Traces in Other Regions
Author and Illustrator, Elizabeth Shaw

Elizabeth Shaw was born in Belfast on 4 May 1920. Her family moved to England in 1933 where she studied art at Chelsea School of Arts, with Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland among her teachers. In 1946 she moved to East Berlin with her husband, the Swiss-born sculptor and painter Rene Graetz. She lived in the part of Berlin, which was the capital of the GDR until 1990, for most of her life, and there became a well-known illustrator and cartoonist.

Numerous movements in modern art were banned by the Nazis and were only partially tolerated in the GDR. The art world in which Shaw had learned was unknown to many and was viewed with suspicion by those responsible for the GDR's cultural scene. Elizabeth Shaw's drawing style, influenced by modernism but not overly abstract, was less affected than her husband's work. Elizabeth Shaw carefully observed those around her. Her caricatures of East Berlin's academic world received widespread attention and led to further commissions. Together with Berta Waterstradt, she published a weekly column with caricatures of her everyday life and impressions of trips abroad in the widely read magazine Das Magazin. The fact that she was often allowed to travel abroad - due to her British passport and behavior consistent with the system - distinguished Shaw from most residents of the GDR. Shaw had already worked as a cartoonist for the SED newspaper “Neues Deutschland” in the 1950s. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, she traveled to Belfast to report on it as the newspaper's correspondent.

The talented artist wrote and illustrated books for children, many of which have been translated into several languages. Her books such as Bela Bellchaud and her Parrots and The Timid Rabbit became classics for East German pre-schoolers during the period of the Berlin Wall and to this day sell in great numbers in Germany. Her illustrations of Brecht’s works for children brought her international acclaim and she received many awards for her work.

Shaw had a spiritual longing for Ireland although many of her family and friends were in England, and she had found her home in East Germany. During her work trips to Belfast she visited Sligo and Ballina, where she had holidayed as a child. She used the royalties from her picture book, The Little Black Sheep, first published in Dublin, to finance another trip to Ireland in the 1980s. “My German, I regret to say, is still faulty. Nevertheless, I have become a Berliner,” she wrote in her autobiography, Irish Berlin, published in 1990 in German. It was never published in English. Elizabeth Shaw died on 27 June 1992. Her ashes were scattered in the Irish Sea as was her final wish.