Helga Maria Stipa Madland

Helga Maria Stipa Madland died on September 9, 2022, in Norman, Oklahoma from congestive heart failure. She was born to Anni Pansa and Hubert Stipa on January 20, 1939, in Klodnitz, Upper Silesia, then a part of the Prussian State of Germany, now Kłodnica, Poland.

In 1945, while Hubert Stipa served in the German military, Anni Pansa and her two children, six-year-old Helga and her four-year-old sister Ingrid, fled Silesia for Western Germany to escape from the Russian front that was advancing from east to west. After the war, the family first settled in Lahr, a small community close to Limburg an der Lahn, where Hubert Stipa had accepted a temporary position as a forester, his profession before the war and that of his father. Here Helga began her education and completed the first three years of Volksschule (grade school) at the top of her class.

In 1948 the family moved to Schmitten im Taunus, a resort community situated in Hessen close to Frankfurt am Main. Hubert Stipa acquired and ran a general store to keep the family afloat. Helga finished 4th and 5th grade then passed the entrance exam for the Gymnasium in Hanau. At that time, few German students passed this exam. From her class, Helga was one of only two students admitted.

In 1951 Hubert Stipa emigrated to Labrador, Canada as a construction worker and subsequently settled in Moncton, New Brunswick. His wife and by now three children (Helga 13, Ingrid 11, and Michael 6 months) followed in December 1952. By the summer of 1953 the family relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri. Here Helga graduated from high school with honors in 1957. Shortly thereafter the family packed its belongings, turtle, and dog into their Studebaker, and headed for Boise, Idaho. Hubert Stipa had accepted a position as a forester, and Helga started working in the capitol building for the state of Idaho.

Soon thereafter, at the age of nineteen, she married Bill Madland, who was working as an apprentice for a mortician. The couple had three children and eventually moved to Twin Falls, Idaho where Bill owned a monument company along with this father. Helga worked as a secretary for a law office while continuing her education, greatly encouraged by the lawyers. After completing her BA she taught high school German and Spanish for three years.

In 1977 Helga and her two sons moved to Seattle so that she could begin graduate study, her long-time dream. Helga was awarded a Ph.D. in German with a minor in Spanish from the University of Washington in 1981 and joined the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma, where she taught eighteenth century German literature and a broad range of other subjects including her department’s first course in literary theory.

She enjoyed teaching and took pride in the German Master’s degree students in her department, many of whom went on to study in prestigious Ph.D. programs. A number received Fulbright grants allowing them to study abroad for a year. Some themselves became university professors.

She enjoyed her extensive research in the German Literary Archive in Marbach and elsewhere, initially focusing on the Storm and Stress writer J.M.R. Lenz, the subject of her book "Image and Text." She organized the International Lenz Symposium held at the University of Oklahoma in 1991. There her graduate students performed a dramatic reading of one of Lenz’s plays.

In the mid-nineteen-eighties Helga met Richard Beck, who taught Ancient Greek language at OU from 2000 until his retirement in 2015, and by 1989 they began to build a life together. It was Helga who persuaded him to learn Ancient Greek. Helga and Richard married in 1994 and built a life in Norman, centered around cats and dogs, cooking, gardening, entertaining, and traveling.

In 1992 she and Richard moved to France for seventeen months so that she could serve as OU’s first exchange professor with Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, where she taught French students German literature. In 1996 and 1997 a Fulbright research grant allowed them to live in Greece and then in Graz, Austria, where she completed research and wrote an intellectual biography "Marianne Ehrmann: Reason and Emotion in Her Life and Works." For Helga, Marianne Ehrmann represented an 18th century kindred spirit. Her work as a journalist, novelist, and essayist, redefined women's subordinate role in the social order.

Dr. Madland received early tenure and then served as Department Chair in 1986 and again from 1999 to 2005, when she retired. As chair she was engaged with the recruitment of new faculty and the support of those already present. She worked to develop new language programs while enhancing already established ones. She worked particularly hard to promote the programs in Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Arabic (which she studied for two years after her retirement). With her former student and later colleague Gerlinde Thompson, Helga established the Madland-Thompson German Award that is currently administered by the OU Foundation.

After her retirement, she continued to enjoy writing, including her memoir entitled "You’re Not From Around Here, Are You?" Additional titles include "Dachshunds Can Fly", "Turtle Bay", and "The Child Murderess", a historical novel based on an eighteenth century play that was published both in English and German.

Despite declining health, Helga was productive until the end of her life, two years ago translating into English the German translation of the Dutch book that greatly influenced her as a child, "J. van Ammers-Küller’s Brave Little Helga". Last year she reworked a novel she had written in her youth, "A Rose for Saint Augustine", describing part of her life in Idaho Falls in the early nineteen-sixties. Meanwhile, she was reading, commenting drolly and sarcastically on television news, and communicating with friends and her very supportive family. She was enthusiastically interactive with the four whimsical housecats and with her flabbergastingly intelligent dachshund, the beloved Maxwell, whom years ago she flew back and forth in a single day to Portland, Oregon to adopt.

Helga touched many lives. She will be remembered and loved for a very long time. She is survived by her husband Richard, her sister Ingrid, brother Michael, nephew Christopher, her children Kathryn (Robert Wright), Michael (Lisa Madland), and Patrick (Bobbie Cook), grandchildren Robert Wright (Stephen), Alexander Wright, Sydney Brace, Colin Madland (Emma), Atticus Madland, Melozie Madland, and great-grandchildren Elwood and Mavis Madland (Colin).

A celebration of life will be announced in the future.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.primrosefuneralservice.com for the Madland family.