A woman with a typewriter: the international career of Dorothea Weger

Auberer, Benjamin (2022): A woman with a typewriter: the international career of Dorothea Weger. In: Almagor, Laura; Ikonomou, Haakon A. and Simonsen, Gunvor (eds.) : Global biographies : lived history as method. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 223-241

Abstract

Benjamin Auberer’s main protagonist is Dorothea Weger, a single, female Australian shorthand-typist of German descent, who made her career in the interwar period in several international organizations, most significantly the League of Nations. In this chapter, Auberer shows that the very traits that made her a valuable employee and a ‘true’ internationalist in the Genevan space, made her a suspicious, rootless cosmopolitan and a possible spy in the Australian space when she returned in 1939. Her credentials were now translated differently, not only because they changed valance in these disconnected contexts, but also because the two spaces were connected by the global deterioration of international relations across the interwar period. Thus, even if the notion of disparate spaces is the driving force of the analysis, scale, crucially, explains the idiosyncratic nature of Weger’s story.

• Item Type: Book Section
• Faculties: Librarianship
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology; 300 Social sciences > 320 Political science; 900 History and geography > 900 Geschichte
• ISBN: 978-1-5261-6116-1 ; 978-1-5261-6115-4
• Place of Publication: Manchester
• Language: English