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Volume CXXXII, Number 17 |
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Cafferty is a witness to change
ADAM BABER
COLUMNIST
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| Helen Cafferty, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of German and the Humanities. (Hans Law, Bowdoin Orient) |
Professor Helen Cafferty remembers the moment well. She was working in the Dean's office when a friend handed her a slip of paper, much like a president's chief of staff would do in the midst of some grave crisis. "The wall has fallen," the note ominously read.
"It was an amazing, heady time," she remembers with a smile, and to this day a large poster showing people dancing on the wall before the Brandenburg Gate in November, 1989, hangs behind her desk. Cafferty was in the midst of preparing for a fellowship in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end of decades of division. Despite the geopolitical changes, she continued on with the fellowship, which was to study the relationship between East German authors and their audiences.
"Of course, when I arrived, the country wasn't there," she says. In its place, there was openness and a new acceptance of free speech-but also dislocation and confusion. The sudden changes that she witnessed have allowed Cafferty to appreciate post German unification issues better.
"It strengthened my understanding of the social context of what was going on politically," Cafferty says. Indeed, her love of the German language has bubbled over into a zest for German culture, beginning with literature and more recently including film.
For Cafferty, film is not just about entertainment. It can point to how a society is dealing with its issues, like working through its past in Germany's case. Postwar German film, for example, addresses themes ranging from the Holocaust to communism to feminism. Looking at the strategies films employ can have a "broad resonance" beyond the specific genre, according to Cafferty, who never hesitates asks how a country can "learn from its history." Her popular German film classes are open to all students, not just German majors, as long as one doesn't mind subtitles.
While Cafferty has witnessed a variety of changes and trends in postwar Germany, she has also seen Bowdoin grow over the past three decades. When she arrived in 1972, there were only three other women faculty members, and the college's commitment to coeducation was just starting to take root.
Indeed, Cafferty counts as one of her greatest pleasures seeing coeducation at Bowdoin become "reality, and not just a promise." Besides mainstreaming gender issues in her classes, she was also instrumental in establishing the Women's Studies Program in the 1980s. As an Assistant Dean in charge of faculty hiring from 1975 to 1990, Cafferty emphasized affirmative action hiring practices, increasing diversity among the faculty.
Along with these efforts to make Bowdoin a more dynamic place, Cafferty has helped the German department maintain its close, family-like relationship with students. As part of a small department that graduates only 10-15 student majors a year, Cafferty gets to know her students very well, and takes advantage of smaller class sizes.
She speaks of both the German language and culture with contagious enthusiasm: "German is fun!" she declares. In addition, she relishes the connections with art, music, philosophy, and history that German can facilitate.
Cafferty began studying German as an undergraduate student at Bowling Green State University and in the early sixties studied away in postwar Germany. While in the West German city of Freiburg, not even the Cuban Missile Crisis could curb her enthusiasm and immersion in the language and culture.
As a senior, she began to consider graduate school, and earned her Masters from Syracuse University, where she also served as a TA and discovered her interest in teaching. After studying for her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, she was drawn to Bowdoin by the prospect of learning more about a smaller, private liberal arts education. Starting as an Instructor, Cafferty has become to the first woman faculty member to rise through the ranks to full professor.
Thirty years after her arrival in Brunswick, Cafferty has not lost touch with her many experiences, especially her travels to Germany both before and after unification. She constantly draws upon the richness of her experience and research to create new courses and enhance existing ones. Never one to stop learning and exploring, Cafferty remembers the first time she heard about graduate school: "I didn't know what it was, but I knew I wanted to do it. If after four years of college you feel you're just starting to scratch the surface, you know the education has taken."
One suspects that the more Helen Cafferty scratches, the thicker the surface becomes.
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