Elizabeth Shaw

“I became a witness to the rise and fall of the GDR . . . I’m happy I came to Berlin.”

Shaw was a celebrated artist, illustrator and children’s book author in the GDR. However, she was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1920. Despite living in the UK, she grew up celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with her family. Her parents moved the family to Bedford, England, in 1933. Shaw hated it there and moved to London after graduating from secondary school. In London, she studied art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1938 to 1940. At art college, Shaw made communist friends and read The Communist Manifesto, which inspired her in the events leading up to World War II.

In 1940, she joined the war effort and worked at the London telephone exchange until 1944. In 1942, she met René Graetz at a party. The couple married in 1944 and later had two children. They joined a group of artists who wanted to build a utopian new Germany and moved to Berlin in 1946. In 1949, Shaw and Graetz moved into the Soviet-occupied zone of Berlin, which became part of the German Democratic Republic that same year.

Although Shaw downplayed her political involvement in her autobiography, she drew caricatures professionally for the GDR’s ruling party (SED) newspaper, Neues Deutschland. The GDR authorities used Shaw as a positive example of a Western artist who chose to live in East Germany. As a result, Shaw’s British passport allowed her to travel to Western Europe, including between East and West Germany, unlike most residents of the GDR.

After leaving Neues Deutschland, she became a freelance artist and a children’s book author and illustrator. Beginning in 1963, she published 21 children’s books. In addition, Shaw also wrote and illustrated articles for DAS Magazin for 20 years. She wrote her autobiography in 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her daughter believed her mother was pleased when the wall came down because Shaw never stopped missing Ireland and wanted her children to visit her homeland. Unfortunately, she would not live to see it. She suffered several strokes and passed away in Berlin in 1992. Her daughter honored her wishes and scattered her ashes in the Irish Sea.

Art by Elizabeth Shaw