How I Came to Berlin

Elizabeth Shaw was one of the most celebrated children’s au­thors in East Germany, producing a series of masterful children’s books that have stayed in print since her death in 1992. She was also a deeply complex, passionate woman, a brilliant author, and a gifted artist beyond the confines of children’s literature.

Born in Belfast in 1920 to Irish parents, Elizabeth Shaw was a life-long outsider, sheltered from the poverty and violence of the city by a liberal upbringing. At the age of 13, her family moved to England, where she would eventually go on to attend the Chelsea School of Art, impressing her teachers and absorbing the social and political struggles of her time. In 1939, she was called up to the war effort in the Lon­don telephone exchange. 

A cartoonist and illustrator to left-wing magazines in the early war years, In 1944, she met the Berlin-born, Swiss-raised émigré artist and communist René Graetz. They married in 1946 and, like other German exiles opposed to National Socialism, decided to help build a better, socialist Germany. Deeply inflected by the politics of East Germany, she worked as a caricaturist with Neues Deutschland, the newspaper of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party, before going on to write 23 enoromously successful books for children, making her a household name across Germany.

By times elusive, moving and deeply revealing, this is a finely tuned, fully illustrated memoir by one of Ireland’s great forgotten artists – now illustrated with many never-before-published illustrations, a foreword by her daughter Anne Schneider, and an insightful afterword by Sabine Egger and Fergal Lene­han which expand the under-explored as­pects of Shaw’s relationship to Stalinism, the GDR, and those around her.