Ruth Weiss: a journalist’s biography, career and archive
The postdoctoral research project about Ruth Weiss studies the life, work and archive of German-South African journalist and writer Ruth Weiss, and the political contexts in which all these facets of her biography unfolded. Ruth Weiss was born in 1924 into a Jewish family in Fürth. In 1936, the family fled from Germany to South Africa. After a career in the insurance industry in Johannesburg, she began writing journalistic articles in the 1950s, first under her husband’s name. After divorce and becoming a single mother, she worked from 1960 onwards as a journalist in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Zambia, Germany and Great Britain. One of few female journalists in Africa at the time, she reported on business and politics, and women’s involvement in liberation movements. The governments of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia banned her because of her critical journalism. In the 1970s, she worked in Zambia. She also briefly worked for radio in Germany where she became known as a witness of antisemitism and apartheid. She regularly contributed to Swiss media. She returned to Zimbabwe in 1982 to work in journalism education. She also wrote numerous non-fiction and fiction books. She built up an exceptional archive that she donated to the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, and sources concerned with her are further kept in archives in Germany, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia. The project analyses all these archival records together with additional oral history interviews and research in other journalism archives.
Ruth Weiss’ life is, in many ways, extraordinary, and an effective lens through which to study histories of gender, race and global entanglements in the 20th century. Yet it is not the objective of this project to simply come up with a “Great Woman” biography; rather it wants to provide a micro-historical study that asks: what can we learn about the political dynamics in which her life unwound from studying her biography, work and archive, and the challenges and opportunities of researching multimedia journalism archives. The project’s first aim is to produce knowledge about several under-researched fields: Ruth Weiss’ biography and work; the history of journalism in southern Africa and reporting about Africa in Europe; intersections of race, class and gender; and entanglements of Jewish, European and African history. The second aim is to contribute to theoretical debates about how to conceptualise the global and study transnational links with an approach that centres biography. The third aim is to add to methodological debates about how to study journalism archives, audio recordings and historical sources’ intermediality. In particular, the project is concerned with sound in Ruth Weiss’ archive and work. Based on an extensive “sound archive ethnography” of studying abour 120 hours of digitised audio recordings as well as a reading her books and texts with a focus on sound and voice, the projects suggests that paying attention to sound reveals more nuanced accounts of global history.
