Alison Owings papers

Alison Owings is a journalist and writer, based in Northern California. She is the author of Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (Rutgers University Press, 1993), Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray (University of California Press, 2004), and most recently Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans (Rutgers University Press, 2011).

Owings grew up in Chatham and East Orange, New Jersey, and in Strafford, Pennsylvania. She graduated from American University in Washington, DC, in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and during her studies, she spent a year at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Following college, she worked in television news, primarily with the CBS network, where she worked as a writer for television anchors such as Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Ed Bradley, and Charles Kuralt, among others. Prior to working for CBS News, she worked on television news and documentaries for the ABC network, as well as local network affiliates WRC-TV in Washington, DC and WNBC-TV in New York, and has since done free-lance work for stations in the Bay Area in California.

The move from television news writer to the author of books began with Frauen, which was inspired during a visit to Spain in the 1980s, where, as she recounts in that book, she became acquainted with a neighbor in the town she was living in, who was an older German woman. During frequent conversations with her, the woman began to gradually talk about her past and about life in Germany during the Third Reich, a topic that intrigued Owings and which she wished to hear more about from the perspectives of other German women—Jewish and non-Jewish—who had experienced that period. Upon returning to her home in Northern California, she began investigating the possibility of writing a book based on oral history interviews with a variety of German women who were eyewitnesses to the Third Reich, and she sought the advice of historian Gordon Craig from Stanford University, who encouraged her to pursue such a project. Between 1984 and 1991, Owings made several trips to Germany, and working from referrals from a network of historians, journalists, and other contacts, she identified approximately 36 women who she interviewed and whose stories are included in the book. Owings took care to find women from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, as well as varying perspectives on the Third Reich, from those who supported it, to those who opposed the Nazis or were persecuted by them. Most of her interviewees lived in West Germany, but she did make multiple trips to East Germany to interview several women there, and also interviewed a few who had relocated to the United States, such as Rita Kuhn and Freya von Moltke, the latter being the widow of resistance leader Helmuth James Graf von Moltke.