Thanks to a financial donation and volunteer time to recruit participants, the German Oral History Project currently underway at the Waterloo Centre for German Studies can increase the number of interviews it conducts this year.
Marga Weigel, Ernst Friedel, and Manfred Richter have been instrumental in speaking to members of the German community in Waterloo Region and raising $20,000. The financial donation was made through the German-Canadian Education Fund plus personal donations from Weigel and Friedel.
This project is the largest research project the WCGS has undertaken since its inception ten years ago. After being underway for five months already, the WCGS has conducted over 40 interviews and plans to continue interviewing throughout 2014. The average interview length is one hour, and each hour of interview takes about four hours to transcribe. The money will be mainly used to pay graduate students to conduct and transcribe the interviews and to provide each participant with a copy of their interview.