Biography
Born 1941 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Poewe became a refugee at the age of three after 189 Lancaster bombers from No. 5 Group of the British RAF dropped 480 tons of bombs on the city centre. Her family was moved to a small estate in Poland, staying several weeks before being moved again. Almost six months later they found themselves in the vicinity of Dresden just in time for the bombing. From Dresden they were moved to Plauen in Saxony and eventually spent three years in Werdau before walking over 250 miles, after the death of Poewe's father, to cross into the British Zone near Göttingen. From there they went to the small town of Buxtehude. Poewe's memories of this period were published as Childhood in Germany during World War II (1988).
Poewe worked as an air hostess with Trans-Canada Airlines before entering the University of Toronto where she won several prestigious scholarships. Originally planning to study medicine, she switched to Anthropology. After completing her B.A. she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico where Harry Basehart was her thesis supervisor. Poewe studied for a while with John Middleton at New York University and learned Swahili and Bemba at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The fieldwork for her Ph.D. thesis was carried out in Zambia.
Read more about this topic: Karla Poewe
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)