them. I have only re-translated one of the 30 interviews so far but it is so much more interesting than my earlier translation. I am not sure why I didn't translate verbatim before but perhaps because my own German was not so good at the time and I wanted to make a story out of the whole thing. Or perhaps I just needed to be older!

So three months into the project I am only part the way through. It is going to take much longer than I expected to revise, but it is proving fascinating and the stories themselves are really readable, or at least the one I have just translated is ... I can see the interviewee there before me in my mind's eye  and it is nearly 40 years since I saw her!