Throughout her life, Susann Schmid-Giovannini, born in Vienna and 88 years old next month, has worked and been active in helping hearing-impaired children learn to hear and speak from an early age.
Abi Wallenstein was born in Jerusalem in 1945, the son of German Jews who had emigrated during the Nazi era. He has lived in Germany since 1960, when his parents returned to their homeland. For almost that long he has been one of the outstanding European blues greats.
Fé Reichelt, dancer, choreographer and dance therapist, has had a decisive influence on the German dance scene – from the post-war period until today, especially through her contribution to the development of dance therapy.
Hartmut Radebold, born in Berlin, in 1935, is considered the “doyen of German-speaking psychotherapy for the elderly”. He is one of the pioneers of research on war children. He has thus found his own two personal life themes and made them his professional focus.
“Life and Survival in Congo. Gorilla Conservation and Family Life in Wartime” is the autobiography of Carlos Schuler who found a second home in Eastern Congo. During three wars, the Swiss national held out there to protect the gorillas from extermination by poachers. Carlos Schuler also reports on the struggle for mineral resources. After the Rwanda war ended, he witnessed gunmen streaming across the nearby border and going unmolested.
The artist, who has lived openly lesbian for decades, turns 70
Women artists of the present. Born in Konstanz in 1942, she spent the 1960s in Paris. At the Berlinale 2012, she was honoured for her life’s work with the Gay and Lesbian Teddy Award.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has written her autobiography, A Life for Liberia. A few days after her birth, she says at the beginning, an old man visited her parents to look at the newborn and wish her luck. And said, “This child will go to the top.” He was right: the girl became the first woman in Africa to attain the office of head of state through an election. In 2011, she received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Lebanese television journalist May Chidiac was the victim of a bomb attack. The Christian and critic of Syrian government lost one arm and one leg. But she continues to fight for freedom in her home country.
Vera Bohle from Berlin is the only German woman who clears mines in international crisis areas. Her last assignment was in Afghanistan.
