Ziehm, Elsa, 1911-1993

Relatively late in life, the linguist and ethnomusicologist Else Ziehm became an expert in the San Pedro Jícora dialect of Nahuatl. Born as Elsa Harmening on March 23, 1911, Ziehm was adopted by a Jewish family and took the family's surname Wertheim. As a result, she suffered from the virulent anti-Semitism infecting the linguistics department at the University of Berlin, causing her to leave in 1934 to study in the Institut für Lautforschung. After receiving her doctorate in 1939 for research on Romanian folk music, she began as an assistant curator at the Lautarchiv at the University, however the outbreak of the war only a few months later derailed her career.

Having recently married the musician Hans-Jürgen Ziehm, Elsa left academia for 22 years to raise her children, resuming only with the rediscovery of Konrad Theodor Preuss's Nahuatl manuscripts which had somehow survived the war. She returned to doing field work and in 1985, lectured at the Freie Universität Berlin on Nahuatl. Her major publication was the three-volume Nahua-Texte aus San Pedro Jícora in Durango (Berlin: Geb. Mann, 1968-1976), based on the texts collected by Preuss. Elsa Ziehm died in Berlin ob October 15, 1993.