About

I work with researchers and families who needed assistance with archives of personal documents. Often their grandparents wanted to leave their old life in Germany behind, and didn’t want to carry on speaking German with their families.

For their descendants this can be an obstacle to accessing the family's past. But a sheer translation is often not enough and not all I aim for. More cultural detail needs to be added for context or to let the authors’ actual personality shine through.

I try to catch the essence of a person my clients have never met and who has been dead for a very long time. How to translate a joke or a harsh passage in a way to make sure the person is correctly portrayed (which I think I can do after getting to know them in a plethora of letters). As I a native German speaker, I feel I understand the authors and try to put that in context for the non-German descendants.

This is a tailor-made service where my clients can tell me what they are specifically looking for. I often have put the material in order and archived it as this is impossible for non-German speakers or those who can’t read the handwriting. My best detective work was trying to piece incomplete disarrayed letters together.

I enjoy this work very much as it is meaningful to bring clients closer to their family history. For me personally it means never stopping to learn something new in exchange with private clients and academics.

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My Story

I was born, raised and educated in Fulda, Germany. During my secondary and university studies in Würzburg and Nürnberg, I focused intensively on Germany’s 20th-century history, in particular the Holocaust and the history, literature and wider culture surrounding it.

I have worked as a lawyer, in insurance, management consulting, compliance and legal translation.

In 2009, I joined the project team of the AJR Refugee Voices Archive, working for its Director, Dr. Bea Lewkowicz. As Archival Researcher. I was able to put my interest for language and history as well as my skills developed working in the legal field together. The Refugee Voices Archive is a collection of now 320 interviews of refugees and survivors from Nazi Germany or occupied Europe. The intense Holocaust Education I had benefitted from during my education was suddenly put into a practical context. My main task in the beginning was to edit the interview testimony transcripts prior to publication on the website. Every interview is an irreplaceable and unique testimony and a rich source for researchers and interviewees’ families alike. But they also contain a collected wisdom that makes you hope that humans can learn from history.

It was through this work that I met researchers and families who needed assistance with archives of personal documents.