The Author
I did not choose this story. I inherited it, instead of the fortune.
My name is Elisabeth Bierschenk Hitz. Anna Maria Hitz, the girl in the 1965 front pages, was my grandmother, my childhood best friend, and my favorite person in the entire world.
At NYU I took a course called Oral History, Cultural Identity and the Arts. The first exercise was small: ask another student their name, and tell them yours. I started asking about mine, Bierschenk, and about the parts of the world it came from. Over Thanksgiving break my mother showed me a stack of newspapers my family had collected over the years. My grandmother was on the front page of the Washington Post: D.C. HEIRESS TO 10 MILLION FORTUNE MISSING.
My final project for that class was a family legacy story built from interviews and newspaper articles, more than 10,000 words long. I continued it in a Gallatin tutorial, Projects in Oral History, with Professor Judith Sloan. My final paper, “Family Legacy,” was built from more than 100 newspaper articles in four languages and from interviews I recorded, transcribed and edited with members of my family.
That paper states the rule I still work by: newspaper reports and family interviews are both biased, and each has to be tested against the other. Since then the test has been the document itself. I then wrote a proposal for a Deans Award for Summer Research to take the project to Switzerland: to interview my grandmother in Zurich on camera and to look through libraries and archives.
She died in February 2019. Since then I have done the only thing left to do: I found the records. An archive of more than 500 documents: 144 family originals from 1941 to 2019, a press corpus of about 200 items from 1959 to 1966 and the records of the Swiss state, in four languages. Front pages from Washington, Zurich, Hannover, Paris and Caracas. Court reporting. Two wills, one missing and one never accounted for. A fortune that, as far as anyone can prove, was never collected by the only person it belonged to.
I was born in Caracas, like my mother, like my grandmother's story says I would be. I was raised in Miami the immigrant way, the legal way, the long way. I built a career in New York and a company of my own, and through all of it, on and off, I have been unable to leave this story alone. Now it is the only work that matters to me.
The book is being written. The archive is real. The questions are still open.
How I work, lesson by lesson, is on the research page.
Bierschenk, E. Bierschenk: (v.) Beer Pourer. A family legacy story. Final project, Oral History, Cultural Identity and the Arts. New York University.
Bierschenk, E. Project proposal, Deans Award for Summer Research. New York University.
Bierschenk, E. Response paper on Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization. Projects in Oral History, Gallatin tutorial, Professor Judith Sloan. New York University.
Bierschenk, E. Family Legacy. Final paper, Projects in Oral History, Gallatin tutorial, Professor Judith Sloan. New York University.
Unpublished coursework.