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Karla Poewe is the author of nine books and numerous academic articles. Her most famous work is Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist (London, Academic Press, 1980) published under the pseudonym Manda Cesara. Her early experiences and later work as an anthropologist provided the motive for the present book which deals with the impact of war and the rise of political and religious fanaticism.
She was born 25 January 1941 in Königsberg, East Prussia. Almost three years later between 27 and 30 August 1944 the RAF staged its most daring long range air raids destroying the center of the historic city. Homeless, Karla, her mother and five sisters, were moved to an estate in what is now eastern Poland. In February 1945 they traveled by train towards Zwickau. Staying overnight outside Dresden on the night of 13 February they watched in fear as the Allies destroyed the city in a firestorm. Eventually they reached Werdau where her mother lived until 1948. Over the next four years Karla experienced hunger and witnessed the murder of civilians, rapes by Russian soldiers, and the suicide of an older cousin. For several months in 1947 Karla and her sisters lived in the Lutheran Orphanage of Telz outside Berlin. Her mother took her and her younger sister out of the orphanage and back to Werdau. This was the last time she saw her other sisters for over forty years. Her father returned from Russian prisoner of war camp only to die of gangrenous lungs in May 1948. Later that year, in mid-September, her mother left Werdau, which was then in the Russian Zone, to begin a 250 mile walk, mostly at night, until they crossed into the British Zone near Göttingen where they were picked up by a British Army patrol that drove them to the local railway station. From there they traveled to Buxtehude where her grandmother and aunts were living as refugees crowded into one small room that held six people. It was in Buxtehude, age eight, that Karla began school for the first time. Seven years later her mother immigrated to Canada where she married an engineer she had met in Buxtehude. Karla attended Parkdale Collegiate in Toronto, before completing her B.A. in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. From there she went on to New York University and completed her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Click here to read more about Karla Poewe's early
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